A Bellona remembrance.
Alexei Yablokov, the towering grandfather of Russian ecology who worked with Bellona to unmask Cold War nuclear dumping practices in the Arctic, has died in Moscow after a long illness. He was 83. Alexei Yablokov, the towering grandfather of Russian ecology who worked with Bellona to unmask Cold War nuclear dumping practices in the Arctic, has died in Moscow after a long illness. He was 83. As a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he was also the lead author of the seminal 2007 book, “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment.” The book presented the conclusion that the 1986 Chernobyl disaster was responsible for 985,000 premature deaths – the boldest mortality tally to date – by analyzing 6,000 source materials on the accident. Bellona President Frederic Hauge Tuesday remembered Yablokov as a friend of three decades standing. “He was an inspiration, a great friend and a great scientist, one of the world’s most significant environmental heroes,” said Hauge. “To know him and to work with him, someone of such cool and keen intellect is a memory we should all take care of and treasure.” Yablokov commanded a broad environmental and political mandate in Russia, and published over 500 papers on biology, ecology, natural conservation and numerous textbooks on each of these subjects. He founded Russia’s branch of Greenpeace and was the leader of the Green Russia faction of the Yabloko opposition party. While serving as environmental advisor to President Boris Yeltsin’s from 1989 to 1992, Yablokov published a searing white paper that detailed the gravity of the radiological threat posed by dumped military reactors and scuttled nuclear submarines in the Arctic. The catalogue of waste dumped at sea by the Soviets, includes some 17,000 containers of radioactive waste, 19 ships containing radioactive waste, 14 nuclear reactors, including five that still contain spent nuclear fuel; 735 other pieces of radioactively contaminated heavy machinery, and the K-27 nuclear submarine with its two reactors loaded with nuclear fuel. Yablokov’s white paper spearheaded an epoch of environmental openness that led to more than $3 billion in international aid to Russia to clean up 200 decommissioned submarines and to secure decades of military nuclear waste. The paper’s findings dovetailed an early Bellona report in 1992 on radioactive waste dumped by the Russian Navy in the Kara Sea. Hauge said that Yablokov was “the first person in a position of power in Russia who was brave enough to step forward and support our conclusions.” “He helped open serious discussion about what was a Chernobyl in slow motion,” said Hauge. The partnership became critical. In 1995, Bellona’s Alexander Nikitin was charged with treason for his contribution to a report expanding on Bellona’s conclusions about nuclear dangers in the Arctic. The report was called “The Russian Northern Fleet: Source of Radioactive Contamination.” Throughout the endless hearings leading up to Nikitin’s eventual acquittal, Hauge said Yablokov’s “calm, collected” knowledge of the Russian constitution helped guide the defense. “His coolness during the Nikitin case was remarkable,” said Hauge on Tuesday. “He really emphasized that the constitution was the way to Nikitin’s acquittal.” In 2000, Russia’s Supreme Court agreed, and acquitted Nikitin on all counts, making him the first person to ever fight a treason charge in Russia and win. Yablokov was a constant luminary at Bellona presentations in Russia, the European Union, the United States and Norway, most recently presenting his 2007 book in Oslo on the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. He was also a tireless defender of environmental activists in Russia, suggesting at a 2014 Bellona conference in St. Petersburg that ecological groups should publish a list of those government officials who harass them. “We must constantly support our comrades who have been forced to leave the country or who have ended up in jail on account of their environmental activism,” he told the conference. That same year, Yablokov championed the presentation of a report on environmental violations that took place at Russia’s showcase Winter Olympics in Sochi. Yablokov arranged for activists from the Environmental Watch on the Northern Caucasus – many of whom were jailed, exiled or otherwise harassed into silence – to present their shocking report on Olympic environmental corruption in Moscow when every other venue had turned them away. “He was a friend and advisor to us from the beginning and in a large part we owe the success of our Russian work to his steady advice and guidance,” said Hauge. Yablokov’s death was mourned across the spectrum in Moscow. Igor Chestin, head of the WWF called Yablokov Russia’s “environmental knight.” Valery Borschsev, Yablokov’s colleague in the human rights faction of the Yabloko party said of him that “he was a person on whom the authorities had no influence.” http://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2017-01-alexei-yablokov-grandfather-of-russian-environmentalism-dies-at-83
“Since Fukushima, there has been a dearth of funds for research into the effects of the on-going radioactive releases worldwide and barriers to publishing papers that look for associated effects. Since the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, we must thank those who observed, collected and published their findings. The original Chernobyl book was published in Russian; since then it has English and Japanese editions. In 2008, Alexey Yablokov brought me a copy of his Russian edition, which I cannot read, and said they needed an editor to put it into English, but did not have any money to pay the person. I have written two books and enjoy writing and editing, so said I would edit it, but I did not realize how long it would actually take: 14 months. The Chernobyl Catastrophe is a story of people – many of whom don’t know they are part of it. It includes essentially all who live in the Northern Hemisphere, the path of the radioactive fallout, but some people must be recognized for what they did under not only adverse environmental conditions, but also adverse political conditions. The senior author is Professor Yablokov, who holds two doctoral degrees – one in biology for marine mammals and a second in science for population biology – and is the author of more than 400 scientific publications and 22 books. From 1992 to 1997, he was chairman of the Interagency Committee for Ecological Security for the National Security Council of the Russian Federation, then president of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy and deputy chairman of the Council of Ecological Problems of the Russian Academy of Science and vice president of the International Union of Conservation of Nature, as well as a consultant to Russian presidents Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The second author is Vassily Nesterenko, who at the time of the Chernobyl catastrophe was director of the Nuclear Energy Institute at the Belarus Academy of Science. He requisitioned a helicopter and flew over the burning reactor, recording some of the few measurements available.” http://sfbayview.com/2015/04/less-than-one-lifetime-eyewitness-to-nuclear-development-from-hunters-point-to-chernobyl-and-fukushima-issues-a-warning/#.VTLzW6cmwhQ.facebook
Lessons of Chernobyl, with Dr. Alexey Yablokov. http://optimalprediction.com/wp/lessons-of-chernobyl-with-dr-alexey-yablokov/
Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. PDF: http://www.strahlentelex.de/Yablokov_Chernobyl_book.pdf
January 12, 2017
Posted by dunrenard |
Nuclear | antinuclear, Russia, Yablokov |
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The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2002, before the 2011 explosion. The EPA is poised to issue new radiation limits for a nuclear emergency set thousands of times higher than allowed by federal law.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is poised to issue guidelines that would set radiation limits for drinking water during the “intermediate period” after the releases from a radioactive emergency, such as an accident at a nuclear power plant, have been brought under control. The emergency limits would allow the public to be exposed to radiation levels hundreds and even thousands of times higher than typically allowed by federal law.
Opponents say that under the proposed guidelines, concentration limits for several types of radionuclides would allow a lifetime permissible dose in a week or a month, or the equivalent of 250 chest x-rays a year, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a watchdog group that represents government employees.
The EPA has stressed that the proposal is aimed at guiding state and local leaders during a crisis and would not change existing federal radiation limits for the water we drink every day, which are much more stringent, and assume there may be decades of regular consumption. Critics of the new proposal say the emergency guidelines are a public relations ploy to play down the dangers of radiation and provide cover for an agency that fumbled during the Fukushima disaster in 2011.
The emergency limits are even higher than those proposed by the EPA during the final days of the Bush administration, which withdrew the proposal after facing public scrutiny and left the Obama administration with the job of finalizing the guidelines.
Now, in the twilight of the Obama administration, the EPA’s “Protective Action Guidelines” for drinking water are once again drawing fire from nuclear watchdogs and public officials.
“The message here is that the American public should learn to love radiation, and that much higher levels than what are set by the statutory limits are OK,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a watchdog group that represents government employees.
PEER says that internal documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show the EPA’s radiation division hid proposed limits for dozens of radionuclides from the public — and even from other divisions within the agency that were critical of the plan — in order to “avoid confusion” until the final guidelines were released.
“It’s not like this has been done with a lot of openness,” Ruch said. “We had to sue them to find out what levels they would allow.”
EPA Caught With Its “Pants Down” During Fukushima
In 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan suffered a meltdown after a deadly earthquake and tsunami and released massive amounts of dangerous radioactive contaminants into the ocean and atmosphere. Ruch said the EPA was caught with its “pants down” as this radiation was detected in air, rainwater and even milk in the United States. The EPA had been working since the early 1990s to develop guidelines on how the government should respond to such a disaster, but specific limits for radiation in drinking water are only now being set.
As Truthout reported at the time, the EPA told the public that radiation from the disaster would not reach the US at levels high enough to pose a public health concern, even as the agency’s own data showed concentrations of radionuclides in rain water far exceeding federal drinking water standards. As Japan struggled with a major nuclear crisis and the media debated the relative danger of radioactive plumes blowing about the world’s atmosphere, the EPA quietly stopped running extra tests for radiation less than two months after the disaster began.
By then, samples of cow’s milk, rain and drinking water from across the country tested positive for radiation from the Fukushima plant, and nuclear critics warned that it was difficult to tell whether there could be impacts on human health in the absence of enhanced radiation monitoring.
The EPA’s radiation division is now on the verge of approving a long-awaited update to its Protective Action Guidelines for responding to such a “large-scale emergency.” Ruch said employees from other divisions of the EPA were cut out of the decision-making process, and internal EPA documents indicate that the concentration limits were set higher than those detected during Fukushima to cover for the EPA’s embarrassing performance.
Ruch points to notes from a 2014 briefing at the EPA’s radiation division, which state that the agency “experienced major difficulty conveying its message to the public” that concentrations of radioactive material in rain water, although higher than federal Maximum Containment Levels (MCLs), “were not of immediate concern to public health” during the Fukushima crisis.
No Safe Dose of Radiation
The EPA’s new proposed guidelines are ostensibly meant to help public officials decide when to take protective actions to reduce exposure to radiation, such as asking the public to switch from tap water to bottled water. Most of the manual has already been finalized, except for the section on drinking water, which has been mired in controversy since the Bush administration.
In June, the EPA put the proposal up for public comment, but only made limits for four types of radionuclides publicly available. Critics say the agency still received 60,000 comments opposing the guidelines, including statements from 65 environmental groups. PEER sued the agency under the Freedom of Information Act in October, and the EPA released the proposed limits for dozens of other radionuclides just days before the Christmas holiday.
Dan Hirsch, president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a nuclear watchdog group, attended a briefing with EPA officials on Thursday and told Truthout that the agency intends to finalize the guidelines despite ongoing protests.
“It’s really hard to believe,” Hirsch said.
Underlying the debate are MCLs for radioactive material in drinking water set by the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. Hirsch said that the nuclear industry has tried to “get out from under” these limits for years, but federal law prohibits them from being lowered. So, the industry and its allies at the EPA focused on the Protective Action Guidelines instead.
The MCLs are based on the idea that adults should not be exposed to more than 4 millirem (mrem) of radiation in drinking water each year for a 70-year period, for a total of 280 mrem in an average lifetime. Since the “intermediate phase” following a nuclear emergency is expected to be temporary, the emergency radionuclide limits are capped at amounts that would expose adults to a maximum 500 mrem dose of radiation over the course of a year.
Hirsch said that such as dose of radiation is equivalent to receiving a chest x-ray about five days a week for a year. The EPA arrived at these figures by “playing” with the numbers used to calculate radiation absorbed by human organs, which in turn increased the amount of certain radionuclides that can be present in drinking water by hundreds, thousands and even tens of thousands of times.
Hirsch said guidelines reflect the nuclear industry’s longstanding argument that MCLs are far too low, and the public should accept higher doses of radiation as permissible in an emergency.
The EPA claims there have been “advancements in scientific understanding of radiation dose and risk” since it began drawing up the Protective Action Guidelines back in 1992, and its emergency dose guidelines are based on the “latest science.” The guidelines are also designed to provide flexibility for decision-makers responding to a crisis.
Nuclear critics, however, argue that no dose of radiation is safe. Even small doses can cause cancer in small portions of a large population.
“The science has actually worked in the opposite direction over the years,” Hirsch said. “Science has concluded that radiation is much more dangerous than what was assumed in the ’70s.”
The guidelines are based on expected exposure over the course of one year, but both Ruch and Hirsch point out that radiation from nuclear calamity could persist for far longer — just look at the fallout from Fukushima, which Japan has struggled with for years. Radiation from the disaster is still being detected in fish on North America’s western coast. They argue that the public needs better protections in the event of an emergency, and the nuclear industry should not be let off the hook based on inflated safety limits.
“The whole thing appears to be [an attempt to] achieve a post-incident reaction of ‘don’t worry be happy,'” Ruch said.
When even small doses of radiation are understood to pose a health risk, however small, setting radiation limits for a nuclear emergency is bound to be controversial.
Unfortunately, this is the radioactive reality of living in the modern nuclear world.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39044-are-the-epa-s-emergency-radiation-limits-a-cover-for-fukushima-fumbles
January 12, 2017
Posted by dunrenard |
Fukushima 2017 | EPA, Fukushima Radiation, USA |
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Renewables Industry ‘More Than Ready’ For N.Y. Nuclear Plant Closure http://solarindustrymag.com/renewables-industry-more-than-ready-for-n-y-nuclear-plant-closure by Joseph Bebon on January 09, 2017 Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, D-N.Y., has announced the closure of a 2 GW nuclear power plant in New York by April 2021. Renewable energy advocates have applauded the decision and say it provides an opportunity to further bolster solar and wind energy, including offshore wind power, in the state.
According to Cuomo’s announcement, the aging Indian Point Energy Center, located 25 miles north of New York City, has been plagued by numerous safety and operational problems, including faulty bolts and various leaks and fires. After extensive litigation and negotiation, plant operator Entergy Corp. has agreed to end all operations at the facility, with plans to shut down Indian Point Unit 2 as early as April 2020 and Unit 3 in April 2021 – 13 and 14 years earlier than required under the anticipated federal re-licensing terms, respectively.
“For 15 years, I have been deeply concerned by the continuing safety violations at Indian Point, especially given its location in the largest and most densely populated metropolitan region in the country,” says Cuomo in the press release. “I am proud to have secured this agreement with Entergy to responsibly close the facility 14 years ahead of schedule to protect the safety of all New Yorkers. This administration has been aggressively pursuing and incentivizing the development of clean, reliable energy, and the state is fully prepared to replace the power generated by the plant at a negligible cost to ratepayers.”
The release says there will be continued employment at the plant throughout the closure process through 2021, and Entergy has committed to offer plant employees new jobs at other facilities. Furthermore, the state will work with employees to gain access to other job opportunities and worker retraining in the power and utility sectors within New York. Through the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, the release notes, the state will also offer workers retraining and new skills in renewable technologies, such as solar and wind.
The release says a combination of current and planned resources, including 1 GW of hydropower, will be able to generate more than enough electricity to replace Indian Point’s 2 GW of capacity by 2021. Nonetheless, Anne Reynolds, executive director of the Alliance for Clean Energy New York (ACE NY), emphasizes that the state should avoid relying on more natural gas and instead focus on additional solar and wind power. In a press release, she says the renewables industry is “more than ready” to help fill in the energy gap.
“Governor Cuomo’s 50 percent renewable energy by 2030 mandate has created fertile ground for renewables developers, and they have responded by proposing dozens of projects,” says Reynolds. “There are now 34 wind projects totaling 4,544 MW in the interconnection queue. There are also 27 proposed utility-scale solar projects totaling 583 MW of capacity. This totals to more than twice the current capacity of the two Indian Point reactors.”
“Meanwhile, continuing adoption of rooftop and community solar will also help push New York toward 50 percent, as will development of small hydro and fuel cells,” she says. “These smaller projects add up, providing New Yorkers the opportunity to generate their own power and modernize the grid.”
Reynolds adds, “Offshore wind development is also moving forward. Offshore areas for wind energy development have already been leased by the federal government off Montauk and the Rockaways and off the shores of neighboring states. Development in these areas alone could provide 1,500 to 2,000 MW of capacity to New York. And more offshore areas should be leased in the coming years.”
Liz Gordon, director of the New York Offshore Wind Alliance, comments, “With the Atlantic Ocean off New York featuring some of the best wind resources in the world, offshore wind power is uniquely situated to help meet that downstate demand.”
January 11, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
renewable, USA |
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Nuclear Power’s Overlooked Insecurity JAN 2017 Wednesday 11TH Morning Star DAVID LOWRY questions whether enough is being done to ensure Britain’s nuclear power plants are protected from cyber attacks
JUST after Christmas, the Times’s science correspondent Oliver Moody provided a public and political service in exposing the worrying inadequacies of Britain’s nuclear safety and security regulator, the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR).
But while the article concentrated mainly on safety concerns, there are several security issues unresolved.
In ONR’s latest annual report it records that: “There are areas where the duty holder’s security arrangements did not fully meet regulatory expectations.”
Regarding the Sellafield facility, it continues: “A requirement to improve processes in place for Cyber Security and Information Assurance (CS&IA) was identified. A contributory factor in this area was associated with a lack of resources within CS&IA capability.”
I raised these concerns at a nuclear policy roundtable seminar in the past month at the Politics Department at Cambridge University.
It was here where Baroness Lucy Neville-Rolfe made her final appearance as energy minister, before being moved to the Treasury two days later, to be replaced by Lord Prior of Brampton.
At a conference on December 6 to the International Conference on Nuclear Security in Vienna, hosted by the UN’s nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Baroness NevilleRolfe made a presentation in which she spent far more time promoting the British nuclear industry than addressing nuclear security…….
A report titled Outpacing Cyber Threats: Priorities for Cybersecurity at Nuclear Facilities, issued by the Washington DC-based Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) at the same IAEA conference, reveals that Britain’s nuclear sector has suffered two significant cyber security failures in the past: one in June 1999 at the Bradwell Nuclear Power Plant — when an employee intentionally “altered/destroyed data” — and in September 1991 at Sellafield — when a software bug led to “unauthorised opening of doors.”
The report asserts worryingly that: “The global community is in the early stages of understanding the magnitude of the cyber threat. In many ways, humans have created systems that are too complex to manage, in most cases, risks cannot even be quantified.”…….http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-9860-Nuclear-powers-overlooked-insecurity#.WHXbfdJ97Gg
January 11, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
general |
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U.S. lists 17 nuclear reactors with parts from forge under probe, Reuters,10 Jan 17 The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on Tuesday unveiled a letter showing that 17 of the country’s nuclear reactors have parts from Areva SA’s Le Creusot forge in France, which is under investigation for allegedly falsifying documents on the quality of its parts.
The number of reactors was more than the nine the NRC had previously disclosed.
Last month authorities in France opened an investigation into decades of alleged forgery of documents relating to the quality of parts produced at Le Creusot and used in power plants around the world.
Areva, a nuclear and renewable energy firm, furnished the information to the U.S. regulator last month but had urged the agency to keep it private, saying it was material to the business of nuclear power generators. The NRC told Areva it did not consider the information to be so and released it 10 days after receiving it.
The parts at reactors include a reactor head at Xcel Energy Inc’s Prairie Island reactor in Minnesota, reactor vessel heads at two of Dominion Resources Inc’s reactors at the North Anna plant in Virginia, and another vessel head at Dominion’s reactor in Surry, Virginia. Some of the components were made by other companies but include parts from the Le Creusot…….
David Lochbaum, an expert on nuclear energy at the Union of Concerned scientists, said the Le Creusot issue was “troubling from both trust and public safety perspectives” because to a large degree both the NRC and U.S. nuclear power plants depended on vendors to certify their work. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-france-nuclearpower-idUSKBN14U2T0
January 11, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
safety, USA |
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