A Hard Rain’s A-Fallin’

Is It Too Late to Save This Planet?

O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!

– William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 1

“In the generation of nuclear energy, manmade hazards seem unavoidable, but bankruptcy strikes us as a needless risk.”

– Barron’s Weekly (the business magazine), 3/21/1981, summing up the experience of the near meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant two years prior.

“The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll, and we can be grateful for that.”

– Larry Kudlow, business commentator, CNBC

 

THE MASSIVE EARTHQUAKES THAT ROCKED JAPAN beginning on March 11^th 2011 caused a huge tsunami 15 meters tall at impact, sending waters cascading over the 10 meter-high barrier walls.¹ Low-lying towns that had ignored 600-year-old stone markers in which were carved “Do not build any homes below this point” were wiped out, while many who heeded the markers, such as the hamlet of Aneyoshi, were spared.² More than twelve thousand people were swept away, and 15,500 more are missing.

The heart­rending tragedy quickly became a global nightmare as the earthquakes ripped open the fault-lines on top of which a number of nuclear power plants had been built, imperiously overlooking the rushing waters and towns awaiting annihilation. Some “inexplicably” contained deadly plutonium used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons and roof pools of radioactive fuel rods. But Mary Olson, the director of the Southeast Office of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), noted that photographs showed “the fuel pool in reactor No. 3 is gone. … There is no fuel there. The reactor fuel pool in No. 3 is gone. Where did it go?” According to law professor Francis Boyle, Japan may have been constructing a secret nuclear bomb infrastructure under the guise of their nuclear industry, and was storing 500 pounds of weapons-grade MOX/Plutonium at Fukushima 3 for the purpose of making bombs.³ Was it swept away and into the ocean? Or did the government grab it, unnoticed amidst the chaos?

Thousands of people wisely thought it best to flee for their lives in those moments before the inev­i­table depletion of coolant and consequent explosions propelled tons of extremely dangerous radioactive gases and water into the atmosphere and oceans.⁴ This, despite the initial broadcasts by government officials who told them not to evacuate but to return to their homes and shut the windows and doors,⁵ eerily paralleling the reckless directions by officials at the World Trade Center in New York City on that horrible September morning a decade ago. As with people responding in New York on 9/11, so too in Japan on 3/11 — many acted heroically to save others from the deadly radioactive contamination, sacrificing themselves in a desperate effort to staunch the ruptures. The world’s population watched helplessly on TV as the catastrophe unfolded (and unfolds still).

Turning off the TV provides no respite. The radioactive clouds and waters from Japan have no regard for borders or national boundaries. They drift with the winds, in recent weeks mostly to the northeast, but also 140 miles south to Tokyo, and then to Singapore, Indonesia and Australia, as if mocking those early confident assurances that the unthinkable could not happen. In an irony perhaps unparalleled in history, the city of Hiroshima in southwest Japan is now seen by many as a refuge for those seeking to escape from the radiation released in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear nightmare.

Soon, winds were to spread the radioactive material to Hawaii and to the western Hemisphere. In fact, after 9 or 10 days independently established monitors picked up increases in radiation along the west coast of the United States and in Idaho, Colorado, Minnesota, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Massachusetts.⁶

Media, government and corporate officials at first denied that the radiation would drift overseas – but their assurances following the “accidents” (in quotes not because they were desired but because they were predictable – and indeed, predicted⁷) turned out to not be worth the paper they’re printed on. And now the story has dropped off the front page altogether.

For several critical days officials in Japan squandered opportunities to control the leakage, which some experts say would have been possible only by immediately entombing the nukes⁸ but thereby sacrificing any chance of ever using them again. Instead of taking emergency measures to avoid what has now come to pass, and instead of evacuating the population immediately from the affected areas, officials’ first thoughts were – again, just as they were following 9/11 – to salvage the investments of the corporations involved and the interests of the insurance companies, therein damning the planet to Hell.

“There was and will not be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors,” swore Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Dr. Jos­eph Oehmen, in a widely circulated business article. “By ‘significant’ I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on – say – a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation.”⁹

Such is the arrogance with which techno-apologists for the nuclear industry approach the apocalyptic situation. Published four days after the earthquake struck in Japan, the barrage of “don’t worry, be happy” propaganda had by then already proved false. Journalist Keith Harmon Snow commented on the smug assurances: “Properly understood for what it is – a childish, myopic, arrogant attempt to belittle the truth and influence public opinion – the article provides an apt example of the rampant industry disinformation that is sweeping aside rational, compassionate and precautionary assessments with irrational jingoism, simplistic emotional appeals, and wrong-headed thinking.”¹⁰

RADIATION IS COMING TO THE U.S.A.

