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Russia facing huge problem to recover radioactive sunken nuclear reactors, but Putin still plans new ones in the Arctic

Russia’s ‘slow-motion Chernobyl’ at sea, FUTURE PLANET | OCEANS By Alec Luhn, 2nd September 2020 ……….

Minimising risk

Russia, Norway and other countries whose fishing boats ply the bountiful waters of the Barents Sea have now found themselves with a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. Although a 2014 Russian-Norwegian expedition to the K-159 wreck that tested the water, seafloor and animals like a sea centipede did not find radiation above background levels, an expert from Moscow’s Kurchatov Institute said at the time that a reactor containment failure “could happen within 30 years of sinking in the best case and within 10 years at the worst”. That would release radioactive caesium-137 and strontium-90, among other isotopes.

While the vast size of the oceans quickly dilutes radiation, even very small levels can become concentrated in animals at the top of the food chain through “bioaccumulation” – and then be ingested by humans. But economic consequences for the Barents Sea fishing industry, which provides the vast majority of cod and haddock at British fish and chip shops, “may perhaps be worse than the environmental consequences”, says Hilde Elise Heldal, a scientist at Norway’s Institute of Marine Research.

According to her studies, if all the radioactive material from the K-159’s reactors were to be released in a single “pulse discharge”, it would increase Cesium-137 levels in the muscles of cod in the eastern Barents Sea at least 100 times. (As would a leak from the Komsomolets, another sunken Soviet submarine near Norway that is not slated for lifting.) That would still be below limits set by the Norwegian government after the Chernobyl accident, but it could be enough to scare off consumers. More than 20 countries continue to ban Japanese seafood, for instance, even though studies have failed to find dangerous concentrations of radioactive isotopes in Pacific predatory fishes following the Fukushima nuclear power plant release in 2011. Any ban on fishing in the Barents and Kara seas could cost the Russian and Norwegian economies €120m ($140m; £110m) a month, according to a European Commission feasibility study about the lifting project.

There is no ship in the world capable of lifting the K-159, so a special salvage vessel would have to be built

But an accident while raising the submarine, on the other hand, could suddenly jar the reactor, potentially mixing fuel elements and starting an uncontrolled chain reaction and explosion. That could boost radiation levels in fish 1,000 times normal or, if it occurred on the surface, irradiate terrestrial animals and humans, another Norwegian study found. Norway would be forced to stop sales of products from the Arctic such as fish and reindeer meat for a year or more. The study estimated that more radiation could be released than in the 1985 Chazhma Bay incident, when an uncontrolled chain reaction during refuelling of a Soviet submarine near Vladivostok killed 10 sailors.

Amundsen argued that the risk of such a criticality excursion with the K-159 or K-27 was low and could be minimised with proper planning, as it was during the removal of high-risk spent fuel from Andreyev Bay.

“In that case we do not leave the problem for future generations to solve, generations where the knowledge of handling such legacy waste may be very limited,” he says.

The safety and transparency of Russia’s nuclear industry has often been questioned, though, most recently when Dutch authorities concluded that radioactive iodine-131 detected over northern Europe in June originated in western Russia. The Mayak reprocessing facility that received the spent fuel from Andreyev Bay by train has a troubled history going back to the world’s then-worst nuclear disaster in 1957. Rosatom continues to deny the findings of international experts that the facility was the source of a radioactive cloud of ruthenium-106 registered over Europe in 2017.

While the K-159 and K-27 need to be raised, Rashid Alimov of Greenpeace Russia has reservations. “We are worried about the monitoring of this work, public participation and the transport [of spent fuel] to Mayak,” he says.

Custom mission

Raising a submarine is a rare feat of engineering. The United States spent $800m (£610m) in an attempt to lift another Soviet submarine, the diesel-powered K-129 that carried several nuclear missiles, from 16,400ft (5,000m) in the Pacific Ocean, under the guise of a seabed mining operation. In the end, they only managed to bring a third of the submarine to the surface, leaving the CIA with little usable intelligence.

That was the deepest raise in history. The heaviest was the Kursk. To bring the latter 17,000-tonne missile submarine up from 350ft (108m) below the Barents Sea, the Dutch companies Mammoet and Smit International installed 26 hydraulically cushioned lifting jacks on a giant barge and cut 26 holes in the submarine’s rubber-coated steel hull with a water jet operated by scuba divers. On 8 October 2001, rushing to beat the winter storm season after four months of nerve-wracking work and delays, steel grippers fitted in the 26 holes lifted the Kursk from the seabed in 14 hours, after which the barge was towed to a dry dock in Murmansk.

At less than 5,000 tonnes, the K-159 is smaller than the Kursk, but even before it sank its outer hull was “as weak as foil”, according to Bellona. It has since been embedded in 17 years’ worth of silt. A hole in the bow would seem to rule out pumping it full of air and raising it with balloons, as has been previously suggested. At a conference of European Bank of Reconstruction and Development donors in December, a Rosatom representative said there was no ship in the world capable of lifting it, so a special salvage vessel would have to be built.

That will increase the estimated cost of €278m ($330m; £250m) to raise the six most radioactive objects. Donors are discussing Russia’s request to help finance the project, said Balthasar Lindauer, director of nuclear safety at EBRD.

“There’s consensus something needs to be done there,” he says. Any such custom-built vessel would likely need a bevy of specialised technologies such as bow and aft thrusters to keep it positioned precisely over the wreck.

But in August, Grigoriev told a Rosatom-funded website that one plan the company was considering would involve a pair of barges fitted with hydraulic cable jacks and secured to deep-sea moorings. Instead of steel grippers like the ones inserted into the holes in the Kursk, giant curved pincers would grab the entire hull and lift it up between the barges. A partially submersible scow would be positioned underneath, then brought to the surface along with the submarine and finally towed to port. The K-27 and K-159 could both be recovered this way, he said.

One of three engineering firms working on proposals for Rosatom is the military design bureau Malachite, which drafted a project to raise the K-159 in 2007 that “was never realised due to a lack of money”, according to its lead designer. This year the bureau has begun updating this plan, an employee tells Future Planet in the lobby of Malachite’s headquarters in St Petersburg. Many questions remain, however.

“What condition is the hull in? How much of force can it handle? How much silt has built up? We need to survey the conditions there,” the employee says, before the head of security arrives to break up our conversation.

Nuclear paradox

Removing the six radioactive objects fits in with an image Putin as crafted as a defender of the fragile Arctic environment. In 2017, he inspected the results of an operation to remove 42,000 tonnes of scrap metal from the Franz Josef Land archipelago as part of a “general clean-up of the Arctic”. He has spoken about environmental preservation at an annual conference for Arctic nations. And on the same day in March 2020 that he issued his draft decree about the sunken objects, he signed an Arctic policy that lists “protecting the Arctic environment and the native lands and traditional livelihood of indigenous peoples” as one of six national interests in the region.

“For Putin, the Arctic is part of his historic legacy. It should be well-protected, bring real benefits and be clean,” said Dmitry Trenin, head of the think tank Carnegie Centre Moscow.

Yet while pursuing a “clean” Arctic, the Kremlin has also been backing Arctic oil and gas development, which accounts for the majority of shipping on the Northern Sea Route. State-owned Gazprom built one of two growing oil and gas clusters on the Yamal peninsula, and this year the government cut taxes on new Arctic liquified natural gas projects to 0% to tap into some of the trillions of dollars of fossil fuel and mineral wealth in the region.

And even as Putin cleans up the Soviet nuclear legacy in the far north, he is building a nuclear legacy of his own. A steady march of new nuclear icebreakers and, in 2019, the world’s only floating nuclear power plant has again made the Arctic the most nuclear waters on the planet.

Meanwhile, the Northern Fleet is building at least eight submarines and has plans to construct several more, as well as eight missile destroyers and an aircraft carrier, all of them nuclear-powered. It has also been testing a nuclear-powered underwater drone and cruise missile. In total, there could be as many as 114 nuclear reactors in operation in the Arctic by 2035, almost twice as many as today, a 2019 Barents Observer study found.

This growth has not gone without incident. In July 2019, a fire on a nuclear deep-sea submersible near Murmansk almost caused a “catastrophe of a global scale,” an officer reportedly said at the funeral of the 14 sailors killed. The next month, a “liquid-fuel reactive propulsion system” exploded during a test on a floating platform in the White Sea, killing two of those involved and briefly spiking radiation levels in the nearby city of Severodvinsk.

“The joint efforts of the international community including Norway and Russia after breakup of the Soviet Union, using taxpayer money to clean up nuclear waste, was a good investment in our fisheries,” says The Barents Observer’s Nilsen. “But today there are more and more politicians in Norway and Europe who think it’s a really big paradox that the international community is giving aid to secure the Cold War legacy while it seems Russia is giving priority to building a new Cold War.”

As long as the civilian agency Rosatom is tasked with clean-up, the Russian military has little incentive to slow down this nuclear spree, Nilsen notes.

“Who is going to pay for the clean-up of those reactors when they are not in use anymore?” he asks. “That is the challenge with today’s Russia, that the military don’t have to think what to do with the very, very expensive decommissioning of all this.”

So while the coming nuclear clean-up is set to be the largest of its kind in history, it may turn out to be just a prelude to what’s needed to deal with the next wave of nuclear power in the Arctic…………….https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200901-the-radioactive-risk-of-sunken-nuclear-soviet-submarines

September 3, 2020 Posted by | ARCTIC, oceans, Reference, Russia, wastes | Leave a comment

Arctic tragedy: the loss of Russian sailors in nuclear submarine accidents


Russia’s ‘slow-motion Chernobyl’ at sea, FUTURE PLANET | OCEANS By Alec Luhn, 2nd September 2020    By tradition, Russians always bring an odd number of flowers to a living person and an even number to a grave or memorial. But every other day, 83-year-old Raisa Lappa places three roses or gladiolas by the plaque to her son Sergei in their hometown Rubtsovsk, as if he hadn’t gone down with his submarine during an ill-fated towing operation in the Arctic Ocean in 2003.“I have episodes where I’m not normal, I go crazy, and it seems that he’s alive, so I bring an odd number,” she says. “They should raise the boat, so we mothers could put our sons’ remains in the ground, and I could maybe have a little more peace.”

After 17 years of unfulfilled promises, she may finally get her wish, though not out of any concern for the bones of Captain Sergei Lappa and six of his crew. With a draft decree published in March, President Vladimir Putin set in motion an initiative to lift two Soviet nuclear submarines and four reactor compartments from the silty bottom, reducing the amount of radioactive material in the Arctic Ocean by 90%. First on the list is Lappa’s K-159. ……………..

‘Cursed August’

Sergei Lappa was born in 1962 in Rubtsovsk, a small city in the Altai Mountains near the border with Kazakhstan. Though it was thousands of miles to the nearest ocean, he cultivated an interest in seafaring at a local model shipbuilding club, and after school he was accepted into the higher naval engineering academy in Sevastopol, Crimea. Tall, athletic and a good student, he was assigned to the navy’s most prestigious service: the Northern Submarine Fleet.

Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, however, the military went into a decline that was revealed to the world when the top-of-the-line attack submarine Kursk sank with 118 crew on board in August 2000. By this time, Lappa was in charge of the K-159, which had been rusting since 1989 at a pier in the isolated navy town of Gremikha, nicknamed the “island of flying dogs” for its strong winds. On the morning of 29 August 2003, the long-delayed order came to tow the decrepit K-159, which had been attached to four 11-tonne pontoons with cables to keep it afloat during the operation, to a base near Murmansk for dismantling, despite a forecast of windy weather.

With the reactors off, Lappa and his skeleton crew of nine engineers operated the boat by flashlight. As the submarine was towed near Kildin Island at half past midnight, the cables to the bow pontoons broke in heavy seas, and a half-hour later water was discovered trickling into the eighth compartment. But as headquarters struggled with the decision to launch an expensive rescue helicopter, the crew kept trying to keep the submarine afloat. At 02:45am Mikhail Gurov sent one last radio transmission: “We’re flooding, do something!” By the time rescue boats from the tug arrived, the K-159 was on the bottom near Kildin Island. Of the three sailors who made it out, the only survivor was senior lieutenant Maxim Tsibulsky, whose leather jacket had filled with air and kept him afloat.

Yet another nuclear submarine had sunk during the “cursed” month of August, Russian newspapers wrote, but the incident caused little furore compared to the Kursk. The navy promised relatives it would raise the K-159 the next year, then repeatedly delayed the project.

Even after 17 years of scavenging and corrosion, at least the bones of the crew likely remain in the submarine, according to Lynne Bell, a forensic anthropologist at Simon Fraser University. But the families have long since lost hope of recovering them.

“For all the relatives it would bring some relief if their fathers and husbands were buried, not just lying on the bottom in a steel hulk,” Gurov’s son Dmitry says. “It’s just that no one believes this will happen.”

The situation has now changed, however, as Russia’s interest revives in the Arctic and its crumbling Soviet ports and military towns. Since 2013, seven Arctic military bases and two tanker terminals have been built as part of the Northern Sea Route, a shorter route to China that Putin has promised will see 80 million tonnes of traffic by 2025. The K-159 is lying underneath the eastern end of the route………….https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200901-the-radioactive-risk-of-sunken-nuclear-soviet-submarines

September 3, 2020 Posted by | ARCTIC, incidents, oceans, PERSONAL STORIES, Reference | Leave a comment

Petition against dumping ‘nuclear mud’ off Cardiff reaches 5k threshold for Senedd debate

September 3, 2020 Posted by | environment, politics, UK | Leave a comment

USA – new plutonium pit production – but no new environmental assessment !

 US officials: No new environmental study for nuclear lab, Spectrum,   BY ASSOCIATED PRESS AP,  SEP. 02, 2020, ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — The National Nuclear Security Administration says it doesn’t need to do an additional environmental review for Los Alamos National Laboratory before it begins producing key components for the nation’s nuclear arsenal because it has enough information.
Watchdog groups are concerned about Tuesday’s announcement, saying the plutonium pit production work will amount to a vast expansion of the lab’s nuclear mission and that more analysis should be done.

Los Alamos is preparing to resume and ramp up production of the plutonium cores used to trigger nuclear weapons. It’s facing a 2026 deadline to begin producing at least 30 cores a year — a mission that has support from the most senior Democratic members of New Mexico’s congressional delegation  ……..

The National Nuclear Security Administration on Tuesday released its final supplemental analysis of a site-wide environmental impact statement done for the lab more than a decade ago. The agency concluded that no further analysis is required.

Critics have pushed for a new environmental impact statement, saying the previous 2008 analysis didn’t consider a number of effects related to increased production, such as the pressure it puts on infrastructure, roads and the housing market.

“The notion that comprehensive environmental analysis is not needed for this gigantic program is a staggering insult to New Mexicans and an affront to any notion of environmental law and science,” Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group said in a statement.

Lab officials last year detailed plans for $13 billion worth of construction projects over the next decade at the northern New Mexico complex as it prepares for plutonium pit production. About $3 billion of that would be spent on improvements to existing plutonium facilities for the pit work, the Albuquerque Journal reported…….https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/buffalo/ap-online/2020/09/02/us-officials-no-new-environmental-study-for-nuclear-lab

September 3, 2020 Posted by | environment, USA | Leave a comment

The Shoeshone people – theirs the most nuclear bombed territory on Earth

August 31, 2020 Posted by | environment, USA, weapons and war | 1 Comment

Big oil looks to solve its problems by flooding Africa and Asia with plastic

Big Oil Is in Trouble. Its Plan: Flood Africa With Plastic.   https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/climate/oil-kenya-africa-plastics-trade.html  

Faced with plunging profits and a climate crisis that threatens fossil fuels, the industry is demanding a trade deal that weakens Kenya’s rules on plastics and on imports of American trash.  NYT,  By Hiroko Tabuchi, Michael Corkery and Carlos Mureithi, Aug. 30, 2020

Confronting a climate crisis that threatens the fossil fuel industry, oil companies are racing to make more plastic. But they face two problems: Many markets are already awash with plastic, and few countries are willing to be dumping grounds for the world’s plastic waste……..

Last year, Kenya was one of many countries around the world that signed on to a global agreement to stop importing plastic waste — a pact strongly opposed by the chemical industry. Emails reviewed by The Times showed industry representatives, many of them former trade officials, working with U.S. negotiators last year to try to stall those rules.

The industry thinks it has found a solution to both problems in Africa.

According to documents reviewed by The New York Times, an industry group representing the world’s largest chemical makers and fossil fuel companies is lobbying to influence United States trade negotiations with Kenya, one of Africa’s biggest economies, to reverse its strict limits on plastics — including a tough plastic-bag ban. It is also pressing for Kenya to continue importing foreign plastic garbage, a practice it has pledged to limit.

Plastics makers are looking well beyond Kenya’s borders. “We anticipate that Kenya could serve in the future as a hub for supplying U.S.-made chemicals and plastics to other markets in Africa through this trade agreement,” Ed Brzytwa, the director of international trade for the American Chemistry Council, wrote in an April 28 letter to the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

The United States and Kenya are in the midst of trade negotiations and the Kenyan president, Uhuru Kenyatta, has made clear he is eager to strike a deal. But the behind-the-scenes lobbying by the petroleum companies has spread concern among environmental groups in Kenya and beyond that have been working to reduce both plastic use and waste.

Kenya, like many countries, has wrestled with the proliferation of plastic. It passed a stringent law against plastic bags in 2017, and last year was one of many nations around the world that signed on to a global agreement to stop importing plastic waste — a pact strongly opposed by the chemical industry.

The chemistry council’s plastics proposals would “inevitably mean more plastic and chemicals in the environment,” said Griffins Ochieng, executive director for the Centre for Environmental Justice and Development, a nonprofit group based in Nairobi that works on the problem of plastic waste in Kenya. “It’s shocking.”

The plastics proposal reflects an oil industry contemplating its inevitable decline as the world fights climate change. Profits are plunging amid the coronavirus pandemic, and the industry is fearful that climate change will force the world to retreat from burning fossil fuels. Producers are scrambling to find new uses for 

an oversupply of oil and gas. Wind and solar power are becoming increasingly affordable, and governments are weighing new policies to fight climate change by reducing the burning of fossil fuels.

Pivoting to plastics, the industry has spent more than $200 billion on chemical and manufacturing plants in the United States over the past decade. But the United States already consumes as much as 16 times more plastic than many poor nations, and a backlash against single-use plastics has made it tougher to sell more at home……….

The Kenya proposal “really sets off alarm bells,” said Sharon Treat, a senior lawyer at the nonpartisan Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy who has worked for more than a decade advising trade talks in both the Trump and Obama administrations. Corporate lobbyists “frequently offer up very specific proposals, which the government then takes up,” she said. ………..

The plastics industry’s proposals could also make it tougher for to regulate plastics in the United States, since a trade deal would apply to both sides.

The records, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by Unearthed, a London-based affiliate of the environmental group Greenpeace, paint a picture of close ties between the trade representatives, administration officials and industry representatives. …………..

Kenya isn’t the only country taking measures to curb plastics. A recent report by the United Nations counted 127 countries with policies on the books to regulate or limit use.

In response, the industry has tried to address the plastics issue. The Alliance to End Plastic Waste — formed by oil giants like Exxon Mobil and Chevron, as well as chemical companies like Dow — last year pledged $1.5 billion to fight plastic pollution. That figure, critics point out, is a small fraction of what the industry has invested in plastic infrastructure.

Manufacturers “say they will address plastic waste, but we say plastic itself is the problem,” Mr. Ochieng said. “An exponential growth in plastics production is just not something we can handle.”………….

Despite the industry opposition, last year more than 180 countries agreed to the restrictions. Starting next year, the new rules are expected to greatly reduce the ability of rich nations to send unwanted trash to poorer countries. The United States, which has not yet ratified the Basel Convention, won’t be able send waste to Basel member nations at all……

That setback has re-energized industry to seek deals with individual countries to boost the market for plastics, and find new destinations for plastic waste, analysts say.

In Nairobi, local groups are worried. “My concern is that Kenya will become a dumping ground for plastics,” said Dorothy Otieno of the Centre for Environmental Justice and Development. “And not just for Kenya, but all of Africa.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/climate/oil-kenya-africa-plastics-trade.html

 

August 31, 2020 Posted by | AFRICA, ASIA, environment, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

Radiation hazard at Dead Horse Bay, Brooklyn

August 27, 2020 Posted by | environment, radiation, USA | Leave a comment

Analysing the evidence on effects of ionising radiation on wildlife

Nature 21st Aug 2020, Tim Mousseau et al: We re-analyzed field data concerning potential effects
of ionizing radiation on the abundance of mammals collected in the
Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) to interpret these findings from current
knowledge of radiological dose–response relationships, here mammal
response in terms of abundance.

In line with recent work at Fukushima, and
exploiting a census conducted in February 2009 in the CEZ, we reconstructed
the radiological dose for 12 species of mammals observed at 161 sites. We
used this new information rather than the measured ambient dose rate (from
0.0146 to 225 µGy h−1) to statistically analyze the variation in
abundance for all observed species as established from tracks in the snow
in previous field studies.

All available knowledge related to relevant
confounding factors was considered in this re-analysis. This more realistic
approach led us to establish a correlation between changes in mammal
abundance with both the time elapsed since the last snowfall and the dose
rate to which they were exposed. This relationship was also observed when
distinguishing prey from predators.

The dose rates resulting from our
re-analysis are in agreement with exposure levels reported in the
literature as likely to induce physiological disorders in mammals that
could explain the decrease in their abundance in the CEZ. Our results
contribute to informing the Weight of Evidence approach to demonstrate
effects on wildlife resulting from its field exposure to ionizing
radiation.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-70699-3?s=09

August 25, 2020 Posted by | environment, radiation, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Ohio school all too close to Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant – nuclear radiation dangers

 

Ohio school still shuttered among radiation fears, Akron Beacon Journal,  By Beth Burger
The Columbus Dispatch, Aug 22, 2020    PIKETON — Monday would have been Layton Cuckler’s first day at Zahn’s Corner Middle School.

Instead, Layton, 11, and about 300 of his peers will be divided between Jasper Elementary School and Piketon High School in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a fourth grader, he’ll have to stay at the elementary school another year.

He might not be happy about missing out on the rite of passage that his older brother, Gavin, 13, and others have experienced, but his parents, Mike and Teresa Cuckler, are relieved.

The change means Layton won’t risk being exposed to radioactive isotopes downwind from the former U.S. Department of Energy Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant. The isotopes have been found in the air, soil, water, vegetation and wildlife in the area, according to federal environmental reports……….

 the community has pushed for independent testing, which is still pending.

A nuclear waste-disposal cell is being built to bury radioactive debris as the 3,000-acre complex is dismantled.

Concerned neighbors   Residents have asked for those efforts to be paused because they’re concerned about exposure to radioactive materials. Contamination has been detected there since the work began in 2017, according to the Scioto Valley Local School District.

The DOE waited two years before informing the school district that the air monitor across from the middle school had picked up radioactive elements: americium in 2018 and neptunium-237 in 2019.

The district closed the school last year after traces of uranium were detected in ceiling tiles and air ducts. The district has asked the state to build a new middle school.

History of school

Zahn’s Corner Middle School was built in 1955. One year earlier, before the school was opened, the enrichment plant came online for defense purposes and operated until 2001. The facility then transitioned to enriching uranium for nuclear power plants.

“Why is there a school on the downwind side of a site like this? That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me,” said David C. Ingram, chairman of the physics and astronomy department at Ohio University.

It’s unclear why the DOE chose that site, less than 2 miles from the school, and did not warn the district……..

When Gavin Cuckler was at the middle school, he would sometimes come home with dirt on his clothes from playing outside, Teresa Cuckler said. ……..

The Cucklers and others worry about cancer and other health risks tied to the plant.

“You think about the size of the air monitor [across from the school]. It wasn’t just one or two more elements floating through the air landing in that air monitor. How much was actually released? What’s the data on site show of where they were sampling at different release points?” said Jennifer Chandler, a former DOE employee who worked as an environmental scientist and who is now a Piketon village council member……..

Residents say the emissions are worrisome.

“They know it’s going to Zahn’s Corner because they put an air monitor there. It makes it to our school property. Our kids are out there,” Chandler said. “The danger comes in the toxicity of the inhalation or ingestion of that molecule, which is there. It’s there. So they want to pivot and talk only about radioactivity, which we are concerned about, obviously, but we’re more concerned with the toxicity of having these things in and on our school property.”

Neptunium, plutonium and americium are considered “bone seekers,″ according to the National Library of Medicine. That means that, if ingested, they will lodge in the body, possibly in bones, lungs, muscles and the liver, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“It’s going to irradiate from you for the rest of your life. It’s the toxicity of that. And what is the safe level of neptunium? … Zero. There is no such thing. There is no safe level of these elements,” Chandler said. …….. https://www.beaconjournal.com/news/20200822/ohio-school-still-shuttered-among-radiation-fears

August 24, 2020 Posted by | environment, health, USA | Leave a comment

Northern Europe: detecting radiation and where it comes from

August 22, 2020 Posted by | environment, EUROPE, radiation, Reference | Leave a comment

Bikini Atoll – food grown there is radioactive – but, it’s “technically habitable”!

Technically Habitable    The background radiation of the island has been found to be at normal levels, and even lower than that of some major US cities. While you could walk around on the island and suffer no real ill effects, living there is an entirely different story because of the aforementioned soil and subsequent food contamination.

Ironically for the islanders of Bikini Atoll, the word ‘bikini’ likely comes from ‘pikinni’ which, in the Marshallese language means ‘coconut place

The Radioactive Coconuts of Bikini Atoll, Beginning in 1946, a series of Atomic bombs were tested on and around the Marshall islands, of which Bikini Atoll is one, as both a means of testing and refining the incredibly destructive power demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki just a year earlier, as well as making a clear statement of US atomic superiority over the Russians.  Medium 21 Aug 20,  Danny Kane

For those that don’t know, Bikini Atoll was the US’ test site during the 1940s and 1950s for 23 separate Nuclear bombs.

Beginning in 1946, a series of Atomic bombs were tested on and around the Marshall islands, of which Bikini Atoll is one, as both a means of testing and refining the incredibly destructive power demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki just a year earlier, as well as making a clear statement of US atomic superiority over the Soviet Union.

The Micronesian inhabitants of Bikini Atoll were approached in 1946 by the US government and asked to re-locate while the tests were being carried out. They would be transported to Rongerik Atoll, which is about 6 times smaller than Bikini Atoll — it also has insufficient food and water supplies and was uninhabited at the time………..

The islanders on Rongerik Atoll were starving, the land their being far less fertile than their native Bikini. They were then moved to Kili Island. It was little improvement for the islanders. Relying on fishing for a large part of their diet, they found Kili, which has no lagoons and rough seas most of the year particularly difficult to survive on.

But on March 1st, 1954, the fate of Bikini Atoll was about to take a destructive turn. Ironically, the bomb that was detonated was one of the few not detonated on the Atoll, instead it was detonated on an artificial island 900m from Namu island. This was the infamous Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb. It exploded that day with the force of 15mt , far more than the 6mt that was expected. It was 750 times more powerful that the Fat Man bomb that levelled Nagasaki. It denoted with 2.5 times the expected yield and remains the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated by the US, equivalent to 15 million tonnes of TNT.

Appropriate precautions hadn’t been taken for such a large detonation, and so nuclear fallout rained down on Bikini Atoll, Rongelap Atoll and Rongerik Atoll. 20,000 people were affected by the Castle Bravo detonation and 15 islands and atolls were contaminated. People showed signs of acute radiation sickness, and, on Rongelap, 2 cm of nuclear ash blanketed the entire island. Children, unaware of the fallouts affects, began playing with the falling ash like snow.

Returning Home

Another 19 atomic bombs would be detonated on and around Bikini Atoll, the last one Juniper on July 22nd, 1954, almost 12 years to the day since the Baker detonation. Now, the fight to return to Bikini Atoll really began. Struggling to survive on Kili Island, the islanders were eager to return home.

In spite of all we’d put it through Bikini Atoll had recovered from its years of abuse at the hands of the US. Having been bounced between various islands and atolls since the testing began, Kili had become their permeant home since 1948, but the islands desperately wanted to return home. It wouldn’t be until 1968 until they got the chance. President Lyndon B Johnson promised that the islanders could return, but an investigation by the Atomic Energy Commission found that the radiation levels in the coconut crab, an essential food source for the islanders, were far above normal and acceptable limits. As such, the islanders were forced to remain on Kili island.

Three families did move back in 1972, followed by others in 1987 despite later advice. Issues continued to plague the islanders though, with a boy who’d been born on Bikini Atoll dying from cancer caused by the radiation. In 1982, those that had returned would be evacuated for a second time when it was found that the top 15 inches of soil contained high concentrations of Caesium 137, which would then make its way into the various plants and fruits the islanders ate — and yes, even the coconuts were affected. This resulted in a high number of stillbirths, miscarriages and genetic abnormalities in the children born from those affected by the atomic tests conducted in and around Bikini Atoll. What’s more men were four times as likely to develop lung cancer on the island, women 60 times more likely develop cervical cancer

Over $150 million has been paid to the Bikini islanders as compensation and to reconstruct homes, facilities and institutions for the islanders, many of whom now live on Kili Island. The call to return to Bikini Atoll is still strong though and many point to the fact that the island is still technically habitable.

Technically Habitable

The background radiation of the island has been found to be at normal levels, and even lower than that of some major US cities. While you could walk around on the island and suffer no real ill effects, living there is an entirely different story because of the aforementioned soil and subsequent food contamination.

One proposed solution, and the one favoured by the islanders themselves, is to scrap the topsoil. The top 15 inches of Caesium 137 contaminated soil would be removed and replaced with potassium rich soil. The plants, preferring the potassium over the caesium, would quickly switch to that. While Caesium 137 would still be present in the earth, it would be absent from the food.

There are unfortunately a number of issues with this. Removing the topsoil would have a devasting effect on the ecology of the island and scientists have argued that it would effectively turn Bikini Atoll into a wasteland. This is to say nothing of the expense and the fact that the scraping of the topsoil would likely have to be repeated on occasion to ensure that Caesium 137 didn’t return to the food supply.

Right now, the islanders live on a majority imported food supply and it’s likely that they could continue to do this on Bikini Atoll. It is hardly a return to normal life on the home island though and if the islanders are forced into the same food import practices they’ve had since the 40s, many argue why return to the island at all. Many islanders seem willing to take the risk of destroying the island if it means that they can return their a potentially grow food once more like their ancestors of old.

And so, it remains to this day. The Bikini islanders have never returned home, instead being forced into limbo. Most live on Kili Island today and there are as many as 2,400 Bikini islanders, with fewer than 40 of them having been alive to witness the fires of nuclear fission all those years ago. A great many of them have never even visited their home island, which in recent years has become a tourist attraction. A great many diving tours are offered, especially of the sunken USS Arkansas and the USS Saratoga aircraft carrier, two of the many ships sunk in the testing, as well as the colossal crater left by Castle Bravo…………..

Ironically for the islanders of Bikini Atoll, the word ‘bikini’ likely comes from ‘pikinni’ which, in the Marshallese language means ‘coconut place’………https://medium.com/@dannykane97/the-radioactive-coconuts-of-bikini-atoll-9bfb568b8b07

 

August 22, 2020 Posted by | environment, radiation, Reference, weapons and war | 1 Comment

Nuclear waste should no longer be exempt from environmental laws

How Bedrock Environmental Law Can Break the Nuclear Waste Logjam, https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/insight-how-bedrock-environmental-law-can-break-the-nuclear-waste-logjam   Geoffrey Fettus, NRDC  17 Aug 20
The 30-year battle over nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain in Nevada shows it’s time for the Atomic Energy Act to be amended. Geoffrey Fettus, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, says Congress should pass legislation to end the exemption of nuclear waste from hazardous waste and other bedrock environmental laws.
For more than 30 years, Congress and the federal government have tried again and again to shove our nation’s spent nuclear fuel down a hole at Yucca Mountain, Nev. It’s time to use our foundational environmental laws get out of this seemingly impenetrable maze.

Congress should amend the Atomic Energy Act to remove exemptions from environmental laws for radioactive waste, a proposal that got an important boost from the House Select Committee on Climate Crisis as it called for a task force of federal, state, local, and tribal officials to study the implications of this idea.

Earlier this year, President Trump bowed to reality and abandoned efforts to force the radioactive waste on Nevada, the Yucca mirage finally dissipated. What’s clear now is that trying to force Nevada, or Utah, or New Mexico, or Tennessee (or any other state) to take the entirety of the nation’s most toxic nuclear waste won’t work. Continuing down that path will get us nowhere.

Instead of seeing recalcitrant states as the problem, what if we acknowledge the reality that they must be a key part of the solution for nuclear waste?

Feds Have Exclusive Jurisdiction Over Radioactive Materials
Remarkably, our bedrock environmental laws don’t cover nuclear waste, and they should. The Atomic Energy Act started the nuclear industry and was enacted years before our key pollution safeguards were established.

Crucially, and mostly for nuclear weapons reasons, the AEA gave the federal government exclusive jurisdiction over all radioactive materials, including radioactive waste. When Congress enacted our foundational environmental laws decades later, each of them included an exemption that excludes radioactive waste except in limited or marginal ways.

This is the original sin that must be rectified.

To explain this pernicious problem, when Congress considered nuclear waste in its precedent setting 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, it just accepted the AEA’s sole federal authority and nuclear waste’s exclusion from environmental law as the way of the world. Only a few years later, for the sake of political expedience, Congress cut short a well thought out siting process and required the Yucca Mountain repository as the only option.

This was supposed to expedite the process, but not surprisingly, it exploded in controversy and eventually ground to a halt. And now it has finally, truly, died. But nuclear waste remains just as toxic and problematic as ever.

If nuclear waste were covered by environmental laws, i.e., without the current exemptions that limit EPA and state authority, protective federal health and welfare standards can combine with state-level decision-making over where and how the waste could be stored within its borders.

Amending the AEA and removing the provisions that exempt nuclear waste from our hazardous waste and water laws would give us our best chance to garner public acceptance for a process to find safe, technically sound storage sites for toxic nuclear waste—waste that will remain dangerous to human health for hundreds of thousands of years.

Why This Can Work
Consider how things could change if environmental laws could operate as intended.

Under regular environmental law (that covers pollution of air, water, land), the EPA sets strong standards commensurate to the harm of the pollutant. States can then assume the management of that program (or leave it to the EPA) and set additional, stricter standards if they wish.

A state can have strong regulatory authority to set terms for how much waste it might dispose of, how the facility will operate, and the requisite power to enforce those protective standards and protect its citizens—all things it cannot do now for radioactive waste.

To be clear, the standards for high-level radioactive waste will need to be special and extraordinarily protective, and the rulemaking for those standards will be quite a technical ordeal. But, there’s no getting around doing that hard work; Congress tried to take a short cut and it failed.

Once those standards are in place, the EPA and the states can, as in other instances, share the necessary roles of guarding public safety and welfare from radioactive waste. This institutional framework allows for both scientific defensibility of potential sites and, importantly, public acceptance of the process.

The Task Falls to Congress
For far too long many members of Congress and officials in Washington fought any efforts like this as they sought the quick fix of Yucca. Now there’s evidence of change. The ambitious report from the House Select Committee on Climate Crisis included this key recommendation:
Congress should establish a task force comprised of federal, state, local, and tribal officials to study the implications of amending the Atomic Energy Act to remove exemptions from environmental laws for spent fuel and high-level waste, while maintaining federal minimum standards.

Lawmakers should pick up this recommendation, create just such a task force, and move forward with this plan. Will this work? Yes—but it will take both hard work and time.

One thing I can guarantee is that the current approach isn’t working and won’t ever work. No single state is going to willingly accept the entirety of the nation’s nuclear burden without any way to protect their citizens; we have decades of evidence for this proposition. No amount of stomping of feet in the halls of Congress can change that.

Author Information
Geoffrey Fettus is a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate and clean energy program in Washington, D.C. He litigates in federal courts and testifies before Congress on the beginning and end of the nuclear fuel cycle. Prior to joining the NRDC, he was a staff attorney at the New Mexico Environmental Law Center and an assistant attorney general in New Mexico’s Office of the Attorney General.

August 18, 2020 Posted by | environment, politics, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

The Arctic – where global heating meets nuclear pollution – theme for September 20

Global heating is bringing massive changes to the Arctic, and at an accelerating pace. It is the warning system to the world, as sea ice melts, Greenland’s glaciers melt, swathes of frozen ground thaw, permafrost melts. The Arctic ocean will probably be ice-free in summer by 2040.

Crazily, Russians and Americans rejoice, seeing all this as the opportunity to exploit the region for oil and gas, the very things that are causing this unfolding climate nightmare. Apparently these governments are not concerned about the Arctic processes that bring changed global weather, with changed ocean currents, sudden extreme cold snaps. Global heating speeds up with feedback loops: as ice is lost , dark water absorbs more heat from the sun, melting permafrost releases methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Arctic regions now experience repeated uncontrollable forest fires, bringing environmental and economic destruction.

Nuclear pollution.  The Arctic is where the the two disastrous threats meet – climate change and nuclear radiation. This danger is happening with fires threatening Northern Russian radioactive sites, and with radiation released as buried nuclear items appear from under the ice.   Russia’s dumping of nuclear submarines and other radioactive trash is now recognised as a danger to Arctic ecosystems.

There are 39 nuclear-powered vessels or installations in the Russian Arctic today with a total of 62 reactors. This includes 31 submarines, one surface warship, five icebreakers, two onshore and one floating nuclear power plant.  These numbers are set to increase; . “By 2035, the Russian Arctic will be the most nuclearized waters on the planet.”

There were 2 fatal arctic accidents in 2019 – 14 sailors killed due to a fire on a nuclear-powered submarine, and an underwater nuclear-powered cruise missile exploded.  Several serious submarine nuclear reactor accidents have occurred in Arctic waters, and a U.S. bomber with plutonium warheads  crashed at Thule airbase on Greenland. In the Kara Sea, thousands of containers wit radioactive waste were dumped, together with 16 reactors.

August 15, 2020 Posted by | ARCTIC, Christina's themes, climate change, environment | 2 Comments

Russia plans removal of its nuclear trash from Arctic waters

Russia to Remove Hazardous Nuclear Objects Dumped in Its Arctic Waters, 

The country’s nuclear energy company will over the next eight years lift two submarines and four reactor compartments from the bottom of the Barents and Kara Seas.  By The Barents Observer  5 Aug 20,   Russia’s state nuclear agency plans to remove several nuclear objects from the depths of Russia’s Arctic waters in an effort to reduce environmental hazards, Rosatom said this week as it presented a clean-up plan for the region.

Russia’s state nuclear agency plans to remove several nuclear objects from the depths of Russia’s Arctic waters in an effort to reduce environmental hazards, Rosatom said this week as it presented a clean-up plan for the region.

From the late 1960s to the late 1980s, about 18,000 radioactive objects were dumped into Russia’s remote northern waters. Most of them present little environmental risk. But some are increasingly seen as a hazard to Arctic ecosystems.

“Rosatom over the next eight years intends to lift from the bottom of Russia’s Arctic waters six objects that are most dangerous in terms of radioactive pollution,” the company’s spokesperson told the state-run TASS news agency.

The company plans to lift the reactors from the K-11, K-19 and K-140 submarines as well as spent nuclear fuel from the reactor that served the Lenin icebreaker.

In addition, two entire submarines will be lifted: the K-27 from the Kara Sea and K-159 from the Barents Sea. While the former was deliberately dumped by Soviet authorities in 1982, the latter sank during a towing operation in 2003.

The K-27 is located in 33-meter depths east of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. It has been described by experts as a potential radioactive “time bomb.” The K-159 is located in 200-meter depths off the coast of the Kola Peninsula.

These six objects represent more than 90% of radioactive sources dumped at sea, Rosatom said………

Lifting the six hazardous nuclear objects will not only be technically difficult, but also very expensive.

A recent report made for Rosatom and the European Commission estimated the costs of lifting these six objects at 278 million euros. That includes the cost of bringing them safely to a yard for decommissioning and long-term storage.

Lifting the K-159 alone is estimated to cost 57.5 million euros. Lifting the K-27 and transporting it to a shipyard for decommissioning and long-term storage in Saida Bay will carry a price tag of 47.7 million euros, the report said.

It’s unlikely that Russia’s increasingly cash-strapped treasury will have the 278 million euros needed for the cleanup.

Several countries have previously allocated billions to assist Russia’s post-Soviet efforts to cope with nuclear waste.

Norway has since the mid-90s granted about 1.5 billion kroner (140 million euros) to nuclear safety projects in the Russian part of the Barents region.  https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/08/05/russia-to-remove-hazardous-nuclear-objects-dumped-in-its-arctic-waters-a71060

August 6, 2020 Posted by | ARCTIC, oceans, Russia, wastes, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Nuclear radiation – potential danger in East Ukraine

Conflict zone in East Ukraine – on the verge of ecological catastrophe and blue-collar brain drain, JAM News, Source – RFE/RL  30 July 20, 

Coal mines and the metallurgical plants associated with them are the backbone of the economy in the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, where the conflict between the central government and the Russian-backed separatists rages on. Closing them deprives the local population of their livelihoods and threatens these and the neighboring regions in Ukraine with ecological disaster.

Pumps cut off

In 2017, the “Donetsk People’s Republic” (“DPR”) developed a plan, according to which only 17 of the profitable mines in the region were kept in operation.

But reality decided to throw a wrench in the works, primarily because Russia did not invest in the Donetsk industry.

The mines were closed by a simple method: the pumps that pump out the water were turned off. The equipment was cut and handed over for scrap.

And it will inevitably affect the situation on the territory controlled by Ukraine – the mines on Ukrainian territory and the Donbass mines form a single water pumping system.

No radioactive contamination…yet

Of particular concern is the Yunkom mine, which in 1979 carried out an experimental nuclear explosion with a yield of 0.3 kilotons.

After the explosion, a glassy capsule with liquid radioactive waste was formed at a depth of 903 meters. It was flooded just after the pumps were turned off in April 2018.

None of the experts really know how the radioactive capsule will react with water, when it will naturally collapse, or where its contents will end up. Neither the authorities of the self-proclaimed republics nor the government of Ukraine are monitoring the radioactive contamination. Nor are they in the Rostov region, where the waters of the Seversky Donets River flow………  https://jam-news.net/ukraine-conflict-miness-ecology/

August 4, 2020 Posted by | environment, Ukraine | Leave a comment

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