Karl Grossman

A Way Around the Federal Nuclear Power Fix

2012-01-22T18:17:00.000-08:00

The nuclear power program in the United States was set up rigged—to allow the federal government to push atomic energy with state and local governments “pre-empted” on most issues.

That’s what the State of Vermont was confronted with last week as a federal judge blocked the state’s attempts to shut down the accident-plagued Vermont Yankee nuclear plant.

But there’s a way around this federal nuclear fix—the use by states of their power of “eminent domain.” That’s a legal principle going back centuries and is how, commonly, states condemn property for a highway right-of-way if the owners refuse to sell.

The application of the state’s power of “eminent domain” to nuclear power was pioneered in New York State in the 1980s—and was how the completed Shoreham nuclear plant was stopped from opening. That ended the scheme of nuclear promoters to turn Long Island into a “nuclear park” with seven to 11 nuclear plants.

The Long Island Power Act was passed by New York State in 1985 creating a Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) with the power to seize the assets and stock of the utility behind this nuclear scheme, the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO).

The federal government was gung-ho for Shoreham. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) had approved the start-up of operations at Shoreham, the first of three nuclear plants to be built on that site, and the construction of two more nuclear plants at Jamesport, to be joined by two more there. More plants would go up between the two with all fronting on the Long Island Sound.

But by enacting the Long Island Power Act that utilized the state’s power of “eminent domain,” New York State made clear that if LILCO persisted with nuclear power, the state would eliminate it.

This strategy can be used by the State of Vermont—and other states—faced by the nuclear juggernaut of the federal government and nuclear industry. Indeed, it’s a strategy that needs to be pursued because it is highly unlikely that federal nuclear officials will be sensible or fair—or uphold democracy.

The NRC like its predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), has never, for example, denied a construction or operating license for a nuclear plant anyplace, anywhere in the United States. These days, with no new nuclear plants having both been ordered and built in the U.S. since 1973, the NRC has been busy rubber-stamping “license renewal” applications of utilities to run their existing plants—including Vermont Yankee—20 more years. It has also begun to give the go-ahead to utilities to build new plants.

The Long Island Power Act “set forth a mechanism for getting rid of the utility by giving the public authority which it created the power to condemn the utility’s assets and stock,” explains Irving Like, a co-author of the act.

“With this we had the ability to tell LILCO: either you shut down the Shoreham plant or we will condemn you,” he said. Like, of Babylon, Long Island, had previously written the Environmental Bill of Rights of the New York State Constitution.

With Vermont now “looking for a path forward,” Like suggested last week that it—and other states faced by the federal government and nuclear industry’s drive—should “see if you can model a statute along those lines.” He would be glad to share his knowledge and can be contacted at ilike@rlt-law.com

Also co-author of the Long Island Power Act was Steve Liss, counsel to the Environmental Conservation Committee of the New York State Assembly, who last week spoke of how “eminent domain” gives a state the power to act “in the public interest for a lawful purpose.” The state must pay “fair market value” for what it condemns, Liss added.

Although Vermont Yankee’s owner is Entergy, a utility based in Louisiana which has been buying nuclear plants around the U.S.—including Vermont Yankee from its original owner—the State of Vermont’s power of “eminent domain” can be applied to it, Liss said. The state, after enacting a legal foundation similar to the Long Island Power Act, could move against the assets of Entergy in Vermont, he said.

Another strategy, said Liss, would be for Vermont to acquire the utilities in Vermont that distribute the electricity from Vermont Yankee and which own the transmission lines through which it runs—and refuse the electricity and bar its transmission over the lines.

In his January 19th ruling, U.S. District Court Judge J. Garvan Murtha declared that the State of Vermont’s demand that Vermont Yankee be shut down was “grounded in radiological concerns,” and this is an issue on which the federal government has “pre-empted” state and local governments.

Indeed, that is central to the scheme concocted in the late 1940s and 1950s by those seeking to promote atomic energy. They came out of the Manhattan Project, the World War II program to build nuclear weapons. They sought after the war to continue and expand their nuclear work. They would keep building weapons but atomic bombs don’t lend themselves to commercial spin-off—they can’t be sold. So there would be a limit in constructing atomic and hydrogen bombs. Thus this “nuclear establishment”—officials and scientists of the multi-billion dollar Manhattan Project and the project’s corporate contractors, notably General Electric and Westinghouse—sought to perpetuate the endeavor with other uses of atomic energy, especially nuclear power plants.

The Manhattan Project in 1946 became the Atomic Energy Commission, to be given extraordinary powers, particularly with the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, by a U.S. Congress that the “nuclear establishment” found (then and now) easy for it to manipulate. This included federal jurisdiction over the issue of radioactivity, as noted by Judge Murtha.

A licensing system for nuclear power plants was devised to give an illusion of democratic process. Hearing officers, many of whom would come from the national nuclear laboratories which sprang up with the Manhattan Project, would be called “judges.” In fact, the hearings have been kangaroo courts—consistently approving atomic projects. The NRC, like the AEC before it, has been an unabashed booster of nuclear power. The system is a sham.

Like, in the 1960s, learned well about the impossibility of making change when a government is dominated by a special interest. He was deeply involved in efforts to stop New York State public works czar Robert Moses from building a four-lane highway on Fire Island, a slender barrier beach south of Long Island. The road would have devastated the famed nature and communities on Fire Island. Moses—the subject of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Power Broker—had such huge power in New York State that stopping his plan through the state couldn’t happen, concluded Like and other highway opponents.

So, instead, a campaign to create a Fire Island National Seashore was launched—to use the power of the federal government to stop Moses.

A Citizens Committee for a Fire Island National Seashore was formed with Like as its counsel. It was chaired by Maurice Barbash, also a lover of Fire Island and Like’s brother-in-law. By 1964, it had led in getting a Fire Island National Seashore established and the Moses road stopped.

Two decades later, Like and Barbash flipped the strategy when it came to Shoreham –and LILCO’s other proposed Long Island nuclear plants. A Citizens Committee to Replace LILCO—with a state public power entity—was created with Like its counsel, Barbash its chairman.

State power would be used to stop the nuclear assault on Long Island.
The Long Island Power Act created a foundation for preventing this plan from moving ahead and also committed the state agency it created, the Long Island Power Authority, to developing clean, safe, renewable energy for Long Island.

In 1989, LILCO abandoned Shoreham because of the Long Island Power Act. It sold Shoreham to LIPA for $1. It was then decommissioned as a nuclear facility. Also helping greatly with this outcome were continuing anti-nuclear demonstrations on Long Island, legal action by Suffolk County against LILCO under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, the refusal of Suffolk and New York State to adopt or implement a federally-required evacuation plan for the plant (after both governments concluded evacuation of heavily-populated Long Island would be impossible in the event of a major nuclear accident), and other legal, political and activist challenges.

Federal nuclear promoters were extremely upset. U.S. Energy Secretary John S. Herrington declared at a Nuclear Power Assembly in Washington that “the Shoreham plant must open!” He asserted: “If it doesn’t, the signals will be the low point in this [nuclear] industry’s history. If it does, we are going to begin a brand new era.”

Well, it didn’t open.

In recent times, trying to use global warming as an excuse (although the nuclear “cycle” of mining, milling, fuel enrichment and the rest of it contributes significantly to global warming), the federal government and the nuclear industry has tried for what it calls a “revival” of nuclear power.

The Fukushima Daiichi disaster has threatened that effort. And, not incidentally, the reactor at Vermont Yankee—and the one which had been at Shoreham—were both General Electric Mark I reactors, the same as those that exploded and released many thousands of tons of radioactive poisons at Fukushima.

For the federal government and nuclear industry to allow Vermont Yankee and other U.S. nuclear plants to operate for 60 years is inviting disaster. The NRC has now given 20-year “license renewals” to more than half of the 104 U.S. nuclear plants—turning a deaf ear to strong state and local opposition. Nuclear plants have been long seen as having an operating life of no more than 40 years, after which their metal components would become embrittled by radioactivity and they’d be far more prone to accidents. The NRC is also considering extending the 60 year extension period to 80 years. Meanwhile, the claim of nuclear promoters that the new nuclear plants they seek to build (and the NRC has started to approve) are “inherently safe” is completely false. They, like the Fukushima plants, like Chernobyl, like Vermont Yankee, like all nuclear power plants, are inherently unsafe.

Importantly, nuclear power is not necessary. From solar to wind to wave power to tidal power to bio-fuels to geothermal to hydropower and on and on, safe, clean, renewable energy technologies can provide all the power we need.

But how to stop the decades-old “nuclear establishment” and its confederates?

A challenge to the Atomic Energy Act and other such laws giving federal nuclear officials the powers to run roughshod over state and local governments—and the people—is vital. There must be an end to the rigged U.S. nuclear power program Taking on the federal nuclear officials must happen. Vermont should appeal Judge Murtha’s ruling. And, as in the case of Shoreham and the scheme to load Long Island with nuclear power plants, other legal, political and activist initiatives need be launched.

Meanwhile, Vermont and other states can replicate New York State’s use of the state power of “eminent domain” to fight nuclear power. It’s a strategy that can work. Through it an end-run can be made around the would-be mandate of federal nuclear officials and the nuclear industry that we must accept deadly nuclear power.

After Fukushima and Chernobyl, Here's The Best Energy Alternative

2012-01-19T19:32:00.000-08:00

(Published today on lipolitics.com)

In the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi and Chernobyl nuclear plant disasters, it is clear that nuclear power is far too dangerous an energy technology. And considering the global warming impact of burning fossil fuels—coal, oil and gas—they also need to be eliminated.

So how are we to power society?

In fact, safe, clean, renewable energy technologies are more than ready to do it.

Scientific American, a most conservative scientific publication, in a 2009 cover story unveiled its “A Plan for a Sustainable Future.” It declared in its “Plan to Power 100Percent of the Planet with Renewables” that, “wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world’s energy, eliminating all fossil fuels.”

The New Scientist, the highly-respected British magazine, also in a 2009 cover story titled “Our Brighter Future”–presented presented a United Nations report declaring that “renewable energy that can already be harnessed economically would supply the world’s electricity needs.”

From solar to wind (now the fastest-growing and cheapest new energy technology) to wave-power to tidal-power to bio-fuels to small hydropower to co-generation (combining the generation of heat and electricity) and on and on, a renewable energy windfall is at hand.

A while back, I visited the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. In one division, solar power was being used to break down water into oxygen and hydrogen — with the hydrogen available for use as fuel. “It’s the forever fuel,” Dr. John Turner, senior scientist at NREL told me. “This uses our two most abundant natural resources—sunlight and water—to give us an energy supply that is inexhaustible.”

In another division, which pioneered thin-film photovoltaic technology (sheets of material embedded with solar collectors that can coat a large building, even a skyscraper, and have the building become a huge power generator), the scientists spoke of solar photovoltaics generating all the energy the world needs. Thin-film photovoltaic is now being widely used in Europe.

In the wind division at NREL, scientists were speaking about the advanced wind turbines they have developed—especially for off-shore siting—and the abundant wind resources all over the world that could provide, they, too, stressed, all the energy the world would need.

All the NREL scientists from the various divisions speaking of how the renewable energy technology they are working on could provide all the energy the world needs might not all be right regarding a specific technology—but together a mix of these and other safe, clean energy technologies can indeed provide all the energy the world needs.

There’s also the NREL division in which technologies to use biomass to produce fuel, not out of food crops but from non-edible vegetation and various waste products. And so on.

Or consider “hot dry rock” (HDR) geothermal. It turns out that below half of the planet, just one to six miles down, it’s extremely hot. When naturally flowing water hits those hot rocks and has a place to come up, geysers are formed. But now a technology has been developed that sends water down an injection pipe to hit the hot dry rock below and rise to the surface in a second production well — which can turn a turbine and generate electricity. Dave Duchane, the HDR manager at Los Alamos National Laboratory, told me: “Hot dry rock has an almost unlimited potential to supply all the energy needs of the United States and, indeed, all the world.”

Renewables Are Ready is the title of a book written by two Union of Concerned Scientists staffers in 1999. Today a host of safe, clean, renewable energy technologies are more than ready. Combined, importantly, with energy efficiency, they render as unnecessary nuclear power, as well as fossil fuels.

Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, last year published World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, which concludes that solar, wind and geothermal energy can provide all the energy the world’s needs and he sets forth his Plan B that would implement this. Brown, formerly president of Worldwatch, dismisses nuclear power as too expensive and dangerous.

It’s already happening, he emphasizes. “The old energy economy, fueled by oil, coal, and natural gas, is being replaced with wind, solar, and geothermal energy,” writes Brown. “Despite the global economic crisis, this energy transition is moving at a pace and on a scale that we could not have imagined two years ago.”

In a chapter titled “Harnessing Wind, Solar, and Geothermal Energy,” Brown details the potential and the technologies for fully utilizing these safe, clean, renewable energy sources.

“This transition is now building on its own momentum,” says Brown, “driven by an intense excitement from the realization that we are tapping energy sources that can last as long as the earth itself. Oil wells go dry and coal seams run out, but for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, we are investing in energy sources that can last forever.” To view my “Enviro Close-Up” TV interview with Brown, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVm33cprlzI

What’s needed now is rapid and full implementation of the safe, clean, renewable enrgy technologies now available.

Instead of a Manhattan Project, the wartime crash program out of which came nuclear weapons (followed by nuclear power plants), let’s have, as Alice Slater of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, says might be called a “Bronx Project”—a crash program to fully implement the use of safe, clean, renewable energy. What a job-creator it would be. And what a new world of safe, clean, non-polluting energy technologies we would then have—energy we and Planet Earth can live with.

Anarchy on the High Seas

2012-01-17T18:56:00.000-08:00

The disdain of much of the cruise ship industry for safety (as well as labor and environmental) laws is signaled by flags that fly on the stern of more than half of cruise ships. They are called “flags of convenience.”

Some 60 percent of cruise ships are now registered in Panama, Liberia and the Bahamas. By doing this—by obtaining “flags of convenience” from these and other countries—ship owners can avoid the laws of the nation from which they actually operate and take advantage of weak safety, labor and environmental standards.

The Costa Concordia and the other Costa ships are registered in Italy, although for years Costa ships flew the “flag of convenience” of Panama. Most of the other 100 ships of Costa’s owner, Florida-headquartered Carnival Corporation., sail, however, under “flags of convenience” of Panama and the Bahamas.

There has been sharp criticism through the years of this practice.

“Maritime lawlessness isn’t confined to pirates. Thanks to a system of ship registration called ‘flags of convenience,’ it is all too easy for unscrupulous ship owners to get away with criminal behavior,” wrote Rose George in an op-ed piece in the New York Times last year. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/opinion/25george.html “They have evaded prosecution for environmental damage like oil spills, as well as poor labor conditions, forcing crews to work like slaves without adequate pay or rest. But unlike piracy, which seems intractable, the appalling conditions on some merchant ships could be stopped.”

It used to be that ships flew the flag of the nation where they were from—and abided by its laws. “A ship is considered the territory of the country in which it is registered,” noted S.J. Tomlinson in a 2007 essay in the Villanova Sports and Entertainment Law Journal.
It was in the U.S. in the 1920s that the practice of registering ships in foreign nations began. Ship owners were frustrated by increased regulation and rising labor costs and also were seeking a way around Prohibition. Panama was an early haven. Liberia later became popular. And the Bahamas later joined in. Other nations now involved include the Marshall Islands.

Indeed, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig at which an explosion in 2010 killed 11 crewmen and set off the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill was registered in the Marshall Islands. It was considered to be a vessel requiring a national flag.

Many of these nations that provide “flags of convenience” at a price “lack the capacity or will to monitor the safety and working conditions on ships or to investigate accidents,” said George. “Instead, ship safety certificates are given out by private classification societies. Owners are allowed to choose which society they want—and the worst predictably choose the least demanding, This self-policing has been compared to registering a car in Bali so you can drive it in Australia with faulty brakes.”

Stated M.J. Wing in a 2003 essay in the Tulane Maritime Law Journal: “Those nations whose open registries have become the most popular also tend to be those who possess the most lax labor, safety, and environmental codes.”

CBS News travel editor Peter Greenberg believes that “when you have a ship that’s home-ported in the United States, U.S. law should prevail.” There needs to be a change of law, he said. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/11/13/earlyshow/saturday/main7051406.shtml

He made the comment after a 2010 fire aboard the Carnival Splendor which left 4,500 passengers and crew stranded at sea. The National Transportation Safety Board had said it would lead the investigation into what happened, but Carnival argued that the U.S. didn’t have jurisdiction because the ship was registered in Panama.

“With all due respect to the Panamanian authorities,” commented Greenberg. “I have not seen a show called ‘CSI Panama’ lately. I really want guys who know what they’re doing, who really live this work, to do the investigation.”

What began in the 1920s has now become a maritime industry norm. Meanwhile, the cruise industry has been exploding—growing at a rate as high as 7 percent annually in recent years. Ships have grown to be humongous. Oasis of the Seas, a ship of Florida-headquartered Royal Caribbean International, which went into service in 2009, can carry more than 6,000 passengers. It’s a model for other megaships. And the gargantuan floating hotel is registered in the Bahamas.

Carnival Corporation proudly announced last April that it had added its “100th cruise ship to its fleet with the delivery of the Carnival Magic. It can carry more than 5,400 passengers. It is registered in Panama. Carnival described itself as “a global cruise company and one of the largest vacation companies in the world. Our portfolio of leading cruise brands includes Carnival Cruise Lines, Holland America Line, Princess Cruises and Seabourn…P&O Cruises…Cunard Line…AIDA…Costa Cruises…and Iberocruceros.”

Carnival categorizes its Carnival Magic as a ship in its “Dream Class.”

The cruise ship industry has become a huge business—and like most big
businesses has no problem avoiding rules. The traditional antidote has been government regulation, but the “flags of convenience” system offers an end-run to that.

The sea is not forgiving to those who would cut corners. The dream of a cruise at sea can easily become a nightmare—as it became for the passengers on the Costa Concordia.

Major changes need to be made in the maritime industry—including the end of the “flags of convenience” system. There should be an international ban on “flags of convenience.” As for the United States, all forms of public transportation—airplane, train, car, truck and much of ship transport—are accompanied by comprehensive government regulation. This needs to happen to all seagoing vessels emanating from U.S. ports—without the scam of licenses from Panama, Liberia and the Bahamas. The years of ship owners doing what they want must end. Large numbers of lives are at stake. The anarchy on the high seas cannot be allowed to continue.

Spaceborne Nuclear Russian Roulette

2012-01-15T16:10:00.000-08:00

By Karl Grossman
Russia’s Phobos-Grunt space probe, with 22 pounds of radioactive Cobalt-57 on board, fell to Earth Sunday. The probe was launched in November to go to Phobos, a moon of Mars, but its rocket system failed to fire it onward from low Earth orbit.

There is some confusion as to where pieces of the 14.9-ton probe fell. The Associated Press reported Sunday that “pieces…landed in water 1,250 kilometers west of Wellington Island in Chile’s south, the Russian military Air and Space Defense Forces said in a statement.” The AP dispatch, datelined Moscow, quoted a spokesman, Colonel Alexei Zolotukhin, as saying that this “deserted ocean area is where Russia guides its discarded space cargo ships serving the International Space Station.”

But, the article went on: “RIA Novosti news agency, however, cited Russian ballistic experts who said the fragments fell over a broader patch of Earth’s surface, spreading from the Atlantic and including the territory of Brazil. It said the midpoint of the crash zone was located in the Brazilian state of Goias.”
http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2012-01-15-EU-Russia-Falling-Spacecraft/id-2c973c77f7604fdeb7b5ceb8405d19ec

“The $170 million craft was one of the heaviest and most toxic pieces of space junk ever to crash to Earth, but space officials and experts said the risks posed by its crash were minimal because the toxic rocket fuel on board and most of the craft’s structure would burn up in the atmosphere high above the Earth anyway,” said the article by Vladimir Isachenkov.

What happened demonstrates what could have occurred to the plutonium-fueled rover which NASA calls Curiosity which it launched on November 26 on a voyage to Mars. Curiosity’s launch went without incident. It is now on its way to Mars. But it could have ended up like Phobos-Grunt—falling back to Earth from orbit, its 10.6 pounds of plutonium released as deadly radioactive dust.

Moreover, the United States and Russia are both planning to launch other space devices with nuclear materials on board. Accidents involving discharge of nuclear materials is inevitable—they’ve already occurred in both the U.S. and Russian/Soviet space programs.

NASA is not only planning more space missions using plutonium but it is developing nuclear-powered rockets. Some of the rocket designs go back to the 1950s and 60s and the projects had come to an end out of concern of such a rocket blowing up on launch or falling back to Earth. Further, NASA is planning nuclear-powered colonies on the Moon and Mars. These nuclear power systems would be launched from Earth—and there could be release of radioactive material in an accident on launch or a subsequent crash back to Earth.

Involved is a lethal game of space-borne nuclear Russian roulette.

The Phobos-Grunt space probe “got stranded in Earth’s orbit after its Nov. 9 launch,” said the AP, “and efforts by Russian and European Space Agency exports to bring it back to life failed.” Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, then estimated that Phobos-Grunt would fall to Earth in January and it would come down along a swatch that included southern Europe, the Atlantic, South America and the Pacific.
Roscosmos “predicted that only between 20 and 40 fragments” of the probe “with a total weight of up to 200 kilograms—440 pounds—would survive the re-entry and plummet to Earth,” the AP said.

The Cobalt-57 was contained in “one of the craft’s instruments,” said AP. Roscomos, it said, claimed the Cobalt-57 posed “no threat of radioactive contamination.”
Indeed, Cobalt-57 is not plutonium, considered the most deadly radioactive substance. Nevertheless, it still can be harmful.

As the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory says in a “Human Health Fact Sheet,” available at http://www.evs.anl.gov/pub/doc/Cobalt.pdf, Cobalt-57 has a half-life of 270 days, “long enough to warrant concern.” (The hazardous lifetime of a radioactive material is 10 to 20 times its half-life.) The “Human Health Fact Sheets” notes that Cobalt-57 can cause cancer. It “can be taken into the body by eating food, drinking water, or breathing.”

The AP article Sunday said the $170 million Phobos-Grunt involved “Russia's most expensive and most ambitious space mission since Soviet times.” The last Soviet interplanetary mission occurred in 1996: a probe to go to Mars “built by the same Moscow-based NPO Lavochkin company” which constructed Phobos-Grunt, said AP. The Mars 96 space probe had plutonium on board.

It also “experienced an engine failure and crashed shortly after its launch,” said AP. The Mars 96 space probe “crash drew strong international fears because of around 200 grams of plutonium on board. The craft eventually showered its fragments over the Chile-Bolivia border in the Andes Mountains, and the pieces were never recovered.”

The AP article said the “worst ever radiation spill from a derelict space vehicle,” the crash back to Earth in 1978 of the Cosmos 954 satellite that contained a working nuclear reactor. Radioactive debris fell over northwestern Canada.

The worst U.S. accident involving a space device with nuclear materials was the fall from orbit in 1964 of a satellite powered by 2.1 pounds of plutonium. The fiery re-entry resulted in a wide dusting of fine particles of plutonium from its SNAP 9-A nuclear system over the Earth, according to subsequent research. Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked this accident to an increase in global lung cancer. A millionth of a gram of plutonium is a fatal dose.

This mishap was cited in the Final Environmental Impact Statement that NASA prepared for the Curiosity mission as being among the three accidents which have occurred among the 26 U.S. space missions that have used plutonium. In the wake of the SNAP 9-A accident, NASA switched to solar energy on satellites. Now all satellites and the International Space Station are solar powered.

Still, there has continued to be a push through the years for using nuclear power in space with that drive accelerating in recent times. Major U.S. space nuclear power work is now underway at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
“NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center here is expanding the scope of its nuclear technology work,” wrote Frank Morring, Jr. in Aviation Week on November 15.

Marshall has been working “with the Department of Energy on nuclear power technology that might one day power a lunar outpost,” said the article. “That work continues, but it has expanded to encompass another technology goal under the new Obama policy: advanced in-space propulsion.”

The Obama administration is also seeking construction of a facility at Idaho National Laboratory to produce the isotope of plutonium that is used in space nuclear systems, Plutonium-238. It is an “ill-conceived plan” that risks the public’s safety, says James Powell, executive director of Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free. The organization has been fighting the opening of the facility.

Because Florida is where the Kennedy Space Center is located, is on the front line for launches in the U.S. space nuclear program. Pax Christi of Tampa Bay and other Florida groups were active in protesting the Curiosity launch. They took to the streets with signs declaring: “No Nukes In Space” and “Danger: Launching of NASA Mars Probe With 10 Lbs. Plutonium. Don’t Do Disney.” That referred to Disney theme parks in Orlando.

NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Curiosity mission said a launch accident releasing plutonium had a 1-in-420 chance of happening and could “release material into the regional area defined…to be within…62 miles of the launch pad,” That would take in Orlando.

“Overall” on the Curiosity mission, NASA said the odds were 1-in-220 of plutonium being released. This included in a fall back to Earth, as the Phobos-Grunt space probe suffered.

John Stewart of Pax Christi of Tampa Bay maintained before the Curiosity launch: “NASA is planning a mission that could endanger not only its future but the state of Florida and beyond. The absurd—and maddening—aspect of this risk is that it is unnecessary. The locomotion for NASA’s Sojourner Mars rover, launched in 1996, and the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, both launched in 2003, was solar powered, with the latter two rovers performing well beyond what their engineers expected. Curiosity’s locomotion could also be solar-powered. NASA admits this in its EIS, but decided to put us all at risk because plutonium-powered batteries last longer and they want to have the ‘flexibility to select the most scientifically interesting location on the surface’ of Mars.”

Beyond the potential price in lives, space nuclear power has a high cost financially. The potential clean-up costs for dispersal of the 10.6 pounds of plutonium on Curiosity would be, said the Final Environmental Impact Statement for the mission, $267 million for each square mile of farmland contaminated, $478 million for each square mile of forests and $1.5 billion for each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas.” The Curiosity mission itself costs $2.5 billion.

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, contends: “The taxpayers are being asked once again to pay for nuclear missions that could endanger the lives of all the people on the planet. Have we not learned anything from Chernobyl and Fukushima? We don’t need to be launching nukes into space. It’s not a gamble we can afford to take.”

"Nukespeak"

2012-01-08T17:03:00.000-08:00

A brilliant analysis of what nuclear technology has been based on is provided by Rory O'Connor in "Nukespeak," part of my Enviro Close-Up series, which has just started airing on the EnviroVideo Blip TV website at --
http://blip.tv/envirovideo/enviro-close-up-613-nukespeak-5864602

Rory is co-author of the new 30th anniversary edition of "Nukespeak," updated
-- with four new chapters -- and now with a subtitle: "The Selling of Nuclear Technology from the Manhattan Project to Fukushima."

The program will be broadcast in coming weeks on the Free Speech TV network of 200 cable TV systems and the DISH and DIRECTV satellite systems. And it will alsoo be up on youtube.

Please spread the program around.

Plutonium-fueled Rover Launch Slated for Saturday

2011-11-22T20:29:00.000-08:00

With NASA intending to launch a plutonium-fueled rover from Florida on Saturday—and admitting that a launch pad accident releasing the deadly plutonium fuel could reach as far as 62 miles away—the issue being raised by the area’s tourism officials is whether the launch will attract tourists.

“Can Curiosity Draw the Crowds?” was the recent Florida Today headline. http://www.floridatoday.com/article/20111113/NEWS02/311120041/Can-Curiosity-draw-crowds- A sub-head: “Tourism Officials Hope Mars Launch Will Lure Observers to the Space Coast.”

It quotes Rob Varley, executive director of the Space Coast Office of Tourism, as saying: “The timing of this is perfect. We don’t always fill up on Thanksgiving weekend, but I think this will help. I think people will hear there is a launch and say, ‘Let’s go there, watch the launch, eat dinner, whatever.”

The piece added that the launch from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station “carries a little extra significance due to the plutonium fuel aboard the spacecraft.” But, it noted, “Extensive emergency preparations were required before the mission received approval to launch, and multiple layers of protections have been built into the craft.”

Don’t worry. Be happy.

At least Florida Today mentioned plutonium in the article. The Washington Post in an extensive piece – “NASA Mars Mission To Test Planet for Ability to Sustain Life” – did not mention the words plutonium or nuclear at all. http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/nasa-mars-mission-to-test-planet-for-ability-to-sustain-life/2011/11/12/gIQAdnapZN_story.html '

Neither did The New York Times in a front page story this week – “On Mars Rover, Tools to Plumb a Methane Mystery.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/science/space/aboard-mars-curiosity-rover-tools-to-plumb-a-methane-mystery.html?_r=1&ref=science

Better not to know about those 10.6 pounds of toxic plutonium.

Some folks in Florida have, however, gotten the word. And, mobilized by Pax Christi Tampa Bay and other groups, they were protesting over the weekend carrying placards that declared: “No Nukes In Space” and “Danger: Launching of NASA Mars Probe With 10 Lbs. Plutonium. Don’t Do Disney.” That referred to Disney theme parks in Orlando.

NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Mars Science Laboratory says a launch accident discharging plutonium has a 1-in-420 chance of happening and could “release material into the regional area defined…to be within…62 miles of the launch pad,”

Historically, one in 100 rockets destruct at launch.

If this Atlas rocket carrying the plutonium-fueled rover, which NASA calls Curiosity, does make it up but then falls back to Earth—that would set up an even a greater disaster.

There’s a model for that up in the sky right now: Russia’s Phobos-Grunt space probe launched on November 9 to go to a moon of Mars. But it never broke out of the Earth’s gravitational field. Its rocket system failed to fire it onward from low Earth orbit. Now it’s expected to fall back to Earth in January, disintegrating in a fiery re-entry when it hits the Earth’s atmosphere.

If that is what happens to Curiosity and its 10.6 pounds of plutonium fuel is released, NASA’s EIS acknowledges that the plutonium could spread widely over the Earth.

In its EIS, NASA designates this as an accident during: “Phase 4 (Orbital/Escape): Accidents which occur after attaining parking orbit could result in orbital decay reentries from minutes to years after the accident affecting Earth surfaces between approximately 28-degrees north latitude and 28-degrees south latitude.”

Between 28 degrees north and 28-degrees south latitudes covers much of South America, Africa and Australia. NASA gives odds of 1-in-830 for the “probability of a release” of plutonium in such an accident.

An especially uncritical piece of reporting this week on the Curiosity venture was on “FLORIDA SPACErePORT” http://spacereport.blogspot.com/2011/11/november-21-2011.html

It provided an assurance that the isotope of plutonium used in space devices, Plutonium-238, “is not used in weapons and cannot explode like a bomb. It does not emit the type of penetrating radioactivity that can cause serious health problems. It emits alpha radiation, a type that is easily shielded. It cannot penetrate the skin, clothing, even a sheet of paper. It is only dangerous to humans if pulverized into a fine dust that subsequently is inhaled or ingested.”

Yes, and that is exactly what could happen in an explosion on launch and, even more likely, in a fiery re-entry of a space device with Plutonium-238 into the atmosphere.

Putting Plutonium-238 on space devices which can disintegrate over our heads and cause plutonium to rain down in fine particles—plutonium which people can breathe in—maximizes the lethality of plutonium.

A millionth of a gram of plutonium is a fatal dose. Plutonium-238, furthermore, is 270 times more radioactive than the common isotope of plutonium, Plutonium-239, used as fuel in atomic bombs.

A fall from orbit of a plutonium-fueled satellite in 1964 caused fine particles of Plutonium-238 to fall out all over the Earth. The late Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked this accident involving a SNAP-9A plutonium system aboard the satellite to an increase in global lung cancer. With that accident, NASA switched to solar energy on satellites. Now all satellites and the International Space Station are solar powered. The SNAP-9A accident is cited in the NASA EIS for the Curiosity shot as being among the three accidents that have occurred among the 26 U.S. space missions which have used plutonium.

Still, insisted Martin LaMonica this week, senior writer for CNET’s Green Tech blog, “Nuclear ‘Space Battery’ Bests Solar in Curiosity Mars Mission,” as the piece was headlined.
Sure, rovers sent to Mars up to now have used solar power for locomotion. http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57329365-76/nuclear-space-battery-bests-solar-in-curiosity-mars-mission/ But LaMonica quoted Stephen Johnson, director of the Idaho National Laboratory’s Space Nuclear Systems and Technology Division, as saying: “You can operate with solar panels on Mars. You just can’t operate everywhere.”

So to go “everywhere” we are to endanger life on Earth? To try to see about life on Mars we would threaten life on Earth?

The NASA EIS says the cost of decontamination of areas on Earth affected by plutonium discharged in an accident from Curiosity would be $267 million for each square mile of farmland, $478 million for each square mile of forests and $1.5 billion for each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas.”

The mission itself has a cost of $2.5 billion.

And the odds for disaster are low, acknowledges NASA in its EIS. The EIS says “overall” on the mission, the likelihood of plutonium being released is 1-in-220. How many people would get on an airplane or take a drive in a car if they knew there was a 1-in-220 chance of not making it.

Further, if Curiosity does make it up and out, it will be just one trigger pull in a game of spaceborne Russian roulette—if NASA gets its way. For not only is NASA seeking to do more space missions using plutonium but it is developing rockets powered by nuclear energy.

Demanding that this all be stopped is Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space www.space4peace.org “The taxpayers are being asked once again to pay for nuclear missions that could endanger the lives of all the people on the planet,” he says. “Have we not learned anything from Chernobyl and Fukushima? We don’t need to be launching nukes into space. It’s not a gamble we can afford to take.”

Update on Planned Launch of Plutonium-Fueled "Curiosity" Rover

2011-11-17T18:58:00.000-08:00

NASA intends in coming days to launch a rover to be deployed on Mars fueled with 10.6pounds of plutonium. If there is an explosion on launch in Florida and plutonium is released, an area as far as 62 miles from the launch pad could be impacted, NASA acknowledges. If the rocket lofting the rover doesn’t break away from the Earth’s gravitational field to keep going into space but falls back to Earth, re-entry into the atmosphere would cause both the rocket and rover to disintegrate potentially releasing plutonium over a huge area.

An example of a space device meant to go to Mars but likely to fall back to Earth is unfolding now. A Russian space probe, named Phobos-Grunt, launched on November 9, reached low Earth orbit, but then an engine system failed to fire to power it on to Phobos, one of two moons of Mars. The Russian space agency is trying to get the craft’s onboard computer, which it believes is the source of the problem, to function properly. But prospects are dim. Reuters in an article on the situation quotes a Russian space expert, Vladimir Uvarov, as saying: “In my opinion Phobos-Grunt is lost.” Unless a fix is made, the probe will come crashing back to Earth, probably in January.

There is concern about the 12 tons of chemical fuel onboard the Phobos-Grunt impacting the Earth. A similar problem with the Mars rover, which NASA calls Curiosity, in falling back to Earth with its 10.6 pounds of plutonium would present a far, far more serious danger.

NASA intends to launch the plutonium-powered rover on what it has named its Mars Science Laboratory Mission during a window from November 25 to December 15.

In its Final Environmental Impact Statement for the mission, NASA addresses the possibility of an accident similar to what the Phobos-Grunt is facing in what NASA designates as “Phase 4” of the launch. Plutonium could be released in such an accident “affecting Earth surfaces” along a wide belt around the middle of the Earth.

NASA’s language for this: “Phase 4 (Orbital/Escape): Accidents which occur after attaining parking orbit could result in orbital decay reentries from minutes to years after the accident affecting Earth surfaces between approximately 28-degrees north latitude and 28-degrees south latitude.” NASA gives odds of 1-in-830 for the “probability of a release” of plutonium in such an accident. Between 28 degrees north and 28-degrees south covers much of South America, Africa and Australia.

The EIS says the cost of decontamination of areas affected by the plutonium would be $267 million for each square mile of farmland, $478 million for each square mile of forests and $1.5 billion for each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas.” The Curiosity mission itself has a cost of $2.5 billion.

The EIS says “overall” on the mission, the likelihood of plutonium being released is 1-in-220. It puts the odds at 1-in-420 of plutonium being released in a launch accident. This could “release material into the regional area defined…to be within…62 miles of the launch pad,” says the EIS. The most densely populated part of that area is Orlando.

“NASA is planning a mission that could endanger not only its future but the state of Florida and beyond,” declares John Stewart of Pax Christi Tampa Bay, a leader in Florida in challenging the launch. “The absurd—and maddening—aspect of this risk is that it is unnecessary,” says Stewart, a teacher. “The locomotion for NASA’s Sojourner Mars rover, launched in 1996, and the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, both launched in 2003, was solar powered, with the latter two rovers performing well beyond what their engineers expected. Curiosity’s locomotion could also be solar-powered. NASA admits this in its EIS, but decided to put us all at risk because plutonium-powered batteries last longer and they want to have the ‘flexibility to select the most scientifically interesting location on the surface’ of Mars.”

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space (www.space4peace.org), which has been opposing NASA’s nuclear missions for two decades, says “NASA sadly appears committed to maintaining its dangerous alliance with the nuclear industry. Both entities view space as a new market for the deadly plutonium fuel. The taxpayers are being asked once again to pay for nuclear missions that could endanger the lives of all the people on the planet. Have we not learned anything from Chernobyl and Fukushima? We don’t need to be launching nukes into space. It’s not a gamble we can afford to take.”

There have been accidents in the use of nuclear power in space. Of the 26 U.S. space missions listed in the EIS which have used plutonium, three underwent accidents, the EIS admits. The worst occurred in 1964 and involved, it notes, the SNAP-9A plutonium system aboard a satellite that failed to achieve orbit and dropped to earth, disintegrating as it fell. The 2.1 pounds of plutonium fuel dispersed widely over the Earth. The late Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked this accident to an increase in global lung cancer. With the SNAP-9A accident, NASA switched to solar energy on satellites. Now all satellites and the International Space Station are solar powered.

But NASA kept using plutonium as a power source on space probes maintaining that solar energy could not be utilized beyond the orbit of Mars. But this August NASA reversed itself with the launch of its solar-powered Juno space probe to Jupiter.

In its description of the Juno mission, NASA states that even when the probe gets to Jupiter, “nearly 500 million miles from the Sun,” its panels will be providing electricity.

The plutonium-fueled Curiosity mission could herald an expanded NASA space nuclear power program—not just for space probes but for nuclear propelled rockets.

During the 1950s and 60s, NASA, working with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, built such rockets under a program called NERVA (for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application) and then under Projects Pluto, Rover and Poodle. Billions in 1950s-1960s dollars were spent and ground-testing done, but no nuclear rocket ever got off the ground. There were concerns about a nuclear rocket blowing up on launch or crashing back to Earth.

Charles Bolden, a former astronaut and U.S. Marine Corps major general, President Obama’s appointee to head NASA, is a big booster of nuclear-propulsion for rockets. He has been pushing a design developed by a fellow ex-astronaut, Franklin Chang-Diaz, who has founded the Ad Astra Rocket Company.

With NASA turning over many space activities to private industry with the end of its shuttle program, another major private company involved is SpaceX. The website of the journal Nature reported last year that SpaceX wants the U.S. government to “return to developing nuclear-powered rockets pursued during the 1960s”—and specifically NERVA. “We have to do nuclear,” stated Tom Markusic, director of the company’s rocket development facility.

Meanwhile, there have not only been advances in solar energy as a power source in space as demonstrated by the Juno space probe mission but also in propelling spacecraft. Last year, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched what it termed a “space yacht” called Ikaros which gets propulsion from the pressure on its large sails of ionizing particles emitted by the Sun. The sails also feature “thin-film solar cells to generate electricity and creating,” said Yuichi Tsuda of the agency, “a hybrid technology of electricity and pressure."

NASA has also been pushing for establishment of a production facility for plutonium for space use to be situated at Idaho National Laboratory.

Plutonium has long been described as the most lethal radioactive substance. And the plutonium isotope used in the space nuclear program, and on the Curiosity rover, is significantly more radioactive than the type of plutonium used as fuel in nuclear weapons or built up as a waste product in nuclear power plants. It is Plutonium-238 as distinct from Plutonium-239. Plutonium-238 has a far shorter half-life–87.8 years compared to Plutonium-239 with a half-life of 24,500 years. An isotope’s half-life is the period in which half of its radioactivity is expended.

Dr. Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear physicist and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, explains that Plutonium-238 “is about 270 times more radioactive than Plutonium-239 per unit of weight.” Thus in radioactivity, the 10.6 pounds of Plutonium-238 that is to be used on Curiosity is the equivalent of 2,862 pounds of Plutonium-239. The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki used 15 pounds of Plutonium-239.

The far shorter half-life of Plutonium-238 compared to Plutonium-239 results in it being extremely hot. This heat is translated in a radioisotope thermoelectric generator into electricity.

The pathway of greatest health concern for plutonium is breathing in a particle leding to lung cancer. A millionth of a gram of plutonium can be a fatal dose. The EIS for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission speaks of particles that would be “transported to and remain in the trachea, bronchi, or deep lung regions.” The particles “would continuously irradiate lung tissue.”

A key issue in terms of effects is whether the plutonium remains as the marble-sized pellets fabricated for space use or dispersed as fine particles that can be inhaled.

The EIS also describes “secondary social costs associated with the decontamination and mitigation activities” including: “Temporary or longer term relocation of residents; temporary or longer term loss of employment; destruction or quarantine of agricultural products including citrus crops; land use restrictions which could affect real estate values, tourism and recreational activities; restriction or bans on commercial fishing; and public health effects and medical care.”

Pax Christi is asking people to call, email or write NASA and, says Stewart, state “that until they can launch spacecraft without nuclear materials aboard, they should not launch at all.” Also, it is calling for people to contact the White House “and tell President Obama that Curiosity should stay safely on the ground until it can be launched without threatening us and future generations.”

A petition to the White House—“Cancel the Launch of the Mars Rover Curiosity by
NASA Which is Powered by Dangerous Plutonium-238”—has also been put up on the Internet for people to sign. It is at: https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/cancel-launch-mars-rover-curiosity-nasa-which-powered-dangerous-plutonium-238/8HzzWHk9

The opponents have created a Facebook page warning people not to visit Disney theme parks in Orlando during the launch window. “Don’t Do Disney brought to you by NASA,” the Facebook page is titled.

Demonstrations in Florida are also planned.

The grunt in the name of the Phobos-Grunt space probe is the word for soil in Russian. The probe was to bring soil back to Earth from Phobos. Reuters has reported that “Phobos-Grunt is also carrying bacteria, plant seeds and tiny animals known as water bears, part of a U.S. study to see if they could survive beyond the Earth’s protective bubble.”

"Don't Do Disney..."

2011-11-08T20:41:00.000-08:00

NASA intends in coming weeks to launch a rover to be deployed on Mars fueled with 10.6 pounds of plutonium. Opponents of the launch in Florida, concerned about an accident releasing deadly plutonium, such as the explosion of the rocket that’s to loft the rover, have created a Facebook page warning people not to visit Disney theme parks in Orlando during the November 25-to-December 15 launch window. “Don’t Do Disney brought to you by NASA,” the Facebook page is titled. Other actions are planned.

Indeed, NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission says a launch accident discharging plutonium has a 1-in-420 chance of happening and could “release material into the regional area defined…to be within…62 miles of the launch pad,” That’s an area including Orlando.

The EIS says “overall” on the mission, the likelihood of plutonium being released is just 1-in-220. This could affect a major portion of Earth in an accident which vaporizes and disperses plutonium from the rover, called Curiosity, as the Atlas 5 rocket carrying it up gains altitude.

The EIS says an accident releasing plutonium in the troposphere, the atmosphere five to nine miles high, is “assumed to potentially affect persons living within a latitude band from approximately 23-degrees north to 30-degrees north.” That’s a swath through the Caribbean, across North Africa and the Middle East, then parts of India and China, Hawaii and other Pacific islands, Mexico, and south Texas.

If there’s an accident resulting in plutonium fallout which occurs above that and before the rocket breaks through Earth’s gravitational field, people could be affected “anywhere between 28-degrees north and 28-degrees south latitude,” says the EIS. That’s a band around the mid-section of the Earth which includes much of South America, Africa and Australia.

The EIS says the cost of decontamination of areas affected by the plutonium would be $267 million for each square mile of farmland, $478 million for each square mile of forests and $1.5 billion for each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas.”

The mission itself has a cost of $2.5 billion.

“NASA is planning a mission that could endanger not only its future but the state of Florida and beyond,” declares John Stewart of Pax Christi Tampa Bay, a leader in Florida in challenging the launch. “The absurd—and maddening—aspect of this risk is that it is unnecessary,” says Stewart, a teacher. “The locomotion for NASA’s Sojourner Mars rover, launched in 1996, and the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, both launched in 2003, was solar powered, with the latter two rovers performing well beyond what their engineers expected. Curiosity’s locomotion could also be solar-powered. NASA admits this in its EIS, but decided to put us all at risk because plutonium-powered batteries last longer and they want to have the ‘flexibility to select the most scientifically interesting location on the surface’ of Mars.”

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, which has been opposing NASA’s nuclear missions for two decades, says “NASA sadly appears committed to maintaining its dangerous alliance with the nuclear industry. Both entities view space as a new market for the deadly plutonium fuel. The taxpayers are being asked once again to pay for nuclear missions that could endanger the lives of all the people on the planet. Have we not learned anything from Chernobyl and Fukushima? We don’t need to be launching nukes into space. It’s not a gamble we can afford to take.”

Since the 1950s, NASA has used nuclear power in space—and there have been accidents. Of the 26 U.S. space missions listed in the EIS that have used plutonium, three underwent accidents, the EIS admits. The worst occurred in 1964 and involved, it notes, the SNAP-9A plutonium system aboard a satellite that failed to achieve orbit and dropped to earth, disintegrating as it fell. The 2.1 pounds of plutonium fuel dispersed widely over the Earth.

The late Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked this accident to an increase in global lung cancer. With the SNAP-9A accident, NASA switched to solar energy on satellites. Now all satellites and the International Space Station are solar powered.

But NASA insisted on using plutonium as a power source on space probes—claiming that solar energy cannot be utilized beyond the orbit of Mars. But this August it reversed itself with the launch of the solar-powered Juno space probe to Jupiter.

In its description of the Juno mission, NASA states that even when the probe gets to Jupiter, “nearly 500 million miles from the Sun,” its panels will be providing electricity.

The choice of solar power by NASA on Juno was less than voluntary, however. The Associated Press has described Scott Bolton, the principal investigator for the Juno mission for the Southwest Research Institute, a NASA contractor, as maintaining “the choice of solar was a practical one…No plutonium-powered generators were available to him and his San Antonio-based team nearly a decade ago so they opted for solar panels rather than develop a new nuclear source.”

The plutonium-fueled Curiosity mission could herald an expanded NASA space nuclear power program—not just for space probes but involving nuclear-propelled rockets.
During the 1950s and 60s, NASA, working with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, built such rockets under a program called NERVA (for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application) and then Projects Pluto, Rover and Poodle. Billions in 1950s-1960s dollars were spent and ground-testing done, but no nuclear rocket ever got off the ground. There were concerns about a nuclear rocket blowing up on launch and crashing back to Earth.

Charles Bolden, a former astronaut and U.S. Marine Corps major general, President Obama’s appointee to head NASA, is a big booster of nuclear-propulsion for rockets. He has been pushing a design developed by a fellow ex-astronaut, Franklin Chang-Diaz, who has founded the Ad Astra Rocket Company.

With NASA turning over many space activities to private industry with the end of its shuttle program, another major private company involved is SpaceX. The website of the journal Nature reported last year that SpaceX wants the U.S. government to “return to developing nuclear-powered rockets pursued during the 1960s”—and specifically NERVA. “We have to do nuclear,” stated Tom Markusic, director of the company’s rocket development facility.

Meanwhile, not only have great advances been made in using solar energy as a power source in space—as demonstrated by the Juno space probe mission—but also in propelling spacecraft and quickly in the vacuum of space. Last year, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched what it termed a “space yacht” called Ikaros which gets propulsion from the pressure on its large sails of ionizing particles emitted by the Sun. The sails also feature “thin-film solar cells to generate electricity and creating,” said Yuichi Tsuda of the agency, “a hybrid technology of electricity and pressure."

The Curiosity rover and the Atlas V rocket on which it is to ride were positioned for launch last week at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. A Florida Today website account—as has been typical in coverage by the mainstream media of NASA’s nuclear program—in reporting this omitted the words plutonium and nuclear and made no reference to the danger s acknowledged in the EIS of the nuclear aspect of the mission.

Plutonium has long been described as the most lethal radioactive substance. And the plutonium isotope used in the space nuclear program, and on the Curiosity rover, is far more radioactive than the type of plutonium used as fuel in nuclear weapons or built up as a waste product in nuclear power plants.

It is Plutonium-238 as distinct from Plutonium-239. Plutonium-238 has a far shorter half-life–87.8 years compared to Plutonium-239 with a half-life of 24,500 years. An isotope’s half-life is the period in which half of its radioactivity is expended.

Dr. Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear physicist and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, explains that Plutonium-238 “is about 270 times more radioactive than Plutonium-239 per unit of weight.” Thus in radioactivity, the 10.6 pounds of Plutonium-238 that is to be used on Curiosity is the equivalent of 2,862 pounds of Plutonium-239. The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki used 15 pounds of Plutonium-239.

The far shorter half-life of Plutonium-238 compared to Plutonium-239 results in it being extremely hot. This heat is translated in a radioisotope thermoelectric generator into electricity.

The pathway of greatest health concern for plutonium is breathing in a particle. A millionth of a gram of plutonium can be a fatal dose. The EIS for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission speaks of particles that would be “transported to and remain in the trachea, bronchi, or deep lung regions.” The particles “would continuously irradiate lung tissue.”

It also describes “secondary social costs associated with the decontamination and mitigation activities” including: “Temporary or longer term relocation of residents; temporary or longer term loss of employment; destruction or quarantine of agricultural products including citrus crops; land use restrictions which could affect real estate values, tourism and recreational activities; restriction or bans on commercial fishing; and public health effects and medical care.”

Pax Christi is asking people to call, email or write NASA and, says Stewart, state “that until they can launch spacecraft without nuclear materials aboard, they should not launch at all.” Also, it is calling for people to contact the White House “and tell President Obama that Curiosity should stay safely on the ground until it can be launched without threatening us and future generations.”

A petition to the White House—“Cancel the Launch of the Mars Rover Curiosity by NASA Which is Powered by Dangerous Plutonium-238”—has also been put up on the Internet for people to sign. It is at: https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/cancel-launch-mars-rover-curiosity-nasa-which-powered-dangerous-plutonium-238/8HzzWHk9

Government-By-Anonymous-Officials

2011-09-25T10:28:00.000-07:00

The U.S. press has become increasingly accepting of officials speaking anonymously.

Having officials identified only as a “a senior department official” or “veteran diplomat” or “high official” and the like is a way for top and lesser officials to say things without having to take any responsibility for what they say.

Not identified by name, they can exaggerate and make claims they’d be reticent to make if they were personally identified. Unnamed, they can also use media to float trial balloons.

And now U.S. officialdom apparently thinks the public can readily accept this, too.

I was surprised to see in recent days this system of having officials speak anonymously displayed for all to see in dispatches out of the U.S. State Department.

They were in the form of transcripts posted online of various “background” briefings including one last week about of all things considering this system of official anonymity—“open government.”

Online at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2011/09/172743.htm, it is titled “Background Briefing on a Preview of the Open Government Partnership.”

It involves a press conference on September 19 at the Waldorf Astoria in New York which opens with the “moderator”—not even the government PR person who ran the event is identified—stating: “Alright everybody. We are here to talk about tomorrow’s Open Government Partnership high-level meeting, which the President will participate in.
We have two senior Administration officials …The first is”—his or her name is omitted and, instead, in brackets in the transcript, is—“Senior Administration Official One.”

The “moderator” continues: “And the second is”—again the person’s name is omitted and the transcript says—“Senior Administration Official Two.”

“Okay, with that, Senior Official Number One, take it away,” says the “moderator.”

This isn’t an unusual occurrence. The system of official anonymity has taken deep hold. And with the U.S. government clearly not ashamed of it whatsoever, the government has loaded the Internet with examples of this opposite of responsibility and transparency.

Consider another State Department press conference last week, a “Special Briefing Via Teleconference” from Washington D.C. on September 21titled “Background Briefing of High-Level Meeting on Nuclear Safety”—http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2011/09/172930.htm

It starts with the unnamed “moderator” thanking “you callers for joining us today…We are delighted to have as our briefer today”—and then the identity of the official is omitted but in brackets are the words “Senior State Department Official.” And the “moderator” goes on, “Hereafter known as Senior State Department Official.”

It’s not as if the anonymous U.S. official is saying unimportant things. The “Senior State Department Official” speaks of the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant complex in Japan and how it shows that “nuclear accidents can transcend national borders and have international consequences. A nuclear accident anywhere affects all of us.” And then he or she goes on to declare that despite Fukushima, “the United States remains committed to nuclear power.”

Is it not important to know, by name, the official who made this declaration?

Years ago, in doing research for a book on U.S.activities in Central America—at a time when the U.S. was arming the “contras” to stage attacks in Nicaragua—I got a taste of this government-by-anonymous-officials. In the book (Nicaragua: America’s New Vietnam?) I wrote about going to a press conference at the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras at which a panel was being presented that included the embassy’s military, public affairs and political officers. Honduras was then being set up as a jumping off point for direct U.S. intervention in Nicaragua.

The press conference began with the embassy’s press attaché discussing with the assembled journalists the “ground rules” for the event—whether what the officers will say will be “attributed to U.S. officials, diplomatic sources, or U.S. official sources.” I and some other journalists there that day, not posted to Honduras, insisted that all comments be on the record.

As I explained in the book: “I am particularly insistent on this point having long felt that ‘off the record’ briefings by officials shield them from accountability and responsibility and compromise the principles of journalism. One senses that such an ‘on the record’ press conference is somewhat unusual here. Reporters stationed in Honduras are not pressing for it. Such reporters are often dependent on embassies or government officials for tips and news—or think they are.”

In the book, and in the account from reporters who were at the press conference that day, the comments of the officials were attributed—by name—to the officials making them.

This, I believe, is the way it should be—rather than public officials hiding behind the cloak of anonymity. The trend to official anonymity seems to, if anything, have grown. The press has increasingly been letting officialdom get away with this cowardly game, indeed developed a co-dependency with government in allowing it. And now, with the Internet, U.S. government agencies have no shame in sharing with the public a system that seriously compromises open and accountable government.

Siemens' Significant Decision -- Abandoning Nuclear Power

2011-09-19T05:40:00.002-07:00

The just-announced decision by Siemens, a major player in the nuclear industry, to withdraw entirely from nuclear power is a significant declaration by a corporation about nuclear power and the world’s potential energy future.

“The chapter is closed for us,” Peter Loescher, chief executive of the Germany-based engineering group, said Sunday. “We are no longer going to participate in taking responsibility for building nuclear power stations or financing them.”

The Siemens decision follows that of the German government to, with the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant complex, abandon nuclear power—to close the nation’s 17 nuclear plants, all of which were built by Siemens—and pursue instead safe, clean, renewable energy led by solar, wind and geothermal.

It comes after Loescher saying, when a deal was struck in 2009 for a joint venture with Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear company, that Siemens would become a “market leader in nuclear energy” challenging General Electric, Westinghouse and Areva.

It follows Wall Street’s now long-standing reluctance to finance the construction of new nuclear power plants. Thus, the financial basis for President Barack Obama’s push for new nuclear power plants in the U.S. is billions of dollars in taxpayer-supported loan guarantees.

The U.S. government is also using the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally-owned entity created during the New Deal, to be a leader in building new nuclear plants.

Although many people blame industry for the development of nuclear power, ever since it began in the 1950s, much of industry hasn’t wanted to get involved. Governments, then and now, have been in the forefront of nuclear power.

Now, with Germany moving in the other direction, Siemens has followed.

The national nuclear laboratories set up in the U.S. during the Manhattan Project of World War II to embark on a crash program to build atomic bombs were key to nuclear power development in the U.S. With the war over, the laboratories constructed more nuclear weapons—thousands of them—and looked for other things nuclear to do. A huge vested interest employing thousands of people was created during the Manhattan Project and was seeking to perpetuate itself.

The Manhattan Project became the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) after the war, and its first chairman, David Lilienthal, later would complain in a book, Change, Hope, and the Bomb, about the "elaborate and even luxurious [national] laboratories that have grown up at Oak Ridge, Argonne, Brookhaven" and the push at them for nuclear devices for "blowing out harbors, making explosions underground to produce steam” and other uses of atomic energy.

Lilienthal, who left the AEC in 1950,in his 1963 book criticized "how far scientists and administrators will go to try to establish a nonmilitary use" for nuclear technology. He was very wary about nuclear power for safety reasons and the nuclear waste dilemma.

In 1957, the first nuclear power plant in the U.S. opened—built by the federal government. The AEC and the Navy’s Division of Naval Reactors partnered in the construction of the Shippingport nuclear plant near Pittsburgh.

As it opened, Lewis Strauss, then AEC chairman, warned the utility industry that if it didn’t built nuclear plants, the government would. That was the stick. The carrot was the passage in 1957 of the Price-Anderson Act. It was supposed to be something temporary to limit liability in the event of a nuclear plant disaster—a limit of $560million in liability with the government paying the first $500 million. Price-Anderson remains law in the U.S. 54 years later with the liability limit now at $12 billion. Beyond that, people cannot collect for death, injury and property damage caused by a nuclear plant accident. The Chernobyl and now Fukushima catastrophes have demonstrated the losses could be in the hundreds of billions.

Having the Price-Anderson Act stay in place has been critical for government to get industry to stick with nuclear power.

GE and Westinghouse got involved with nuclear technology as contractors for the Manhattan Project. They became the Coke and Pepsi of nuclear power worldwide with 80 percent of nuclear power plants globally of GE or Westinghouse design or manufacture.
In 2006, GE partnered in its nuclear division with the Japanese corporation Hitachi and Westinghouse sold its nuclear division to Toshiba. Both companies have since been closely tied to the Japanese government—an additional reason why it has sought to underplay the impacts of the Fukushima accident, which involved six GE plants.

As to the other main actors in the nuclear field, Areva is largely financed by the French government. Siemens has been a partner in an Areva subsidiary seeking to build an “advanced generation” nuclear plant, a collaboration that will now seemingly be over.

Then there is Rosatom which grew out of the Soviet Union’s Ministry of Nuclear Engineering and Industry. In the Soviet Union, and now Russia, government has totally dominated atomic energy development.

What did it take for Germany to abandon nuclear power—and followed now by Siemens?
Democracy.

Germany’s decision was announced by Chancellor Angela Merkel, herself a physicist, after historic post-Fukushima election losses for her party and large wins by the anti-nuclear Greens.

Nuclear power—a product of Big Government followed by Big Business.

What can end it and lead to safe, clean, renewable energy? The will of the people—democracy—in action.

And Now..."Radiation is Good for You." But DOE Cancels Pitch.

2011-07-26T05:23:00.001-07:00

Among the nuttiest theories about radiation is that it is good for you. Yes, radiation is good for you—it exercises the immune system.

That’s what some nuclear scientists claim. They call it the “hormesis radiation” theory. These scientists don’t just want to minimize or even flatly deny the deadly impacts of radioactivity—they want people to think it’s healthy.

An advocate of the “hormesis radiation” theory was scheduled to peddle the theory today before the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site-Citizens Advisory Board.

The DOE’s Savannah River Site is a radioactive mess—310 square miles in South Carolina—that includes the Savannah River National Laboratory and five now closed nuclear reactors. It’s been used through the years to produce plutonium and tritium for nuclear weapons, plutonium to power NASA space probes, and now seeks to make plutonium-based MOX fuel for nuclear power plants, and do other things nuclear. It is in an area of South Carolina which has a large minority population. It’s been designated a high-pollution Superfund site.

But Dr. Clinton R. Wolfe, executive director of Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness, wasn’t planning to simply comfort the 25-person advisory board with the “hormesis radiation” theory as regarding the radioactive muddle where they reside.

The topic of his talk was; “A Perspective on Radiation Exposure and the Fukushima Disaster.” People in South Carolina—indeed around the world—have become more aware of and concerned about radioactivity because of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex disaster.

Wolfe, like many in his group, is a product of the system of DOE national nuclear laboratories. He was at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the atomic bomb was developed, specializing in work with plutonium, then worked for Westinghouse, a nuclear industry giant where he led research on nuclear power plant corrosion issues, according to his biography on his group's website, and ended up at the Savannah River National Laboratory. After being deeply involved in nuclear technology—both its military and civilian sides—he took his position at Citizens for Nuclear Technology which, its website says, is committed “to being a credible, consistent voice on behalf of beneficial nuclear technologies and the Savannah River Site.” He holds a Ph.D. in chemistry.

Wolfe telegraphed what he intended to talk about today in an op-ed piece in The State, South Carolina’s largest newspaper.

Wolfe began by explaining, “’Hormesis,’ a Greek word meaning ‘impel, urge on,’ refers to the phenomenon by which gradually adding a toxic substance to an organism produces an initial beneficial effect….The concept of small doses of radiation having beneficial effects on living organisms fits this model.” He said there “are considerable data on laboratory animals and selected populations of humans from epidemiological studies that show beneficial effects of low levels of radiation. “

He continued that “even if you don’t believe that some low levels of radiation are good for you, perhaps we can stop the hysteria about low levels causing harm. Based on what we know to date, there’s no reason to think that even the most highly irradiated workers at Fukushima will suffer harmful health effects.”

A grouping of safe-energy and environmental organizations took issue with Wolfe’s plan to pitch “hormesis radiation” to the Savannah River Site-Citizens Advisory Board.

They wrote a letter to the Department of Energy complaining that there would be “no accurate, science-based counterbalancing presentation that radiation at all doses can be harmful,” the agency’s “allowance for the presentation of a pseudo-scientific presentation to be irresponsible and believe that such a presentation may well give the false impression that hormesis is being endorsed by DOE. “

The letter discussed international and U.S. scientific bodies and reports that have concluded that there is “no threshold” for radiation exposure—that any amount can harm a person—and noted that the DOE itself “also affirms challenges to the hormesis theory.”

“Given that the hormesis theory does not comport with DOE policy and that a presentation about it is scheduled without equal time being given to an explanation of the linear no-threshold radiation dose model accepted by the scientific community, we request that you take steps to make sure that a presentation on the rejected hormesis theory does not remain on the Citizen Advisory Board’s agenda at its upcoming meeting.”

The letter also noted that Wolfe “does not appear to have requisite credentials in the medical or health physics fields.”

It was signed by: Tom Clements of Friends of the Earth, Michele Boyd of Physicians for Social Responsibility, Susan Corbett of the South Carolina Chapter of the Sierra Club, Glenn Carroll of Nuclear Watch South, Mary Olson of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Bobbie Paul of Georgia Women’s Action for New Directions, David Kyle of the Center for a Sustainable Coast, Brett Bursey of the South Carolina Progressive Network and Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico.

The DOE then cancelled Wolfe’s talk.

"The public interest groups interested in the truth stopped the talk from going forward," comments Clements of Friends of the Earth.

Wolfe is not the only nuclear scientist pushing the hormesis radiation-is-good-for-you-theory. A leader in promoting it has been Dr. T. D.. Luckey, the author of Hormesis and Ionizing Radiation and Radiation Hormesis. He contends: “We need more, not less, exposure to ionizing radiation. The evidence that ionizing radiation is an essential agent has been reviewed…There is proven benefit.”

Luckey, whose Ph.D. is in biochemistry/nutrition, also states: “The trillions of dollars estimated for worldwide nuclear waste management can be reduced to billions to provide safe, low-dose irradiation to improve our health. The direction is obvious; the first step remains to be taken.”

Luckey did some of his research as a visiting scientist at another national nuclear laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory.

A medical expert on the impacts of radiation, Dr. Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina School of Public Health, where he is a professor of epidemiology, comments that “Luckey and the others advocating hormesis are without foundation.”

Wing’s Ph.D. is in epidemiology, defined as the branch of medicine that deals with the study of the causes, distribution and control of diseases in populations.

He declares that the push for “radiation hormesis” is “related to the conflicts of interest” involving these individuals connected to “universities, government agencies, industry and government laboratories that profit from nuclear weapons and the nuclear power industry.”

NASA and Nukes: A Recipe for Disaster

2011-07-22T11:36:00.000-07:00

What is NASA’s future now that Atlantis has landed and the shuttle program is over? If NASA persists in using nuclear power in space, the agency’s future is threatened.

Between November 25 and December 15 NASA plans to launch for use on Mars a rover fueled with 10.6 pounds of plutonium, more plutonium than ever used on a rover.

The mission has a huge cost: $2.5 billion.

But if there is an accident before the rover is well on its way to Mars, and plutonium is released on Earth, its cost stands to be yet more gargantuan.

NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement for what it calls its Mars Science Laboratory Mission says that if plutonium is released on Earth, the cost could be as high as $1.5 billion to decontaminate each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas” impacted.

What‘s the probability of an accident releasing plutonium? The NASA document says “the probability of an accident with a release of plutonium” is 1-in-220“overall.”

If you knew your chance of not surviving an airplane flight—or just a drive in a car—was 1 in 220, would you take that trip?

And is this enormous risk necessary?

In two weeks, there’ll be a NASA mission demonstrating a clear alternative to atomic energy in space: solar power.

On August 5, NASA plans to launch a solar-powered space probe it’s named Juno to Jupiter. There’s no atomic energy involved, although NASA for decades has insisted that nuclear power is necessary for space devices beyond the orbit of Mars. With Juno, NASA will be showing it had that wrong.

“Juno will provide answers to critical science questions about Jupiter, as well as key information that will dramatically enhance present theories about the early formation of our own solar system,” says NASA on its website. “In 2016, the spinning, solar-powered Juno spacecraft will reach Jupiter.” It will be equipped with “instruments that can sense the hidden world beneath Jupiter’s colorful clouds” and make 33 passes of Jupiter.

As notes Aviation Week and Space Technology: “The unique spacecraft will set a record by running on solar power rather than nuclear radioisotope thermoelectric generators previously used to operate spacecraft that far from the Sun.”

The Mars rover to be launched, named Curiosity by NASA, will be equipped with these radioisotope thermoelectric generators using plutonium, the deadliest radioactive substance.

Juno, a large craft—66-feet wide—will be powered by solar panels built by a Boeing subsidiary, Spectrolab. The panels can convert 28 percent of the sunlight that them to electricity. They’ll also produce heat to keep Juno’s instruments warm. This mission’s cost is $1.1 billion.

In fact, Juno is not a wholly unique spacecraft. In 2004, the European Space Agency launched a space probe called Rosetta that is also solar-powered. Its mission is to orbit and land on a comet—beyond the orbit of Jupiter.

Moreover, there have been major developments in “solar sails” to propel spacecraft. Last year, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched its Ikaros spacecraft with solar sails taking it to Venus. In January, NASA itself launched its NanoSail-D spacecraft. The Planetary Society has been developing several spacecraft that will take advantage of photons emitted by the Sun to travel through the vacuum of space.

At no point will Juno (or the other solar spacecrafts) be a threat to life on Earth. This includes Juno posing no danger when in 2013 it makes a flyby of Earth. Such flybys making use of Earth’s gravity to increase a spacecraft’s velocity have constituted dangerous maneuvers when in recent years they’ve involved plutonium-powered space probes such as NASA’s Galileo and Cassini probes.

Curiosity is a return to nuclear danger.

NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement admits that a large swath of Earth could be impacted by plutonium in an accident involving it. The document’s section on “Impacts of Radiological Releases” says “the affected environment” could include “the regional area near the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and the global area.”

“Launch area accidents would initially release material into the regional area, defined…to be within …62 miles of the launch pad,” says the document. This is an area from Cape Canaveral west to Orlando.

But “since some of the accidents result in the release of very fine particles less than a micron in diameter, a portion of such releases could be transported beyond…62 miles,” it goes on. These particles could become “well-mixed in the troposphere”—the atmosphere five to nine miles high—“and have been assumed to potentially affect persons living within a latitude band from approximately 23-degrees north to 30-degrees north.” That’s a swath through the Caribbean, across North Africa and the Mideast, then India and China Hawaii and other Pacific islands, and Mexico and southern Texas.

Then, as the rocket carrying Curiosity up gains altitude, the impacts of an accident in which plutonium is released would be even broader. The plutonium could affect people “anywhere between 28-degrees north and 28-degrees south latitude,” says the NASA document. That’s a band around the mid-section of the Earth including much of South America, Africa and Australia.

Dr. Helen Caldicott, president emeritus of Physicians for Social Responsibility, has long emphasized that a pound of plutonium if uniformly distributed could hypothetically give a fatal dose of lung cancer to every person on Earth. A pound, even 10.6 pounds, could never be that uniformly distributed, of course. But an accident in which plutonium is released by a space device as tiny particles falling to Earth maximizes its lethality. A millionth of a gram of plutonium can be a fatal dose. The pathway of greatest concern is the breathing in plutonium particle.

As the NASA Environmental Impact Statement puts it: “Particles smaller than about 5 microns would be transported to and remain in the trachea, bronchi, or deep lung regions.” The plutonium particles “would continuously irradiate lung tissue.”

“A small fraction would be transported over time directly to the blood or to lymph nodes and then to the blood,” it continues. Once plutonium “has entered the blood via ingestion or inhalation, it would circulate and be deposited primarily in the liver and skeletal system.” Also, says the document, some of the plutonium would migrate to the testes or ovaries.

The cost of decontamination of areas affected by the plutonium could be, according to the NASA statement, $267 million for each square mile of farmland, $478 million for each square mile of forests and $1.5 billion for each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas.”

The NASA document lists “secondary social costs associated with the decontamination and mitigation activities” as: “Temporary or longer term relocation of residents; temporary or longer term loss of employment; destruction or quarantine of agricultural products including citrus crops; land use restrictions which could affect real estate values, tourism and recreational activities; restriction or bands on commercial fishing; and public health effects and medical care.”

As to why the use of a plutonium-powered rover on Mars—considering that NASA has successfully used solar-powered rovers on Mars—the NASA Environmental Impact Statement says that a “solar-powered rover…would not be capable of operating over the full range of scientifically desirable landing site latitudes” on this mission.

There’s more to it. For many decades there has been a marriage of nuclear power and space at NASA. The use of nuclear power on space missions has been heavily promoted by the U.S. Department of Energy and its predecessor agency, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and the many DOE (previously AEC) national laboratories including Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. This provides work for these government entities. Also, the manufacturers of nuclear-powered space devices—General Electric was a pioneer in this—have pushed their products. Further, NAS has sought to coordinate its activities with the U.S. military. The military for decades has planned for the deployment of nuclear-powered weapons in space.

Personifying the NASA-military connection now is NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, a former NASA astronaut and Marine Corps major general. Appointed by President Barack Obama, he is a booster of radioisotope thermoelectric generators as well as rockets using nuclear power for propulsion. The U.S. has spent billions of dollars through the years on such rockets but none have ever taken off and the programs have all ended up cancelled largely out of concern about a nuclear-powered rocket blowing up on launch or falling back to Earth.

Accidents have happened in the U.S. space nuclear program. Of the 26 space missions that have used plutonium which are listed in the NASA Environmental Impact Statement for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission, three underwent accident, admits the document.

The worst occurred in 1964 and involved, it notes, the SNAP-9A plutonium system aboard a satellite that failed to achieve orbit and dropped to Earth, disintegrating as it fell. The 2.1 pounds of plutonium fuel dispersed widely over the Earth and Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked this accident to an increase in global lung cancer. With the SNAP-9A accident, NASA switched to solar energy on satellites. Now all satellites—and the International Space Station—are solar-powered.

There was a near-miss involving a nuclear disaster and a space shuttle. The ill-fated Challenger’s next mission in 1986 was to loft a plutonium-powered space probe.

The NASA Environmental Impact Statement includes comments from people and organizations some highly critical of a plutonium-powered Mars Science Laboratory Mission.

Leah Karpen of Asheville, North Carolina says: “Every expansion of plutonium research, development and transportation of this deadly material increases the risk of nuclear accident or theft. In addition, plutonium production is expensive and diverts resources from the more important social needs of our society today, and in the future.” She urges NASA “to reconsider the use of nuclear” and go with solar instead.

Jeremy Maxand, executive director of the Idaho-based Snake River Alliance, calls on NASA and the Department of Energy to “take this opportunity to move space exploration in a sustainable direction with regard to power. Using solar rather than nuclear to power the Mars Science Laboratory Mission would keep the U.S. safe, advance energy technologies that are cleaner and more secure, be more fiscally responsible, and set a responsible example to other countries as they make decisions about their energy future.”

Russell Ace Hoffman of Carlsbad, California speaks of “today’s nuclear NASA” and a “closed society of dangerous, closed-minded ‘scientists’ who are hoodwinking the American public and who are guilty of premeditated random murder.” He adds: “The media has a duty to learn the truth rather than parrot NASA’s blanketly-false assertions.”

NASA, in response to the criticisms, repeatedly states in the document: “NASA and the DOE take very seriously the possibility that an action they take could potentially result in harm to humans or the environment. Therefore, both agencies maintain vigorous processes to reduce the potential for such events.”

Involved in challenging the mission is the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space (www.space4peace.org). Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Maine-based organization, says that “NASA sadly appears committed to maintaining their dangerous alliance with the nuclear industry. Both entities view space as a new market for the deadly plutonium fuel.”

Says Gagnon: “The taxpayers are being asked once again to pay for nuclear missions that could endanger the life of all the people on the planet…Have we not learned anything from Chernobyl and Fukushima? We don’t need to be launching nukes into space. It’s not a gamble we can afford to take.”

With the return of Atlantis and end of the shuttle program, there are concerns about this being the “end” of the U.S. space program.

An accident if NASA continues to insist on mixing atomic energy and space—a nuclear disaster overhead—that, indeed, could end the space program..

Atomic Energy: Unsafe in the Real World

2011-06-29T11:24:00.000-07:00

Nuclear power requires “perfection” and “no acts of God,” we were warned years ago. This has been brought home by the ongoing disaster caused by the earthquake and tsunami that struck the Fukushimi Daiichi nuclear plant complex, the flooding along the Missouri River in Nebraska now threatening two nuclear plants, and the wildfire laying siege to Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of atomic energy.

Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, fire—these and other disasters will inevitably occur. Add nuclear power with its potential to release massive amounts of deadly radioactive poisons when impacted by such a disaster, and it is clear that atomic energy is incompatible with the real world.

There’s no perfection in human beings or in technology. Accidents will happen. And there will always be natural disasters—we can’t eliminate them. But we can—and must—eliminate atomic energy.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr. Hannes Alfven explained in 1972 in declaring his strong opposition to nuclear power: “Fission energy is safe only if a number of critical devices work as they should, if a number of people in key positions follow all their instructions, if there is no sabotage, no hijacking of the transports, if no reactor processing plant or reprocessing plant or repository anywhere in the world is situated in a region of riots or guerilla activity, and no revolution or war—even a ‘conventional one’—takes place in those regions. The enormous quantities of extremely dangerous material must not get into the hands of ignorant people or desperados. No acts of God can be permitted.” Dr. Alfven was writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

“Nuclear power is an unforgiving technology. It allows no room for error,” wrote Carl J. Hocevar of the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1975. Hocevar had earlier been an engineer working on reactor safety at Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. “Perfection must be achieved if accidents that affect the general public are to be prevented,” he wrote in his foreword to the book We Almost Lost Detroit. The book is about the partial meltdown at the Fermi 1 nuclear power plant in 1966 that threatened nearby Detroit, one of numerous near-misses and many other accidents involving nuclear power in addition to the disasters at Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986 and now Fukushima.

In We Almost Lost Detroit, Hocevar described the blind faith of scientists in atomic energy and their wrong assumptions. “The scientists involved were most confident that they had covered all possible problem areas. They had built safeguards on top of safeguards. Yet in spite of the precautions in the design and construction of the Fermi reactor, and in spite of the reassurances by the scientists that a serious accident could not happen, one did occur. The results far exceeded the expectations of anyone involved with the project. Fortunately, at the time of the accident, the reactor was operating at a very low power level or the consequences could have been much worse.”

“The Fermi accident and others described in this book demonstrate the fact that no matter how much diligence is exercised in the design, construction, and operation of a nuclear reactor, things can and do go wrong,” Hocevar related. “Design errors occur, the unexpected happens, human error is a very real possibility.”

Still, “for many years, the [nuclear] industry vigorously defended the nuclear power
program as being essentially risk-free. Nuclear power was claimed to be perfectly safe. It was said that no serious accidents would ever happen,” he noted. “Such a position was of course necessary to promote the acceptance of nuclear power by the general public. It has not been until just recently that the proponents of nuclear energy have admitted that accidents can and will happen, and the public should prepare itself for such eventualities.”

Wei Zhaofeng, an energy official in China, which is now reconsidering its plans for nuclear power because of the Fukushima catastrophe, said recently: “We have to ensure 100 percent safety of these nuclear power plants.”

That cannot be. Nuclear power can never be 100 percent safe. And it must be. That is why it should not be. And, instead, we must get rid of it and fully implement the clean, renewable technologies such as solar, wind and others now available which can provide, as major studies in the last several years have shown, all the energy we need—and are safe.

As physicist Amory Lovins, chairman and chief scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute, recently wrote: “Nuclear power is uniquely unforgiving.” It’s “the only energy source where mishap or malice can kill so many people so far away.”

That’s been made evident by the Fukushima disaster, the crisis along the Missouri River in Nebraska and the wildfire at the gates of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

To err is human, it’s realized. Technology fails, it’s comprehended. And we must also understand that atomic energy is unsafe in the real world. It can never be safe. It must be eliminated in favor of energy we can live with.

The Big Fukushima Lie Flies High

2011-06-16T17:55:00.000-07:00

The global nuclear industry and its allies in government are making a desperate effort to cover up the consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. “The big lie flies high,” comments Kevin Kamps of the organization Beyond Nuclear.

Not only is this nuclear establishment seeking to make it look like the Fukushima catastrophe has not happened—going so far as to claim that there will be “no health effects” as a result of it—but it is moving forward on a “nuclear renaissance,” its scheme to build more nuclear plants.

Indeed, next week in Washington, a two-day “Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy” will be held involving major manufacturers of nuclear power plants—including General Electric, the manufacturer of the Fukushima plants—and U.S. government officials.

Although since Fukushima, Germany, Switzerland and Italy and other nations have turned away from nuclear power for a commitment instead to safe, clean, renewable energy such as solar and wind, the Obama administration is continuing its insistence on nuclear power.

Will the nuclear establishment be able to get away with telling what, indeed, would be one of the most outrageous Big Lies of all time—that no one will die as a result of Fukushima?

Will it be able to continue its new nuclear push despite the catastrophe?

Nearly 100 days after the Fukushima disaster began, with radiation still streaming from the plants, with its owners, TEPCO, now admitting that meltdowns did occur at its plants, that releases have been twice as much as it announced earlier, with deadly radioactivity from Fukushima spreading worldwide, and with some countries now changing course and saying no to nuclear power, while others stick with it, a nuclear crossroads has arrived.

“No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at Fukushima,” the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, flatly declared in a statement issued at a press conference in Washington last week.

“They’re lying,” says Dr. Janette Sherman, a toxicologist and contributing editor of the book Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009. Using medical data from between 1986 and 2004, its authors, a team of European scientists, determines that 985,000 people died worldwide from the radioactivity discharged from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

The Fukushima disaster will have a comparable toll, expects Dr. Sherman, who has conducted research into the consequences of radiation for decades. “People living closest to the plants who receive the biggest doses will get sick sooner. Those who are farther away and receive lesser doses will get sick at a slower rate,” she says.

“We’ve known about radioactive isotopes for decades,” says Dr. Sherman. “I worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s and we knew about the effects then. To ignore the biology is to our peril. This is not new science. Cesium-137 goes to soft tissue. Strontium-90 goes to the bones and teeth. Iodine-131 goes to the thyroid gland.” All have been released in large amounts in the Fukushima disaster since it began on March 11.

There will inevitably be cancer and other illnesses—as well as genetic effects—as a result of the substantial discharges of radioactivity released from Fukushima, says Dr. Sherman. “People in Japan will be the most impacted but the radiation has been spreading worldwide and will impact life worldwide.”

The American Nuclear Society, made up of what its website says are “professionals” in the nuclear field, is also deep in the Fukushima denial camp. “Radiation risks to people living in Japan are very low, and no public ill effects are expected from the Fukushima incident,” it declares on its website. As to the U.S., the Illinois-based organization adds: “There is no health risk of radiation from the Fukushima incident to people in the United States.”

Acknowledging that “radiation from Fukushima has been detected within the United States,” the American Nuclear Society asserts that’s because we are able to detect very small amounts of radiation. Through the use of extremely sensitive equipment, U.S. laboratories have been able to detect very minute quantities of radioactive isotopes in air, precipitation, milk, and drinking water due to the Fukushima incident…The radiation from Fukushima, though detectable, is nowhere near the level of public health concern.”

Says Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, “The absurd belief that no one will be harmed by Fukushima is perhaps the strongest evidence of the pattern of deception and denial by nuclear officials in industry and government.”

The World Health Organization has added its voice to the denial group. “For anyone outside Japan there is currently no health risk from radiation leaking from the nuclear power plant,” Gregory Hartl, a WHO spokesman, has insisted. “We know that there have been measurements in maybe up to about 30 countries [and] these measurements are miniscule, often below levels of background radiation…and they do not constitute a public health risk.”

WHO, not too incidentally, has a formal arrangement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in place since both were established at the UN in the 1950s, to say nothing about issues involving radiation without clearing it with the IAEA, which was set up to specifically promote atomic energy. On Chernobyl, together in an initiative called the “Chernobyl Forum,” they have claimed that “less than 50 deaths have been directly attributed” to that disaster and “a total of up to 4,000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident.” That nuclear Big Lie precedes the new nuclear deception involving the impacts of Fukushima.

As to background radiation, Dr. Jeffrey Patterson, immediate past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Public Health, says: “We do live with background radiation—but it does cause cancer.” That’s why there is concern, he notes, about radon gas being emitted in homes from a breakdown of uranium in some soils. “That’s background [radiation] but it’s not safe. There are absolutely no safe levels of radiation” and adding more radiation “adds to the health impacts.”

“There has been a cover-up, a minimization of the effects of radioactivity since the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear technology,” says Dr. Patterson. Meanwhile, with the Fukushima disaster, “large populations of people are being randomly exposed to radiation that they didn’t ask for, they didn’t agree to.”

Dr. Steven Wing, an epidemiologist who has specialized in the effects of radioactivity at the School of Public Health of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, said: “The generally accepted thinking about the safe dose is that, no, there is no safe dose in terms of the cancer or genetic effects of radiation. The assumption of most people is that there’s a linear, no-threshold dose response relationship and that just means that as the dose goes down the risk goes down, but it never disappears.”

Of the claims of “no threat to health” from the radioactivity emitted from Fukushima, that “just flies in the face of all the standard models and all the studies that have been done over a long period of time of radiation and cancer.”

“As the radiation clouds move away from Fukushima and move far away to other continents and around the world, the doses are spread out,” notes Dr. Wing. “But it’s important for people to know that spreading out a given amount of radiation dose among more people, although it reduces each person’s individual risk, it doesn’t reduce the number of cancers that result from that amount of radiation. So having millions and millions of people exposed to a very small dose could produce just as much cancer as a thousand or a few thousand people exposed to that same dose.”

He believes “we should be focusing on putting pressure on people in government and the energy industry to come up with an energy policy that minimizes harm,” is a “sane energy policy.” Those who have “led us into this situation” have caused “big problems.”

And they are still at it—even with radioactivity still coming out at Fukushima and expected to for months. On Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington, the “Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy” will be held, organized by the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council.

Council members include General Electric, since 2006 in partnership in its nuclear plant manufacturing business with the Japanese corporation Hitachi.

Other members of the council, notes its information on the summit, include the Nuclear Energy Institute; Babcock & Wilcox, the manufacturer of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant which underwent a partial meltdown in 1979; Duke Energy, a U.S. utility long a booster of nuclear power; the Tennessee Valley Authority, a U.S. government-created public power company heavily committed to nuclear power; Uranium Producers of America; and AREVA, the French government-financed nuclear power company that has been moving to expand into the U.S. and worldwide.

Also participating in the summit as speakers will be John Kelly, an Obama administration Department of Energy deputy assistant for nuclear reactor technologies; William Magwood, a nuclear power advocate who is a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Matthew Milazzo representing an entity called the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future set up by the Obama administration; and Congressmen Mike Simpson of Idaho, chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee Interior & Environment and Ed Whitfield of Kentucky, chairman of the House Energy & Power Subcommittee, both staunch nuclear power supporters.

Other participants, according to the program for the event, will be “senior executives and thought leaders from the who’s who of the U.S. new nuclear community.” Bruce Llewelyn, who hosts “White House Chronicle” on PBS television, is listed as the summit’s “moderator.”

There will be programs on the “State of the Renaissance,” “China, India & Emerging Global Nuclear Markets,” “Advancing Nuclear Technology” and “Lessons from Fukushima.”

As the nuclear Pinocchios lie, the nuclear promoters push ahead.

Nuclear Pinocchios

2011-06-15T07:51:00.000-07:00

Published in Long Island newspapers this week.

“Remember, we can change the world. Or at least Long Island,” Nora Bredes, former executive director of the Shoreham Opponents Coalition, just wrote on her Facebook page. With her message was a New York Times article about a massive demonstration 25 years ago this month protesting the Shoreham nuclear plant.

“More than 600 protesters were arrested here today after 15,000 demonstrators gathered,” the piece began. The headline noted it was “One of the Largest Held Worldwide” against nuclear power.

Because of demonstrations, legal challenges, political initiatives and other actions by organizations and individuals, and work by Suffolk County, state and local officials, the Shoreham plant was stopped.

Two months before that June 1986 demonstration, the Chernobyl nuclear plant catastrophe occurred in the former Soviet Union clearly showing the deadliness of nuclear power, despite the claims of nuclear promoters—including on Long Island—that it was safe.

Now, the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants in Japan has again proven the lethality of nuclear power. A baseline for how many people will likely die from Fukushima radiation is provided by a 2009 book published by the New York Academy of Sciences, “Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment.” Using medical data from between 1986 and 2004, a team of eminent European scientists concludes that 985,000 people died worldwide from the radioactivity discharged from Chernobyl. And the Fukushima disaster involved not one but a cluster of nuclear power plants and is ongoing with radioactivity still streaming out and spreading worldwide.

But the nuclear Pinocchios are still at it.

Last week, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, held a press conference in Washington at which it issued a statement asserting: “No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at Fukushima.” And as for the rest of us: don’t worry.

“This is as believable as the Marlboro man offering you the same assurance,” said Paul Gunter, director of Reactor Oversight at the organization Beyond Nuclear (www.beyondnuclear.org). “The global nuclear industry should focus on bringing this catastrophic nuclear accident to an end rather than damage control for its increasingly radioactive public image.”

Reaction to Fukushima has varied. Germany, Switzerland, Italy and other nations have declared they will now abandon nuclear power and instead pursue safe, clean, renewable energy technologies such as solar and wind. A difference between today and 25 years ago is that such technologies are more highly developed and if fully utilized can provide all the energy the world needs, as recent studies have shown. They render nuclear power unnecessary.

In Washington this week, a Congressional Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Expo and Forum involving safe energy advocates and members of Congress was held. But the Obama administration, heavily influenced by Steven Chu, the nuclear scientist who heads the Department of Energy, is still pushing atomic power. It wants, despite the Fukushima disaster, more nuclear plants built in the U.S. and is seeking $34 billion in taxpayer monies to build them. Next week, a New Nuclear Energy Summit to “advance” nuclear power will be held in Washington involving Obama administration and nuclear industry officials.

Shoreham was stopped, along with Long Island Lighting Company plans to build other nuclear plants here as well. Long Island is nuclear-free. But across the Sound in Connecticut, the two Millstone nuclear plants continue to operate, dangerously. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has just issued a report finding “pervasive performance lapses” by plant operators during a serious “unexpected power spike” at Millstone 2 on February 12, a month before the Fukushima meltdowns. Taking on Millstone is the Standing for Truth About Radiation Coalition, restarted by Priscilla Star of Montauk (priscillaastar@hotmail.com) since Fukushima.

The threat of nuclear power continues, as does the struggle to end the deadly technology and shift to safe, clean, renewable energy.

Downplaying Deadly Dangers in Japan and at Home, After Fukushima, Media Still Buying Media Spin

2011-04-30T02:53:00.001-07:00

Published in Extra! The Magazine of FAIR—The Media Watch Group
May 2011 Cover Story

Ever since the start of nuclear technology, those behind it have made heavy use of deception, obfuscation and denial--with the complicity of most of the media. New York Times reporter William Laurence, working at the same time with the Manhattan Project, wrote a widely-published press release covering up the first nuclear test in New Mexico in 1945, claiming it was nothing more than an ammunition dump explosion. The Times and Laurence went on to boost nuclear power for years to come (Beverly Deepe Keever, News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb).

A central concern of nuclear promoters, as Rosalie Bertell writes in her book No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth, has been: "Should the public discover the true health cost of nuclear pollution, a cry would rise from all parts of the world and people would refuse to cooperate passively with their own death." In the U.S., nuclear industry and government nuclear agencies lied after the accident at Three Mile Island. In the Soviet Union, government lies flowed after the catastrophe at Chernobyl. There have been cover-up after cover-up of the smaller accidents in between (Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon, Killing Our Own, The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation; Jay M. Gould and Benjamin A. Goldman, Deadly Deceit; Low-level Radiation, High-level Cover-up).

The nuclear enterprise, with its army of PR people, has had little trouble through the years manipulating a largely compliant media, a major component of which it has owned: Westinghouse owning CBS for many years, and General Electric, NBC. And this continues in the still-unfolding nuclear disaster in Japan.

Media coverage of the Fukushima nuclear power facility disaster has ranged from dreadful to barely passable. Much of the reporting about the threats of nuclear power and the impacts of radioactivity has been outrageously poor, as journalists and their talking-head experts have parroted the assurances of Japanese and other officials that the amounts of radioactivity being released were low and thus posed "no health threat" to people (e.g., AP, 3/21/11).

Decades ago, there was the notion of a "threshold dose" of radiation, below which there was no harm. That’s because when nuclear technology began and people were exposed to radioactivity, they didn’t promptly fall down dead. But as the years went by, it was realized that lower levels of radioactivity take time to result in cancer and other illnesses--that there is a five-to-40-year "incubation" period.

Now most scientists acknowledge that any amount of radioactivity can lead to illness and death, especially in fetuses and children whose cells are dividing more rapidly than in adults. As the National Council on Radiation Protection (No. 136, 2001) has said: "Every increment of radiation exposure produces an incremental increase in the risk of cancer." Or the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission ("Fact Sheet: Biological Effects of Radiation"): "Any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer.”

Much coverage reassured the public that, even if there was some risk, potassium iodide pills being distributed in Japan "block radioactivity" (CNN, 3/18/11). In fact, potassium iodide pills work only on the thyroid, filling it with "good" iodine so radioactive iodine-131, which causes thyroid cancer, cannot be absorbed. But there are hundreds of other fission products--including cesium-137 and strontium-90, both of which were discharged when the Fukushima nuclear plants erupted--and there are no magic pills for any of them.

Fox News took its coverage to another level, with Geraldo Rivera declaring (3/18/11): "I love nuclear power." And right-wing firebrand Ann Coulter on the O'Reilly Factor (Fox News, 3/17/11) asserted that "radiation [amounts] in excess of what the government says are the minimum amounts we should be exposed to are actually good for you and reduce cases of cancer." Even fellow right-wing firebrand Bill O’Reilly was taken aback. "You have to be responsible," he told her.

Coulter's comment stems from a wild theory of some nuclear scientists called "hormesis," which holds that radioactivity is good because it exercises the immune system. Coulter challenged media for not pursuing the radiation-is-good hypothesis. They should--they'll find that it's been dismissed by national and international agencies involved with radiation protection, including the U.S. National Research Council, the National Council on Radiation Protection and the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation.

There have been huge scientific errors, even by people who acknowledged the seriousness of the disaster—such as the explanation for cesium-137 by "expert" Bill Nye, aka "The Science Guy," on CNN (3/12/11). "We hear about this substance called cesium, which is being released," anchor John Vause said to Nye. "What's the significance of that?" The "Science Guy" responded: "Cesium is used to slow and control the nuclear reaction, the fission of these very large atoms of uranium. And so when cesium can’t get in there to slow things down, it gets hotter and hotter."

In fact, cesium-137 has absolutely nothing to do with slowing or controlling fission (that's boron); it is one of the deadliest radioactive products created by fission, and one of the main reasons there's still a 1,660-square-mile Exclusion Zone around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. "The Science Guy" flubs a high-school physics exam question, and one that is crucial to understanding the health effects of nuclear accidents.

Media have betrayed a lack of understanding about the hydrogen explosions that blew the roofs off the Fukushima plants as well. It was reported that this had to do with fuel rods, and sometimes zirconium was mentioned. (e.g. LA Times, 3/16/11). But missed was a huge issue: Zirconium, which is used to make nuclear fuel rods because it allows neutrons to pass freely, is extremely volatile. It explodes at 2,000[o] F with the explosive power, pound for pound, of nitroglycerin. (A tiny speck of zirconium produces the flash in a flashbulb; a typical nuclear plant contains 20 tons.) With lesser heat, it emits hydrogen, which itself can explode, and this is what occurred at Fukushima. Using zirconium in a nuclear plant is like building a bridge out of firecrackers. It’s not hard to explain, but that didn’t happen.

Then there were the reports about three GE nuclear engineers who resigned because of defects in the GE Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactor used at Fukushima (ABC News, 3/16/11). This was in line with the spin that the problem is not nuclear power in general, but merely one flawed plant design.

While the Mark 1 design was, indeed, a factor in why the three GE nuclear engineering supervisors, Dale Bridenbaugh, Richard Hubbard and Gregory Minor, left the nuclear industry, their broader point went missing in media coverage: As they declared in a statement to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in Congress in 1976,
"We did so because we could no longer justify devoting our life energies to the
continued development and expansion of nuclear fission power--a system we
believe to be so dangerous that it now threatens the very existence of life on
this planet."

Meanwhile, disinformation about the impacts of previous nuclear plant disasters has served to downplay the potential impacts of the Fukushima disaster.

U.S. media regularly reported that only a few thousand people died as a result of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant catastrophe--commonly used as a baseline of comparison (e.g. New York Times, 3/27/11). These numbers ignore the most comprehensive study done on the effects of Chernobyl, a book published in 2009 by the New York Academy of Sciences titled Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. A team of scientists from Russia and Belarus studied health data, radiological surveys and scientific reports--some 5,000 in all--from 1986 to 2004, and estimated that the accident caused the deaths of 985,000 people worldwide. More deaths, they wrote, will follow. That’s the real baseline for a major disaster at one nuclear power plant.

Indeed, the senior scientist in that study, Dr. Alexey Yablokov, at a March 25 press conference in Washington, D.C., pointed out that because of the multiple nuclear power plants and spent fuel pools involved in the Fukushima disaster, and "because the area is far more densely populated than around Chernobyl, the human toll could eventually be far worse." The New York Times did not cover or run a story on that press conference at the National Press Club--or the New York Academy of Science's book.

There were also declarations that "no one died" as a result of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 (e.g., O'Reilly Factor, 3/16/11). NPR (3/28/11) went so far as to claim that "relatively small amounts of radiation had escaped from the plant. No one was even injured."

That myth was long ago long exploded by the book Killing Our Own, which includes a chapter called "People Died at Three Mile Island," detailing infant and adult deaths. I wrote and narrated a TV documentary on the impacts of the TMI partial meltdown, Three Mile Island Revisited, that focused on the cancers and death in the area around the plant, and how its owner has quietly given pay-outs, many for $1 million apiece, to settle with people who suffered health impacts or lost family members because of the accident.

Meanwhile, media didn't mention that Japan in recent years has become a global giant in the sale of nuclear power plants. GE and Westinghouse have long been the Coke and Pepsi of nuclear power plants worldwide, historically manufacturing or designing 80 percent of all nuclear plants. In 2006, Toshiba bought Westinghouse's nuclear division and Hitachi entered into a partnership with GE to run its nuclear division. How might this huge Japanese stake in selling nuclear plants worldwide affect what Japanese officials were saying about Fukushima? This area was ignored by U.S. media--many of which have links to the nuclear industry themselves. (See FAIR Blog, 4/12/11).

A pioneer journalist on nuclear technology, Anna Mayo, had one word to describe U.S. media coverage of the Japanese disaster: "grotesque." From 1969 to 1989, Mayo worked for the Village Voice, writing a column titled "Geiger Counter." She once said (Karl Grossman, Cover Up), "I built a full-time career on covering nuclear horror stories that the New York Times neglected." Mayo was forced out after changes of ownership at the Village Voice, with "nuclear industry pressure" having much to do with her ouster: "The nuclear industry went after me. It was very obvious."

The nuclear industry on the disaster in Japan, said Mayo, "is trying desperately to conceal the extent of radiation exposure, and they’ve wheeled out the same old lies." And media, as usual, have bought the deadly nuclear deception.

Nuclear Power Can Never Be Made Safe

2011-04-25T18:08:00.000-07:00

With the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant catastrophe having arrived, and with the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear complex still unfolding—and radioactivity continuing to spew from those plants—some people are asking: can nuclear power be made safe?

The answer is no. Nuclear power can never be made safe.

This was clearly explained by Admiral Hyman Rickover, the “father” of the U.S. nuclear navy and in charge of construction of the first nuclear power plant in the nation, Shippingport in Pennsylvania. Before a committee of Congress, as he retired from the navy in 1982, Rickover warned of the inherent lethality of nuclear power—and urged that “we outlaw nuclear reactors.”

The basic problem: radioactivity.

“I’ll be philosophical,” testified Rickover. “Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on Earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn’t have any life—fish or anything.” This was from naturally-occurring cosmic radiation when the Earth was in the process of formation. “Gradually,” said Rickover, “about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet…reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin.”

“Now, when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible,” he said. “Every time you produce radiation” a “horrible force” is unleashed. By splitting the atom, people are recreating the poisons that precluded life from existing. “And I think there the human race is going to wreck itself,” Rickover stated.

This was Rickover, a key figure in nuclear power history, not Greenpeace.

The problem is radioactivity—unleashed when the atom is split. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a General Electric boiling water reactor such as those that have erupted at Fukushima, or the Westinghouse pressurized water design, or Russian-designed plants like Chernobyl, or the “new, improved” nuclear plants being touted by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a nuclear scientist and zealous promoter of nuclear technology.

All nuclear power plants produce radiation as well as radioactive poisons like the Cesium-137, Iodine-131 and Strontium-90 that have been—and continue to be--spewed from the Fukushima plants.

Upon contact with life, these toxins destroy life. So from the time they’re produced in a nuclear plant to when they’re taken out as hotly radioactive “nuclear waste,” they must be isolated from life—for thousands for some millions of years.

In the nuclear process, mildly radioactive uranium is taken from the ground and bombarded by neutrons—and that part of the uranium which can split, is “fissile,” Uranium-235, is transformed into radioactive twins of safe and stable elements in nature: There are hundreds of these “fission products.” The human body doesn’t know the difference between these lethal twins and safe and stable elements. Also produced are alpha and beta particles and gamma rays, all radioactive.

In addition, much of the larger part of uranium, Uranium-238, which cannot split, grabs on to neutrons and turns into Plutonium-239, the most radioactive substance known.

In this atom-splitting, too, heat is produced—which is used to boil water. Nuclear power plants are simply the most dangerous way to boil water ever conceived.

Why use this toxic process to boil water and generate electricity? It has far less to do with science than with politics and economics—from the aftermath of the Manhattan Project to today During the World War II Manhattan Project, scientists working at laboratories secretly set up across the U.S. built atomic weapons. By 1945
it employed 600,000 people and billions of dollars were spent. Two bombs were dropped on Japan. And, with the war’s end, the Manhattan Project became the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and more nuclear weapons were built. But what else could be done with nuclear technology to perpetuate the nuclear undertaking?

Many of the scientists and government officials didn’t want to see their jobs end; corporations which were Manhattan Project contractors, notably General Electric and Westinghouse, didn’t want to see their contracts ended. As James Kunetka writes in his book City of Fire about Los Alamos National Laboratory, with the war over there were problems of “job placement, work continuity…more free time than work…hardly enough to keep everyone busy.”

Nuclear weapons don’t lend themselves to commercial spinoff. What else could be done with atomic technology to keep the nuclear establishment going? Schemes advanced included using nuclear devices as substitutes for dynamite to blast huge holes in the ground—including stringing 125 atomic devices across the isthmus of Panama and setting them off to create the “Panatomic Canal,” utilizing radioactivity to zap food so it could seemingly be stored for years; building nuclear-powered airplanes (this didn’t go far because of the weight of the lead shielding needed to protect the pilots)—and using the heat built up by the nuclear reaction to boil water to produce electricity.

All along, the nuclear scientists—such as Chu now—attempted to minimize, indeed deny, the lethal danger of radioactivity and, like Nuclear Pinocchios, they pushed their technology.

Nuclear power plants—all 443 on the earth today—should be closed and no new ones built. As Rickover declared, nuclear reactors must be outlawed.

During the Bill Clinton campaign years ago, the slogan was, “It’s the economy, stupid.” With nuclear power plants, “It’s the radioactivity”—inherent in the process and deadly.

Instead we must fully implement the use of safe, clean, renewable energy technologies like solar, wind (now the fastest growing energy source and cheaper than nuclear) and geothermal and all the rest which, major studies have concluded, can provide all the energy the world needs—energy without lethal radioactivity, energy we can live with.

Fukushima: A Month of Media Disinformation

2011-04-11T04:15:00.000-07:00

Today marks exactly a month since the nuclear power disaster in Japan began. Along with the ongoing discharges of radioactivity from the Fukushima nuclear plant complex, there has been a largely outrageous flow of media coverage.

Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News on April 6th asked a good question: “And what about all that water, the many million gallons of it, highly radioactive, dumped in the Pacific Ocean for days on end—and we’ve all been told it will dissipate. But how can this not be harmful?” he queried correspondent Miguel Almaguer.

The question might have been good but the response to it, Almaguer’s report, was far from that. He presented a talking head expert, Luca Centurioni of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who said: “No, there is no immediate danger.” (Centurioni’s background, according to his resume posted on the Internet, reflects no background in radioactivity.)

“The bottom line,” said Almaguer, “experts are in agreement there’s no threat to our water or our food.” He added: “And as you can see Brian, California’s coastline is as beautiful as ever.” Radioactivity, of course, is invisible.

Or consider Charles Osgood on “The Osgood File” on CBS radio on April 1—stressing that there was nothing to fear but fear. Indeed, he played President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s declaration in 1933 that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That might have been a reasonable reassurance amid the Depression. But here were the first indications of radioactivity having come to the U.S. from Japan.with radioactive iodine being “found in milk in the states of California and Washington,” noted Osgood.

But, he quickly added, “the contamination is described as miniscule, posing no threat to the public.” To bolster that assertion he presented Blair Thompson, “spokesman for the Washington Dairy Products Commission.”

“Radiation can be a scary word, but I think it’s important to remember that actually we live surrounded by radiation every day,” said milk industry PR man Thompson.

Indeed, chirped Osgood: “Some of our most common foods—potatoes, carrots, bananas and Brazil nuts—contain radioactive potassium.”

Yes, there is naturally occurring “background radiation” of various sorts—and that causes a level of cancer. As the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (www.nirs.org) states: “Even exposure to background radiation causes some cancers. Additional exposures cause additional risks.” Cited is a 700-page 2005 National Academy of Sciences report, “Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation,” that concluded that: “There is no safe level or threshold of ionizing radiation exposure.” There have been numerous similar reports.

And not only were reporter after reporter over the past month unaware of the facts about radioactivity, the experts they presented were quite a crew, too.

Consider David Brenner. He was on PBS Nightly News on March 18, two days after being featured in the New York Times story about him headlined: “Countering Radiation Fears With Just the Facts.” In the article, he was quoted as saying “I think there is a role for safe nuclear power.” Just a fact? Clearly, he was ready for TV, too.

Asked by Jeffrey Brown about “the plutonium found in the ground” around the Fukushima nuclear plants, Dr. Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University, responded: “Well, there are various sources that the plutonium could have come from. But I think we’re relieved that the levels of plutonium are actually very low, and actually, typical of plutonium—natural plutonium contamination in this country.”

Plutonium is the most lethal of all radioactive substances. There is no level “actually very low.” A millionth of a gram inhaled, a microscopic particle, is all that’s needed to produce lung cancer. Furthermore, there is no “natural plutonium contamination in this country.”

Plutonium is a manmade substance. It was discovered by Glenn Seaborg in 1941 and used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki and almost all atomic weapons since. Plutonium-239 is what Uranium-238 can become when in the proximity of fission.

Nuclear power plants build up 500 to 1,000 pounds of plutonium every year. Indeed, the concept for nuclear power plants came from the plutonium production reactors built at the Hanford reservation in the state of Washington during the Manhattan Project crash program of World War II to build atomic bombs. Also produced in those reactors were large amounts of heat. With the war over, seeking to do more with nuclear technology than just build more nuclear weapons, the scientists, engineers and corporate contractors of the Manhattan Project—which became the Atomic Energy Commission—pushed a scheme to use that heat to boil water to turn a turbine and generate electricity.

Among their schemes, too, has been using plutonium as fuel in nuclear plants for the same reason plutonium was turned to by the Manhattan Project: limits of high-grade uranium. Manmade plutonium has been seen as the fuel for what’s called “breeder” reactors.

Meanwhile, amid all the disinformation about radioactivity there has been the effort by most of media to frame a debate between nuclear and coal—chpose your poison. In fact, the energy debate is between nuclear, coal and oil, on one side, and safe, clean, renewable energy technologies, led by solar and wind, on the other.

But you wouldn’t know that from media reports over the past month. The New York Times, for example, devoted part of a long “Science Times” article on March 29 to what the subhead stated: “Alternatives Carry Risks Too.” It said: “Radiation is a real threat, nuclear physicists say, but not as great as many people believe it is, and not as great as other threats. Indeed, every energy source comes with dangers, from mine or wellhead or the smokestack or tailpipe.” The piece went on to discuss coal-mining accidents and gas pipeline explosions. There was not a mention of the safe, clean energy technologies such as solar and wind.

Editorial cartoonist Walt Handelsmann in Newsday on April 4 went even further, drawing a picture of two pieces of wood with the caption: “Looking for cheap, risk free, all-natural, abundant energy…Start rubbing.” That’s not the choice.

As Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, concludes in his new book, World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse—as have many studies and reports—solar, wind and geothermal energy can provide all the energy the world’s needs. He dismisses nuclear power as too expensive and dangerous.

It not only can happen, it is happening, emphasizes Brown. “The old energy economy, fueled by oil, coal, and natural gas, is being replaced with an economy powered by wind, solar, and geothermal energy. Despite the global economic crisis, this energy transition is moving at a pace and on a scale that we could not have imagined even two years ago.”

But the real energy choices were largely not being discussed by media through the past month of Fukushima disinformation.

The classic book on disinformation on nuclear technology is Nukespeak, published in 1982. It is dedicated to George Orwell, author of 1984, and written by Stephen Hilgarten, Richard C. Bell and Rory O’Connor.

It opens by declaring that “the history of nuclear development has been profoundly shaped by the manipulation through official secrecy and extensive public-relations campaigns. Nukespeak and the use of information-management techniques have consistently distorted the debate over nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Time and time again, nuclear developers have confused their hopes with reality, publicly presented their expectations and assumptions as facts, covered up damaging information, harassed and fired scientists who disagreed with established policy, refused to recognize the existence of problems…claimed that there was no choice but to follow their policies.”

In the first month of the Fukushima disaster, there’s been an explosion of Nukespeak by the nuclear power establishment aided and abetted by a compliant media.

My book, "Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power," Is Being Distributed Free by Publisher Online

2011-04-05T05:36:00.000-07:00

People can now get free copies of my book "Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power" -- with a new updated preface I've written in the midst of the ongoing Fukushima nuclear power disaster.

Just go to www.thepermanentpress.com and you will see the book displayed on the homepage--and a box to click on and have the book downloaded at no cost.

What I emphasized in putting the book together was printing actual documents, as facsimiles, documents from the nuclear industry and government nuclear agencies. I believed that would be a good way to counter the Atomic Pinocchios and their lies -- something we're being intensely hit with now as the nuclear propagandists try to cover-up the consequences of the Fukushima disaster.

For example, in recent days I received an email asking for the source of the line in a government report that a major nuclear plant accident could involve an area the size of the state of Pennsylvania. It is on Page 9 of Cover Up, exactly as it appears in a government report titled "WASH-740-update" -- "the possible size of the area of such a disaster might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania." This projection is repeated over and over again in this report about the consequences of nuclear power plant accidents that was done by Brookhaven National Laboratory and kept secret for years. It was written a little more than a decade before the Three Mile Island accident.

By pasting down portions of such reports on the flats from which the book was printed, between narrative, I hoped to empower people by providing them with primary documents and thus make them fully aware of the truth about nuclear power -- and give them tools to refute the snow-jobs and the lies.

Marty and Judy Shepard of The Permanent Press had the guts to put out the book while publishers in New York refused claiming at the time that they didn't think interest in nuclear power was long-lasting. My agent, a top New York agent, was astonished. I eventually understood that this was part of the overall media cover-up on nuclear power. A good part of a chapter in the book is about this informational cover-up. Chapters include: "What Is At Stake?," "How It Works," "Accident Hazards," "Medical Consequences," "Radioactive Waste," "Economics and Jobs," "How We Got So Far," "The Alternatives," and "What You Can Do About It."

Marty says on his publisher's blog that the book is being distributed free because: "We’re not interested in making a nickel off Cover Up....Our passion in publishing has always been the good feeling that comes from doing worthy books, which trumps profits any time."

Publisher's Weekly said when the book came out that it was "powerfully documented" and that I make "a strong case for the view that giant nuclear energy corporations have taken extreme measures to hide the shocking facts about nuclear power, and are now stalling development of other energy sources in order to protect their huge investment."

So, please download the book. And, please put this information on other websites and list-servs so even more people can at no cost download the book.

Also, videos I have done on nuclear power are available for viewing free at www.envirovideo.com They include: "Three Mile Island Revisted," "The Push to Revive Nuclear Power," and "Chernobyl: A Million Casualties."

Obama's Wrongheaded Nuclear Stance -- After Japan Disaster

2011-03-31T06:45:00.000-07:00

President Barack Obama’s support this week for the construction of more nuclear power plants in the United States, amid the ongoing nuclear power plant disaster in Japan, must be considered as among the most wrongheaded and irrational positions ever taken by a U.S. president, against stiff competition.

As a candidate for president, Obama knew about the deadly dangers of nuclear power. “I start off with the premise that nuclear energy is not optimal and so I am not a nuclear energy proponent,” Obama said at a campaign stop in Newton, Iowa on December 30, 2007. “My general view is that until we can make certain that nuclear power plants are safe...I don’t think that’s the best option. I am much more interested in solar and wind and bio-diesel and strategies [for] alternative fuels.”

As he told the editorial board of the Keene Sentinel in New Hampshire on November 25, 2007: “I don’t think there’s anything that we inevitably dislike about nuclear power. We just dislike the fact that it might blow up…and irradiate us…and kill us. That’s the problem.”

But as president, he hired a nuclear power proponent out of the national nuclear laboratory system, Steven Chu, as his energy secretary. Chu, who had been director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, minimizes, indeed denies, the impacts of radioactivity, as do many of the atomic physicists in the national laboratory system. Obama’s two top White House aides, meanwhile, had been deeply involved with what is now the utility operating more nuclear power plants than any other in the U.S., Exelon. Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, was as an investment banker central to the $8.2 billion corporate merger in 1999 that produced Exelon. David Axelrod, senior advisor and chief political strategist, was an Exelon PR consultant. Candidate Obama received sizeable contributions from Exelon executives including John Rowe, its president and chief executive officer who, in 2007, also became chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry’s main trade group. Forbes magazine, in a January 18, 2009 article about Rowe and how he has “focused the company on nuclear,” displayed a sidebar titled “The President’s Utility.” It read: “Ties are tight between Exelon and the Obama administration,” noting Exelon political contributions and Emanuel’s and Axelrod’s Exelon links.

So as president, Obama began talking about “safe, clean nuclear power” and pushed for multi-billion dollar taxpayer subsidies for the construction of new nuclear plants

The disaster in Japan is not stopping that. In his speech Wednesday evening on energy, Obama also wheeled out a major nuclear lie in its effort to “revive” nuclear power—that it provides “electricity without adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.”

But what the nuclear industry and Obama are not admitting is the fact that the overall nuclear “fuel cycle”—mining, milling, fuel fabrication, enrichment, and so on—contributes substantially to global warming. It is safe, clean, renewable energy technologies such as solar and wind power that are carbon-free and don’t release greenhouse gases, don’t contribute to global warming.

And as the organization Beyond Nuclear (www.beyondnuclear.org) emphasizes: “Nuclear power is counterproductive to efforts to address climate change effectively and in time. Funding diverted to new nuclear power plants deprives real climate change solutions like solar, wind and geothermal energy of essential resources.”

Obama also spoke Wednesday, March 30, about how “I’ve requested a comprehensive safety review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to make sure that all of our existing nuclear energy facilities are safe” and “We’ll incorporate those conclusions and lessons from Japan in designing and building the next generation of [nuclear] plants.”

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is an unabashed promoter of nuclear power—never having denied a license for a nuclear power plant anywhere, anytime in the United States. In recent times it has been busy extending the operating lives of half of U.S. nuclear plants to 60 years, although because radioactivity embrittles metals in nuclear plants, they were never seen as operating for more than 40 years. But with no nuclear plant ordered and built in the U.S. since 1973, the commission has been seeking to keep the nuclear industry going, somehow. The commission and the nuclear industry have recently been seeking to extend the operating lives of the plants to 80 years. With this promotional stance, will the commission “make sure all of our existing” nuclear plants are safe?

As to “new, improved” nuclear plants—a “next generation” as Obama called it—this is also a major theme of Dr. Chu, before and since the nuclear disaster in Japan. The key issue here is radioactivity. And thus, no matter what the design, all nuclear plants are deadly. Whether they are the U.S.-manufactured General Electric boiling water plants in Japan now spreading radioactivity in Japan and around the world, or the Westinghouse pressurized water design, or the design of Russian plants, etc., all nuclear plants generate thousands of tons of lethal radioactive poisons as they boil water to turn a turbine to generate electricity.

As Admiral Hyman Rickover, the “father” of the U.S. nuclear navy and head of construction of the first U.S. nuclear plan, Shippingport in Pennsylvania, said in an address before a committee of Congress when he retired in 1982: “I’ll be philosophical. Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn’t have any life—fish or anything. Gradually, about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet and probably in the entire system reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin…Now when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible…Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has life, in some cases for billions of years, and I think there the human race is going to wreck itself, and it’s far more important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it. I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation.” Rickover declared that “we outlaw nuclear reactors.”

But the nuclear agencies of government—led by Obama—and the nuclear industry would instead promote nuclear power despite it being a gargantuan threat to life and unnecessary.

Safe, clean, renewable energy technologies fully implemented can provide all the power we need—and energy that we can live with.

Renewables Are More Than Ready

2011-03-29T13:04:00.000-07:00

“Wind and solar are great but strictly supplemental,” declared Al Velshi on CNN on March 27 in a report on the nuclear power disaster in Japan.

“You’re wrong,” environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a guest, shot back.

Indeed, Velshi was wrong—as have so many in media been—in insisting that the choice in energy in the wake of the nuclear disaster in Japan is between nuclear on one side and coal, oil and gas on the other.

In fact, there’s no need for nuclear power because there are safe, clean, renewable energy technologies, not coal, oil and gas, here to substitute for nuclear power.

Scientific American, a most conservative scientific publication, in a cover story on October 26, 2009—unveiled its “A Plan for a Sustainable Future” It declard in its “Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables” that, “wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world’s energy, eliminating all fossil fuels.”

The British magazine, New Scientist, in a special October 11-17, 2009 issue on safe, clean, renewable energy technologies—titled “Our Brighter Future”—presented a United Nations report declaring that “renewable energy that can already be harnessed economically would supply the world’s electricity needs”

From solar to wind (now the fastest-growing and cheapest new energy technology) to wave-power to tidal-power to bio-fuels to small hydropower to co-generation (combining the generation of heat and electricity) and on and on, a renewable energy windfall is at hand.

A while back, I visited the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. In one division, solar power was being used to break down water into oxygen and hydrogen—with the hydrogen available for use as fuel. “It’s the forever fuel,” Dr. John Turner, senior scientist at NREL told me. “This uses our two most abundant natural resources—sunlight and water—to give us an energy supply that is inexhaustible.” In another division, which pioneered thin-film photovoltaic technology (sheets of material embedded with solar collectors that can coat a large building, even a skyscraper, and have the building become a huge power generator) the scientists spoke of solar photovoltaics generating all the energy the world would need. Thin-film photovoltaic is now being widely used in Europe. In the wind division at NREL, scientists were speaking about the advanced wind turbines they have developed and the abundant wind resources all over the world providing all the energy the world would need.

They all might not be right, but together these and other safe, clean energy technologies developed by the 1,000 scientists and engineers at NREL can provide all the energy the world needs.

There’s also the division in which technologies to use biomass to produce fuel, not out of food crops but from non-edible vegetation and various waste products. And so on.

Or consider “hot dry rock” (HDR) geothermal. It turns out that below half of the planet, just one to six miles down, it’s extremely hot. When naturally flowing water hits those hot rocks and has a place to come up, geysers are formed. But now a technology has been developed that sends water down an injection pipe to hit the hot dry rock below and rise to the surface in a second production well—which can turn a turbine and generate electricity. Dave Duchane, the HDR manager at Los Alamos National Laboratory, told me: “Hot dry rock has an almost unlimited potential to supply all the energy needs of the United States and, indeed, all the world.” My TV program on HDR is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Szdx8F_g3Z0

Renewables Are Ready is the title of a book written by two Union of Concerned Scientists staffers in 1999. Today a host of safe, clean, renewable energy technologies are more than ready. Combined, importantly, with energy efficiency, they render nuclear power as unnecessary.

Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, earlier this year published World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, which concludes that solar, wind and geothermal energy can provide all the energy the world’s needs and he sets forth his Plan B that would implement this. Brown, formerly president of Worldwatch, dismisses nuclear power as too expensive and dangerous.

“The old energy economy, fueled by oil, coal, and natural gas, is being replaced with wind, solar, and geothermal energy,” writes Brown. “Despite the global economic crisis, this energy transition is moving at a pace and on a scale that we could not have imagined two years ago.” In a chapter titled “Harnessing Wind, Solar, and Geoterhal Energy,” Brown details the potential and the technologies for fully utilizing these safe, clean, renewable energy sources. “This transition is now building on its own momentum,” says Brown, “driven by an intense excitement from the realization that we are tapping energy sources that can last as long as the earth itself. Oil wells go dry and coal seams run out, but for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, we are investing in energy sources that can last forever.”

Instead of a Manhattan Project, the wartime crash program out of which nuclear weapons came, followed by nuclear power plants, this time let’s have a Bronx Project, as Alice Slater of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has called it—to fully implement the use of safe, clean, renewable energy.

Tool of the Nuclear Establishment -- The New York Times

2011-03-26T05:12:00.000-07:00

The model of a journalist being co-opted by the nuclear establishment involves New York Times reporter William L. Laurence. News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb. by Beverly Deepe Keever, writes of how General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, personally made arrangements with Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger and senior editor Edwin James to have Laurence work for the World War II program to build atomic
bombs.

The Timesman would be paid by the government while, under the arrangement, his wife would collect “his regularly weekly salary” from The Times.

"To sell the bomb, the U.S. government needed The Times...and The Times willingly obliged,” writes Keever, professor of journalism at the University of Hawaii.

Laurence was central to the first major piece of official government media disinformation about nuclear technology. When it came time for a test of a nuclear device, in July 1945, Laurence wrote a press release to “disguise the detonation and resulting radiation,” notes Keever.

The deceptive release stated: “A remotely located ammunition magazine containing a considerable amount of high explosives and pyrotechnics exploded….Weather conditions affecting the content of gas shells exploded by the blast made it desirable for the Army to evacuate temporarily a few civilians from their homes.” The purported source of the information was given in the release as “the Commanding Officer of the Alamagordo Army Air Base.”

The atomic device was detonated on July 16, 1945 at the Alamagordo Test Range in New Mexico. It lit up the night sky. The flash “was seen in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Silver City and El Paso,” relates James Kunetka in his book, City of Fire.

Meanwhle, the Manhattan Project had “stationed” an intelligence officer, a Phil Belcher, at the Associated Press office in Albuquerque, states City of Fire. After AP began receiving calls about “a strange explosion in southern New Mexico,” Belcher presented the Laurence press release to AP and AP ran it—basically as is. “New Mexico newspapers ran the story” and “it appeared in a number of radio shows,” says City of Fire. “No further word was issued by the Alamagordo Base.”

Timesman Laurence didn’t stop with this deception. At the Manhattan Project, he prepared a 10-part series glorifying it, and after the bombs fell on Japan The Times itself ran the series and “on behalf of the government” and distributed it free “to the press nationwide,” notes News Zero. The series hardly mentioned the word radioactivity at all.

The Times was chosen by Groves not because of its circulation. “The Times was hardly the nation’s biggest newspaper then terms of circulation,” notes Keever. But “the prestige of The Times was highly significant for the government that was seeking to channel first-time-ever public attitudes about the atomic bombs it was developing.” Of Laurence, she writes, “this major player served as a scribe writing government propaganda.”

Laurence boosted all things nuclear in the years ahead. He would describe nuclear power as "making the dream of the Earth as a Promised Land come true." This avid belief in nuclear power became the institutional stance of the publication.

The Times, writes Keever, “became little more than a propaganda outlet for the U.S. government.” It “tolerated or aided the U.S. government’s Cold War cover-up that resulted in minimizing or denying the health and environmental effects arising from the use in Japan and later testing of the most destructive weaponry in U.S. history in Pacific Islands once called paradise….The Times aided the U.S. government in keeping in the dark thousands of U.S. servicemen, production workers and miners, even civil defense officials, Pacific Islanders and others worldwide about the dangers of radiation.”

Keever, herself a veteran journalist, says that “from the dawn of the atomic-bomb age, Laurence and The Times almost single-handedly shaped the news of this epoch and helped birth the acceptance of the most destructive force ever created.”

This pro-nuclear stance of The New York Times has continued with the U.S. paper of record leading U.S. media in recent years in pushing for a “revival” of nuclear power.

And after the nuclear power disaster in Japan, The Times was still at it. It acknowledged in an editorial (3/14/11) that it has “endorsed nuclear power” and went on: “We suspect that, when all the evidence is in from Japan, it will remain a valuable tool.” That said by a long-time tool of the nuclear establishment—The New York Times.

Hydrogen, Zirconium, Flashbulbs -- and Nuclear Craziness

2011-03-12T05:58:00.000-08:00

The explosion at the Fukushima nuclear power plant is being described as caused by a “hydrogen build-up” The situation harks back to the “hydrogen bubble” that was feared would explode when the Three Mile Island plant in 1979 underwent a partial meltdown.

The hydrogen explosion problem at nuclear power plants involves a story as crazy as can be. As nuts as using nuclear fission to boil water to generate electricity is, the hydrogen problem and its cause cap the lunacy.

Eruption of hydrogen gas as a first reaction in a loss-of-coolant accident has been discussed with great worry in U.S. government and nuclear industry literature for decades.

That is because a highly volatile substance called zirconium was chosen back in the 1940’s and 50’s, when plans were first developed to build nuclear power plants, as the material to be used to make the rods into which radioactive fuel would be loaded.

There are 30,000 to 40,000 rods—composed of twenty tons of zirconium—in an average nuclear power plant. Many other substances were tried, particularly stainless steel, but only zirconium worked well. That’s because zirconium, it was found, allows neutrons from the fuel pellets in the rods to pass freely between the rods and thus a nuclear chain reaction to be sustained.

But there’s a huge problem with zirconium—it is highly volatile and when hot will explode spontaneously upon contact with air, water or steam.

The only other major commercial use of zirconium through the years has been in flashbulbs used in photography. A speck of it, on a flashbulb, ignites to provide a flash of light.

But in a nuclear plant, we’re not talking about specks—but tons and tons of zirconium, put together as a compound called “zircaloy” that clads tens of thousands of fuel rods.

Heat, a great deal of heat, builds up in a very short time with any interruption of coolant flow in a nuclear power plant—the problem at Fukushima after the earthquake that struck Japan.

Zirconium, with the explosive power, pound for pound, of nitroglycerine, will catch fire and explode at a temperature of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, well below the 5,000 degree temperature of a meltdown.

Before then, however, zirconium reacts to the heat by drawing oxygen from water and steam and letting off hydrogen, which itself can explode—and is said to have done so at Fukushima.

As a result of such a hydrogen explosion, there is additional heat—bringing the zirconium itself closer and closer to its explosive level.

Whether in addition to being a hydrogen explosion, zirconium also exploded at Fukushima remains to be known.

But what has happened regarding hydrogen at Fukushima, like the “hydrogen bubble” when the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania underwent its near partial meltdown, is no mystery—but precisely what is expected in a loss-of-coolant accident.

It is described in U.S. government and nuclear industry accident studies as a “metal-water” reaction. It’s a reaction, the research has long stated, that can easily trigger a meltdown.

Using tons of a material otherwise used as the speck that explodes in a flashbulb in nuclear power plants —yes, absolutely crazy.

Moreover, in the spent fuel pools usually situated next to nuclear power plants, there are large numbers of additional fuel rods, used ones, disposed of as waste. There must be constant water circulation in the spent fuel pools. In what is labeled a “loss-of-water’ accident in a spent fuel pool, the zirconium cladding of the fuel rods is projected as exploding—sending into the environment the lethal nuclear poisons in a spent fuel pool.

Japan Nuclear Emergency

2011-03-11T09:52:00.000-08:00

What Japan is now trying to avoid is a complete loss of power to the cooling systems at its Fukushima nuclear power plant. This would lead to a loss-of-coolant or meltdown accident—a disaster which could have catastrophic impacts on Japan and much of the world.

Radioactive material is used in a nuclear plant as a heat source—to boil water and produce steam that turns a turbine that generates electricity. Huge amounts of radioactive material are made to go through a chain reaction, a process in which atomic particles bombard the nuclei of atoms, causing them to break up and generate heat.

But to keep the nuclear reaction in check—to prevent the material from overheating—vast amounts of coolant are required, up to a million gallons of water a minute in the most common nuclear plants that have been built (“light water” reactors). That is why nuclear plants are sited along rivers and bays, to use the water as coolant.

If the water which cools the reactor “core”—its 200,000 to 300,000 pounds of radioactive fuel load—stops flowing, the “emergency core cooling system” must send water in. If it fails, a loss-of-coolant or meltdown accident can occur.

In such an accident, the core of nuclear fuel, which in less than a minute can reach 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, burns through the cement bottom of the nuclear plant and bores into the earth. This is what U.S. nuclear scientists have dubbed the “China syndrome”—based on a nuclear plant on their side of the planet undergoing an accident seemingly sending its white-hot core in the direction of China.

In fact, the radioactive core doesn’t—in any location—go to China but it descends to the water table underlying a plant. Then, in a violent reaction, molten core and cold water combine, creating steam explosions and releasing a plume of radioactive poisons.

The problem at Fukushima Diachi nuclear facility is that one of its six reactors lost all its power as a result of the earthquake. Back-up diesel generators didn’t work, so battery power became necessary to keep coolant water flowing. If the battery power is depleted and electric power is not otherwise restored, a loss-of-coolant accident or meltdown would ensue.

“The emergency shutdown has been conducted but the process of cooling down the reaction is currently not going as planned,” explained Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, according to CNN.

Thus, Japan declared a state of “atomic power emergency” and people living within three kilometers of the Fukushima facility were advised to evacuate.

In fact, if the coolant flow is not maintained and a loss-of-coolant accident with a “breach of containment” occurs, people way beyond three kilometers around Fukushima would be impacted. The radioactive releases in the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident affected the entire northern hemisphere, as a book published last year by the New York Academy of Sciences documents. And Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, authored by Dr. Alexey Yablokov, Dr. Vassily Nesterenko and Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, finds that medical records between
1986, the year of the accident, and 2004 reflect 985,000 deaths as a result of the radioactivity released. Most of the deaths were in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, but others were spread through the many other countries the radiation from Chernobyl struck.

Where the radioactivity spreads after a nuclear plant meltdown is largely a function of where winds take the radioactivity and of the rain that causes it to fall out.

There are numerous lessons to be learned from the situation now underway in Japan including why a nation situated on a string of volcanic islands would build nuclear power plants, vulnerable as they are to earthquakes. Of course, Japan is not alone on this score: in the U.S., the Diablo Canyon nuclear facility in California was built less than three miles from the Hosgri earthquake fault.

Nuclear power plants are, in fact, life-threatening wherever they are—they represent the most dangerous way to boil water ever devised.

Wind, solar and geothermal energy and other forms of safe, clean power would not cause massive deadly damage because of an earthquake.

World Wetlands Day Today

2011-02-02T04:06:00.000-08:00

Today marks the 14th annual celebration of World Wetlands Day. It is telling that the event is only in its 14th year—an acknowledgement of how long it has taken for the critical importance of wetlands to be recognized globally.

Where I live, on Long Island, New York, much of it once fringed with wetlands—many of them now filled in—I’ve witnessed this slow recognition. When I began as a journalist here in the 1960s, there was general ignorance about the important role of wetland. Money was being made in filling in what were considered useless marshes, and there were those in government joining in the profit-making.

As an investigative reporter for the Long Island Press, I exposed how the Suffolk County Department of Public Works utilized a huge dredge to suck up bay bottom and deposit it as fill on wetlands in Southampton Town so they could be used for housing developments. Rudolph Kammerer, then Suffolk public works commissioner, moonlighted as a private engineer on these developments, working with C. Marvin Raynor, president of the Southampton Town Trustees. The trustees have been empowered since colonial times with supervision of the town’s wetlands. Raynor laid out plans for bulkheading that would front the wetlands, making filling possible. And as a trustee, he voted for the dredging, bulkheading and fill depositing.

The articles forced the sale of the county dredge—but the struggle to save Long Island wetlands continued and goes on to this day.

Extensive damage to the wetlands has been done on Long Island by ditches dug by Suffolk County in the name of mosquito control. Further, it has regularly doused the wetlands with toxic pesticides—including DDT—to kill mosquitoes, although marine and bird life die as well.

Just out is a comprehensive book on the variety of life in the wetlands, their importance and the destruction that has been going on: “Tidal Marshes of Long Island, New York. Published by the Torrey Botanical Society, the oldest botanical organization in the western hemisphere, it is full of fascinating essays, vivid color photos, maps and charts.

The book is edited by Dr. John Potente who as a member of the Suffolk County Council on Environmental Quality fought against the county’s damaging undertakings in the wetlands. He resigned from the council in 2007 in protest to these activities, joined by environmental attorney Lauren Stiles and members representing Riverhead and Southold Towns.

Dr. Potente contributes a chapter in the new book along with 17 others including Philip Weinberg who as head of the New York State Attorney General’s Environmental Protection Bureau in the 1970s pioneered legal protection for Long Island wetlands; Larry Penny, East Hampton Town’s director of natural resources; Professor Christopher Gobler of the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University; and Matthew Atkinson, former general counsel for Peconic Baykeeper.

“Long Island’s salt marshes,” writes Dr. Potente, “play an important ecological role as nursery grounds for finfish, shellfish and marine plankton, as well as providing a buffer against ocean storms.” But he points out that “half of the marshes that originally existed in the northeastern United States have been lost, and the remaining marshes have been significantly altered.”

He speaks of the “filling of marshlands with trash and concrete [and] the development of waterfront property” as major causes of wetlands destruction. And then there are the impacts of pollution: “ And he elaborates on how “linear ditches were dug out of pristine marshlands” and Long Island wetlands were “saturated with DDT” and other poisonous pesticides.

“Today, reducing human impacts on our salt marshes is imperative because so much marshland already has been irretrievably lost,” declares Dr. Potente. “Only after acquiring a general respect for the inherent complexity of the salt marsh can humans begin to withdraw their need to interfere.”

Penny in his chapter—titled “Healing Salt Marshes from the Scars of Mosquito Ditches”—writes: “Despite the laments of Rachel Carson and a handful of conservationists, before the mid-1960s salt marshes had a reputation rivaling that of weed patches…Across Long Island, in a span of less than 15 postwar years, a quarter of the salt marshes, especially those along the South Shore bays, were filled over.”

The chapter by Weinberg, who went on to be a professor at St. John’s University School of Law, centers on the 1973 passage of the Long Island Wetlands Law—over the intense opposition of Long Island development interests. He writes: “Long Island’s and the state’s wetlands remain vital and irreplaceable resources” and “their continued survival depends on sufficient resources, and penalties, being deployed to protect them.”

Says Dale Humburg, chief biologist of Ducks Unlimited, the main sponsor of World Wetlands Day: “Wetlands are some of nature’s most productive and biologically diverse ecosystems, providing natural flood control, water quality and prime habitat for fish and wildlife….But we’re losing these precious natural resources at an alarming rate. World Wetlands Day is a good opportunity to highlight this imperiled ecosystem, but the focus really needs to be continual.”

A special focus of the day this year is the wetlands along the Gulf of Mexico coast, hit hard by the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill, on top of a continual loss. “This region continues to lose wetland habitat the size of a football field every 30 minutes,” notes Ducks Unlimited.

Avoiding Nuclear Destruction: By The Skin Of Our Teeth

2010-11-22T05:22:00.000-08:00

As Thanksgiving 2010 arrives, thanks should be given for something that never happened decades ago: the use as planned of bases built all over the United States armed with BOMARC and Nike Hercules nuclear-tipped missiles.

It was the 1950s and 60s and the U.S. feared Soviet bombers might strike major American cities and various strategic targets. So a scheme was hatched to deploy nuclear-tipped missiles. These were early antiaircraft missiles and seen as unable to score direct hits. Thus the plan was to have the nuclear warheads on the BOMARC and Nike Hercules missiles detonate when the missiles reached a formation of Soviet bombers, blowing the formation apart—although also raining radioactivity down below.

The nuclear warheads on the BOMARC and Nike Hercules missiles had massive power. The tips on the BOMARCs had the equivalent of 10 kilotons of TNT. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had the power of 13 kilotons. The Nike Hercules warheads ranged up to 30 kilotons.

How much radioactive fall-out would have descended on coastal areas where BOMARC and Nike Hercules bases were located depended on the winds and where the detonations of the nuclear warheads occurred. For bases sited inland, and BOMARC and Nike Hercules bases ringed several inland cities including Chicago, the nuclear warheads would definitely have exploded over populated regions of America. The BOMARC had a range of 250 miles, the Nike Hercules 100 miles.

I had the eerie experience recently of walking around two former nuclear-tipped missile sites—a BOMARC base in Westhampton and a Nike Hercules base in Rocky Point, both on Long Island, New York. (The BOMARC program was run by the Air Force and named for its developers—BO for Boeing and MARC for Michigan Aerospace Research Center. The Nike program was run by the Army and named for the Greek goddess of victory, although in this scheme it would have been a potentially suicidal victory.)

I was making a TV documentary on the BOMARC and Nike bases set up on Long Island and elsewhere in the New York Metropolitan Area with Soviet bombers headed for New York City as the major concern.

The documentary, which I did as chief investigative reporter for WVVH-TV in New York, has been broadcast in recent weeks, and WVVH has also put it up on YouTube. You can view it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLb_8FuH-8M Or just input my name at www.youtube.com along with the words: Avoiding Nuclear Destruction: By The Skin Of Our Teeth.

Each of the 56 BOMARC missiles in Westhampton had its own building. The missiles were positioned on the floors of the buildings and their roofs would open when they were to be fired. The buildings remain, and they and the machinery in them to open the roofs are very solid. Large amounts of money were spent on this scheme.

With the shift by the Soviets (and the U.S.) to ICBMs, the BOMARC and Nike bases were closed in the 70s. The nuclear-tipped missiles are now all gone, but many of the bases remain, frightening reminders of a dangerous period.

The Westhampton BOMARC base was given to Suffolk County which utilizes some of the buildings for storage. The site is also used as a police shooting range. Fittingly, gunfire was in the background as we filmed.

The three-mile Nike Hercules base in Rocky Point is now the site of an Army Reserve Center. The Nike missiles were positioned underground in silos. I stood on one of the welded-shut tops of a silo to explain what had been below.

The words that came to me in visiting the nuclear-tipped missile sites were: by the skin of our teeth. Only by the skin of our teeth, I thought, had we avoided nuclear destruction. Thus the title of the program.

A book has just been published, Continental Defense in the Eisenhower Era: Nuclear Antiaircraft Arms and the Cold War by Christopher J. Bright. He writes about the “effort to facilitate popular acceptance of these weapons…The arms were touted in news releases, featured in films and television episodes…The need for atomic antiaircraft weapons was readily accepted by most Americans, and few objected to their existence or ubiquity.”

Nuclear technology is still being heavily promoted. The U.S. as well as the French and Russian governments are pushing for the building of many more nuclear plants—and inevitably there will be more accidents as bad as or worse than the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster. Though ostensibly for civilian use, the reactors would also provide the fuel and give their technicians the expertise for making nuclear weapons—this is how India got the atomic bomb. The Pentagon, meanwhile, still holds nuclear war to be quite feasible. And U.S. Senator John Kyl, an Arizona Republican, is right now seeking to block ratification of a new nuclear arms pact between the U.S. and Russia, a successor to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. The treaty has done a good job in limiting the nuclear weapons stockpiles of both countries and providing transparency. Will Kyl and his followers kill that?

This, too, is a highly dangerous period.

In front of a BOMARC building, I ended the documentary asking: how long will we be able to survive by the skin of our teeth? We should give thanks this week that somehow we got through the Cold War atomic nightmare. Now we must roll back the new crazy atomic push.

Cancer--The Number One Killer--And Its Environmental Causes

2010-11-11T03:35:00.000-08:00

The World Health Organization projects that this year cancer will become the world's leading cause of death. Why the epidemic of cancer? Death certificates in the United States show cancer as being the eighth leading cause of death in 1900.

Why has it skyrocketed to now surpass heart disease as number one?

Is it because people live longer and have to die of something? That's a factor, but not the prime reason as reflected by the jump in age-adjusted cancer being far above what could be expected from increased longevity. And it certainly doesn't explain the steep hike in childhood cancers. Is it lifestyle, diet and genetics, as we have often been told? They are factors, but not key reasons.

The cause of the cancer epidemic, as numerous studies have now documented, is largely environmental--the result of toxic substances in the water we drink, the food we eat, the consumer products we use, the air we breathe. (Some of the pollution is voluntarily caused--by smoking. But most is involuntary.)

As the President's Cancer Panel declared in May, in a 240-page report titled "Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now," "The American people--even before they are born--are bombarded continually with myriad combinations of these dangerous exposures." It said: "With the growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer, the public is becoming increasingly aware of the unacceptable burden of cancer resulting from environmental and occupational exposures that could have been prevented through appropriate national action."

It pointed to chemicals and radiation as major causes of cancer and stated: "Cancer continues to shatter and steal the lives of Americans. Approximately 41 percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, and about 21 percent will die from the cancer. The incidence of some cancers, including some most common among children, is increasing...The burgeoning number and complexity of known or suspected environmental carcinogens compel us to act to protect public health."

The panel urged President Obama "most strongly to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our nation's productivity, and devastate American lives."

In 1980, another presidential panel, the Presidential Toxic Substances Strategy Committee, came to the same conclusion. It declared: "Of the hazards to human health arising from toxic substances, cancer is a leading cause of concern. Cancer is the only major cause of death that has continued to rise since 1900. It is now second only to heart disease as a cause of death... Some of the increase in cancer mortality since 1900 is a function of the greater average age of the U.S. population and the medical progress made against infectious disease. But even after correcting for age, both mortality (death) rates and incidence (new cases) of cancer are increasing. Many now believe that environmental (nongenetic) factors--life style and work and environmental exposures--are significant in the great majority of cancer cases seen."

Meanwhile, through the years solid science done by independent researchers -- not those taking money from the chemical or nuclear industries -- has extensively documented this cancer/environment connection.

"The evidence is there that the majority of cancer cases are environmentally caused," says Dr. David Carpenter, founding dean of the University of Albany School of Public Health and now director of the Institute for Health and the Environment there. Among the research he points to is a 2000 study involving examining health records of 44,788 pairs of twins in Sweden, Denmark and Finland. If genetics were the main cause of cancer, if one twin developed cancer the other probably would, too. This was not found. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, concluded that "inherited genetic factors make a minor contribution" in most cancers. "This finding indicates that the environment has the principle role in causing sporadic cancer."

Dr. Samuel Epstein, professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, in his book The Politics of Cancer concludes that cancer is a preventable disease "caused mainly by exposure to chemical or physical agents in the environment." The huge problem, he said, is how "a combination of powerful and well-focused pressures by special industrialized interests, together with public inattention and the indifference of the scientific community" has warped public policy and thwarted "meaningful attempts to prevent the carnage." Dr. Epstein now chairs the Cancer Prevention Coalition committed to eliminating those toxins that are causing the cancer epidemic (http://www.preventcancer.com).

The initiative, Prevention is The Cure, was founded by breast cancer survivor Karen Joy Miller and on its website,(http://www.preventionisthecure.org/), declares that four decades have passed, "and the wake-up call put forth by Rachel Carson" in her book Silent Spring "and other activists has been blocked by powerful political interests that profit from pollution."

These powerful interests have long had allies in government. The late James Sibbison, who went from being a reporter for the Associated Press to press officer at the Environmental Protection Agency, would tell the story of how immediately after Ronald Reagan became president, orders were given to the EPA press office "never to use the words cancer-causing in front of the word chemical." Now the number of chemicals in commercial use in the U.S. totals 80,000. The EPA under the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 has been required to assess all of them. In over 30 years it has gotten around to examining 200.

The poisoning--and consequent cancer--is not necessary. The report by the President's Cancer Panel emphasize how "the requite knowledge and technologies exist" to provide safe "alternatives" to cancer-causing agents.
But this doesn't suit those doing the polluting--who have such a hold on government.

The Push To Revive Nuclear Power -- A Presentation at the State University of New York at New Paltz on October 21, 2010

2010-11-08T18:29:00.000-08:00

I’d like to start with the bottom line: the problem with nuclear power is—in one word—radioactivity.

In a presidential election campaign several years ago, there was the line: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

When it comes to nuclear power: It’s the radioactivity.

Admiral Hyman Rickover, who was in charge of building the first nuclear power plant in the United States, Shippingport in Pennsylvania, and is heralded as the “father” of the nuclear navy, finally realized that. In a farewell address before a committee of Congress in 1982, as he retired, Rickover said, “I’ll be philosophical. Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on Earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn’t have any life—fish or anything.” This was from cosmic radiation around when the Earth was in the process of forming. “Gradually,” said Rickover, “about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet…reduced and make it possible for some form of life to begin…Now, when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible….every time you produce radiation” a “horrible force” is unleashed, said Rickover, “and I think there the human race is going to wreck itself.” Rickover went on to declare: we must “outlaw nuclear reactors.”

That was Rickover, a key figure in nuclear development in the U.S., not Greenpeace.

The problem is radioactivity—the radioactivity unleashed when the atom is split. That splitting is called fission.

This is a bit technical, but we need to understand it to understand the central problem of nuclear power: radioactivity.

Uranium is taken from the ground. That portion of the uranium, not much, less than 1 percent, Uranium-235, that’s fissile—which means it splits when bombarded with neutrons. What does it split into? Radioactive twins of safe and stable elements in nature: radioactive iodine, Strontium-90, Cesium-137—all called fission products. There are 200 of them.

The body doesn’t know the difference between, for example, that radioactive iodine and the iodine you put on a cut.

If these fission products are let loose in an accident—or are released without an accident and there are what are termed “routine emissions” from nuclear plants letting out fission products—and they are absorbed by the body, they can cause cancer and other diseases. They kill.

And then also produced by fission are three forms of ionizing radiation: alpha and beta particles and gamma rays.

And, importantly, additional neutrons are set loose which bombard other atoms and cause these atoms to split and yet more neutrons to be set loose. And this goes on and on—and is called a chain reaction.

And from this there’s heat—which in a nuclear power plant is used to boil water. It’s the most dangerous way to boil water ever designed.

Fission products, further, are what radioactive waste is composed of. Some of these poisons remain hot with radioactivity for thousands, some millions of years. During this time they must be isolated from life or they’ll destroy life.

This is the problem: radioactivity. The radioactivity produced with fission. This is the “horrible force” that Rickover spoke about that is unleashed and “is going to wreck” the human race. And we should not be anthropomorphic. Other forms of life are impacted by radioactivity, too. Cockroaches somehow are resistant to radioactivity—but we don’t want to leave a planet for cockroaches.

Why use this toxic process to boil water and generate electricity?

It has far less to do with science than it has to do with politics and economics—in specific: vested interests.

Atomic technology begins in the United States with a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, from Albert Einstein—written in Peconic on Long Island—and, if you’d like to see that letter, go to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum not far from here, in Hyde Park. It’s on display.

In 1938 fission was accomplished in Nazi Germany. Physicists Leo Szilard and Edward Teller, like Einstein, refugees from the Nazis, fearing Hitler might develop a bomb based on fission, with others, asked Einstein to write that letter to Roosevelt.

Einstein wrote that “it may be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium” leading “to the construction of bombs…extremely powerful bombs of a new type.” Based on, yes, fission.

Out of that letter came the Manhattan Project. Scientists and engineers were gathered and put to work at facilities secretly built at locations across the United States. Laboratories and manufacturing plants in Los Alamos, New Mexico; Hanford, Washington; Argonne, Illinois; Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Large corporations and universities were retained to manage the facilities. General Electric and Westinghouse—which were to become the Coke and Pepsi in the U.S. in the manufacture of nuclear power plants—got their start in atomic technology as Manhattan Project contractors.

By 1945 four atomic bombs had been built, one used for a test and two dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

Also by 1945, 600,000 people had become part of a program on which billions of dollars had been spent.

With the war’s end there was anxiety among many of those involved in the Manhattan Project. Many of the scientists and government officials didn’t want to see the endeavor and their jobs over; corporations didn’t want to see their contracts ended.

As James Kunetka writes in his book City of Fire about Los Alamos Laboratory, with the war over there were now problems of “job placement, work continuity…more free time than work…hardly enough to keep everyone busy…without a crash program underway.”

Some of the people and corporations could continue building nuclear weapons, and they did. And they built even bigger bombs—the “super,” the hydrogen bomb. Buy nuclear weapons do not lend themselves to commercial spinoff. What else could be done with atomic technology to perpetuate the nuclear establishment that was established with the Manhattan Project?

There were all kinds of schemes conceived: using nuclear devices as substitutes for TNT to blast huge holes in the ground.

Indeed, in the 1950s the U.S. planned to string 250 nuclear devices across the isthmus of Panama and detonate them and, presto, there’d be a new canal—dubbed the Panatomic Canal. But that would rain radioactive debris on a large section of Central America. Finally, what the Manhattan Project became in 1946, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, withdrew that project because of “prospective host country opposition to nuclear-canal excavation.”

There were plans to use nuclear technology to use radioactivity to zap food so it would be seemingly OK to store for years. And to build nuclear-powered airplanes and nuclear-powered rockets.

And from the earlier reactors which were built to produce fuel for atomic bombs came another idea: using the heat of fission to boil water to produce electricity.

This was all about people and corporations seeking to perpetuate their vested interests, to somehow continue the nuclear establishment first created with the Manhattan Project.

The extreme dangers of atomic energy were understood.

1957 was a pivotal year. In that year, the first U.S. nuclear power plant—that one Rickover was in charge of building called Shippingport—opened. It was constructed by the government, and Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, made a speech saying that if you, the utility industry, didn’t build nuclear plants, we, the government, would. That was the stick. The carrot: passage in 1957 of the Price-Act Act which limited liability in the event of a catastrophic accident at a nuclear plant to $560 million –with the U.S. government paying the first $500 million.

Utilities would only have to pay $60 million in the event of a meltdown or other catastrophic accident.

That was the carrot.

I could fall on the sidewalk here at SUNY New Paltz and sue the state. Or slip in front of the motel where I’m staying in town and sue 87 Motel.

