nuclear-news

Potential for disaster in USA’s nuclear reactors and cooling systems

It would not even require a quake or tsunami, only a moderately ingenious terrorist, to breach Shearon Harris’s puny defences and sabotage the cooling systems. A study by the Brookhaven Labs estimates that a pool fire there could cause 140,000 cancers, and contaminate thousands of square miles of land.

Another Fukushima meltdown? In America? Not if, but when | The First Post, Alexander Cockburn, 18 March 11, “…….. President Obama for example, who took plenty of money from this industry for his presidential campaign and used his State of the Union address last January to reaffirm his commitment to “clean, safe” nuclear power. This week, Obama’s press spokesman confirmed that nuclear energy “remains a part of the President’s overall energy plan”.

The United States produces more nuclear energy than any other nation. It has 104 nuclear plants, many of them old, many prone to endless shutdowns, all of them dangerous. Take the Shearon Harris nuclear power station in North Carolina, also a repository for highly radioactive spent fuel rods from two other nuclear plants.

It would not even require a quake or tsunami, only a moderately ingenious terrorist, to breach Shearon Harris’s puny defences and sabotage the cooling systems. A study by the Brookhaven Labs estimates that a pool fire there could cause 140,000 cancers, and contaminate thousands of square miles of land.

The benchmark catastrophe amid peacetime nuclear disasters remains the explosion in the fourth reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station on April 26, 1986, in the Ukraine. Earlier this week Fergus Walsh, the BBC’s medical correspondent, comforted his audience with the amazing nonsense that by 2006 Chernobyl had prompted only 60 deaths from cancer!

In 2009 the New York Academy of Sciences published Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, a 327-page volume by three scientists, Alexey Yablokov and Vassily and Alexey Nesterenko. It is the definitive study to date.

In the summary of his chapter ‘Mortality After the Chernobyl Catastrophe’, Yablokov says flatly: “A detailed study reveals that 3.8–4.0 per cent of all deaths in the contaminated territories of Ukraine and Russia from 1990 to 2004 were caused by the Chernobyl catastrophe…

“Since 1990, mortality among the clean-up teams has exceeded the mortality rate in corresponding population groups. From 112,000 to 125,000 liquidators [members of clean-up crews] died before 2005 – that is, some 15 per cent of the 830,000 members of the Chernobyl clean-up teams.

“The calculations suggest that the Chernobyl catastrophe has already killed several hundred thousand human beings in a population of several hundred million that was unfortunate enough to live in territories affected by the fallout.”

Set Fukushima next to Chernobyl and its ongoing lethal aftermath. Think of southern California or North Carolina. Nuclear expert Robert Alvarez, who advised President Clinton on nuclear matters, writes this week that a single spent fuel rod pool – as at Fukushima or Shearon Harris – holds more

cesium-137 than was deposited by all atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in the northern hemisphere combined, and an explosion in that pool could blast “perhaps three to nine times as much of these materials into the air as was released by the Chernobyl reactor disaster”……

Alexander Cockburn: Another Fukushima meltdown? In America? Not if, but when | News & Politics | News & Comment | The First Post

March 18, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA