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Nuclear Shutdown News chronicles the decline and fall of the nuclear power industry and highlights the efforts of those working to create a nuclear free world.

Last Summer’s “Mysterious” Nuclear Explosion

As this year winds down a nuclear weapons explosion last summer still begs for our attention.

What does this incident, half way around the world in another country, have to do with the nuclear power plants in this country?

Let’s remember though, the “Atoms For Peace” program wherein the federal government encouraged (and heavily subsidized) the development of civilian nuclear reactors to produce electricity. The idea was to try to overshadow the images of the nuclear holocaust in Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused by the US.

So it is far from ironic that the nuclear explosion in question occurred on August 8, the 74th anniversary of Nagasaki’s immolation.

Novaga Gazeta also reported that an anonymous hospital worker said that “traces of Cesium 137 (which remains dangerously radioactive for 300 years) were detected in the emergency room area an hour after the patients were brought in.” Doctors and nurses  had only face masks for protection, and nothing but soap solutions to decontaminate the ER.

The nearby city of Serevdinsk’s 183,000 residents were initially told to evacuate because of the radiation released by the explosion, but then the evac order was abruptly canceled. Instead they were told to stay inside and close their windows.
Authorities later claimed the disaster wasn’t as bad as the 1986 nuclear disaster in the Ukraine at Chernobyl in 1986, then ruled by the USSR.

More Fallout

Later in August it emerged that there may have been two nuclear explosions, and that actually seven people had died in the blasts.

The debacle supposedly happened while testing a new type of long range Russian nuclear powered cruise missile. Or, as unnamed US intelligence sources claimed, as reported by CNBC on August 28, it may have occurred while trying to recover one such missile from the bottom of the White Sea.

Post Script  Many people are not aware that US nuclear power reactors regularly release radiation into our air and water in order to operate. You may have heard about this at the Three Mile Island plant in 1979 in Pennsylvania (whose remaining reactor just  shut down) or the Millstone nuke in my home state of Connecticut.

Although this happens all the time at the nation’s 90-some nuclear plants, the public is usually not informed of these potentially carcinogenic releases. As with nuclear weapons operations, US nuclear power doings are largely carried on in secret.

After all, we wouldn’t want the enemy to find out, would we? Except, all too often, the”enemy” is us!

Sources: Fox News, foxnews.com; Moscow Times, moscowtimes.com; CNBC, cbnbc.com; Nuvaya Gazeta, nugayagazeta.ru.