Friday, March 18, 2011

Not Again! I'm outta here!

Look here, Barak, and the rest of you: I've had it.  Now you said Gaddafi would be gone in a week, I told you he was one of the last revolutionaries and he'd never leave.  Someone even wanted to bet.  He has already won the war, got it?

If we want to start shooting, that would be war number four against Moslem countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and now Libya.  If you really want to overthrow a dictator who has it coming, start with Morocco, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain -- Libya would be the last to gain any sort of Arab approval.  But go ahead, nobody listens to me anyway.  Screw it!

I said Japan was a 6.  They finally admitted it was a 5.  Well, it's a 6 and rising.  New York will get it next.  (I'm not threatening, just a prophecy.)

So -- I need a break.

Sleep tight. 
Posted by Unknown at 4:30 PM 0 comments
Labels:

Finally, some Reliable Information about Nuclear Power





Finally, we are starting to see some reliable and knowledgeable people on the airwaves who are also able to speak the truth.

First, a couple points.  My last calculations were based on 4 REM, the only number available to me.  Recently, numbers from 10 to 50 have been disclosed.  So, to correct, just add a zero before all decimal points in the last issue or, if no decimal point, just add it on to the end.

Second, our Nobel Prize winning Physicist, Dr. Chu, working in the administration says there is not problem and we don't have to stop our nuclear industry.  So, since he won the Nobel Prize for Physics, he knows as much about physics as Obama does about making Peace since he is a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Here is some reliable information: 




Radiation Spreads

Rush Transcript

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, More...

Related Links

Related Democracy Now! Stories

JUAN GONZALEZ: The Japanese nuclear crisis continues to worsen as authorities race to find a way to cool the overheating reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Earlier today, Japan raised the nuclear alert level at the crippled plant from a four to a five, which is on par with Three Mile Island. Japan’s prime minister, Naoto Kan, described the situation as, quote, "still very grave."

Japan is continuing to dump water on the reactors, while attempting to fix a power cable that could help restart the water pumps needed to cool the overheating nuclear fuel rods. But Gregory Jaczko, the chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said Thursday that it could take weeks for the crisis to be brought under control.

Meanwhile, the number of dead and missing from last week’s devastating earthquake and tsunami has now topped 16,000. It is the deadliest natural disaster to hit Japan in nearly a century.

Twenty-two hundred emergency shelters are operating in the disaster zone, but many are running out of food, fuel, water and medicine. The organization Save the Children estimates 100,000 children have been left homeless.

To talk more about the crisis in Japan, we’re joined by Philip White of the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo, Japan. Also with us is Dr. Ira Helfand of Physicians for Social Responsibility and longtime nuclear critic Ralph Nader, author of the recent book Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!

I want to begin with Philip White in Tokyo. Your sense of this latest announcement by the Japanese government that it’s raising the level of the emergency and what you’re seeing from Tokyo?

PHILIP WHITE: I think it’s a good indication of how they are underestimating the seriousness of the problem. Our experts think that it’s a level 6.5 already, and it’s on the way to a seven, which was Chernobyl. It’s actually—we were very shocked that they only called it a five.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And why do you—what makes you think that the level is still being so grossly underestimated?

PHILIP WHITE: Well, you have—so much radiation is already out—radioactivity is already out there. You have spent fuel pools in at least two of the reactors that are burning and exploding and things like that. You’ve got a hole in another reactor—well, in the containment vessel. You’ve got six reactors lined up there, ready to go off any minute. And they think that’s a five. I’m not quite sure what they’re thinking about, really.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, we’ve begun to get some of the actual levels of radiation that have been measured. The helicopters, for instance, that flew over some of the reactors yesterday, trying to dump water on them, measured, supposedly, according to the Japanese government, at levels of 300 meters above the reactors, about four millisieverts of radiation per hour, and then at 100 meters, which is where they descended to, 87 millisieverts per hour. Could you talk to—tell us what that means in layman’s terms, for those who don’t know the levels of radiation measurement?

PHILIP WHITE: Millisieverts, so that’s a thousand of those makes up one sievert. And one sievert is well and truly into the high dose of radiation, and you’re getting acute—you’re getting acute radiation symptoms well below that. When you’re counting millisieverts, you’ve got to remember, this is per hour, so people who are actually there for any length of time, you multiply that figure by the number of hours they’re there. So, people who are actually on the plant—in the plant, although they’ll have protective clothing, they’re getting massive doses of radiation by now.

People off the site, we’ve seen figures in—around 170 millisieverts per hour at 30—sorry, 170 microsieverts per hour at about 30 kilometers. Now, microsieverts, it’s a much smaller figure, but those people are potentially there for quite a long time. And if they were outside, which hopefully they’re not, they would be getting the average yearly dose in about a day or less, or maybe 10 hours or something like that. So, just think of that. In one day, you can get your average [yearly] dose of radiation if you go out 30 kilometers from this site.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We’re also joined by Ira Helfand of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Your assessment of the—talk about the dangers of the radiation in the exclusion zone to the workers and the potential for other areas outside the exclusion zone.

IRA HELFAND: Yeah, I mean, there are basically two distinct dangers that we’re faced with a reactor accident of this sort. One is the levels of very high radiation, which are primarily confined to the area right around the plant, at least at this point. And these are doses which, if you get up to a full sievert, will cause, as Philip was just explaining, radiation sickness. This is primarily a concern for people working in the plant, the 180-some-odd workers who have stayed behind there to try to bring this situation under control. If there was a much larger release, this conceivably could be a problem further out, but hopefully would not go out beyond the evacuation zone.

I think the danger, though, that we need to focus on, because it’s the one that affects the largest numbers of people, is the danger posed by low-level radiation and the possibility of cancer and other chronic illnesses being caused down the road from this episode. The radioactive material coming out of the plant is made up of about 200 different radioactive isotopes, and particles of these radioactive materials can travel great distances with the wind if they are dispersed into the air. We’re picking up radiation as—you know, elevated levels of radiation in Tokyo and in other places at some remove. At this point, those levels are still quite low. And while it is important to emphasize that there is no safe level of radiation—any radiation exposure increases your risk of cancer—the levels that people are being exposed to at this point remain quite low, if you get away from the plant itself, and will have very low health effects.

If there’s a larger release from this plant—and the situation there is still completely out of control—that could change very dramatically, and we could end up with a situation, as occurred at Chernobyl, where significant amounts of these radioactive isotopes get deposited downwind, contaminating populations, exposing them to an increased risk of cancer. And the best estimate that I’ve seen is that there will be approximately 250,000 excess cancer deaths, ultimately, as a result of the Chernobyl accident. We could have the same kind of wide deposition of radioactive materials if there’s a much larger release than has occurred so far.

In addition, large areas of ground can become so contaminated that people can’t use these areas for extended periods of time. And again, the Chernobyl experience, there were areas up to 100 miles downwind from the plant that had to be evacuated and which remain unsafe for human use today.

So, these two distinct differences—these two distinct dangers: the high doses of radiation affecting primarily people right around the plant at this point and then the potential for a fairly broad distribution of low-level radiation, which could be quite, quite destructive from a public health point of view.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And your sense of the differences that have emerged between the U.S. government’s assessment of the problem and the Japanese government at this stage?

IRA HELFAND: Well, I think it’s very hard to figure out what’s going on for sure. And I think both the U.S. and the Japanese governments are working somewhat in the dark here. And so, it’s kind of hard to know whose assessment is right. But I think that what you’re seeing on the part of the Japanese is that—one might perhaps wish to evacuate up to 50 miles, as the U.S. government has suggested should be done. I’m not sure how you do that in a situation where the area has been devastated by an earthquake and a tsunami.

I think, from my point of view, the most important aspect of the U.S. government recommendation of a 50-mile evacuation zone applies not just to the situation here in Japan right now, but to potential future situations in the United States. The primary danger to American citizens at the moment is not from radiation emanating from the plant in Japan; it’s the potential future release of radiation if we have an accident like this in the United States. And, for example, the nuclear plant in the U.S. which has been said to be most vulnerable to earthquake activity is not, as I had expected, in California; it’s Indian Point, 27 miles north of New York City. If there were to be the kind of release at Indian Point that we are seeing now at Fukushima, a 50-mile evacuation zone involves the entire New York metropolitan area. And I’m not sure quite how we would evacuate the 20 million people who live in that metropolitan area or where we would put them.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, we’re going to discuss precisely that when we come back from break. We’re talking with Philip White from the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo and Ira Helfand from Physicians for Social Responsibility. And we’re also going to discuss this with Ralph Nader. We’ll be back in a moment.

[break]

JUAN GONZALEZ: We’re discussing the continuing nuclear crisis in Japan, and we’re joined by Philip White from the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo, Dr. Ira Helfand from Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Ralph Nader joins us from Washington, longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate. His latest book is Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Ralph.

RALPH NADER: Thank you, Juan.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Your assessment not only what’s happening in Japan, but what the impact will be here in the United States, and especially with the Obama administration and Congress trying to move forward with a renaissance of development of nuclear plants here in the United States?

RALPH NADER: The Japanese disaster has ended whatever nuclear renaissance is being considered here in the United States. The problem is that people have got to get more involved, because the government and the industry will defend nuclear power in the United States to the last mutation. They are representing a closed, monetized mind that does not have options for revision, which true science should provide for. Secretary Chu, Energy Secretary, has refused for two years to meet with the leading critics of nuclear power, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, Friends of the Earth and other groups. He has met with nuclear business interests regularly, and he has written articles touting nuclear power.

What we’re seeing here is 110 or so operating nuclear plants in the United States, many of them aging, many of them infected with corrosion, faulty pipes, leaky pumps and combustible materials. These have been documented by data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission assembled by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Indian Point, for example, is a plant that presents undue risks, in the opinion of the Union of Concerned Scientists, to millions of people in the New York City greater area. And it is unevacuable if there’s an accident. You’re never going to evacuate a population of millions of people, whether it’s around San Onofre or Diablo Canyon in Southern California or Indian Point or Davis-Besse near Toledo and Detroit or any of the other endangered nuclear plants.

Why are we playing Russian roulette with the American people for nuclear plants whose principal objective is simply to boil water and produce steam? This is technological insanity. It presents national security problems, for every nuclear plant is a prime target. It affects our civil liberties. It endangers our workers. It is an industry that cannot be financed by Wall Street because it’s too risky. Wall Street demands 100 percent taxpayer guarantees for any nuclear plant.

So I suggest that people listening and watching this program to pick up the phone and dial the White House comment number, which is (202) 456-1111, (202) 456-1111, and demand the following: that there be public hearings in every area where there’s a nuclear plant, so the people can see for themselves what the hazards are, what the risks are, how farcical the evacuation plans are, how costly nuclear power is, and how it can be replaced by energy efficiency, by solar energy, different kinds of solar energy, by cogeneration, as Amory Lovins and many others, Peter Bradford, have pointed out.

We must no longer license any new nuclear plants. We should shut down the ones like Indian Point. How many people know that Hillary Clinton, as senator, and Andrew Cuomo, as attorney general, demanded that Indian Point be shut down? That doesn’t matter to the monetized minds in Washington, D.C. We also should prepare a plan where, apart from the aging plants, which should be shut down, and apart from the earthquake-risk plants—should be shut down—for the phase-out of the entire industry. We’re going to be left with radioactive waste for hundreds of thousands of years, for which there is no permanent repository. This is institutional insanity, and I urge the people in this country to wake up before they experience what is now going on in northern Japan: uninhabitable territory, thousands dead, hundreds of thousands at risk of cancer, enormous economic loss. And for what?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Ira Helfand, this statement by President Obama, of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that they’re going to do a comprehensive review of the safety of U.S. nuclear plants, do you have much expectation for that review?

IRA HELFAND: I don’t, unfortunately. I’m most troubled by—in this regard, by President Obama’s rush to defend nuclear power last Sunday, even as this crisis was just beginning to unfold. I think the mindset is strongly in support of nuclear power within the administration. And obviously the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has functioned primarily as a cheerleader for the industry since its inception, which is really, you know, a tragic situation.

But I would agree exactly with what Ralph Nader just said. What we need to do instead is to have a real review of our energy policy here and to figure out how we can move as quickly as we possibly can away from nuclear, and away coal, for that matter, which also has huge health risks associated with it, and to seriously begin to build a green energy system based on energy efficiency, conservation and the development of renewable sources of power generation like wind and solar. This is an urgent national security task for the United States, and it’s something we have been ignoring and failing to address for decades at this point. The events in Japan have clearly shown that nuclear power is not reliable and contrary to the claims of the industry and the administration, and we need to move away from it.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Philip White, your group, Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, have been especially involved in efforts to prevent the development of a new plant in South Texas that the Japanese are directly involved in. Could you talk about that?

PHILIP WHITE: The Japanese government has been falling over backwards to support Toshiba, in particular, which made a very, very bad investment when it paid double what Westinghouse was worth to buy that company, and Toshiba is one of the investors in the proposed South Texas project, along with this very—would the Americans like this Tokyo Electric Power Company to come over and help them with their energy plants and advise them? This is the very Tokyo Electric Power Company which is now responsible for this reactor here.

Anyway, sort of irony aside, just recently, the Japan Bank [for] International Cooperation listed on its website that it was considering providing finance for this project. We believe that it would be in the order of four billion U.S. dollars, and that would be about one-third of the total capital worth of JBIC. So it would be—JBIC being Japan Bank for International Cooperation. So it would be an absolutely unprecedented loan for JBIC. And we have been lobbying, along with United States groups, as well as people from around the world, against the—on the grounds of the financial risk. I mean, we, of course, are very concerned about all these other risks, but somehow or other it always seems to fall on a deaf ear. We thought maybe the financial risk would resonate. And it has resonated with many people, even within the bureaucracy here. But there’s this incredibly powerful organization called the Ministry for Economy, Trade and Industry here, METI, which really has had a stranglehold on energy policy and nuclear policy for many years in Japan, and shifting them is a very, very difficult process. So, I think this has basically blown that away.

But actually, something really quite remarkable has begun to happen, something I never thought I would see. Yesterday, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, the more or less permanent government until a few years ago, 'til a couple of years ago, came out and said that it would be very difficult to maintain the nuclear policy as it currently exists. Fairly noncommittal words, you might say, but that in itself was an amazing statement. And then, the following day, the chief cabinet secretary in the current government, the Democratic Party of Japan, said that this was absolutely right. It was completely obvious that it would be difficult to maintain this policy now. That, in itself, to get that from both sides of the political spectrum, is extraordinary. But without public pressure, we won't make that to actually come through, I don’t think.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Philip White, I want to thank you, from the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo, Dr. Ira Helfand from Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Ralph Nader, longtime consumer advocate. Ralph will be returning in another segment later on in the show to talk about his involvement in protests against the anniversary of the Iraq invasion. Thank you all for joining us.

Creative Commons License The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

***************************

JUAN GONZALEZ: We’re discussing the continuing nuclear crisis in Japan, and we’re joined by Philip White from the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo, Dr. Ira Helfand from Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Ralph Nader joins us from Washington, longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate. His latest book is Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Ralph.

RALPH NADER: Thank you, Juan.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Your assessment not only what’s happening in Japan, but what the impact will be here in the United States, and especially with the Obama administration and Congress trying to move forward with a renaissance of development of nuclear plants here in the United States?

RALPH NADER: The Japanese disaster has ended whatever nuclear renaissance is being considered here in the United States. The problem is that people have got to get more involved, because the government and the industry will defend nuclear power in the United States to the last mutation. They are representing a closed, monetized mind that does not have options for revision, which true science should provide for. Secretary Chu, Energy Secretary, has refused for two years to meet with the leading critics of nuclear power, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, Friends of the Earth and other groups. He has met with nuclear business interests regularly, and he has written articles touting nuclear power.

What we’re seeing here is 110 or so operating nuclear plants in the United States, many of them aging, many of them infected with corrosion, faulty pipes, leaky pumps and combustible materials. These have been documented by data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission assembled by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Indian Point, for example, is a plant that presents undue risks, in the opinion of the Union of Concerned Scientists, to millions of people in the New York City greater area. And it is unevacuable if there’s an accident. You’re never going to evacuate a population of millions of people, whether it’s around San Onofre or Diablo Canyon in Southern California or Indian Point or Davis-Besse near Toledo and Detroit or any of the other endangered nuclear plants.

Why are we playing Russian roulette with the American people for nuclear plants whose principal objective is simply to boil water and produce steam? This is technological insanity. It presents national security problems, for every nuclear plant is a prime target. It affects our civil liberties. It endangers our workers. It is an industry that cannot be financed by Wall Street because it’s too risky. Wall Street demands 100 percent taxpayer guarantees for any nuclear plant.

So I suggest that people listening and watching this program to pick up the phone and dial the White House comment number, which is (202) 456-1111, (202) 456-1111, and demand the following: that there be public hearings in every area where there’s a nuclear plant, so the people can see for themselves what the hazards are, what the risks are, how farcical the evacuation plans are, how costly nuclear power is, and how it can be replaced by energy efficiency, by solar energy, different kinds of solar energy, by cogeneration, as Amory Lovins and many others, Peter Bradford, have pointed out.

We must no longer license any new nuclear plants. We should shut down the ones like Indian Point. How many people know that Hillary Clinton, as senator, and Andrew Cuomo, as attorney general, demanded that Indian Point be shut down? That doesn’t matter to the monetized minds in Washington, D.C. We also should prepare a plan where, apart from the aging plants, which should be shut down, and apart from the earthquake-risk plants—should be shut down—for the phase-out of the entire industry. We’re going to be left with radioactive waste for hundreds of thousands of years, for which there is no permanent repository. This is institutional insanity, and I urge the people in this country to wake up before they experience what is now going on in northern Japan: uninhabitable territory, thousands dead, hundreds of thousands at risk of cancer, enormous economic loss. And for what?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Ira Helfand, this statement by President Obama, of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that they’re going to do a comprehensive review of the safety of U.S. nuclear plants, do you have much expectation for that review?

IRA HELFAND: I don’t, unfortunately. I’m most troubled by—in this regard, by President Obama’s rush to defend nuclear power last Sunday, even as this crisis was just beginning to unfold. I think the mindset is strongly in support of nuclear power within the administration. And obviously the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has functioned primarily as a cheerleader for the industry since its inception, which is really, you know, a tragic situation.

But I would agree exactly with what Ralph Nader just said. What we need to do instead is to have a real review of our energy policy here and to figure out how we can move as quickly as we possibly can away from nuclear, and away coal, for that matter, which also has huge health risks associated with it, and to seriously begin to build a green energy system based on energy efficiency, conservation and the development of renewable sources of power generation like wind and solar. This is an urgent national security task for the United States, and it’s something we have been ignoring and failing to address for decades at this point. The events in Japan have clearly shown that nuclear power is not reliable and contrary to the claims of the industry and the administration, and we need to move away from it.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Philip White, your group, Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, have been especially involved in efforts to prevent the development of a new plant in South Texas that the Japanese are directly involved in. Could you talk about that?

PHILIP WHITE: The Japanese government has been falling over backwards to support Toshiba, in particular, which made a very, very bad investment when it paid double what Westinghouse was worth to buy that company, and Toshiba is one of the investors in the proposed South Texas project, along with this very—would the Americans like this Tokyo Electric Power Company to come over and help them with their energy plants and advise them? This is the very Tokyo Electric Power Company which is now responsible for this reactor here.

Anyway, sort of irony aside, just recently, the Japan Bank [for] International Cooperation listed on its website that it was considering providing finance for this project. We believe that it would be in the order of four billion U.S. dollars, and that would be about one-third of the total capital worth of JBIC. So it would be—JBIC being Japan Bank for International Cooperation. So it would be an absolutely unprecedented loan for JBIC. And we have been lobbying, along with United States groups, as well as people from around the world, against the—on the grounds of the financial risk. I mean, we, of course, are very concerned about all these other risks, but somehow or other it always seems to fall on a deaf ear. We thought maybe the financial risk would resonate. And it has resonated with many people, even within the bureaucracy here. But there’s this incredibly powerful organization called the Ministry for Economy, Trade and Industry here, METI, which really has had a stranglehold on energy policy and nuclear policy for many years in Japan, and shifting them is a very, very difficult process. So, I think this has basically blown that away.

But actually, something really quite remarkable has begun to happen, something I never thought I would see. Yesterday, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, the more or less permanent government until a few years ago, 'til a couple of years ago, came out and said that it would be very difficult to maintain the nuclear policy as it currently exists. Fairly noncommittal words, you might say, but that in itself was an amazing statement. And then, the following day, the chief cabinet secretary in the current government, the Democratic Party of Japan, said that this was absolutely right. It was completely obvious that it would be difficult to maintain this policy now. That, in itself, to get that from both sides of the political spectrum, is extraordinary. But without public pressure, we won't make that to actually come through, I don’t think.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Philip White, I want to thank you, from the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo, Dr. Ira Helfand from Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Ralph Nader, longtime consumer advocate. Ralph will be returning in another segment later on in the show to talk about his involvement in protests against the anniversary of the Iraq invasion. Thank you all for joining us.

Creative Commons License The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.


Posted by Unknown at 12:27 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Nuclear Radiation, REM -- Our Friend the Atom.





It has been very difficult to get any sort of real information about what is going on in Japan and will eventually go on here.  Part of this is because of the numbers and terms used and most of it is because most of the people who talk about it, and are qualified to talk about it, are subsidized or bought off by the nuclear industry.  So, how do we know how dangerous this whole things is?

Well, I'm going to take a shot at it and try not to use numbers that are hard to follow.  So, let's use the standard of measurement of the REM.  Forget what it should mean, you might as well call it a blek.  The point is that it is a real unity.  OK?

Now, radiation is accumulative; that is, it stays there in your body and waits for more.  Well, the standard for an employee in one of those plants, the highest safe standard, is 5 a year.  You get exposed to more than 5 and more than cancer is on the way.  The average person, just surfing or typing or having sex, will get exposed to one tenth of one REM a year, and that includes background radiation, like stuff from the sun and radio stations and such stuff.  It can be written as .1, and don't forget the decimal point!

How much was being let loose by just one of those plants in Japan?  Over 4 each hour!  That's the only figure I have heard about or found.  That means 96 each day or 34,176 a year.  Now thirty four thousand one hundred and seventy six is a hell of a lot more than one tenth a year.

Now, how do these plants work?  Well, forget about the e=mc squared figure.  What happens is they start these fissions so they heat up rods that heat up water that is pumped past them and that turns the water to steam that turns a turbine that makes magnets swirl and that produces electricity as the fly eats the sugar and that releases the string and makes the little metal ball run down the tube and hit the switch.  (I made that last part up to show how much like a Rube Goldberg device the whole thing is).

The term scientists use is miliseverts which are a tenth of a REM or blek.

With that, here is Democracy Now with one of these three guys who knows what he is talking about (White) and is willing to express it.  The other two are not bad.

At the bottom is an appendix of sorts I took from Wikipedia.

Rush Transcript

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, More...

Related Links

Related Democracy Now! Stories

JUAN GONZALEZ: Japan’s nuclear crisis is intensifying. A second reactor unit at the damaged Fukushima plant may have ruptured and appears to be releasing radioactive steam. According to the New York Times, it is not clear how serious the breach may be, but the vessel that possibly ruptured is the last fully intact line of defense against large-scale releases of radioactive material.

The plant has been hit by several explosions after a devastating earthquake and tsunami last Friday damaged its cooling functions. It has sent low levels of radiation wafting into Tokyo more than 130 miles away.

The radiation levels around the plant are so high that Japanese authorities abandoned a plan on Wednesday to dump water from military helicopters in an attempt to cool the reactors. The plan was made after the company operating the reactors withdrew at least 750 workers, leaving a crew of 50 struggling to lower temperatures. And even those workers were briefly moved to a bunker because of a rise in radiation levels.

Meanwhile, Japanese Emperor Akihito made an extremely rare appearance on live TV to say he is deeply worried about the situation and is praying for the people.

The nuclear crisis has sparked international alarm. France is urging its citizens in Tokyo to move further south or to leave the country. Australia is also advising its citizens to consider leaving the capital, and Turkey has warned against travel to Japan.

We go now to Japan, where we are joined by Philip White of the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo. We’re also joined in Washington, D.C., by Peter Bradford, a former commissioner at the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s go first to Philip White in Tokyo. Can you tell us what’s the latest, from what you can tell?

PHILIP WHITE: You seem to have covered it fairly well, but certainly, at least three plants have had a significant amount of melting fuel. And certainly one has breached—the containment has been breached. And the question is whether that has also happened in reactor three. And the fourth reactor, which was actually—had actually gone into a—what do you call it?—a periodic inspection at the time the earthquake struck, so it was supposed to be stable, that—because of loss of off-site power, loss of power supply, and inability to cool the spent fuel pool, that spent fuel pool has now gone up into flames and smoke has come out and breached the roof, and a large amount of radioactivity has spewed into the sky. So, that’s a general summary of—as far as the reactors are concerned.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And this issue of the breach in one of the reactors—and there were conflicting reports last night here in terms of whether all the workers had been pulled out. They had been pulled back to a bunker. The importance of keeping workers there at the site to keep those—all of the reactors there, the six reactors, under control?

PHILIP WHITE: Well, that’s right. I mean, if they’re not being cooled—and you need water to cool them, and there’s not power—normal power supply to provide that water, then somehow or other you’ve got to have some people in there ensuring that the water supply is provided in some way or another, and were supplying it from the sea. I guess they were pumping it up in some way. And that required human beings to be involved. And if those people are pulled out, then I guess it just goes into natural—whatever escalation or whatever there is. And it’s hard to imagine how it will stop, because there are spent fuel pools in all six of the reactors.

And certainly, the first three reactors, which were operating when the earthquake struck, have very hot fuel loads inside of them. So it’s a massive amount of radioactivity. If you just consider the quantity of radioactivity that’s in all those reactors, it far exceeds what was in Chernobyl, because that was just a single reactor. The question is, how far does it get spewed out into the environment? But even if it doesn’t get spewed out, it’s sort of still sitting there, dribbling away or whatever, and it’s leaving a totally contaminated site.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We’re joined also by Peter Bradford, who was a commissioner on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. Welcome to Democracy Now!

PETER BRADFORD: Thank you.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Mr. Bradford, can you tell us, in terms of being able to, in real time, as folks who are dealing with this crisis, have an accurate handle of what is actually happening in those reactors—in your own experience during the time of Three Mile Island, can you talk about the difficulty officials have in knowing exactly what is going on?

PETER BRADFORD: It’s extremely difficult. And, in fact, it’s impossible to know exactly what’s going on. The barriers to accurate information flow are very large, to start with, especially given the chaos resulting from the tsunami and the earthquake. On top of that, a lot of the monitoring equipment, the transmitting equipment, has probably been damaged. The people who are at the site, trying to deal with things that they’ve never seen and never been trained to deal with, have very little time to spend communicating and discussing with the outside world. And so, whenever one hears assertions made with a high degree of confidence, it’s important to remember that the unknowable just can’t be stated with certainty. The figures regarding radiation emissions are subject to all the inaccuracies of monitoring, plus the predilection of the government not to want to create panic. The situation in the reactor itself is infinitely complicated by the fact that this is not a situation that has been trained for and analyzed. So, there are no manuals that people not on the site can consult in order to figure out what’s going on and what will happen next.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We’re also joined by Peter Ford of the Christian Science Monitor, Beijing bureau chief, who’s been reporting on the ground from Sendai, the city closest to the epicenter of last Friday’s earthquake. Peter, what is your sense of—and especially in the northern part of the country, which is still in the midst of trying to deal with the devastating earthquake and tsunami, what is—what are people feeling as they’re hearing these reports of what is going on in the nuclear reactors?

PETER FORD: Well, it’s just one more thing to worry about. But it’s not, at the moment, the most immediate concern for the people who are in shelters or trying to find shelters or looking for food or gas or water, all of which are in very, very short supply up here. The situation complicated and made even more miserable by the fact that today it started snowing, and temperatures are close to zero. But, of course, in the back of everybody’s minds, and on the front of—and on their television screens are all the images of what’s happening in the reactor and all the uncertainties that Mr. Bradford talked about. And as you said, this is really unknowable. Nobody really knows what to think up here.

At least for the time being, the wind is blowing southeast, away from here, so there is no immediate danger of any radiation that might leak contaminating people up here. But, of course, winds can change, and the radiation levels, which, as the government says at the moment, are not an immediate hazard to human health outside the 20-kilometer exclusion zone, those radiation levels could rise if things go wrong. And it certainly seems, from what we’ve seen today—the failed effort, for example, to send a helicopter in to drop water onto one of the reactors to cool it, because the radiation levels directly above the reactor are too high—it certainly seems that, from what we’ve seen today, the situation is far from being under control.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And in terms of the government being able to continue the rescue of those directly affected, whose homes were destroyed, and, as you say, supplying these basic necessities—we’ve heard of 100,000 of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces being mobilized—how efficient has that effort been, from what you can tell?

PETER FORD: Well, it’s certainly not been efficient enough, almost by the government’s own admission. They asked today that private businesses start helping to distribute food, as well, to people. But most people are in shelters. There are, I think, still a hundred, perhaps more than that, people who are still cut off in the most remote villages in the areas that were affected by the tsunami, but there are 400,000—more than 400,000—people in shelters now, between those who were evacuated from villages that have been destroyed, towns that have been destroyed, and those who have been moved out of the exclusion zone around the Fukushima power plant. Now, that’s an awful lot of people to look after. Not all of them are being fed and watered and sheltered and kept as warm as they might like, but most of them are at least tolerably comfortable. But this is an enormous task. And the government is going to need help from private forces, as well, to try and meet it.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask Philip White—you’re familiar with the record of Tokyo Electric, the main operator of these plants, and there have been reports in recent days of an increasing rift or conflict between the government and the officials of Tokyo Electric. At one point, the Prime Minister was overheard saying, "What the hell is going on? Why haven’t you given us certain information?" Your sense of the history of Tokyo Electric in handling problems at its plants?

