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Beyond Fukishima: A World in Denial About Nuclear Risks
What will it take for our world to recognize the dangers that nuclear scientists and even Albert Einstein were warning about at the "dawn" of the nuclear age?Nuclear power and nuclear weapons have been sold to the public relentlessly, in the first instance as necessary, and the second, as safe. Rory O' Connor and Richard Bell coined the term "Nuke Speak" to describe the Orwellian methods deployed by the nuclear industry's PR offensive in a book length analysis of a well funded campaign that continues to this day using euphemistic language to mask its real agenda.
Amy Goodman reminds us of the prophetic statement by Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett who tried to find words to describe the horror he was seeing in Hiroshima in 1945 after the bomb fell.
"It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts ... as a warning to the world."
The world heard his warning, but seems to have ignored it. In fact, what followed has been decades of nuclear proliferation, the spread of nuclear power plants and the escalation of the arms race with new higher tech weaponry.
As Hiroshima becomes yesterday's distant memory and Fukishima the current threat, the full extent of the casualties and body count are not yet in, partly because the Japanese government and the power companies don't want to alarm the public.
Years earlier, a similar cover-up was in effect at Thee Mile Island complex in Pennsylvania where reports of the damage people suffered from a serious accident was minimized, never examined in depth by some of the very same media outlets who are today criticizing Japan for a lack of transparency.
On August, 6, 2008, the anniversary of the dropping of the first nuclear bomb, Alternet.org reported that the government and media were complicit in minimizing public awareness of the extensive suffering that did take place:
"But the word never crossed the conceptual chasm between the "mainstream" media and the "alternative." Despite a federal class action lawsuit filed by 2400 Pennsylvania families claiming damages from the accident, despite at least $15 million quietly paid to parents children with birth defects, despite three decades of official admissions that nobody knows how much radiation escaped from TMI, where it went or who it affected, not a mention of the fact that people might have been killed there made its way into a corporate report"
Was this just accidental or is there a deeper pattern of denial? The great expert on psycho history, Robert J. Lifton, wrote a book, Hiroshima In America, with journalist Greg Mitchell about the aftermath of Hiroshima in America exploring what they call "50 years of denial."
One reviewer explained, "The authors examine what they perceive to be a conspiracy by the government to mislead and suppress information about the actual bombing, Truman's decision to drop the bomb, and the birth and mismanagement of the beginning of the nuclear age. The authors claim that Americans then, and now, are haunted by the devastating psychological effects of the bomb."
Lifton and Mitchell are evidence-based writers, not conspiratologists, but they could find no other explanation for how such a seminal event could have been distorted and misrepresented for a half century.
Nuclear power and nuclear weapons have been sold to the public relentlessly, in the first instance as necessary, and the second, as safe. Rory O' Connor and Richard Bell coined the term "Nuke Speak" to describe the Orwellian methods deployed by the nuclear industry's PR offensive in a book length analysis of a well funded campaign that continues to this day using euphemistic language to mask its real agenda.
And today, as the world watches the dreadful and even Darwinian struggle for survival by the earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan, as information about the extent of the nuclear danger trickles out, President Obama has reaffirmed his commitment to build new nuclear plants.
Others stress more parochial concerns. The TV Production community fears a shortage in Japanese made magnetic and recording tape. Consumers are being told that they may face a delay in ordering new iPads so get your orders in now. And, the Israeli new service YNET says people there worry about a sushi shortage.
Meanwhile, in Germany, more than 50,000 activists took to the streets in protest, but, so far, there has been no organized outcry here in the U.S. At the Left Forum in New York, the issue was barely addressed in the opening plenary.
On the right, flamboyant talking head/provocateur Ann Coulter defended the imagined health benefits of a release of radiation to counter what she calls the alarmism of the environmentalists. She calls it a "cancer vaccine."
In a talk during a recent visit to Iran, which insists it is not making nuclear weapons, I raised questions about what their government said they want to do: expand their nuclear power plants. When I questioned the wisdom of that approach, I was jeered because they felt I was challenging their "right" to have what other countries have, their right to "progress." The thought that the plants could be dangerous was dismissed.
What they don't seem to know and what millions in Japan are finding out is this technology—with spent rods that are never "spent" and the nuclear waste that will outlive us all-- is inherently unsafe. Jonathan Schell makes this point well in a recent essay in The Nation:
"The chain of events at the reactors now running out of control provides a case history of the underlying mismatch between human nature and the force we imagine we can control. Nuclear power is a complex, high technology. But the things that endemically malfunction are of a humble kind.
The art of nuclear power is to boil water with the incredible heat generated by a nuclear chain reaction. But such temperatures necessitate continuous cooling. Cooling requires pumps. Pumps require conventional power. These are the things that habitually go wrong—and have gone wrong in Japan. A backup generator shuts down. A battery runs out. The pump grinds to a halt. You might suppose that it is easy to pump water into a big container, and that is usually true, but the best-laid plans go awry from time to time. Sometimes the problem is a tsunami, and sometimes it is an operator asleep at the switch."
As the "incident" records of our own Nuclear Regulatory Agency make clear, these are not just Japanese problems. The Christian Science Monitor reports, "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission failed to resolve known safety problems, leading to 14 'near-misses' in US nuclear power plants in 2009 and 2010, according to a new report from a nuclear watchdog group."
We don't even know the full of the extent of the accidents, unintentional releases of radiation and other problems in this country much less in others with fewer rules and less oversight. No one expected Chenobyl to explode, claiming so many lives; no one knows where the next disaster will occur.
Bernie Sanders is calling for a full investigation of nuclear safety here. Ralph Nader writes, ""The unfolding multiple nuclear reactor catastrophe in Japan is prompting overdue attention to the 104 nuclear plants in the United States - many of them aging, many of them near earthquake faults, some on the west coast exposed to potential tsunamis."
The global nuclear roulette game goes on. Even moderate and restrained criticisms are dismissed until there is an "event" that cannot be denied. Nuclear energy supporters promise that "Gen 4," the next generation of reactors, will be much safer.
Problem solved? Not everyone thinks so. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists carries an assessment by Hugh Gusterson on "The Lessons of Fukishima."
"To this anthropologist, then, the lesson of Fukushima is not that we now know what we need to know to design the perfectly safe reactor, but that the perfectly safe reactor is always just around the corner. It is technoscientific hubris to think otherwise.
This leaves us with a choice between walking back from a technology that we decide is too dangerous or normalizing the risks of nuclear energy and accepting that an occasional Fukushima is the price we have to pay for a world with less carbon dioxide. It is wishful thinking to believe there is a third choice of nuclear energy without nuclear accidents."
We are still debating if nuclear power is worth the risk as irradiated clouds float over Los Angeles and there is a panicked run in the public to buy iodine pills. The industry's marketing machine is in crisis response mode and hasn't missed a beat, while many of us look on with a sense of impotence as we are told, once again, what's in our best interest.
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26 Comments so far
Show AllI nearly puked over this morning's CNN commentary by Fareed Zakaria. I would have replied on line, but CNN has me blocked from laying any hand on this worthy.
The first casualty of war is being blocked from posting acerbic commentary on CNN. I just made that up.
Trylon
Yup you can have all the free speech you want, just as long as you don't say anything important.
The free press exists for those who own one.
NADER DEMANDS PUBLIC HEARINGS IN EVERY US DISTRICT THAT HAS NUCLEAR PLANT TO CLOSE THEM AND NO MORE LICENSING
phone Washington White House 202 456 1111
Nuclear industry and Obama playing Russian Roulette with the American People
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/18/why_are_we_playing_russian_roulette
"closed monetized minds", Obama, energy secretary Chou, will not meet with nuclear power critics, but only with nuclear corporate allies, technological insanity, won't be financed by bankster, but only by taxpayers. Closed "monetized minds" in Washington. Obama's rush to defend nuclear power by Obama, a cheerleader for Nuclear polluters. Obama likes "clean coal", and hides continuing oil disaster in Gulf while cutting loose the corporate fascists to deep drill even more.
NADER DEMANDS IMPEACHMENT OF OBAMA AS WAR CRIMINAL
"Many legal experts know that Obama is committing war crimes and should be impeached, veterans for peace want us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama committing worse crimes than Bush in Afghanistan "innocents are being slaughters, using state secrets, CIA engaging in illegal surveillance "running wild", "if Bush should have been impeached, Obama should be impeached"
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/18/daniel_ellsberg_joins_peace_activists_risking
The longer you people believe that Obama is a moral human being, the less chance we and all life on this planet have of making it to the next century without living in war ravaged, desolated,radioactive, toxic, ugly, lifeless world. Please people, realize Obama is a fake, a frenemy, he will not even listen to you, he is a tool of the corporate fascists.
if people knew
that all the nuclear waste, (not just the active reactor) , had to be covered by refrigerated water, or it would explode and cause catastophic radioactive fallout
the how many people do you think would support nuclear power??
Americans love their silver bullets...simple faux solutions to problems.
The nuke PR machine has convinced Americans that 1) the lights will go out if we don't build more nuke plants and 2) nuclear power doesn't create greenhouse gas.
If Obama earmarked as much money for truly clean energy as he has earmarked for new nukes, there would be more power than anybody knows what to do with.
Mining, transporting and processing uranium, building nuke plants and disposing of wastes burns boatloads of fossil fuel, creating lots of greenhouse gas.
And then the eventual decommisioning or disaster coping.
And some uninformed people diss renewables because they are too technologically advanced, or require energy and material to build, or in their ignorance "unproven".
Glenn,
There is a report in the blogsphere (I have not been able to confirm it with an actual news story) that there was a hydroelectric dam burst in Fukushima Prefecture from the earthquake and that there were 1600 homes destroyed in the resulting flood. A reasonable estimate would be on average one person present in each home.
The fatality count that I last saw at the nuclear plant was 3 souls, all employees. All were lost to the earthquake/tsunami, not the accident afterwards. There have been injuries and an undesirable level of radiation exposure for some employees but no fatalities from the accident.
I don't discount renewables or call for the elimination of hydroelectric but, comparatively speaking, nuclear power is perhaps as safe as renewable hydroelectric or possibly safer in a natural disaster.
Bill
hydro electric can't make areas uninhabitable for years, by having the nuclear waste explode because you can't keep it covered with water and refrigerated
and what about all that water you cover it with
can't that escape and expose us to radiation, you know like in new hampshire and other plants like it?
I'll accept that when you tell me your fail safe plan for disposing of the nuclear waste from our 104 power reactors and our 36 research reactors.
The US is a grotesque monster of vast proportions and the grip of its propaganda matrix on the minds of its citizens is nearly as invisible as radioactivity.
No one 'voted' for nuclear power. Indeed, we never enjoyed an honest debate. Corporations and the US government made the decision for us.
...nuclear power, we are told, is necessary, democracy is black-box voting machines owned and programmed by corporations...
"I'm realizing again that democracy is so hollow now. We do not have power," Oiwa says. "We have been controlled by the government and the Tokyo Electric Company, a private company... We have to really look for a lifestyle and a way of thinking again, to live again with harmony, in harmony with nature."
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/17/prominent_japanese_environmentalist_keibo_oiwa_urges
We're at number two of the five stages of grief: anger, denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Nuclear energy is too big weird and scary to get angry at. The plants are already built so shaking our fists at those who built them feels futile. You can get mad at those who still tell us these are good things. That might help.
Denial -- makes us feel better at least until some annoying fact gets through the mental barriers and makes it hard to stay in denial.
Bargaining -- With who? Those officials who are in charge of the plants are unlikely to agree that they were a bad idea and should be "decommissioned," and what can we offer as our part of the bargain?
Depression -- I'm there!
Acceptance -- I hope nobody reaches acceptance, gets to the "nuclear power is dangerous but it's the best we can come up with so we'll just have to put up with the risks" place.
Pay no attention to that reactor behind the fire truck. I am the safe and powerful energy of tomorrow.
It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts ... as a warning to the world."
unfortunately, the world didn't experience 'first hand' the aftermath of those atrocities. if they had, there would be no more nuclear anything i suspect.............
What no one is saying, and what I wish they would say until it was clear in people's heads, is that nuclear power kills people one by one, just as cigarettes do. Tobacco kills 200,000 Americans a year.
Almost nobody steps forward and says "I'm about to die from nuclear power." The exception, at a tiny antinuclear rally, were a couple of nuclear plant workers who were quite sick and at least one was on the edge of not getting out of a bed ever again, but she was in a wheelchair. The industry throws people away.
However, 1 in 1800 people died from cancer 200 years ago. A child today has a 1 in 2 chance of facing cancer in his/her lifetime. Almost every American family has seen cancer. These numbers can be apportioned to the various carcinogens out there, to the terrible American diet, and to stress and depression.
A Mother Jones story put 50,000 extra American deaths on the radiation from Three Mile Island. I wouldn't doubt that the nuclear plant nearest to you has killed people. I've seen Chernobyl estimates of 300,000, 400,000, 500,000 and 1 million people killed. That last estimate includes 170,000 people in North America killed by the Ukranian catastrophe. Yes this stuff blows around the world and it gets in the whole world's food chain. I wouldn't be surprised if Fukushima equals Chernobyl.
In the end, the cost of nuclear power is the cost of cigarettes, except instead of the chain smokers, the plant's workers and neighbors are most likely to die early, and kids die too. (Whose kids? Can you handle the truth?) Unlike smoking, you can kick the habit with solar/wind and save enormous hospital costs downstream.
You might find this of interest:
http://steveosborn.blogspot.com/2011/03/twenty-five-years-ago-i-wrote-article.html
There is a way to close down all the nuclear power plants. Reduce the growing demand for electricity by peacefully reducing the human population with family planning education. A smaller, more rational number of people could get all the electricity they need from wind and solar. But growth is an instinctive addiction, especially when corporate billions are involved. Everyone says "grow the economy'" but they refuse to think and answer these questions:
1. How many people can the Earth support as it slowly shrinks with each volcano and earthquake?
2. How long can life on Earth survive as humans dump tons of garbage on growing mountains of landfill and tons of garbage and sludge into the global ocean?.
The symptoms of ecocidal collapse have already begun, as you will see if you dare to read the environmental news reports.
Don't forget that the 1972 Rasmussion Report "proved" that due to the redundant safety systems designed for nuclear power plants, the chance of a person being killed by a nuclear power plant was 1 in 500,000,000,000 per plant per year. So there can only have been a handful of deaths from nuclear power in the history of the world.
Those of you who think that Chernobyl, TMI, or Fukishima had any problems must be mistaken.
The book "World on the Edge," by Lester R. Brown, the president of the Earth Policy Institute, based in Washington, D.C., dismisses nuclear power in his and his helpers "Plan B" for saving the world from climate change, population growth, food and water shortages, mass migrations of people, failing states and the like, which he says will require an effort exactly like the one FDR (Now, THERE was a president!) drove from 1938 or so through 1945; it included the Manhattan Project, a all-resources, all-hands-on-deck effort to build the atomic bomb before Hitler did. Brown is NOT in denial about nuclear power. He says that it has been the dream of humanity since the early 1950s. But the proof is now in. It will NOT work. It may kill us as well as any other catastrophe that awaits us these days. He says: Plan B "is a wartime mobilization, an all-out effort to restructure the world energy economy. We replace ALL coal and oil-fired electricity with that from renewable resources. Plan B, which will be powered largely by electircity, does NOT relay on a buildup in nuclear power. If we use full-cost pricing--insisting that utilities pay for disposing of nuclear waste, decommissioning worn-out plants, and insuring reactors against accidents and terrorist attacks--no one would build a nuclear plant. They are simply NOT economical." His 200-page book describing the Institute's Plan B to save the earth says "wind is the centerpiece of the Plan B energy economy." Plan B would cost "less than $200 billion of additional funding per YEAR worldwide. The benchmark of political leadership will be whether leaders succeed in shifting taxes from work to environmentally destructive activities. It is tax shifting NOT additional appropriations that is the key." The wartime conversion that FDR accomplished and the corporate pigs and Obama cannot or will not included: a sparkplug factory switched to producing machine guns; a stove manufacturer to producing lifeboats;a merry-go-round factory making gun mounts; a toy company turning out compasses; a corset manufacturere producing grenade belts; and a pinball machine plant making armor-piercing shells."
Worse, with public funding, Big Nuke uses taxpayer billions to finance their pro-nuke campaigns against taxpayers best interests.
Big Nuke shills appear on CD whenever the subject comes up. This is an illegal use of taxpayer subsidies. Report these shills to your congressperson.
Why Fukushima Made Me Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Power
-George Monbiot
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima
Another explanation of how nuclear power remains a necessary and reasonable part of near-term mitigation of greenhouse emissions and climate change.
Another example of what the shills want you to take away from this disaster.
They're so anxious to push their agenda they can't even wait until the situation is under control.
Intimations of the Next World
2.
Armored vehicles
cross the bridge from Saudi to
Bahrain to prop up
the Al-Khalifas, guard the
US fleet moored off Juffair.
In Miyagi, more
than half million survivors
build fires from fallen
branches and roofs of houses,
trying to keep from freezing.
They are surrounded
by corpses of neighbors, mounds
of pestilent mud,
without food or drink, waiting--
while the snow covers their fires--
like flies in amber,
for the frigid relief of
radioactive spinach.
Drones penetrate Mexico.
The gringo ambassador
is packing his bags,
but leaving armed agents and
DEA handlers
carousing on three floors in
avenida Reforma.
Carlos complied with
his orders, says Hillary,
and now Mexico's
president must complete his--
or it's 1848
with the stars and stripes
flying in the Zócalo--
or if you prefer,
Sunday in Gadafi's tent
ventilated courtesy
of our Tomahawk
cruise missiles and thirst for oil.
Near Yucca Mountain
two Shoshone, smoking in
silence, salute the solstice.
Not only is Nuclear Power unsafe, uneconomical and enormous consumer of fossil fuels in its multi-billion construction - Uranium is NOT a renewable resource!
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/12/19/peak-uranium-whats-going-to-fuel-all-those-nuclear-plants/
About 2.3 million tons of uranium have already been produced. Reasonably assured resources below 40 $/kgU are in the range of the already produced uranium. At present reactor uranium demand of about 67 kt/year these reserves would last for about 30 years, and would increase to 50 years if the classes up to 130 $/kgU were included. Inferred resources up to 130 $/kg would extend the static R/P ratio up to about 70 years. [...] However, the production profiles and reported reserves of individual countries show major downward reserve revisions in USA and France after their production maximum was passed. These downward revisions raise some doubts regarding the data quality of reasonably assured resources.
From a report on peak Uranium:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2379
We need first to conserve energy and resources via Green Transit, insulation, restoring Main Street mixed use towns
and then use solar, wind, hydro, wave geothermal for
RENEWABLE sustainable energy sources!!
The nuclear power plants that you all so roundly criticize are of the enriched-material, steam-water type [light water reactor or heavy-water reactor]. But, and this remains undiscussed, you can have two other types: the natural uranium rector, also called the "slow-poke," which is entirely stable, and the pebble-bed reactor, which uses enriched materials yet has no coolant water, and hence is self-limiting and non-explosive. We build the "other kind" because the military uses them and thus the builders are familiar with the construction parameters.
The promoters of wind/solar/hydraulic do not acknowledge one other truth: the source sites for these are remote from the usage points, and since energy portability has not been well developed, the power so far is transferred by wires. We do not have the wires, nor the ability to build the wires, to replace the power generated from current in-site coal and nuclear plants. And that is why these remote-site wind/solar plants are going nowhere.
Until someone you know or in your own family gets cancer from radiation emanating from Japan then you will remain in denial about the scope and seriousness of this issue at hand.
According to recent reports, the state of Washington has traced material back to Japan. So, the radiation issues from Japan have already HIT America.
Whether one is a liberal or conservative, this issue is not going away whether you want it to or wish it away. The contamination is already into the atmosphere and the earth, so its time for everyone to get out of fantasyland and into reality about this very, very serious health and environmental issue.