But if there is an accident at a nuclear plant—like a disaster at the Indian Point plants in Buchanan just 40 miles down the Hudson from where we are tonight—and New Paltz and elsewhere around the plant is impacted, and people are irradiated and land left rendered useless because of contamination, like around the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine, we’d only be able to get reimbursed for a fraction of the loss.

Price-Anderson was supposed to be a temporary law but it has been extended and extended with now a $10.5 billion cap, still a fraction of the damages seen as resulting from a major nuclear plant accident.

Also in 1957, the first report on the consequences of a major nuclear plant accident was done, WASH-740, it was named, done at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.

It said that in the “worst case” a nuclear power plant accident could kill 3,400 people. And injure 43,000—as distances of up to 45 miles. Property damage could be as high as $7 billion, it said. Not $560 million.

But WASH-740 was based on small nuclear power plants like Shippingport. Being proposed were plants five time that size, like the Indian Point plants now running not far from here.

So a WASH-740-update was done. It increased the estimated death toll from a major nuclear plant accident to 45,000, injuries to 100,000 and property damage to up to $280 billion. And over and over again WASH-740-update states “the possible size of the area of such a disaster might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania.”

This was a decade before a major nuclear plant accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania happened.

There’s not been a new nuclear power plant ordered and built since that near-catastrophe at Three Mile Island in 1979, but now the nuclear establishment—the nuclear interests within the U.S. government and nuclear industry—are pushing for a “revival” of nuclear power, to, more than 30 years later, get new nuclear plants built again.

They are showering us with disinformation to promote their deadly technology.

Some of the claims—and the realities:

Nuclear Power “Doesn’t Contribute” to Global Warming

This is a key claim in the current drive—that nuclear plants don’t emit greenhouse gases. But what we’re not supposed to know is that the overall nuclear “chain” or “cycle” has significant greenhouse gas emissions.

As Michel Lee, chair of the Council on Intelligent Energy & Conservation Policy, which has been involved in the Indian Point issue, the “dirty secret is that nuclear power makes a substantial contribution to global warming. Nuclear power is actually a chain of highly energy-intensive industrial processes. These include uranium mining, conversion, enrichment and fabrication of nuclear fuel; construction and deconstruction of the massive nuclear facility structures; and the disposition of high-level nuclear waste.”

As the Nuclear Information & Resource Service notes in its report Nuclear Power Can’t Stop Climate Change, the claims that nuclear plants don’t contribute to global warming “fail to account for the entire nuclear fuel chain.” Omitted is the “fact that the nuclear fuel chain emits more CO2” than “sustainable options…Wind and solar…which are virtually greenhouse-gas free.”

Michael Mariotte, executive director of NIRS, stresses, moreover, that these sustainable alternatives, renewable energy technologies here today are the “safer, faster and cheaper way” to deal with global warming. He says: “Why not go safer, faster and cheaper when you have a choice—and we do have a choice.”

Then there’s the claim that: No One in the U.S. Has Died As a Result of Nuclear Power And Perhaps the Toll of the Chernobyl Disaster Will Be 4,000 Dead

This book, published this year by the New York Academy of Sciences, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, is the most comprehensive study ever done on the explosion of Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, the worst nuclear plant disaster—so far—in the world.

Written by a team of scientists, it concludes that between 1986, when the accident happened, and 2004, some 985,000 people died, especially of cancer, as a result of the radioactivity emitted. That’s based on health data, radiological reports and scientific studies especially from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus but from other affected nations as well.

This new documentation of Chernobyl casualties coincides with the estimate of Dr. Vladimir Chernousenko, the nuclear physicist in charge of the clean-up, on a television program I did with him a decade ago—The Truth About Chernobyl which you can view on YouTube—that that a million people will die due to the accident.

Incidentally, the International Atomic Energy Agency claims that 56 people have died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster and the final death toll can be expected to maybe reach 4,000. The IAEA was set up through the United Nations in 1957 “to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy.” It was to be a mirror image of our U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. The AEC was abolished by Congress in 1974 for being in conflict of interest: promoting and at the same time supposedly regulating nuclear power. But the IAEA continues. And its Chernobyl casualty claim is quite the Big Lie.

Importantly, it doesn’t take an accident for radioactivity to be released from a nuclear power plant affecting on people (and other life). As noted, there are “routine releases” of radioactive gases because nuclear plants are not sealed—and I’d recommend you go to the website of the Radiation and Public Health Project to see important reports on the impacts through the years—especially in cancer clusters—as a result of these “routine emissions.”

Then there’s The French Nuclear “Success” Story

In fact, the French nuclear power program is a health and economic disaster. On the table in the back I’ve left a pile reports by the group Beyond Nuclear, Nuclear Power and France: Setting the Record Straight. It discloses leukemia clusters in communities around France’s La Hague nuclear reprocessing center and notes that La Hague, on the Normandy Coast, discharges 100 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste yearly into the English Channel. Marine life has been seriously contaminated. Waters off La Hague have been “measured as 17 million times more radioactive than normal sea water”—and this contamination has affected waters as far as the Arctic Circle.

Inland, there have been numerous leaks at French nuclear plants—and the problems have been rising.

And there is no French love affair with nuclear energy but rather a deep mistrust. Polls show a majority in France want nuclear power phased out. There have been massive protests against construction of new plants.

Global Chance, a French research organization, has issued a report Nuclear Power: The Great Illusion, which states that the “image” that the French nuclear program is “successful…is a sham.”

A Nuclear Plant Can Withstand an Airborne Terrorist Hit

There have been concerns about nuclear plants being terrorist targets for years. This concern was heightened after 9/11 when American Airlines Flight 11 flew over the two Indian Point nuclear plants just above New York City before, minutes later, crashing into the World Trade Center. Then came the revelation that al-Qaeda had been considering targeting nuclear plants. And, reports are, it still is.

The nuclear industry insisted its plants were “robust” and could withstand such a hit. But in recent times, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (which replaced the AEC) has finally stopped accepting this claim.

It has ordered the builders of all new nuclear plants in the U.S. do a “design-specific assessment of the effects of the impact of a large commercial aircraft.”

What about the existing 104 U.S. nuclear plants? They would be left as is and be, as Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear says, “pre-deployed weapons of mass destruction.” Gunter notes: “Public documents within the NRC confirm that the plants were never designed or constructed for aircraft impact, particularly explosion and fire.”

Uranium Fuel Is Abundant

The claim is made by nuclear proponents that the uranium fuel used in nuclear plants is an abundant source in comparison to oil that could vanish in several decades. But uranium fuel for nuclear plants comes from so-called “high-grade” ore containing substantial amounts of Uranium-235, the isotope of uranium that splits or fissions. It is not abundant.

Even the IAEA, that promoter of nuclear power, estimates that there is only enough high-grade uranium resources “to last only another 85 years.”

This limit is why many nuclear scientists have long said nuclear power will need to be based on manmade plutonium. But the plutonium-fueled breeder reactors can explode like atomic bombs. And they would contain tons of plutonium compared to the few pounds needed to make an atomic bomb. The first atomic bomb using plutonium, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, contained 15 pounds of plutonium. And plutonium-fueled breeder reactors, even more so than uranium-fueled reactors, can easily provide the fuel with which to make atomic bombs.

It is The “Peaceful” Atom

There has never been a “peaceful” atom. Any country which gets a nuclear facility has the materiel—the plutonium built up in a uranium reactor—and the trained technicians to make nuclear weapons. That’s how India got The Bomb in 1974. It got a “civilian” reactor from Canada and the U.S. trained Indian personnel in atomic technology. And India had nuclear weapons. Atoms for war and energy are two sides of the same coin.

Nuclear Power Is “Inexpensive”

It’s extremely expensive—now $12 to $15 billion to build a nuclear power plant. “No private money anywhere in the world is being used to build new nuclear plants,” points out Michael Mariotte of NIRS.

President Obama has called for a taxpayer-supported nuclear loan guarantee fund of $54.5 billion to build new nuclear plants. There’s been one bill that’s been in Congress, pushed by Senators Joseph Lieberman and Lindsay Graham, to provide $544 billion for new nuclear plants. There’s another bill to provide unlimited taxpayer dollars.

Says Amory Lovins, a physicist and co-founder and chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute: “Nuclear is incredibly expensive. “Wall Street is not putting a penny of private capital into the industry…It’s uneconomic. It costs, for example, about three times as much as wind power, which is booming.”

Just last week, Constellation energy pulled out of building what was to be one of the first of the nuclear plants, at Calvert Cliffs in Maryland, because of finance issues.

And, John Rowe, chairman of Exelon, the biggest nuclear utility in the country, said last week that the lower price of natural gas puts off the sought-for revival of nuclear power by 10 or 20 years. It need be forever.

Speaking of costs, the costs of an accident, the most recent report on the impacts of a reactor accident—and I’ve left photocopies of the Congressional breakdown of the report on the table in the back—is titled Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences for U.S. Nuclear Plants (acronymed CRAC-2).

Every nuclear plant in the U.S. was evaluated as to “early fatalities” in the event of a meltdown with breach of containment. For the Indian Point 2 and 3 nuclear plants (Indian Point 1 has been permanently shut down), CRAC-2 projects 46,000 “early fatalities” if Indian Point 2 underwent a meltdown with breach of containment; 50,000 “early fatalities” from a meltdown at Indian Point 3. Peak “early injuries” from 2: 141,000. From 3, 167,000. Cancer deaths, 13,000 from 2; 14,000 from 3. As to property damage, CRAC-2 estimated $274 billion as a result of a meltdown at 2; $314 billion as a result of a meltdown at 3. But that’s in 1980 dollars which would be triple that today: a trillion dollars for an accident at one of the two Indian Point plants.

And, as noted, because of the Price-Anderson Act, all the nuclear industry would have to pay to compensate people for deaths, injuries and property damage would be $10.5 billion— a fraction of what CRAC-2 estimates would be the potential costs.

Another claim, The New Nuclear Plant Designs Are “Inherently Safe”

The nuclear industry is touting its “new and improved” nuclear plant models as “inherently safe.” They’re not. They, like all nuclear plants, are “inherently dangerous,” emphasizes Gunter of Beyond Nuclear. They are subject to catastrophic accidents, have “routine emissions” of radioactivity, produce nuclear waste which must somehow be isolated from life some of it for millions of years.

Says Mariotte of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, the purportedly “inherently safe” new nuclear plants “do not exist.”

And they, in fact, never can. That’s because the basic issue about atomic energy is radioactivity. Once atom-splitting or fission occurs, radioactivity is produced—and it’s a killer.

Finally, the argument that Nuclear Power Is “Needed”

This is a central falsehood for, in fact, there’s absolutely no need to undergo the life-threatening dangers of nuclear power.

The noted British magazine, the New Scientist, put out this issue on safe renewable energy technologies based on a United Nations report that found, as the New Scientist notes, that “renewable energy that can already be harnessed economically would supply the world’s electricity needs.”

From solar to wind (now the fastest-growing and cheapest new energy technology) to geothermal to tidal-power to wave-power to bio-fuels to small hydropower to co-generation, and on and on, a renewable energy windfall is here today.

Consider the breakthroughs at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, in using solar power to break down water into oxygen and hydrogen—with the hydrogen then being able to be used as a a fuel.

As Dr. John Turner, senior scientist at the lab told us when I did a TV shoot out there: “It’s the forever fuel. This uses are two most abundant natural resources—sunlight and water–to give us an energy supply that is inexhaustible.”

Indeed, amazing at that lab, NREL, is whatever division you go to, scientists speak of the potential for all the energy we need from the energy technology they’re working on.

At NREL’s Solar Energy Research Facility they’ve pioneered a new amazing solar energy technology called “thin film photovoltaic.” Rather than conventional rigid solar panels, it involves flexible membranes impregnated with high-efficiency solar collectors. These sheets of solar-collecting membranes can be applied over glass buildings. Skyscrapers that rise in Manhattan or buildings here on the New Paltz campus can serve as electricity generators. “Thin film photovoltaic” is now being widely used in Europe. Scientists at NREL’s Solar Energy Research Facility say through solar we could get all the energy we’d ever need.

But then you go to NREL’s National Wind Technology Center where the scientists speak about wind providing all the energy we need. They were pioneers in the great advances in wind energy in recent years—especially the development of turbines with highly-efficient blades and wind turbines that can be…and are...being placed on land and increasingly, in Europe, offshore.

Bluewater Wind is getting set to build the first offshore wind farm off Delaware. It would be this country’s first.

Wind is now the fastest growing energy technology. It has been expanding 25 percent a year and that kind of future annual growth is predicted. Wind energy costs a fifth of what it did in the 1980s—and is now fully competitive with other energy technologies—and a continuing downward cost trend is anticipated.

And at NREL’s National Bioenergy Center, the scientists say biomass could fulfill a huge portion of the world energy needs—and we’re not talking here about using food stocks, corn, but switchgrass and poplar trees and other, again, non-food energy crops.

The scientists at NREL might not be right on any single energy source—but all together these and other renewable energy sources, can, in a mix, provide all the energy we need. As NREL declares on its website:“There’s no shortage of renewable energy resources.”

And there’s so many more:

Consider: wave power. In Portugal, a wave power project has just begun. Pelamis Wave Power, a Scottish company, has engineered it—a line of machines will be tapping nature’s constant ocean power.

And tidal energy. The government of Nova Scotia is moving ahead with tapping the enormous power of the 40 and 50 foot tides that twice a day rush in and out of the Bay of Fundy—driven by the moon.

And energy from algae.

And micro or distributed power, smart grids, cutting energy loss from transmitting electricity over long distances.

Renewables Are Ready is the title of a book written by two Union of Concerned Scientists staffers in 1999. Today, they are more than ready. Combined, importantly, with energy efficiency, these clean, safe, renewable energy technologies render nuclear as unneeded.

The question, of course, is can we put the nuclear genie back into the bottle. We can and must. What people have done—things that are terrible like nuclear power—other people can undo.

Nuclear technology came out of World War II like mustard gas came out of World War I. Mustard gas, a horrible killer, has been outlawed. Nuclear power needs to be, too—and instead we need to employ energy we can live with.

Jellyfish Revenge, continued

2010-09-29T17:47:00.000-07:00

Summer was officially over last week and it was some summer in the Greater New York Area: record hot and a summer—and this is related—in which we were hit with loads of jellyfish off Long Island, where I live.

It used to be that jellyfish would arrive in these parts in August—when the waters off our shores had become sufficiently warm. But again this year, those stinging globs were here in June and by July there were swarms of them, remaining through August.

This jellyfish explosion here is mirrored around the world. With global warming a prime culprit, there’s been the revenge of the jellyfish for those who love the water all over this earth.

“There has been a global increase in jellyfish with the higher temperatures of recent years,” explains Dr. Christopher Gobler, associate professor at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at New York’s Stony Brook University. “With global warming, jellyfish emerge earlier, grow quicker and stay around longer.”
He notes other factors, too—also having to do with the activities of people.

There’s eutrophication, the process in which water bodies receive excess nutrients. Algal blooms are triggered by eutrophication, Dr. Gobler notes, and the blooms “reduce oxygen and water clarity. These conditions have adverse effects on planktivorous fish [fish that eat plankton] meaning the fish consume lower amounts of plankton. Because jellyfish are non-visual predators and are less sensitive to low oxygen” they can feast on the plankton that the planktivorous fish are missing. Jellyfish “thrive under these conditions.”

Then there’s overfishing. “The overharvest of filter feeding bivalves and planktivorous fish such as menhaden leaves more plankton for jellyfish to consume,” says Dr. Gobler.

And there is what’s termed “shoreline hardening—the building of bulkheads, docks and jetties which encourages greater jellyfish populations because jellyfish polyps attach to these “hard surfaces” and “we have more of these now,” says Dr. Gobler.
What was termed a worldwide “jellyfish plague” was examined a while back by the British magazine, New Scientist, in an article -- http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19626323.700-insight-overfishing-is-creating-a-jellyfish-plague.html -- that began: “Global warming is starting to sting—literally.” The story by Debora Mackenzie told of how warmer water caused by global warming has resulted in mammoth swarms of jellyfish—such as one 20 square miles in area, 33 feet deep in the Irish Sea that hit a salmon farm “killing all 100,000 fish in it.

The piece also linked the increased levels of carbon dioxide being released on the planet—central to global warming—to the jellyfish explosion. The CO2 discharges are causing seawater to become more acidic. This has been harming “small creatures with acid-soluble shells that compete with jellyfish.”

It stressed overfishing, and what was described as “a vicious cycle” was outlined. “Overfishing means we need more fish farms and it also boosts populations of jellyfish which damage fish farms,” it related. “As the growing human population needs more food, that exacerbates warming, and…jellyfish prosper. The final irony: small plankton-eating fish, which compete most directly with jellyfish” are being “overfished—largely to make fishmeal, the main food for fish farms.”

The article stated: “Fisheries scientists have warned for years that we are replacing an ocean full of fish with one full of jellyfish.”

Wow, what an aquatic mess.

Now with due respect to those in the Orient who like to eat jellyfish, I must say I don’t like them at all—I can’t imagine eating them and I don’t like swimming around them.

Considering that humans are the prime culprits when it comes to the conditions that have created the huge uspsurge in jellyfish, it’s obvious that we must change course, and fast. The jellyfish explosion is sending us a very clear message.

Floating Chernobyls

2010-07-29T15:37:00.001-07:00

Published on CounterPunch on July 27, 2010

They would be floating Chernobyls.

Russia has embarked on a scheme to building floating nuclear power plants to be moored off its coasts—especially off northern and eastern Russia—and sold to nations around the world.

“Absolutely safe,” Sergei Kiriyenko, director general of Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear energy corporation, told Reuters as the barge that is to serve as the base for the first floating plant was launched recently in St. Petersburg.

However, David Lochbaum, senior safety engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, describes an accident at a floating nuclear power plant as “worse” than at a land-based plant. “In a meltdown, a China syndrome accident, the molten mass of what had been the core would burrow into the ground and some of the radioactive material held there. But with a floating nuclear plant, all the molten mass would drop into the water and there would be a steam explosion and the release of a tremendous amount of energy and radioactive material. It would be like a bomb going off,” said Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Project at Washington-based UCS.

“With a floating nuclear plant you have a mechanism to significantly increase the amount of radioactive material going into the environment,” said Lochbaum, who worked 18 years as an engineer in the nuclear industry and also for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A large plume of radioactive poisons would be formed and “many more people would be put in harm’s way.” Further, there would be radioactive pollution of the sea, he noted.

Nuclear experts in Europe—including in Russia—are as critical as Lochbaum is about floating nuclear power plants and their unique accident potential. Other issues raised include the floating plants being sources of fuel for nuclear weapons and easy targets for terrorists.

“This project is clearly a risky venture,” said Alexander Nitikin, a former chief engineer on nuclear-powered submarines of the Soviet Union and senior inspector for the Nuclear and Radiation Safety Inspection Department for its Department of Defense. He is now head of the St. Petersburg branch of the Bellona Foundation, an international environmental organization.

“Safety shouldn’t be neglected for the profits Rosatom wants to get from selling floating nuclear power plants to the troubled regions. Such Rosatom activities simply violate the idea of non-proliferation.”

“Such installations could heighten the risk of radioactive contamination of the sea and shore zones…by many times,” said Andrei Ponomarenko, coordinator for the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Project of Bellona’s chapter in Murmansk.

In a statement describing the plants “floating Chernobyls in waiting,” the main office of Norway-headquartered Bellona said that “Russia has neither the means nor infrastructure to ensure their safe operation, has made no plans for disposing of their spent fuel, and has not taken into consideration the enormous nuclear proliferation risks posed.”

“It is better to invest in solar and wind energy rather than produce time bombs,” said Vladimir Chuprov, energy projects chief for Greenpeace Russia.

Greenpeace Russia, in a report to Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB, had declared that the export of the floating nuclear plants, particularly to countries in Southeast Asia with numerous terrorist groups, “creates a serious threat of terrorism and piracy on the high seas.”

The floating nuclear plants would use a far more volatile fuel compared to land-based plants: weapons-grade uranium containing 40 percent Uranium-235. The U-235 enrichment level in land-based plants is 3 percent. Each would include two reactors providing a total of 70 megawatts of electricity.

A press release by Rosatom issued with the June 30th launch of the football field-sized barge at St. Petersburg said “there are many countries, including in the developing world, showing interest” in the plants.

The Times of London has reported countries interested in buying them include China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Algeria and Argentina (“Floating Nuclear Power Stations Raise Spectre of Chernobyl at Sea.”) World Nuclear News in its article added Namibia and Cape Verde to the list

The notion of a floating nuclear power plant being pursued by Russia originated in the United States where it was scuttled because of excessive cost, public opposition and lack of energy need. Public Service Electric and Gas. Co. of New Jersey, in its literature, has related that while taking a shower in 1969 the idea of floating nuclear plants came to its vice president for engineering and construction, Richard Eckert. In the shower, Eckert thought that the sea could supply the mammoth amounts of water nuclear plants need as coolant.

PSE&G convinced Westinghouse Electric Co. to build such plants. In 1970, Westinghouse and Tenneco set up Offshore Power Systems to fabricate them at a facility it built on Blount Island off Jacksonville, Florida. The plants were to be towed into position with the first four moored l.8 miles off Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey, 11 miles northeast of Atlantic City. Costs skyrocketed, there were protests—in both Jacksonville and New Jersey as well as national opposition. And because of the 1973 oil crisis energy conservation reduced PSE&G’s need for more power. In 1984, Offshore Power Systems cancelled the undertaking and dissolved after spending $180 million on the failed venture.

The most comprehensive analysis which has been done on the floating nuclear power plants Russia is now building is a book researched and written by a team of Russian scientists and titled: Floating Nuclear Power Plants in Russia: A Threat to the Arctic, World Oceans and Non-Proliferation. Its authors include: Vladimir Kuznetsov, formerly of the Russian Federal Inspectorate for Nuclear and Radiation Safety; Alexey Yablokov, a biologist, former environmental advisor to the Russian president and president of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy; Yevgeney Simonov, senior engineer at the Obninsk nuclear power plant; Vladimir Desyatov, an engineer who worked in nuclear submarine construction; and Alexander Nitikin.

“One would have imagined that the Chernobyl catastrophe would have taught us to treat nuclear technologies with caution,” begins the book. It notes that the reactor to be used on the floating nuclear plants is a version of the reactor built for Soviet nuclear-powered icebreakers and provides information on “at least six serious accidents” involving it.

As to accidents, the book says that there can be no “guarantee that” the floating nuclear power plants “will operate in the way the developers suppose. Trouble-free operations of floating nuclear power plants cannot be in principle. The only question is how serious the emergency and its consequences.” It considers the “radioactive cloud” that would be formed in an accident, and for a plant off eastern Russia, says it would impact on a “considerable proportion of Alaska.”

Moreover, in the “case of such emergency, the engaging of any serious rescuing forces and means will be extremely difficult because of remoteness and usually unfavorable weather conditions…Thus, it is completely clear that [a} floating nuclear power plant creates [a] serious threat to the nature and the population.”

In a chapter on the floating plants as “an attractive object of nuclear terrorism,” the book cites an impossibility of providing “protection from torpedo attack or from underwater saboteurs, and on the surface from a rocket-bombing strike.” Further, the “spreading” of the floating plants “all over the world will allow” this to be done “much easier and with more efficiency.” Moreover, each floating nuclear plant will contain “the ready material for ten nuclear bombs in the way of enriched uranium of weapon quality.”

It speaks of officials in several Russian regions saying they welcome the floating plants “with their desire to receive funds from the federal budget” but they do “not imagine perils and negative consequences” of the plants’ operation.

The book includes a chapter on economics asking whether the floating plants can be profitable and concludes they cannot: that the cost of construction and operation of a plant would exceed the value of the electricity it would generate. It states: “During the Soviet era, the costs of constructing a nuclear power plant were covered by governmental funding and nuclear engineers were not overly concerned about providing accurate cost calculations since they knew that any additional expenditures incurred would eventually be covered.” Now, “purely ideological arguments can no longer take precedence over economic feasibility.”

“The idea of creating floating nuclear power plants originated in the USA, but did not come to fruition due to obvious inherent economic drawbacks,” it adds.

The floating nuclear plant scheme is backed, it has been reported, by now Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin “as part of a program to raise the portion of Russian electricity generated by nuclear power.”

Kiriyenko of Rosatom is extremely bullish on the project. Kiriyenko’s background is in politics: he, too, was Russia’s prime minister, but only briefly, from March to August 1998, when he was forced to resign after his financial machinations led to a devaluation of the Russian ruble and a major financial crisis that year. He was appointed as head Rosatom in 2005.

There is strong opposition in the initial area off which the first nuclear plants would be moored—the Murmansk Region. The Romir polling agency has found some 71 percent of respondents there said they were “strongly negative.”

And, “protests against the project have already occurred,” said Vitaly Servetnik, chairman of the organization Nature and Youth.

Obama Brings Back Space Nuclear Power

2010-06-10T15:16:00.000-07:00

(Published in Summer 2010 issue of Space Alert!, publication of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power In Space -- www.space4peace.org.)

The Obama administration is seeking to renew the use of nuclear power in space. It is calling for revived production by the U.S. of plutonium-238 for use in space devices—despite solar energy having become a substitute for plutonium power in space.

And the Obama administration appears to also want to revive the decades-old and long-discredited scheme of nuclear-powered rockets—despite strides made in new ways of propelling spacecraft. Last month, Japan launched what it called its “space yacht” which is now heading to Venus propelled by solar sails utilizing ionized particles emitted by the Sun. “Because of the frictionless environment, such a craft should be able to speed up until it is traveling many times faster than a conventional rocket-powered craft,” wrote Agence France-Presse about this spacecraft launched May 21.

But the Obama administration would return to using nuclear power in space—despite its enormous dangers.

A cheerleader for this is the space industry publication Space News. “Going Nuclear” was the headline of its editorial on March 1 praising the administration for its space nuclear thrust. Space New declared that “for the second year in a row, the Obama administration is asking Congress for at least $30 million to begin a multiyear effort to restart domestic production of plutonium-238, the essential ingredient in long-lasting spacecraft batteries.”

The Space News editorial also noted that “President Obama’s NASA budget [for 2011] also includes support for nuclear thermal propulsion and nuclear electric propulsion research under a $650 million Exploration Technology and Demonstration funding line projected to triple by 2013.”

Space News declared: “Nuclear propulsion research experienced a brief revival seven years ago when then-NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe established Project Prometheus to design reactor-powered spacecraft. Mr. O’Keefe’s successor, Mike Griffin, wasted little time pulling the plug on NASA’s nuclear ambitions.”

Being referred to by Space News as “spacecraft batteries” are what are called radioisotope thermoelectric generators or RTGs, power systems using plutonium-238 to provide on board electricity on various space devices including, originally, on satellites.

But this came to an end when in 1964 a U.S. Navy navigational satellite with a SNAP-9A (SNAP for Systems Nuclear Auxiliary Power) RTG on board failed to achieve orbit and fell to the Earth, disintegrating upon hitting the atmosphere. The 2.1 pounds of plutonium fuel dispersed widely. A study by a group of European health and radiation protection agencies subsequently reported that “a worldwide soil sampling program carried out in 1970 showed SNAP-9A debris present at all continents and at all latitudes.” Long linking the SNAP-9A accident to an increase of lung cancer in people on Earth was Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, who was involved in isolating plutonium for the Manhattan Project.

The SNAP-9A accident caused NASA to turn to using solar photovoltaic panels on satellites. All U.S. satellites are now solar-powered.

But NASA persisted in using RTGs on space probes—claiming there was no choice. This was a false claim. Although NASA, for instance, insisted—including in sworn court depositions —that it had no alternative but to use RTGs on its Galileo mission to Jupiter launched in 1989, documents I subsequently obtained through the Freedom of Information Act from NASA included a study done by its Jet Propulsion Laboratory stating that solar photovoltaic panels could have substituted for plutonium-fueled RTGs.

And right now, the Juno space probe—which will getting its on board electricity only from solar photovoltaic panels—is being readied by NASA for a launch next year to Jupiter. It’s to make 32 orbits around Jupiter and perform a variety of scientific missions.

Meanwhile, in recent years facilities in the U.S. to produce plutonium-238—hotspots for worker contamination and environmental pollution—have been closed and the U.S. has been obtaining the radionuclide from Russia. Under the Obama 2011 budget, U.S. production would be restarted. Last year, Congress refused to go along with this Obama request.

As for rocket propulsion with atomic energy, building such rockets was a major U.S. undertaking 50 and 60 years ago, under a program called NERVA (for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application) followed by Projects Pluto, Rover and Poodle. Billions of dollars were spent and ground-testing done, but no nuclear rocket ever got off the ground. There were concerns over a nuclear rocket blowing up on launch or crashing back to Earth. The effort ended in 1972 but was revived in the 1980s under President Reagan’s Star Wars program. The “Timberwind” nuclear-powered rocket was developed then to loft heavy Star Wars equipment into space and also for trips to Mars. Most recently, Project Prometheus to build nuclear-powered rockets was begun by NASA in 2003, but ended in 2006, the cancellation referred to in the Space News editorial.

Obama’s choice to head NASA, Charles Bolden, favors nuclear-powered rockets—but he acknowledges public resistance. In a recent presentation before the Council on Foreign Relations, he opened the door to having a nuclear-powered rocket launched conventionally and moving in space with nuclear power.

Bolden, a former astronaut and U.S. Marine Corps major general, spoke in the May 24th address, of work by another ex-astronaut, Franklin Chang-Diaz, on a nuclear-propelled rocket. “Chang-Diaz is developing what’s called a VASIMIR rocket,” said Bolden. “It’s an ion engine, very gentle impulse that just pushes you forever, constantly accelerating. And this, theoretically, is something that would enable us to go from Earth to Mars in a matter of some time significantly less than it takes us now.”

But, he said, “most people…in the United States are never going to agree to allow nuclear rockets to launch things from Earth.” Yet “once you get into space, you know, if we can convince people that we can contain it and not put masses of people in jeopardy, nuclear propulsion for in-space propulsion” would enable a faster trip to Mars. He said, “You don’t want to have to take eight months to go from Earth orbit to Mars.”

Having nuclear power systems only activated once up in space was a system followed by the Soviet Union—because of it having suffered many launch pad explosions. Still, the scheme wasn’t accident-free. The worst Soviet space nuclear device accident involved its Cosmos 954 reconnaissance satellite. Its on board nuclear reactor was only activated after launch when the reactor was in orbit. But then there was a malfunction causing Cosmos 954 to tumble out of control and hurtle back to Earth, breaking up and spreading hotly radioactive debris over 124,000 square miles of the Northwest Territories of Canada.

President Obama, in a speech on “Space Exploration in the 2lst Century” given April 15 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, didn’t mention nuclear-powered rockets (not even those that would only be activated after launch). He did announce that “we will invest more than $3 billion to conduct research on an advanced heavy lift rocket—a vehicle to efficiently send into orbit the crew capsules, propulsion systems and large quantities of supplies needed to reach deep space. In developing this new vehicle, we will not only look at revising or modifying older models; we want to look at new designs, new materials, new technologies that will transform not just where we can go but what we can do when we get there. And we will finalize a rocket design no later than 2015 and then begin to build it.”

“At the same time, after decades of neglect, we will increase investment—right away—in other groundbreaking technologies that will allow astronauts to reach space sooner and more often, to travel farther and faster,” he said.

“How do we supply spacecraft with energy needed for these far-reaching journeys? These
are questions that we can answer and will answer. And these are the questions whose answers no doubt will reap untold benefits right here on Earth.”

“And by 2025,” Obama said, “we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first-ever crewed missions beyond the Moon into deep space. So we’ll start—we’ll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history. By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars.”

“I want to repeat this,” Obama asserted. “Critical to deep space exploration will be the development of breakthrough propulsion systems and other advanced technologies.”

With Obama on the platform was U.S. Senator Bill Nelson of Florida—who he introduced at the start of his speech. Nelson in 1986 was a passenger on the space shuttle (before the 1986 Challenger disaster ended the shuttle passenger program) and he is a member of Senate Science and Transportation Committee. Although Obama was not specific on the kind of spacecraft he envisioned for trips to Mars, later that day on “Hardball With Chris Matthews” on MSNBC, Nelson was—and it was Chang-Diaz’s nuclear rocket. “One of my crewmates,” said Nelson, speaking of former astronaut Chang-Diaz who was with him on the 1986 shuttle flight, “is developing a plasma rocket that would take us to Mars in 39 days.”

The object of Administrator Bolden and Senator Nelson’s technical affections, Chang-Diaz, a Costa Rican-native, the first naturalized U.S. citizen to become a U.S. astronaut, founded the Ad Astra Rocket Company after retiring from NASA in 2005. He is its president and CEO. In an interview with Seed.com last year, he said the engine for his VASIMIR (for Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) could work with solar power. The engine uses plasma gas heated by electric current to extremely high temperatures.

But larger versions are needed for space travel and they require nuclear power, said Chang-Diaz. “What we really need is nuclear power to generate electricity in space. If we don’t develop it, we might as well quit, because we’re not going to go very far. Nuclear power is central to any robust and realistic human exploration of space. People don’t really talk about this at NASA. Everybody is still avoiding facing this because of widespread anti-nuclear sentiment.”

“People have fears of nuclear power in space,” continued Chang-Diaz, “but it’s a fear that isn’t really based on any organized and clear assessment of the true risks and costs.”

Comments Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space: “Despite claims that ‘new’ and innovative technologies are under development at NASA, the story remains much the same—push nuclear power applications for future space missions. Obama is proving to be a major proponent of expansion of nuclear power—both here on Earth and in space. His ‘trip to an asteroid and missions to Mars’ plan appears to be about reviving the role of nuclear power in space. The nuclear industry must be cheering.”

My TV Commentary on Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Disaster

2010-05-22T18:12:00.000-07:00

Just posted on YouTube, my TV commentary on the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXIksDe4Zl4

Cancer and Pollution

2010-05-22T18:06:00.000-07:00

The Health Department of New York State this month put out a first-in-the-nation cancer map showing the locations of incidences of cancer and likely sources of pollution such as hazardous waste and Superfund sites. For many places in New York, with high cancer rates and numerous sources of pollution, the map—accessible on the Internet—is a breakthrough.

Only reluctantly did the Health Department put together the map based on cancer cases between 2003 and 2007 listed in the state’s Cancer Registry and data on potentially polluting sites provided by the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

As the New York Times reported, the department along with the American Cancer Society
“opposed” the mapping because of “concerns that its unfiltered data could be misinterpreted.” But Governor David Paterson “sided against his own administration in signing the legislation” which mandated the mapping, noted the Times.

The Assembly sponsor of the legislation, Richard Brodsky of Westchester County, commented that the map is a “first step in getting to answers about whether these clusters are statistical accidents or related to an environmental cause.”

The unveiling of the map came a week after the President’s Cancer Panel issued a 240-page report pointing to chemicals and radiation as key causes of cancer. It is titled “Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now” and is also available online.

It states that “cancer continues to shatter and steal the lives of Americans. Approximately 61 percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, and about 21 percent will die from the cancer. The incidence of some cancers, including some most common among children, is increasing…The burgeoning number and complexity of known or suspected environmental carcinogens compel us to act to protect public health.”

The panel concludes that “the grievous harm” from carcinogens “has not been addressed adequately by the National Cancer Program…The burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated…The American people…are bombarded continually with myriad combinations of these dangerous exposures.”

It urges President Obama “most strongly to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives.”

But will government move? For example, although the Toxic Substances Control Act was passed in 1976 requiring the Environmental Protection Agency to assess chemicals in commercial use in the U.S.—now totaling 80,000, the report notes—EPA has only gotten around to examining 200.

I wrote a book on all this titled The Poison Conspiracy, out in 1983, showing how those who are supposed to protect us from poisons—including the EPA—largely do not because of coziness with those who do the polluting.

And in a chapter on “Admitted Consequences,” I cited reports of a number of federal panels on the cancer epidemic and its pollution link including a 1980 report of the Presidential Toxic Substances Strategy Committee that found “environmental factors…are significant in the great majority of cancer cases seen, perhaps 80-90 percent.”

The American Cancer Society criticized the new President’s Cancer Panel report insisting pollution isn’t a major cause of cancer. This caused Dr. Samuel Epstein, chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition and author of The Politics of Cancer, to criticize the society noting the large amount of money it receives from DuPont, BP and other polluters.

The poisoning—and consequent cancer—isn’t necessary. The President’s Cancer Panel emphasizes how “the requite knowledge and technologies exist” to provide safe “alternatives” to cancer-causing agents. But this doesn’t suit those doing the polluting—who have such a hold on government.

My Enviro Close-Up Programs Now Can Be Seen In Full On Your Computer

2010-05-01T05:09:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, my partners at EnviroVideo accomplished having many of the Enviro Close-Up television programs I've hosted in the past years--plus current offerings--put up on the Internet and available to be viewed, in full, on computer. Visit www.envirovideo.com and you will see a wide variety of programs you can click on and watch.

Chernobyl Catastrophe: 24th Anniversary

2010-04-19T18:11:00.000-07:00

With the 24th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster coming next week, a new book has been published by the New York Academy of Sciences which concludes that between 1986, when the accident happened, and 2004 some 985,000 people died, especially of cancer, as a result of the radioactivity that was emitted.

The 985,000 figure is based on health data, radiological reports and scientific studies—some 5,000 in all—especially from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus but from other affected nations as well.

It belies the assertion of the International Atomic Energy Agency that, as the IAEA still claims on its website, the “total number of deaths already attributable to Chernobyl or expected in the future…is estimated to be about 4,000.” That claim of the IAEA, which was set up in 1957 “to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy,” has been widely reported as the toll from the disaster.

The new book, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, shows it to be an extreme minimization.

It is authored by three noted scientists: Dr. Alexey Yablokov of Russia, a biologist and former environmental advisor to the Russian president; Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, a biologist and ecologist in Belarus; and Dr.Vassili Nesterenko, a physicist, and at the time of the accident director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. The consulting editor is Dr. Janette D. Sherman, a Virginia-based physician and toxicologist who has long specialized on the impacts of radioactivity.

The work is comprehensive, indeed, the most encompassing study that has ever been done of the Chernobyl accident. It is anchored in strong evidence. And it is chilling.

The radioactive release from Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, starting with it exploding on April 26, 1986 and ending when it stopped burning in mid-May, “was many hundreds of millions of curies, a quantity hundreds of times larger than the fallout from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” notes the book.

The “winds around Chernobyl” kept changing, covering 360-degrees “so the radioactive emissions from the mix of radionuclides varied from day to day and covered an enormous territory.” The radioactive poisons included Cesium-137, Plutonium, Iodine-131 and Strontium-90, among others.

A country-by-country breakdown of where they fell out, with the detailed measurements taken and maps, follow. The list starts with Belarus—“Practically the entire country of Belarus was covered by the Chernobyl cloud”—and on to Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Sweden, United Kingdom and so on to Asia and North America, where “some 1% of all Chernobyl radionuclides…fell.”

The consequences on public health are exhaustively analyzed, first “General Morbidity, Impairment, and Disability.” Again, the grisly list starts with Belarus where, it is noted: “According to data from the Belarusian Ministry of Public Health, just before the catastrophe…90% of children were considered ‘practically healthy.’ By 2000, fewer than 20% were considered so.” Rises in nonmalignant diseases including blood and cardiovascular diseases are examined.

There is a focus on genetic impacts with records showing an increase in “chromosomal aberrations” cited. This will continue through the “children of irradiated parents for as many as seven generations.” Thus, “the genetic consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe will impact hundreds of millions of people.”

And then comes cancer—with records illuminated by charts showing the increases in various countries of childhood cancer, thyroid cancer, leukemia and other cancers. For Ukraine, for instance, “According to official data, the general [cancerl] mortality rate in the heavily contaminated territories was 18.3 per 1,000 in 1999, some 28% higher than the national average of 14.9 per 1,000.”

Considering health data of people in all nations impacted by the fallout, the “overall [cancer] mortality for the period from April 1986 to the end of 2004 from the Chernobyl catastrophe was estimated as 985,000 additional deaths.”

Moreover, “the concentrations” of some of the poisons, because they have radioactive half-lives ranging from 20,000 to 200,000 years, “will remain practically the same virtually forever.”So “the number of Chernobyl victims will continue to grow in the next several generations.”

The book investigates, too, the impact on flora, fauna and animals. It presents numerous studies, including those finding rapid genetic alterations, and, as to animals, notes “serious increases in morbidity and mortality that bear striking resemblance to changes in the public health of humans—increasing tumor rates, immunodeficiencies, decreasing life expectancy…”

The book concludes: “The Chernobyl catastrophe demonstrates that the nuclear industry’s willingness to risk the health of humanity and our environment with nuclear power plants will result, not only theoretically, but practically, in the same level of hazard as nuclear weapons.”

Dr. Sherman, speaking of her experience editing the book, commented: “Every single system that was studied—whether human or wolves or livestock or fish or trees or mushrooms or bacteria—all were changed, some of them irreversibly. The scope of the damage is stunning.”

In his foreword, Dr. Dimitro Grodzinsky, chairman of the Ukranian National Commission on Radiation Protection, writes about how “apologists of nuclear power” sought to hide the real impacts of the Chernobyl disaster from the time when the accident occurred. The book “provides the largest and most complete collection of data concerning the negative consequences of Chernobyl on the health of people and the environment...The main conclusion of the book is that it is impossible and wrong ‘to forget Chernobyl.’”

The claim that “only” 4,000 people will die as a result of the Chernobyl catastrophe is among the biggest lies of modern times.

The Chernobyl disaster should not only be remembered but must not be allowed to be repeated—which will happen regularly if the forces behind nuclear power get their way in their effort to “revive” nuclear power and build more nuclear plants.

Those in operation now need to be shut down and no more built—and a rapid transition made to clean, safe energy technologies available today, led by solar and wind power, which don’t kill people and other forms of life.

Offshore Oil Drillilng Stupidity

2010-04-06T16:12:00.000-07:00

Larry Penny, the director of natural resources here in East Hampton Town on Long Island, tells of being out in a small boat having taken friends to the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara, California when a blow-out on an offshore oil rig resulted in a massive oil spill in 1969.

The oil on the Pacific Ocean through which his boat needed to travel was “about a foot thick,” he recouns. He only barely made it through the “black mess” and got back. “It sure choked up the motor.” The next day he went up in a small plane and saw the devastation from the air. The “wind had been blowing from the west” and the shoreline was coated with oil.

Penny was a fisherman, ran an aquarium and was a teacher in Santa Barbara at the time. The spill was a pivotal event for him—and many others. It resulted in the organization Get Oil Out (GOO) demanding an end to the drilling—and today the waters from Santa Barbara to north of San Francisco have been declared marine sanctuaries and no longer is there offshore oil drilling there.
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Thus the announcement last week by President Obama that he is moving to open up large sections of offshore waters to oil drilling—including the Atlantic from Delaware to Florida, a stretch also barred to drilling for decades—is seen as an outrage by Penny.

The waters off Long Island are not—now—part of what Obama wants opened to drilling. But Penny notes that spilled oil travels far and Delaware and Maryland are not that distant—especially considering frequent southerly winds and the Gulf Stream off our coast, both of which would send black goo north. Moreover, those rigs would go up right in hurricane alley.

And the East Coast stands to be far more damaged by an oil spill than the West Coast, notes Penny, considering that it is lined with wetlands, the feeding and breeding grounds of sea life. “Once oil gets in the marshes, that’s it.”

“This is completely unnecessary,” protests Penny. The technologies for clean, renewable energy are here today waiting to be fully implemented. “In this day and age this is ridiculous.”

It would be a huge threat to marine life, the fishing industry and the recreational industry which serves as an economic base for much of the East Coast. As New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg said last week, Obama’s gift to “Big Oil” is a “kill baby kill policy. It threatens to kill jobs, kill marine life and kill coastal economies that generate billions of dollars.”

It was exactly 40 years ago, in 1970, that as a reporter for the daily Long Island Press
that I broke the story of the oil industry seeking to drill in the offshore Atlantic. I got a tip from a fisherman in Montauk who said he had seen in the ocean east of Montauk the same sort of vessel as the boats he observed searching for oil when he was a shrimper in the Gulf of Mexico.

I spent the day telephoning oil companies. PR people for each said their companies were not involved in searching for oil in the Atlantic. But at day’s end, as I was walking out of the office, there was a call from a PR guy at Gulf saying, yes, Gulf was involved in exploring for oil in the Atlantic—as part of a “consortium” of 32 oil companies. These included the companies which all day issued denials. It was a first lesson in oil industry honesty, an oxymoron.

I traveled widely on the issue including in 1971 visiting the first drilling rig set up in the Atlantic, off Nova Scotia. The process was fraught with danger. A rescue boat went round and round the rig as the man from Shell Canada explained: “We treat every foot of hole like a potential disaster.” An oil well blow-out, a gusher, is one thing on land and another entirely on water. The Shell Canada official acknowledged that curtains, booms and other devices the oil industry still claims clean up spills “just don’t work in over five foot-foot seas.”

In 1974, the President’s Council on Environmental Quality stated that a major spill along the Atlantic Coast “could devastate the areas affected…the Atlantic [is a] hostile environment for oil and gas operations. Storm and seismic conditions may be more severe than in the North Sea or the Gulf of Mexico.” There were strong Congressional, state and local challenges and the Atlantic was closed to offshore oil drilling.

The Republican presidential slate, John McCain and Sarah Palin, advocated offshore oil drilling. Obama, as a candidate, opposed it. As president, Obama has—as he earlier did on nuclear power—done a complete reversal. “This is stupid,” said Penny. It sure is and needs to be stopped with citizen action and Congressional, state and local opposition.

Obama Goes Nuclear

2010-02-18T19:05:00.000-08:00

Published on Counterpunch February 17, 2010.

Is there any chance that President Barak Obama can return to his long-held stand critical of nuclear power? Is he open to hearing from scientists and energy experts, such as Amory Lovins, who can refute the pro-nuclear arguments that have apparently influenced him?

Obama’s declaration in his State of the Union speech on January 27 about “building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country” marked a significant change for him. His announcement Tuesday on moving ahead on $8.3 billion in federal government loan guarantees to build new nuclear plants and increasing the loan guarantee fund to $54.5 billion was a further major step. Wall Street is reluctant to invest money in the dangerous and extremely expensive technology.

Before taking office, including as a candidate for president, Obama not only was negative about atomic energy but—unusual for a politician—indicated a detailed knowledge of its threat to life.

“I start off with the premise that nuclear energy is not optimal and so I am not a nuclear energy proponent,” Obama said at a campaign stop in Newton, Iowa on December 30, 2007. “My general view is that until we can make certain that nuclear power plants are safe, that they have solved the storage problem—because I’m opposed to Yucca Mountain and just dumping…in one state, in Nevada particularly, since there’s potentially an earthquake line there—until we solve those problems and the whole nuclear industry can show that they can produce clean, safe energy without enormous subsidies from the U.S. government, I don’t think that’s the best option. I am much more interested in solar and wind and bio-diesel and strategies [for] alternative fuels.”

As he told the editorial board of the Keene Sentinel in New Hampshire on November 25, 2007: “I don’t think there’s anything that we inevitably dislike about nuclear power. We just dislike the fact that it might blow up…and irradiate us…and kill us. That’s the problem.”

Yes, that’s the big problem with splitting the atom—one that has existed since the start of nuclear power and will always be inherent in the technology. Using the perilous process of fission to generate electricity with its capacity for catastrophic accidents and its production of highly toxic radioactive poisons called nuclear waste will always be unsafe. And it is unnecessary considering the safe energy technologies now available, from solar, wind and other clean sources.

Just how dangerous it is has been underlined in a book just published by the New York Academy of Sciences, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. Written by a team of scientists led by noted Russian biologist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, using health data that have become available since the 1986 accident, it concludes that the fatality total “from April 1986 to the end of 2004 from the Chernobyl catastrophe was estimated at 985,000 additional [cancer] deaths.” This is in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and other countries where Chernobyl’s poisons fell. The toll, they relate, continues to rise.

Chernobyl was a different design from the nuclear plants which the U.S., France and Japan seek now to build but disasters can also happen involving these plants and they, too, produce the highly toxic nuclear waste poisons. The problem is fission itself. It’s no way to produce electricity.

Obama has been aware of this. As he stated at a Londonderry, New Hampshire town meeting on October 7, 2007: “Nuclear power has a host of problems that have not been solved. We haven’t solved the storage situation effectively. We have not dealt with all of the security aspects of our nuclear plants and nuclear power is very expensive.”

He still left the door open to it. His Energy Plan as a candidate stated: “It is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power from the table. However, there is no future for expanded nuclear without first addressing four key issues: public right-to-know, security of nuclear fuel and waste, waste storage, and [nuclear weapons] proliferation.”

In his first year as president, nuclear power proponents worked to influence him. Among nuclear opponents, there has been anxiety regarding Obama’s two top aides, both of whom have been involved with what is now the utility operating more nuclear power plants than any other in the United States, Exelon.

Rahm Emanuel, now Obama’s chief of staff, as an investment banker was in the middle of the $8.2 billion merger in 1999 of Unicom, the parent company of Commonwealth Edison of Chicago, and Peco Energy to put together Exelon. David Axelrod, now a senior Obama advisor and formerly chief campaign strategist, was an Exelon consultant. Candidate Obama received sizeable contributions from Exelon executives including from John Rowe, its president and chief executive officer who in 2007 also became chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the U.S. nuclear industry’s main trade group.

It’s not only been nuclear opponents who have seen a link between Exelon and the Obama administration. Forbes magazine, in its January 18th issue, in an article on John Rowe and how he has “focused the company on nuclear,” displayed a sidebar headlined, “The President’s Utility.” It read: “Ties are tight between Exelon and the Obama administration,” noting Exelon political contributions and featuring Emanuel and Axelrod with photos and descriptions of their Exelon connections.

The Forbes article spoke of how last year “Emanuel e-mailed Rowe on the eve of the House vote on global warming legislation and asked that he reach out to some uncommitted Democrats. ‘We are proud to be the President’s utility,’ says Elizabeth Moler, Exelon’s chief lobbyist,” the article went on. “It’s nice for John to be able to go to the White House and they know his name.’”
Chicago-based Exelon’s website boasts of its operating “the largest nuclear fleet in the nation and the third largest in the world.” It owns 17 nuclear power plants which “represent approximately 20 percent of the U.S. nuclear industry’s power capacity.”

The climate change or global warming issue is another factor in Obama’s change on nuclear power. An Associated Press article of January 31 on Obama’s having “singled out nuclear power in his State of the Union address and his spending plan for the next budget,” began: “President Barack Obama is endorsing nuclear energy like never before, trying to win over Republicans and moderate Democrats on climate and energy legislation.”

MSNBC’s Mike Stuckey on February 9 reported about “Obama’s new support for nuclear power, which some feel may be a down payment for Republican backing on a climate change bill.”

After the “safe, clean nuclear power” claim, Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, declared: “Politically, Obama likely was simply parroting the effort being led by Senators John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham to gain support for a climate bill by adding massive subsidies for nuclear power, offshore oil and ‘clean’ coal. But recycling George W. Bush energy talking points is no way to solve the climate crisis or develop a sustainable energy policy…Indeed, Obama knows better. Candidate Obama understood that nuclear power is neither safe nor clean.”

Climate change has been used by those promoting a “revival” of nuclear power—there hasn’t been a new nuclear plant ordered and built in the U.S. in 37 years—as a new argument. In fact, nuclear power makes a substantial contribution to global warming considering the overall “nuclear cycle”—uranium mining and milling, conversion, enrichment, fuel fabrication and the disposition of radioactive waste, and so on.

Climate change is also one argument for pushing atomic energy of another major influence on Obama on nuclear power, Steven Chu, his Department of Energy secretary. Chu typifies the religious-like zeal for nuclear power emanating for decades from scientists in the U.S. government’s string of national nuclear laboratories. Chu was director of one of these, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, before becoming head of DOE.

First established during World War II’s Manhattan Project to build atomic weapons, the laboratories after the war began promoting civilian nuclear technology—and have been pushing it unceasingly ever since. It has been a way to perpetuate the vested interest created during World War II. The number of nuclear weapons that could be built was limited because atomic bombs don’t lend themselves to commercial distribution, but in pushing food irradiation, nuclear-powered airplanes and rockets, atomic devices for excavation and, of course, nuclear power, the budgets and staffs of the national nuclear laboratories could be maintained, indeed increase.

That was the analysis of David Lilienthal, first chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, which preceded the Department of Energy. Lilienthal in his 1963 book Change, Hope, and the Bomb wrote: “The classic picture of the scientist as a creative individual, a man obsessed, working alone through the night, a man in a laboratory pushing an idea—this has changed. Now scientists are ranked in platoons. They are organization men. In many cases the independent and humble search for new truths about nature has been confused with the bureaucratic impulse to justify expenditure and see that next year’s budget is bigger than last’s.”

Lilienthal wrote about the “elaborate and even luxurious [national nuclear] laboratories that have grown up at Oak Ridge, Argonne, Brookhaven” and the push to use nuclear devices for “blowing out harbors, making explosions underground to produce steam, and so on” which show “how far scientists and administrators will go to try to establish a nonmilitary use” for nuclear technology.

Chu, like so many of the national nuclear laboratory scientists and administrators, minimizes the dangers of radioactivity. If they didn’t, if they acknowledged how life-threatening the radiation produced by nuclear technology is, their favorite technology would crumble.

A major theme of Chu, too, is a return to the notion promoted by the national nuclear laboratories in the 1950s and 60s of “recycling” and “reusing” nuclear waste. This way, they have hoped, it might not be seen as waste at all. The concept was to use radioactive Cesium-137 (the main poison discharged in the Chernobyl disaster) to irradiate food, to use depleted uranium to harden bullets and shells, and so on. In recent weeks, with Obama carrying out his pledge not to allow Yucca Mountain to become a nuclear waste dump, Chu set up a “blue-ribbon” panel on radioactive waste—stacked with nuclear power advocates including Exelon’s John Rowe—that is expected to stress the “recycling” theory.

“We are aggressively pursuing nuclear energy,” declared Chu in January as he announced DOE’s budget plan—which included an increase in the 2011 federal budget in monies for nuclear loan guarantees to build new nuclear plants cited by Obama Tuesday. “We are, as we have repeatedly said, working hard to restart the American nuclear power industry.”

The $8.3 billion in loan guarantees Obama announced Tuesday is to come from $18.5 billion in guarantees proposed by the George W. Bush administration and authorized by Congress in 2005. “My budget proposes tripling the loan guarantees we provide to help finance safe, clean nuclear facilities,” said Obama Tuesday, referring to the DOE plan which would add $36 billion and bring the loan guarantee fund to $54.5. And this despite candidate Obama warning about “enormous subsidies from the U.S. government” to the nuclear industry.

The $8.3 billion in loan guarantees is to go toward the Southern Company of Atlanta constructing two nuclear power reactors in Burke, Georgia. These are to be AP1000 nuclear power plants designed by the Westinghouse nuclear division (now owned by Toshiba) although in October the designs were rejected by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission as likely being unable to withstand events like tornadoes and earthquakes.

Obama’s change of stance on nuclear power has led to an earthquake of its own politically. MoveOn, the nonprofit advocacy group that has raised millions of dollars for Democratic candidates including Obama, gauged sentiment of his State of the Union speech by having10,000 MoveOn members record their views. Every few seconds they pressed a button signaling their reactions—ranging from “great” to “awful.” When Obama got to his line on energy, the overwhelming judgment was awful. “The most definitive drop in enthusiasm is when President Obama talked about nuclear power and offshore drilling,” said Ilyse Hogue, MoveOn’s director of political advocacy. “They’re looking for clean energy sources that prioritize wind and solar.”

“Safe, clean nuclear power—it’s an oxymoron,” said Jim Riccio, nuclear policy analyst for Greenpeace USA. “The president knows better. Just because radiation is invisible doesn’t mean it’s clean.”

“From a health perspective, the proposal of the Obama administration to increase federal loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors poses a serious risk to Americans,” said Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project. “Adding new reactors will raise the chance for a catastrophic meltdown. It will also increase the amount of radioactive chemicals routinely emitted from reactors into the environment—and human bodies. New reactors will raise rates of cancer—which are already unacceptably high—especially to infants and children. Public policies affecting America's energy future should reduce, rather than raise, hazards to our citizens."

As to government loan guarantees, “The last thing Americans want is another government bailout for a failing industry, but that’s exactly what they’re getting from the Obama administration,” said Ben Schreiber, the climate and energy tax analyst of Friends of the Earth.

“It would be not only good policy but good politics for Obama to abandon the nuclear loan guarantee program,” said Mariotte of NIRS.

After Obama’s Tuesday declaration on loan guarantees, Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Oversight Project of the organization Beyond Nuclear, said: “Unfortunately, the president’s decision is fuel for opposition to costly and dangerous nuclear power. It signals a widening of a divide as the administration steps back from its promise for a change in energy policy and those of us who are committed to a change.”

“We are deeply disturbed by President Obama’s decision,” said Peter Wilk, executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility. “Not only does this put taxpayers on the hook for billions, it prioritizes a dirty, dangerous, and expensive technology over public health. From the beginning to the end of the nuclear fuel cycle, nuclear reactors remain a serious threat to public health and safety. From uranium mining waste to operating reactors leaking radioactivity to the lack of radioactive waste solutions, nuclear power continues to pose serious public health threats.”
Nuclear opponents have been disappointed in a lack of access to the Obama White House of those with a critical view on nuclear power—who could counteract the pro-nuclear arguments that Obama has been fed. Will President Obama open himself to hearing from those who question nuclear power?

Obama has credibility trouble already. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote
on January 26: “Who is Barack Obama? Americans are still looking for the answer…Mr. Obama may be personally very appealing, but he has positioned himself all over the political map…Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won’t be able to close it.”

Credit Card Company Usury

2009-11-07T15:22:00.000-08:00

The behavior of credit card companies in recent months has been unbelievable.

Hysterical that new federal rules are to take effect dealing with their operations, the credit card companies have, among other things, been raising interest rates to levels otherwise only charged by Mafia loan sharks—to 30 and 40 percent.

A definition of usury: “An interest rate that greatly exceeds the bounds of reason or moderation, one that is exorbitant.” Like 30 and 40 percent.

The new rules—provisions of the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009—include:

· Not allowing an interest rate increase to be applied to an existing balance unless a cardholder is delinquent.
· Notifying cardholders of an interest rate jump 45 days in advance.
· Stopping young people with no income from getting hooked on credit cards; under-21-year-olds would need a co-signer or a job.

Some of the rules are to take effect in February, some in August.

But importantly, there’s no cap in the new rules on interest rates—a gargantuan hole considering the recent behavior, indeed the history of credit card companies.

Did you ever wonder why you mail your payments to credit card companies in states like South Dakota, Utah Delaware? It’s because these states have no or very loose usury laws.

Vermont’s independent Senator Bernie Sanders tried to get a cap set on credit card interest rates of 15 percent in the new rules. With rates of 30 and 40 percent, the credit card companies, he said, weren’t “making credit available. They’re engaging in loan-sharking.”

His effort failed—only 33 senators supported it. The banking lobby is plenty powerful in Washington.

Because of the recent credit card company machinations, there’s a second bill now before Congress, the Expedited Card Reform for Consumers Act of 2009—to make them comply with the new rules starting next month.

Incidentally, folks with solid finances who pay off their credit card bills every month are also being victimized-- with big hikes in fees.

New York’s U.S. Senator Charles Schumer says the “sneaky fees and tricks” of the credit card companies “are ripping off consumers across the country and it’s time to stop them dead in their tracks.”

He’s right, but just expediting the new rules won’t do it. Necessary are tougher rules—including a cap on credit card interest to end credit card company usury.

No Family History

2009-11-05T16:16:00.000-08:00

No Family History: The Environmental Links to Breast Cancer is the title of a just-published book by Sabrina McCormick, who has also produced and directed and accompanying video documentary.

The book and video lay out the case that what must be done about the epidemic of breast cancer is dealing with the toxins in the environment that largely cause it.

Dr. McCormick chose where I’m from–Long Island—as the geographical centerpiece of the book and video because of Long Island’s high rates of breast cancer ranging up to 200 percent over the national average. She is the Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and an assistant professor of environmental science and sociology at Michigan State University,

The key figure in the video and book is Robin Caslenova, a 44-year-old woman from West Islip, Long Island who was diagnosed with breast cancer without a family history of the disease.
Her ordeal in followed over several years—including the operation she must undergo, chemotherapy and breast reconstruction.

The video is graphic. Indeed, the announcement for the recent New York premiere of it, issued by the Suffolk County Cancer Awareness Task Force and the Huntington, Long Island-based initiative, Prevention is the Cure, noted: “This documentary contains adult material, scenes during and after a real-life surgery and its aftermath, and medical situations and discussions which may not be suitable for children or those with weak stomachs.” No matter how queasy your stomach might get, this is a video and book that are essential viewing and reading. The truth about cancer, its causes and the ordeal it puts people through, must be faced squarely.

In the book, published by Rowman & Littlefield, Dr. McCormick speaks of a “political economy of disease—a vast, powerful group of corporations protected by weak governmental practices that have shaped what we are exposed to every day…It affects everyday lives and deaths.” This “political economy...has caused us to focus on treatment, detection, and cure while missing a more difficult and political piece of the puzzle—how to prevent breast cancer.” These “institutions often prioritize major corporate interests instead of the public’s health and well-being.”

In the book and video, Dr. McCormick details how cancer-causing chemicals “permeate the planet.” Meanwhile, in 1964 one in 20 women was afflicted with breast cancer and by 2006 it “reached one in eight.” Few have a family history. Breast cancer has become “the most common killer of middle-aged women in the United States, Canada and northern Europe.”

“We exercise. We get mammograms. We also walk, shop, and race for a cure. We know what pink stands for. It means breast cancer. It means raising money. It means finding a cure. The fact is that we are missing the boat,” she writes.

She is especially critical of corporations that promote treatment and donate to cancer research while manufacturing cancer-causing toxins. For more information on her documentary and book, visit www.nofamilyhistory.com

Mrs. Caslenova, with her supportive husband and their three children, were at the premiere of the video, at which Mrs. Caslenova also spoke. Buoyant despite her travails, she told of having “a great family that lifted me up" and she declared that “prevention is so minimal” in how cancer is being challenged.

This must change as a matter of life and death.

FAA--Forget About Administration

2009-08-14T15:42:00.000-07:00

Published on OpEdNews.com, August 14, 2009

FAA—Forget About Administration. That should be the official name of the Federal Aviation Administration for it is a toothless government agency long in bed with the industry it is supposed to regulate.

The recent fatal collision between an airplane and sighteeing helicopter over the Hudson River is yet another episode involving a regulatory agency with little interest in regulation. The busy Hudson River corridor adjacent to the skyscrapers of Manhattan is, because of FAA inaction, “unregulated” airspace.

“It is unconscionable that the FAA permits unregulated flights in a crowded airspace in a major metropolitan area,” declared Congressman Jerrold Nadler this week. “The Hudson River flight corridor must not continue to be the Wild West.”

But that’s the FAA—which prefers to let industry do its thing.

To the east of where that tragedy occurred, the people of Long Island have gotten a lesson on this in recent times as they’ve tried to seek action to deal with the racket of helicopters ferrying people between Manhattan and the Hamptons.

Despite the economic downturn, the helicopter traffic to and from the Hamptons, a warm-weather vacation mecca, is booming allowing the well-heeled to avoid traffic jams below—at the cost of peace for residents of the highly-populated island also below.

In the island’s largest county, Suffolk County, a law was proposed seeking to quell the noise. “Low flying helicopters have become a public nuisance in Suffolk County,” it declared. It continued: the FAA “has failed to regulate the operation” of the helicopters. Thus, it held, it was necessary for the county to step in.

“The operation of helicopters at low altitudes is presumed to be a hazard to persons and property on the surface and constitutes careless and reckless operation,” said the bill authored by Suffolk County Legislator Edward Romaine.

Standing with the helicopter industry against the measure was…yes, the FAA.

FAA Regional Executive Manager Diane Crean came before the legislature last year and declared that the FAA has “supreme” power over air traffic. The proposed law was “pre-empted” by the FAA, she insisted.

Romaine countered that the FAA insists “we control” helicopter traffic but, in fact, “doesn’t control it” and will allow the Hamptons choppers to fly at any altitude and without any plans. The FAA policy, he said, is: “Essentially, you’re on your own.”

Despite the FAA opposition, Suffolk County legislation to attempt to din the chopper racket passed and was signed into law in June. And it has teeth: “up to $1,000 and/or one year in prison per offense.”

FAA inaction is a national problem. The New York Times in a front-page article August 14 detailed the agency’s inaction when it came to recommendations of the National Transportation Safety Board. “Fatal Collision Above the Hudson Bares a Longtime Rift Over Air Safety,” declared a headline for the piece. It related: “The safety board and the FAA have a long history of being frustrated with each other in matters involving major airliners or crashes of commercial jetliners, and there are various theories about why. On the one hand, the safety board sometimes proposes fixes that require technological advances or are viewed as too costly. On the other, the FAA is sometimes criticized as working too closely and protectively with the airline industry.”

The FAA website declares: “Our continuing mission is to provide the safest, most efficient aerospace system in the world…Safety is our passion…Integrity is our character. We do the right thing, even when no one is looking.” Can a government agency be charged with false advertising? (The FAA, not too incidentally, has an annual budget of more than $14 billion.)

Appearing with Congressman Nadler along the Hudson August 10, near where the airplane-helicopter crash took place, New York State Assemblyman Richard Gottfried said: “It’s obvious the FAA’s policy of leaving pilots to fend for themselves endangers people in the area and the rest of us down below. That’s got to change.”

Change must come—including complete reform of the FAA.

The "Freedom" to Be Given Cancer

2009-08-10T09:43:00.000-07:00

The link between tanning beds and cancer, in particular that deadly skin cancer, melanoma, has been known for years. It’s the reason that laws have been passed across the United States to deal with tanning salons—despite intense lobbying by the tanning industry.

Now, the basis for those laws has been thoroughly confirmed by a comprehensive report of the World Health Organization http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs287/en/
putting tanning beds into the top cancer risk category—deeming them as deadly as arsenic and mustard gas.

Younger people were found to be the biggest victims: Said the report: “The risk of skin melanoma is increased 75 percent when use of tanning devices starts before 30 years of age.”

The International Tanning Association and other segments of the tanning industry are, meanwhile, trying to refute the study.

Where I live, in Suffolk County, Long Island, early on there was a move to regulate tanning salons. Suffolk County Legislator Vivian Viloria-Fisher in early 2005 introduced a bill requiring young people between 14 and 18 only be allowed to get toasted in a tanning salon if accompanied by a parent.

She was inspired by her experience as a high school teacher when, she recalls, “I saw students coming to school in the winter months with tans,” especially girls and not from vacations but from going to tanning salons. “I would lecture the students about what they were doing to their skin…the health dangers involved.”

Ms. Viloria-Fisher's bill faced “tremendous resistance” from the tanning industry and became stuck in committee.

It’s amazing how vested interests—entities seeking to perpetuate themselves and their dubious doings—have the power all over the United States to stop sensible governmental action. (Consider currently the insurance industry and health care.)

The Indoor Tanning Association proclaims on its website (www.theita.com): “Promoting Responsible Sun Care.” It stresses that it “represents thousands of indoor tanning manufacturers, distributors, facility owners and members from other support industries. The professional indoor tanning industry employs more than 160,000 people and generates an economic impact of more than $5 billion annually.” It was “founded to protect the freedom of individuals to acquire a suntan.” Its claims include how the “sunshine vitamin may make you brighter…may help older people stay mentally fit.”

A major break on the tanning salon issue in Suffolk came, recounts Ms. Viloria-Fisher, when she attended a meeting the Suffolk County executive was holding with environmentalists and health advocates and met Colette Coyne “and got to talk to her.” Ms. Coyne and her husband, Patrick, of New Hyde Park, Long Island, founded the Colette Coyne Melanoma Awareness Campaign (www.ccmac.org) after their daughter, also named Colette, died at 29 of melanoma.

Ms. Viloria-Fisher re-introduced her bill, this time calling it the “Colette Melanoma Awareness Act” later in 2005. And, despite continued industry opposition, this time the measure passed the legislature, unanimously, and was signed into law by the county executive.

With the WHO report, Ms. Viloria-Fisher has just introduced a new bill to flatly ban those under 18 from using tanning salons.

Reflecting on her experience with the issue, Ms. Viloria-Fisher speaks of how “very nasty” the situation became when she first introduced her bill. But she says she knew she was correct from the research then done—by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control—cited in her bill. She also received personal advice from “a very good friend, a plastic surgeon, who told me, ‘It’s about time. I get young people coming to me who have actually scarred themselves on tanning beds.’”

As to those who fought her initiative, “There’s no interest like self-interest. Bt my job is as a policy maker to look at this dispassionately because I don’t have a vested interest, to look at this in terms of the public health and public good, to look at the bigger interest.” The WHO report “confirms what we’ve been reading.”

She hopes pending New York State legislation barring those under 18 from using tanning salons might now pass. The Indoor Tanning Association, on its website, lists the New York measure and other bills in the U.S. on tanning salons and urges their defeat. After all, it says, “All human activity presents risk.”

How vested interests can twist the truth and damage and destroy life.

Deadly Gamble: Nuclear Power and You

2009-07-23T16:27:00.000-07:00

Ten Big Lies!
Deadly Gamble: Nuclear Power and You
WE’RE TOLD IT IS SAFE, BUT THE EVIDENCE INDICATES SOMETHING VERY DIFFERENT.
Hustler, October 2009

By Karl Grossman
Advocates in government and the private sector are engaged in a massive drive to “revive” nuclear power. Here are ten big lies they’re using to promote their deadly agenda:
1. No one in the United States has died as a result of nuclear power…and only
4,000 will die due to Chernobyl. People died and are still dying in the United States from this country’s biggest nuclear plant disaster: the partial meltdown at Unit 2 of the Three Mile Island facility in Pennsylvania. Lung cancer and leukemia rates downwind of the reactor were found to be two to ten times higher in years after the 1979 accident, according to research by Dr. Steven Wing, professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health.
The Radiation and Public Health Project (Radiation.org) has calculated tens of thousands of cancer deaths caused by the radioactivity released during the meltdown. “The accident had a devastating effect…especially for those who were infants and young children at the time,” says Joseph Mangano, the organization’s executive director.
In the book Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation, its authors—including energy expert Harvey Wasserman and former high U.S. Department of Energy official Robert Alvarez—declare “People died at Three Mile Island.”
My television documentary, Three Mile Island Revisited (EnviroVideo.com) reveals how the plant’s owner has quietly paid out millions of dollars to area residents for health impacts they and their loved ones suffered.
The 1986 explosion at Ukraine’s Chernobyl plant was the worst nuclear disaster in the world. It probably shouldn’t be a big surprise that the Chernobyl Forum—a group led by the International Atomic Energy Agency, an entity set up by the United Nations to promote nuclear power—reported in 2005 that only 56 people had died as a result of that accident. The final death toll, the Chernobyl Forum said, can be expected to reach no more than 4,000.
However, reporting in 2006 that “at least 500,000 people have already died” from the Chernobyl disaster was Nikolai Omelyanets, deputy head of the National Commission for Radiation Protection in Ukraine. Dr. Alexey Yablokov, environmental advisor to former Russian President Boris Yeltsin and now president of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy, calculates a death toll of 300,000.
In my television interview The Truth About Chernobyl, Dr. Vladimir Chernousenko—the nuclear physicist in charge of the clean-up—estimated that a million people will die due to the accident. (Our conversation can be viewed at YouTube.com.)
It doesn’t take an accident for radioactivity to be emitted from a nuclear power plant. Because nuclear plants are not sealed, there are “routine releases” of krypton, xenon, tritium and other radioactive poisons. The Radiation and Public Health Project has documented rates of cancer being significantly higher “for distances of up to 40 miles” around nuclear plants due to such emissions.
2. Nuclear plants can’t explode. Then how come Chernobyl’s Unit 4 exploded? And although the U.S. has a different design for its nuclear plants, they can explode, too. Nuclear physicist Dr. Richard E. Webb is the world expert on the problem. Indeed, the cover of his book The Accident Hazards of Nuclear Power Plants features an official U.S. government photo of a scaled-down nuclear plant exploding. This happened in the 1950s when the government conducted tests in Idaho on the explosive potential of nuclear plants.
We’ve been told that a meltdown or “China syndrome” accident is the worst mishap that can occur at a nuclear plant. It is caused by a stoppage in the massive amounts of water a nuclear plant needs to keep atom-splitting (or fission) in check. In fact, the worst-case scenario involves a control rod malfunction. There are approximately 200 control rods in a nuclear plant. A single control rod malfunction can trigger an exponential increase in the rate of fission, causing coolant water to flash to steam. A steam explosion will blow apart a plant’s containment dome. That’s what was tested for in Idaho.
Dr. Edward Teller, the scientist who led the development of the hydrogen bomb, warned then that because of the threat of such a reactor explosion, nuclear plants must be built underground. They weren’t.
In 1961 in Idaho a reactor named the SL-1—built to generate power at remote military installations—underwent a steam explosion and meltdown, killing three servicemen. The propelled control rod in this accident flew into the groin of one of the operators, pinning him, like a butterfly, to the ceiling of the reactor. His body was recovered but it was so hot with radioactivity, he was buried in a lead-lined coffin at Arlington National Cemetery.
But forget steam explosions. Dr. Webb has written extensively about how plutonium breeder reactors can generate a cataclysmic atomic explosion.
3. A nuclear plant can withstand the impact of an incoming aircraft used as a missile. Concerns about nuclear plants being terrorist targets have existed for years. This concern was heightened after 9/11 when American Airlines Flight 11 flew over the two Indian Point nuclear plants just above New York City before crashing into the World Trade Center. Then came the revelation that al-Qaeda had been considering targeting nuclear plants. It still is.
The nuclear industry once insisted its plants were “robust” and could withstand such a hit. Earlier this year the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) stopped accepting this claim, ordering the builders of all new nuclear plants in the U.S. do a “design-specific assessment of the effects of the impact of a large commercial aircraft.” The industry would have to “avoid or mitigate to the extent practical” damage caused by a 9/11-like strike. But what about the existing 104 nuclear plants? They would be left as is—essentially “pre-deployed weapons of mass destruction,” says Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Oversight Program of the organization Beyond Nuclear (BeyondNuclear.org). “Public documents within the NRC confirm that these plants were never designed or constructed for aircraft impact, particularly explosion and fire.”
4. Uranium fuel is abundant. Raw materials containing substantial amounts of high-grade uranium-235 are not abundant. “Startingly, there are only a few decades left of the proven high-grade uranium ore it [nuclear power] needs for fuel,” says Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation (NewEconomics.org).
The foundation stated in its 2005 report “Mirage and Oasis” that by one estimate “uranium reserves will be depleted in around four decades…Even the International Atomic Energy Agency…estimates ‘enough to last only another 85 years.’”
This limit is why the nuclear establishment has long believed nuclear energy will need to be based on man-made plutonium. But plutonium-fueled breeder reactors can explode like atomic bombs. Kay Drey, a board member of Beyond Nuclear, notes that “every” 1,000-megawatt uranium-fueled nuclear plant “generates enough plutonium every year to create at least 40 atomic bombs.
5. The “peaceful” atom. There has never been a “peaceful” atom. Any country with a uclear facility has the materiel—the plutonium built up in a uranium reactor—to make nuclear weapons. Look at India. In 1974 it received a “civilian” reactor from Canada and training from the U.S. Presto: India had nuclear weapons.
6. France’s nuclear “success” story. The French nuclear power program is a health and economic mess. A Beyond Nuclear report—“Nuclear Power and France: Setting the Record Straight”—discloses leukemia clusters in communities around France’s La Hague nuclear reprocessing center. It notes that the facility discharges 100 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste yearly into the English Channel. Waters off La Hague have been “measured as 17 million times more radioactive than normal sea water,” and this contamination has affected waters as far as the Arctic Circle.
French nuclear plant mishaps in 2008 included a radioactive leak from a plant near Avignon polluting two rivers. People were warned not to drink water, swim or eat fish from the waterways. “There is no French love affair with nuclear energy, but rather a deep mistrust of this most secretive of industries,” says Linda Gunter, a co-founder of Beyond Nuclear. A majority in France want nuclear power phased out, polling shows. There have been massive protests against construction of new nuclear plants.
In 2008, Global Chance (Global-Chance.org), a French research organization, issued a report declaring “France today has no industrial solution for all its long-term radioactive wastes,” It concludes that nuclear power in France is an “undemocratic choice.”
7. Nuclear power is inexpensive. It’s extremely expensive: $12 billion just to build a plant. “No private money anywhere in the world is being used to build new nuclear plants,” says Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service (www.NIRS.org). “They are all being built with some sort of government subsidy.”
In 2008, with Wall Street unwilling to finance new nuclear plants, U.S. Senators Joseph Lieberman and John Warner advanced legislation to provide $544 billion for new nuclear plant development. (See my article, “Half-Trillion Dollars for Nukes,” at
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/29/9268. That didn’t pass, but the nuclear establishment is still pushing to get your tax dollars.
Physicist Amory Lovins, cofounder and chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI.org), says, “It [nuclear power] costs about three times as much as wind power, which is booming.”
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories conducted a report titled “Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences for U.S. Nuclear Plants” (acronymed CRAC-2). Every nuclear plant in the U.S. is evaluated as to “early fatalities” in the event of a meltdown with breach of containment. “Property damage” costs are estimated as high as $314 billion for a single accident. And that’s in 1980 dollars, which would be tripled today. Deaths are estimated at up to 100,000.
Meanwhile, the 1957 the Price-Anderson Act was passed to shield the nuclear industry from having to pay for those damages. That was made necessary because insurance companies refused to insure nuclear plants. It was supposed to be only temporary, but the act has been extended and extended.
Based on the Price-Anderson Act, all the nuclear industry would have to pay to compensate people for deaths, injuries and property damages in the event of a nuclear plant accident would be $10 billion—even though that’s just a fraction of what CRAC-2 estimates would be the costs. (For more about CRAC-2, see NIRS.org.)
8. Nuclear Power “Doesn’t Contribute” to Global Warming. This claim is part of the current push to “revive” nuclear power. What you’re not supposed to know is that the overall nuclear “chain” or “cycle”—including uranium mining and milling, enrichment and fuel fabrication—generates significant greenhouse gas emissions.
In its report “Nuclear Power Can’t Stop Climate Change,” the Nuclear Information & Resource Service notes: “The nuclear industry conveniently omits [that] the emissions related to nukes are caused by the fossil fuel-intensive processes involved in uranium mining, conversion, enrichment, transport and construction. As a result nuclear power produces direct and indirect emissions of 73 to 230 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour of electricity produced. Wind and solar, by comparison, are virtually greenhouse-gas free, recouping construction emissions in the first years of operation.”
“Nuclear power makes a substantial contribution to global warming,” says Michel Lee, chair of the Council on Intelligent Energy & Conservation Policy.
9. Nuclear power is needed. In fact, there’s absolutely no need to undergo the life-threatening dangers of nuclear power. In a 2008 edition on safe, renewable energy technologies, the prestigious British magazine New Scientist pointed to a United Nations report declaring that “renewable energy that can already be harnessed economically would supply the world’s electricity needs”
From solar to wind (now the fastest-growing and cheapest new energy technology) to wave-power to tidal-power to bio-fuels to small hydropower to co-generation (combining the generation of heat and electricity) and on and on, a renewable energy windfall is here today.
Consider the breakthrough at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado, regarding the use of solar power to break down water into oxygen and hydrogen, with the hydrogen then usable as a fuel. “It’s the forever fuel,” Dr. John Turner, senior scientist at NREL told me. “This uses our two most abundant natural resources—sunlight and water—to give us an energy supply that is inexhaustible.”
10. New designs are inherently safe. The nuclear industry is touting its “new and improved” nuclear plant models as “inherently safe.” They’re not. They, like all nuclear plants, are “inherently dangerous,” stresses Paul Gunter. They are subject to catastrophic accidents, they have “routine emissions” of radioactivity, and they produce nuclear waste which must somehow be isolated from the human environment for millions of years. Moreover, says Gunter, the new plants “may be even more risky, more dangerous, because they are using less concrete,” and the manufacturers are “papering over a lot of the risk.”
Says Michael Mariotte of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, the purportedly “inherently safe” new nuclear plants “do not exist.”
Admiral Hyman Rickover made the same ominous observation. The “father” o the nuclear Navy, he also supervised the construction of the Shippingport (Pennsylvania) Atomic Power Station, this country’s first commercial nuclear plant, which began operating in 1957. Rickover testified in his farewell address to a Congressional committee in 1982: “I’ll be philosophical. Until about 2 billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on Earth; you couldn’t have any life—fish or anything. Gradually, about 2 billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet…reduced making it possible for some form of life to begin…Now, when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible…I think there the human race is going to wreck itself.” Finally, Rickover declared that we must “outlaw nuclear reactors.”

A Sensible Alternative -- The New Prius Hybrid

2009-07-19T19:39:00.000-07:00

We just bought a new Prius hybrid car—and it is sensational.What can you say about getting an average of 55 miles per gallon? And, overall, the Prius works superbly.

I’d love to have been patriotic and bought an American car, but the closest American hybrid is the Ford Fusion getting 41 miles per gallon.

The 2010 Prius is the kind of car that should be produced by a U.S. manufacturer. Just out, it’s selling like hotcakes, not just here but in Japan, where it is made. With its release in recent weeks, it’s become the Number 1 selling car Japan. It quickly edged out the earlier released Honda Insight hybrid.

An Internet piece on this, headed “Battle of the Hybrids” notes: “Toyota now has released its all-new 2010 Prius hybrid in Japan…and it looks like there was lots of pent-up demand even in these difficult economic times.” As to the competition among hybrids for being the best-seller, it adds: “Notice a trend here.”

Surely, this is the direction that the U.S. auto manufacturers should have gone in. Why didn’t they?

The Economist magazine, in an caustic editorial about the Detroit auto-makers last month—“Detroitosaurus wrecks” was the title—spoke about how the problem has not been “the arrival of better, smaller, lighter Japanese cars.” It focused on General Motors’ “failure to respond in kind.” It said: “Rather than hitting back with superior products,” GM tried to limit the imports while producing “squadrons of SUV’s.”

Said The Economist: “If Detroit had spent less time lobbying for government protection and more on improving its products, it might have fared better.”

Now there has been a big exception: the Saturn. This was an attempt by GM to produce a well-made, fuel-efficient American car. We have one, a 1995 Saturn station wagon, which now has 165,000 miles on it, gets gas mileage in the mid-30s.

Not only were Saturns produced differently, with more quality, in a special factory GM set up in Tennessee, but the attitude of Saturn dealers, when you bought one or went for service, was extraordinarily user-friendly.

Then GM downsized and scuttled the Saturn initiative. In recent times, as the company got into big trouble, it sold off what was indeed its answer to Toyota, Honda and so on.

Detroit lost its way.

And like many, I’ve had to move to a sensible alternative.

Health Insurance Mess

2009-07-14T06:11:00.000-07:00

Eastern Long Island, where I live, is a microcosm of the health insurance mess in the United States.

In recent days, residents have been receiving a draconian notice from Empire BlueCross BlueShield, the area’s largest health insurer and a division of the biggest health insurer in the nation. “Important Hospital Termination Notice,” it’s headed.

It advises Empire Plan members that unless an “agreement” is reached with the three hospitals that serve eastern Suffolk County, “effective August 1, 2009” each of the hospitals “will no longer be a participating provider with Empire BlueCross BlueShield.”

Empire members would have to pay “out of network” at Southampton Hospital, Peconic Bay Medical Center in Riverhead and Eastern Long Island Hospital in Greenport, except for a few categories including “cases of emergency.”

The Empire letter gives a list of “alternate hospitals”—many miles to the west—including Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip, Huntington Hospital, St. Catherine of Siena Hospital in Smithtown and Southside Hospital in Bay Shore. Consider the trips of many miles from Montauk or East Hampton or Southampton or Shelter Island or Riverhead to and from these hospitals, especially for the sick.

Importantly, Stony Brook University Medical Center—the tertiary care hospital for Suffolk, the place where the most serious and complex medical care is provided—is not on the list. That’s because Empire hasn’t settled on rates with it either, so Empire is getting set to cut off Stony Brook also on August 1.

It’s a health care outrage. People and businesses and government entities are paying great amounts of money for Empire Plan insurance. Hospitals are struggling. Meanwhile, health insurers are making huge profits. The Empire plan is no longer that non-profit mainstay of health insurance in New York State. Five years ago, it was gobbled up by a for-profit company based in Indianpolis, Indiana called WellPoint.

WellPoint, notes Paul Connor, president and chief executive officer of Eastern Long Island Hospital, reported profits last year of $2.5 billion.

Connor, chairman of the East End Health Alliance—a grouping of the three East End hospitals—said the three simply “want to negotiate fair rates” from Empire. There’s a “mismatch,” said O’Connor, in the combination of non-profit hospitals and the for-profit health insurers. It’s a mismatch that has become the basic health care combination in the U.S.

(The other major health insurance entities in this region, GHI and HIP, also switched to becoming profit-making entities in recent years joining into EmblemHealth.)

Kevin Dahill, head of the Nassau-Suffolk Hospital Council, which represents 24 hospitals, said what is happening to the three eastern Suffolk hospitals and Stony Brook is “not an isolated event.”

The health insurers should function as “someone in the middle to broker” between health care providers and employers who buy health insurance for their employees or the employees themselves. But that’s not the case as health insurers have “risen to a level of dominance.” He said: “It’s like you selling your house and the person who walks away with most of the money is the real estate agent.”

“It’s an absurd business,” said Dahill.

It is, yes, wholly absurd—and life-threatening. The health and lives of millions upon millions of Americans are at stake as the private health insurers grab 30 to 40 percent of the money they receive—and on eastern Long Island and elsewhere focus on short-changing hospitals, doctors and patients to get their profits higher. (In comparison, non-profit Medicare has 5 percent overhead.)

The “termination” which Empire is threatening the hospitals should instead be what happens to Empire. It and the for-profit health insurance companies that have become central to health care in recent years should be eliminated.

The sensible solution now being debated nationally is for the U.S. government to create a single-payer or “Medicare for-all” national non-profit health care program. Polls show a large majority of Americans, and their doctors, support this. Meanwhile, the for-profit health insurance industry is fighting back—while undercutting health care here and everywhere else in America.

Getting in touch with your representatives in Congress and offering your view would be important.

"Naming Rights" Goes Wild

2009-07-13T09:15:00.000-07:00

What’s this with naming rights?

All over the U.S., financially-pressed governments especially have been selling what are called “naming rights”—rights sold to a corporation to have a building or road or a park named after it.

Last week’s funeral for Michael Jackson at the Staples Center is an example of how a corporation can really get its name out there by buying naming rights.

Staples, the office supply company, spent $100 million – yes, $100 million—to have the Los Angeles arena carry its name for 20 years.

Here on Long Island, Suffolk County has a 10-year $2.3 million naming rights deal under which the arena the Long Island Ducks call home is called Citibank Park.

And in New York City, last month the Metropolitan Transportation Authority began selling the naming rights to subway stations. Yes, subway stations.

The MTA approved a $4 million deal with Barclay’s Bank to have its name added to the the Atlantic Avenue/Pacific Street station in Brooklyn.

An WNBC-TV report asked: What’s next? Coca-Cola 59th Street-Lex? Pepsi Fifth Avenue—53rd?

In Nassau County, earlier, an $86 million, 20-year deal was reached with Clear Channel Communications to let it place 65 digital signs outside six Nassau County parks.

And Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy in March launched a pilot program that he said could lead to a wider effort to make county buildings and properties available for advertising. He stressed targeting advertising. He said it would be “more productive" for a Petco or Coleman "to have a Petco [county] dog run or a Coleman campground” rather than they having to “haphazardly” place ads.

At the same time, the Suffolk County Legislature passed a bill to have the county sell “naming rights” to “suitable county facilities” including roads and parks.

The bill declared that Suffolk County has “experienced budget shortfalls due to a weak economy, requiring budget adjustment measures, and therefore must actively pursue other sources of revenue.”

Environmental groups expressed concern about selling “naming rights” to parks. Said Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment: “It gives a commercial or corporate image to something that is supposed to be public space.”

And Legislator Jay Schneiderman of Montauk said that although the county “needs every dollar…the county shouldn’t be for sale to the highest bidder.”

That’s quite right as the “naming rights” push gets pretty wild.

Extended Auto Warranty Scam

2009-07-06T06:18:00.000-07:00

It came in the mail last week—and looked very official.

In bold print it said: “Request for Immediate Action—Time Sensitive Material.” Then: “18 U.S. Code: Warning: $2,000 Fine, 5 Years Imprisonment, or both, for any person interfering or obstructing with delivery of this letter.”

Then, the notice that this “is to inform you that your factory warranty may have expired or is about to expire. You may have an opportunity to extend your coverage on your vehicle.”

In small letters on the bottom though were a tip-off. The sender of the notice
“is not affiliated with any dealer or manufacturer.”

What I received was a phony pitch.

I’ve also—and I suspect you, too—have gotten phone calls along the same lines.

New York Senator Charles Schumer has been hollering about what’s been going on, speaking about U.S. consumers being “bombarded” with millions of “robocalls” for phony extended auto warranties. He’s called on the Federal Trade Commission to take action. It has agreed.

Says Schumer: “Many Americans have been fleeced by these companies….I look forward to these calls being stopped and the ill-gotten gains returned to their victims.”

Attorney generals around the nation have also been investigating.

I had an interesting experience with agents from one of these outfits a few weeks ago. First, I got a robo or automated call advising me that my car’s warranty was about to expire and I should press one to speak to a representative. I did that and then a woman, seemingly reading from a script, advised that I probably was entitled for an extended full service 100,000-mile warranty—covering the engine, the transmission, the air conditioner, everything.

But, I said, I didn’t think I had a warranty to begin with, considering I bought the car used on Craigslist with 85,000 miles on it. And now the old Honda has well over 100,000 miles. Are you sure it can be warrantied for another 100,000?

She said she’d pass me on to another agent. In broken English, he said his supervisor would make a decision.

“Congratulations,” said the supervisor. I could get the deal.

But I asked for it to be put in writing and mailed to me. He said that could only be done if I put a deposit down with a credit card. I don’t think so, I said.

What a huge scam. It should be stopped before any more people are hurt.

The Public's Right to Know

2009-06-30T17:06:00.000-07:00

As a journalist all my working life, I am completely committed to the public’s right to know.

Thus I was outraged recently hearing about Roger Corbin, a member of Long Island’s Nassau County Legislature, its former deputy presiding officer, bringing a lawsuit against News12 and Newsday for broadcasting and publishing images of him in handcuffs.

Corbin was arrested last month on charges that he didn’t report several hundred thousand dollars he received from a developer in his district. He was accused of income tax evasion and lying about the money he got.

U.S. District Court Judge Arthur Spatt ruled in the case that "the court is simply without authority to censor the press" or "to instruct the press as to what" it could air or publish.

A News12 spokeswoman, Deborah Koller-Feeney, said afterwards: “We are pleased with the judge’s decision, and are gratified that the public’s right to know will not be compromised.”

We have, after all, freedom of the press in the United States. Or should have.

There’s an interesting website: Photography is Not a Crime: It’s a First Amendment Right.

It’s run by Carlos Miller and it looks at various attempts in the U.S. to suppress—yes, photography.

It turns out that Miller, a journalist, was arrested by police down in Miami after taking some photos of five police officers standing inside a construction zone along Biscayne Boulevard.

No big deal, but it was against the wishes of the police, he relates, even though taking a photo in a public area is supposed to be legal in America.

Since then, he started the website (http://www.carlosmiller.com/) to focus, he says, on “First Amendment violations against other photographers throughout the country, which occur on a shockingly regular basis.”

Of course, the situation is far worse in other nations.

What a scene last month airing on CNN: Chinese intelligence agents running around with umbrellas to try to block CNN reporter John Vause from being seen on-camera as he reported, on Tianneman Square, about the bloody suppression there 20 years before.

CNN anchor Tony Harris exclaimed that the cover-up, literally, that was happening, "looks absolutely ridiculous. "

Harris said the Chinese agents apparently "don’t care what the rest of the world thinks."
Still, he noted, "the story gets out. "

Only feebly, really. In China the anniversary of the Tianneman Square massacre was suppressed in all Chinese media.

Outrageous.

'No Peaceful Nuclear Power' The whole planet must be declared a nuclear-free zone

2009-06-15T15:41:00.000-07:00

Published in the Manhattan Jewish Sentinel and Long Island Jewish World
Issue of June 12-18, 2009

President Barack Obama’s declaration last week in his speech in Cairo that “any nation — including Iran — should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power” ignores a central issue. There is no “peaceful nuclear power.” Nuclear weapons and nuclear power are two sides of the same coin.

Physicist Amory Lovins and attorney L. Hunter Lovins wrote in their seminal book, Energy/War: Breaking the Nuclear Link: “All nuclear fission technologies both use and produce fissionable materials that are or can be concentrated. Unavoidably latent in those technologies, therefore, is a potential for nuclear violence and coercion which may be exploited by governments, factions.

“Little strategic material is needed to make a weapon of mass destruction. A Nagasaki-yield bomb can be made from a few kilograms of plutonium, a piece the size of a tennis ball.

“A large power reactor,” they note, “annually produces…hundreds of kilograms of plutonium.” Civilian nuclear power technology, they conclude, provides the way to make nuclear weapons, furnishing the material and the trained personnel.

Indeed, that’s how India got The Bomb in 1974. Canada supplied a nuclear reactor to be used for “peaceful purposes” and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission trained Indian engineers. And lo and behold, India had nuclear weapons.

“Human society is too diverse, national passion too strong, human aggressiveness too deep-seated for the peaceful and warlike atom to stay divorced for long,” oceanographer Jacques Cousteau emphasized. “We cannot embrace one while abhorring the other; we must learn, if we want to live at all, to live without both.”

The organization Beyond Nuclear (www.beyondnuclear.org), on whose board I sit, focuses on this connection. The organization warns that the “insistence on supplying the technology, materials and know-how for civilian nuclear programs perpetuates the danger that nuclear weapons may also be developed—with speculation over Iran a case in point.”

“The ‘unofficial’ nuclear weapons states all developed weapons from civilian nuclear programs,” it notes. “At least 32 additional countries could do the same using uranium and plutonium from their civilian programs.”

The only real way to end the threat of nuclear weapons spreading throughout the world is by putting an end to nuclear technology. Such a move might seem radical but consider the even more radical alternative: a world in which scores of nations have nuclear weapons. There are parts of the earth designated “nuclear-free zones.” If we are to have a world free of the terrible threat of nuclear weapons, this designation should be extended to the entire planet: no nuclear weapons, no nuclear power.

To keep using carrots and sticks, by trying to juggle through the 2lst Century to prevent nuclear proliferation, we are on the road to inevitable nuclear disaster. A nuclear-free world is the only way humanity will be free of the specter of nuclear war.

Is it possible to put the atomic genie back into the bottle? Anything people have done, other people can undo. And the prospect of massive loss of life from nuclear destruction offers the best of reasons for doing so.

In Prague in April, Obama, in a remarkable declaration, said: “As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

That’s only half of what needs to be done. There needs to be a world, too, without the nuclear power plants that provide the means for any nation — or terrorist group — to get nuclear weapons.

There are well-grounded concerns that a nuclear-armed Iran might attack Israel. A nuclear counter-attack would follow. There would be atomic devastation of a major area of the world. Would zealots in Iran invite such self-destruction? This might have seemed illogical until the 9/11 terrorists demonstrated suicide as a desirable form of martyrdom. Thousands of suicide bombings have further illustrated the phenomenon.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic earlier this year: “You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.”

What about controls of the International Atomic Energy Agency? The IAEA was formed as a result of President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” speech before the UN in 1953. He proposed an international agency to promote civilian atomic energy and, at the same time, to control the use of fissionable material — a dual role paralleling that of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. In 1974, the AEC was abolished after Congress concluded that the two roles were a conflict of interest. But the IAEA — set up in the AEC’s image and riddled with the same conflict of interest — continues to operate.

With its mission “to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy,” it unabashedly boosts nuclear power at the same time it tries to police that same power.

In the last several months, I’ve been a guest by phone on Tehran radio programs on which Iranians have insisted that nuclear power represents “progress” to which their nation is entitled. I’ve argued that it is not progress but vested interests that are the driving force behind nuclear power.

At the end of World War II, the scientists, bureaucrats and corporate contractors involved in the Manhattan Project viewed their future with anxiety. The program, created after Albert Einstein wrote President Franklin Roosevelt calling on the U.S. to develop atomic technology before the Nazis did, led to the construction of four atomic bombs, two of which were dropped on Japan. The program would continue to build nuclear weapons, but bombs don’t lend themselves to commercial spin-offs. Schemes were concocted to keep jobs and contracts, despite the enormous dangers involved with nuclear technology. These included nuclear-powered airplanes, using radiation to zap food so it could last for years, and setting off atomic devices as a substitute for TNT. And there was the scheme to use the heat of nuclear reactors to boil water and generate electricity.

In Russia, where I’ve also researched and spoken, I found similar links, this time between the vested interest of the Soviet military nuclear establishment and its civilian atomic program.

In this country, some on the inside would eventually recognize the terrible mistake.

Admiral Hyman Rickover, “father” of the U.S. nuclear navy, stated in a farewell address before a committee of Congress in 1982 that the world must “outlaw nuclear reactors.” He said, “Until about 2 billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on earth: that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn’t have any life — fish or anything. Gradually, about 2 billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet and probably in the entire system reduced and made it possible for some for some form of life to begin.

“Now,” he went on, “when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible. … Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has life, in some cases for billions of years, and I think there the human race is going to wreck itself, and it’s far more important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it.”

As for nuclear weaponry, the “lesson of history,” he said, is that in war nations “will use whatever weaponry they have.”

Meanwhile, today, safe, clean, renewable energy technologies render nuclear power unnecessary. These technologies include solar (for which Iran is abundantly endowed), wind (now the fastest-growing and cheapest new energy form), geothermal, hydrogen, tidal-power, wave-power, bio-fuels, hydropower and co-generation.

On Iranian radio, too, I’ve stressed that if Iran gets nuclear plants, pushing nuclear power in response will be Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria and other Arab nations, and, considering the neighborhood’s volatility, atomic conflict would happen sooner than later. The Mideast is an especially wrong place for nuclear power.

There were some excellent points in Obama’s speech. “Tomorrow,” he said, “I will visit Buchenwald…part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed—more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction… is deeply wrong.” But his support for “peaceful nuclear power” — an oxymoron — was something else.

In the end, Einstein regretted the letter he sent in 1939 to President Roosevelt. “If I had known that the Germans would not succeed in constructing the atom bomb, I never would have moved a finger,” he wrote in Out of My Later Years. He described atomic energy as “a menace.”

How horrific it would be if a technology that came about because of the Nazis (fission was discovered in Berlin in 1938) is used by Iran for what could be a Second Holocaust.

Shoreham Turning Point--30 Years Later

2009-06-11T09:28:00.000-07:00

A demonstration 30 years ago involving 15,000 people, the largest protest ever held here on Long Island, New York, coupled with nearly 600 people being arrested for non-violent civil disobedience, was a turning point in the battle against the Shoreham nuclear power plant.

Importantly, not only would Shoreham be stopped but so would the Long Island Lighting Company’s scheme to build seven to 11 nuclear plants. In all the official filings for Shoreham, it was Shoreham Nuclear Power Station 1. LILCO planned two more nuclear plants at Shoreham. Four more were slated to the east, at Jamesport. And LILCO wanted to construct several more, also along the Long Island Sound, between Shoreham and Jamesport. This is why the book I wrote on the situation was titled Power Crazy.

Long Island would have been turned into a “nuclear park,” a term the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission used to denote areas slated for intense nuclear power development when Shoreham l was first advanced in 1966.

The key to the protest at Shoreham on June 3, 1979 was the partial core-meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in March. Proponents of nuclear power had insisted that the chances of a catastrophic accident were infinitesimal. The TMI accident and, even more seriously, the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident seven years later, showed that to be baloney.

Also a factor: what became known as the Shoreham “dump documents.” In May, a person who refinishes furniture, scavenging in the Southold Town dump, came upon a box of documents from Shoreham each headed “Engineering & Design Coordination Report.” The reports, brought to me, included 416 labeled as citing “nuclear safety related” problems in the building of Shoreham. The documents had apparently been dispatched to the dump after the TMI accident.

“A lemon grows on Long Island!” declared Dr. Michio Kaku, a nuclear physicist and professor at the City University of New York, at the June 3 demonstration. I had given Dr. Kaku copies of the reports to evaluate. He has gone on to become a well-known scientist globally—and remains solidly against nuclear power.

Nobel Prize-winner biologist Dr. George Wald also spoke declaring: “Not only is nuclear power anti-life” but despite “constant industry and government propaganda…it’s an economic disaster and the whole game now is to lay all its major costs on the people.”

Thirty years later, this is even more severe. These days, “no private money anywhere in the world is being used to build new nuclear plants,” notes Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service. And although the price of Shoreham ended up at $6.5 billion—in contrast to the “$65-$75 million range” LILCO spoke of when it announced Shoreham—today nuclear plants are projected to cost $12 billion each.

With Wall Street unwilling to providing financing, U.S. Senators Joseph Lieberman and John Warner last year pushed legislation to give $544 billion in taxpayer subsidies to build new nuclear plants. That didn’t pass, but the nuclear industry and its friends in the federal government are still pushing hard for your tax dollars.

No new nuclear plant has been ordered and built in the U.S. since 1973—and Shoreham was an element in this. As U.S. Energy Secretary Donald Herrington said at the height of the Shoreham fight: “The Shoreham plant must open! If it doesn’t, the signals will be the low point in this [nuclear] industry’s history.”

As was the case 30 years ago, the pro-nuclear propaganda remains intense. In their current drive to “revive” nuclear power, the nuclear promoters are trying to latch on to the global warming issue by saying nuclear plants don’t emit greenhouse gases. What we’re not supposed to know is that the overall nuclear “chain” or “cycle”—including uranium mining and milling, enrichment, fuel fabrication—has significant greenhouse gas emissions.

Meanwhile, the great advances since 1979 in safe, clean renewable energy technologies mean they can provide all the power we need—without endangering life. Nuclear power not only remains outrageously expensive and terribly dangerous but is--ever more clearly—unnecessary.

On Billionaires Becoming Politicians

2009-05-14T16:54:00.000-07:00

Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with billionaires becoming politicians.

But in this day with slick TV commercials being the key determinant of many a political contest, one has to be concerned with billionaire New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s way of doing politics.

Not that there’s anything wrong with how Bloomberg has run New York City.

He’s been OK compared to many a mayor.

Bloomberg was elected in 2001 after blitzing New York with millions upon millions of dollars in TV spots.

He got re-elected in 2005 with the help of more millions upon millions of dollars in TV commercials.

Bloomberg spent $77.8 million to get re-elected in 2005, according to Newsday, much of this for TV spots. This comes, it said, to $103 for each vote he got. It was 12 percent over his 2001 spending.

And although term limits were supposed to limit Bloomberg to two terms, with arm twisting he got the New York City Council to alter the term limit law for hizzoner—and let him run for a third term.

And now he’s running again with again the heavy use of TV commercials.

The New York Times has just reported that Bloomberg “has poured $7.5 million into the campaign so far.” And the election is six months away. He is, said the paper, “shattering—once again—records for spending in a New York City election.”

The Times said “the TV ad wars have started in the New York City mayor’s race and, so far, it’s a study in asymmetrical combat.” Bloomberg, it said, is “running financial laps around his challengers.”

The "ads showcase," the Times said, Bloomberg’s “staggering financial advantage.”

There are calls to limiting political advertising in New York City, “to level the playing field,” because of the Bloomberg drown-‘em-with TV commercials strategy.

The Bloomberg camp responds that its simply “exploiting a financial advantage.”

Meanwhile, you can’t sit down in front of the screen in the New York Metropolitan Area these days without seeing Mayor Mike. Over and over again.

“Strong, independent leadership to keep New York City working,” the ads say. And big money to keep Madison Avenue’s TV commercial-makers working.

Meanwhile, as the New York Observer reports, Bloomberg is “still not taking questions at campaign events.”

Apparently he prefers being packaged in TV spots.

Is this the way a sensible democracy is supposed to function?

I don’t think so.

A Radioactive Extension for Aging Nuclear Plants

2009-04-17T03:14:00.000-07:00

For 10 years now, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been busily extending the operating license of nuclear power plants—designed to run for 40 years—another 20 years.

Imagine driving down a highway in a 60-year-old car.

But safety concerns are minimized by the NRC, a lapdog of the nuclear industry. Just as the NRC has never denied a construction or operating license for a nuclear plant anywhere, anytime in the U.S., it has rubber-stamped every application for a 20-year extension for now 52 nuclear plants.

That’s half the 104 nuclear plants in the U.S. and, as the 40-year licenses of the rest get set to expire, watch the NRC extend their licenses to run for another 20 years, too.

And it may end up to be more than 20 years. The New York Times in a report April 2 on the NRC extending the operating license to 60 years of the oldest nuclear plant in the U.S., Oyster Creek in New Jersey, noted that “some commission officials have even discussed the possibility of a second round of extensions that would allow reactors to operate for up to 80 years.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/science/earth/02nuclear.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=Nuclear%20Regulatory%20Commission%20&st=cse

Imagine driving down a highway in an 80-year-old car.

Consider how trustworthy that 1929 antique would be racing down the interstate.

“This decision is radioactive. To keep open the nation’s oldest nuclear power plant for another 20 years is just going to lead to a disaster,” said Jeff Tittel of the Sierra Club. “We could easily replace the plant with 200 windmills that will not pose a danger.”

At the NRC hearings on the re-licensing of Oyster Creek, evidence was presented that the critical drywell liner—the shell that encases the reactor and is supposed to suppress radioactive steam during an accident—is too corroded to deal with a mishap. Major deterioration was also found in other areas of the plant 60 miles south of New York City.

Even an avid nuclear power booster, William Tucker, who recently published a pro-nuclear book, is calling for no operating license extensions for Oyster Creek and the Indian Point nuclear plants, 28 miles north of New York City which the NRC is also soon to rule on re-licensing. “Veterans of the nuclear industry I talk to say they are very concerned that relying on aging reactors like Oyster Creek and Indian Point is eventually going to lead to an accident which will kill nuclear power in this country forever,” said Tucker in a statement last week.

But many, many people would be killed, too.

The NRC working with Sandia National Laboratories did an analysis in the 1980s on the consequences of a meltdown with breach of containment at every nuclear plant in the United States—including Oyster Creek and the two operating Indian Point plants.

Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences for U.S. Nuclear Plants (acronymed CRAC-2) projected, for Oyster Creek: 16,000 “peak early fatalities;” 10,000 “peak early injuries;” 23,000 “peak cancer deaths;” and $79.8 billion in “scaled costs” in terms of property damage—and that was in 1980 dollars. For Indian Point 2, in a more densely populated area with more valuable real estate that would be rendered uninhabitable for millennia, it would be: 46,000 “peak early fatalities;” 141,000 “peak early injuries;” 13,000 “peak cancer deaths” and $274 billion in “scaled costs.” And for the slightly larger Indian Point 3 plant, it would be 50,000 “peak early fatalities;” 167,000 “peak early injuries;” 14,000 “peak cancer deaths;” and $314 billion in “scaled costs.” Again, those are 1980 dollars; it would be triple that today.

The World Nuclear Organization notes how “most of today’s nuclear plants…were originally designed for 30 or 40-year operating lives…Some components simply wear out, corrode or degrade to a low efficiency…The properties of materials may degrade with age, particularly with heat and neutron irradiation.”

But operators of nuclear power plants want to wring out as much from their investments as they can—and not only do they want them to operate beyond their expected lifetimes, they are seeking to run them hotter and harder in order to generate more power. And the NRC has been obliging the industry on this, too.

The first nuclear facilities the NRC gave permission to operate another 20 years were the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plants in Maryland 45 miles southeast of Washington, D.C. That was in 1999.

“The public has been closed out of the process,” said Paul Gunter, then with the Nuclear Information & Resource Service. He added: “The whole term ‘nuclear safety’ is an oxymoron. It’s an inherently dangerous process and an inherently dangerous industry that has been aging.”

Last week Gunter, now director of the Reactor Oversight Program of the organization Beyond Nuclear, said the NRC re-licensing program is “blind to how these machines are breaking apart at the molecular level…they embrittle, crack and corrode.” The agency in its “rigged game” is driving the nation toward a nuclear disaster, he said.

Can the NRC be stopped before disaster occurs?

The U.S. Congress finally became so disgusted with the Atomic Energy Commission and its nuclear boosterism—it, too, never denied a construction or operating license for a nuclear plant anywhere, anytime in the U.S..—that it abolished the AEC in 1974. Congress then created the NRC to ostensibly properly regulate the nuclear industry.

That has never happened.

It’s time that the NRC be abolished, too, along with the toxic technology that it promotes—nuclear power—before it is too late. Safe, clean renewable energy technologies are here today making dangerous nuclear power unnecessary.

Meanwhile, by extending the licenses of nuclear plants by 20 and now perhaps 40 years, the NRC has gone beyond tempting fate. It is asking for it, the it being an atomic catastrophe which would kill tens of thousands and render a part of the United States a dead zone.

(Published on CounterPunch April 13, 2009)

Damage Not Done By W

2009-04-16T18:14:00.000-07:00

One of the things we must be thankful for during this time of economic instability is that former President George W. Bush never got his way in privatizing social security. Bush had wanted social security accounts transferred from the government to the stock market.

If millions upon millions of Americans today had had their social security accounts invested in the stock market, consider the situation.

The distress of folks has been intense enough seeing their 401(k) retirement accounts—heavily based on stocks—lose a good part of their value with the decline of Wall Street. Imagine if this had happened to their social security accounts.

This privatization of social security was not some incidental issue for the Bush administration. Bush built is second-term domestic policy agenda around it.

There were critics of the scheme. It was a “lethal plan,” insisted Edith Weller of the Economic Policy Institute. She wrote that social security under the Bush proposal “would no longer be a social insurance program providing a guarantee of…lifelong retirement income. Instead,” peoples “core retirement income would be put at risk.”

She said “social security is too important a source of income for America’s families to be left to the uncertainties of the stock market.”

And this was well before the stock market demonstrated something beyond uncertainties—it had a meltdown, as it has every few decades in U.S. history.

The AARP campaigned against the Bush plan and was part of the coalition that successfully stopped it in Congress.

Importantly, polls showed that a majority of Americans were dead-set against it—although that often doesn’t deter politicians.

The AARP noted that Bush’s line was that with privatization, Americans would have “a chance to make money in the stock market.” It emphasized that it “and other critics contend that private accounts carved out of social security funds add an element of risk to retirement savings.”

Bush was on social security privatization—as he was on so many issues—as stubborn as could be. Even as he saw his plan failing, he insisted he was “confident that eventually the will would be there to make it a reality.”

It’s a new day today. This and so many of Bush’s bad calls—from environmental protection to regulatory issues to health matters and on and on—are gone, thank the democratic process.

We All Live, More Or Less, In Illinois

2009-03-06T03:54:00.000-08:00

The antics of now thankfully former Governor Rod Blagojevich—and the jailing of his predecessor and two other former Illinois governors for corruption—resulted in the perception that Illinois is the most corrupt state.

As an FBI agent commented when the infamous tapes of Blagojevich were presented: “If it is not the most corrupt state in the United States, Illinois is certainly one hell of a competitor.”

Following that, the New York Times devoted nearly a full page to listings of comparative corruption among states. http://nytimes.com/2008/12/14/weekinreview/14marsh.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=corruption%20state&st=cse

One chart was based on local, state and federal officials convicted of federal corruption charges between 1996 and 2007. Florida topped the list followed by New York and Texas. As for my neighboring state of Connecticut—sometimes called Corrupticut after the jailing for corruption of former Governor John Rowland—it was smack in the middle, 26.

Then there was a chart based on convicted public officials per one million constituents. This was described as “perhaps a better measure”—crookedness based on one-person, one vote.

Well, North Dakota topped that list, with Alaska second—you betcha.

Then there was a chart based on the views of journalists who cover state governments. In their minds, Rhode Island, which also not long ago had a governor jailed for corruption, was Number One. Louisiana, Two. New York was pretty well down on that list—16, even below Connecticut, 12.

Back to Illinois, Chicago and that long-corrupt county in which the windy city sits, Cook County. There was a kind of contest as last year ended, on the website http://www.reformcookcounty.com/ on Cook County’s Most Corrupt Activities of 2008.

Among the top were, of course, Blagojevich’s attempted sale of now President Obama’s Senate seat.

Also on the list was the enactment of a hefty sales tax increase—giving Cook County the highest sales tax in the country: 10.25%. Ouch.

Yeah, we pay for corruption in many ways.

Which takes us to Wall Street’s now fallen financial lions, the failed bank tycoons, the other corporate crooks in the tradition of Enron, etc.

Corrupt politicians. Corrupt financial titans.

It’s like comparing typhoid and malaria.

Both must be eradicated.

If there’s to be a civilized society there needs to be integrity and honesty.

At this point, we all live, more or less, in Illinois.

Cold War Atomic Craziness

2009-03-05T04:13:00.000-08:00

On Long Island, where I live, a bill was recently passed by the Suffolk County Legislature providing for prisoner labor to sort metal which has piled up at the former BOMARC base in Westhampton.

The legislature’s presiding officer said that Suffolk County could make millions of dollars by selling the metal as scrap.

The base was transferred to the county after its closing and has been used as a firing range for police, an impoundment yard for vehicles and for storage of old equipment and county records. .

To get some background on the BOMARC base, I went to Google, putting in the words BOMARC and Suffolk. Among the first websites listed was that of the New York State Military Museum which related: “BOMARC, the missile site in Westhampton was operated by the 6th Air Defense Missile Squadron of the USAF Air Defense Command. It was operational with the first version of the BOMARC missile, the BOMARC A, from 1959 through 1964. The base has 56 missile shelters. Each missile was armed with a 10-kiloton nuclear warhead.” http://www.dmna.state.ny.us/forts/fortsA_D/bomarc.htm

What was that? “Each missile was armed with a 10-kiloton nuclear warhead.” The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had the TNT equivalent of 13 kilotons.

There were further details on other websites. They told of how the mission of the BOMARC base in Westhampton—and BOMARC bases set up all over the nation—was to blast Soviet bombers from the sky. Why use nuclear-tipped missiles? That way a direct hit need not be made. Once a BOMARC missile came close to the Soviet bombers, the atomic weapon on its tip would be detonated and destroy not one but part of a formation of bombers.

A November 21, 1958 front-page article in the New York Times (downloadable from the New York Times’ online archive) was headlined: “Riverhead Missile Base to Get Bomarcs With Nuclear Warheads by ’60.” It began: “The Suffolk Bomarc Base, ninety miles east of New York City, will be equipped with anti-aircraft missiles carrying nuclear warheads. The missiles, which have a range up to 250 miles, will be launchable from the site near Riverhead, L.I.” There would be 56 Bomarc missiles “at the ready.” The article spoke of there being, a day earlier, a “press conference by Army and civilian engineers” and “Air Force and Boeing Airplane Company specialists” at which these “experts confirmed that the Bomarc base would soon be fully operational atomically.” The story further noted: “No special provisions have been made for atomic hazards; they are not needed, the engineers said.”

Curiosity led me to information on the Nike bases I knew were set up on Long Island around the same time. BOMARC was an Air Force project and its acronym combined the names of its developers: BO for Boeing and MARC for Michigan Aerospace Research Center. Nike was an Army missile program and named for the mythical Greek goddess of victory.

There are numerous websites about the Nike bases established on Long Island and elsewhere in the U.S. and how the Nike Hercules model was nuclear-tipped—with bases on Long Island armed with nuclear-tipped Nikes including those in Rocky Point, Amityville, Lido Beach, Oyster Bay and Lloyd Harbor. While a main reason for the BOMARC base in Westhampton was to intercept Soviet bombers headed to New York City, the Nike bases were primarily set up to defend facilities on Long Island considered strategic, among them, according to the New York State Military Museum website, Brookhaven National Laboratory and military industrial facilities including the then Grumman Corp. and Republic Aviation factories.

There were three types of Nike nuclear tips: “low-yield” 3-kiloton; “medium yield” 20-kiloton; and “high yield” 30-kiloton

I put together an article for Long Island newspapers on the metal scavenging project at the ex-BOMARC base and referred to some of the history of nuclear-tipped missiles on Long Island. Editors inquired: how could this be? If these nuclear-tipped missiles were detonated over and around Long Island, wouldn’t there be impacts to people on the ground? Absolutely. We would have had warheads with vast explosive power—comparable to and greater than the Hiroshima atomic bomb—detonating all around us, spreading deadly radioactive fall-out.

With all the violence of recent years—and our concerns of violence ahead—we should give thanks that somehow we got through this Cold War atomic nightmare.

Killer Tobacco

2009-03-04T04:54:00.000-08:00

It’s high time the U.S. government regulate tobacco for what it is—a dangerous drug.

There’s a bill that’s been in Congress that would empower the Food and Drug Administration to regulate the content and marketing of tobacco products.

The FDA would not be able to ban tobacco products outright under the bill, or to eliminate in them nicotine—that ingredient which hooks smokers, narcotic like.

But the FDA would be able to mandate a reduction in levels of nicotine and other harmful ingredients—cancer-causing ingredients—in cigarettes. And it would be able to restrict tobacco advertising.

The legislation has been strongly endorsed by the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free kids, and other organizations around the country.

In the Senate, Democrat Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, are the sponsors. In the House, Democrat Henry Waxman of California and Republican Tom Davis of Virginia are the sponsors, all of identical, bipartisan measures.

No surprise, the administration of George W. Bush was against the legislation.

President Barak Obama is for it.

The New York Times, in an editorial, has described the legislation as “the culmination of more than a decade of struggle to bring the renegade tobacco industry under regulatory control.”

The tobacco industry has been out of control for many decades.

Its liars-for-hire denied the connection between tobacco smoking and lung cancer. Its advertising in newspapers led to a press silence on the smoking-cancer link, broken only decades-ago by independent investigative reporter George Seldes. It plied politicians with money to fend off government action.

And the tobacco industry and its products kill.

In a recent report, the federal Centers for Disease Control determined that nationwide, tobacco use kills more than 443,000 persons a year. That’s nearly a half million people a year—dying because of smoking.

The number of non-smokers who die each year from exposure to second-hand smoke: 50,000.

The related health care costs: enormous, more than $100 billion annually.

Tobacco use is the leading cause of death in the United States that’s preventable.

But the huge problem has been the powerful tobacco industry—compromising government and the press, peddling its cancer-sticks with abandon, addicting millions of people and lying about the harm of its deadly products.

There’s been litigation against tobacco companies and huge financial judgments.

There needs to be far more action—and now.

Not Just Peanuts

2009-03-03T04:54:00.001-08:00

It’s being charged that the Peanut Corporation of America knowingly sold peanuts tainted with salmonella in 2007 and 2008.

The Food and Drug Administration, which made the allegation, has, meanwhile, asked retailers and consumers to throw out every product made with peanuts processed by the corporation’s plant in Blakeley, Georgia. It has produced peanut butter, paste and granules used in products including cookies and ice cream.

FDA officials said four different strains of salmonella have been detected at the plant at which, in 14 inspections made in January, it found unsanitary conditions, including dead roaches and gaps where rodents could enter.

The situation has been linked to a salmonella outbreak in 43 states in which nine people have died, 500 have become ill.

Officials of the Peanut Corporation of America have a lot of answering to do and that might be in criminal court. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut has called on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation.

But, meanwhile, what about the FDA—which is supposed to protect us from bad food?

Until its 14 inspections after the salmonella outbreak happened, the last time the FDA inspected the Blakeley plant was in 2001.

Representative John Dingell of Michigan has said the Peanut Corporation of America situation demonstrates that the FDA “can’t and doesn’t do its job, and American lives are at risk. We’re killing Americans.”

This is a very old story: about those who are supposed to protect us from tainted food and other poisons failing to do so, and that’s often because of a coziness with those they’re supposed to be regulating.

I wrote a book about this in which I told the tale of Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, regarded as the father of the FDA. Indeed, there’s even a postage stamp in his honor. As chief chemist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he played a large part in getting the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 passed and the FDA created.

But in 1912, as a matter of conscience, Dr. Wiley resigned from the government and wrote a book, The History of a Crime Against the Food Law, about how the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act was not being properly enforced because of power of those it was supposed to police.

President Barak Obama has an opportunity to do something about a century of failure by U.S. regulatory agencies—especially the FDA. It’s a matter of life and death.

Solar Bonanza

2009-03-02T04:57:00.000-08:00

It’s amazing—I’m seeing our electric meter going backwards.

We’ve just gotten solar panels installed on the roof of our house and they harvest all the electricity we need. And under the net metering program of our region’s utility, the Long Island Power Authority, that means LIPA is to send us a check for the excess electricity fed back into the grid. Also, we’ve put up panels on the roof that heat water. Even on cold days, as long as the sun is shining water comes down from those panels at 100 to 120 degrees.

You can do the same thing. And with federal and state tax credits and with LIPA, a big rebate, you can do it with an astonishing financial break.

You can now get 70 percent—yes, 70 percent—off the cost of a solar photovoltaic installation.

I’ve reported on solar power for decades—but it took doing a TV documentary this summer, “Renewable Energy Is More Than Ready,” for WVVH-TV, to see the reality of the feasibility of solar energy.

To see the program, go to YouTube:
WVVH-TV Renewable Energy is More Than Ready (Part 1)http://youtube.com/watch?v=1Iug28mWSlY
WVVH-TV Renewable Energy is More than Ready (Part 2)http://youtube.com/watch?v=Xw0qLzaqmos

A main figure in the program is Gordian Raacke of Renewable Energy Long Island. We went to his home where solar photovotaic panels produce all the electricity he and his wife need. And solar thermal panels furnish hot water.

So we arranged to have photovoltaic and hot water panels installed on our roof. The work was done by Majestic Son and Sons of Patchogue, New York. If the Obama administration is looking for infrastructure projects that produce jobs and have a grand energy pay-off, solar energy is Number One.

A swarm of Majestic workers, including the company’s president, Dean Hapshe, and two of his sons, were all over our roof merrily installing panels.

For Hapshe, it’s far more than a business. He’s a pioneer in solar power installing solar systems for 29 years. He says of solar: “It’s limitless. And free.” And, with global warming, vital .

As noted, the final price is a bonanza. A 3,000-watt photovoltaic system (what the Raackes have) costs $27,000. But then reduce that by 70 percent. And you, too, can watch electric meter go backward.

Imagine if all over the United States, houses and businesses were equipped with solar panels. Energy independence—courtesy of the sun. Just great.

The Military-Industrial-Scientific Complex

2009-03-01T10:42:00.000-08:00

Twenty-eight years ago, Dwight Eisenhower gave what has often been described as the most memorable farewell address by any U.S. president since George Washington. He warned in the speech about the “military-industrial complex.”

But in the original draft, as historian Douglas Brinkley has noted in an article on the address in the September 2001 issue of American Heritage magazine, Eisenhower was to warn not only of a “military-industrial complex” but of a “military-industrial-scientific complex.” (http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/2001/6/2001_6_58.shtml)

Brinkley writes that because of the plea of Eisenhower’s science advisor, James Killian, was the word “scientific” eliminated.

The “military-industrial-scientific complex” was the far more accurate description of the complex of vested interests manipulating the U.S. then—and now.

Eisenhower in the 1961 address declared: “In the council of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial complex.” And although allowing the removal of “scientific,” he then went on with other words on this issue. He said, “Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists and laboratories” and people must be “alert” that “public policy could…become the captive of a scientific technological elite.”

The system of U.S. national laboratories which grew out of the crash program of World War II to build atomic bombs, the Manhattan Project, was—and is—the base for much of the scientific establishment about which Eisenhower was concerned.

With the war over, the scientists, engineers and corporate contractors, notably General Electric and Westinghouse, at the facilities which sprung up during the war continued to build nuclear weapons, thousands of them. But atomic weapons don’t lend themselves to commercial spin-off. What else could be done, they asked, with nuclear technology to perpetuate the jobs and contracts which began with the Manhattan Project?

After the war’s end, the Manhattan Project was turned into the Atomic Energy Commission. Under it, and at the former Manhattan Project laboratories which the commission took over and at the new laboratories it built, the push was on for all sorts of other things atomic: nuclear power plants, food irradiation, nuclear-powered airplanes and spacecraft, atomic devices for excavation—anything to bring more activity and money to the vested interests established during the war.

As President, Barack Obama draws from the federal scientific establishment for appointments and it continues to shape U.S. policy, notably energy policy, Eisenhower’s warning needs to be sounded again.

And we need to reduce the awesome political power of the government’s scientific complex.

Making Our Tax System Progressive Again

2009-03-01T10:09:00.000-08:00

Taxes have quite a history in the United States. At its start, the federal government was supported by taxes on whiskey, carriages, sugar, tobacco and snuff.

In 1817, Congress moved to have the government rely instead on tariffs on imported goods.

Then, in 1862, to pay to fight the Civil War, the nation’s first income tax law was passed. It was made the mainstay of our tax system in 1916 with the idea that it would be what’s called progressive. The more people make, the more they pay.

That worked fine until Ronald Reagan and what was called the Reagan Revolution, a revolution but one involving the richest in the U.S. Their tax rate was halved. More recently, there were more huge tax breaks given to the rich under the tenure of George W. Bush.

So increasingly, those in the middle and lower classes ended up carrying a greater and greater proportional tax load.

On a state level, this has what’s been happening, too.

In the last three decades, New York State, where I live, has also cut its tax rate for the richest by 50 percent—so now someone making $4 million a year pays the same as someone earning $40,000 a year in New York.

Over in Connecticut, the income tax situation is also disproportionally tougher on working families.

On this side of the Long Island Sound, folks have joined together to challenge the unfair tax structure—pressing their case recently in a special lobby day in Albany.

Of great concern, New York State seeking to deal with an anticipated $15 billion deficit by placing even more of a burden on working people.

And not just working people. In an especially nasty would-be rip-off, Governor David Paterson’s proposed state budget would have 90% of the money raised by a tuition hike imposed on State University students go to the state’s general fund instead of SUNY.

Paying the deficit off the backs of students. Disproportioinally taxing the middle and lower classes. This is not progressive.

Meanwhile, in Washington, President Obama is preparing a new federal budget—which includes ending the enormous tax breaks the rich have received. As he said in his speech to the nation last week, people earning less than $250,000 would see a tax break, those above an increase. The Obama administration would try to make our tax system progressive again.

It’s about time.

Energy We Can Live With

2008-10-31T11:07:00.000-07:00

Presentation at Dutchess County Community College
October 30, 2008

When I originally made plans for this presentation, the title was to be: "The Next Time You Visit The Pump, Are You Ready to Pay Over $5.00 A Gallon For Gas? Energy We Can Live With." It was the summer and the price of gasoline was skyrocketing: to $4 and, indeed, $4.25 and $4.50 and higher a gallon.

That was a few months ago. The oil companies were claiming the fault was China and India going car-crazy and guzzling up gas, problems in the Middle East, then it was refinery capacity, and all along -- if the ban on drilling in areas on the continental shelf offshore was only lifted, everything would be different.

Meanwhile, filling up a car, at 40 or 50 bucks a shot, was hurting people badly. And impacting on the economy.

And, the oil companies were raking in record, indeed obscene profits -- billions upon billions of dollars. People were getting angrier and angrier thinking that some kind of price-rigging was going on.

Then, suddenly, just in recent weeks, the price of gas went down and down. Now it's back to under $3 a gallon. Would you believe? The price of a barrel of crude has dived -- from a high of $145 a barrel in July to as of this week less than $65 a barrel.

And people are still car-crazy in China and India, problems continue in the Middle East, no new refineries have been built in the last several weeks, and as to that ban on drilling on the continental shelf offshore, it was just lifted by Congress -- but, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, if drilling starts ASAP, it wouldn't "have a significant impact on domestic prices...before 2030."

Do you think the oil industry is manipulating the market, grabbing our money to make windfall profits and is deep in deception?

I've thought so for years. Let me tell you a story -- how decades ago I broke the story of the oil industry exploring in the Atlantic -- and received my first lesson in oil industry honesty.

I was a reporter for a daily newspaper on Long Island, the Long Island Press, and I got a tip from a fisherman out of Montauk who said he had seen the same sort of vessel as the boats he observed searching for oil when he was a shrimper in the 1940s in the Gulf of Mexico. I spent the day telephoning oil companies. Public relations people for each said, no, we�re not involved in looking for oil in the Atlantic.

I was leaving the office when there was the yell that a public relations man from Gulf was on the phone. The PR man at Gulf's headquarters in Pittsburgh said he checked and, yes, Gulf was involved in searching oil in the Atlantic -- in a "consortium" of 32 oil companies. These included the companies that all day issued flat denials.

Later on, I looked into whether offshore drilling was really as safe as the oil industry claimed. I visited the first rig set up in the Atlantic -- off Nova Scotia.

Some safe. My article began: "The rescue boat goes round and round...as the man from Shell concedes, 'We treat every foot of hole like a potential disaster.'"

On the rig were capsules to eject crew members in an accident. I wrote, "Workers may all be kept in one piece, but erupting oil won't, the man from Shell admits." The Shell executive acknowledged that "curtains, booms and other devices the oil industry flashes in its advertising 'just don't work in over five-foot seas.'" So, he said, there are "stockpiles of clean-up material on shore. Not straw as in the States. Here we have peat moss."

As the President's Council on Environmental Quality in a report on offshore Atlantic drilling stated: "A major spill along the beaches of Cape Cod, Long Island or the Middle or South Atlantic states could devastate the areas affected�the Atlantic [is a] hostile environment for oil and gas operations. Storm and seismic conditions may be more severe than in the North Sea or the Gulf of Mexico."

That's why there was that prohibition on drilling on the continental shelf for 26 years -- and, as of last month, in the midst of our most recent oil crisis, gone. Meanwhile, the price of gas has come down�with about as much logic and sense as it went up.

There's a terrific new book just out: The Tyranny of Oil: The World's Most Powerful Industry
-- and What We Must To Do Stop It. The author, Antonia Juhasz, writes: "The masters of the oil industry, the companies known as "Big Oil," exercise their influence "through rapidly and ever-increasing oil and gasoline prices, a lack of viable alternatives, the erosion of democracy, environmental destruction, global warming, violence, and war."

She cites a Gallup poll on �public perceptions of U.S. industry -- and reports that the oil industry "earned the lowest rating of any industry."

Americans are on to the oil industry -- and they need to do a lot about it!

And it's not just Big Oil. When it comes to energy, it's Big Oil and Big Coal and Big Nuclear -- vested energy interests -- which manipulate U.S. policy.

S. David Freeman who helped form the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and headed the Tennessee Valley Authority, and also the New York Power Authority here, and is the author of another fine book, Winning Our Energy Independence: An Energy Insider Shows How, calls oil, coal and nuclear, "The Three Poisons," as a chapter in the book

Meanwhile, and this is the central point of my talk today and Freeman's book and something I've focused on for decades: there's a windfall at hand of safe, renewable, clean energy -- if only it would be fully pursued.

But these vested interests, working with their partners in the U.S. government, have fought that. These energy technologies are energy that we can live with, energy that can unhook us from oil, coal and nuclear.

An example of a renewable energy bonanza is hot dry rock geothermal energy. It's a technology originated by the U.S -- at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It turns out that below half the earth, two to six miles down, it's extremely hot. When naturally flowing water hits those hot rocks and has a place to come up, you get geysers like in California or Iceland. But, the Los Alamos scientists found, water can be sent down an injection pipe to hit the hot dry rock below and rise up second production pipe as super-heated water that can turn a turbine and generate electricity or furnish heat. They built a model hot dry rock facility at Fenton Hill near the lab. I was there in the 90s, and the system worked great.

Others in media were equally enthusiastic. As Fortune headlined an article: "Using Hot Rocks to Generate Energy. The biggest -- and cleanest -- power source on earth."

As the New York Times wrote: "The estimated energy potential of hot dry rock nationwide is 10 million quads -- more energy than this country uses in thousands of years."

Here's a television news piece I did:

(PLAY THREE-MINUTE ENVIROVIDEO PIECE ON HOT DRY ROCK GEOTHERMAL)

That was some statement from Dave Duchane, a respected, careful scientist, that "hot dry rock is has an almost unlimited potential to supply all the energy needs of the United States and all the world."

So what happened? A request for proposal -- an RFP -- was prepared by Los Alamos inviting industry take over the Fenton Hill facility that you just saw and to "produce and market energy" from it. It was to be an initial step in getting hot dry rock technology out there into the United States. But on its way to Washington, the RFP was cancelled by the Department of Energy. Cancelled because hot dry rock was seen as too much of a threat to other kinds of energy, sources at Los Alamos have told me. And the Department of Energy ordered the Fenton Hill facility decommissioned.

Some work has restarted with hot dry rock geothermal in the U.S. But much, much more is going on in other countries among them Australia, The Phillipines, Switzerland and Japan.

During the oil crisis of the 70s President Jimmy Carter set up what's now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The 1,000-employee NREL in Golden, Colorado is a beacon for a sustainable, independent energy future.

Let's consider hydrogen -- it's the fuel choice for locomotion in the future. For moving vehicles of all types -- and more.

As environmental analyst Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, in his book EcoEconomy: Building an Economy for the Earth, says: "In the eco-economy, hydrogen will be the dominant fuel, replacing oil, much like oil replaced coal and coal replaced wood. Since hydrogen can be stored and used as needed, it provides perfect support for an energy economy with wind and solar power as the main pillars. If this pollution-free, carbon-free energy source can be developed sooner rather than later, many of our present energy-related problems can be solved. Electricity and hydrogen can together provide energy in all the forms needed to operate a modern economy, whether powering computers, fueling cars, or manufacturing steel."

The ideal way to produce hydrogen? Through solar energy breaking water down into its two components: hydrogen and oxygen.

Indeed, that's exactly what's being worked on at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Here's my interview with John Turner, senior scientist, at NREL.

(PLAY TURNER INTERVIEW)

Here is Dr. Turner, another respected, careful scientist speaking of "sunlight to hydrogen -- basically an inexhaustible fuel...the forever fuel."

The hydrogen-through-solar-energy approach of NREL is also the way Volkswagen envisions a hydrogen infrastructure. It has opened a solar hydrogen filling station in Germany built in collaboration with the German solar energy company Solvis. You drive up and see a large solar array which, through electrolysis, produces hydrogen from water. And you fill'er-up -- with hydrogen. It's all part, says Volkswagen, of people being able to move around in "emission-neutralized vehicles at standard market prices."

That combination of endless hydrogen from water and endless solar from the sun to produce it is being called green hydrogen. But what has the administration of George W. Bush been up to -- with its cronies in the coal, oil and nuclear industries -- looking to use coal, oil and gas, and nuclear power to produce hydrogen.

Not long ago I was in Idaho where, at the Idaho National Laboratory, a nuclear power plant -- yes, a nuclear power plant -- is being built to make hydrogen. To get clean hydrogen -- and when hydrogen burns, all that's left is water vapor -- the Bush administration would use atomic power with all its dangers: the potential for catastrophic accidents, routine radioactive emissions, the production of nuclear waste that somehow must be safeguarded for millennia, problems of nuclear proliferation, and so forth.

And, according to The Financial Times, "you come up with a requirement of about 4,000 reactors" needed to be constructed in the U.S. to produce the nuclear power-produced hydrogen to replace gas."

Talking about screwing up a great idea. As Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, says: "President Bush and the environmental community agree that hydrogen is America�s future. We disagree on where to get the hydrogen from. The White House would like to extract hydrogen from coal and natural gas and by harnessing nuclear power to the task ---locking us into a black hydrogen future. The environmental community would like to use renewable sources of energy like wind, solar, hydro and geothermal to extract hydrogen from water or to extract hydrogen from biomass -- a green hydrogen future."

A coalition -- the Green Hydrogen Coalition -- which includes Greenpeace, League of Conservation Voters, Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Foundation on Economic Trends, and others, charges that the Bush administration is "attempting to hijack America's hydrogen future to promote the interests of the coal, oil, gas and nuclear industries."

Returning to that good U.S. Department of Energy laboratory committed to clean, safe, renewable power -- the National Renewable Energy Laboratory-- I think what I have been most impressed visiting there has been that whatever division I went to, the outlook is for boundless energy. Not only by using solar to generate hydrogen but through new amazing solar energy technologies including "thin film photovoltaic," scientists at NREL's Solar Energy Research Facility say that through solar we could get all the energy we need.

"Thin film photovoltaic" -- developed by NREL with the solar industry -- is quite something. Different than conventional rigid solar panels put on roofs, it involves flexible membranes impregnated with high-efficiency solar collectors. These sheets of solar-collecting membranes can be applied over glass buildings. Skyscrapers that rise in Manhattan or Chicago or office buildings here in Poughkeepsie could serve as electricity generators. "Thin film photovoltaic" is is now being widely used in Europe.

At NREL's National Wind Technology Center, scientists speak about wind providing all the energy we need. They were pioneers, working with the wind power industry, in the great advances in wind energy in recent years -- especially the development of turbines with highly-efficient blades. Wind turbines that can be -- and are...being placed on land and increasingly, in Europe, offshore. Bluewater Wind is getting set to build the first offshore wind farm off Delaware. It would be this country's first.

Wind is now the fastest growing energy technology. Last year, wind energy grew 25 percent worldwide and that kind of future annual growth is predicted. Wind energy costs a fifth of what it did in the 1980s -- and is now fully competitive with other energy technologies -- and a continuing downward cost trend is anticipated.

And at NREL's National Bioenergy Center, the scientists say biomass could fulfill a huge portion of the world energy needs -- and we're not talking here about using food stocks, corn, but switchgrass and poplar trees and other, again, non-food energy crops.

The scientists at NREL might not be right on any single energy source -- but all together these and other renewable energy sources, can, in a mix, provide all the energy we need. And energy we can live with.

As NREL declares on its website: "There's no shortage of renewable energy resources."

And there's so many more:

Consider: wave power. In Portugal, a wave power project has just begun. Pelamis Wave Power, a Scottish company, has engineered it -- a line of machines will be tapping nature's constant ocean power.

And tidal energy. The government of Novia Scotia is moving ahead with tapping the enormous power of the 40 and 50 foot tides that twice a day rush in and out of the Bay of Fundy-- driven by the moon.

And there's micro or distributed power, returning to the vision of Thomas Edison who saw small power plants providing electricity -- this way cutting energy loss from transmitting electricity over long distances.

And throughout, we must remember efficiency, a key across the board. Here's my interview with energy analyst Amory Lovins.

(SHOW LOVINS TAPE)

Here's the current issue of New Scientist magazine: "A Special Issue," it says: "A Brighter Future. Running the World on Guilt-Free Energy."

As the magazine editorializes, "Our sustainable future. The means to generate zero-carbon electricity are already here." It continues: "The UN says the renewable energy that can already be harnessed economically would supply the world's electricity needs 15 times over. As yet only a tiny proportion of electricity is generated this way, but replacing existing coal, gas and oil-fired power stations with renewables and you achieve a colossal environmental win...It's time we...got on with making it a reality."

There is a political dimension to all this, however. Energy is not necessarily a partisan issue. It was the Clinton administration's DOE which put the kabosh on the hot dry rock facility at Fenton Hill.

And I don't want to get highly political in this presentation -- but there are tremendous differences on energy between the two candidates for president up for election next week. John McCain's call for many more polluting, catastrophic accident-prone, multi-billion dollar nuclear plants, and Sarah Palin's call to "drill baby drill" for oil in sensitive marine environments, is just the wrong direction. Let me note that I have a connection with the McCain family. His oldest daughter was my student. Indeed, has heard my findings on nuclear and renewable energy. I wish she had some pull with her father.

Barak Obama, meanwhile, has long thoroughly embraced safe, clean renewable energy technologies.

Renewables Are Ready was the title of a book written by two Union of Concerned Scientists staffers in 1995. They're more than ready now. And so are we -- after all the manipulation and, yes, tyranny of Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Nuclear. More than ready for energy we can live with.

Now, questions.

Protecting People from Poisons

2008-10-17T09:51:00.000-07:00

The European Union has just come out with new restrictions on chemicals linked to cancer and other diseases—and U.S. chemical companies and the Bush administration are moaning and groaning.

New laws of the European Union require that chemical manufacturers show that a chemical is safe before it enters commerce.

This, notes the Washington Post, ”is the opposite of policies in the United States” where we depend on the government to act, if it does, and it comes “at a time when consumers are increasingly worried about the long-term consequences of chemical exposure.”

The European approach is an outgrowth of the Precautionary Principle which states that if an activity or product might cause severe or irreversible harm to people or the environment the burden of proof falls on those behind that activity or product—in this case, chemicals—to show that it would not do harm. The Precautionary Principle has been spreading around the world in recent years.

The Center for International Environmental Law says the new EU laws will “compel companies to be more responsible for their products.”

In the U.S., control of toxic chemicals has been—well, a sham. The Toxic Substances Control Act was enacted in 1976 but, noted the Washington Post in its article on the new European Union laws, noted that the Environmental Protection Agency has banned only five chemicals since that time.

Indeed, said the Post, the EPA hasn’t even been able to ban asbestos under the act, even though it is “widely acknowledged as a likely carcinogen and barred in more than 30 countries.”

There are 80,000 chemicals on the U.S. market, noted the Post, and the U.S. government “has had little or no information about the health hazards or risks of most of those chemicals.”

American chemical companies would have to either comply with the new EU laws or lose access to a market of 27 countries and 500 million people. Mike Walls, director of government and regulatory affairs for the American Chemistry Council, complains that some its chemical manufacturer members will be unable to “afford the cost of compliance” with the new European Union laws.

What about all the people who get sick and die, and the cost to them of the current way toxic chemicals have been distributed?

The European Union is on the right track—and the U.S. should have similar laws protecting people from poisons.

Green Light for Nuclear-Powered Amphibious Assault Ships

2008-10-17T09:43:00.000-07:00

New large U.S. Navy amphibious assault ships will be required to be nuclear powered as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2009 signed into law by President George W. Bush on Tuesday, October 14.

The Senate had originally not included this provision in its version of the act. It had been part of the House version, pushed by Representative Gene Taylor, chairman of the Seapower and Expeditionary Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. A major shipyard for building amphibious assault ships, Northrop Grumman’s Ship Systems facility, is located in his Mississippi district.

But in recent weeks, the Senate Armed Services Committee added under a section of the act titled “Policy Relating to Major Combatant Vessels of the Strike Forces of the United States Navy,” a parallel requirement that new “amphibious assault ships including dock landing ships (LSD), amphibious transport-dock ships (LPD), helicopter assault ships (LHA/LHD) and amphibious command ships (LCC) if such vessels exceed 1,500 dead weight ton…displacement” be nuclear-powered.

Safe-energy and environmental groups have been critical of the scheme.

“This reckless plan gives ‘we'll fight them on the beaches’ a whole new sinister meaning," said Linda Gunter of Beyond Nuclear of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute. "If one of these amphibious ships is hit, or has an accident, we would be fighting a tide of radioactivity on beaches that could leave them contaminated indefinitely."

“Expanding the use of nuclear technology as a form of propulsion puts our sailors at risk,” said Jim Riccio of Greenpeace U.S.A. Also, because “nuclear-powered vessels are already rejected from ports around the world, it undermines the ability to actually use them.” Further, they would be “more of a target” for terrorists. “And what if the Cole had been nuclear powered?”

Indeed, if the U.S.S. Cole, struck by suicide bombers who crashed into it with explosives off Yemen in 2000, had been nuclear-powered, a nuclear disaster could have occurred killing many more than the 17 crewmembers who died.

The Navy has also been concerned because the price of the nuclear-powered amphibious assault ships is estimated at $1.5 billion-plus each, some $700 million more than if built with conventional power systems. There would also be the tens of millions in cost for their eventual radioactive decontamination and disposal.

The rationale for the plan, which Taylor’s subcommittee had included in the House version of the act, is that “the future naval force should not be reliant on the availability of fossil fuel for fleet operations. Removing the need for access to fossil fuel sources significantly multiplies the effectiveness of the entire battle forces.”

The National Defense Authorization Bill of 2008 required that all new U.S. aircraft carriers, cruisers and submarines be nuclear-powered. The 2009 act’s provision that amphibious ships, too, be nuclear-powered is set up as an amendment to this.

The New Scientist, a British magazine, noted in a June 14th article on the U.S. plan for nuclear-powered assault ships that the “vessels’ position in combat can…vary—from a ‘stand-off’ over-the-horizon location to be being moored to a pier in a combat zone.” It added that “a U.S. Navy website confirms that such ships ‘are designed to get in harm’s way.’”

Another problem involves nuclear proliferation. “Military reactor fuel,” said the New Scientist, “can reach 90 percent enrichment level.” That is atomic bomb-grade. “This could make reactor maintenance sites at U.S. bases in ports around the world a tempting target for any thief intent on making weapons-grade fuel for a bomb.”

The Congressional Research Service, in a December 2006 report to Congress, examined a variety of non-oil energy alternatives for Navy ships. Titled “Navy Ship Propulsion Technologies: Options for Reducing Oil Use,” it considered “integrated electric-drive propulsion,” fuel cells, solar power, nuclear energy and various “synthetic fuels” especially “alternative hydrocarbon fuels.” It noted that the Navy “started making its own biodiesel fuel” in a pilot program in 2003.

This report said that “shifting” amphibious assault ships to using nuclear power “might make them potentially less welcome in the ports of countries with strong anti-nuclear sentiments” and “reduce the number of potentially suitable location for forward-homeporting the ships.”

A May 2008 Congressional Research Service Report, “Navy Nuclear-Powered Surface Ships: Background Issues, and Options for Congress,” related that in the 1960s the Navy began building nuclear-powered cruisers and nine were constructed, indeed at one point Congress mandated it, but after 1975 “procurement of nuclear-powered cruisers was halted…due to…costs.”

In addressing environmental impacts, it spoke of “those associated with mining and processing uranium to fuel reactors, and with storing and disposing of spent nuclear fuel cores, radioactive waste water from reactors, and the reactors and other radioactive components of retired nuclear-powered ships.” Also, “a very serious accident involving a nuclear-powered Navy ship…or a major enemy attack on a nuclear-powered Navy ship might damage the ship’s hull and reactor compartment enough to cause a release of radioactivity.”

Alan Greenspan and the Economic Meltdown

2008-10-09T19:58:00.000-07:00

As the economy melts down, not enough attention is being given to the motivation of Alan Greenspan that led to his role—a major one—in causing this mess.

Greenspan, from the time he was in his late 20’s to now, has been an ardent follower of Ayn Rand and her view of extreme laissez-faire capitalism. In the early 1950s Greenspan joined Rand’s inner circle. He wrote for Rand’s newsletter and authored several essays in her 1966 book Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal, which in non-fiction form offered the economic philosophy presented in Rand’s novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

Rand stood besides Greenspan in 1974 when he was sworn in to his first job in the federal government, as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Gerald Ford.

Greenspan’s close personal—and ideological—relationship with Rand continued until her death in 1982.

He was appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve by Ronald Reagan in 1987—and somehow stayed, through Reagan, the first George Bush, Bill Clinton and then the second George Bush, until 2006 when his fifth term as head of the Federal Reserve Board ended. He was replaced by Ben Bernanke—the person we see often these days trying to deal with the crisis.

Greenspan “didn’t believe in regulation,” says Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz. His perspective was “self-regulation—an oxymoron.” For Greenspan, it was an oxymoron rooted in the Rand perspective.

Meanwhile, when the economy wobbled, Greenspan sought to deal with it by lowering credit rates precipitously—to allow people to get mortgages at rock-bottom rates thus creating what became the real estate boom. And he promoted adjustable rate mortgages.

As warnings came of this boom, which had sent the prices of housing up to stratospheric levels, going bust, Greenspan did nothing.

The New York Times, in the middle of its extensive October 9th examination of Greenspan’s “legacy” as Federal Reserve chairman and its link to the financial crisis, noted: “A professed libertarian, he counted among his formative influences the novelist Ayn Rand, who portrayed collective power as an evil force set against the enlightened self-interest of individuals. In turn, he showed a resolute faith that those participating in financial markets would act responsibly.”

The article, by Peter S. Goodman, declared: “Over the years, Mr. Greenspan helped enable an ambitious American experiment in letting market forces run free. Now, the nation is confronting the consequences.”

How did such a fringe figure become central to the U.S. economy?