Archive for the ‘News’ Category
Proposed Andrews Truck Route Debate Heats Up
May 22, 2011
Nick Lawton
KWES NewsWest 9
ANDREWS – More and more truck traffic coming to Andrews has sparked the now controversial proposed truck reliever route debate there.
The project planning was started back in 2007 and is now poised to take off this year if the funding comes through.
The 13-mile route circling the city will have two lanes going opposite directions for large trucks to travel with a narrow turn lane in the middle.
It’s meant to keep them off of the main city streets.
"We’ve had a 60-80% increase in truck traffic in Andrews in the last five years," Andrews City Manager, Glen Hackler, said. "That means about 1,000-1,200 trucks a day on Main St."
Andrews officials said that can be a safety hazard to other cars just making their errands around town.
The project will cost $6 million and the city will have an election in May to raise the sales tax by a quarter to help pay it off.
If it’s approved, the city will issue $6 million dollars in bonds for a period not exceeding 20 years in the Fall and construction on the route will begin in January 2012.
But there’s a stretch of homes on the North side of town on County Road 2500, about a quarter-of-a-mile long, where the route is cutting too close.
One Andrews family in that area has the route coming within 14 feet of their front lawn and said it’s too unsafe for them.
"You’re gonna have those trucks passing by every day within 40 feet of my son’s room where he’s gonna be asleep," 15-year Andrews resident, Justin Johnson, said.
For the Johnson’s, they don’t want their children to be in danger just by playing out in the front yard but Andrews officials said there will be measures in place on that stretch to protect those homes.
"Putting curb and gutter that would help slow and calm the traffic in that area, a masonry decorative fence with some sound baffling, reducing the speed limit to 35 along that quarter-of-a-mile section," Hackler said.
The Johnson’s said they’ve yet to hear from a city official. They fear there won’t be a safe alternative, and if the sales tax is approved and the route built, they might have to move.
But officials said there wasn’t a better place to put the new route and now the wait is on to see if the funding will be voted in.
"There’s no perfect route," Hackler said. "What we’ve done is three or four years of study, evaluation and work and brought it to this point. Now it’s up to the voters to decide."
"Take a minute to put themselves in my shoes," Johnson said. "And how would they like 600-800 trucks a day passing within 40 feet of their home where their children play out in their yard."
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Japan’s nightmare-in-progress overshadowed by media mush
MAY 19, 2011
Biologist estimates 900,000 deaths
By Geoff Olson
Vancouver Courier
What a beginning to 2011. For the past few month’s it’s been a stomach-churning roller coaster of victory and defeat, with a detour through Malcolm Gladwell’s Funhouse of Tipping Points. It began with the pro-democracy uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, which emboldened other Arab states to try out dictator whack-a-mole. In contrast, 40 per cent of Canadians optimistically chose to reelect a secretive leader charged with contempt of Parliament.
For comic relief, we had Charlie Sheen’s camera-friendly meltdown, bundled with his "Torpedo of Truth" tour. Osama bin Laden, cornered, killed, and given a counterintuitive burial at sea, supplied some couch-potato catharsis south of the border. The Royal Wedding enchanted some of Her Majesty’s subjects in the North. Locally, we had Christy Clark’s byelection bonding with the people of Point Grey, consummated by her close-lipped campaign.
Yet the biggest story of all, which has all but spiralled down the media memory hole, is the ongoing disaster in Japan following the March 11 tsunami. The Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) are attempting desperate, finger-in-the-dike measures in the irradiated zone of Fukushima prefecture, after upgrading the crisis to a Chernobyl-level 7. This week, TEPCO admitted that reactor 1 experienced a meltdown within hours of the quake, and reactors 2 and 3 have likely melted down as well. Building number 4 threatens to collapse. Radioactive material is leaking into the Pacific, into the atmosphere and into Japan’s groundwater.