By early April, 2011 – around 3 weeks after the explosions in Japan – Radioactive Cesium-137 from Fukushima was found in strawberries and mushrooms in northern California. Cesium-137 fixes to materials and soil and so must be separated and quickly removed, before it begins to accumulate in living organisms. A few days earlier, from March 22-25, each of 12 samples taken by the EPA at 10 sites in the U.S. showed 20 times the allowable levels of radioactive Iodine-131 (a cause of thyroid cancer).¹¹

Radioactive isotopes were found in drinking water and milk in cities ac­ross the U.S. at the beginning of April and shortly thereafter in broad-leaf plants like spinach. Summarizing the data, Natural News writes that “as of April 10, 2011 23 US water supplies have tested positive for radioactive Iodine-131,^{12 13} and milk samples from at least three US locations have tested positive for Iodine-131 at levels exceeding EPA maximum containment levels (MCL).”¹⁴

Across Europe agencies are advising pregnant women and children to beware of consuming fresh milk, creamy cheeses and vegetables with large leaves.¹⁵ One agency reports that even Uranium 234 has been detected in Hawaii and the U.S. west coast.¹⁶ But the EPA announced that levels were “below public health concern”¹⁷ – although there shouldn’t be any radioactive isotopes there at all.

Faster than you can say “Nuclear Armageddon? Arm-a-geddin-outa-here,” U.S. officials switched gears. No longer able to convince the public that the radiation would never reach the Western hemisphere they retreated to their fall-back position. The increased levels of radiation rec­orded in some states was insignificant, they claimed. “We’ll take a tiny ‘hit’ but it will be minuscule, nothing to worry about and it will soon pass.”¹⁸ But even that “lone hit theory” turned out to be disinformation; radioactive clouds, which are not visible to the eye, are being refueled daily by the ongoing disaster and this may continue for weeks or even months, fed again and again by the venting and leakage of radioactive gases and water from Fukushima – as was the case with the 9/11 toxic plume and the false assurances as to its safety.¹⁹

Twenty-five years ago Chernobyl proved the extreme danger in such “magical thinking”. Researchers now estimate that the explosions and fire that exposed the reactor core at Chernobyl propelled as much as 10 billion curies of radioactive material into the environment – 200 times greater than the projected estimate, and hundreds of times larger than the fallout from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first indication of the catastrophe caused by such massive releases of radiation was, as so often is the case, a mass die-off of young birds.²⁰

Dr. Ernest Sternglass was one of the first scientists to publish research showing that radiation emitted by Chernobyl caused over the next 4-6 weeks dramatic increases in infant mortality and pulmonary diseases around the globe and a spike in “excess” cancers over the longer term. To date, some scientists estimate that one million people throughout the world died from cancers due to radiation released from Chernobyl,²¹ with 40,000 Chernobyl-related deaths occurring in the months immediately following the explosion there.²² And when all is said and done, Fukushima will likely be worse.

Figure 1. Concentration of Iodine-131 in fresh farm milk following Chernobyl, May-June 1986, in the NY metropolitan area. (Recorded by the Environmental Measurement Laboratory of the Department of Energy)

 

Nevertheless, the corporate media in the U.S. ignored the dangerous parallels to U.S. nuclear reactors. They posited a sort of “American exceptionalism” argument (“it can’t happen here, we do things differently, our reactors are different, we’re exempt”). They got away with portraying Chernobyl as due to faulty Soviet construction²³ by suppressing accurate information. Reports concerning Chernobyl to this day wrongly insist that the reactor had “no containment housing,” even though one of the five commissioners of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, James Asselstine, testified before a Congressional subcommittee chaired by Rep. Edward Markey (D, Mass.) that the containment structure surrounding the reactors at Chernobyl was in fact rated ‘stronger’ than those surrounding some U.S. reactors.²⁴ Fukushima-Daiichi’s reactors, on the other hand, are Boiling Water Reactors (BWR). Five of the six reactors have Mark-1 containments designed by General El­ectric, whose 23 similarly antiquated Mark-1 models are sputtering along here in the U.S. At least one Atomic Energy Commission official back in 1972 said the Mark-1 reactors should never have been allowed to be built.²⁵

Thirty-five years ago, Dale G. Bridenbaugh, Gregory C Minor and Richard B. Hubbard resigned from their jobs at General Electric “after becoming increasingly convinced that the nuclear reactor design they were reviewing – the Mark-1 – was so flawed it could lead to a devastating accident,” writes Matthew Mosk for ABC World News:²⁶

Questions persisted for decades about the ability of the Mark-1 to handle the immense pressures that would result if the reactor lost cooling power, and today that design is being put to the ultimate test in Japan. Five of the six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which has been wracked since Friday’s earthquake with explosions and radiation leaks, are Mark-1s.

“The problems we identified in 1975 were that, in doing the design of the containment, they did not take into account the dynamic loads that could be experienced with a loss of coolant,” Bridenbaugh told ABC News in an interview. ”The impact loads the containment would receive by this very rapid release of energy could tear the containment apart and create an uncontrolled release.”²⁶

 

 

Unfortunately, some of that information – as well as the horrible accident at Fukushima itself – is being used by proponents of nuclear power as propaganda for “the need to build new and safer” nuclear power plants, as opposed to getting rid of them altogether! The false claims about Fukushima, like Cherno­byl, serve a dastardly ideological purpose²⁷ – coraling an anxious but helpless public behind reassurances that enable ongoing government subsidies to the nuclear industry.

So on April 20^th, 2011 the advocacy group Beyond Nuclear submitted an ”emergency enforcement petition” to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission urging the suspension of 21 General Electric Boiling Water Mark-1 Reactor operating licenses in the wake of the catastrophic failure of identical containment systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. In addition, Beyond Nuclear petitioned that a total of 24 GE BWR Mark-1 storage pools for high-level radioactive waste in the U.S. be required to install backup power supplies for running cooling water circulation systems in the event of a loss of the primary electrical grid, something they now lack despite their location outside of a primary containment structure.²⁸

In the mass media over the years, only the TV cartoon “The Simpsons” got it right – and that show was not launched until 3½ years after Chernobyl. Week after week, it spoofs Homer Simpson’s job at the Springfield nuclear power plant owned by the odious capitalist Mr. Burns. In reality, the corporate media parroted the reassurances of the U.S. and Japanese governments, twisting every which way to avoid the obvious implications with regard to the nuclear industry. But thousands of kids who have grown up watching “The Simpsons” are now aware of the insanity of nuclear power and ridicule the lies justifying it.

After all, nuclear power is a crazy way to essentially boil water, fraught with potentially catastrophic dangers. There are currently 439 nuclear fission reactors operating worldwide (104 of them in the U.S.). They generate 14 percent of global electric power. In a report issued in 1985 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission acknowledged that over a 20-year period, the likelihood of at least one severe core meltdown was basically 50-50.²⁹ Less than a year later, Chernobyl exploded. As journalist Karl Grossman sums it up, “They’ve known all along that disaster could come, and there’s a good likelihood of it coming, and they’ve known the consequences.”³⁰ And yet they persist in calling what happened in Fuku­shima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, “accidents” – as though by minimizing the results of their own studies they could legitimately discount the risks of something going wrong, or that meltdowns and radiation “leakage” are natural ca­lamities over which they have no control.

In 2010 alone, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says there were 14 “near misses” at U.S. nuclear power plants.

Nuclear power is an inherently holocaustic technology. An accident, as we’re now seeing (again) threatens the health and safety of the entire planet. To make matters worse, many of those risks are exacerbated because reactor owners, and often the NRC in the U.S., tolerated known safety problems.³¹ In the past year alone, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission documented 14 “near misses” at U.S. nuclear power plants. And those do not even include many incidents at the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Buchanan, NY, such as an explosion in early November 2010, which prompted officials in the four surrounding counties to open emergency response centers in case a regional evacuation was necessary.³² Indian Point is just 24 miles up the Hudson River from New York City and the NRC considers it the reactor at the highest risk of earthquake damage in the country.³³ A 2010 review of Nuclear Regulatory Commission data by the Union of Concerned Scientists reports that the liner of a refueling cavity at Unit 2 has been leaking since at least 1993, without repair. By allowing this reactor to continue operating with equipment that cannot perform its safety function, the NRC is putting people in the NYC metropolitan area at elevated and undue risk.³⁴

The Indian Point reactors are owned by Entergy, Inc., which also owns the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. On April 19, 2011 Entergy filed a lawsuit ag­ainst the State of Vermont, in its attempt to continue to operate past its closure date of March 2012, despite having agreed to abide by all legislative as well as PSB decisions when it bought the nuke in 2002. The Citizen’s Awareness Network asks, “What changed?” The answer: The corporation didn’t get its way.³⁵

The conservative Brookings Institute elaborates on the dangers of poor oversight by the NRC, and of government allowing the nuclear industry to get its way:

The NRC’s Office of the Inspector General uncovered 24 instances in which nuclear plants failed to report defects in equipment that could pose safety risks. In the last eight years, the regulator has not imposed any penalties on plant operators for such infractions.

For 15 years, the NRC allowed a water containment system to leak in New York despite the problem being documented. In South Carolina, a plant operator had to shut down reactors twice in six months. One of the shutdowns was caused by a power shortage in an electrical cable that had been installed in 1986 and was not up to standard. In New Jersey, a nuclear plant was relicensed in 2009 even though it lacked a reactor containment shell that could withstand a jet crash. Within seven days of its relicensing, an ongoing leak of radioactive water was uncovered. …

The US regulatory system faces a particular challenge regarding the handling of the vast amounts of spent fuel. At the beginning of 2010, nearly 65,000 metric tons of spent fuel was being stored at U.S. nuclear power plants. The NRC does not have limits on the amount of time fuel can remain in spent fuel pools and has not mandated, for instance, the transfer of spent fuel to dry casks, which are located away from reactors. Currently, nearly 10 times as much fuel is located in spent fuel pools than in the reactors. This is worrying as the pools are not protected by containment shells as the reactor cores are.³⁶

It is sobering to realize what almost happened: In 1962 New York City’s electric utility, Con Ed, had planned to build the world’s largest nuclear plant, “with a capacity of a thousand megawatts, more power than all the other atomic plants in the United States put together.” And where did those geniuses think to situate it? Why, in Queens, right smack on the eastern bank of the East River and less than two miles as the radiation flies from Times Square, the heart of New York City!

In 1963, opponents of the plan – known as “Ravenswood” – marched on City Hall. Their concerns were similar to those raised today, and included the effects of radiation in causing genetic mutation.

The head of Con Ed at the time, Harland C. Forbes, dismissed such concerns before a Congressional committee as “rather silly”.

Shortly thereafter, the NY City Council considering a resolution to ban nukes outright from NY City. The Times picks up the story from there:

A city utility commissioner called [the ban] “repressive and shortsighted.” The chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Glenn T. Seaborg, questioned the measure’s legality. A state senator from Queens, Seymour R. Thaler, told the Council, “The mind of man has not yet invented an accident-proof piece of mechanical equipment.”

All told, 29 people testified against the ban; 30 testified in favor. Out in City Hall Plaza, the growing crowd of picketers now had a name: Canpop, the Committee Against a Nuclear Power Plant in New York City.

In Washington, the Atomic Energy Commission harbored doubts. In August, it sent Con Ed a list of safety questions about the plant. The commission’s 1962 siting guidelines were deliberately ambiguous. On one hand, they called for a one-mile unpopulated zone around a nuclear plant, and low population density within a 16-mile radius. (More than five million people lived or worked within five miles of the Ravenswood site.) But the guidelines also noted that applicants were “free — and indeed encouraged” to argue for exceptions.

Con Ed had boasted that the shielding for its pressurized water reactor, featuring a concrete igloo 167 feet high and 7 feet thick, encased in another shell of thick concrete, could withstand a complete meltdown or a jetliner crash.

The plant’s neighbors remained unimpressed. “We think one of the threats is a decline in property values, and that is a factor,” Irving Katz, a founder of Canpop and a biochemist, told The Times in an October 1963 article. “But really it comes down to this — when we look out of our windows and see those two stacks up there, we are frightened. And our women are frightened.” [!] … Con Edison told the commission it would modify its plans to include “additional engineering safeguards.”³⁷

However in early 1964, Con Ed – under growing public pressure – withdrew its Ravenswood application. “It said it had made arrangements to buy hydroelectric power from Canada instead, a move that ‘had absolutely nothing to do with the public opposition to the proposal.’ The cost of building transmission lines was suddenly not a factor.”³⁸

Also weighing in significantly against Con Ed’s Rav­enswood plan was David E. Lilienthal, the first chair of the Atomic Energy Commission. He testified before Congress that he “would not dream of living in Queens” if such a plant were built there.³⁹ However,

Con Ed was not done trying to build a nuclear plant in the city, though. In 1968, it floated a plan to build an underground reactor — “because it would provide the nth degree of safety” — beneath an abandoned hospital site at the south end of Welfare Island, now Roosevelt Island, a few hundred feet from the Ravens­wood plants and that much closer to the East Side of Manhattan. It went nowhere.

