Volume 7 Number 1
by Audrey Newcomb
Where is the outrage?
Either Governor Andrew Cuomo is unaware of the highly-respected, peer-reviewed model devised by Prof. Mark Z. Jacobson, Stanford’s Atmosphere/ Energy Program director for New York State, or pretending not to know about the model that would get us to 100% renewable energy by 2030. It may be conflicting with Cuomo’s more immediate future plans.In an AlbanyTimes-Union op-ed following the Public Service Commission’s nuclear reactor bail-out announcement August 2, Jacobson said, “Allowing these plants to close would be cheaper, create more jobs, and get the state to its renewable energy goals by 2030. Closure of these plants would jeopardize fewer than 2,000 jobs, while converting New YorkState to renewable energy, which is entirely possible now, and would create a net of approximately 82,000 good long-term jobs.” Not to mention that taxpayers would save $7.6 billion in taxes, which, at the very least, is what subsidizing 4 reactors for 12 years is estimated to cost New Yorkers. Gannett’s Jon Campbell wrote several accounts of this. But vital facts were omitted. PSC members made the decision without considering alternatives to this drastic step. Instead, their decision was more about how to deal with the nuclear companies to keep the reactors open than whether keeping these aging plants open was actually “safe” (a word that never appeared in the Gannett articles, along with “catastrophe.”) Also, Campbell described nuclear energy using inaccurate phrases like “carbon-free” and “clean energy plan. The bail-out promises to work out very well for Chicago-based nuclear corporation Exelon. The industry has seen hard times competing with natural gas prices. Nuclear energy is so absolutely off-the-charts expensive that Wa l l Street won’t invest in it and insurance companies refuse to insure it. Exelon owns Wayne County’s 46-year-old Ginna, but FitzPatrick and Nine Mile Point in Oswego County are owned by another nuclear giant, Entergy, of Texas. Ginna and FitzPatrick have one reactor each, and Nine Mile Point has 2. Entergy was all set to close FitzPatrick when PSC and Cuomo twisted Exelon’s arm to buy it and keep it open, apparently making an offer of our money that Exelon couldn’t refuse. Entergy also owns Indian Point, 26 miles north of NYC, which is even older than Japan’s Fukushima’s reactor #1 (one that melted down in 2011). Indian Point lacks EPA’ s “social nececessity” category (?) that the others have, but that may change in 2 years, upping the bailout to at least $11 billion. The Cuomo plan’s 50% “Clean and Renewable by 2030” took the liberty of redefi n ing the word “renewable” to includenuclear energy, but has earmarked twice the money for nuclear as it does for actual renewables such as wind and solar. Cuomo assumes the choice is either natural gas or nuclear power. But other states and countries which have closed nuclear plants have replaced them with renewables, not dirty fuels. Nor are they reverting to candles, as Cuomo warns, but are keeping the lights on in homes heated with renew-ables. His motives have been called into question. When first elected, Cuomo made a point of promising to close Indian Point because of its proximity to the heavily populated NYC area, presumably because of the possibility of a catastrophic accident. This worry has slipped his mind now that Indian Point is not allowed in the package. He can only hope it willkeep from blowing up in the next 2 years. This is not hyperbole. Indian Point has serious problems that should have closed it years ago. Cuomo is preoccupied with the absolute imperative of saving those Oswego and Wayne County jobs. He lost the 2 counties in 2014 and apparently thinks keeping the nuke plants open will change that. This may be a miscalculation. By 2017, the new taxation will start to affect, not only individual voters’ pocketbooks, but also local governments, businesses, and school districts. Because of caps on local property taxes, raising local taxes will not be an option. School programs and other vital services will likely be cut, and the $7.6 million will not have created a single new job.By election time, 2018, Cuomo may be feeling blowback. Other states have not fast-tracked schemes through hand-picked unelected committees with only 17 public commentdays. Illinois spent 2 years deliberating whether to close their expired-deadline reactors and fi nally decided to do so. Other states, such as Ohio, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, are conducting transparent reviews. According to Tim Judson of the Nuclear Information & Resource Center (NIRC), both the PSC and the NYS governor’soffice are under investigation for similar cases that do not involve anywhere near as much money as the nuclear subsidies would direct to a single company. By 2029, the plants will be closed down, the money will be gone, and NYS will not have reached the 100% emission goals that we know are possible. Ginna will then be 58, if it survives its advanced age. There seems to be a collective memory loss about the history of nuclear