On top of this, there is the issue of the damaged cooling ponds with their spent nuclear fuel rods. In videos of the March 14 explosion at reactor 3, an immense amount of solid material is seen rising with the plume and falling to Earth. Fuel may have been ejected from the pool up to one mile from the plant, according to a leaked NRC report. The fuel rods were likely launched into the air out of their containment vessels "like the muzzle from a gun," believes Arnold Gundersen, a chief nuclear engineer with the energy consulting firm Fairwinds Associates. This would account for TEPCO’s discovery of plutonium in soil samples taken from outside the plant.
Plutonium is very nasty stuff. You may remember the protests leading up to the 1997 NASA launch of a probe containing 72.3 pounds of the lethal element. An accident would have been catastrophic, scientists argued. Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku estimated up to 200,000 deaths from an accident. Other scientists predicted up to 40 million deaths in the event of a dispersal of plutonium from the Cassini probe in an Earth "flyby" accident. We’re talking about only 72 pounds of the material.
With the explosion of reactor 3, radioactive elements were "aerosolized" into a fine mist that can make its way across the Pacific, says Gundersen. Scientists have detected trace amounts of radioactive iodine, believed to be from Fukushima, as far away as Glasgow and Pennsylvania. So how much plutonium, the most toxic element of all, was in the Fukushima spent fuel? With an estimated 600,000 fuel rods in the entire complex, and six per cent of the fuel rods from reactor 3 containing a mix of uranium and plutonium, it’s certainly much more than that of the infamous Cassini probe. Who to believe? The estimates of nuclear health risks and fatalities are all over the map. In a recent debate on Democracy Now, Guardian columnist George Monbiot repeated the UN figures of 43 deaths in total from the Chernobyl disaster. Antinuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott responded with Russian biologists’ calculations of 900,000 deaths, with more to come due to the decades-plus half-life of nuclear isotopes, and the incubation period for cancers and other diseases. (A 2007 BBC documentary on Chernobyl quotes Russian military sources that of 500,000 emergency workers in the Chernobyl area, 20,000 have already died, and 200,000 are officially disabled. This doesn’t include other civilian numbers.)
I have to wonder, as the media flits from marrying royals to manic sitcom stars, why there isn’t more focus on what appears to be the worst ecological disaster in human history. The atmosphere doesn’t heed lines on a map, so how dangerous is the invisible threat issuing from Fukushima to the planet’s population? And how can Obama continue to endorse the much-hyped "nuclear renaissance" for atomic energy production in the U.S., with this nightmare-in-progress?
Has the unthinkable truly happened, and is there a global, institutional inability to address it properly?
www.geoffolson.com
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U.S. Was Warned on Vents Before Failure at Japan’s Plant
May 18, 2011
By MATTHEW L. WALD
New York Times
WASHINGTON — Five years before the crucial emergency vents at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant were disabled by an accident they were supposed to help handle, engineers at a reactor in Minnesota warned American regulators about that very problem.
One of the two engineers, Anthony Sarrack, notified staff members at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the design of venting systems at his reactor and others in the United States, similar to the ones in Japan, was seriously flawed. He later left the industry in frustration because managers and regulators did not agree.
Mr. Sarrack said that the vents, which are supposed to relieve pressure at crippled plants and keep containment structures intact, should not be dependent on electric power and workers’ ability to operate critical valves because power might be cut in an emergency and workers might be incapacitated. Part of the reason the venting system in Japan failed — allowing disastrous hydrogen explosions — is that power to the plant was knocked out by a tsunami that followed a major earthquake.
Mr. Sarrack’s memo was found in the archives of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by David Lochbaum, a boiling-water-reactor expert who works for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group based in Cambridge, Mass., that is generally hostile to nuclear power.
"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission cannot claim ignorance about this one," he said.
Plant managers and nuclear regulators are warned about far more problems each year than actually occur, but in this case, the cautionary note was eerily prescient and could rekindle debate over whether automatic venting systems are safer alternatives.
While staff members at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission considered Mr. Sarrack’s suggestion, they decided against it.
On Wednesday, a commission spokesman, Scott Burnell, said the commission still believed that existing venting systems were a "reasonable and appropriate means" of dealing with a rise in pressure after an accident. But he has also said that the commission’s staff members are studying the events at Fukushima for "lessons learned," and that they had identified means of "reducing risk even further" by making the vents "more passive." He said the staff had not yet chosen a way to do that.
In Japan Reactor Failings, Danger Signs for the U.S.
May 17, 2011
By HIROKO TABUCHI, KEITH BRADSHER and MATTHEW L. WALD
New York Times
TOKYO — Emergency vents that American officials have said would prevent devastating hydrogen explosions at nuclear plants in the United States were put to the test in Japan — and failed to work, according to experts and officials with the company that operates the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant.
The failure of the vents calls into question the safety of similar nuclear power plants in the United States and Japan. After the venting failed at the Fukushima plant, the hydrogen gas fueled explosions that spewed radioactive materials into the atmosphere, reaching levels about 10 percent of estimated emissions at Chernobyl, according to Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency.
Venting was critical to relieving pressure that was building up inside several reactors after the March 11 tsunami knocked out the plant’s crucial cooling systems. Without flowing water to cool the reactors’ cores, they had begun to dangerously overheat.
American officials had said early on that reactors in the United States would be safe from such disasters because they were equipped with new, stronger venting systems. But Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the plant, now says that Fukushima Daiichi had installed the same vents years ago.
Japan’s Tepco: History of nuclear disaster cover-ups
22 April 2011
Mike Head
Aliran Monthly
A huge explosion at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan following a major earthquake and tsunami
The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) is the conglomerate at the centre of Japan’s nuclear radiation emergency at Fukushima. Its operations over the past several decades epitomise the government-backed pursuit of corporate profit, at the direct expense of lives, health and safety.
Tepco is the fourth largest power company in the world, and the biggest in Asia, operating 17 nuclear reactors and supplying one-third of Japan’s electricity. It has a long, documented history of serious safety breaches, systemic cover-ups of potentially fatal disasters, persecution of whistle-blowers, suppression of popular opposition and use of its economic and advertising clout to silence criticism.
Among the company’s record of more than 200 proven falsifications of safety inspection reports are several relating to the stricken Fukushima Daiichi facility itself. In 2002, Tepco admitted to falsifying reports about cracks that had been detected in core shrouds at reactors number 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, as far back as 1993.
The current crisis at Fukushima, caused by last Friday’s magnitude 9 earthquake, is not the company’s first quake-related breakdown. In 2007, a much smaller 6.8-magnitude tremor caused a fire and radiation leaks that shut down Tepco’s seven-reactor Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant, the world’s biggest. The company later admitted that the plant had not been built to withstand such shocks.
Tepco’s record is a case study in the complicity of successive Japanese governments and regulatory agencies over the past 40 years in the safety failures of nuclear power companies. With the backing of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which ruled Japan virtually continuously from 1955, when it was formed, to 2009, the business elite aggressively pursued the construction of more than 50 nuclear plants over the objections of residents and environmentalists, in order to secure the energy needs of Japanese capitalism, despite the patent dangers of doing so in one of the world’s most earthquake-prone zones.
The known nuclear cover-ups—undoubtedly just the tip of the iceberg—began to emerge in 1995. In that year, an official falsification of the extent of a sodium leak and fire at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency’s Monju fast-breeder reactor caused public outrage. It was revealed that Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (PNC), the agency then in charge of Monju, had altered reports, edited a videotape taken immediately after the accident, and issued a gag order to employees. After a long series of court battles, the government allowed the reactor to restart last year.
In 1999, one of Japan’s worst nuclear accidents occurred at the Tokaimura uranium processing plant, 120 kilometres north of Tokyo. An uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction at the plant, operated by JCO, a subsidiary of Sumitomo Metal Mining, killed two employees and leaked radioactivity over the countryside. Fifty-five workers were exposed to radiation and 300,000 people ordered to stay indoors, after the circumvention of safety standards caused a leak. Government officials later said safety equipment at the plant had been missing.
Three years later, Tepco was exposed as falsifying safety data, including at the ageing Fukushima Daiichi facility. