nuclear-news

Risky Business  What CPS won’t tell you about nuclear power

Walking behind South Texas Project Unit 1 with STP Operating Company spokesperson Cathy Gann.

San Antonio Current, By Greg Harman, 30 Sept 09

“…………..Nuclear power grew up in darkness.

Just as the atomic-weapons program that preceded it, nuclear-power research was considered “classified at birth” by the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. All information about the “the production of fissionable material, or the use of fissionable material in the production of power” was considered “restricted data.” That, of course, included candid discussions about the radiation risk posed by nuclear-power generation.

“There still remains a cloak of secrecy around nuclear power plants,” said Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Oversight Project for the nonprofit organization Beyond Nuclear. “It has actually become more opaque since September 11.”

According to the 9/11 Commission report published in the summer of 2004, al Qaeda operatives had originally planned to hijack 10 planes and target nuclear power plants in their suicide missions.

While NRC officials insisted that such an attack would fail to cause any significant damage, employees were quietly pulling a 1982 report by Argonne National Laboratories out of the public document room, Gunter said. Only recently restored as a public document, the Argonne study stresses that while aircraft hazards are generally considered “low risk events,” a jetliner impact that knocked out electrical power at pressurized water reactors like those operating outside Bay City “would leave the plant vulnerable to core melt.”

………… The size of the radiation release at Three Mile Island is unknown since plant monitors were overwhelmed, knocked off scale by the released radioactivity, but the NRC would later state that no exposures greater than an average annual dose of natural background radiation occurred.

Wing’s team followed on the heels of a study by Colombia University researchers and found elevated numbers of cancers downwind from the plant that could not be explained by either stress or the officially estimated radiation-release figures. Only something “several orders of magnitude” higher could account for recorded cancers that were up to 10 times higher downwind from the reactor than upwind. What made Wing’s report explosive was its willingness to entertain the possibility that the official story may not be accurate. It’s important to remember, Wing says, that prior to Three Mile Island the atomic industry’s relationship with truth was not always consistent. “I know from the past — and it’s now general knowledge — there were times information about these radiation releases was not published or publicized in any way,” Wing said. “There’s a lot of documentation of really unethical coverups, basically, or failure to tell people about their exposures.”

Even when they’re operating properly and “safely,” nuclear power plants aren’t emission-free. Low levels of radioactivity are routinely discharged into the air and water at the best-run reactors. One radionuclide that keeps turning up is tritium. Associated with nuclear power and weapons production, tritium is a known cancer-causer if ingested or inhaled, and remains hazardous for dozens of years as it slowly decays into a harmless form of hydrogen…………… http://sacurrent.com/news/story.asp?id=70567