PHILIP WHITE: [inaudible] is basically wired to conceal things. It doesn’t want to give information. We, as an organization that deals with TEPCO directly in negotiations, particularly since the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa—the earthquake that hit that plant three years ago, and you have to extract information as you extract hen’s teeth. They had a massive scandal about 10 years—nearly 10 years ago, in which they concealed cracking within a certain piece of equipment, some equipment in their reactors, and that led to them having been forced to shut down all 17 of their reactors. Since then, they have been under tremendous pressure to improve their performance. And to some extent, they have. But it’s really a fight all the way to get them to change their natural nature, as it were.

In this case, as I—I mean, I’ve been doing lots of interviews and things, so I actually missed many of the press conferences that go on, but the ones that I’ve heard, I mean, what I would notice, firstly, they give very technical reports that no layperson could possibly understand. Then you get an interpreter from the television station telling you what that all meant. And that information, itself, has probably been accurate, but—I assume; we might find that otherwise later—but it has the problem that they haven’t given real-time data on things. And our scientists and engineers have been calling for real-time, much more detailed information, not only on things like the radiation levels, but also on the temperatures of the reactor and the pressure levels and all that sort of technical detail, to help them analyze the situation.

And as for the—both TEPCO and the government, I suppose, are involved in this—but presentation of the risks associated with this radiation, there’s been downplaying of the risks. Now, Mr. Bradford talked about avoiding panic, and that’s a real issue, and I don’t think you should present information in a way that’s going to cause panic, because that will make it much harder to handle the situation. But I think that they have not been frank about the risks with the radiation.

In particular, they have repeatedly said that below—this is a technical figure, but below a dose of 100 millisievert, there is no risk. Sometimes they qualify it by saying there’s no immediate risk, which is perhaps technically accurate. But they have completely refused to point out that these lower levels of radiation are scientifically recognized—there’s maybe some debate—but basically, the consensus is that there’s—your risk is proportional to your dose. And that goes right down, you know, right down to the lowest doses. So, this notion that you’re somehow or other safe below 100 millisieverts is—it’s not recognized in the scientific community. The difference is that there’s no—you’re not going to get acute radiation sickness; you’re looking more at long-term effects, such as cancer. But they have just refused to give that perspective, which—you know, that’s getting to the point of being outright deceptive, I think.

And today, for the first time, I heard a spokesman of the—and the TV station is involved in this, too. The NHK, the national broadcaster, I heard the person who had been putting forward that view and supporting the view of the government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the first time, I heard him actually say that there was this risk from lower doses. But you could see that that was in response to our—organizations like mine—saying, "This is inaccurate. You can’t go out and say this." Yeah, [inaudible].

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Peter Bradford, former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, you said that it’s clearly—there’s not enough accurate information to be able to give a sense of what—how this will develop. But can you talk about a worst-case scenario and a best-case scenario, given what we know now, as to how this might end up?

PETER BRADFORD: I have no idea what the worst-case scenario is. It would involve a breach of one or more of the containments in such a way that the radiation was released in a way that propelled it up and out into the atmosphere. But at that point, the direction of the wind still makes a big difference in terms of the consequences.

The best-case scenario at this point is not a good one, not a good one for the public, not a good one for the nuclear industry. There is not going to be a happy ending to this story.

But let me also say, on this question of TEPCO’s corporate character, you know, we had that problem with the licensee at Three Mile Island also, in terms of whether the information was accurate, whether there had been falsification of some relevant records beforehand. And it will be important, in the context of subsequent investigations. Right now, my sense is that if TEPCO’s people were replaced by a band of angels, they still could not give very accurate information with regard to what’s going on within the damaged reactors, because much of the area is inaccessible, a lot of the equipment is disabled, and there are no manuals that describe this situation. So, the problem of inaccurate information has moved past the point at which TEPCO’s corporate character is the driving factor.

As to off-site measurements, both as to emissions levels and as to health effects, it’s certainly true that the conservative assumption that most regulators, public health officials go by is that the risk is proportional to the dose. Much of the measurement is probably not being done by TEPCO at this point. Certainly at Three Mile Island, the off-site measurements done by helicopters in the air were being done by various government agencies, state and federal. And the disagreements over the amounts released, the dosages received, are going on to this day. So, when you hear a particular number stated with great confidence, you have to put very large uncertainty bands on it in the context of what’s happening in Japan now.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Peter Bradford, in terms of the—some of the statements from the nuclear industry that this could not happen here in the United States, obviously as the Obama administration and others in Congress are seeking to ramp up the development of nuclear plants here in the United States, your response?

PETER BRADFORD: Well, the statement, "This could not happen here," has a troubled history in the nuclear industry. The Soviet Union came to Three Mile Island and said that accident can’t happen in the Soviet Union. And of course they got Chernobyl. The Japanese, among others, went to Chernobyl and said, "Oh, we don’t have that kind of reactor in Japan," so now they have this. I mean, of course it’s true that particular nuclear accidents are somewhere between unlikely and simply will not repeat themselves from one decade to the next, but the underlying problem of regulators and plant builders, plant operators, deeming certain events to be impossible and therefore not something that has to be designed against and guarded against, it does seem to have a way of recurring at long intervals and rarely, thank heavens. But if you see the sentence "This cannot happen here" in that context, you ought not to believe it.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I want to thank all of our guests: Peter Bradford, formerly of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Peter Ford, a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor, who is in Sendai; and Philip White of the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo.

Creative Commons License The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.





