Thursday, March 31, 2011

Deconstructing Nuclear Experts by Dr. Chris Busby

March 31st, 2011

Dear Readers,

This article by Dr. Chris Busby is unbeatable. I saw him speak in Chicago many years ago, and believe his scientific understanding of the issues involved is second to none.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman Carlsbad, CA

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http://rense.com/general93/decon.htm

Deconstructing Nuclear Experts By Chris Busby 3-29-11 Since the Fukushima accident we have seen a stream of experts on radiation telling us not to worry, that the doses are too low, that the accident is nothing like Chernobyl and so forth. They appear on television and we read their articles in the newspapers and online. Fortunately the majority of the public don't believe them. I myself have appeared on television and radio with these people; one example was Ian Fells of the University of Newcastle who, after telling us all on BBC News that the accident was nothing like Chernobyl (wrong), and the radiation levels of no consequence (wrong), that the main problem was that there was no electricity and that the lifts didn't work. " If you have been in a situation when the lifts don't work, as I have" he burbled on, "you will know what I mean." You can see this interview on youtube and decide for yourself. What these people have in common is ignorance. You may think a professor at a university must actually know something about their subject. But this is not so. Nearly all of these experts who appear and pontificate have not actually done any research on the issue of radiation and health. Or if they have, they seem to have missed all the key studies and references. I leave out the real baddies, who are closely attached to the nuclear industry, like Richard Wakeford, or Richard D as he calls himself on the anonymous website he has set up to attack me, "chrisbusbyexposed". I saw him a few times talking down the accident on the television, labelled in the stripe as Professor Richard Wakeford, University of Manchester. Incidentally, Wakeford is a physicist, his PhD was in particle physics at Liverpool. But he was not presented as ex- Principle Scientist, British Nuclear Fuels, Sellafield. That might have given the viewers the wrong idea. Early on we saw another baddy, Malcolm Grimston, talking about radiation and health, described as Professor, Imperial College. Grimston is a psychologist, not a scientist, and his expertise was in examining why the public was frightened of radiation, and how their (emotional) views could be changed. But his lack of scientific training didn't stop him explaining on TV and radio how the Fukushima accident was nothing to worry about. The doses were too low, nothing like Chernobyl, not as bad as 3-Mile Island, only 4 on the scale, all the usual blather. Most recently we have seen George Monbiot, who I know, and who also knows nothing about radiation and health, writing in The Guardian how this accident has actually changed his mind about nuclear power (can this be his Kierkegaard moment? Has he cracked? ) since he now understands (and reproduces a criminally misleading graphic to back up his new understanding) that radiation is actually OK and we shoudn't worry about it. George does at least know better, or has been told better, since he asked me a few years ago to explain why internal and external radiation exposure cannot be considered to have the same health outcomes. He ignored what I said and wrote for him (with references) and promptly came out in favour of nuclear energy in his next article. So what about Wade Allison? Wade is a medical physics person and a professor at Oxford. I have chosen to pitch into him since he epitomises and crystallises for us the arguments of the stupid physicist. In this he has done us a favour, since he is really easy to shoot down. All the arguments are in one place. Stupid physicists? Make no mistake, physicists are stupid. They make themselves stupid by a kind of religious belief in mathematical modelling. The old Bertie Russell logical positivist trap. And whilst this may be appropriate for examining the stresses in metals, or looking at the Universe (note that they seem to have lost 90% of the matter in the Universe, so-called "dark matter") it is not appropriate for, and is even scarily incorrect when, examining stresses in humans or other lifeforms. Mary Midgley, the philosopher has written about Science as Religion. Health physicists are the priests. I have been reading Wade Allison's article for the BBC but also looked at his book some months ago. He starts in the same way as all the others by comparing the accidents. He writes: More than 10,000 people have died in the Japanese tsunami and the survivors are cold and hungry. But the media concentrate on nuclear radiation from which no-one has died - and is unlikely to. Then we move to 3-Mile Island: There were no known deaths there. And Chernobyl: The latest UN report published on 28 February confirms the known death toll - 28 fatalities among emergency workers, plus 15 fatal cases of child thyroid cancer - which would have been avoided if iodine tablets had been taken (as they have now in Japan). This is breathtaking ignorance of the scientific literature. Prof. Steve Wing in the USA has carried out epidemiological studies of the effects of 3-Mile Island, with results published in the peer-review literature. Court cases are regularly settled on the basis of cancers produced by the 3-Mile Island contamination. But let us move to Chernobyl. The health effects of the Chernobyl accident are massive and demonstrable. They have been studied by many research groups in Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, in the USA, Greece, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and Japan. The scientific peer reviewed literature is enormous. Hundreds of papers report the effects, increases in cancer and a range of other diseases. My colleague Alexey Yablokov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, published a review of these studies in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (2009). Earlier in 2006 he and I collected together reviews of the Russian literature by a group of eminent radiation scientists and published these in the book Chernobyl, 20 Years After. The result: more than a million people have died between 1986 and 2004 as a direct result of Chernobyl. I will briefly refer to two Chernobyl studies in the west which falsify Wade Allison's assertions. The first is a study of cancer in Northern Sweden by Martin Tondel and his colleagues at Lynkoping University. Tondel examined cancer rates by radiation contamination level and showed that in the 10 years after the Chernobyl contamination of Sweden, there was an 11% increase in cancer for every 100kBq/sq metre of contamination. Since the official International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) figures for the Fukushima contamination are from 200 to 900kBq.sq metre out to 78km from the site, we can expect between 22% and 90% increases in cancer in people living in these places in the next 10 years. The other study I want to refer to is one I carried out myself. After Chernobyl, infant leukaemia was reported in 6 countries by 6 different groups, from Scotland, Greece, Wales, Germany, Belarus and the USA. The increases were only in children who had been in the womb at the time of the contamination: this specificity is rare in epidemiology. There is no other explanation than Chernobyl. The leukemias could not be blamed on some as-yet undiscovered virus and population mixing, which is the favourite explanation for the nuclear site child leukemia clusters. There is no population mixing in the womb. Yet the "doses" were very small, much lower than "natural background". I published this unequivocal proof that the current risk model is wrong for internal exposures in two separate peer-reviewed journals in 2000 and 2009. This finding actually resulted in the formation in 2001 by UK Environment Minister Michael Meacher of a new Committee Examining Radiation Risks from Internal Emitters CERRIE. Richard Wakeford was on this committee representing BNFL and he introduced himself to me as "BNFL's Rottweiler". No difference there. Wade then turns to a comparison of contamination: So what of the radioactivity released at Fukushima? How does it compare with that at Chernobyl? Let's look at the measured count rates. The highest rate reported, at 1900 on 22 March, for any Japanese prefecture was 12 kBq per sq m (for the radioactive isotope of caesium, caesium-137). A map of Chernobyl in the UN report shows regions shaded according to rate, up to 3,700 kBq per sq m - areas with less than 37 kBq per sq m are not shaded at all. In round terms, this suggests that the radioactive fallout at Fukushima is less than 1% of that at Chernobyl But the IAEA themselves, not known for their independence from the nuclear industry, report that contamination levels out to 78km were between 200 and 900kBq/sq metre. And Wade has been rather selective with his data, to put it kindly. The UN definition of radioactively contaminated land is 37kBq/sq metre just as he writes, but actually, in all the maps published, the inner 30km Chernobyl contamination exclusion zone is defined as 555kBq/sq metre and above. This is just a fact. Why has he misled us? In passing, this means that there are 555,000 radioactive disintegrations per second on one square metre of surface. Can you believe this is not harmful? No. And you would be correct. And another calculation can be made. Since the IAEA data show that these levels of contamination, from 200,000 to 900,000 disintegrations per second per square metre, exist up to 78km from Fukushima, we can already calculate that the contamination is actually worse than Chernobyl, not 1% of Chernobyl as Wade states. For the area defined by a 78km radius is 19113 sq km compared to the Chernobyl exclusion zone of 2827 sq km. About seven times greater. Now I turn to the health effects. Wade trots out most of the usual stupid physicist arguments. We are all exposed to natural background, the dose is 2mSv a year and the doses from the accident are not significantly above this. For example, the Japanese government are apparently making a mistake in telling people not to give tap water containing 200Bq/litre radioactive Iodine-131 to their children as there is naturally 50Bq/l of radiation in the human body and 200 will not do much harm. The mistake is made because of fears of the public which apparently forced the International Commission on Radiological Protection, ICRP, to set the annual dose limits at 1mSv. Wade knows better: he would set the limits at 100mSv. He is a tough guy. He shoots from the hip: Patients receiving a course of radiotherapy usually get a dose of more than 20,000 mSv to vital healthy tissue close to the treated tumour. This tissue survives only because the treatment is spread over many days giving healthy cells time for repair or replacement. A sea-change is needed in our attitude to radiation, starting with education and public information. But Wade, dear, these people are usually old, and usually die anyway before they can develop a second tumour. They often develop other cancers even so because of the radiation. There are hundreds of studies showing this. And in any case, this external irradiation is not the problem. The problem is internal irradiation. The Iodine-131 is not in the whole body, it is in the thyroid gland and attached to the blood cells: hence the thyroid cancer and the leukaemia. And there is a whole list of internal radioactive elements that bind chemically to DNA, from Strontium-90 to Uranium. These give massive local doses to the DNA and to the tissues where they end up. The human body is not a piece of wire that you can apply physics to. The concept of dose which Wade uses cannot be used for internal exposures. This has been conceded by the ICRP itself in its publications. And in an interview with me in Stockholm in 2009, Dr Jack Valentin, the ex-Scientific Secretary of the ICRP conceded this, and also made the statement that the ICRP risk model, the one used by all governments to assess the outcome of accidents like Fukushima, was unsafe and could not be used. You can see this interview on the internet, on www.vimeo.com. Why is the ICRP model unsafe? Because it is based on "absorbed dose". This is average radiation energy in Joules divided by the mass of living tissue into which it is diluted. A milliSievert is one milliJoule of energy diluted into one kilogram of tissue. As such it would not distinguish between warming yourself in front of a fire and eating a red hot coal. It is the local distribution of energy that is the problem. The dose from a singly internal alpha particle track to a single cell is 500mSv! The dose to the whole body from the same alpha track is 5 x 10-11 mSv. That is 0.000000000005mSv. But it is the dose to the cell that causes the genetic damage and the ultimate cancer. The cancer yield per unit dose employed by ICRP is based entirely on external acute high dose radiation at Hiroshima, where the average dose to a cell was the same for all cells. And what of the UN and their bonkers statement about the effects of the Chernobyl accident referred to by Wade Allison? What you have to know, is that the UN organisations on radiation and health are compromised in favour of the nuclear military complex, which was busy testing hydrogen bombs in the atmosphere at the time of the agreement and releasing all the Strontium, Caesium, Uranium and plutonium and other stuff that was to become the cause of the current and increasing cancer epidemic. The last thing they wanted was the doctors and epidemiologists stopping their fun. The IAEA and the World Health Organisation (WHO) signed an agreement in 1959 to remove all research into the issue from the doctors of the WHO, to the atom scientists, the physicists of the IAEA: this agreement is still in force. The UN organisations do not refer to, or cite any scientific study, which shows their statements on Chernobyl to be false. There is a huge gap between the picture painted by the UN, the IAEA, the ICRP and the real world. And the real world is increasingly being studied and reports are being published in the scientific literature: but none of the authorities responsible for looking after the public take any notice of this evidence. As they say on the Underground trains in London: Mind the Gap. Wade Allison and the other experts I refer to need to do just this for their own sake. The one place that this gap is being closed rapidly and savagely is in the courts. I have acted as an expert witness in over 40 cases involving radiation and health. These include cases where Nuclear Test veterans are suing the UK government for exposures at the test sites that have caused cancer, they include cases involving nuclear pollution, work exposures and exposures to depleted uranium weapons fallout. And these cases are all being won. All of them. Because in court with a judge and a jury, people like Wade Allison and George Monbiot would not last 2 minutes. Because in court you rely on evidence. Not bullshitting. Joseph Conrad wrote: "after all the shouting is over, the grim silence of facts remain". I believe that these phoney experts like Wade Allison and George Monbiot are criminally irresponsible, since their advice will lead to millions of deaths. I would hope that some time in the future, I can be involved as an expert in another legal case, one where Wade Allison, or George or my favourite baddy, Richard Wakeford (who actually knows better) are accused in a court of law of scientific dishonesty leading to the cancer in some poor victim who followed their advice. When they are found guilty, I hope they are sent to jail where they can have plenty of time to read the scientific proofs that their advice was based on the mathematical analysis of thin air. In the meantime, I challenge each of them to debate this issue with me in public on television face to face, so that the people can figure out who is right. For the late Professor John Gofman, a senior figure in the US Atomic Energy Commission until he saw what was happening and resigned, famously said: "the nuclear industry is waging a war against humanity." This war has now entered an endgame which will decide the survival of the human race. Not from sudden nuclear war. But from the on-going and incremental nuclear war which began with the releases to the biosphere in the 60s of all the atmospheric test fallout, and which has continued inexorably since then through Windscale, Kyshtym, 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl, Hanford, Sellafield, La Hague, Iraq and now Fukushima, accompanied by parallel increases in cancer rates and fertility loss to the human race. There is a gap between them and us. Between the phoney scientists and the public who don't believe what they say. Between those who are employed and paid to protect us from radioactive pollution and those who die from its consequences. Between those who talk down what is arguably the greatest public health scandal in human history, and the facts that they ignore. Mind the Gap indeed. Chris Busby is Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk. He is visiting Professor at the University of Ulster and also Guest Researcher at the Julius Kuehn Institute of the German Federal Agricultural Institute in Braunschweig, Germany. He was a member of the UK Committee Examining Radiation Risk on Internal Emitters CERRIE and the UK MoD Depleted Uranium Oversight Board. He was Science and Policy Interface leader of the Policy Information network on Child Health and Environment based in the Netherlands. He was Science and Technology Speaker for the Green Party of England and Wales. He has conducted fundamental research on the health effects of internal radiation both at the theoretical and epidemiological level, including recently on the genotoxic effects of the element uranium.

