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Nuclear industry brazenly exploiting Pandemic to get tax-payer funding

The Nuclear Industry at the Feeding Trough   https://www.the-american-interest.com/2020/05/15/the-nuclear-industry-at-the-feeding-trough/  VICTOR GILINSKY & HENRY SOKOLSKI, 15 May, 20

The nuclear lobby is playing the national security card in trying to justify Federal handouts. It’s a con.

We are getting used to brazen coronavirus claims for federal largess, but it’s hard to beat the claims coming from the nuclear industry. Even before the pandemic hit, it had for the most part given up competing for new power plant sales in the domestic and international energy marketplace and instead was wrapping itself in the flag and declaring itself essential to U.S. national security, and therefore deserving of generous federal support.

This approach has the full backing of the Trump Energy Department, and has been dutifully rolled out as part of the broader scramble for federal relief funds unleashed by the coronavirus crisis. As Energy Secretary Danny Ray Brouillette made clear to radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt in an April 28 interview:

We’ve lost our leadership both on the technology side and on the market side… to the Russians and the Chinese. And why does that matter? Well, obviously it matters, because we are, we were the world leader not only in the development of nuclear technology, but in the export of this technology around the world. And we lost that, and it leads to a national defense issue.

And, indeed, DOE’s web site announces: “Nuclear power is intrinsically tied to National Security.” Among the ways DOE plans to restore American nuclear energy leadership are “minimizing commercial fleet fiscal vulnerabilities [DOE-speak for subsidizing],” and “leveling the playing field against state-owned enterprises.”

The implication is that other countries are not competing fairly, as if they snuck around us to jump the line. Now, to cope with this, we have to sweeten the deals we offer to get the sales. And as a thriving nuclear sector is supposedly a necessary condition for gaining foreign sales, we have to prop up domestic nuclear plants, too.

If nothing else, there is a stunning lack of self-awareness in this view. Yes, the United States pioneered the light water reactor technology used around the world. But, as a result of U.S. business decisions, in part reflecting the unfavorable economics of nuclear power in the United States but also poor management, we effectively no longer have any reactor manufacturers.

Combustion Engineering, a company with 28,000 employees, a pressurized water reactor manufacturer, sold itself in 1989 to the European firm ABB Asea Brown Boveri Ltd. The great Westinghouse firm, once the world leader on pressurized water reactors, blundered financially into becoming a subsidiary of the CBS Corporation. In 1995, CBS sold it to British Nuclear Fuels Limited. BNFL in turn sold Westinghouse nuclear activities to Toshiba in 2006.

Westinghouse, by then a shell of its former self, performed so miserably in constructing the last large reactors to be built in the United States in South Carolina and Georgia that it went bankrupt and almost took Toshiba down, too. The South Carolina owners canceled their two plants, and the remaining two in Georgia will cost nearly $30 billion, double the original contract price. After this experience, it is hard to see any future sales of large reactors in the United States.

General Electric used to build boiling water reactors, but it only offers sales abroad as a junior partner to Japan’s Hitachi Corporation. Its reputation is anyway tarnished because it designed the plants that failed during the 2011 Fukushima accident. In short, U.S. nuclear plant manufacturing capabilities are much diminished, and the domestic market just isn’t there. And it isn’t there because nuclear economics are extremely unfavorable.

Currently, the US still has 95 power reactors online, supplying a bit less than 20 percent of America’s electrical demand. They are on average 39 years old. Only two plants, the ones in Georgia, are now under construction and they are expected to be the last large ones to be built for some time.

That hasn’t fazed the nuclear faithful both in and out of government. They still think, as their predecessors thought sixty years ago, that nuclear power is the technology of the future. They paint a picture of our putative arch-enemies, Russia and China, selling nuclear power plants and locking up nuclear relationships with numerous states, including important friendly states such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, relationships that will last for the rest of the century. We will be frozen out and will thereby lose influence throughout the world. But it’s still not too late if we follow the advice of the Energy Department, the nuclear industry, and a gaggle of consultants looking to cash in.

What is it we have to do? The battles in Washington turn on so-called agreements for cooperation with potential customers that are prerequisites for sales of major reactors and components. The main issue concerns whether we will accept customers that also want to acquire acquires auxiliary facilities that can be used to produce plutonium and highly enriched uranium, the fuels that are also the explosives used in nuclear weapons. The only position consistent with non-proliferation, halting the spread of nuclear weapons, is “no.”

But the nuclear enthusiasts say that’s too strict, that others have more accommodating terms, and that if we sell with looser terms, we’ll have more influence. They have their eye especially on Saudi Arabia, a country that at one point said, implausibly, it was going to build 16 nuclear power plants. They don’t seem to pay attention to the other thing the Saudis said—the crown prince’s statement that if Iran was going to get a bomb, he was going to get one, too, and fast.

It’s not just the Trump crowd that opposes tightening security rules over nuclear exports (in the name, they say, of security). President Obama’s Energy Secretary, Ernest Moniz, has been arguing that subsidizing domestic nuclear power and encouraging nuclear sales without especially tight security restrictions—restrictions that go by the rubric of “gold standard”—are in the interests of U.S. nuclear security, and even support the deterrence value of our nuclear weapons.

All this is a bit much. Do we really think that Russia, with a GNP below that of Italy, is capable of freezing us out of the world? Does it have the financial capacity to offer generous terms on many projects? Will they ever be completed?

Nuclear power is just one U.S. export technology, and not exactly the most promising. For example, the U.S. exported $136 billion in aircraft last year; U.S. nuclear exports for the same period could only be measured in millions of dollars. China is building a comparatively large number of nuclear plants but nuclear power supplies less than five percent of its electrical demand and is only projected to account for seven percent by 2040. Any large accident will turn this program off.

There are many more exciting technologies to share with others. We don’t have to sell out our nonproliferation policies. If anything, we should be strengthening them, and convincing Russia and China to conform to them, as well.

As for the DOE and industry sales pitch, we should see it for what it is: a con to get at the federal trough. May 15, 2020

Victor Gilinsky is program advisor for the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC) in Arlington, Virginia. He served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. Henry Sokolski is executive director of NPEC and the author of Underestimated: Our Not So Peaceful Nuclear Future (2019). He served as deputy for nonproliferation policy in the office of the U.S. secretary of defense during the George H.W. Bush administration.

May 30, 2020 Posted by | politics, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | 3 Comments

“grave challenge to global peace and security” – Nuclear watchdog on potential U.S. nuclear test

Nuclear watchdog says any US test would be ‘grave challenge to peace’

Lassina Zerbo, head of body monitoring test ban treaty, responds to White House discussions about potential first US test for 28 years, Guardian,  Julian Borger in Washington, Fri 29 May 2020  The head of the international watchdog monitoring nuclear tests has warned that a US return to testing being contemplated by the Trump administration would present a “grave challenge to global peace and security”.

Lassina Zerbo, the executive secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO), was responding to the news that staging the first US underground test in 28 years had been discussed at a high-level White House meeting on 15 May.

The idea was shelved for the time being, but appears not to have been rejected outright. Drew Walter, acting deputy assistant secretary of defence for nuclear matters, said this week that an underground nuclear test could be carried out within months “if the president directed”.

Arms control advocates said that the fact such a step was contemplated was disturbing, as it would be likely to lead to a return to nuclear testing by the world’s other nuclear weapons powers, and the demise of the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban treaty (CTBT)……

The US signed the CTBT in 1996 but the Senate voted against ratifying it. The treaty has been signed and ratified by 168 states but it will not come into force until the US, China, Israel and Egypt have ratified it, and it is signed and ratified by India, Pakistan and North Korea.

Meanwhile, the US has observed a voluntary moratorium on tests, as have the UK, France, Russia and China, and the CTBTO preparatory commission was established to set up a network of 300 seismic, hydroacoustic, infrasound and radionuclide sensors around the world, that helped identify nuclear tests by India, Pakistan and North Korea.

Zerbo noted that the US is the biggest financial contributor to the CTBTO and its verification regime.

Over the past year, the US has accused Russia and China of secretly conducting very low-yield tests, an accusation that both countries have denied, and for which the US has yet to provide evidence.

“The CTBTO’s international monitoring system [IMS] has been operating as normal and has not detected any unusual event,” Zerbo said. The IMS, complemented by the national technical means of the states signatories themselves, provides full confidence that the system can detect nuclear test explosions according to the provisions of the treaty.”

He added that the only way to remove all doubts was to bring the CTBT into force.

“At that point, the provisions for on-site inspections would come into effect, allowing for on-site visits at short notice if requested by any state party.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/28/nuclear-watchdog-us-underground-test-challenge-to-peace

May 30, 2020 Posted by | politics international, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Huge task of carting 770-ton nuclear reactor from Southern California to Utah

2 weeks needed to switch 770-ton nuclear reactor from train to truck, Las Vegas Review Journal May 29, 2020

The train carrying a decommissioned nuclear reactor vessel from Southern California is passing through Las Vegas on Thursday afternoon.

The vessel from the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station is headed for a burial ground in Utah. It will be transferred starting either Friday or Saturday at Apex Industrial Park, according to Nevada Department of Transportation spokesman Tony Illia.

Cranes will be used to lift the heaviest load to ever travel a Nevada road onto a 45-axle, 180-tire trailer. It will take a couple of weeks to complete the transfer.

4 tractors to push and pull,   The 300-foot-long shipment will consist of two tractors to pull and another two tractors to push the over 1.5-million pound load.

It will travel at 5 to 10 mph on the highway for the 400-mile trip to Clive, Utah, where it will be buried at EnergySolutions, the contractor that is dismantling the plant.

NDOT has to issue an overdimensional permit, which won’t occur until 24 hours before hitting the highway, Illia said.

Nevada State Patrol troopers will escort the shipment to the Utah border……… https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/downtown/2-weeks-needed-to-switch-770-ton-nuclear-reactor-from-train-to-truck-2037931/

May 30, 2020 Posted by | safety, USA | Leave a comment

Resuming Nuclear Testing a Slap in the Face to Survivors

Resuming Nuclear Testing a Slap in the Face to Survivors  HTTPS://ALLTHINGSNUCLEAR.ORG/GUEST-COMMENTARY/RESUMING-NUCLEAR-TESTING-A-SLAP-IN-THE-FACE-TO-SURVIVORS  LILLY ADAMS , UCS | MAY 26, 2020, The news that the Trump administration is considering resuming nuclear weapons testing is morally abhorrent. The current US moratorium on nuclear testing was put in place for many reasons, but we must not forget one crucial reason: In conducting explosive nuclear tests, the US government killed thousands of innocent people and sickened untold thousands more.

The very suggestion of resuming nuclear testing is shocking and a slap in the face to testing survivors who have spent decades watching their loved ones pass away—survivors like Sandra Walsh, of Salt Lake City, who grew up in Parowan in southern Utah, which received high levels of fallout from the Nevada Test Site.

“My family and I are Downwinders,” said Walsh. “I have had thyroid cancer and I have lost three of my children, three little girls, a mother should die before her children. My family, three sisters and my mom and dad all have had cancer. I have helped over 5000 downwinders get the help they need from the government. That is just a small amount of the people that have been affected by the bomb testing. My hope is that it will never happen again.”

Millions of Americans exposed to radioactive fallout

By treaty, the United States is barred from conducting above-ground nuclear tests, the type that created the mushroom clouds that regularly spread radiation across much of the country in the 1950s and 1960s. But underground testing has its own deadly risks, as well as  severe environmental and health consequences. In fact the second most fallout-intensive nuclear weapons test in the continental US was an underground test in Nevada, exposing millions of Americans to radioactive fallout as far away as Iowa and Illinois. Another test—one that was intended to be fully contained underground—accidentally released 80,000 curies of radioactive iodine-131 into the atmosphere.

In addition, any resumption of explosive testing could quickly lead other nuclear weapons states to resume testing as well, further accelerating the arms race that is already building around the world. The kind of nuclear posturing we are seeing today led to massive above-ground testing and resulting deaths during the Cold War. We should do everything possible to avoid heading down this path again.

To do this, we must understand the history and the consequences of testing. The United States conducted over 1,000 nuclear weapons tests between 1945 and 1992, and 216 of them were above ground. The US conducted far more tests than any other country, with Russia conducting just over 700 tests and China only 45.

The scope of death and illnesses that resulted from this testing is hard to quantify, but it was devastating no matter how you look at it. A 1997 study from National Cancer Institute, which only examined thyroid cancers that may have resulted from exposure to I-131 estimated that up to 75,000 cancers could be connected to the testing. That study did not look at other illnesses that might have resulted from exposure to additional radioactive contaminants.

Meanwhile, in 2008, Arjun Makhijani, President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, estimated deaths from nuclear testing at around 200,000. A recent study from the University of Arizona put the number higher, at 340,000 to 460,000 likely deaths. A study from International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War estimated that ultimately, global cancer deaths from nuclear testing could reach 2.4 million.

Radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing spread across the United States, including Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Guam. In 1953, radiochemistry students in Troy, New York, 2,500 miles from the Nevada Test Site, measured radiation levels many times above normal, which were later connected to a nuclear weapons test in Nevada two days earlier. In the Marshall Islands, the US tested 67 nuclear weapons. The total explosive yield of those tests is equal to one Hiroshima-sized bomb detonated every single day for 20 years. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency admits that in the course of nuclear weapons testing, 550,000 military service members were exposed to radiation.

Seventy-five years after the first above-ground nuclear weapons test, the victims of nuclear weapons testing are in many cases still fighting for basic recognition of harm, as well as compensation for their often staggering health concerns. Downwinders of tests and uranium workers are fighting for equitable compensation through the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which currently has gaping holes in coverage and is set to expire in 2022.

Nuclear test survivors still owed billions

Tona Henderson, head of Idaho Downwinders, which has been fighting since 2004 for compensation for downwinders in Idaho, stated:

“It is unbelievable that anyone would think it was alright to start nuclear testing again! The government has not even compensated the Downwinders from the first 100 tests. We don’t need to kill and maim our own citizens again. On Memorial weekend we honored our fallen soldiers. Downwinders have suffered losses through no fault of their own, yet there will be no parades or flag draped coffins for us. Would you do these tests if your children or grandchildren were in the fallout path?”

Largely because of the impact of nuclear testing, Marshallese people living in the United States were promised Medicaid under an agreement called the Compact of Free Association, but this was stripped from them in 1996. In addition, the US owes billions of dollars to the Marshall Islands for unpaid health and environmental claims due to testing.

Shamanda Hanerg, Lani Kramer, Desmond Doulatram with REACH-MI, a non-profit in the Marshall Islands focused on their nuclear legacy, shared the following statement in response to the news:

“With outstanding human rights claims, one should pay no surprise as to why the Marshall Islands has been aggressive in the international scene in climate change and nuclear disarmament.

Our grandparents and parents suffered tremendously from the horrific effects of the nuclear testing (by the U.S. Government) on our beautiful islands. That was 74 years ago. We haven’t returned to our home, our ancestral heritage, because our land is contaminated by the many toxins and poisons we can’t even pronounce. Some of our islands were vaporized instantly from the nuclear testing.

We suffered severe burns from being in the direct fallout of the bombs. We continue to have miscarriages, still births, birth defects, various cancers, genetic disorders, and many more illnesses.

The enormity of the devastation of damages done by the nuclear testing is unfathomable, unthinkable, and inhumane. The mass destruction of the bombs on our islands have left us nuclear nomads…emotionally, mentally, and physically scarred forever.

More than ever we need to be emboldened and united in our quest to fight for justice and nuclear disarmament. For the U.S. Government to even consider continuing with nuclear testing would be an injustice to the People of the Marshall Islands.”

As a country, we have so much work left to do to right the wrongs of nuclear testing. It is unconscionable that the Trump administration is now considering resuming testing while these people are still fighting for justice.

 

May 28, 2020 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | 2 Comments

Heavy problems in transporting dead nuclear reactor, especially in hot weather

Decommissioned nuclear reactor will be heavy load for Nevada roads, By Marvin Clemons Las Vegas Review-Journal May 26, 2020 The nuclear reactor vessel from Southern California’s decommissioned San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station has started to make its way toward Las Vegas by rail. At more than 1.5 million pounds, it will be the largest and heaviest object ever moved on a Nevada road.The vessel is bound for a burial ground in Utah but may sit in California for an undetermined period while experts at the Nevada Department of Transportation work to ensure that it won’t damage the state’s roads as it passes through.

When it does arrive, the 770-ton nuclear reactor vessel will be unloaded from the world’s largest rail car at Apex Industrial Park to be trucked north on eastern Nevada roads before eventually being buried at Clive, Utah, about 75 miles west of Salt Lake City.

But before that leg of the journey, Nevada needs to shore up some drainage structures along the undisclosed route to Wendover, Utah.

“We anticipate that the vessel will get shipped to Apex sometime in early June,” Department of Transportation spokesman Tony Illia said in an email Tuesday. “However, the drainage structures along the transport route through Southern Nevada need reinforcing in order to handle the load. The structures would get crushed like a soda can because the load is so heavy.”

The company hired to deliver the reactor to Utah is Emmert International, which is among the world’s biggest movers of heavy equipment. Workers plan to use heavy-duty hydraulic jacks to support the culverts when the vehicle hauling the reactor passes over, Illia said.

“It would be, by far, the biggest object ever moved on a road in the state,” he said. “Our people have been scratching their heads for months to figure out a route that could work.”………

Security will be making the trip as well.

Any asphalt or road surface could buckle under the 1.5 million-plus pounds of the reactor, plus a shipping skid that adds 7 tons to the total. Making such a shipment during warmer months is a bigger issue than it would be in colder  weather…….. https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/decommissioned-nuclear-reactor-will-be-heavy-load-for-nevada-roads-2036202/

May 28, 2020 Posted by | safety, USA | 1 Comment

Nuclear deregulation threatens workers at Pennsylvania plants and nationwide

May 28, 2020 Posted by | health, safety, USA | Leave a comment

During pandemic, U.S. military runs the largest maritime war games in the world

COVID-19: US Military Pursues War Games Amid Contagion, Consortium News, May 26, 2020  A robust schedule of military maneuvers and exercises is either underway or planned for Europe and the Pacific this year, with more in store for 2021, Ann Wright reports.   During the pandemic the U.S. military is running the largest maritime military maneuvers in the world, with Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) coming to the waters off Hawaii Aug. 17-31, bringing 26 nations, 25,000 military personnel, up to 50 ships and submarines and hundreds of aircraft.Hawaii hasstringent measures to combat the spread of Covid-19, with a mandatory 14-day quarantine for all persons arriving in the state; returning residents as well as visitors. This quarantine is required until at least June 30, 2020.

The U.S. Army is also pursuing a 6,000-person war game in Poland, June 5-19, with a Polish airborne operation and a U.S.-Polish division-size river crossing.

If these weren’t too many military operations during an epidemic in which personnel on 40 U.S. Navy ships have come down with the hyper-contagious virus and during which military personnel and their families have been told not to travel, plans are also underway  for a U.S. Army division-sized exercise in the Indo-Pacific region  in less than a year.  Known as Defender 2021, the U.S. Army has requested $364 million to conduct the war exercises throughout Asian and Pacific countries.

The pivot to the Pacific, begun under the Obama administration, and maintained by the Trump administration, is reflected in a U.S. National Defense Strategy (NDS) that sees the world as “a great power competition rather than counterterrorism and has formulated its strategy to confront China as a long-term, strategic competitor.”

Earlier in May, the U.S. Navy sent at least seven submarines, including all four Guam-based attack submarines, several Hawaii-based ships and the San Diego-based USS Alexandria to the western Pacific in what the Pacific Fleet Submarine Force announced as simultaneous “contingency response operations” for all of its forward-deployed subs. This was all in support of the Pentagon’s “free and open Indo-Pacific ” policy — aimed at countering China’s expansionism in the South China Sea — and as a show of force to counter ideas that the capabilities of U.S. Navy forces have been reduced by Covid-19…….

In May, 2020, the Australian government announced that a delayed six-month rotation of 2,500 U.S. Marines to a military base in Australia’s northern city of Darwin will go ahead based on strict adherence to Covid-19 measures including a 14-day quarantine. The Marines had been scheduled to arrive in April but their arrival was postponed in March because of the pandemic.

The remote Northern Territory, which had recorded just 30 Covid-19 cases, closed its borders to international and interstate visitors in March, and any arrivals must now undergo mandatory quarantine for 14 days.  U.S. Marine deployments to Australia began in 2012 with 250 personnel and have grown to 2,500.    The Joint U.S. Defense facility Pine Gap— the U.S. Department of Defense, Five Eyes and CIA surveillance facility that pinpoints airstrikes around the world and targets nuclear weapons, among other military and intelligence tasks — was also adapting its policy and procedures to comply with Australian government COVID restrictions.

As the U.S. military expands its presence in Asia and the Pacific, one place it will NOT be returning to is Wuhan, China.  In October 2019, the Pentagon sent 17 teams with more than 280 athletes and other staff members to the Military World Games in Wuhan. Over 100 nations sent a total of 10,000 military personnel to the games in Wuhan last October.

The presence of a large U.S. military contingent in Wuhan just months before the outbreak of the Covid-19 in Wuhan in December 2019, fueled a theory by some Chinese officials that the U.S. military was somehow involved in the outbreak, which now has been used by the Trump administration and its allies in Congress and the media that the Chinese deliberately used the virus to infect the world and adding justification for the U.S. military build-up in the Pacific region.

Ann Wright served 29 years in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves and retired as a colonel.   She was a U.S. diplomat for 16 years and served in U.S. Embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia.  She resigned from the U.S. government in March 2003 in opposition to President George W. Bush’s war on Iraq. She is co-author of “Dissent: Voices of Conscience.”  https://consortiumnews.com/2020/05/26/covid-19-military-pursues-war-exercises-amid-contagion/

May 28, 2020 Posted by | health, OCEANIA, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Trump administration to remove almost all sanctions relief to Iran

May 27, 2020 Posted by | Iran, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Trump withdraws from Open Skies Treaty, throws more doubt on the future of the New START nuclear treaty

May 26, 2020 Posted by | politics international, USA, weapons and war | 4 Comments

Federal report: 2019 Seattle radiation leak could have been disastrous, was a ‘near miss’

May 26, 2020 Posted by | incidents, USA | 1 Comment

The folly of removing US caps on Russian nuclear fuel imports

The folly of removing US caps on Russian nuclear fuel imports, The Hill, 

BY IKE BRANNON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 05/25/20  The Trump administration’s recent Nuclear Fuel Working Group report provides a sobering view of the national security threat posed by Russia’s aggressive global strategy to dominate the nuclear power and fuel industry to extend its geopolitical influence. The report warns of Russia’s efforts to increase its market share of the U.S. nuclear fuel industry and the threat that its below-market prices pose to the survival of the U.S. nuclear fuel sector. If this is left unchecked, the U.S. may find itself dependent on Russia for its nuclear fuel.
Russia’s steps to boost its nuclear fuel market share are taking place at a perilous time. The market for nuclear fuel in the United States has weakened considerably in the past decade and the country’s production facilities are in danger of being driven out of business. The global industry has been hit with a one-two punch of decreased demand and increased supply; Japan and Germany have greatly reduced their nuclear power generation, and Russia’s state-owned nuclear enterprise has expanded production and marketing without regard to profit in a bid to obtain a dominant market share here and around the world. ….. https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/498686-the-folly-of-removing-us-caps-on-russian-nuclear-fuel-imports

May 26, 2020 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Michigan flooding: a warning on potential triple disaster – climate, pandemic, and nuclear radiation

Michigan floods expose impossible challenges of mass evacuations during Covid-19 https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/72759838/posts/2720846982 –By Paul Gunter 24 May, 20  Two dam failures and major flooding in central Michigan, which also prompted a low-level emergency notification (scroll to NCR event #54719) at a nearby nuclear research reactor in Midland, have exposed the almost impossible challenge of evacuating people to safety during simultaneous catastrophic events.The sudden need to evacuate large numbers of people from severe flooding — also threatening to compromise a Dow chemical facility that uses a research reactor — during a time of national lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, raises serious questions and concerns about the emergency response readiness and the viability of evacuation that might simultaneously include a radiological accident.

Michigan authorities were forced to face a “no-win compromise” between protecting the public from exposure to Covid-19 while at the same time moving people out of harm’s way after heavy rains caused failures at the Edenville and Sanford dams, leading to devastating floods.

The Dow plant insists there have been no chemical or radiological releases, but the situation will be evaluated once floodwaters recede. Fortunately, no full-scale commercial nuclear power plant was in the path of the Michigan floods.

Operating nuclear power stations are required by federal and state laws to maintain radiological emergency preparedness to protect populations within a ten-mile radius from the release of radioactivity following a serious nuclear accident. These measures include mass evacuations.

However, many communities around the nation’s 95 commercial reactors are presently sheltering-in-place at home as a protective action during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Michigan flooding has forced the relocation of thousands of citizens from their stay-at-home lockdown into the social distancing challenges of mass shelters. Evacuating tens of thousands from a likely more far-reaching radioactive cloud to mass shelters, as is presently planned during a nuclear emergency, raises difficult if not impossible choices under pandemic conditions.

In fact, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) (Sect.03.02 p.2) between the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) already obligates the federal government to re-exam radiological emergency plans around nuclear facilities specifically in response to a pandemic, and to identify any shortcomings, deficiencies and enhancements that might be needed under such conditions.

But to date, neither agency has taken the initiative to do so. In fact, the NRC actions are focused on relaxing safety measures required by operating licenses, resulting in extended work hours for reactor operators and security guards, and deferred safety inspections and repairs for as much as another 18 months. This makes an accident more likely.

Given what we are now seeing in Michigan, the NRC and FEMA should lose no time in reviewing their MOU and the viability of their radiological emergency plans, and take action to make any necessary enhancements or shut these nuclear facilities down.

Beyond Nuclear has identified two such actions under the MOU as vital to public health:

  • The NRC and FEMA must conduct a “Disaster Initiated Report”, as mandated by the MOU, on the adequacy of offsite radiological emergency response plans during the pandemic, and;
  • Federal and state response plans need to be bolstered by the immediate pre-distribution of potassium iodide (KI) tablets by direct delivery to every resident within the ten-mile radius of U.S. nuclear power stations, now, before any accident occurs. This is in accordance with disaster medicine expert recommendations including from the American Thyroid Association (ATA).
  • KI, if taken promptly in advance or shortly after exposure to radioactive iodine, is recognized by the US Food and Drug administration as a safe, inexpensive and effective prophylactic prevention for thyroid cancer and other developmental disorders caused by exposure to highly mobile iodine-131. Radioactive iodine is a gas released early in a serious nuclear accident.
  • KI is particularly important for the protection of infants, young children and pregnant women and should be readily on hand, according to the ATA and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

    The ATA further recommends stockpiling KI tablets in schools, hospitals, police and fire stations from 10 miles out to 50 miles from every nuclear power plant. These institutions could then serve to pre-distribute KI free through the mail upon request to every home and business within 50 miles of an operating nuclear plant.

    KI is commonly used to iodize table salt in concentrations. When taken in tablet form, it saturates the thyroid with stable iodine and blocks the absorption of radioactive iodine into the thyroid gland.

  • KI only protects the thyroid. It does not protect other parts of the body, or prevent damage from other radioactive isotopes released during a nuclear power plant accident, such as cesium-137 or krypton or xenon gases. Ideally, it is used to provide protection to the thyroid — because iodine-131 can be the large and early radioactive exposure first to arrive — while people are still evacuating out of the oncoming radioactive fallout pathway.

    KI is a critical adjunct to evacuation, but it should not replace evacuation from a nuclear accident, even during a viral pandemic. If faced with an immediate threat to life, perhaps even a triple threat such as an extreme flood, a nuclear accident and Covid-19 exposure, evacuation must be the immediate decision.

    However, at least having KI tablets on hand provides for a reasonable protection from the radioactive iodine, a fundamental human right while seeking to shelter farther away from a nuclear accident.

    The prospect of a nuclear disaster prompting a mass evacuation during a viral pandemic reinforces the need for an energy policy focused on safe, clean and affordable renewable energy. It’s time to remove the added and unnecessary danger presented by the 95 nuclear reactors still operating in the US today and transition to a rapid phaseout before a nuclear emergency during a pandemic becomes a nightmarish reality.

May 25, 2020 Posted by | climate change, health, USA | Leave a comment

On weapons treaties US administration is blundering toward nuclear chaos

 

Fumbling the nuclear football: is Trump blundering to arms control chaos?

The president believes he alone can negotiate away nuclear weapons and win a Nobel prize – but he has quit three treaties and gutted his administration of experts, Guardian,   Julian Borger in Washington Sun 24 May 2020

The Trump administration signaled this week that it was ready to get back in the business of nuclear arms control. A newly appointed envoy, Marshall Billingslea, made his first public remarks to announce talks with Russia are about to resume.

“We have concrete ideas for our next interaction, and we’re finalizing the details as we speak,” Billingslea said.

The fact that this relaunch came on the same day that the US was pulling out of the Open Skies Treaty (OST) – the third withdrawal from an arms control agreement under the Trump presidency – underlined the contradictions at the heart of the administration’s approach towards nuclear weapons.

According to those who have worked for him on the issue, Trump is preoccupied with the existential threat of nuclear war, and resolved that he alone can conjure a grand arms control bargain that would save the planet – and win him the Nobel prize.

But at the same time, he is clearly thrilled by the destructive power that the US arsenal gives him, boasting about the size of his nuclear button, and a mystery “super duper” missile he this week claimed the US had up its sleeve.

Administration officials have been left to try to confect a coherent-sounding policy out of such contradictory impulses – so far without success.

“He believes only he has what it takes to make the big deal, if only everyone else – all the experts – would get out of his way,” a former senior official said. “But he just has no idea about how to make it happen.”

Billingslea, the new envoy, is not an arms control specialist. He previously served as the undersecretary for terrorist financing at the US Treasury and was nominated last year to the top human rights job at the state department – but that foundered amid controversy over his involvement in the post 9/11 torture programme . The arms control envoy job did not require Senate confirmation.

In his maiden speech as envoy, Billingslea made clear that if there were to be a new arms race, the US would win.

“We know how to win these races and we know how to spend the adversary into oblivion,” he said in a videoconference organised by the conservative Hudson Institute thinktank on Thursday. It was a statement of bravado as the US plunged into recession owing about $7tn in foreign debt, $1tn to China.

Billingslea argued Trump would succeed through his mastery of the art of the deal.

“The president has a long and successful career as a negotiator, and he’s a master at developing and using leverage,” he said, showing an early instinct for what it takes to keep your job in this administration.

So far, however, Trump has failed to negotiate a single arms control agreement. His flamboyant summitry with Kim Jong-un produced nothing, and the North Korean nuclear weapons programme has continued unabated. Meanwhile the president has taken the US out of three arms control agreements, leaving them dead, dying or maimed.

He walked out of the nuclear deal with Iran in 2018, and the following year withdrew from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which had kept nuclear missiles out of Europe since the cold war. Then on Thursday, he confirmed the US was leaving the OST, agreed in 1992 as a means of building transparency and trust between Russia and the west through observation overflights of each other’s territory.

That may not be the end of Trump’s arms control demolition. The Senate never ratified the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban treaty, which – partly as a result – has yet to come into force. But the US has signed it and observes a voluntary moratorium on nuclear tests.

Hawks in the administration, however, want a renunciation. At a high-level White House meeting last week, the suggestion was raised that the US carry out its first underground nuclear test since 1992, according to former officials. The proposal was resisted by the state and energy departments. A senior administration official told the Washington Post however the proposal is “very much an ongoing conversation.”

The only arms control agreement still in effect is the 2010 New Start treaty, which limits US and Russian deployed strategic nuclear weapons to 1,550 each. It is due to expire in February but it can be extended for another five years. The Trump administration has not taken a position on whether it wants an extension, however.

“There’ll be plenty of time to look at the full range of options related to that treaty,” Billingslea said. At the same time he made clear he viewed New Start as being inadequate, criticising its verification requirements, its exclusion of non-strategic, shorter-range weapons – and, most importantly, the fact that it does not include China……

Arms control advocates in the administration believe that the insistence on China’s inclusion was originally pushed by Trump’s third national security adviser, John Bolton, a lifelong opponent of arms control treaties, and his like-minded aide, Tim Morrison, as a means of killing off New Start.

……Disarmament advocates worry that even if Billingslea re-establishes regular contacts with Moscow, the US no longer has the diplomatic muscle to pursue substantive, complex arms negotiations because of the steady loss of experienced staff responsible for such negotiations.

“It’s not obvious they have a kind of a serious team in place to try and make that happen,” a western diplomat said.

“Three years after entering office, the Trump administration lacks a coherent set of goals, a strategy to achieve them, or the personnel or effective policy process to address the most complex set of nuclear risks in US history,” a group of arms control experts wrote in a report this month by the disarmament group, Global Zero. “Put simply, the current US administration is blundering toward nuclear chaos with potentially disastrous consequences.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/24/nuclear-weapons-donald-trump-arms-control-chaos

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