weapons and power plants. It started with the top-secret Manhattan Project project in the 1940s, testing atom bombs in Pacific islands such as the Marshalls, then in Nevada, and finally setting off the first attack in Hiroshima, Japan, August 6, 1945. A few days later the second bomb hit thecity of Nagasaki. Pres. Harry Truman told the public it had to be done in order to win the war. He also said it was limited to military targets; but the Hiroshima bomb hit children on their way to school and workers on their way to jobs. Truman said it was as powerful as 20 tons of TNT, but neglected to mention that the bomb gave off ionizing radiation. We rarely hear about the tens of thousands of civilian deaths and the agony of survivors who died slowly from radiation-inducedburns and trauma. Relief workers who came to assist were exposed to the radiation and became victims themselves. The eminent Boston climate activist, Hattie Nestel writes about the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, who arrived at the scene a month later, and likened what he saw to a “death-stricken planet.” He described hospital patients with purple skin hemorrhages and gangrene in the final stages of
radiation. Following publication of his article in England on Sept. 5, Burchett’s camera was confiscated and Gen. Douglas MacArthur had him expelled from Japan. By Sept. 19, a censorship press code kept the public from knowing the true nature of the bombing. The exception was John Hersey’s book Hiroshima, commissioned by Life and the New Yorker, where it was serialized before it became a book in 1947. Thousands of US Marines and Navy Seabees who were assigned to clean up the rubble in Hiroshima, were told there was no danger, wore no protective clothing, and drank the water. They came home with terminal bone marrow illnesses associated with radiation exposure, but lived and died with lack of care and compensation by veterans’ services. Declassified documents later revealed that these veterans had received 10 times the radiation considered “safe” (There is no safe radiation), causing minute alpha particles to lodge in bone marrow, lungs, and other organs. Shortly after the occupation, when the Japanese government sent a film crew to record the physical and medical effects of the bomb, US occupiers seized their cameras and film. From that time on, filming was banned in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Only one documentary was permitted by the US Strategic Bombing Survey, classified top secret and sealed in a vault until the late 1960s, when it was returned to Japan. In 2003 the Smithsonian Institution featured the B-29 plane, Enola Gay, that dropped the Hiroshima bomb. Under pressure from Congress, the exhibition lauded the pilots and crew as national heroes without telling the more nuanced account that curators had intended. Many government and military personnel have admitted that Japan would have surrendered without the bomb, including US Navy Fleet Admiral William D. Leah, who said, “Use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan… In being the first to use it, we adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.” Atmospheric nuclear testing took place at the Nevada test site during the 1950s and at various Pacific islands, including the Marshalls, where the first hydrogen bomb test in 1954 was at the Bikini Atoll. That bomb was nearly 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. From 1946 to 1962, at least 250,000 servicemen and tens of thousands of downwinders surrounding the Nevada test site were exposed to radioactive fallout, When the Knapp Report, a systematic study of radioactive fallout, was finally done, it was immediately classified. When fallout began to affect more and more people, it was declassified, revealing that at the Nevada Test Site over 1,000 kilotons of Iodine-131 were released. Exposed veterans who fi led claims for service-connected radiation sickness were once again denied claims, The VA told the vets that they had been exposed to “low-level” radiation. When the AEC stated in 1954 that “the development of atomic energy for peaceful purposes and development of atomic energy for bombs are in much of their course interchangeable and interdependent,” the commision expressed in words a policy that had not yet been officially adopted. In 1968 the five nuclear nations signed the Nuclear Non–Proliferation Tre aty, an agreement to begin disarming and discontinue expanding nuclear weapons. Pres. Jimmy Carter complied in 1977 by banning all commercial reprocessing, a ban that Pres. Ronald Reagan lifted in the 1980s. By 2005, the Department of Energy got $50 million to build a new waste-processing plant, reversing over 30 years of US policy against recovering plutonium from civil reactors. Reprocessing creates stockpiles of nuclear-weapon-usable plutonium, in which the spent fuel rods are broken open and the outer cladding is dissolved in nitric acid. Plutonium is separated out for use in nuclear weapons or for fuel in a breeder or mixed oxide nuclear reactor. The spent nuclear fuel rods and liquid reprocessing waste stockpiles must be kept secure because they remain hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years, isolated and “protected” with water and thick lead walls. Maintaining control of plutomium presents a major challenge, even without an accident. Releases into air, water, and soil is a daily occurance which is legal but not necessarily safe. Besides ionizing radiation, these releases can include cesium, strontium 90, iodine 129, and tritium. NRC testing of all 103 nuclear plants for tritium has been sporadic, even though many leaks have been reported. Tritium is a vital component of nuclear weapons, especially the smaller ones, which are the ones most likely to be used intentionally. The Congressional Office of Technology Assessment reports that “Reprocessing provides the strongest link between commercial nuclear power and nuclear weapons. It is this connection to the potential proliferaton of nuclear weapons that has always been kept out of the public discourse.” Seldom mentioned are the millions of gallons of water used to cool the hot radioactive core. A typical 1,000 megawatt pressurized water reactor of river or lake water takes in 20,000 gallons of water per minute, returns some of it to the same body of water and releases the rest into the atmosphere as vapor. This extremely hot water is then released as steam vented through the stack or into the river or lake. If the water source dries up, as it is doing throughout the world, the nuclear industry will be forced to shut down. In addition, as uranium sources have become less accessible, prices will continue to go up. At some point, sources will be exhausted. Utility companies thought for a long time that nuclear power plants were too expensive to be cost-effective.The Price-Anderson Act of 1957, which limited nuclear facility operators’ catastrophic accident liability, softened their resistance. Large government subsidies of over $77 million from 1948 to 1998 kept them afl oat. But the economics of nuclear power continued to worsen, culminating in the first US nuclear reactor accident at Three Mile Island in 1979. The China Syndrome movie that opened in theatres March 14, 1979 was an acclaimed success, starring Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda, and Michael Douglas, but the nuclear industry termed it “sheer fiction.” Only twelve days later, the first major US nuclear accident at Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, PA made the movie’s message seem prescient. Dr. James Hansen and other nuclear apologists downplayed it by saying, “No one died.” That’s the official story, but the fact is that people got sick and later died, and after more than three decades, people exposed at TMI are still dying. At the time, it was conceded that the amount of radiation emitted had not been determined, but that didn’t stop officials from saying it was “insignificant,” ignoring the well-known, by then, fact that radiation fallout spreads unevenly. According to Harvey Wasserman, journalist, author, and climate activist, the state hid the health impacts, deleting cancers and tumors from public registries, and misinterpreting the tripling of infant death rates in Harrisburg after TMI. Realizing that the state denials did not match what they were hearing, two extraordinary, ordinary citizens, Jane Lee andMary Osborne, went door-to-door in neighborhoods where radiation symptoms had been reported. They found cancer, leukemia, birth defects, respiratory illnesses, hair loss, and lesions, all symptoms similar to symptoms of those who were exposed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the Marshall Islands, and Nevada. Wild animals, farm livestock, bees, birds, and pets were affected by TMI. Puppies and kittens were bornmalformed, and horse reproduction rates plummeted.Arnie Gundersen, leading technical nuclear engineering expert, claimed that the TMI radiation releases were a hundred times higher than NRC’s claim. Dr. Stephen Wing of U-NorthCarolina submitted epidemiological data that supported Gundersen’s work, as did Ernest Steinglass of U-Pittsburgh and statistician Joe Mangaro of NY, who agreed thateven lesser releases than TMI can have catastrophic health effects on local populations. Causes of radiation damage are medical misuse of X-rays,radium watch dial painting, radioactive fuel production, and nuclear waste disposal exposure. Although every effort was made to deny that TMI caused personal injuries, the General Public Utility Co. paid out $15 million in out-of-court settlements for radiation-induced injuries (in exchange for silence). A class-action lawsuit was fi led by 2,400 residents demanding compensation, but they were denied access to the federal court system, which held that the radiation thatresulted from TMI could not have caused harm. Hundreds of cases are still pending. Each one of the 100 US reactors is 3 decades older than TMI was during its partial meltdown. In 1985, Forbes magazine charged that “The failure of the nuclear power program has already cost $125 billion, with $140 billion to come before the decade is up, and only theblind or the biased can think the money was well-spent.” One year later, in 1986, having just been extolled by the Soviet press as the ultimate triumph of new generation atomic technology, the Chernobyl accident took place in Ukraine. Gorbachov kept the event from public knowledge until Swedish radiation monitors, hundreds of miles away, detected falloutfrom the blast of Unit #4. The government silence added to the casualties, in addition to the 800,000 men who were sickened when they were sent to clean up the debris. The Soviet public was furious, a factor which helped bring down the Soviet Union. Estimated initial casualties totaled 300,000, but diseases from radiation are still causing deaths. The earthquake and tsunami that ripped through 10 reactors at Fukushima, Japan in 2011 did not surprise Japanese anti-nuclear activists. They had known in advance that most of Japan is far too mountainous and earthquake-prone toallow nuclear plant siting. Each one of Japan’s 55 reactors sits on or near an earthquake fault. Harvey Wasserman says that “a tsunami was somewhere between a perennial possibility and a virtual certainty.” The number of emissions that have spewed into the atmosphere and into human bodies from Fukushima is incalculable. After 5 years, Fukushima has been and still is polluting the entire Pacific Ocean, but that outrageous fact is rarely mentioned. Japanese authorities have failed to secure the fuel rods. It has been suggested that the Fukushima cleanup be taken over by an outside agency because of mismanagement by an irresponsible governmentofficials controlled by Tokyo Power Electric Co. (TOPCO). Following Chernobyl, nuclear energy proponents blamed “inferior Soviet technology.” But the accident included 23 reactors in all, many of which are virtually identical to Vermont Yankee, Indian Point, and others produced by GE, Toshiba, Westinghouse, and Hitachi. Fukushima is the latest in an escalating series of terrifying disasters, any of which should have raised red flags. This includes the many “minor”mishaps that never get reported. Statistics rarely mention how far radiation travels from the countries where they take place. Chernoblyl emissions traveled to Europe, and Fukushima emissions to the United States, as well as Asia. Do we really want to risk another similar, or worse, catastrophe? Indian Point is located perilously close to a serious seismic fault. More than 10 million Americans live within the corresponding 50-mile radius from the ground zero recommended by the NRC. Four coastal California reactors are far closer to earthquake faults than Fukushima was to the earthquake fault that destroyed it. Two at Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo, and two others at San Onofre, between LA and SanDiego, could easily be ripped apart by quakes and tsunamis. These huge population centers are far closer to those ground zeroes than Tokyo is to Fukushima. Had that 9.0 earthquake hit California, we could have watched the evacuations of LA and San Diego and the permanent ruination of the CentralValley, which produces much of America’s fruits, nuts, and vegetables. A Diablo-Onofre cloud would blanket the United States in lethal radiation within 4 days. Any one of the 100 licensed reactors could kill untold thousands and do trillions in permanent damage.After Fukushima, the nuclear power plant financial slump continued to dog the industry. When what they wanted and needed desperately to fi n d was a new selling point, one was handed to them: Fear of global warming could overcome the fear of nuclear catastrophe! Ignore the real dangers and monumental failures of nuclear power. Focus on low carbon emissions compared to coal, oil, and natural gas.Leave out the fact that milling, mining, reprocessing, and transporting uranium relies extensively on coal, gas, and oil even though nuclear power plants use no fossil fuels at their actual reactors. But their gain was the planet’s loss. Governor Cuomo needs to review independent research on nuclear energy the way he did before making his decision to ban fracking in New York State. He would find that nuclear power is no more a “bridge” to renewables than is fracking. Dr. Hansen has cited statistics of low numbers of immediate deaths after nuclear accidents and disregarded long-term consequences of illness, death, suffering, displacement, and devastation that lasts generations. He disrupted the ParisCOP21talks with his pro-nuclear rants. Environmental and climate change organizations both national and local should no longer see him as their guru on all climate matters. Coming together and pushing for 100% renewables has to happen now. It should have happened yesterday. Being outspoken on fossil fuels and silent on crazy plans to rehabilitate potentially-dangerous aging nuclear plants needs urgent consideration of a policy upgrade by every organiza- tion purporting to be working to preserve the earth.Sifting & Winnowing, written and produced by Audrey Newcomb, is emailed to those who wish to receive it. Contact: audrey@ audreynewcomb.com