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Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Carlsbad, CA
Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org

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Wednesday, March 30, 2011

The expanding "dead zone" around Fukushima Daiichi...

March 30th, 2011

Dear Readers,

Unit Two at Fukushima Daiichi is now presumed to be a molten pile on the concrete floor of its Reactor Containment Vessel. Radiation levels in water near the plant were measured at 1250 times normal a few days ago. Yesterday readings were 1,800 times normal levels. And today? 3,000 times normal levels.

And things can still get much worse.

For example, the containment vessel could explode from hydrogen gas released by any zirconium cladding that's left on the fuel pellets. Zirconium reacts with the concrete, according to Dr. Helen Caldicott (see below).

According to the World Nuclear News, TEPCO says Fukushima units 1 to 4 "are highly likely to be written off" (gosh!) and in an unbelievably simplistic description of the current problem -- huge trenches near the plant, filled will highly radioactive water -- WNN states that the trenches "were probably flooded by the tsunami." If you want prescience, don't go to WNN.

The world was promised that this could never happen in a commercial nuclear reactor of "western" design.

Those who said it could were ignored whenever possible, and scoffed at or ridiculed when not.

I can show you hundreds of letters I've received over the years, assuring me nothing like this could ever happen -- again -- because, of course, Chernobyl's design was "different" and "western" designs are "superior".

Clearly, they are not. Case closed. We don't need an investigation of what exactly went wrong to know that.

But what happens next?

Will the uranium pile, which as dropped out of the Reactor Pressure Vessel and is now on the cement base of the Reactor Containment Vessel, flow towards the low point, where a sump pump is usually located? (Such a pump, for removing water, would be nonfunctional, if only because it has no power, but also because it's undoubtedly clogged and encrusted with salt.)

After collecting at the low point, will "the molten blob from hell" coalesce once again into a critical mass? It was a critical mass just three weeks ago. "It can't explode like an atomic bomb!" the pronukers always remind us. "I know that" we always respond. But it CAN explode other ways: Violent steam explosions, for example. Or hydrogen explosions.

And it CAN achieve criticality -- that's what it was doing, but under "controlled" conditions, when the earthquake/tsunami (and manmade systems failures) all struck in a pack a few weeks ago. Control at a nuclear power plant can be lost very quickly. Who doesn't know that, now?

All reactors have hundreds of pounds of plutonium in them, from the conversion from uranium to plutonium during "criticality" during normal operations.

But even without re-achieving criticality on its own, the "pile" may still have so much "decay heat" (from fission and activation products continuing to decay) that it might still get so hot that it explodes from touching the water table, or from all the water that's being poured on it.

Any number of things can happen. None of them are good.

If The Blob achieves criticality, it will produce even vastly greater quantities of fission products than have already been released. If it has any zirconium cladding on any of the fuel pellets that are left, they will burn / melt oxidize off. One more way The Blob could achieve criticality is, of course, if the spent fuel pool high above it were to collapse onto it, adding greatly to the total mass of uranium/plutonium. I'm not saying it's inevitable or anything but it seems possible to this writer, gravity being what it is.

And, all the steel holding the uranium has undoubtedly already burned away or melted, vaporized, oxidized, or perhaps merely been washed away. But much of the uranium and the plutonium -- much denser -- has probably remained. Everything that was used to keep it apart and only come together a little bit -- the fuel assemblies, the zirconium cladding -- it's all gone. So if/when criticality is achieved again, it could be very violent.

Meanwhile, radioactive liquids and gases continue to pour out.

IF TEPCO couldn't see this coming, we sure could. Years ago.

I've released a new video about dangers at San Onofre specifically, although everything applies to other plants, too. The video is intended to show that what is happening in Fukushima Daiichi was predictable. So it might be a good idea to listen to what the people who predicted it are now saying. At least, that's the not-so-subtle subtext of my new video. Here's the URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiRj7yo5w2E

Yesterday Katie Kouric, CBS News, presented interviews with three former workers at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station -- each with decades of experience at the plant. See link to CBS Report here:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/29/eveningnews/main20048512.shtml

Here's is a link to a grim video of nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen discussing conditions at Fukushima on March 29, 2011. "The containment isn't containing.":

http://www.fairewinds.com/content/what-we-do or: http://vimeo.com/21630171

Here's a debate between confused "environmentalist" George Monbiot and all the world's favorite nuclear expert, Dr. Helen Caldicott: http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/30/prescription_for_survival_a_debate_on

George says he's read "part of it" regarding the Chernobyl New York Academy of Sciences report indicating a million deaths. He calls the 5,000 individual studies it reviewed "outliers" and "cherry-picking of the science" (versus the 350 or so truly cherry-picked studies the IAEA/WHO reviewed, that he prefers). George Monbiot has blinders on, along with the rest of the Nuclear Mafia -- as Dr. Caldicott indicates during the interview. He's arrogant, too. No wonder the nuclear industry loves him.

Lastly, to see the sheer power of a tsunami, this video appears to be unbeatable (so far): http://jalopnik.com/#!5786275/this-is-the-scariest-tsunami-video-yet

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman Carlsbad, CA

The author has been reviewing nuclear issues for a number of decades. He has a collection of approximately 500 books on the subject and has interviewed hundreds of nuclear experts. His book, The Code Killers, is available as a free download:

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Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Carlsbad, CA
Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org

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Monday, March 28, 2011

It's as if every day is April Fool's day for the Nuclear Industry...

Monday morning, March 28th, 2011

Dear Readers,

Since my last report about the ongoing nuclear Fukushima Daiichi tragedy on Saturday, everything has kept oozing, leaking, steaming... dark smoke, white smoke, patchy smoke, thick clouds of smoke, workers contaminated. Workers pulled off the site. Workers sent back.

This isn't Chernobyl, they say. Not yet, anyway, they add.

Everything is precarious and at least one reactor containment vessel is surely breached. Or maybe one reactor.

One expert, Dr. Robert Gale, who visited Chernobyl soon after that accident, has stated what I've been saying for years: That the containment vessels make it much more difficult to bury the problem in cement, like they did at Chernobyl.

This isn't Chernobyl, alright. It's far more complicated, for one thing.

Below are two articles from this morning's World Nuclear News, the global supporters of nuclear energy (they, along with the IAEA and the Japanese regulators are, perhaps, most responsible for what is happening in Japan, besides the American nuclear promoters of course, who sold the American-designed reactors to Japan decades ago).

These two articles, and WNN's own commentaries (below, top) just don't belong together! Yet blithely they go forward, as if every day is April Fool's Day for the nuclear industry.

If the contaminated pools are to be drained, as one article states, then the radioactive crud goes into the environment. Yet, as the other article states, the American Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved two new reactors without a new Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), less than three weeks into the Fukushima tragedy!

And they did it after saying they would take into account all the "lessons learned" from the accident!

The first lesson is that all EISs, and all evacuation plans, and all KI (potassium iodate) distribution plans, are insufficient. Regardless of whether they are for reactors that are operating or planned, or for reactors near the coast or not, or near earthquake zones, and so on. Every EIS has now been proven insufficient in every way.

But not to the NRC!

Another lesson is that pouring sea water onto or into a nuclear reactor is a really, really bad idea. Yet every coastal reactor plans to do this if needed, as a "last-ditch" resort! They need clean, fresh water. But who, anywhere, has water to give to these things? Fukushima, it appears, will need fresh water from the "community" (what's left of it) for years and years.

Such plans need to be modified, but that can't happen without major retrofitting, including running huge new pipes for, in some instances, dozens of miles in multiple directions around the plant! And these new pipes might rupture in an earthquake anyway. And it's too expensive, costing billions of dollars. Well, then shut the plants down. That's the other choice.

Another lesson is that when a nuclear plant calls for help, SOMEBODY better respond. I don't care what hospital needs your generator, buddy, or what town needs your water. If the nuke plant asks for it in an emergency, it better get it.

