nuclear-news

COVID Infects World Nuclear Plants, May 27, 2020, by Alex Smith,  Radio Ecoshock, “……….RUSSIAN NUCLEAR INDUSTRY STRUGGLES WITH PANDEMICNow it the time to talk about the awful virus out of control in Russia, the last bastion of nuclear ambition with an infamous track record. I have to report it, because it seems no one from there feels safe to talk about it. One environment group reported safety questions about secret nuclear cities – after a government minister mentioned it. They declined an interview. I contacted reporters usually willing to do radio, including two from the English language Moscow Times, but got no reply. Radio silence as they say. These are dangerous times in Moscow, as ambulances line up outside hospitals, mortuaries go into overdrive, and the Putin government, like many governments, covers up early mistakes.

o I patch together what little we can find out. The Russian nuclear story, as I said in the beginning, spreads out to governments all over the world, from the Middle East to North Korea. Really their nuclear technology is not much more dangerous than in Japan or America. It is all dangerous when built and run by flawed humans. Every nuclear country has a secret history of near-misses and hidden atomic poisons. Britain, Canada, France, you name it. There is a long list of atomic leaks, break-downs, hair-raising risks all over the world.

Like the Trump Administration, the Putin government downplayed the threat of COVID-19 for precious months after it broke out in China. For a while in February, it looked like the pandemic would barely graze Russia. It was business-as-usual. Then the first wave arrived.

Now Russia has the third most serious infection in the world, with way over 300,000 cases confirmed, and who knows how many really. The government is reporting low death rates, under 4,000 mortalities. As in China, these numbers are not credible. The real number of deaths has to be many times that. In late May, the Moscow Times ran an article explaining why the Russian government did not count 60% of suspected Covid-19 deaths. Only cases where autopsies showed the disease were counted. But who has time or staff to do thousands of autopsies during a wave of the pandemic? The Moscow health department attributed the obvious spike in deaths to things like “heart failure, stage four malignant diseases, leukemia … and other incurable deadly diseases”.

In many ways, Russia is still a secret state. Certainly it has secret atomic cities. These are closed cities. You needed special permits to go there even before the pandemic, in fact, since the 1950’s. Nuclear bombs, missiles, and torpedoes are made there. Factories make reactors that can float in the sea, hide in the ground, or blast out into space. During Soviet times, these cities also specialized in chemical and biological weapons. Some say they still do, though the Russians publicly denounced those weapons.

So if was surprising when “The head of Russia’s state nuclear corporation has expressed concerns about the spread of the novel coronavirus to three of its so-called “nuclear cities.” At the beginning of May, Charles Digges from the Russian environment group Bellona wrote about it, after the public announcement by Rosatom chief Alexei Likhachev. Likhachev said: “The situation in Sarov, Elektrostal, Desnogorsk is today particularly alarming.” People in the West do not understand why it is alarming that anything was admitted at all. When he said it, Russia was just the seventh most infected country. Less than a month later, their cases have doubled, and Russia is number two worst.

The archipelago of nuclear labs and businesses controlled by Russia’s Rosatom employ around 250,000 people. The company admits they have stashed some workers permanently on nuclear sites, but like the U.S. industry, won’t say how many or where. This is what you do when you have an emergency. During the pandemic, they need to try to isolate enough workers to keep nuclear reactors operating and cool, to keep vast lakes and mountains of nuclear waste cool and secure, literally, to keep the lights on.

The record shows safety at many Russian nuclear complexes has been poor at the best of times. There is a long and painful history not just of nuclear accidents – those are legendary – but of atomic neglect. Barrels of highly radioactive materials were just buried all over, or sunk at sea. Nobody is totally sure where all of it went. The Soviet Union left the world a legacy of abandoned hot spots no-go zones. Putin inherited that, and doubled down on Russian nuclear ambitions. The Russians will sell, and have sold, nuclear technology to anyone. Iran? Sure. North Korea, well that transfer of Russian nuclear technology may or may not have been authorized. Now they are building a nuclear reactor in Bangladesh. But why not? Canada gave India nuclear tech that led to their atomic bomb, and trained the Pakistani father of the bomb. Canadian engineers watched as prison slave labor built a Candu nuclear plant in Romania. The Romanians couldn’t really pay, so Canada agreed to take it out in coal and jam. It’s a dirty corrupt business no matter who does it. The on-again off-again felon Mike Flynn was busy trying to selling nuclear reactors to dictators in the Middle East. China wants to make money selling reactors. Nobody makes money selling reactors. Nuclear power is the biggest money pit in the history of money pits. And the cost never ends. Deconstruction usually falls on future taxpayers. The dangerous radioactive waste needs to be secured and guarded for tens of thousands of years. It’s never over.

Thank goodness nuclear weapons are no longer a threat. Except both Russia and the United States have announced new supersonic atomic delivery missiles in just the last couple of years. Trump is pushing to build new nuclear weapons – the best anybody has ever seen! Britain is always embarking on a new nuclear plan that sinks into hundreds of billions of wasted pounds. Don’t get me started on nuclear waste dump schemes that never work or mini-reactors to save the climate.

But the Russians have to be champions of nuclear secrecy. I don’t know of any other whole cities entirely closed off, so secret they did not even appear on maps. Now they say that despite official worries, everything nuclear is under control in Russia. The Rosatom chief reported 47 employees infected with COVID-19. 23 of them are in the secret city of Sarov, he said, in late April. How many are there now?

MORE NUCLEAR WORRIES IN RUSSIA AS COVID-19 RUNS RAMPANT

Eleven hundred miles East of Moscow, the Russian nuclear power plant at Beloyarsk was the first to keep it’s staff on site. Nobody goes home. That was reported in Russian-only by the state news agency Interfax. At least one staff member was sick for days with a high fever. That was in April. The old reactors from the 1960’s are temporarily shut down, but now they run two large fast-neutron reactors there.

The Russian group Bellona reports “270 workers isolated at the Rostov nuclear plant took to social media to complain they were being treated like ’cattle’.” That is in Southwest corner of Russia, along the Don River. The workers reported lack of protection against the virus and terrible working conditions. Rosatom says those concerns have since been addressed.

URANIUM MINING SHUT DOWN AROUND THE WORLD

Rosatom also reports the large Russian uranium mining industry has been shut down due to coronavirus concerns. Many mines of all kinds have been closed around the world. We will start to feel the shortages some time in the fall, even though demand has fallen off. The Russians are also concerned about their electric utilities, because as they say “Falling incomes of both retail and corporate consumers might result in a tidal wave of unpaid electricity bills.” The American and European electric utilities fear that too. Uranium mining has been closed down for the pandemic pretty well everywhere from Canada to Kazakhstan to Namibia. Nuclear reprocessing plants are also closed. There is currently a glut of nuclear fuel, but I suppose if the pandemic is not solved in a year or so, nuclear power plants could run low on fuel. Perhaps experts can advise us on that.

On April 14, a Russia language news outlet reported three employees of Kursk Nuclear Power Plant were infected by COVID-19. That is in the city of Kurchatov, in the direction of the border with Ukraine. You need a special permit to go there too. How many are infected there now? The Russian nuclear industry, both weapons and power, is not immune to this novel virus. So far they have not been overwhelmed by it. Not that we know of. Now that the pandemic is full blown and still growing in Russia, there is practically nothing coming out about the nuclear danger there. I suppose we will find out 30 years from now when the archives are released. Or maybe any day now, when radioactivity monitors in Sweden or Washington State go off. Of course, that could be coming from Japan, China, Canada, the U.S., or any of the dozens of nuclear operations run by humans with no immunity to a new disease, and economies shaking down.

THERE IS ANOTHER HOT SPOT – SIBERIA

Before we leave Russia, let me tell you about another hot spot there: Siberia.

In last week’s Radio Ecoshock program, two top scientists told us about the coming heat as we load up the atmosphere with carbon. Dr. Radley Horton from Columbia was part of a team that discovered heat beyond human endurance is already popping up in various countries. It’s not that hot in Siberia. I’m sure the locals are enjoying the early summer warmth, although they must be nervous. Forest fires, and they have massive planet-changing forest fires, are already burning in Siberia, when it should be time for the snow to melt.

For European and Canadian listeners, that’s 31 degrees C in Siberia, instead of -12 C, over a massive, massive area. Will we see a repeat of the 2010 heat wave over Russia, that killed tens of thousands of people and closed down the country’s wheat export trade? How much carbon will be released this year from forest fires in the far north? It has begun. ‘…… https://www.ecoshock.org/2020/05/covid-infects-world-nuclear-plants.html