In 1970, the utility proposed nuclear plants on man-made islands several miles off Coney Island and Staten Island, built of solid waste and each crowned with four thousand-megawatt reactors.⁴⁰

In tandem with the push for nuclear power, in 1957 Congress passed the Price-Anderson Act, which minimized corporate liability in the case of an accident and guaranteed public subsidies to the nuclear industry. The Price-Anderson Act

 

artificially limits the amount of primary insurance that nuclear operators must carry. … This distorts electricity markets by masking nuclear power’s unique safety and security risks, granting nuclear power an unfair and undesirable competitive advantage over safer energy alternatives. Second, Price-Anderson caps the liability of nuclear operators in the event of a serious accident or attack, leaving taxpayers on the hook for most of the damages. This makes capital investment in the nuclear industry more attractive to investors because their risk is minimized and fixed. … Since corporations under Price-Anderson are only responsible for around two percent of the estimated cost of a serious accident, nuclear power corporations can largely ignore (from a financial perspective) the dangers that reactors impose on American communities.⁴¹

As CUNY Professor of Theoretical Physics Michio Kaku puts it, “the Price-Anderson Act … mandates [that] the U.S. government, the taxpayers, will underwrite the insurance, because nuclear power stations are not insurable. … Nobody will sell an insurance policy for a nuclear power plant, because who can afford a $200 billion accident?”⁴²

It was the Price-Anderson Act that permitted, for example, Pacific Gas & Electric to build the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor right atop the Hosgri Fault in San Luis Obispo, California, and adjacent to a later-discovered offshore fault a mile out to sea – an area prone to quakes. PG&E bragged that the reactor was built to withstand a 6.5 magnitude earthquake. However, the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 occurred along one of those fault lines and measured 7.1 on the Richter scale. In response to many large protests, the utility has now been forced to postpone relicensing of the plant.⁴³ Some environmental groups believe this to be a victory for sanity, but it appears that this may be a diversion allowing PG&E added time to keep the plant running, while conducting more unnecessary seismic studies as the pretext.

At least three times since the year 2000 have deadly radioactive fuel rods disappeared from U.S. nuclear power plants, including rods “lost” at the Humboldt Bay Power Station run by PG&E in Eureka, California.⁴⁴ Its 2nd reactor complex at Humboldt Bay was dubbed “the dirtiest nuclear reactor in the U.S.” and was shut down in the late 70’s when traces of plutonium triggered Geiger counter alerts in a children’s playground a mile away.⁴⁵

Nor are false assurances and outright lying limited to the United States. Officials overseeing the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex have a sordid history of falsifying records. In 2002, a scandal over this rocked Japan and led to the departure of a number of senior executives of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) as well as to disclosures of previously unreported problems at the plant.⁴⁶ TEPCO officials admitted they had falsified safety records at Fukushima Daiichi. As a result of the scandal and a fuel leak at Fukushima, the company had to temporarily shut down all of its 17 nuclear reactors.⁴⁷ Fukushima state governor Yuhei Sato condemned TEPCO and METI (the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Jap­an’s nuclear regulatory agency), saying, “Some of the pundits have said, ‘This is an accident beyond all expectations. It is a natural disaster,’ but do not be fooled. This accident was doomed to happen. In other words, it is a man-made disaster.” He pledged that he “will never allow Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to re-open the reactors there.”⁴⁸

Of course, that assumes that the current governor does not reverse his statements – after all, he’s the one who in August, 2010 signed off on the plutonium-generating plan – and remains in office long enough to keep the nuclear industry at bay, not a likely scenario. The last governor, Sato Eisaku, even more forcefully fought the nuclear regulatory agency, and he was soon deposed and brought to trial on corruption charges. Still, Sato Eisaku sounds the warning: “During my ten­ure as governor of Fukushima prefecture, I fought hard against METI, demanding a transparency guarantee on accident information and working to secure the state government’s rights with regard to where nuclear plants are built. METI is supposed to supervise and instruct TEPCO so as to prevent TEPCO’s repeated tampering with and concealing of information, but instead, the two organizations have been working hand-in-hand. … Government must accept responsibility for defrauding the people.’”⁴⁹

Nevertheless, just a month before the powerful 2011 earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, government regulators approved a 10-year extension for the oldest of the six reactors at the power station, ignoring warnings about its safety.