As attorney Francis Boyle has stated, the nuclear industry should be tried for "crimes against humanity". I agree. That includes the purveyors of these wicked machines, who in many cases bribed their way onto foreign soil, with the excuse that "there's no other way to do business there" although their pockets were invariably deeper than the solar-wind guy's pockets were, if he had any.

It includes the regulators, who have proven once again, below, to be a deadly joke on the rest of us. They don't even pretend to try to protect us anymore.

It includes everyone -- state representatives too -- even down to the townships that supported these things and now own a piece of them. It includes some of the world's largest multinational corporations.

It includes anyone who doesn't think they could cut back 18% on their electricity usage to allow ALL the nukes in America to be shut down. We're virtually ALL guilty to some extent.

But some are much more guilty than others. It's time to go after them to the fullest extent of the law. International trials. Why do, for example, General Electric Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) Mark 1s exist on this earth? Why would ANYONE keep one running now, after what we've seen they can do? Yet nearly two dozen run day and night in America, and many similar models operate around the world.

There are plenty of clean alternatives to nuclear energy. The biggest farce in the world is that there isn't any alternative.

Nuclear power destroys us all, bit by bit. It never has been vital in any way, and never will be. It's too inefficient, and too prone to catastrophic failures beyond their builder's "wildest" imaginations.

It's time to face reality about nuclear power. Humanity's dustbin includes some very large mistakes, but by any measure, this is our biggest.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, CA

The author has been studying nuclear issues for many decades. His book, The Code Killers, is available for free download here: www.acehoffman.org .

------------------------------------------------------------------- World Nuclear News briefs, March 28th, 2011: ------------------------------------------------------------------- REGULATION & SAFETY: Contaminated pools to be drained Pools of water with significant contamination are slowing down repair work in units 1, 2 and 3 at Fukushima Daiichi. It was in unit 3 that three workers recently suffered higher radiation exposure.

NEW NUCLEAR: Environmental approval for two new US reactors There are no environmental reasons why two new reactors should not be built at the existing Vogtle nuclear power plant site in Georgia, according to the US nuclear safety regulators.

------------------------------------------------------------------- Full stories: ------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/print.aspx?id=29711

WNN

REGULATION AND SAFETY Contaminated pools to be drained 27 March 2011

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 6.53pm GMT UPDATE 1: 10.44am GMT 28 March, Several minor details

Pools of water with significant contamination are slowing down repair work in units 1, 2 and 3 at Fukushima Daiichi. It was in unit 3 that three workers recently suffered higher radiation exposure.

The origin of the water remains unknown, but readings by Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) have shown very significant radiation dose rates near the pools in the lower levels of the turbine buildings. In unit 2 doses from the water's surface are 1000 millisieverts per hour, in unit 3 this is 750 millisieverts per hour while unit 1 shows 60 millisieverts per hour.

Evacuation

Residents within 20 kilometres of Fukushima Daiichi were moved on to evacuation centres by government after 15 March. People in a further ten kilometre radius have been recommended to stay indoors, but this group too has now been asked to evacuate on a voluntary basis.

Reconnection work to bring normal cooling systems and diesel generators back into operation requires access to these areas, on the first floor and basement of the turbine building. The necessity of this work forced Tepco to immediately begin pumping the water for storage in the hot wells of the condenser units higher up in the building. This is already happening at unit 1 while preparations are made to do the same at units 2 and 3.

It was at unit 3 on 24 March that three workers were inadvertently exposed to radiation from the pools and may have suffered radiation burns to the skin of their legs. They were exposed to over 170 millisieverts, compared to the current temporary limit set by regulators of 250 millisieverts. The workers ignored their dosimeters and continued working based on radiation survey results one day earlier. This indictes that either the survey was in error, or the contents of the water changed significantly in the space of one day.

The high doses from the water come from the rapid decay of radionuclides with short half lives. This leads officials to presume the water comes from the reactor system rather than the used fuel pond where this decay would have taken place some time ago. At the same time, however, pressures in the reactors have not dropped, indicating no large-scale pipe break. The primary containments of unit 1 and 3 are thought intact, although damage is suspected at unit 2. At least some damage to fuel assemblies is expected to have taken place at all three units.

Media coverage of the pools has been complicated by a mistake in Tepco's reporting which put the level of radioactivity in the water at 'ten million times' the normal level for reactor coolant. The company has retracted this, explaining that the level it reported for iodine-134 was actually for another radionuclide with a longer half-life and therefore a lower activity rate.

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

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http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/print.aspx?id=29720

WNN

NEW NUCLEAR Environmental approval for two new US reactors 28 March 2011

Site clearance for the new units at Vogtle (Image: Southern)

There are no environmental reasons why two new reactors should not be built at the existing Vogtle nuclear power plant site in Georgia, according to the US nuclear safety regulators.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has completed its consideration of the environmental impacts of expanding the Vogtle plant with two 1100 MWe Westinghouse AP1000s in addition to two 1250 MWe units that have operated there since the late 1980s. The regulator's approval came in the form of a final supplemental environmental impact statement for a limited work authorization (LWA) and the combined construction and operating licences (COLs). It concluded that "there are no environmental impacts that would preclude" the awards.

The NRC work in reaching this point was built on an Early Site Permit awarded to Vogtle in August 2009. This officially noted the site's suitability for new nuclear reactors and therfore allowed planning to begin in earnest. The early site permit documentation was supplemented with a statement from the NRC on environmental impact in September 2010.

Southern Nuclear submitted its application to construct and operate two the new reactors in March 2008 and the company supplemented this in October 2009. The Vogtle application incorporates information from both the Site Safety Analysis Report conducted for its ESP application and from Southern's environmental report. For a COL application referencing an ESP, the NRC is required to prepare a supplement to the ESP Environmental Impact Statement.

The NRC's evaluation of the safety and security aspects of the construction of the new Vogtle units will be addressed in its Safety Evaluation Report.

Preliminary site work has already started, with start-up of the reactors slated for 2016 and 2017. Actual construction of the new plant cannot begin until Southern receives the COL.

In February 2010, Vogtle units 3 and 4 became the first new nuclear power plant construction projects to be offered conditional loan guarantees by the US Department of Energy (DoE).

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

------------------------------------------------------------------- Author of this newsletter: -------------------------------------------------------------------

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Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Carlsbad, CA
Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org

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Saturday, March 26, 2011

"Monbiot's fallacy"; "Source term is about the same as Chernobyl"

Items included in this newsletter:

(1) Commentary by Ace Hoffman, Author (2) Stick nuclear waste where the sun don't shine! (3) "Source term is about the same as Chernobyl" (4) "Tool of the Nuclear Establishment -- The New York Times" (5) On YouTube -- "Chernobyl: A Million Casualties" (6) "Time To Reassess The International Atomic Safety Regime" (7) What, ME a pessimist? I'm just a very hard realist! (8) Contact information for the author of this newsletter appears below:

This newsletter maybe freely distributed. The author's book on nuclear issues, The Code Killers, is available online from his web site: www.acehoffman.org .

-------------------------------------------------- (1) Commentary by Ace Hoffman, Author: --------------------------------------------------

March 26th, 2011

Dear Readers,

Food exports to many countries from Japan have been halted. The water in Tokyo is apparently safe at the moment for everyone to drink, including the mayor, who bravely did so on TV.

Water around the Fukushima Daiichi reactors, however, is said to be 1,250 times more radioactive than normal. Yesterday it was a thousand times normal. Meanwhile, the Japanese government is complaining to the operator of the plant, TEPCO, that proper radiation measurements aren't being taken.

In the U.S.A., eight of the EPA's 18 radiation detectors on the West Coast are out of order. That's apparently normal, and there is no outcry.

In Japan, 20,000 people are dead or missing because of the earthquake/tsunami, and hundreds of thousands are displaced, both because of the natural disaster, and because of the nuclear catastrophe-in-process.

Much worse -- a meltdown (or perhaps more than one, plus a spent fuel pool fire, or more than one) -- is still very possible, and perhaps even likely. What has happened already at Fukushima Daiichi is a lot worse than any "design basis accident". No Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) written anywhere in the world (they all follow the American example, more or less) allowed for a proper discussion of something like this, because it was considered so unlikely, that for mathematical calculation purposes, it was assumed that it simply couldn't happen.

Now that it HAS happened, all the calculations everywhere are obviously inaccurate.

There have been no breakthroughs at Fukushima Daiichi. That's bad news, because the reactor fuel is probably still decomposing, cracking, fissuring, fracturing, reconfiguring... and still burning or melting... If we're lucky, the fuel is just very, very hot, but NOT melting their reactor pressure vessels, especially at Unit #3, which may or may not have cracked. We have not been very lucky so far.

Around the world, the accident is producing increased radiation levels on par with Chernobyl now (see item #3, below). Yesterday they were saying, "50% as bad as Chernobyl" and the day before, "30%".

A chart comparing many different levels and types of radioactivity has been making the rounds on the Internet. Richard Bramhall has responded both to George Monbiot's pro-nuclear, post-Fukushima stance and to the misleading information presented in the chart (which Monbiot used in his article). Bramhall, of the Low Level Radiation Campaign in England, offers a blood-boiling comparison of what we might call "Monbiot's fallacy" to a famous murder of a British King. Hard reading, but it gets the point across.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman Carlsbad, CA

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-------------------------------------------------- (2) Stick nuclear waste where the sun don't shine: --------------------------------------------------

At 11:27 AM 3/26/2011 +0000, Richard Bramhall wrote:

From: "Richard Bramhall" <bramhall@llrc.org> Subject: George Monbiot and King Edward the Second (10)

An open letter to George Monbiot. Monbiot has a regular column in the UK Guardian newspaper. On 22nd March he dismayed many people by announcing that the Fukushima disaster has converted him to loving nuclear power; he now supports the technology. A basic plank of his case is the concept of radiation dose. In our letter we point out why this is a bad and unscientific mistake. The ghost of Edward the Second, King of England, makes a surprising appearance.

We link to two streamable videos on the health effects of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island which suggest that fallout can be expected to have a serious and early impact on health in Japan.

On Wednesday 23rd March we reported that contamination levels up to 70 kilometres from Fukushima were twice as high as in the Chernobyl Permanent Control Zone. We recommended the evacuation of Honshu.

We noted that all official agencies are conspicuously silent about the alpha-emitters Plutonium and Uranium.

www.llrc.org/fukushima/monbiot.htm

Follow llrc on Twitter for quicker updates than these emails.

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-------------------------------------------------- (3) "Source term is about the same as Chernobyl": --------------------------------------------------

From Bob Alvarez (via Facebook):

"From my friend and colleague, Bernd Franke, at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Heidelberg, Germany: 'The Austrian ZAMG puts the source term (Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG), founded in 1851, is Austria's national weather service agency) says the source term is about the same as Chernobyl.'"

"FYI 'source term' is a quantitative estimate of the nature and extent of the total amount of radioactivity released into the environment."

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-------------------------------------------------- (4) "Tool of the Nuclear Establishment -- The New York Times": --------------------------------------------------

At 08:56 AM 3/26/2011 -0400, Karl Grossman <kgrossman@hamptons.com> wrote:

"With The New York Times seeking to lead the media in minimizing, indeed denying, the impacts of the nuclear disaster in Japan, I have put this up on my blog, 'Tool of the Nuclear Establishment -- The New York Times.'"

It's at: karlgrossman.blogspot.com/2011/03/tool-of-nuclear-establishment-new-york.html

Karl Grossman is a professor of journalism at the State University of New York.

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-------------------------------------------------- (5) On YouTube -- "Chernobyl: A Million Casualties": -------------------------------------------------- From: Karl Grossman <kgrossman@hamptons.com> Subject: On YouTube -- "Chernobyl: A Million Casualties"

"Chernobyl: A Million Casualties" is now on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc72kT_gFNQ

EnviroVideo has expedited release of the program that is based on the book recently published by the NY Academy of Sciences concluding 985,000 people died as a result of the catastrophe. Karl interviews Dr. Janette Sherman, its contributing editor. Taped a week before the nuclear disaster in Japan, it was to be aired with the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl next month. That's been expedited because the consequences of the catastrophe provide a baseline for the Japan disaster.

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-------------------------------------------------- (6) "Time To Reassess The International Atomic Safety Regime": --------------------------------------------------

At 12:38 PM 3/26/2011 -0700, Conrad Miller wrote:

Here's my video for today, 3.5 minutes: 'U. N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon Says It Is "Time To Reassess The International Atomic Safety REGIME"' - also talk about new findings regarding childhood leukemias around nuclear plants, and nations refusing to take food and milk or even docking in or by Japan, including Australia and the USA and South Korea and Germany. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR0CZgE91jQ

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-------------------------------------------------- (7) What, ME a pessimist? I'm just a very hard realist!: --------------------------------------------------

At 09:19 AM 3/26/2011 -0400, "Jack Shannon" <jacksha1@aol.com> wrote:

Re: Slowly but inexorably worse and worse...

Boy what a pessimist. It can get worse, a lot worse, so bad in fact that the Japanese might lose 1/2 of their island. I know what can make it worse. I gave a lecture north of Syracuse. At the meeting I was told by the residents that some of the BWR reactors have vertical cracks in the downcomers. These were being fixed, at that time, by welding strips of metal across the vertical cracks. The Citizens have been told that the fix would do the job. I'm not sure what the "job" was that would be done. I think the phrase "job" kind of mean't, hang on to collective assess folks, you ain't seen nothing yet. Just a thought. Jack Shannon

-----------

Jack Shannon designed naval nuclear reactors at KAPL.

What are "downcomers"? Check out my animation of BWRs like Fukushima (also includes animations of PWRs, which, together, are the two types of commercial nuclear reactors used in America):

www.tinyurl.com/964hd

--------------------------------------------------- (8) Contact information for the author of this newsletter appears below:

Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers: An Expose of the Nuclear Industry Free download: acehoffman.org Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman Carlsbad, CA Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org

Friday, March 25, 2011

Slowly but inexorably worse and worse...

March 25th, 2011

Dear Readers,

We are two weeks into the Fukushima Daiichi tragedy. Now the Unit 3 Reactor Pressure Vessel (RPV) has apparently breached. That is, it's leaking. Oh, no. This may make it impossible to keep coolant covering the damaged reactor core, greatly increasing the likelihood of a meltdown or even an RPV explosion -- a very violent steam explosion or steam/hydrogen explosion, which would release huge amounts of radioactivity all at once.

In typical Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs), the control rods are inserted into the RPV from the bottom. Just one more stupid part of a stupid design, like the spent fuel pools being above the reactors. (But don't go thinking other reactor designs are much better. They each have their own problems.)

Fuel pellets that have broken off are likely to gather at the bottom of the RPV. The extra heat and radioactivity can damage the seals between the control rods and the RPV. This might be the cause of the leaks.

Radiation levels 10,000 times more than normal were found when technicians tried to get near the reactor. Two workers received serious radiation burns from water that seeped into their boots.

Who knows how many gauges and control mechanisms have already been destroyed? Or how many more are undoubtedly failing as they get clogged with soot, salt, seaweed, contaminated water, boron, and radioactive debris?

The operators are losing control: Things are overheating, evaporating, steaming, boiling, burning, melting. A full-scale meltdown, even without an RPV explosion, can render the entire area fatally radioactive to those who remain for more than a few seconds even with many layers of protection. So they'll run out of operators, sooner or later.

The Unit 4 spent fuel pool is particularly precarious because THAT fuel was just recently removed from the reactor and is very "hot" both thermally and radioactively. It won't just sit there. It will burn. It might even collapse into a critical configuration.

Is a meltdown in Unit 3 now inevitable? The Japanese Prime Minister says he cannot rule out things getting much worse.

One meltdown will be tragic. But we will be lucky now if it is ONLY one.

And yet, the mainstream media can still present "experts" who will tell the public that the U.S. nuclear industry is somehow different. That it is more "safety-conscious." It reacts faster to problems. It's taking the "lessons learned" from Fukushima Daiichi very seriously. They'll always say things like that.

The public has to demand that the plants be shut down. (Or they can just demand that the illogical and immoral Price-Anderson Act be abolished and put the liability for an accident where it belongs -- that would work, too.)

I don't know how to stop what is happening in Japan from turning worse. It seems that nobody does. But I do know how to stop the same thing from happening here in America: SHUT THE PLANTS DOWN!

Nuclear power is certainly not green energy, and it has never lived up to its promise of being clean, too cheap to meter, safe, reliable, or even merely cost-effective. But it sure is living up to its threats, and to the most dire predictions of its opponents.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman sweating bullets in... Carlsbad, CA

The author, 54, has written extensively about nuclear power for many years. His book, The Code Killers, written in 2008, is available for free download or online viewing from his web site: www.acehoffman.org . Hoffman is also an educational software developer and bladder cancer survivor.

-------------------------------------------- Comments on Dry Cask Storage: --------------------------------------------

Some activists, experts, and politicians think that dry cask storage is the solution to the nuclear waste storage problem, and point to the fact that no dry casks have caught fire (yet) in Japan as "proof."

But dry casks are each an additional danger, and they'll need endless numbers of them as long as the nuclear power plants remain open. In fact, they'll need hundreds of dry casks at each location! Dry cask fires, once started, will burn until the entire cask is vaporized -- and maybe casks underneath or next to them too, and then the one next to that, and the one next to that, until they are all gone.

An airplane or a tsunami might have smashed the dry casks into each other. So perhaps criticality can even be achieved (NOT like an atomic bomb, but like what happened in Idaho, Tokiamura, Los Alamos, and elsewhere in the past).

Shown below, from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) web site, are comments on criticality control of nuclear spent fuel, showing that preventing criticality requires an "engineered solution".

Dry cask storage isn't a good solution to the nuclear waste problem. (Note: This is not an endorsement of Yucca Mountain, either.)

-------------------------------------------- Criticality control: --------------------------------------------

From: http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/te_1192_prn.pdf

"Criticality control shall be maintained throughout all phases of spent fuel management. This includes operations during: handling, storage, transport, and geological disposal. This report will not discuss criticality control during storage in spent fuel pools or during loading operations. Criticality control will be provided primarily by the basket of the transport, storage, or geological disposal container. "

-------------------------------------------- Animations of PWR and BWR types of reactors (including a GE Mark 1 BWR): --------------------------------------------

http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/nukequiz/nukequiz_one/nuke_parts/reactor_parts.swf or: http://tinyurl.com/964hd

----------------------------------------------------- From Crisis to Catastrophe: A Nightmare Scenario: -----------------------------------------------------

From: http://www.sovereignindependent.com/?p=16733

"The leakage of plutonium and uranium from reactor number 3 is the nightmare scenario that many experts predicted would turn the situation at Fukushima from a crisis to a catastrophe. "

----------------------------------------------------- At 09:34 AM 3/25/2011 -0700, Jerry Collamer sent: -----------------------------------------------------

>The trouble at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is "nowhere near the point" of being resolved, Prime Minister Naoto Kan conceded on Friday. Two workers were hospitalized for radiation burns Thursday after stepping in highly radioactive water that suggests a breach in the No. 3 reactor vessel, according to the Los Angeles Times. The No. 3 reactor was the only reactor at the plant to use a concoction of uranium and plutonium known as mox fuel. It's likely that a mox fuel leak led to the unusually radioactive water, and officials say even more radiation from the fuel could be released. Meanwhile, the Japanese government has "quietly" extended its evacuation zone from 12 to 19 miles from the plant, suggesting that the threat is worse than officials have acknowledged. The U.S. government recommends that citizens stay at least 50 miles away the reactors. Apart from the dangers radiation, daily life in the affected area has come to a standstill. There's little access to shopping or gas, and many companies have stopped making deliveries. Efforts to repair the plant continue, with 700 workers operating in shifts to vent radioactive gases and cool the damaged reactors. The official death toll from the earthquake and tsunami has topped 10,000 people, with 17,500 still missing, reports the New York Times. > >Read original story in Los Angeles Times | Friday, March 25, 2011

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-quake-20110325,0,2343279.story

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

-----------------------------------------
Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Carlsbad, CA
Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org -----------------------------------------

Thursday, March 24, 2011

I'm not impressed when people tell me they think something has been "over-engineered." Here's why not.

3/24/2011

Dear Readers,

Below is a news item from 2008 regarding negligent behavior in the workplace at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. You probably had to already be paying attention to the plant's problems when it happened to have noticed it. And even that might not have helped, since at the time, it was just one more incident on top of many. And things have only gotten worse at the plant since then.

But it's an incident that SHOULD be remembered, in light of the ongoing events at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station.

A battery that was supposed to power safety systems in an emergency was inoperable for four years. Ho hum, there were others. Enough others? And in a separate incident in the same article, a worker "skipped hourly rounds" for five years (and, of course, falsified reports). And that's just one of many articles about problems at San Onofre. It's an accident waiting to happen.

TEPCO was a typical nuclear power company before the disaster. They were even being courted to build new reactors in Texas. (Now I think that deal will fall through.) TEPCO wasn't above suspicion, but who is? Certainly not the workers at San Onofre!

The fact is, what happened in Japan -- OR WORSE -- can happen anywhere. And don't think there's always time to "call in the Marines", assuming they'll come, even if they're right nearby -- and don't expect them to have every potential spare part a nuclear power plant might need, anyway.

But even if we had perfect human operators and emergency responders, and perfect weather, and no terrorists to worry about, and lots of spare parts, and the Emergency Core Cooling Systems all work when necessary from now on, and no asteroids (!) smash into the spent fuel pools either, which would be a real planet-killer... even then, there's still design failures which, even after 40 years, might not have appeared yet. Perhaps a study of what went wrong in Japan will reveal many unknown shortcomings of the GE Mark 1 BWR reactor design. More likely it would confirm shortcomings that were already pointed out and ignored. However, if they bury the stricken reactors in concrete it might be hard to know what went wrong. And it may be difficult to fix things if they go wrong again under all that concrete.

