Author Archive

March 31 2013

By Eric Brown
International Business Times

An accident at an Arkansas nuclear power plant resulted in the death of one worker and the injury of three others Sunday. No nuclear material was released.

A generator was being moved out of the turbine building at Russellville’s Arkansas Nuclear One power plant when it fell, crushing one of the workers, Reuters reported. The injured workers were quickly taken to a hospital.

“We are deeply saddened by what has happened today,” said Jeff Forbes, the chief nuclear officer of the power plant’s parent Entergy Corp. (NYSE:ETR), the Associated Press reported. “Our greatest sympathy is with the family and friends of the employee who lost his life, and with those who sustained injuries.”

While the accident resulted in injuries and a loss of life, Arkansas Nuclear One’s owner was quick to note that the accident was not nuclear in nature and there is no danger of nuclear fallout.

The accident was labeled an “unusual event,” the lowest of four levels of emergency situations defined by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“There was no nuclear release of any kind,” Reuters quoted Arkansas Health Department representative Ed Barham as saying.

Both of Arkansas Nuclear One’s nuclear generators were shut down after the accident.

December 9, 2013

Reuters

U.S. power company Entergy Corp said on Monday a 989-megawatt Unit 2 at its Arkansas nuclear power plant is offline after a transformer fire earlier this morning.

Mike Bowling, a spokesman at Entergy, said there were no injuries and there was no harm to the workers, the public or the environment. The fire was on the non-nuclear side of the plant, he added.

Bowling said the incident occurred at about 7:50 a.m. local time and there may have been an explosion in the transformer area as there were reports of people hearing something in the area at that time.

He said it was an auxiliary transformer that provides offsite power from the grid to the reactor.

The fire was contained, Bowling said, noting that firefighters were allowing some of the oil in the area to burn out.

(Reporting by Scott DiSavino and Sabina Zawadzki; editing by Jeffrey Benkoe, G Crosse)

November 19, 2013

by CHRIS BUSBY
Counterpunch

A new study of the effects of tiny quantities of radioactive fallout from Fukushima on the health of babies born in California shows a significant excess of hypothyroidism caused by the radioactive contamination travelling 5,000 miles across the Pacific. The article will be published next week in the peer-reviewed journal Open Journal of Pediatrics.

Congenital hypothyroidism is a rare but serious condition normally affecting about one child in 2,000, and one that demands clinical intervention – the growth of children suffering from the condition is affected if they are left untreated. All babies born in California are monitored at birth for Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) levels in blood, since high levels indicate hypothyroidism.

Joe Mangano and Janette Sherman of the Radiation and Public Health Project in New York, and Christopher Busby, guest researcher at Jacobs University, Bremen, examined congenital hypothyroidism (CH) rates in newborns using data obtained from the State of California over the period of the Fukushima explosions.

Their results are published in their paper Changes in confirmed plus borderline cases of congenital hypothyroidism in California as a function of environmental fallout from the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. The researchers compared data for babies exposed to radioactive Iodine-131 and born between March 17th and Dec 31st 2011 with unexposed babies born in 2011 before the exposures plus those born in 2012.

Confirmed cases of hypothyroidism, defined as those with TSH level greater than 29 units increased by 21% in the group of babies that were exposed to excess radioactive Iodine in the womb [*]. The same group of children had a 27% increase in ‘borderline cases’ [**].

Contrary to many reports, the explosion of the reactors and spent fuel pools at Fukushima produced levels of radioactive contamination which were comparable with the Chernobyl releases in 1986. Using estimates made by the Norwegian Air Laboratory it is possible to estimate that more than 250PBq (200 x 1015) Bq of Iodine-131 (half life 8 days) were released at Fukushima.

This is also predicted by comparing the Caesium-137 estimates with I-131 releases from Chernobyl, quantities which caused the thyroid cancer epidemic in Byelarus, the Ukraine and parts of the Russian Republic.