Here is the appendix (the figures are a bit different from what I gave you above, but close enough:



Effects on human health

Normal background radiation varies from place to place but delivers a dose equivalent in the vicinity of 2.4 mSv/year annually, or about 0.3 µSv/h.[191][192] The international limit for radiation exposure for nuclear workers is 20 mSv per year, averaged over five years, with a limit of 50 mSv in any one year.[192] Chronic radiation exposure of 100 mSv per year is the "lowest level at which any increase in cancer is clearly evident," according to the World Nuclear Association.[192] Symptoms of radiation poisoning typically emerge with a 1000 mSv total dose over a day.[193] EPA guidance on dose limits for workers performing emergency services is 10 rem (100 mSv) when the activity is "protecting valuable property" and 25 rem when "life saving or protection of large populations."[194] A 25 rem dose is estimated to increase one's lifetime risk of developing fatal cancer from about 20% to about 21%.[195]

Radiation dose rates at one location between reactor Units 3 and 4 was measured at 400 mSv/h at 10:22 JST, 13 March 2011, causing experts to urge rapid rotation of emergency crews as a method of limiting exposure to radiation.[196][197] At these levels, the 50 workers remaining on site risked developing radiation sickness.[196] Prior to the accident, the maximum permissible dose for Japanese nuclear workers was 100 mSv in any one year, but on 15 March 2011, the Japanese Health and Labor Ministry increased that annual limit to 250 mSv, for emergency situations.[198][199] The general population faced separate risks from chronic exposure to lower-level contaminants released into the environment.[196]

The isotope iodine-131 is easily absorbed by the thyroid. However, taking potassium iodide tablets prevents this absorption. Caesium-137 is also a particular threat because it behaves like potassium and is taken-up by the cells throughout the body. Strontium-90 behaves like calcium, leading to accumulation in bones and teeth.[196]
Posted by Unknown at 12:43 PM 0 comments

Monday, March 14, 2011

Nuclear Power






Illustration:  The al-Quaeda flag (means "the foundation").  In one of those announcements you only hear once on the radio before the bosses shut it down, they were quoted as encouraging the rebels in Libya to fight and continue the struggle against the infidel, Gaddafi.  And you thought he was making it all up, didn't you?


ANYWAY, ONWARD:

I find it difficult to get very surprised at the news from Japan.  I have always considered it a truism that these plants were dangerous (well, since I was 15, anyway).    When they start with "Our friend, the atom," crap, they even said that they did not know what to do with the waste, but nothing had to be done for at least 20 years and by then technology would have solved that problem.  That was in 1958. 

We are still using fission, not fusion (which is what gave us the enormous calculations of the energy that could be produced, and without much waste).  Well, forget fusion -- it is not going to happen until after you are dead.

I think the whole issue takes a back seat, is ignored, because most people haven't the slightest idea as to what something as simple as an isotope is.  What about half-life?  Did you know that there is no such thing as "depleted uranium'?  It is just enhanced uranium, a different isotope that has gone back to a previous isotope level.  Yeah, glad I was able to clear that one up.

So, now it is agreed that three reactors are in a state of melt-down and some radioactive stuff has a half-life of 17,000 years.  They are giving out tablets for that, take one daily.




Bring DN! to Your Community

Today’s Show



RECENT SHOWS

Friday, March 11, 2011

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Wednesday, March 09, 2011



BLOG



Podcasting & Torrents



Japan Facing Biggest Catastrophe Since Dawn of Nuclear Age

Share354
Japan
Japan remains in a state of emergency three days after a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit the country. An estimated 10,000 people have died, and Japan is facing the worst nuclear crisis since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On Monday, a second explosion hit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, and a third reactor lost its cooling system, raising fears of a meltdown. Radiation levels have been detected as far as 100 miles away. Dozens of people have tested positive for radiation exposure, and hundreds of thousands of have been evacuated, with the number expected to rise. [includes rush transcript–partial]
Filed under Nuclear Power
Guests:
Yurika Ayukawa, professor of the environment at Chiba University in Japan. She is formerly with the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center.
Harvey Wasserman, longtime anti-nuclear activist and the editor of nukefree.org. He is also a senior adviser to GreenPeace USA and the author of the book SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth.
Kevin Kamps, specialist in nuclear waste at the nuclear watchdog, Beyond Nuclear. Last year he was in Japan assessing the state of its nuclear facilities.
Arnie Gundersen, nuclear industry executive for many years before blowing the whistle on the company he worked for in 1990, when he found inappropriately stored radioactive material. He is now chief engineer at Fairewinds Associates.
Japan Al Jazeera English report on Minami Sanriku,
Related stories

Rush Transcript

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, More...

Related Links

Related Democracy Now! Stories

AMY GOODMAN: Japan is facing its biggest catastrophe since the dawn of the nuclear age, when the U.S. dropped two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the wake of the massive earthquake and tsunami Friday, a second explosion has hit a Japanese nuclear plant. Monday’s explosion, caused by a hydrogen buildup, blew the roof off a containment building at Fukushima Daiichi’s reactor 3, two days after a blast hit reactor 1. Eleven people were injured in the blast.
Officials say the reactor core inside was undamaged, but now a third reactor at the plant has lost its cooling system, and news agencies are reporting a meltdown of the fuel rods cannot be ruled out.
While Japanese officials are playing down any health risk, Pentagon officials reported Sunday helicopters flying 60 miles from the plant picked up small amounts of radioactive particulates, suggesting widening environmental contamination. And the U.S. Navy moved one of its aircraft carriers from the area after detecting low-level radiation 100 miles offshore. The New York Times reports radioactive releases of steam from the crippled plants could go on for weeks or even months. Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from the area around the plant. At least 22 people have tested positive for radiation exposure, with the number expected to rise.
Technicians have been battling to cool reactors at the plant since Friday. They’re using an untested method of pouring in a mixture of seawater and boric acid. Re-establishing normal cooling of the reactors would require restoring electric power, which was cut in the earthquake and tsunami and now may require plant technicians working in areas that have become highly contaminated with radioactivity.
The New York Times reports, quote, "In a country where memories of a nuclear horror of a different sort in the last days of World War II weigh heavily on the national psyche and national politics, the impact of continued venting of long-lasting radioactivity from the plants is hard to overstate."
Harvey Wasserman is a longtime anti-nuclear activist and editor of nukefree.org. He’s also senior adviser to Greenpeace U.S.A. and the author of SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth. He joins us from Columbus, Ohio.
We’re also joined by Kevin Kamps, specialist in nuclear waste at the nuclear watchdog Beyond Nuclear. Last year he was in Japan assessing the state of nuclear facilities. He’s joining us from Washington, D.C.
And we’re joined via Democracy Now! video stream from Burlington, Vermont, by Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear industry executive for many years before blowing the whistle on the company he worked for in 1990, when he found inappropriately stored radioactive material, now chief engineer at Fairewinds Associates.
And we are going first, though, to Japan. We are going to be speaking with Yurika Ayukawa. She is joining us from Tokyo, formerly with the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, now a professor of the environment at Chiba University in Japan.
Welcome to Democracy Now! Can you talk about the latest with the nuclear reactors?
YURIKA AYUKAWA: Hello. This is Yurika Ayukawa.
The latest one is the threatening of meltdown by nuclear reactor 2 at Fukushima 1 site. So, this is the third reactor that’s going to be in a very critical situation. All of the fuel rods seems to be out of water, and they are pouring in seawater, but they couldn’t detect how much water they’ve put in, in the beginning, and now they said it’s going in, but still there is a lot of—the whole rod is exposed. And the latest news is that they found some radioactive materials, like—they didn’t say the name, but I feel it’s like cesium—around the site. So, there must be melting going on inside the reactor.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to Harvey Wasserman. He’s speaking to us from Columbus, Ohio, long experience in dealing with nuclear plants in this country. Harvey, this latest news of the Japanese nuclear reactor, water levels inside almost empty, according to the power plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power. Then, the news agency Jiji saying a meltdown of fuel rods inside the Fukushima Daiichi complex’s No. 2 reactor could not be ruled out. Can you explain the significance of this, the exposure of the fuel rods?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, it’s hugely significant, and it’s a very, very dangerous situation. I should note that the first reactor at Fukushima is identical to the Vermont Yankee plant, and which is now up for relicensing and which the people of Vermont are trying to shut. And we should also note that this kind of accident, this kind of disaster, could have occurred at four reactors in California, had the 9.0-Richter-scale earthquake hit close to Diablo Canyon at San Luis Obispo or San Onofre between L.A. and San Diego. We could very well now be watching Los Angeles or San Diego being evacuated, had this kind of thing happened in California. And, of course, the issue is the same in Vermont. There are 23 reactors in the United States that are identical or close to identical to the first Fukushima reactor.
Now, this exposure of fuel is about as bad as it gets. It means that these fuel rods, superheated fuel rods, could melt if they are exposed to water, which they’re trying to pour water in there. It could create radioactive steam, conceivably bow off the containment and result in another Chernobyl and a horrific, horrendous release of radiation that could, and in fact would, come to the United States within a week or so, as the Chernobyl radiation came to California within 10 days. This is about as bad as it gets. And we are not 100 percent sure we’re getting fully accurate information. We only know that the worst case scenario is very much a possibility. There are 10 reactors at the Fukushima site—two separate sites, one with six reactors and one with four. And the fact that a U.S. aircraft carrier has detected significant radiation 60 miles away is very much a dangerous sign. It means that radiation releases are ongoing and probably will only get worse.
AMY GOODMAN: Here in the United States, some have raised concerns about the safety of nuclear power plants located in earthquake-prone areas like California, like you, Harvey Wasserman. But speaking to Meet the Press yesterday, Marvin Fertel, the president of the NEI, the Nuclear Energy Institute, expressed confidence about the safety of nuclear plants in California.
CHUCK TODD: We have a couple of nuclear power plants in earthquake zones, or at least in California. Is there a concern? Should Americans be concerned about the fact that these power plants are sitting in earthquake zones? Are they safe?
MARVIN FERTEL: Yeah, all of our power plants, whether they’re in California, which is a high earthquake area, or in the Midwest or other places, are required by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to design to be able to withstand the maximum credible earthquake. And the NRC continues to update and upgrade what the requirements are.
CHUCK TODD: And you said post-9-11 that there were some extra upgrades put in to make sure that—that these nuclear plants could handle a total power shutdown, correct?
MARVIN FERTEL: Yeah. We’ve done things post-9-11 to make sure that if something happened in our plant, like happened in Japan, where you lost all power, that you could get water to the core and continue to cool it.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Marvin Fertel, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, which represents the energy industry, speaking with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press. Harvey Wasserman, your response?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, that’s what he’s paid to say. You know, I was in Japan in the mid-1970s. That’s exactly what they said about Fukushima. I spoke at the Kashiwazaki plant, which, less than five years ago, was also hit by a huge earthquake, and seven reactors shut there. The people of Japan were repeatedly assured that this could not happen. Those reactors in Japan, and the ones in United States, are designed to withstand a 7.5-Richter earthquake, and this is a 9.0, which is more than 10—a significantly higher impact than what they’re designed to withstand. We’re also seeing pressures inside these reactor pressure vessels and containment domes that are in excess of design capacity. The nuclear industry is defending a product that cannot withstand Mother Nature, both in the United States and Japan.
You have to remember that the Japanese industry is highly advanced. Both Westinghouse and General Electric, the two major purveyors of nuclear plants in the United States, are now owned by Japanese companies. This is not the Soviet Union. This is a highly advanced country that cannot cope with nuclear power plants that have been—sustained damage that was predicted. We predicted that these nuclear plants would be hit by earthquakes and by tsunamis, and the Japanese government and the nuclear industry laughed it off, just as Mr. [Fertel] has done yesterday. Every nuclear plant in the United States is susceptible to this kind of damage and this kind of disaster, and it’s time that they be shut, in any kind of prudent mindset that will protect the people of this country and our economy, by the way, as we’re going to see what’s happening to the Japanese economy.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re speaking with anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman, speaking to us from Columbus, Ohio. When we come back, we’ll speak with a specialist in nuclear waste who has recently returned from looking at the nuclear power plants in Japan. And we’ll speak with a nuclear whistleblower from Vermont who says one of the plants in Japan is similar to, almost the same as, the one in Vermont, that even the Vermont governor is attempting to shut down. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.
[break]
Posted by Unknown at 1:17 PM 0 comments
Labels:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)