Of course, if we shut all the other reactors it won't matter so much what went wrong. But we haven't done that yet, have we?

In any event, we know that a lot of things failed that the public was promised would always work flawlessly. This would never happen, we were told. The public believed it.

Many people believe San Onofre was properly designed, built, and maintained. We won't know the truth until it's tested in an earthquake. But we do know that supposedly properly-built modern buildings fell (more modern than San Onofre) near the epicenters of recent earthquakes. Buildings which should have stood up.

When asked about severe earthquakes, the plant's owners have always simply assured the media and the public that San Onofre has undoubtedly been "over-engineered" (whatever THAT means) by factors of three, or five, or ten, etc.. Whatever number they need to close the gap.

But really, whatever "over-engineering" is, you can bet it costs money. But that's not the real problem. The problem is that over-engineering doesn't happen. And shouldn't.

When companies bid to build a proposed project, they don't bid on building something better than the specifications. Other companies bid on the projects as well -- competition is considered healthy. Then the lowest qualified bid is chosen, and the project begins. Where does the money for "over-engineering" then come from?

Instead what happens is you design and build things according to the design specifications. As an engineer, you develop your designs based on stone-cold calculations. You don't just "wing it"!

Thus, the final project is not "over-engineered" and if everyone tried to simply "over-engineer" everything, what would happen?

Ships would sink and buildings would topple. And perhaps worse.

Let's say your gut feeling is that the bolts should be heavier, they're not strong enough. So, believing in yourself, you put bigger bolts in. Nice move!

Ah, but you can't just do that, of course. You have to drill out bigger holes. But the space between the holes is what holds the I-beam together. You've weakened that. The building falls down in a strong hurricane. Blame mother nature if you want to. Or blame "over-engineering." Or you put the bigger bolts in, the boat becomes too heavy, and sinks in a storm. Blame mother nature if you want to. Or blame "over-engineering."

Okay, so you just buy a stronger steel than was specified. Same size, just stronger. Only you don't know that a certain chemical will be used in that building, and only very specific metals must be used.

Some metals react chemically to electrical charges that run through them. Did everyone think of what would happen when a large utility box had its main cable bolted to the floor under its own metal stand? It took more than 30 years for that to short out. But it happened, and they had to SCRAM the reactor when it did.

Let's say you find the perfect better bolt. All it cost was money -- your time to find it, and maybe it cost a lot more too. After all, it's perfect. Nuclear reactor components routinely cost ten or twenty or more times what a run-of-the-mill unit of the same specification, with the same warrantee, would cost.

But anyway, let's say you got what you wanted. Again and again, you get your changes approved. Then what happens? Well, two bad things might happen. You might make a mistake because you don't really know what you're doing, or you become complacent. After all, nobody's checking your work against the specifications, because if they did, they'd find you aren't following them. The other bad thing that can happen is, at the end of the project, you run out of money. Then what do you do? Just over-spend, as if money grows on trees? Your checks will bounce and you'll go to jail. Cut corners somewhere YOU don't think is important? At least then nobody goes to jail, right? So that's probably what you do.

When I hear the operators at San Onofre tell me they believe the facility has been "over-engineered" I cringe and so should everyone else. There's no easy way to get from a 7.0 to a 7.5 level of protection.

Instead, you do that by engineering to a 7.5 specification, not by "over-engineering" (whatever that means) a 7.0 specification just because you're altruistic and assume 7.0 isn't good enough, and no one can stop you. It just doesn't happen that way! It can't! Technology is a pretty tight box to fit in. Bridge spans aren't really supposed to fall down at all, but they do.

Over-engineered? I'm not even impressed that they try to claim that it is! And I certainly don't believe it.

They should be saying San Onofre is 7.0 -resistant, and that's all they can assume based on the specifications that it was built to. Or was it 6.9? I've heard the REAL value isn't even 7.0, it's 6.9. Small difference? If so, then it's all guesswork, isn't it?

And even the 7.0 (or 6.9) figure assumes everyone did their job properly. We have no evidence to support such an assumption. Time and again at the facility, corners were cut and problems were covered up. We know that.

San Onofre looks a lot better than it is. And it doesn't look very good.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman Carlsbad, CA

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At 12:03 PM 12/23/2008 -0800, MoJo <mollypj@yahoo.com> sent:

>http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_11289054 > > >San Onofre nuke plant battery inoperable 4 years > >The Associated Press >Posted: 12/22/2008 10:36:01 AM PST > >SAN CLEMENTE, Calif.—Federal regulators are ramping up inspections at the San Onofre nuclear plant after it was discovered a battery used to supply power to safety systems didn't work for four years. > >Nuclear Regulatory Commission regional administrator Elmo Collins said in a statement Monday that the problem stemmed from poor maintenance and the lapse is troubling because the condition persisted for so long. > >Other emergency batteries were available to supply power to plant safety systems, but the NRC said the loss of even one emergency battery reduced the plant's safety margins. It was inoperable from 2004 to 2008. > >San Onofre, on the coast between Los Angeles and San Diego, is operated by Rosemead-based Southern California Edison. > >The utility said in a statement that it accepted the outcome of the NRC's special inspection and will focus on preventing a recurrence. > >"We agree with the NRC regarding the rigor needed in problem identification and resolution. To that end, we have made significant leadership and organizational changes at San Onofre to ensure that plant performance keeps pace with continuously rising nuclear industry standards," the statement said. > >The commission said the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station will receive additional oversight because of the "white" inspection finding. The problem was discovered on March 25. > >NRC color-coded safety inspection categories range from green to white, yellow and red. >White is a low to moderate safety significance finding. > >NRC inspectors found loose electrical connections to the battery were caused by inadequate maintenance. The regulatory commission also noted seven findings determined to be of low safety significance. > >The NRC report said the San Onofre plant's "ability to effectively evaluate problems has been, and continues to be, a concern to the NRC." > >The commission plans additional oversight at the San Onofre plant "until sustained improvements are recognized." > >The San Onofre plant has troubled the NRC for some time. > >In September, Edison executives and NRC officials met in San Clemente to discuss safety lapses at the northern San Diego County plant. > >The commission disclosed in January that Edison fired or disciplined seven employees over the last two years for safety and security violations, including one worker who skipped hourly rounds for five years and falsified hourly logs. > >Edison then appointed a site manager who replaced a half-dozen plant managers and began a new accountability training. > >——— ----------------------------------------------

Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers: An Expose
Carlsbad, CA

www.acehoffman.org
Email: ace@acehoffman.org
-------------------------------------------------------

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Re: NO NUKES ANYWHERE some suggestions and comments by Lorna Salzman

3/23/2011

Dear Readers,

I agree with the enclosed letter, which was written yesterday by Lorna Salzman. All nuclear power plants are extremely hazardous, replaceable technology. Our voice should be united: SHUT 'EM DOWN!

I for one am tired of having my own voice weakened by those who continuously call for "stricter safety standards" and "more public openness" and worst of all, more studies. When they haven't even been to a hearing in years, and don't know where the spent fuel is stored (they think it's INSIDE the containment domes -- IT ISN'T!), and never read a single previous study, anyway!

I'm tired of hearing from friends who tell me they know someone at the plant who told them the spent fuel is "treated" eighteen different ways before it's "released" so there's nothing to worry about. And everything's 12 feet thick there.

"What chemicals or physical processes did he say are used in this 'treatment' of the spent fuel?" I ask.

"I don't know."

"When did you talk to the guy?"

"Years ago."

"Well, here are the facts: It doesn't happen! Those used reactor cores just sit there, risking destroying all of Southern California! There's no safe place to put them and there's no safe way to reprocess, recycle, or reuse them in any way! Some spent fuel is in pool, and some is in dry casks, which are arguably even more dangerous."

"Well, I heard that it was being treated. Gotta go. Business call coming in. Nice chatting with you. Don't worry, everything's going to be okay, you'll see."

Convincing know-it-all acquaintances that have friends that work at nuclear power plants that nukes are dangerous isn't easy.

Convincing the workers themselves might even be easier, since they usually have a better understanding of what's actually going on. If I say there's lies and cover-ups, they know it's true. They just haven't been questioning the basic principles. Principles such as that perfection can be achieved, and that a little bit of radiation is harmless. They SHOULD question these basic beliefs, and maybe now many of them will.

Meanwhile, activists should recognize that there isn't one safe nuclear power plant in the world, and even the safest one should be shut down permanently today. In America, there is enough excess electrical generating capacity that no one even needs to notice a full across-the-board shutdown! Your lights would still go on. Any "blackouts" that might occur would be artificially-induced to make us want to turn the nukes back on. And it would work: After a few days without electricity, the general public would certainly clamor for the nukes to be turned back on, even after seeing what can happen at Fukushima Dai-ichi.

Relying on nuclear power was a "Faustian Bargain" as Michio Kaku has been saying, and the next payment has come due.

Nuclear power is too expensive, too dangerous, and too unreliable.

Shut 'em down. Shut 'em all down.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman Carlsbad, CA

At 08:13 AM 3/23/2011 -0700, Darla Reynolds-Sparks <drsok1937@yahoo.com> wrote:

