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USA’s Inflation reduction act expands tax-payer funding for nuclear power plants

Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner

The Inflation Reduction Act (“IRA”) created new incentives for the generation of electricity from nuclear power plants, supplementing incentive provisions that are currently in place.  The primary changes are (i) the adoption of a new 8-year production tax credit (“PTC”) for certain existing nuclear power plants, and (ii) enabling nuclear facilities to qualify under the new technology-neutral zero-emission PTC and investment tax credit (“ITC”) regime that will apply beginning in 2025.  Some of the other incentives adopted by the IRA may also support the nuclear industry.

Existing Incentives Prior to IRA

The advanced nuclear production tax credit (“Advanced Nuclear PTC”) under Code Section 45J of the Internal Revenue Code (the “Code”)………………………………..

Inflation Reduction Act Incentives…………….  enabling new nuclear power plants placed in service after December 31, 2024 to participate in the PTC and ITC incentives available for the production of electricity from renewable and other low-carbon sources. 

Zero-Emission Nuclear Power Production Tax Credit

The IRA creates a new zero-emission nuclear power production tax credit (“Zero Emission PTC”)  for certain existing nuclear power plants under Section 45U of the Code. ………………………

Clean Electricity Production Tax Credit

For facilities placed in service after December 31, 2024, the IRA replaces the existing PTC under Section 45 of the Code with a technology-neutral “zero emissions” clean electricity production tax credit (“Clean Electricity PTC”) under Section 45Y of the Code……………………………

Clean Electricity Investment Tax Credit

For facilities placed in service after December 31, 2024, the IRA also replaces the existing ITC under Section 48 of the Code with a technology-neutral “zero emissions” clean electricity investment tax credit (“Clean Electricity ITC”) under Section 48E of the Code. The credit is available for any “qualified facility” and certain energy storage technology…………………………….

Other Tax Credit Incentives

The IRA provides some additional tax credit incentives that could benefit the development of future nuclear power plants…………………………………

High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium Funding

The IRA also earmarks $700 million for the development of a domestic market and production of high-assay low-enriched uranium (“HALEU”)………………………….  https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/inflation-reduction-act-expands-support-4367428/—

June 14, 2023 Posted by | politics, USA | 1 Comment

Connecticut Governor Lamont should veto SB 7 that would advance dangerous nuclear power

Gov. Lamont, veto bill to ‘advance’ dangerous nuclear power. CT Mirror, by Stanley Heller, June 12, 2023

What folly!  Just as a dam necessary for cooling nuclear waste at Europe’s biggest nuclear power complex is blown up, members of the Connecticut legislature pass a bill that includes promotion of dangerous outmoded nuclear power.

Senate Bill 7 creates a “Council for Advancing Nuclear Energy Development” specifically packed with six positions for people who work in the nuclear energy industry.  Their mission will be to discuss “advancements that are occurring in nuclear energy development.”  They’ll study “small modular reactors, advanced nuclear reactors, [and] fusion energy facilities.”

Rather than seek “advancement,” we should be figuring out how to phase out this technology.  We see by the Ukraine example that parties at war do not respect what one would think would be totally obvious, the need to do nothing to harm the safety of nuclear power plants.  Not that we expect warfare to break out in the U.S., but this country should lead in best practices so that countries where war is a lot more likely won’t go down the nuclear path and risk huge releases of nuclear contamination that spread world-wide. 

Realize that the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 led to thousands of fatalities.  In Ukraine alone 35,000 women have received compensation for spouses who died because of the disaster.   And that’s only the numbers from Ukraine. High levels of radiation covered southern Belarus too, but the government there has never released its statistics.

Another section of the Connecticut bill would classify nuclear power as a “Class 1 renewable energy source.”  That would allow the owner of a new nuclear facility to sell renewable “energy credits,” another dubious idea.  Rather than limit the use of polluting fuels, the idea is for “the market” to take care of things.  Grand, let’s rely on the same market whose mindless profit seeking got us hooked on fossil fuels in the first place.

The new council will study ways to “promote nuclear energy development, expansion and research” in Connecticut.  What won’t be studied is the problem of importation of Russian uranium that is used to generate nuclear power. Every year hundreds of millions of dollars are spent by U.S. companies to buy raw and enriched uranium from Russia.   Presumably Connecticut nuclear power companies are no different. Reuters reports that the U.S. power industry relies on Russia and its allies Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan for roughly half of the uranium powering its nuclear power plants.  Why not respond to a petition about this and study how to stop relying on a fuel that enriches the Russian dictator?

……………………………………….. Governor Lamont should veto SB 7.  Then call a special session to pass a revised SB 7 clean of plans for more nuclear power.  After doing that stay in session and spend time passing blockbuster legislation that will provide leadership for a country teetering on a climate precipice.

June 14, 2023 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

My nuclear family

“The locals know their local land and water supplies are contaminated from the nuclear material that was either buried in nearby canyons or on riverbanks,” Gómez writes in her book. “They know their presence on the Pajarito Plateau is being erased from national memory. They know they were placed in dangerous jobs because of their identities. They know the plutonium exploded into the atmosphere during the Trinity Test is making them sick. They know nuclear waste, if buried in their backyard, poses severe threats.”

Alicia Inez Guzmán, Searchlight New Mexico, 14 June 23,  https://www.lcsun-news.com/story/news/2023/06/11/my-nuclear-family/70306994007/

My parents’ house sits at the foot of the Sangre de Cristos facing west toward the setting sun and the Jemez Mountains. I still remember nights looking out across the vast darkness at the twinkling lights of Los Alamos, the secret city, “a place,” as the late anti-nuclear activist and Ohkay Owingeh elder Herman Agoyo put it, “with no public memory.” 

As the crow flies, Truchas is 30 miles from Los Alamos, separated by the great Tewa Basin and arid badlands checkerboarded by Hispano settlements and Indigenous Pueblos. For most of my young life, I took the Lab for granted. It was there in the background, omnipresent like a low-frequency hum. 

But it didn’t always just exist. It was forced onto our homeland and into our consciousness, even if most origin stories about the Manhattan Project and the Lab’s continued presence in the region treat local people like extras in a movie. 

“For the several hundred workers required to man these plants, there must also be several thousand service and supporting personnel,” a 1950 internal report read. Its writer was debating whether Los Alamos was the best place for the weapons Lab moving forward. 

Scientists performed clandestine work here, yes, but that work required and continues to require the effort of so many others — “supporting personnel” — who can also be on the frontlines of exposure. 

I am reminded, for instance, of an experiment that went horribly wrong just nine months after American forces decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs. A Canadian physicist, Louis Slotin, was trying to gather data on nuclear chain reactions when the screwdriver he was holding as a wedge between a beryllium tamper and a plutonium core accidentally slipped. For a brief second, the beryllium and plutonium reached fission, sending out a blast of blue light and radioactivity. 

Slotin’s death in 1946 has been famously recorded in histories of the Lab. But there were several other people in the room that day, including several colleagues and a security guard whose fate has largely been eclipsed. All that was noted in records of the event was his fear. Apparently, it was said, the security guard ran out of the room and up a hill. And that’s where his part in the story ends. 

But he was there, a witness — and one, I imagine, who was exposed to the same plutonium that within a matter of nine days killed Slotin. I’ve long wondered: Who was he? What was his story?

When I think of that man, I think of my Grandpa Gilbert. Many auxiliary staff were local people who got their start on “the hill” as security guards for the Atomic Energy Commission. That was his story — a career begun as a security guard in 1946 and ended some three decades later as a staff member of the Lab and the University of California, which managed it. The position was a distinction that not many Hispanos held at the time. My mom says he felt dignified by his work there — the only means he had to raise five kids after World War II. But there was a trade-off, including discreet trips to the doctor where he was screened for cancer on a more-than-routine basis. 

Many family members would follow in his footsteps — my Uncle Jerry among them. Los Alamos was a place abounding in conspiracy theories and Uncle Jerry found himself at the center of one of them. He believed that racism had created a culture of retaliation, so toxic that it led to his being framed for intentionally dosing his supervisor with plutonium-239. After my uncle’s death two years ago, the Santa Fe New Mexican published a column narrating the sordid events — his boss ultimately recanted the allegations and my uncle and others won a settlement — but he was haunted by a lasting specter. The multiple cancers that consumed his body decades later were products of the Lab, in his opinion, like sleeper fires set within him. 

I only recently came to know the fragments of my Uncle Pat’s story. During his three years at the Lab in the late 1970s, he was flown on two occasions to California with a locked box chained to his wrist. His destination was TRW, the predecessor of Northrop Grumman Space Technology, and his cargo, he told me, was top-secret technology that could detect nuclear weapons testing from outer space. 

There’s a kind of mental acrobatics required to compartmentalize these different realities — the opportunity and the harm, the secrets and the consent. I know this compartmentalization well, this desire to draw a line in the sand between the good and the bad. When I was 19, I spent a summer working as an undergraduate intern in the Lab’s explosives division, a building perched behind a maze of fences and guards. I didn’t have a security clearance at the time, nor could I foresee getting one, so I spent most days marooned at my desk in the front office, filing papers and sending emails. I couldn’t even take a bathroom break without a chaperone accompanying me. 

Nothing of that work rings more clearly than a memory of two scientists stumbling out into the hallway, covered in blood. An experiment had gone awry — nothing radiation related — but it was so shrouded in mystery that parsing what actually happened is like trying to put a puzzle together that’s missing half the pieces. I watched in horror from the doorframe.

After that, I transferred to the Bradbury Science Museum, also in Los Alamos, where I walked by replicas of Little Boy and Fat Man daily to get to my desk. I spent that summer, among other things, writing exhibition text about the Manhattan Project’s early architects — J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman. I wrote not the history of mi gente, but of those agents of immense creation and destruction, those who’d exacted what Myrriah Gómez in her book, “Nuclear Nuevo México,” calls nuclear colonization. The irony. 

It was only when I left the state that I had the distance to understand the debt our communities pay for the good jobs. I began to unpack what it means for New Mexico to be what the writer D.H. Lawrence once called the moon of America. This place was distant enough in America’s consciousness to be foreign, exotic even. But as that “tierra incognita,” the unknown and unknowable blankness stretched across mental maps of the Southwest, our world became America’s wasteland. We continue to sit at the periphery of centers of power, yet we have been forced into the epicenter of this nation’s nuclear weapons complex. 

Now, as I write about the role of nuclear weapons across New Mexico, the nation and the globe, Toni Morrison’s words come to mind: “The subject of the dream is the dreamer.” Her ideas about literature were deeply influenced by psychoanalysis. Indeed, to her mind, the act of dreaming was not unlike the act of writing. Or, to put it another way, the subject of the writing is the writer. Here, that is me. 

My family and community’s own tangled history with the Lab sits in my subconscious like an inchoate thought. Only when I hold it up to scrutiny does that thought form into the imperative, allowing me to fully fathom what the Manhattan Project birthed in our backyard. Perhaps this is what Gómez refers to as an “innate knowing,” our local “sixth sense.” 

“The locals know their local land and water supplies are contaminated from the nuclear material that was either buried in nearby canyons or on riverbanks,” Gómez writes in her book. “They know their presence on the Pajarito Plateau is being erased from national memory. They know they were placed in dangerous jobs because of their identities. They know the plutonium exploded into the atmosphere during the Trinity Test is making them sick. They know nuclear waste, if buried in their backyard, poses severe threats.”

I know all of this when I drive along Highway 84/285, an artery that connects Pojoaque Pueblo to Española and the Pueblos of Santa Clara and Ohkay Owingeh, below a billboard sprawled against sienna-hued bluffs. A woman with a complexion like my own holds radiation detection equipment and smiles down at me. 

“Radiation Control Technicians are vital to operations at LANL,” the billboard proclaims. “Start your career as an RCT at Northern NM College now.”

My worldview will always shape my writing on a topic that hits so close to home, but the focus of this series — The Atomic Hereafter — is to highlight all the communities most impacted by 80 years of nuclear presence, from the most recent attempts to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal to the long, drawn-out ways radiation can transmit from mother to child. Nuclear issues in this state are generational. I will take them one story at a time.

June 13, 2023 Posted by | PERSONAL STORIES, USA | Leave a comment

Lawmakers seek clearer picture of nuclear command and control costs

By Colin Demarest C4ISR Net 12 June 23

WASHINGTON — U.S. lawmakers are pushing for a clearer catalog of spending on nuclear command, control and communications, the means through which the devastating arsenal is readied, coordinated and potentially used.