More on this later. At Fukushima, the winds generally blew the radioactive iodine and other volatile radionuclides out to sea, to the Pacific Ocean. The journey 5,000 miles to the West Coast of the USA leaves a lot of time for dispersal and dilution. Nevertheless, small amounts of I-131 were measured in milk causing widespread concern.

The authorities downplayed any risk on the basis that the "doses" were very low; far lower than the natural background radiation. The University of Berkeley measured I-131 in rainwater from 18th to 28th March 2011 after which levels fell. If we assume that mothers drank 1 litre of rainwater a day for this period (of course they didn’t) the current radiation risk model of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) calculates an absorbed dose to the adult thyroid of 23 microSieverts, less than 1/100th the annual background "dose". The foetus is more sensitive (by a factor of about 10 according to ICRP) but is exposed to less as it is perhaps 100 times smaller.

So this finding is one more instance of the fact that the current radiation risk model, employed by the governments of every nation, is massively insecure for predicting harm from internal radionuclide exposures or explaining the clear observations.

The Fukushima catastrophe has been dismissed as a potential cause of health effects even in Japan, let alone as far away as California. And on what basis? Because the "dose" is too low.

This is the mantra chanted by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO, largely the same outfit), and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR). And let’s not forget all the nuclear scientists who swooped down on Fukushima with their International Conferences and placatory soothing presentations.

This chant was heard after Chernobyl, after the nuclear site child leukemias; in the nuclear atmospheric test veterans cases; and in all the other clear situations which in any unbiased scientific arena would long ago have blown away the belief that low level internal exposures are safe.

But this one-size-fits-all concept of "dose" is the nuclear industry’s sinking ship. It provides essential cover for the use of uranium weapons, whether fission bombs or depleted uranium munitions; for the development of nuclear power stations like Hinkley Point; the burying of radioactive waste in landfills in middle England; releases of plutonium to the Irish Sea from Sellafield (where it drifts ashore and causes increases in cancer on the coasts of Wales and Ireland); and most recently, for the British Governments denial of excess cancers among nuclear test veterans.

This new study is not the first to draw attention to the sensitivity of the unborn baby to internal fission products. In 2009 I used data supplied to me when I was a member of the UK government Committee Examining Radiation Risks from Internal Emitters (CERRIE) to carry out a meta-analysis of infant leukemia rates in five countries in Europe: England and Wales, Germany, Greece, and Byelarus.

There had been an unexpected and statistically significant increase in infant leukemia (age 0-1) in those children who were in the womb during the (whole body monitored) increased levels of Caesium-137 from Chernobyl. The beauty of this study (like the TSH study) is that, unlike the Sellafield child leukemias, there is really no possible alternative explanation.

It was the low "dose" of Caesium-137 that caused the leukemias. And the dose response trend was not a straight line:The effect at the very low "dose" was greater than at the very high "dose". Presumably because at the high doses the babies perished in the womb and could not, therefore, develop leukemia. I published the results and drew attention to the failure of the ICRP model in the International Journal of Environment and Public Health in 2009.

I had published a paper on this infant leukemia proof of the failure of the risk model inEnergy and Environment in 2000, and also presented it in the same year at the World Health Organisation conference in Kiev. It was there that I first really came up against the inversion of science deployed by the chiefs of the IAEA and UNSCEAR. The conference was videofilmed by Wladimir Tchertkoff and you can see his excellent documentary, which made it to Swiss TV, Atomic Lies, re-released in 2004 as Nuclear Controversies (link to youtube, 51 minutes).

For what is done by these people is to dismiss any evidence of increased rates of cancer or any other disease by shouting at it: "the doses were too low". In this way, reality is airbrushed away. What is this quantity "dose"? It is a simple physics-based quantity which represents the absorption of energy from radiation. One Sievert of gamma radiation is one Joule per kilogram of living tissue.

This might work for external radiation. But it doesn’t work for internal exposures to radioactive elements which can produce huge effects on cellular DNA at low average "doses". It is like comparing warming yourself in front of the fire with eating a hot coal. Or comparing a punch to stabbing. Same dose, same energy. Very different effects.