>I certainly agree that this is an important message. We must support any organization that opposes all Nuclear Reactors, regardless of their locations within our country. >Darla Reynolds-Sparks > > >--- On Wed, 3/23/11, BG <thinkcivic@gmail.com> wrote: > >From: BG <thinkcivic@gmail.com> >Subject: NO NUKES ANYWHERE some suggestions and comments Lorna Salzman >Date: Wednesday, March 23, 2011, 4:54 AM > >I think this is an important message. >bg > >---------- Forwarded message ---------- >From: Jean MCMAHON <jean_mac222@yahoo.com> >Date: Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 11:50 AM >Subject: Fw: some suggestions and comments Lorna Salzman > >--- On Tue, 3/22/11, Lorna Salzman <lsalzman1@verizon.net> wrote: > >From: Lorna Salzman <lsalzman1@verizon.net> >Subject: some suggestions and comments >To: "Mary Olson" <maryo@nirs.org> >Date: Tuesday, March 22, 2011, 11:40 AM > > >Respectful suggestion: > >All groups facing relicensing proceedings or new ones should be contacting each other to exchange information and coordinate responses. Some groups may have technical information that other groups night need but dont yet have. I would even suggest that a national strategy meeting be held, or at least one or two, one in the east or at least northeast (Vermont Yankee, Millstone, Indian Point, Oyster Creek), and the others in California. There are also two nukes in upstate NY (Ginna, near Rochester). Oyster Creek is the oldest in the country, and Vermont Yankee...just relicensed. Are we up for a blockade? > >The Ecology Party in Florida is CO=intervenor in the Florida Light and Power application to build a new reactor (whatever happened to hurricanes and sea level rise?).NIRS and Mary Olson are the lead intervenors. > >I would like to get Nader to reconvene his Critical Mass conferences. Does someone have access to him? He could get someone from Japan..from the Citizens Nuclear Information Center there, and of course Michio Kaku is in NYC. We need to restart the national movement quickly so we work together, with mutual support and a consistent No Nukes message. Half the American population lives within 50 miles of a reactor, and a third of our reactors are boiling water reactors, all relying on the same unreliable Emergency Core Cooling System. The ECCS is prone to many potential failures, not just loss of electric power. But the AEC in the 1972 rulemaking hearings on the ECCS refusing to allow testimony by its own staff as to the full range of possible causes of a Loss of Coolant Accident. > >Note today's NY Times ad by Entergy, owner of Indian Point, which says the plant is designed to cope with an earthquake ten times stronger than the plant's design. MISLEADING. Each magnitude of measurement represents a FACTOR OF TEN GREATER than the previous one. A 7 on Richter scale is ten times worse than a 6. An 8 is 100 times worse. If IP was designed to withstand a 6, then anything greater than an 8 would destroy it. This is the kind of information we need to challenge when we see it from the utility or the government. > >It is extremely urgent that each group not do or say anything that would undermine the case of another group elsewhere. The NIMBY syndrome has already emerged regarding Indian Point because there are people who are not (yet) anti nuclear but agree on the IP closure due to the proximity to NYC. The Hudson Riverkeeper is not anti nuclear and is focusing only on shutting IP. Gov. Andrew Cuomo opposes its license extension. If for some reason we win on IP, I sincerely hope people will not close shop and go home but will work on the other threats along with groups in Vermont and Connecticut. >There are also two nukes up near Rochester, the Ginna plants; has everyone forgotten about them? > >IMPORTANT: I am not suggesting we divert attention or effort away from Indian Point. I AM suggesting that each group adopt an internal policy opposing all nuclear power so if and when the time comes, we have a unified position of solidarity with all the other groups fighting to shut reactors near them. Without this consistent anti nuclear policy, we run the risk of being divided by our adversaries, to their advantage. I cant stress this enough...after thirty years of anti nuclear activism and organizing. Yes, by all means focus on IP. But have your back up position; eventually I can promise that you will be asked by the media or government officials where you stand. If you do not clearly oppose all nukes, you will be weakening your own group and the rest of us. Please consider this carefully. > >Of course Millstone, Vermont Yankee and Oyster Creek are at least as threatening to tens of millions of people. And keep going south along the coast. We are all at risk. If there is a demonstration, it should be not just at local plants but in front of either the NRC or the White House, or both. Obama needs to hear from us. NOW. > >Building a staunch uncompromising No Nukes Anywhere network should be our main goal. Anything that one group achieves will help other groups as well as the cause. I cannot stress this enough. We must have a national network/coalition that supports full abandonment of nuclear power. We have excess electric capacity equal to what all the nukes provide. We can shut them down immediately and provide surplus power through wind and conservation. > >I hope that all groups agree with me on this. Those that won't come out of the closet are doing the rest of us a disservice and maybe even weakening our case and our credibility with the press. Imagine the damage that could be done if, at a press conference, a group opposing Indian Point was asked by the press: do you support the closure of all nuclear plants? And they stammered and hedged or answered NO. THIS WOULD DESTROY US. We cannot allow anyone to speak for or with us who does not oppose all nukes. Please heed my advice. I have been involved in this issue since 1972. > >We must speak with ONE VOICE: No Nukes Anywhere. > >PS: NIRS is really important helpful but in dire need of money. Please donate to them if you can. > >Lorna Salzman ------------------------------------

Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers: An Expose
Carlsbad, CA

www.acehoffman.org
Email: ace@acehoffman.org
-------------------------------------------------------

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Like all reactors, GE Mark 1 BWRs are absolutely safe... unless something goes wrong...

3/22/11
Dear Readers,
A few weeks before the devastating Tohoku 9.0 earthquake and tsunami struck, Japanese nuclear regulators approved extending the life of one of the six reactors at Fukushima Dai-ichi by ten years, although they were warned that the unit's backup power system contained stress cracks that could cause it to become water-logged and inoperable in the rain, let alone in a tsunami.
The day before Tohoku struck, regulators in the United States approved a license extension for a nearly identical old GE Mark 1 BWR: A dilapidated, tritium-leaking reactor in Vermont, one of the most (relatively) pristine places left in America.
The Vermont reactor is surrounded with spent fuel, mainly in pools and also in dry casks. The extremely hazardous process of loading dry casks with spent fuel began at Vermont Yankee in May, 2008.
The small state could kiss itself and its neighbors goodbye if an accident occurs at the plant, or in the spent fuel pool, or as the fuel is being transferred (there are about 3,500 fuel assemblies at Vermont Yankee, each with hundreds of fuel rods containing tens of thousands of individual fuel pellets). The contents of the casks themselves can settle, inappropriately, unnoticed... until disaster strikes. Look it up.. These facts are buried deep in the regulatory data, but are outside the "Design Basis Accident" and discounted.
As you can see in Japan, such discounting has nothing to do with reality.
Shortly after the license extension to Fukushima Dai-ichi's reactor was granted, it was revealed that TEPCO failed to inspect dozens of pieces of equipment inside the plant, including water pumps and other safety systems. We all know what happened next. The system was tested, and failed. Further "testing" may not be over: A few hours ago, Japan experienced three of the most massive aftershocks yet, measuring 6.6, 6.4, and 6.6.
The entire nuclear industry is being very quick to call this a "natural disaster" because there was a large earthquake and a nominally large tsunami involved. But the real root cause was global corporate negligence. This could happen anywhere.
It is well known around here, by those who study the issues, that our local nuclear reactor in Southern California, San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, has, like TEPCO, failed to inspect, failed to report, lied on official documents, lied to inspectors, and failed to maintain backup equipment properly. Over the years they've changed large swaths of management, of workers, and of inspectors. And yet these problems have persisted. Unbelievable as it may sound, it's a culture at EVERY nuclear power plant to cut corners. Here's why:
To be in total compliance with every regulation is not only frightfully expensive, it's impossible without doubling (or more) the staffs of EVERY nuclear reactor. But reactors are already short-staffed and routinely require workers to put in long overtime shifts and to work many days in a row. That adds to the stress and inability to react properly in an emergency. Add to that, worker distrust of management (and vice-versa), and both distrust government, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
Oh, and add that less than 1% of whatever happens at a nuclear reactor is inspected by federal regulators in any way. And most of what IS inspected is only "inspected" on paper.
The normal way to fix most things at a nuclear power plant anywhere in the world, including large pumps, transformers, switches, valves, pipes, and control cabling, is to wait until they fail. If the failure can be isolated from the system, they keep the reactor operating, unless regulations won't permit it. Otherwise, they shut down the plant and, after the fuel has cooled down (as we can see, that takes a while) they go in and fix everything that broke in the meantime that they could isolate, and whatever broke that made them shut down, and restart the reactor.
Every 18 months they shut down anyway, to load 1/3 of the reactor with fresh nuclear fuel, and remove the oldest 1/3. They also rearrange the remaining fuel for more efficient "burn-up". Fuel that comes out of the reactor is loaded with fission products and approximately ten million times more dangerous than "fresh" fuel.
"Burned-up" nuclear fuel is not really burned up. Uranium (and/or plutonium) atoms that were split produced fission products instead, in a process which releases enormous amounts of heat, as well as neutrons to sustain the "chain reaction".
Ideally, the fission products that are created are NEVER released. At Fukushima Dai-ichi, they have been released in massive quantities.
After an old transformer exploded in a switchyard at San Onofre, other similar transformers were NOT replaced, because of the cost of replacing so many transformers (over 100). Instead, the old transformers continue to be replaced on a fix-on-fail basis instead.
However, a transformer explosion could cascade and disrupt the entire power grid, affecting incoming (offsite) power as well as the reactor's ability to feed power to the grid. When the transformer exploded, the reactor automatically shut down, a very dangerous and expensive procedure that doesn't always go right.
What's happening because of Fukushima Dai-ichi to the people of Japan could happen in Southern California tomorrow because our reactor operators are just as lax, and even if they were perfect, mother nature deals cards they can't trump. Ours are Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs) and theirs were Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs) but PWRs are still very dangerous, perhaps more so. Ours are also very old reactors, and operate at a higher temperature and pressure than BWRs do. Therefore, they age more rapidly.
The International Atomic Energy Agency is currently saying: "We are still in an accident that is still in a very serious condition." That's the best they can offer after nearly two weeks. Unknowns among experts abound. So why are we even calling them experts? What's left for anyone to learn about nuclear power? IT DOESN'T WORK!
At this moment, all six reactors at Fukushima Dai-ichi are said to have power lines hooked up, but power has not actually been restored yet. Radiation is "leaking" but they don't know where from. They are still dumping sea water onto at least one spent fuel pool, which suggests that water is still leaking from that pool.
Radiation readings of 160 microsieverts per hour -- said to be 3,000 times Tokyo's normal background levels -- have been recorded six miles BEYOND the evacuation zone around the stricken fleet of reactors. Radiation in the soil was measured at 400 times normal levels 30 miles from the plant.
Japanese government experts say that exposure to 100,000 microsieverts a year is "the lowest level at which any increase in cancer risk is clearly evident." 160 microsieverts an hour will give you that dose in less than in a month.
Most experts assume the risk from radiation exposure increases at a linear rate as the dose goes up. There is no lower threshold for radiation damage to biological systems. Every human will be ingesting and inhaling poisons from this accident forever, from their first breath to their last, from their first suckle of breast milk to their last meal before death's door.
Heartless.
Meanwhile today, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the propaganda arm of the American nuclear industry, released a document written by General Electric defending the Mark 1 reactor design. It's available at their web site. GE says the design works perfectly -- when properly cared for and when big bad accidents don't happen, like this one! Duh! GE admits that, JUST AS WITH EVERY OTHER APPROVED TYPE OF REACTOR, a so-called "beyond design-basis accident" can have serious consequences. Duh.
Once again, self-evident facts have ended any reason for debate, or more studies, or more delay. The Mark 1 reactor design cannot ensure safe shutdown, and nor can any other operating nuclear reactor design in the world. (It should be noted that the proposed Westinghouse AP1000 design -- supposedly innovative -- also cannot ensure safe shutdown except within a narrow range of "Design Basis Accidents" that don't match the real world any more than GE's reactors -- or current Westinghouse reactors -- can.)
San Onofre Nuclear Waste-Generating Station is a disaster-waiting-to-happen which could make even Fukushima Dai-ichi seem small (assuming it doesn't get much worse than it is already): Nuclear fuel at "SanO" is an enormous risk, whether it's stored in dry casks or spent fuels or is still in the reactors.
The Tohoku tsunami, with its 30-foot waves, was able to set large boats down on top of multi-story buildings well inland in Japan. And yet San Onofre officials insist our 25-foot sea wall is sufficient!
Can it happen here? Oh, can it ever. Shut 'em down. Shut 'em all down.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
The author's highly acclaimed 2008 handbook on nuclear power, called The Code Killers because of the damage to the DNA code done by radiation, can be viewed online or downloaded at no charge from his site: acehoffman.org

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



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

Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers: An Expose
Carlsbad, CA

www.acehoffman.org
Email: ace@acehoffman.org
-------------------------------------------------------

Vexing Mess: Experts perplexed, citizens stop sex...

