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The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope

Ionising radiation – the killer for super fast space travel

Super-Fast Space Travel Would Kill You In Minutes http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/11/super-fast-space-travel-would-kill-you-in-minutes/ JAMIE CONDLIFFE, 6 Nov 12, Everyone thinks it would be cool to travel at the speed of light, which is why scientists devote their lives to working out if it would be possible and NASA is trying to develop its own warp drive. But easy, tiger: turns out super-fast space travel would be fatal. A paper published in Natural Science  brings some boring common sense to the speed-of-light-travel table. In order to travel huge distances in next to no time, people need to travel close to the speed of light. In so doing, travellers cover extremely large distances very quickly, and thanks to the quirks of relativity, it would feel like it took mere minutes because of an effect known as time dilation , which squashes perceived time.

The trouble is that travelling close to the speed of light brings about other effects too. In Natural Science , Edelstein and Edelstein point out that hydrogen in any craft cable of travelling at the speed of light would also prevent it from travelling at the speed of light. They explain :

Unfortunately, as spaceship velocities approach the speed of light, interstellar hydrogen H, although only present at a density of approximately 1.8 atoms/cm3, turns into intense radiation that would quickly kill passengers and destroy electronic instrumentation. In addition, the energy loss of ionizing radiation passing through the ship’s hull represents an increasing heat load that necessitates large expenditures of energy to cool the ship.

In other words, travel close to the speed of light and you’ll be bombarded with so much radiation that you kick the bucket. The knock-on effect is that even if it’s possible to create a craft capable of travelling close the speed of light, it wouldn’t be able to transport people.

Instead, there’s a natural speed limit imposed by safe levels of radiation due to hydrogen, which means humans couldn’t travel faster than half the speed of light unless they were willing to die almost immediately. Dammit. [Natural Science ]

November 6, 2012 Posted by | 2 WORLD, health, Reference, technology | Leave a comment

Death and illness rate in Chernobyl’s fallout area

Chernobyl Children Fukushima Children  1995 “At a press conference on Tuesday, April 25, acting Health Minister Andriy Serdiuk told reporters that the total number of deaths among victims of the Chornobyl accident in the period between 1988 and 1994 is more than 125,000.” The ministry also released the sobering results of research it had conducted among 1 million residents in the three regions most affected by Chornobyl’s fallout. In the Kyyiv, Zhytomyr and Rivne oblasts, the incidence of thyroid cancer has increased 200 percent; heart disease by 75 percent; respiratory diseases by 130 percent; and gastrointestinal ailments by 280 percent. In addition, the ministry noted that the death rate among inhabitants of the three-oblast region had increased by 15.7 percent since the 1986 catastrophe.”http://tekknorg.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/ukraines-ministry-of-health-125000-chernobyl-deaths-between-1988-and-1994/

November 6, 2012 Posted by | health, history, Reference, Ukraine | Leave a comment

USA -Questions arise about shuttering of Kewaunee Nuclear PP -Waste storage problems!

According to that report, about 3,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel is in storage at nine sites across the country where commercial reactors have been shuttered.

“This all came as an awful surprise,” said Paplham. “That waste may be sitting there for 200 years.”

In the meantime, the residents around the Kewaunee plant are preparing for life without one of the area’s biggest employers and an indeterminate number of years living next to an impromptu nuclear waste storage facility.

“They were going to bury those rods under a mountain,” said Hardtke. “And yet now they are just going to let them sit there. I have kids here and grandkids, and we’re leaving them a mess.”

WSJ, 4 Nov 12 Residents who live near the Kewaunee Power Station with its 556-megawatt nuclear reactor still are absorbing the recent news that the plant will shut down in May, taking with it 655 jobs and leaving behind — possibly for decades — scores of concrete canisters filled with spent nuclear waste.

The loss of the jobs as well as the hundreds of thousands of dollars Dominion Resources pays locally in lieu of property taxes is unsettling enough, local officials say. More disturbing, they say, are the 42 containers of nuclear waste that will remain sitting just off the shore of Lake Michigan.

“We’ve been lied to for 35 years,” Dave Hardtke, chairman of the town of Carlton, said of the waste. “When they built that plant, the federal government said they were going to move the waste. That was 35 years ago, and look where it is sitting.”

The impending shutdown of the plant renewed attention on the national impasse over the disposal of spent nuclear fuel. And it is not just an issue at Kewaunee. More than 300 assemblies of spent nuclear fuel rods are submerged in a cooling pool on the site of the now-closed nuclear reactor at the Genoa Generating Station on the banks of the Mississippi River near La Crosse. The small reactor, adjacent to a traditional coal plant, was closed in 1987 but the fuel rods, with no central federal storage available, remain.

Continue reading →

November 4, 2012 Posted by | Reference, wastes | Leave a comment

USA: nuclear reactors – assurances of safety precautions

 they are unlikely to be affected by strong winds or unusually high tides.

Hurricane Sandy and N.J. nuclear power plants: Keeping it cool in high
winds http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/science-updates/nj-nukes-prepare-for-sandy , 28 OCTOBER 2012   BY ROBERT KINKEAD On Sunday, New Jersey’s four nuclear power stations, along with another dozen or so along the Eastern Seaboard,were prepped to deal with Hurricane Sandy as that massive storm crawls up the East Coast toward the Garden State.

Federal regulators require nuclear reactors to be in a safe shutdown condition at least two hours before hurricane force winds strike, according to Alec Marion, VP of nuclear operations at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an energy industry association.

Typically, plant operators begin shutting down reactors about 12 hours before winds exceeding 74 miles per hour arrive. One of the most significant challenges in the shutting down process is keeping the reactor core cool. Continue reading →

October 29, 2012 Posted by | Reference, safety, USA | Leave a comment

Nuclear fusion – pie in the sky – years away from even feasibility study

Nuclear Fusion Project Struggles to Put the Pieces Together Scientific America, 27 Oct 12, Contracting woes may cause further delays for $19.4-billion ITER, a project designed to show the feasibility of nuclear fusion as a power source

By Geoff Brumfiel and Nature magazine The world’s largest scientific project is threatened with further delays, as agencies struggle to complete the design and sign contracts worth hundred of millions of euros with industrial partners, Nature has learned.

ITER is a massive project designed to show the feasibility of nuclear fusion as a power source. Continue reading →

October 27, 2012 Posted by | 2 WORLD, Reference, technology | Leave a comment

Price Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act – a whopper government subsidy

It is worth noting that Exelon, as an owner and operator of more nuclear power plants than any other American company, benefits to a considerable degree from what is potentially one of the largest government subsidies of energy production in world history, the Price Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act.

Nuclear Company Blasts Wind Industry Tax Incentive KCET, by Chris Clarke
on October 23, 2012 The largest operator of nuclear power plants in the United States has blasted the Wind Production Tax Credit in a commissioned study…… Continue reading →

October 25, 2012 Posted by | business and costs, politics, Reference, USA | Leave a comment

The world’s nuclear industry continues to decline

World Nuclear Industry Status Report maps nuclear power’s global decline http://www.beyondnuclear.org/home/2012/10/22/world-nuclear-industry-status-report-maps-nuclear-powers-glo.html A new World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2012, authored by Mycle Schneider with Antony Froggatt and Julie Hazemann, maps the continuing global decline of nuclear power. The report shows that nuclear’s future rests not on new construction, but that “Plant life extension seems the most likely survival strategy of the nuclear industry at this point” – a good reason to continue to block reactor license extensions. The report noted that: “Only seven reactors started up, while 19 were shut down in 2011.” By July 2012, “only two were started up, just compensating for two that were shut down so far this year”. Other highlights:

China is spending five times more on renewables than nuclear post-Fukushima with no new nuclear construction since 3/11; nine reactors have been listed as “under construction” for more than 20 years; four countries – Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Taiwan – will phase out nuclear power and five more to date – Egypt, Italy, Jordan, Kuwait and Thailand – have abandoned plans to develop, or re-develop nuclear power; new builds have been canceled in Brazil, France, India and the US; certification of new reactor technologies has been delayed numerous times; in the US, of the 28 license applications received, 16 were subsequently delayed and eight were suspended indefinitely or officially canceled; of the 59 units under construction in the world, at least 18 are experiencing multi-year delays, while the remaining 41 projects were started within the past five years or have not yet reached project start-up dates.

October 23, 2012 Posted by | 2 WORLD, business and costs, Reference | Leave a comment

The nuclear fusion dream – ever elusive

Fusion: Maybe Less Than 30 Years, But This Year Unlikely Bill Chameides Dean, Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, August 2012 No ignition at the U.S. National Ignition Facility , home to the world’s largest laser….. Scientists have been thinking about how to bring this game changer into the energy game for decades. (See fusion/fission timeline .) As far back as 1946, two British scientists — Sir George Paget Thomson and Moses Blackman — filed the first patent for a fusion power plant .

But there have been a couple of hold-ups . To get a fusion reaction started, you need to slam the hydrogen atoms together really, really hard and that requires a lot of energy. (In a hydrogen bomb, the fusion reaction gets ignited by an atomic bomb, using fission. Not exactly the preferred method for your local fusion power plant.)

Even trickier is controlling the fusion reaction. It’s one thing to make a fusion bomb, it’s a lot harder to get the reaction going and keep it under control in a way that the amount of energy extracted is larger than that expended to initiate and manage the reaction.

Over the almost 70-year pursuit of the fusionary holy grail, it’s been fairly common for scientists working on the problem to say that they’re about 30 years away from achieving a power plant based on fusion. (See here  and here .) The problem has been that while time has marched on, the 30-year horizon has remained fixed. Suffice to say it has proven to be a very tough problem…. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-chameides/fusion-maybe-less-than-30_b_1949573.html

October 10, 2012 Posted by | Reference, technology, USA | Leave a comment

East Kazakhstan’s 812 million tonnes of highly radioactive uranium tailings

Josef Stalin’s nuclear legacy remains in East Kazakhstan Scotsman.com, 9 October 2012  “…..It was over 20 years after the end of atomic testing in the Polygon that the world began to take notice, but Stalin’s legacy may yet have an impact that could threaten future generations across the globe. The mining of uranium to manufacture the atomic weapons tested in the Polygon has left a staggering 812 million tonnes of highly radioactive uranium tailings (waste byproduct). They lie in dilapidated dumps in four of the five Central Asian republics, posing not just an imminent threat to the environment but a potential flashpoint for violence and conflict. Continue reading →

October 9, 2012 Posted by | Kazakhstan, Reference, Uranium, wastes | Leave a comment

Thorium bred Uranium-233 can be used to make atomic bombs

Thorium Nuclear Bombs (Shorter version)  Kevin Meyerson, kevinmeyerson.wordpress.com 9 Oct 12, Thorium bred Uranium-233 can be used to make atomic bombs, despite what proponents may claim.

You don’t have to trust me on this, see what the experts at various institutions have to say below:

MIT Energy Initiative, The Future of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Continue reading →

October 9, 2012 Posted by | 2 WORLD, Reference, Uranium, weapons and war | Leave a comment

East Kazakhstan’s horror nuclear legacy from Soviet times till now

Josef Stalin’s nuclear legacy remains in East Kazakhstan Scotsman.com, 9 October 2012   Stalin used the area as a nuclear test site and the local population have been paying a terrible price ever since. The plight of these people in East Kazakhstan has touched the heart of Scottish MEP Struan Stevenson, who has campaigned to bring their situation to wider 
recognition for 13 years. Now, in an exclusive article for 
The Scotsman, he argues Stalin’s actions could have devastating consequences in the future, too Continue reading →

October 9, 2012 Posted by | civil liberties, health, history, psychology - mental health, Reference, social effects | Leave a comment

Japanese government secrecy tightening, over Fukushima health effects

Officials from Fukushima Prefecture have admitted that they conducted secret meetings with 19 health experts and government officials, discussing the impact of radiation on human health, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. The meetings were held before official meetings, and participants were instructed not to tell anyone that they had
participated. Meeting materials were collected after the meeting so that they could not be removed from the room, and no minutes were kept.

Fukushima  Nuclear Crisis Update for October 2nd to October 4th, 2012 Greenpeace International,  by Christine McCann – October 5, 2012 “…..As duties are transferred from the now defunct Nuclear Safety Commission (NSC) to the newly-created Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA), the Nuclear Energy Library, which gave the public access to over 40,000 documents relating to nuclear power, will close.

The Library was created in 1997 to create transparency after a leak and subsequent cover-up at the Monju fast-breeder. It was heavily visited in the period following the Fukushima nuclear disaster; many documents there are not available online. Experts are criticizing the decision. Continue reading →

October 6, 2012 Posted by | health, Japan, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

Human Rights request to Fukushima Prefecture

Human Rights Now (3 September 2012)【Statement】Request for the Radical Reform of the Health Check System including Thyroid Examination for the Affected People by the Nuclear Power Plant Accident  “…..HRN requests to Fukushima prefecture to:

 1. Conduct the thyroid examination for children at least once a year for the “early identification” and “early treatment.” Especially when the thyroid nodules or cysts are recognized, establish and implement the system quickly;

 2. Expand the thyroid examination to adults, and also conduct the blood and urine examinations;

 3. Provide information of the thyroid examination and others (such as blood examination and thyroid sonogram) conducted by the prefecture to first-person or their parents, and provide explanation if requested;

 4. Store the result of the thyroid examination over a long period of time for the future follow-up and comparison, and disclose the information of the examination result when requested by the examinees or their parents, without asking the information disclose procedure. Also, take necessary measures so that other municipalities and medical institutes that will provide the health examinations can share the data.

 HRN requests to the state to:

1. From the position of protecting the residents’ rights to health around the nuclear power plant accident, as a responsibility of the state, construct the guidelines regarding health checks, examination, and medical treatment promptly. In the course of that, take into account the international perception and the good practice of medical policies, taken by the related countries of the Chernobyl accident;

 2. Publish guidelines about the information disclosure of the result of health examinations including the thyroid examination, and instruct the prefecture;

 3. As a state, commit to the health checks of the prefecture, and request the drastic reform and improvement of the examination system, based on the above mentioned recommendations towards Fukushima prefecture;

 4. Provide a financial support to the municipalities in Fukushima prefecture to enable them to establish the examination systems including the thyroid examination and the internal exposure examination; secure the base hospitals of the health examinations including the thyroid examination in all areas in Japan, and provide a financial support so that the affected people are able to take necessary examinations, such as thyroid and internal exposure examinations, for free at least once a year, regardless of their living place.

 HRN requests to Mr. Shunichi Yamashita (the head of the Exploratory Committee on the “Fukushima Health Management Survey,” the vice-president of the Fukushima Medical University, and the president of theRadiation Medical Science Center for the Fukushima health management survey) to:

 1. Officially withdraw the announcement (dated 16 January 2012) sent to the members of the Japan Thyroid Association.

 These recommendations are all important to protect the right to people’s health (Article 25 of the Constitution, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights), therefore, prompt improvement and implementation are required. http://hrn.or.jp/eng/activity/area/japan/statementrequest-for-the-radical-reform-of-the-health-check-system-including-thyroid-examination-for/

October 5, 2012 Posted by | Fukushima 2012, Reference | Leave a comment

Increasing worry over the piling up of nuclear wastes

Nuclear industry slowed by its own waste By Kristi Swartz The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 23 Sept 12, “…..NO MAGIC BULLET’ Utilities store a total of 2,000-2,300 metric tons of used nuclear fuel a year, according to industry figures. That adds up to about 65,000 metric tons of radioactive waste currently sitting at nuclear plants.
“If we reject long-term storage, we’re left with dry casking, and that’s it,” said Cham Dallas, a professor and director at the University of Georgia’s Institute for Health Management and Mass Destruction Defense. “Yes, it’s probably safe, but can we continue this policy for an infinite number of years?”
The concerns over safely handling nuclear waste are many. Continue reading →

September 28, 2012 Posted by | Reference, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Poorly paid, dangerous, work of nuclear sub-contracted workers

Desirability of nuclear power is the real question, THE HINDU, 28 Sept 12
MADHUMITA DUTTA“……In France, over 20,000-30,000 workers dubbed as “nuclear nomads” are subcontracted annually in the 58 nuclear reactors operated by Électricité de France S.A. (EDF) located in 20 sites which contribute 78 per cent of the electricity produced in the country.

EDF subcontracts over 1,000 companies, who employ the “nuclear nomads,” sometimes of foreign origin, to do the dangerous maintenance, repair and clean-up work in these plants, exposing them to ionising radiations. In her book “Nuclear Servitude: Subcontracting and Health in the French Civil Nuclear Industry,” French social scientist Annie Thébaud-Mony has highlighted this division of labour and “risk” by subcontracting dangerous work in the French nuclear power industry.

In the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, over 18,000 workers were hired to clean-up the power plant, who were all subcontracted to do dangerous radioactive clean-up work. These men, hailed as “national heroes” by many, were actually local residents rendered unemployed by the disaster or were daily wagers from city slums.

Since the 1970s, Japan has had a dubious track record of subcontracting maintenance
work of reactors to outside companies which hire workers on a short-term basis who remain employed till they reach their radiation exposure limit (Nuclear Nomads: A look at the Sub-contracted Heroes by Gabrielle Hecht in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 9, 2012)…. http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/desirability-of-nuclear-power-is-the-real-question/article3939373.ece

September 28, 2012 Posted by | employment, France, Japan, Reference | 1 Comment

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