Several weeks after a 10-year extension was granted for the Fukushima Daiichi plant, its operator admitted that it had failed to inspect 33 pieces of equipment related to the plant’s cooling systems, … including water pumps and diesel generators, at the power station’s six reactors, according to findings published on the agency’s Web site shortly before the earthquake.⁵⁰

Less than two weeks later, the earthquake and tsunami set off the crisis at the power station.

THE “OBAMA CONNECTION”

The nuclear nightmare is entirely man-made and profit driven. There is nothing “natural” about it. It is the result not just of technology gone “inexplicably” haywire but, predictably, of a certain kind of technology – a centralized, metered and capitalist technology,⁵¹ very expensive and made economically profitable only by a boatload of government subsidies to the nuclear industry.⁵²

And yet, even amidst the current catastrophe, and even as the government of Venezuela halts its nuclear program in response to public requests to reconsider the direction for society in light of Fukushima,⁵³ the U.S. government is dead-set on shoring up the industry and constructing new nuclear power plants. Along with Wall Street brokerage house Goldman Sachs, nuclear reactor operator Exelon Inc. – one of the largest employers in Illinois where Obama was Senator (a state that gets approximately half of its electricity from nuclear power, more than any other state) – was a top contributor to Barack Obama’s campaigns, officially donating over $269,000.

The company currently operates 10 reactors at six sites. The Quad-cities Nuclear Power Plant, located on the banks of the Mississippi River, is a GE Mark-1 plant, with the identical design and nearly the same age as the Fukushima reactors. Exelon barely averted disaster at its Braidwood nuke in Joliet, IL last year, caused by several problems that the company had refused to correct — including a poor design that led to repeated floods in buildings housing safety equipment. The company allowed vented steam to rip metal siding off containment walls and used undersized electrical fuses for vital safety equipment, according to the NRC.⁵⁴

As 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.”⁵⁵

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 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 Exelon — the utility operating more nuclear power plants than any other in the U.S. Rahm Em­an­u­el, his former chief of staff, was an investment banker central to the $8.2 billion corporate merger in 1999 that produced Exelon. David Axelrod, senior advisor and Obama’s chief political strategist, was an Exelon PR consultant. Frank M. Clark, who runs ComEd, helped advise Obama before he ran for President and is one of Obama’s largest fundraisers. Candidate Obama received sizable contributions from Exel­on president and CEO John Rowe, who in 2007 also became chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry’s main trade group. As Forbes magazine wrote, “Ties are tight between Exelon and the Obama administration,” noting Exelon’s political contributions and Emanuel’s and Axelrod’s Exelon links.⁵⁶ Upon becoming President, Obama appointed Rowe to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Energy Future.

The revolving door between government and industry rotates just as fast in Japan as it does in the U.S. In fact, the former director general of METI left the agency and joined TEPCO as a senior adviser. Another METI board member became executive vice president at TEPCO.⁵⁷

Not surprisingly, given who funded his campaigns, as president Obama betrayed his campaign statements and began promoting “safe, clean nuclear power.” He pushed for multi-billion dollar taxpayer subsidies for the construction of new nuclear plants, and made them a central part of his energy policy. He now proposes allocating $36 billion in federal loan guarantees to jump-start the construction of new nuclear reactors. Unfortunately, he has maneuvered some who have argued fervently for the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions and to reduce or reverse global warming, such as NASA scientist James Hansen, into supporting his pro-nuclear policies by falsely posing coal mining and sequestration, mountaintop removal, deep sea oil drilling, and hydro-fracking for natural gas as the options to nuclear power – all of which the Obama administration is aggressively promoting. Opponents of nuclear power, in contrast, vigorously oppose every one of those Obama proposals and argue instead for funding for development of decentralized sustainable energy alternatives like solar and wind power. Contrary to the claims of nuclear supporters, anti-nuke activists also strongly oppose expansion of oil and coal-burning power plants and support phasing them out, as they are rightly seen as prime contributors to air pollution, asthma and greenhouse gases involved in global climate change. But nuclear power is not the answer.

John Rowe’s Nuclear Energy Institute praises legislation that would facilitate the development of smaller, scalable nuclear reactors. The legislation, sponsored by Democrats as well as Republicans,

was introduced March 8 in the U.S. Senate. The Nuclear Power 2021 Act (S. 512) was introduced by Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), along with Sens. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.). The legislation directs the Secretary of Energy to implement programs to develop and demonstrate two reactor designs, one fewer than 300 megawatts of electric generating capacity and the other fewer than 50 mega­watts. This public-private, cost-shared program would facilitate the design certification by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of two small reactor designs by the end of 2017 and the licensing of the reactors by the end of 2020.⁵⁸

 

Even as the nuclear nightmare plays out in Japan, the President, the nuclear industry and its proponents in Congress bull ahead, disregarding the potential for causing global catastrophic events. Just as former President George W. Bush increased allowable arsenic in drinking water when that water was found to have higher arsenic levels than expected, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under Obama is preparing to dramatically increase permissible radioactive releases in water, food and soil, in preparation for what they are calling ‘radiological incidents.’⁵⁹

This is taking place entirely behind closed doors, warns the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Because this plan is considered ‘guidance’ it does not require public notice as a normal regulation would. The radiation guides (called Protective Action Guides or PAGs) “are protocols for responding to radiological events ranging from nuclear power-plant accidents to ‘dirty’ bombs.” Under the new guides, nuclear energy plants would be allowed to vent much higher levels of radioactive isotopes into the water supply and expose many more people to higher doses of radiation, including

 

• A nearly 1000-fold increase in strontium-90;

 

• A 3000 to 100,000-fold hike for iodine-131; and

 

 

• An almost 25,000 rise for nickel-63.

 

 

 

The new radiation guidelines would also allow long-term cleanup standards thousands of times more lax than anything EPA has ever before accepted, permitting doses to the public that EPA itself estimates would cause cancer in as many as every fourth person exposed.⁶⁰ These relaxations of radiation protection requirements are favored by the nuclear industry and allies in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Energy Department.

Fortunately, there are some in the regulatory agencies resisting the proposed increase in allowable radiation guides. The idea that there could be any “acceptable level” of radiation – let alone these drastically “enhanced” levels – is being vigorously opposed by public health professionals inside EPA where a critical debate is now taking place, according to documents PEER obtained by suing the EPA under the Freedom of Information Act. Even Exelon CEO John Rowe said lawmakers shouldn’t expand U.S. guarantees for loans for new reactors, and that he is reassessing a $3.65-billion plan to boost output by upgrading Exelon’s existing reactors⁶¹ – not for any newfound moral, environmental or health-related concern but as a smokescreen for reducing corporate expenditures. The EPA’s documents show that such higher-ups as Charles Openchowski of EPA’s Office of General Counsel, on the other hand, is truly appalled at the proposed allowable radiation guides and wrote:

[T]his guidance would allow cleanup levels that exceed MCLs [Maximum Contamination Limits under the Safe Drinking Water Act] by a factor of 100, 1000, and in two instances 7 million and there is nothing to prevent those levels from being the final cleanup achieved (i.e., it’s not confined to immediate response of emergency phase).⁶²

It is worth noting that measurements in seawater near the Fukushima Daiichi reactors currently found radio­active Iodine-131 levels at 7.5 million times the legal limit. Those readings were recorded just before Tokyo Electric began releasing an additional 11,000 tons of radioactive water into the sea, poisoning whales, dolphins, sea turtles and fish.⁶³ (Why measure it at all if they’re just going to dump it in the ocean, regardless of what the measurements show?) The radioactive water being discharged into the Pacific has prompted experts to sound the alarm, as radioactive cesium, which has a much longer half-life than iodine, is expected to concentrate in the upper food chain.

After a month had passed, the Japanese government raised the level of the accident at Fukushima from 5 to 7, the most severe of accidents, on par with Chernobyl and which would put into motion em­ergency measures that, criminally, were not yet in effect. The anti-nuclear environmental organization Greenpeace – among others – had already calculated three weeks before that the accident at Fukushima was scale 7. Thomas Breuer, the head of the Climate & Energy Unit for Greenpeace Germany, is part of a field team of radiation monitors in Japan. He questioned why the government of Japan waited so long to raise the accident level, noting that Japan “wasted three weeks of not informing the public about the real risks of this accident.”

Fukushima “is not equal to Chernobyl, it is way worse, because we are facing three reactors totally, or partly, destroyed,” Breuer said. “A fourth reactor has a problem with the spent fuel, which had a huge explosion. … Each of these reactors could be rated as an INES scale 7 accident, because the INES scale does not even consider a multiple accident.”

Another point, Breuer emphasizes, is that the Chernobyl reactor was situated more or less in a rural area. “But Fukushima is in a densely populated area, so millions of people are living around it,” making it even worse than Chernobyl and more difficult to manage.

“[Greenpeace] warned the government that there are a lot of cities and villages outside the 20-kilometer evacuation zone where the radiation levels are so high that people need urgently to be evacuated, especially children and pregnant women, because they are the most vulnerable part of the population to radiation.”

Fukushima “is a city of 340,000 inhabitants, and we found very high levels of radiation in the city.”⁶⁴ But, TEPCO did not even notify the relevant government institutions until more than three desperate hours into the catastrophe.⁶⁵ Timely notification of the people living near the plant could have meant the difference between living and dying.

And yet amidst the ongoing desperation, despair and heroic attempts by so many people to contain the current crisis and keep it from becoming even worse, Japan’s Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, ridiculed those calling for an end to nuclear reactors, saying that they “exaggerat[ed] the danger.”⁶⁶ Unbelievably, he declared that produce from the region around the Fukushima plant was safe to eat despite farmers’ own misgivings over the radiation on their crops. “From now on, people should not fall into an extreme self-restraint mood, and they should live life as normal,” he said. Impersonating George W. Bush, Naoto Kan called on Japan’s people to go out of their way “to consume products from the areas that have been affected. … We should enjoy the use of such products and support the areas that have been affected. I ask you to do this.” Oh my God, did he really say that? Who can forget U.S. president Bush’s advice following 9/11: “Go shopping. Travel. Live your life as usual. Don’t let the terrorists win.” Today we have: “Eat your spinach. Don’t let the radiation win!” Yikes!

The truth is, the “terrorists” are those who are holding the entire world hostage to their insatiable drive for expanded energy production and profits at any cost. Unfortunately for the rest of us, there is no “Planet B”. Fukushima highlights once again the stark reality of the choice facing us: The Capitalist system vs. the Immune system. President Obama has made his choice – one of solidarity, not with the suffering people of Japan but with the corporations that own the world’s nuclear power plants. But, regardless, it will be our resistance that will be decisive, just as it was in the late 1970s and early 80s when the huge antinuclear movement in the U.S. prevented any new reactors from being built.

Back in the 1980s, Dr. Ernest Sternglass (together with Jens Scheer) correlated fluctuations in infectious diseases – and significantly, those associated with the then-emerging AIDS epidemic and other immune compromising conditions – with releases of radiation into the atmosphere from nuclear weapons testing. He expanded that work to examine the results of radiation exposure following Chernobyl. Sternglass also ascertained that illnesses occurred not only as a result of nuclear weapons tests and extreme nuclear power plant accidents such as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, but in proportion to people’s proximity to nuclear power plants in the course of their “normal” operations. Sternglass concluded that the everyday low-level radiation generated by nuclear power plants plays havoc with people’s immune system as well as with the surrounding environment.⁶⁷

The inhabitants of Maharashtra in India are fiercely protesting the plan to build the world’s largest nuclear complex.⁶⁸ Anti-nuke protesters are marching in Japan as well as throughout Europe. In Germany, the Green Party – due to its longstanding militant opposition to nuclear power – won unprecedented pluralities in the recent election and numerous seats in the legislature.

We in the U.S. must seize this moment, become far more visible and move quickly to force the government to:

 

• shut down all nuclear power plants;

 

• vastly increase subsidies to decentralized sustainable alternatives like wind and solar power;

 

 

• conserve nature and energy by forcing a reduction in unnecessary and wasteful production⁶⁹; and,

 

 

• end the “revolving door” between government regulators and industry by forbidding regulators from joining the private corporations they had been monitoring.

 

 

Whether global capitalism can accommodate itself to these needs or whether the demands will serve as part of a program of a movement for a non-nuclear and sustainable socialist society remains to be seen. That transition is now on us. What we do is all important. We want our kids to inherit a world worth living in, and so must put an end to nuclear power immediately. The world hangs in the balance. 

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Mitchel Cohen organizes with the Brooklyn Greens / Green Party and NY State Against Genetic Engineering (NYSAGE), and coordinates the No Spray Coalition against pesticides. He is a founding member of the Red Balloon Collective (1969) at SUNY Stony Brook, hosts a weekly radio show “Steal This Radio” on www.NYTalkRadio.net, and is currently the Chair of the WBAI Radio (99.5 FM) Local Station Board. www.MitchelCohen.com.

This essay, along with essays by Harvey Wasserman and Ernest J. Sternglass, are bundled into a wonderful pamphlet and available for $6 (plus postage). Just drop a note to mitchelcohen(at)mindspring.com if you would like one.

NOTES

2 Jay Alabaster, Associated Press, “Tsunami-hit towns forgot warnings from ancestors,” April 6, 2011.