Members of the House strategic forces panel included in a draft of fiscal 2024 defense legislation a provision to establish a major force program for NC3, a highly guarded topic. The proposal was shared June 12, alongside additional National Defense Authorization Act input from other subcommittees.

……………………………… The Biden administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, published last year, pledged to strengthen nuclear command and control, including further insulation from cyber, space-based and electromagnetic attack. Different nuclear weapon types face different risks, as well, in part because of their age and lack of ingrained information technologies. Newer nuclear weaponry is expected to enter the stockpile after 2030 — and with it, the potential for more-modern systems. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/c2-comms/2023/06/12/lawmakers-seek-clearer-picture-of-nuclear-command-and-control-costs/

June 13, 2023 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Stealth actions by SpaceX, as 36 space launches approved by California Coastal Commission without a vote, public hearing, or public notice

Nina Beety, 11 June 23

June 7, the California Coastal Commission approved 36 SpaceX launches at
Vandenberg AFB per year without a vote, public hearing, or public notice
in the agenda. SpaceX presently launches 6 rockets per year.

The proposal was hidden in a staff report which the Commission merely
concurred with. The public did not know it was proposed. Fortunately, a
commissioner commented on it during the meeting, and a member of the
public caught it and investigated. She and another person then spoke
during public comments the following day June 8 against this possibly
unlawful action, and hearing about it for the first time, I joined them.
If this attendee had not caught it, the action would not have come to
light.

Stealth actions are being repeated by agency after agency, exempting
projects from review, environmental evaluation, hearings, public notice,
and laws, and this must be exposed and contested very publicly whenever they
occur.

Below is the link to the agenda. Item #10 “Energy, Ocean Resources and
Federal Consistency” report.

Also,  U.S. Department of the Air Force propose a new space complex at
Vandenberg Air Force Base
for private company Phantom Space Company for up to 48 launches per year
and 48 rocket tests per year. This was scheduled on the June 7 agenda
but was postponed until probably the July meeting. The staff report for
it is linked in the June agenda.

10 Energy, Ocean Resources & Federal Consistency
https://www.coastal.ca.gov/meetings/agenda/#/2023/6
Report by the Deputy Director on permit waivers, emergency permits,
immaterial amendments & extensions, negative determinations, matters not
requiring public hearings, and status report on offshore oil & gas
exploration & development. For specific information contact the
Commission’s Energy, Ocean Resources, and Federal Consistency Division
office at (415) 904-5240.

June 12, 2023 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | 1 Comment

The ABCs of a nuclear education

Then she remembered the words of her grandmother, a field nurse from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, who once tended to Navajo Nation tribal members affected by uranium mining and saw the health impacts of radiation exposure firsthand. 

“She used to tell me, ‘Don’t ever, ever work at Los Alamos National Labs.’” 

New Mexico’s local colleges are training students to work in a plutonium pit factory. What does this mean for their future — and the world’s?

Searchlight NewMexico, by Alicia Inez Guzmán, June 7, 2023

Every day, thousands of people from all parts of El Norte make the vertiginous drive up to Los Alamos National Laboratory. It’s a trek that generations of New Mexicans have been making, like worker ants to the queen, from the eastern edge of the great Tewa Basin to the craggy Pajarito Plateau. 

All in the pursuit of “good jobs.”

Some, inevitably, are bound for that most secretive and fortified place, Technical Area 55, the very heart of the weapons complex — home to PF-4, the lab’s plutonium handling facility, with its armed guards, concrete walls, steel doors and sporadic sirens. To enter “the plant,” as it’s known, is to get as close as possible to the existential nature of the nuclear age.

For 40 years, some 250 workers were tasked, mostly, with research and design. But a multibillion-dollar mission to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal has brought about “a paradigm shift,” in the words of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, a federal watchdog. Today, the plant is in the middle of a colossal expansion — growing from a single, aged building to what the safety board calls “a large-scale production facility for weapon components with the largest number of workers in its history.”  

In short, the plant is slated to become a factory for making plutonium pits, the essential core of every nuclear warhead. 

Four years ago, LANL began laying the groundwork for this expansion by searching out and shaping a highly trained labor pool of technicians to handle fissile materials, machine the parts for weapons, monitor radiation and remediate nuclear waste. The lab turned to the surrounding community, as it often had, tapping New Mexico’s small regional institutions — colleges that mostly serve minority and low-income students. The plan, as laid out in a senate subcommittee meeting, set forth a college-to-lab pipeline — a “workforce of the future.”

Taken altogether, Santa Fe Community College, Northern New Mexico College and the University of New Mexico’s Los Alamos campus are set to receive millions of federal dollars for their role in preparing and equipping that workforce. They’ve graduated 74 people to date, many of whom will end up at TA-55……………………………………

For many local families, the lab has been a gateway to the American dream. Its high wages have afforded generations of Norteños a chance at the good life — new houses, new cars, land ownership, higher education for their kids. Indeed, to work there is to become part of the region’s upper crust.

It carries a legacy of illness, death and environmental racism for countless others. History tells of a long practice of hiring local Hispano and Pueblo communities to staff some of the most dangerous positions, a practice that has its origins in the early years of the lab, as Myrriah Gómez described in her 2022 book “Nuclear Nuevo México.” 

New Mexico’s academic institutions have for decades served as LANL’s willing partner, feeding students into the weapons complex with high school internships, undergraduate student programs; graduate and postdoc programs; and apprenticeships for craft trades and technicians. The lab heavily recruits at most local colleges with the assurance of opportunities not easily found in New Mexico. 

Talavai Denipah-Cook can still remember LANL representatives plying her with promises of a high-paying job and good benefits at an American Indian Sciences and Engineering Society conference years ago. At the time, she was a student at a local high school, and the future that they painted looked bright. 

“I was like, ‘Wow, that sounds really intriguing.’ We don’t get that around here, especially as people of color,” said Denipah-Cook, now a program manager in the Environmental Health and Justice Program at Tewa Women United, an Indigenous nonprofit based in Española. 

Then she remembered the words of her grandmother, a field nurse from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, who once tended to Navajo Nation tribal members affected by uranium mining and saw the health impacts of radiation exposure firsthand. 

“She used to tell me, ‘Don’t ever, ever work at Los Alamos National Labs.’” ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….

“The lab has never had to be accountable for their promises,” said Greg Mello, of the Los Alamos Study Group, an influential anti-nuclear nonprofit based in Albuquerque. “Could they be a factory? Could they produce pits reliably? No. Not at all.” 

LANL, regardless, was tapped as one of two sites — the other being the Savannah River plutonium processing facility in South Carolina — to produce an annual quota of “no fewer than 80 such pits by 2030,” according to the Fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. With this, LANL has been authorized to produce 30 pits per year by 2026. 

What’s being proposed is so huge it has no precedent, said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, an anti-nuclear advocacy organization in Santa Fe. 

“Here we have this arrogant agency that thinks it can just impose expanded bomb production on New Mexico,” said Coghlan, referring to the National Nuclear Security Administration, the lead agency for pit production. “They do not have credible cost estimates and they do not have a credible plan for production. But yet they expect New Mexicans to bear the consequences.” 

The costs, according to the Los Alamos Study Group, will come to some $46 billion by 2036 — the earliest the NNSA says it can hit 80 pits per year at the two sites. It’s roughly the same amount of money it would take to rebuild every single failing bridge in America. 

To support the pit mission at LANL, the NNSA estimates the lab will need 4,100 full-time employees, including scientists and engineers, security guards, maintenance and craft workers, and “hard-to-fill positions,” as LANL has dubbed the pipeline jobs. 

More costly than the Manhattan Project in its day, the NNSA program is the most expensive in the agency’s history. It is also destined, Coghlan and others say, to collapse under its own weight. Both Los Alamos and Savannah River are, according to federal documents, billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.

Money, waste and risk

In the meantime, LANL’s budget has increased by 130 percent over the past five years, according to a June 2022 report by the Government Accountability Office. There’s no real way to determine how much money LANL will need to reach its quota. 

…………………………………………………………. Radiation 101: Students get prepped for pit work

Last spring, assistant professor Scott Braley taught two back-to-back introductory courses to 13 future radiation control technicians at NNMC. His lectures covered a host of topics: the history of “industrial-scale” radiation accidents worldwide, algebraic formulas to determine the correlation between individual cancer and workplace exposure, and maximum permissible doses for future workers like themselves. The rates are higher than for the general public, Braley explained, because, for one, radiation workers “have accepted a higher risk.” 

……………………………. Much of the college programs and their curricula center around minimizing risk. But because the possibility of serious harm at LANL is much higher than in most jobs, the programs present an ethical dilemma: Who are the people bearing the risk? 

“What does it mean to assume that exposure is acceptable at all?” asked Eileen O’Shaughnessy, cofounder of Demand Nuclear Abolition. “Because the thing about radiation is it’s cumulative and any amount is unsafe.”

………………….. “You realize, yes, they are paying you well, but you’re being put in situations that you have no idea about,” said the retired machinist, a man with over two decades of experience working at the lab, much of it at the plant. He asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “It’s the mentality at the lab,” he said. “They don’t really think that people that are techs are even really worth much.”

A powerful neighbor

Dueling perspectives in El Norte reveal the chasms around the lab and, in particular, what some consider the Manhattan Project’s original sin: Its use of eminent domain to force Indigenous and Hispano people off their farms and sacred lands on the Pajarito Plateau. Its arrival, oral histories hold, spelled the end of land-based living. 

……………………. As the single largest employer in northern New Mexico, LANL’s horizon of influence is vast. And with billions more dollars flooding in, its sway in almost every sphere — economics, politics, education — seems only to grow.

“It is hard for us at the Los Alamos Study Group to see how New Mexico can ever develop if LANL becomes a reliable, enduring pit factory,” said Greg Mello, the executive director. “We see it as a death sentence for economic and social development in Northern New Mexico.” 

Despite the lab’s omnipresence, economic gains have been relatively limited. While Los Alamos County has one of the highest median household incomes in the nation, the surrounding communities — including Española — are among the poorest in the state. 

The most damning indication of that disparity came in a draft report from the University of New Mexico’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research, which showed that the lab actually cost Rio Arriba County $2.6 million and Santa Fe County $2.2 million in fiscal year 2017. 

According to the Rio Grande Sun, LANL suppressed that information in the report’s final version. And though LANL jobs are by far the most competitive in the region, the trickle-down hasn’t amounted to collective uplift. 

“LANL has been a bad neighbor,” charged Warren. “If the economic benefits are so good for them to continue their work and expand, you would think the communities around here would be doing better. But we’re not.” https://searchlightnm.org/the-abcs-of-a-nuclear-education/

June 12, 2023 Posted by | employment, USA | 1 Comment

The warmonger neocons, run the show of the puppet figurehead Biden.

Contribution from readers Tom and Sue Millon, 10 July 23

For Republicans and corrupt democrats, it’s never been about the debt of the USA or ending devastating military conflict. It has never been about domestic tranquility. As the arch neocon Dick Cheney said, “Reagan taught us that the debt doesn’t matter.” It’s about re-allocating the federal budget to the people who put you in office: arms makers, the military. oil companies, slumlords, tech giants. If you don’t have a lobbyist, a PAC or a dark money conduit, you don’t count for a damn thing in Washington dc. America and the world is paying the price of this. The neocons run Biden now. Their think tanks and focus, are heavily funded by arms makers and the military. The warmonger neocons, run the show of the puppet figurehead Biden.
Their goals are out of touch with anything that is rational. They are not preventing the escalation of this potential nuclear confrontation, they are encouraging it.

Eve Ottenberg
From the human-caused climate catastrophe to a nuclear showdown between Washington and Moscow or Beijing, to fascism ascendant, three terrifying disasters loom over humanity like the shadow of death. These threats have lurked for some years, but the Ukraine war, facilitated by Joe Biden’s arrival in the white house in 2021 and his pronounced aggressiveness toward Moscow, shifted nuclear Armageddon to center stage and pushed the doomsday clock close to midnight.

Trust between the Kremlin and western governments vanished long ago, so it’s hard to see how this calamity ever gets resolved. Russian officials watched the U.S. fork over more than $30 billion in armament to Ukraine with billions more in the pipeline, arm neo-Nazis, whitewash them and cover Kiev’s government payroll. They’ve seen (and often destroyed) the weapons Washington sent. Those weapons would never include long-range missiles that could strike inside Russia, Biden promised. Well, that oath wasn’t worth the toilet paper it was written on. The U.S. would never provide Ukraine with tanks, Biden swore up and down – until he changed his mind. American fighter jets, he gave his word, would not fly in Ukraine. Well, now we see what his word is worth. What next? NATO troops in Ukraine? Because then the bombing of U.S., European and Russian cities will commence. It’s called World War III. Biden knows this. So do the Russians. And despite their loud protests in the face of this nonstop U.S. escalation, they have become ominously quiet about their red lines.

Once upon a time in Bucharest back in 2008, Moscow basically told the west that if its neighbor Kiev joined NATO, that would be the end of Ukraine. Feckless Eurocrats and birdbrain American presidents did not listen. Years passed. Washington sponsored a coup against the duly, legally elected leader of Ukraine in 2014, then installed a west friendly, Russophobic regime, or perhaps more accurately a puppet, whose idiotic economic policies led to a population outflow of millions of Ukrainians, as Washington proceeded massively to arm and train far-right fanatics.

Through all of this, until December 2021, Moscow only protested about its red lines in general terms. It also periodically indicated it might snap. Then, in late 2021, the Kremlin sent detailed letters to Washington, listing Russian security concerns, chiefly that Ukraine should not join NATO. Moscow also was alarmed at the fate of Donbas Russians, 12,000 of whom Ukraine had slaughtered since 2014 and on whose borders Kiev had massed troops and, in early 2022, dramatically stepped up assaults, as noted by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Such a deadly uptick signaled assault and possibly ethnic-cleansing for Russian-speaking Ukrainians. But the U.S. blithely responded with hokum about NATO being a defensive organization. Hokum any half-wit can see right through by looking at U.S. missiles in Poland and Romania, two countries that border Russia.

Washington also insisted on every country’s sacred right to join NATO, though decades ago when Moscow mentioned joining, it got the cold shoulder; apparently Russia did not have that right. So the Kremlin could be excused for regarding NATO as a hostile military axis. Indeed, as our leading public intellectual Noam Chomsky said, “Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was clearly provoked, while the U.S. invasion of Iraq was clearly unprovoked.” (He also said whataboutism is “otherwise known as elementary honesty.”) Both invaders wrecked the target country, Russia more slowly, but make no mistake, that will be the outcome if this war doesn’t end soon.

The moral of the story is that if you can avoid war, that is a very good idea. If someone says “I will attack, if you don’t stop threatening me,” well, listen. The peacemakers are blessed, but sadly they were absent from the world’s imperial capital, Washington, in December of 2021. Currently they are absent everywhere they are needed, period.

So now, thanks to Biden, we stare down the barrel of nuclear war. The alternative in 2024 will likely be Trump, who promises accessories like martial law, a presidency for life, show trials of his political enemies and possibly nuclear war with China, in short, fascism. For this lousy choice we can blame our corrupt plutocracy and its media parasites. Put another way, those who rise to the top in Washington are not the cream of the crop, but the cream that curdled, years ago. Obama, Bush, Clinton – slick hustlers all, who slaughtered innocents across the globe, and all very short-sighted about anything other than looking out for the main chance, even if it meant bombing helpless residents of impoverished nations.


Meanwhile in the U.S. imperial capital, blood-soaked neocons run the show. This led to events May 26, when Russia’s foreign ministry summoned U.S. diplomats “over what it called ‘provocative statements’ by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan,” according to RT. “The American official was de facto supporting Ukrainian strikes against Russian territory.” Given that Sullivan’s up to his elbows in blood for his responsibility in this Ukrainian debacle, the blood of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and tens of thousands of Russian ones, I’m not surprised he was, de facto or otherwise, basically advocating World War III. Moscow called his endorsement of Ukrainian attacks on Russia “hypocritical and untruthful.” That’s called understatement.

Sullivan, secretary of state Antony Blinken and his undersecretary Victoria Nuland are in charge in Washington, instead of the unfocussed, forgetful figurehead, Joe Biden, and they want war, for decades, if they so choose.

Inauspiciously, sane, non-neocons now resign from the Biden regime en masse, a development covered in depth by Moon of Alabama May 25. Rick Waters, head of the state department’s “China House” leaves his post. After the ridiculous spy balloon hysteria, with its wild delusions of assault and evil designs by a mortal enemy, Waters was one of the more rational actors, trying to limit the damage, reportedly emailing state department staff to postpone some sanctions and export controls on China, you know, moves that could have been viewed as, um, hostile.

Also dispiriting to those hoping to restrain imperial war schemes, deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman announced her retirement. Sherman backed the original Iran nuclear pact and pushed hard to get an inept Biden administration to return to it, something, contrary to campaign promises, Biden couldn’t manage to do. As a result, the Middle East teeters constantly on the edge of regional war, which the pact would have helped prevent. Colin Kahl, a defense undersecretary departs this summer. He opposed escalating the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine. Nor was he popular with lunatic Sinophobes. To make the loss of these realists even worse, Biden tapped a ferocious China hawk to head the joint chiefs of staff, thus replacing the less rabid though rather ineffectual Mark Milley. All these moves spell trouble. They mean maniacal warmongers run the empire.

So the situation has deteriorated dangerously, and this is what Chomsky predicted if Washington didn’t face the “ugly” post-invasion choice of rewarding Moscow by enforcing Kiev’s neutrality and the Minsk Accords for the Donbas. No one has documented the U.S. empire’s depravity as long and relentlessly as Chomsky. His new book, Illegitimate Authority, continues this effort, singling out the triad of cataclysms – climate collapse, nuclear war and fascism – thundering in humanity’s front yard like the crack of doom. These interviews, collected from Truthout, at first zero in on how rich countries burning oil, gas and coal have crushed anything resembling a normal climate, with a few that focus on rising fascism.

For Republicans and corrupt democrats, it’s never been about the debt. As the arch neocon Dick Cheney said, “Reagan taught us that the debt doesn’t matter.” It’s about re-allocating the federal budget to the people who put you in office: arms makers, the military. oil companies, slumlords, tech giants, If you don’t have a lobbyist, a PAC or a dark money conduit, you don’t count for a damn thing in washington dc. Same goes for the , neocons whose think tanks are and focus, are heavily funded by arms makers and the military. The warmonger neocons, that run the show of the demented old, puppet figurehead biden.
Their goals are out of touch with anything that is rational. They are not preventing the escalation of this potential nuclear confrontation, they are encouraging it.

But when the book reaches early 2022, it shifts its emphasis to Ukraine. Chomsky is well aware of Washington’s provocations, while regarding Moscow’s response to them as criminal. He quotes Eastern Europe specialist Richard Sakwa: “NATO’s existence became justified by the need to manage threats provoked by its enlargement.” Well, now NATO has provoked a threat that, according to one whose hands are red with blood from this war, Nuland, could last “16 years.”

Chomsky also addresses the imbecilic fantasy of regime change, noting that historically this has led to worse, more extreme leaders, for which he cites a convincing discussion by Andrew Cockburn. Chomsky called NATO dreams of overthrowing Vladimir Putin “foolish,” because someone far more menacing would very likely take over. Among Kremlin leaders, Putin is, in fact, a moderate, with far less of an appetite for war than the others who advocated invading Ukraine for years, while he demurred.

In March 2022, when neutral countries sponsored talks between Moscow and Kiev, Chomsky warned, “negotiations will get nowhere if the U.S. persists in its adamant refusal to join…and if the press continues to insist that the public remain in the dark by refusing even to report Zelensky’s proposals.” Well, nowhere is exactly where they went, thanks to the then U.K. prime minister, the buffoonish Boris Johnson, who jetted into Kiev, allegedly at Biden’s behest, and clarified to Zelensky that while the Ukrainian president might be ready for peace, the west was not. That scuttled the talks.

That’s where we are now. Washington just extracted itself from losing a 20-year military quagmire in Afghanistan. Now it’s up to its neck in a proxy war its boosters say could last decades. Unfortunately for the imperial team, its opponent in this latest bloodletting is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. This is not some helpless undeveloped country that Washington can bully and then prevaricate about pusillanimous American behavior not amounting to a military defeat. Russia is a great power and a nuclear one.

June 11, 2023 Posted by | politics, Reference, USA | 1 Comment

Trump held secret nuclear documents |

June 11, 2023 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

Mayors call for action against nuclear war

Beyond Nuclear, June 9, 2023

At the close of its 91st Annual Meeting in Columbus, Ohio, on June 5, 2023, the final business plenary of the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM) unanimously adopted a new resolution, titled, “Calling for Urgent Action to Avoid Nuclear War, Resolve the Ukraine Conflict, Lower Tensions with China, and Redirect Military Spending to Meet Human Needs.” This is the eighteenth consecutive year that the USCM has adopted a resolution submitted by U.S. members of Mayors for Peace.

The resolution’s lead sponsor, Mayor Frank Cownie of Des Moines, Iowa, (pictured) and U.S. Vice-President of Mayors for Peace, commented: “This resolution carries on the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ proud tradition for nearly two decades of standing for the non-use and global elimination of nuclear weapons.”

Jackie Cabasso, Mayors for Peace North American Coordinator, added: “For the first time, a U.S. Conference of Mayors resolution on nuclear disarmament lends the organization’s support to a specific legislative measure, H. Res. 77, ‘Embracing the Goals and Provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons’.”

Res. 77, introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) on January 31, 2023, calls on the United States to adopt the Back from the Brink Campaign’s comprehensive policy prescriptions for reducing nuclear risks and preventing nuclear war. More than 70 cities, towns, counties and states have passed Back from the Brink resolutions, and more than 400 organizations have endorsed the Back from the Brink platform………………………………………………… more https://beyondnuclear.org/mayors-call-for-action-against-nuclear-war/

June 11, 2023 Posted by | opposition to nuclear, USA | Leave a comment

US presidential candidate Nikki Haley says that arming Ukraine is “preventing war”

US presidential candidate Nikki Haley insists on WW3 if Ukraine loses, 9 June 23,  https://www.rt.com/news/577539-nikki-haley-ukraine-ww3-cheerleading/

The Republican presidential candidate explained that the only way to prevent war was to “send a message” by fighting one

Allowing Ukraine to lose to Russia on the battlefield will unleash world war, according to US Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley. The former South Carolina governor told a town hall audience in Iowa on Sunday that arming Kiev was all about “preventing war” by “sending a message” to America’s rivals. 

“When Ukraine wins, that sends a message to China with Taiwan, it sends a message to Iran that wants to build a bomb, it sends a message to North Korea testing ballistic missiles, it sends a message to Russia that it’s over.”

“It is in the best interests of America, it is in the best interests of our national security for Ukraine to win. We have to see this through, we have to finish it,” Haley declared. 

Regarding how the war might finish, Haley was less forthcoming. “It would end in a day if Russia would pull out,” she suggested. “If Ukraine pulls out, then we’re all looking at world war.” To prevent that, she explained, Kiev needed weapons – lots of them.

“A win for Ukraine is a win for all of us, because tyrants tell us exactly what they’re gonna do,” Haley continued, claiming “Russia said Poland and the Baltics are next,” should Ukraine fall. “If that happens, we’re looking at a world war,” she repeated.

While much has been written about the possibility of a Russian invasion of Poland or the Baltic states, even most US experts admit these are unlikely. Invading any of those countries would trigger Article 5, NATO’s mutual-defense clause, turning a conflict many have described as a proxy war between Moscow and Brussels into a direct war between nuclear powers. 

Haley has been quick to set herself apart on foreign policy matters from Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, who quipped earlier this year that it was the US, not Russia, that needed regime change, and from challenger Ron DeSantis, who downplayed the conflict in Ukraine as a “territorial dispute.” 

During the town hall, she again scoffed at the notion of remaining neutral in the conflict, insisting “This is a war about freedom and it’s one we have to win.”

While Haley served as US ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, she made no secret of her interventionist leanings, even announcing an unexpected round of sanctions against Russia that the White House then had to retract. She has urged the Biden administration to give in to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s demands for F-16 fighter jets for months and impose even more sanctions, insisting Washington is too soft on Moscow.

June 11, 2023 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Timeline: The history of radioactive contamination in St. Louis County

The long history of radioactive contamination in St. Louis County began with the Manhattan Project during World War II.

5 on Your Side, Clarissa Cowley, June 8, 2023

FLORISSANT, Mo. — Jana Elementary School has been in the spotlight for months after conflicting reports regarding radioactive pollution at the school. At its root is nearby Coldwater Creek, which was contaminated for years by improperly stored nuclear waste.

In the months since an independent report showed high levels of radioactive lead at the school, parents and community members have called for action to clean up the pollution, and some families said they are even moving out of their homes and away from the Hazelwood School District.

Now the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers planned to hold a public meeting Thursday night at Jana Elementary School after it made public the final results of its testing, which conversely found no radiological concerns at the school.

5 On Your Side has created a timeline of the decades-long saga leading up to this point, citing public documents as well as our own records and reporting.

The details below include information about the atomic waste illegally dumped in the Bridgeton Landfill, which sits inside the West Lake Landfill site off St. Charles Rock Road. It was a dumpsite for radioactive material following World War II, and in 2010, a fire broke out underground not far from that dump site that is still burning. In addition, this timeline breaks down the history of chemical pollution alongside Coldwater Creek near Jana Elementary School.

Timeline:

1940

  • The Manhattan Project, an American-led effort during World War II to develop a functional atomic weapon, is officially created. The Mallinckrodt Chemical Works plant in St. Louis begins processing uranium oxide used by the Manhattan Project.
  • 1947
  • Waste from the uranium oxide production is taken and stored at a site north of St. Louis Lambert International Airport from 1947 until the late 1960s. 
  • 957
  • Mallinckrodt moves uranium processing to a Weldon Spring facility, where it would continue until 1966.
  • 1960s
  • The toxic waste is purchased and moved from the airport site to a site half a mile away on Latty Avenue. This site and the airport site were located near 19-mile-long Coldwater Creek. Radioactive waste would contaminate the creek, which would then carry the contamination into north St. Louis County.
  • 1973
  • Atomic waste is illegally dumped in the West Lake Landfill.
  • A long-time employee of the Mallinckrodt plant, who took radioactive waste to Coldwater Creek in Styrofoam containers in an open-air truck, dies of brain cancer.
  • The EPA takes over West Lake Landfill as a Superfund Site.
  • 2004
  • Mallinckrodt employees, who worked with uranium used in nuclear weapon manufacturing, become eligible for compensation in Weldon Spring and St. Louis. Workers had to prove how much exposure they had to radiation while working for the Mallinckrodt facility.
  •  
  • 2010
  • A smoldering underground fire is found at the Bridgeton Landfill, raising concerns it would threaten the nearby radioactive material. 
  • Families and workers around the Bridgeton Landfill are burdened by smelly fumes that were emitting from the fire still burning underground. The smoldering accelerated the decay of solid waste at the site, causing excessive gas release and powerful odors that many living nearby said made them sick. 
  • 2012 
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) began a detailed investigation of Coldwater Creek and its floodplain areas in October 2012, working downstream from the historical source areas.
  • 2013 
  • Three years after the underground smoldering started at the landfill, then-Attorney General Chris Koster files a lawsuit against Republic Services over ongoing concerns.

…………………………………………………….January 2022

…………………………August 2022: Several details regarding the levels of contamination begin to come to light. Parents are notified that soil sampling showed a presence of low-level radioactive contamination on the banks of Coldwater Creek. The amount of toxins found around Jana Elementary and the two landfills (Bridgeton and West Lake) had to reach a certain threshold, according to CDC guidelines. Based on these findings, parents became concerned about exposure and health risk.

…………………………………………………………………..June 8, 2023 

  • The Army Corps of Engineers planned to hold a public meeting to discuss the findings of all three reports with the community.

All Army Corps of Engineers reports can be found here.  

June 10, 2023 Posted by | USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Washington banned Kiev from signing truce with Moscow – Russian security chief

Prolonging violence in Ukraine at any cost is in the interest of the US, Nikolay Patrushev has claimed.

 https://www.rt.com/russia/577700-patrushev-us-truce-ukraine/ 8 June 23

Nikolay Patrushev, one of Russia’s senior security officials, has accused the US and the UK of standing in the way of peace. Unlike the peoples of Russia and Ukraine, the two English-speaking countries are interested in prolonging the violence and do not care about human suffering, he alleged.

“I can identify the nations that are most interested [in continued hostilities] – they are the US and England,” he said on Thursday during a press conference in Belarus. “And one should clearly realize that they do not care about people dying, because it’s not their people, they are not waging the war on their own soil.”

Patrushev, who serves as secretary of the Security Council, reminded journalists that Moscow and Kiev were on the verge of a truce in the first weeks of the conflict. But the Ukrainian government pulled out of peace talks under US pressure, he added.

The official was referring to negotiations in Istanbul, during which Ukraine proposed to pledge neutrality in exchange for security guarantees, to which Moscow provisionally agreed.

“Russia is not the ultimate target [for Western nations],” Patrushev assessed. “Their ultimate target is China. They [intend to] dominate the world, but that is unacceptable and won’t happen.”

Patrushev was visiting the Belarusian capital Minsk for a meeting of security chiefs from members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a regional mutual defense bloc that also includes Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Russian officials have described the hostilities in Ukraine as part of a larger proxy war waged by the US and its allies against Moscow, aimed at preserving Western powers’ hegemony.

Washington has declared the “strategic defeat” of Russia as its goal in Ukraine and pledged to provide military assistance to Kiev for as long as it takes to achieve that objective.

June 10, 2023 Posted by | politics international, USA | Leave a comment

BLINKEN’S BATTLE HYMN

Biden’s favorite hawk calls for no end to the bloodshed in Ukraine

SEYMOUR HERSH, JUN 7, 2023

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in a June 2 speech in Helsinki welcomed Finland as NATO’s newest member state. A career hawk when it comes to Russia, he outdid himself in the fierceness of his commitment to the Ukraine war. Once again he was dismissive of any talk of a ceasefire—something desperately needed by an increasingly besieged Ukrainian army and citizenry.

“Now, over the coming weeks and months,” Blinken explained, “some countries will call for a ceasefire. And on the surface, that sounds sensible—attractive, even. After all, who doesn’t want warring parties to lay down their arms? Who doesn’t want the killing to stop? But a ceasefire that simply freezes current lines in place and enables Putin to consolidate control over the territory he’s seized, and then rest, re-arm, and re-attack—that is not a just and lasting peace. It’s a Potemkin peace. It would legitimize Russia’s land grab. It would reward the aggressor and punish the victim.”

Does America’s secretary of State not know—or want to know—the historical importance and success of international peace-keeping forces? Is he not aware of the work done by the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, controversial as he may have been? In 1995 he negotiated an end to the murderous ethnic violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina among Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. Their hatred for each other was as intense as the feelings now simmering among the citizenry and military in Ukraine for their Russian adversaries. 

Blinken concluded his speech: “when a free people like the Ukrainians have at their backs the support of free nations around the world—nations who recognize their fates and freedom—their rights and security are inextricably bound together, the force they possess is not merely immense. It is unstoppable.”

His real message might be put more bluntly: I hate the Russians and let the blood flow. 

………………. More than fifteen months later, Blinken told the Finnish crowd that there’s a bright side to the continuing carnage: “There is no question: Russia is significantly worse off today than it was before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine—militarily, economically, geopolitically.” The European Union is more united than ever, he asserted, and has supplied more than $75 billion in military, economic, and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. It has also absorbed more than 8 million Ukrainian refugees. (I have written of the growing costs and anxieties of the regional refugee crisis due to the war. Many of Ukraine’s neighbors, while hostile to Russia and to Putin, have been secretly urging the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to seek a ceasefire and an end to the slaughter.)

Russia’s economic growth has diminished due to the cost of the war, but Russia is far from isolated. The Economist’s Intelligence Unit reported in March, one year after Russia attacked Ukraine, that “an increasing number of countries are siding with Russia. . . …………….

One would imagine that an American secretary of State, with his international influence, would have an obligation not to diminish American credibility by misrepresenting the state of the world. Another explanation is that the world that backs American power is the world only he sees.

………………….. Samuel Charap, a Russia scholar, just published an essay in Foreign Affairs about Washington’s strategy in Ukraine. Charap served in the Obama administration and is now at the RAND Corporation. He is no fan of Russia or what he termed America’s “nebulous” notions about an endgame to the war, or lack thereof. He has a lot of ideas about intermediate steps that could lead to serious peace talks or, as he puts it, “facilitating an endgame.” These include an armistice agreement, demilitarized zones, joint commissions for dispute resolution, and third-party guarantees—feel-good moves aimed at allowing bitter enemies to achieve peace without resolving their fundamental differences.

It’s not much but it could be a start. Too bad that the name Antony Blinken never appears in Charap’s article.  https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/blinkens-battle-hymn?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1377040&post_id=126473084&isFreemail=false&utm_medium=email

June 10, 2023 Posted by | politics international, USA | Leave a comment

US “Doomsday” Plane, Capable Of Surviving Nuclear War, Just Got A Big Revamp

The E-6B Mercury has been called the Pentagon’s deadliest aircraft, even though it doesn’t carry any weapons.

IFL Science, TOM HALE 9 June 23

The US Navy has just received a revamped “Doomsday” plane that has been kitted out with new communications hardware to connect the President’s “big red button” to the nation’s nuclear forces.

Defense contractor Northrop Grumman recently returned the first E-6B Mercury aircraft to the US Navy after installing five new kits onboard that improve its “aircraft command, control, and communications functions,” according to an announcement on the company’s website. 

The renovation was all part of a $111 million contract between Northrop Grumman and the US Navy. …………………

What is the E-6B Mercury “Doomsday” plane?

The E-6B Mercury is essentially a flying command post that helps to relay instructions from the National Command Authority – the ultimate authority that decides whether to “push the red button” – and the nuclear forces of the US.

Given its potential role in nuclear war, the aircraft is often nicknamed the “doomsday” plane.

The idea is that an airborne command post is a much more reliable communications outpost for military commands in the event of a crisis like, let’s say, a nuclear war. Even if the worst does happen, the E-6B Mercury fleet will allow decision-makers to maintain communication with their nuclear weapon delivery systems……..  https://www.iflscience.com/us-doomsday-plane-capable-of-surviving-nuclear-war-just-got-a-big-revamp-69321

June 10, 2023 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Energy Northwest nuclear plant failed to properly measure workers’ radioactive exposure, report says

KPVI, Annette Cary Tri-City Herald, Jun 7, 2023 

Energy Northwest failed to correctly measure the exposure of workers who inhaled or ingested radioactive material during an incident at the Northwest’s only commercial nuclear power plant, said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

On the night shift during the spring refueling and maintenance outage two years ago, some workers received unexpected and significant exposure to radiation, according to the initial report by the NRC.

The NRC issued a “white finding” last week and said it is considering issuing a second white finding after workers were exposed to radiation May 28, 2021, at Energy Northwest’s Columbia Generating Station nuclear power plant, according to documents made public Monday.

A white finding, the second lowest on NRC’s four-step color scale, has low to moderate safety significance and can lead to an additional NRC inspection to make sure issues have been corrected.

The notice of the first white finding was for three violations in the incident — failure to the control the concentration of radiation material in the air, failure to control the activities in a high radiation area and failure to survey areas to evaluate the extent of radiation levels.

But while investigating the incident at the plant near Richland, Wash., the NRC also began questioning whether Energy Northwest correctly measured the internal radioactive exposure of the workers…………………………………………………………………….

Radiation readings ‘off-scale high’

The updated NRC information says that as the two pipefitters left the heat exchanger room, they were frisked by radiation protection staff “and the instrument readings went off-scale high.”

They were then escorted to personnel contamination monitors, which alarmed, indicating there was radioactive material on or in the workers.

After multiple showers and scans on the personnel contamination monitors, Energy Northwest confirmed they had internal uptakes.

The two workers were sent to initiate the whole-body count process, with initial counts confirming they had inhaled or ingested cobalt 58 and cobalt 60 radionuclides.

However, there was indication from checking the pipe that was cut that plutonium 239 and plutonium 240 contamination was possible in the incident, but that information was not used to assess workers.

Energy Northwest’s procedures for internal dose assessment were incomplete, failed to provide clear directions and did not fully address all radionuclides that could have contaminated the workers, according to the NRC report.

Dose is a measure of the amount of radiation absorbed that accounts for the type of radiation and its effects on particular organs.

The two pipefitters had their urine tested only once and no fecal samples were collected.

“In conclusion, not only did the licensee (Energy Northwest) fail to implement the most appropriate sampling methods to detect the level of hard-to-detect radionuclides from the intake, including alpha emitters, but they did not take any additional samples to suitably establish trends and elimination rates of these radionuclides,” according to the most recent NRC inspection report.

Energy Northwest also failed to effectively take air samples in the workers’ breathing space during the incident, the NRC said.

Not only were procedures inadequate, but Energy Northwest did not have the equipment or personnel available to address the level of contamination and assess the dose within workers bodies, according to the NRC report………………… https://www.kpvi.com/news/national_news/nw-nuclear-plant-failed-to-properly-measure-workers-radioactive-exposure-report-says/article_820def90-c6b4-581a-a989-708339c2c32e.html

June 8, 2023 Posted by | USA, women | Leave a comment

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