3/22/11

Dear Readers,

Dr. Miller has asked me to correct a line in yesterday's newsletter. The line appeared to be based on my conversation with Dr. Miller, but was actually based on an interview this author saw with a "qualified" expert on, I believe, MSNBC. I did not mean to attribute it to Dr. Miller.

The line stated that side effects of KI could "mimic" those of radiation poisoning. The side effects of taking KI (if they happen) would likely be similar to those of most allergic reactions. (Typically: Itching, rash, tongue swelling, difficulty breathing...) Of course, if these occur you would have to stop taking the iodide solution or pills and then treat the allergic reaction/symptoms, and realize that henceforth you are allergic to the form of iodide you took, and probably to anything containing iodine.

A corrected version with the line removed and the phrase "are typical for any allergic reaction" in its place appears below.

This morning's newsletter will follow shortly.

The author regrets the error.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman Carlsbad, CA

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

3/21/11

Dear Readers,

Fukushima Dai-ichi may still be getting worse, not better.

The birth rate is bound to decline in Northern Japan. Whether by choice or by biological influence, no one will be sure. Sperm counts will drop and spontaneous abortions will rise. Many people will not WANT to have babies. It happened after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It happened after Chernobyl. It will happen here too. We're only human.

Radiation monitors were blown out when the buildings exploded, or simply stopped working at some point. Readings at the plant are generally unknown, and whatever is known is seldom presented to the public.

Today, spinach, milk, and water were all reported poisoned with radiation in various places in Japan. Radiation readings 1,600 times normal were detected TWENTY KILOMETERS from the plant, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Levels were reported to be over 160 microsieverts per hour.

No one should ever believe that a ten-mile evacuation planning zone is good enough anymore. Or that evacuation zones are the answer.

The truth of what's coming over the U.S. border, here where I live, is hard to know. I finally ordered my very own radiation detector -- but it's not scheduled to be shipped until the middle of May!

Dr. Conrad Miller recommends people in California start taking KI and says he's prescribed it "more than a thousand times" for other reasons as a doctor, and has never seen a side effect in anyone. He points out that the accident has already happened, the radioactive isotopes are in the air and falling now, and the side effects of taking KI (if they happen), are typical for any allergic reaction, and will presumably go away when you stop taking the KI.

Dr. Miller additionally say's he'll "probably" take it soon himself (he lives on Long Island, New York). Dr. Miller's videos are available online here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/conradmillermd

But I should point out that as far as I know, readings are NOT elevated in California... yet...

The following are the four main barriers to radioactive releases in these types of nuclear power plants, from the outermost layer to the innermost:

1) Outer walls of a fairly airtight building. These have been blown away at three reactors.

2) Primary Containment Vessel (large steel structure with cement base and large posts inside to hold the Reactor Pressure Vessel). Hopefully these are all intact but it seems unlikely.

3) Reactor Pressure Vessel. At least one of these may be damaged. All are still in danger of catastrophic failures, especially if they run out of boron or if seaweed plugs up the reactor's water channels. "We're not out of the woods yet" is a common pronouncement from the talking heads on television today.

4) The last barrier to prevent fission products and fuel (uranium and plutonium) escaping is the fuel cladding, made of zirconium, in steel rods with hundreds of pellets in each rod. It's presumably what has been burning, when things burn at the site. When that happens, fission products are released, which gathered between fuel and the inner wall of the cladding.

Keeping fission products from escaping is what the cladding is there for: To keep the Cesium-137, Iodine-131, Strontium-90 and an ugly rainbow of other isotopes isolated from the human environment. Those deadly elements -- the ones they talk about in science fiction movies -- are being released at Fukushima Dai-ichi.

Everything that breaks off is undoubtedly being washed out to sea, to enter life's many food chains. What doesn't burn or oxidize and go up in smoke or steam, that is.

Fuel claddings are never perfect, and fuel clad cracking has been a recurrent problem for the nuclear industry.

Plutonium in the fuel is another problem. The cladding burns at one temperature, the uranium / plutonium burns at another, higher temperature. MOX fuel has plutonium but of course, so does uranium-based fuel: It builds up in the reactor at the rate of about 500 pounds per year. So any fuel that has melted, has probably released plutonium into the environment, whether it was from the MOX reactor or not.

When all is said and done -- and who knows when that will be -- a perfect accounting of what's missing from the reactor site will be impossible. TEPCO records can't be trusted, and employees who might know the truth are very likely to be too sick to testify, or dead.

The spent fuel pools appeared to be burning again today. Smoke or -- hopefully -- only steam has been seen rising from two reactors at the site. Workers were pulled away because of high radiation levels -- again. Things are still very out of control.

Regarding exposure levels here in America: It's probably still true that if you smoke cigarettes, stopping smoking today will still make more of a difference for your overall health and life expectancy than the radiation plume now descending all around us will make to you as an individual.

Smoking, of course, kills tens of millions of people every year. Japan has a very high rate of smoking, which will probably increase the effect of the radiation on their bodies, since the smoking already weakens their lungs. This will be true for anyone experiencing any chemical assault or other biological assault at the same time as this "little" wave of radiation passes by and through us, falls on our food... This will tip some people over the edge. The authorities might blame increased deaths on a late flu, on some virus that might be going around. And it might be true that such a thing caught hold and DID spread around -- because of weakened immune systems!

And then, later... cancer. This accident is something no expert who understands the dangers ever wanted to see. And yet so many activists and experts alike have said to me in the past, "IT WILL TAKE AN ACCIDENT." Well, here it is, folks. If we don't use this incident to shut down nuclear power, then there will be another incident. And another. And another.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman Using my HEPA filters in... Carlsbad, CA

The author has been studying nuclear disasters, real or imagined, for many decades. This one was easily imagined.

---------------------------------------------- Interactive live map of cross-referenced radiation readings:

http://www.rdtn.org/ ----------------------------------------------

Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers: An Expose
Carlsbad, CA

www.acehoffman.org
Email: ace@acehoffman.org
-------------------------------------------------------

Sunday, March 20, 2011

QUAP: If there's a hell, it's surely radioactive... and looks like Fukushima Dai-ichi...

March 20th, 2011

Dear Readers,

Here's the news today: Japanese nuclear experts "might" be making SOME progress on cooling the overheated reactors and spent fuel pools at Fukushima Dai-ichi. The problem is, maybe they AREN'T making ANY progress at all! They just can't know. The internal temperatures of the reactor cores are unknown. Pressures at various places in the system are all that is known. The only thing that creates heat in the system -- and thus, pressure -- is the radioactive fuel. So the continued steam releases suggest fuel isn't cooling very quickly, and stability is NOT guaranteed at ANY of the three reactors that had the misfortune to be operating when the 9.0 earthquake struck.

An explosion of a reactor pressure vessel is not impossible. Those hydrogen explosions we've seen so far were NOT the reactor pressure vessels. Those would be even worse. Hydrogen OR steam explosions are possible within them. Such explosions would be much worse than anything we have seen so far, especially if such explosions cascade across reactors, a very real possibility.

The reactors all shut down as expected (depriving the area of much-needed electrical power) but for days or even weeks after a shutdown, reactors stay very, very hot, whether you get the control rods inserted properly, as apparently happened here, or not, as happened in Chernobyl. So in a sense, no reactor can be guaranteed to be safely shut down in a hurry. That should be obvious now.

After the approximately 25-foot tsunami waves struck an hour later, the site's many backup systems failed one by one by one... and things got neglected, too.

A better immediate grasp of the seriousness of their plight, causing faster responses such as bringing in extra pumps and power generators sooner, might have made a big difference. No matter who else needed them -- and everybody did, and does, including hospitals and sewage stations.

Flooding the reactors with seawater sooner might have helped. Flooding them with boric acid sooner. Ordering emergency shipments of boric acid from around the world sooner. Having a whole lot more on site... One can probably find a hundred things TEPCO did wrong in the first 24 hours alone.

The nuclear industry will admit to one or two of them and move forward unless we stop them. Every plant would make 100 mistakes in the first 24 hours, too. They did at Chernobyl and they did at Three Mile Island. At the Davis Besse plant in Ohio in 2002, nuclear "experts" ignored repeated clogged filters indicating something was seriously rusting out inside the plant -- it was the reactor pressure vessel! It was completely eroded in one place -- a football-sized hole -- and perhaps hours or days away from bursting. ONLY THE LINER (3/16ths of an inch thick!) was holding back the pressure (and the liner was bulging out already)!! Six inches of steal had eroded.

At the Monticello plant in Minnesota, bolts kept baffles for the Emergency Core Cooling System from flapping as they were shipped by truck from the manufacturer. To allow the ECCS to function, these "shipping bolts" were supposed to be removed during installation when the plant was constructed. They weren't, and nobody noticed. For thirty years.

So don't let anyone tell you it can't happen here. It can and it will, and it almost has many times. We won't be the lucky ones forever.

The Japanese are technological wizards. A year ago they were bragging about their nuclear technologies in fancy productions still available -- and laughable -- on You Tube. But a slew of 40-year-old reactors have them beat. Experts called in from around the world are also perplexed.

Venting of radioactive steam might have to go on for YEARS according to many experts.

Meanwhile, Libyan jets are being shot down on film. Good thing THEY are not falling onto reactors or spent fuel pools! They could be! There is a nuclear research center located in Tajura, just ten miles from Tripoli. And AREVA was negotiating to build power reactors in Libya, too! Hopefully that idea was scratched when French fighter jets were scrambled to attack the country instead.

News is now coming out that TEPCO, the owner of the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors in Japan, wanted the U.S. military and the Japanese governments to take over three days into the disaster. But they were told that was "not an option." TEPCO employees understood this to literally mean, "keep going until YOU die" and many of them are apparently doing so.

Wall Street knew all along that nuclear power is a bad investment. Hence the need for "loan guarantees" and other billions of dollars in gifts every year to the nuclear industry. This accident will cost Japan hundreds of billions of dollars (tens of trillions of yen).

I've heard nuclear power called: "The most complicated way known to man to boil water."

But it looks pretty simple to me: Pour sea water on it, and the water boils away!

The nuclear demons charge dearly in lives, land, money, and futures. The price rises every day.

Uranium starts killing the moment the "quap" (the derogatory term science fiction writer H. G. Wells gave it, in his prescient way) is dug out of the ground. Splitting the uranium atom releases energy but also produces extremely deadly byproducts called fission products. Usually a two-for-one deal. You get two fission products for every uranium atom or plutonium atom that's split. These fission products are now being released, along with uranium and plutonium, into the atmosphere, farmlands, and water. This catastrophe will have a profound effect on human DNA globally, as well as on all other living things.

And just how many global nuclear accidents can the human genome tolerate? How many MUST we tolerate?

This latest nuclear cascade of accidents may not be the worst to come: Four nuclear reactors at two sites in California (where this author lives) might do the same thing tomorrow (or today). They have thousands of tons of spent fuel stored at these sites too, either in dry casks (which have no pool for dousing them with water if they catch fire) or in spent fuel pools, which, obviously, are also not safe.

Everyone knows "the big one" is coming to California soon. Huge earthquakes have struck three quadrants of the Pacific Rim -- the Ring of Fire -- recently. But not ours.

The ongoing Fukushima Dai-ichi disaster was really no accident: It was premeditated murder. Virtually every aspect of what's going on was predicted years ago.

Professor Francis A. Boyle considers nuclear power a Crime Against Humanity. I completely concur.

Below is a letter someone sent me about a way to take iodine. I am not a doctor and am not making any recommendations. Consult a physician, of course. If any doctors comment on this suggestion, I'll pass it on in a later newsletter.

Tut, tut, looks like rain. We're in for a heavy rain any minute now. Cesium-137, Strontium-90, Iodine-131, Tritium (Hydrogen-3)... here it comes.... what went up... must come DOWN!

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman Taking his forced dose of radioactive "sunshine vitamins" in Carlsbad, California

The author's landmark visual/technical guide to the nuclear industry, The Code Killers, is available for free download from his web site: acehoffman.org . The author is grateful to anyone who forwards this message, publishes it, discusses it with others, or has simply read this far!

------------------------------------------------------- Useful educational material: -------------------------------------------------------

An interview with Dr. Ernest Sternglass was posted on You-Tube yesterday: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPO7Tft0YlQ

An interview with Karl Grossman was also posted yesterday: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrMDcZA-YjU

A news conference with CNIC Japan (the first half is translated into English), recorded today: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/13447172

Newsweek published a short article by Dr. Helen Caldicott called The Manhattan Meltdown Scenario: http://www.newsweek.com/2011/03/20/the-manhattan-meltdown-scenario.html

Out of France comes a map which may or may not accurately predict, or indicate any actual values for, the wind plume from Fukushima Dai-ichi: http://www.irsn.fr/FR/popup/Pages/irsn-meteo-france_19mars.aspx

Here is something from Nutritionist Sara Shannon's "Diet for the Atomic Age". Many other such diets are based on her book, first published in 1987 and updated and expanded in 1997: http://www.ratical.org/radiation/NGP/Diet4AtomAge.html

Heavy stuff (the roof of the building?) goes up what appears to be 1000 feet or more (these are VERY big buildings) -- and then comes down on or very near the reactor, AFTER the cloud has drifted away somewhat. Terrifying. Watch closely: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_N-wNFSGyQ&feature=related

---------------------------------------------------------------- Iodine solution? At 10:47 AM 3/19/2011 -0700, Mark Smith wrote: ----------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Ace--

Many years ago on a motorcycle trip, I stayed for a week at the house of a woman in Del Mar. If I recall correctly, her name was Esther Czerny. She was an older woman from Vienna and in excellent health. She had the curious habit of putting two drops of tincture of iodine, the kind you put on minor cuts and scrapes that is marked "for external use only," into a glass of water every day, and drinking it. When I asked, she said it was to protect from radioactivity. I didn't think about it for years, until Chernobyl. Then it made sense to me, so I started doing the same thing for a while. I forgot about it again for years until Fukushima happened. Then I started doing it again. I don't know if it helps, but it doesn't seem to hurt.

--Mark

-------------------------------------------------- Letter to Canadian Premier Wall from Elaine Hughes (includes Francis Boyle's commentary): --------------------------------------------------

Premier Wall - QUOTE: "Gorbachev described Chernobyl as "a warning sign" for countries dependent on nuclear power or keen to turn to it. " . . . .and now, we have the Nuclear Nightmare in Japan! As a follow-up to your most disappointing (point-less!) letter dated March 8, 2011 (see below) - which totally missed the concerns I set out in my email to you regarding the lessons to be learned by Chernobyl - you might want to examine your conscience within the context of the article below. What a shameful state of affairs that the Saskatchewan Government continues to tout our province around the world as the 'Saudi Arabia of Uranium'! And, continues its unnecessary and dangerous pursuit of more uranium mining, more uranium 'development', more so-called 'innovation', more radioactive waste with no way to handle it.

I urge you, once again, Premier Wall, to devote your time and my tax money to research and development of truly safe, sustainable and clean energy sources, and halt any and all needless activity related to uranium and its killer industry. Elaine Hughes Box 23 Archerwill, SK S0E 0B0 = = = = = = = = Nuclear Power Industry is a Crime Against Humanity

http://mwcnews.net/focus/letters-to-editors/9423-nuclear-power-industry-is-a-crime-against-humanity.html

by Francis Boyle March 20, 2011

QUOTE: ". . . . The same must be done by the other peoples in the world against their own Nuclear Power Industries, including and especially here in the United States, the originator of nuclear energy that was criminally used for the first two times at Hiroshima and Nagasaki against innocent Japanese Civilians, also a Crime Against Humanity."

Dear Friends:

I have now had the opportunity to review my information sources. I have already sent to you the basic thrust of my analysis: Namely, that the Japanese Nuclear Power Industry constitutes a Crime against Humanity as defined by Article 7 of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court, to which Japan is a party. The same holds true for the Nuclear Power Industries in all the other countries of the World. You have the text of Rome Statute Article 7 below, which is directly on point. The Japanese People must now use this legal conclusion to terminate the Nuclear Power Industry in Japan, this ongoing Crime Against Humanity. The same must be done by the other peoples in the world against their own Nuclear Power Industries, including and especially here in the United States, the originator of nuclear energy that was criminally used for the first two times at Hiroshima and Nagasaki against innocent Japanese Civilians, also a Crime Against Humanity. The Japanese people are now being victimized once again by nuclear energy, only this time by your own Government and Business People in the Nuclear Power Industry.

As for the MOX, you know I have worked before with Junko Abe to stop the further deployment of MOX in Japan. MOX contains plutonium, the deadliest substance known to humanity. And there has already been an explosion at Fukushima Reactor No. 3 containing MOX/plutonium. The Japanese People must demand that the Japanese Government and Nuclear Power Industry inform them specifically about the plutonium at Reactor 3. Has the plutonium been released into the atmosphere already? So far they have said nothing about plutonium release. You must obtain this information and monitor it continuously. Perhaps it might be possible for private scientists and NGOs in Japan to start monitoring for plutonium release­we are starting to do this in the United States, not relying upon the U.S. Government to tell us the truth since they never do so when it comes to Nuclear Power. And you must now consult with private medical doctors and health experts about what to do about any plutonium release and the other radioactive substances that have already been released­cesium, strontium, etc. You must not trust the Japanese Government or the Japanese Nuclear Power Industry to tell you the truth. They are the ones who are responsible for this Crime against Humanity in the first place. The Japanese People must act to save yourselves from your own Government and Nuclear Power Industry.

I hope you find these comments to be useful. You have my permission to use them for a newspaper article.

Yours very truly,

Francis A. Boyle Professor of International Law University of Illinois College of Law

- - - -

Dear Friends:

It is very good to hear from you again. I wish to express my deepest sorrow to the Japanese People for all of their suffering as a result of the earthquake and tsunami. As a young Marine my Father arrived at Nagasaki on September 26, 1945. It must have been an horrific site. I am very saddened to see that the Japanese People are once again being victimized by nuclear energy.

It is early in the morning here. Before I respond to your questions, I want to study and examine my information sources that have come in over the night. Then I can adequately respond to your questions. I will perform this task sometime later today and then get back to you. In the meantime, let me state that the Nuclear Power Industry in Japan currently constitutes a Crime Against Humanity as defined by Article 7 of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court, to which Japan is a contracting party:

Article 7

Crimes against humanity

1. For the purpose of this Statute, "crime against humanity" means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:….

(k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.

2. For the purpose of paragraph 1:

(a) "Attack directed against any civilian population" means a course of conduct involving the multiple commission of acts referred to in paragraph 1 against any civilian population, pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy to commit such attack; ….

You are free to publish this conclusion at this time in your newspaper if you wish. I will get back to you on the other questions later today after I have had the opportunity to study my information sources.

Yours very truly

Francis A. Boyle

Professor of International Law

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======================================== Quotes collected by Ace Hoffman: ========================================

---------------------------------------------- "Nuclear war must be the most carefully avoided topic of general significance in the contemporary world. People are not curious about the details." -- Paul Brians (author; quote is from: Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction) ---------------------------------------------- "When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." -- Sinclair Lewis (first American Nobel Prize winner in Literature, 2.7.1885 - 1.10.1951) ---------------------------------------------- "There is no such thing as a pro-nuclear environmentalist." -- Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa, 1992) ---------------------------------------------- "Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories." -- Sun Tzu (Chinese general b.500 BC) ---------------------------------------------- "The most intolerable reactor of all may be one which comes successfully to the end of its planned life having produced mountains of radioactive waste for which there is no disposal safe from earthquake damage or sabotage." -- A. Stanley Thompson (a pioneer nuclear physicist who later realized the whole situation) ---------------------------------------------- "Any dose is an overdose." -- Dr. John W. Gofman (another pioneer nuclear physicist who saw the light (9.21.1918 - 8.15.2007)) ---------------------------------------------- "Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery." -- Octavia Butler (science fiction writer, 7.22.1947 - 2.24.2006) ---------------------------------------------- "If you want real welfare reform, you focus on a good education, good health care, and a good job.

If you want to reduce poverty, you focus on a good education, good healthcare, and a good job.

If you want a stable middle class, you focus on a good education, good health care, and a good job.

If you want to have citizens who can participate in democracy, you focus on a good education, good health care, and a good job.

And if you want to end the violence, you could build a million new prisons and you could fill them up, but you never end this cycle of violence unless you invest in the health and the skill and the intellect and the character of our children. You focus on a good education, good health care and a good job.

And other than that, I don't feel strongly about anything."

-- Paul Wellstone (US Senator, D-Minnesota, 7.21.1944 - 10.25.2002) ---------------------------------------------- "There are no warlike peoples - just warlike leaders." -- Ralph Bunche (8.7.1903 - 12.9.1971) ---------------------------------------------- "Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." -- Thomas Jefferson ---------------------------------------------- "Officials from the San Onofre nuclear reactor said the warning siren that went off yesterday was just a malfunction and no one should worry. Hey, I worry, if they can't even get the siren to work right, what the hell are they doing with the reactor??" Jay Leno 1/20/10 ---------------------------------------------- "Please send this to everyone you know!" -- Ace Hoffman (original collector of the above quotes, January, 2008) ----------------------------------------------

This email was sent by:

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Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers: An Expose
Carlsbad, CA

www.acehoffman.org
Email: ace@acehoffman.org
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