This "dose" scam has been used to dismiss real effects since it was invented in 1952 to deal with the exposures from nuclear weapons development and testing. For those who want to dig deeper into the science there is a recent book chapter I wrote in the book New Research Directions in DNS Repair.

The most scary instances of the sensitivity of the foetus to radiation are the sex ratio studies of Hagen Scherb, a German biostatician and member of the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR). With his colleague Christina Voigt he has published a series of papers showing a sudden change in the sex ratio of newborns after various radiation exposure incidents.

Sex ratio, the number of boys born to 1,000 girls is a well accepted indicator of genetic damage and perturbations in the normal ratio of 1,050 (boys to 100 girls) are due to the deaths before birth of radiation damaged individuals of one sex or the other depending on whether the father (sperm) or mother (egg) was most exposed.

We found such an effect (more girls) in our study of Fallujah, Iraq, where there was exposure to Uranium weapons. But Scherb and Voigt have looked at the major catastrophes, Chernobyl, the weapons tests fallout, near nuclear sites in data from many countries of the world. Huge datasets.

They estimate that millions have babies have been killed by these subtle internal radiation exposures. The nuclear military project is responsible for an awful lot of deaths. In years to come I believe this will eventually be seen as the greatest public health scandal in human history.

Of course, the exposure to radio-Iodine is associated with thyroid cancer in children. There was a big rise of thyroid cancer in Byelarus, the Ukraine and the Russian Republic after Chernobyl. The situation at Fukushima seems set to echo this, despite the reassurances from the authorities that there will be no effects.

Our paper reports 44 confirmed thyroid cancer cases in 0-18 year olds in Fukushima prefecture in the last six months (a figure that has since risen to 53). In the hypothyroidism paper we discuss the 44 cases relative to the population and calculate that this represents an 80-fold excess based on national data prior to the Fukushima Iodine releases.

This presents a severe challenge to Dr Wolfgang Weiss of the UN and WHO, who stated last year that no thyroid cancers could result from the Fukushima disaster as the "doses were too low". How does he explain the 80-fold increase in this normally rare condition?

Or rather, when will he admit that the entire scientific model that underpins his views is fraudulent? And that nuclear radiation is – roughly speaking – 1,000 times more dangerous to human health than he is letting on?

Chris Busby is the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk. For details and current CV see www.chrisbusbyexposed.org. For accounts of his work see www.greeenaudit.org, www.llrc.org and www.nuclearjustice.org. This article originally appeared in The Ecologist.

For statisticians:
* RR 1.21, 95% CI 1.04-1.42; p = .013
** RR 1.27, 95% CI 1.2-1.35; p = .00000001.

Mon, Nov 11 2013

Nuclear Street News

As Mitsubishi Heavy Industries turns its focus to restarting nuclear plants in Japan, the maker of the APWR and utility Luminant have shelved plans to build new reactors in Texas.

APWR rendering. Source: NRCIn 2008, Luminant applied for a combined license to add two reactors to the Comanche Peak nuclear plant near Fort Worth. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the project had been issued a final environmental impact statement, and a decision on the license was tentatively scheduled for 2015.

The NRC is also considering a license for the APWR design, but on Friday the Dallas Morning News reported that MHI would "slow the development of their design control document by several years.” Consequently, Luminant will suspend its COL application, although the company is not withdrawing it entirely. A Luminant statement quoted by the Morning News also noted that the utility “understand(s) the current economic reality of low Texas power prices driven in large part by the boom in natural gas."

The 1,620 megawatt APWRs would join two other pressurized water reactors at the site licensed in the early 1990s.

Cache of spent fuel rods grows at Comanche Peak as U.S. disposal stalemate drags on

The Comanche Peak nuclear power plant near Glen Rose uses specially designed cooling pools to store its spent uranium. With no permanent storage site designated by the federal government and Comanche Peak’s pools nearing capacity last year, workers began moving the rods into concrete casks for storage a half mile from the reactors.

03 August 2013

By JAMES OSBORNE Staff Writer
josborne@dallasnews.com
Dallas Morning News

GLEN ROSE — On a reinforced slab of concrete half a mile from Comanche Peak’s two nuclear reactors, armed guards in towers keep constant watch over rows of 19-foot-tall concrete casks.

Inside, uranium rods that once powered North Texas are in the earliest stages of a cooling process that could span hundreds of thousands of years. Technically, the casks are supposed to be headed to a U.S. Department of Energy facility.

But as the search for a national disposal site drags into its third decade, stockpiles of highly radioactive uranium continue to build up at Comanche Peak and nuclear reactors across the country.

With no solution in sight, Luminant, the power generating company that owns Comanche, has designed the storage area to take all the plant’s spent fuel until its license expires two decades from now and hold it into perpetuity.

"The casks will sit here, at least until the federal government decides to create a permanent storage facility," said Craig Montgomery, the plant’s project engineering manager.
Four years after a long-planned underground facility at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain was shelved amid fierce opposition in that state, the process of finding a repository for the nuclear power industry’s spent fuel is back at square one.

At a U.S. Senate hearing last week, Natural Resources and Energy Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., urged action on bipartisan legislation to bypass the Energy Department and create a new federal agency to oversee the task.

"It’s been three decades," he said. "If anything, there is less confidence now in the government’s ability to solve these problems."
75,000 tons

By the latest count, there are more than 75,000 tons of spent uranium stored at nuclear power plants around the country, dating to the early days of the industry in the 1960s.
Comanche Peak lies on a manmade lake about 80 miles southwest of Dallas. It is, along with the South Texas Project near Bay City, one of two nuclear plants in Texas. At only 23 years in operation, it is also one of the younger facilities in the country.

Energy Future Holdings is the parent company of Luminant.

The plant was designed to store its spent rods in specially designed cooling pools until the federal government eventually retrieved them. But with those pools nearing capacity last year, workers began slowly moving the used rods into concrete casks for storage. The casks are so heavy it takes a custom-built transporter two hours to move one less than a mile.

The ad-hoc system is in place at most every plant in the country. And while far from ideal, it poses no particular safety risk, said Mark Deinert, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

"Eventually you will decommission the facilities, and you don’t want to leave [radioactive waste] in 64 different sites around the country," he said. "In principle, those casks are really safe storage places. The stuff is really well contained from the environment."

Federal costs

But keeping the nuclear waste at the plants could cost the federal government tens of billions of dollars.

In the early 1980s, Congress passed legislation establishing an industry-backed fund to build a disposal site and stating that within 15 years the federal government would begin picking up the spent fuel. When the deadline came and went, the power companies sued, claiming breach of contract, and in some cases have won large judgments.
So far, the federal government has spent close to $3 billion paying off the power plants. They will probably spend $17 billion more, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said at Tuesday’s hearing.

"The dry storage casks are a million dollars apiece, and we have to load them and guard them indefinitely," said Jay Silberg, a Washington attorney who represented power companies in some of the litigation. "It’s appalling how long this has been hanging around."

The legislation introduced last month hopes to end that impasse, but skepticism is rife.

Temporary sites

Already, interests groups are picking the bill apart. Environmentalists are opposed to a provision creating temporary storage sites for the spent fuel — sites they fear will turn into permanent facilities by default.

"Waste could be shipped around the country to some parking lot somewhere with no sense there’s going to be a permanent solution," said Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, an anti-nuclear advocacy group.

"Once the waste is somewhere, no one else is going to want it."

And then there’s the larger issue of who would ever agree to house a permanent disposal site. Scientists believe spent uranium rods could produce radiation for hundreds of thousands of years, through earthquakes and changes in government and scientific understanding.

Attempting to avoid a repeat of Yucca Mountain, the crafters of the new federal legislation have given local and state authorities full veto power over any proposed disposal site. There is hope economic incentives could bring some communities to the table, but no one is certain.

"I’m not sure how that’s going to work," Silberg said when asked about the local approval provision. "That [the legislation] got drafted at all is kind of an accomplishment."

Follow James Osborne on Twitter at @osborneja.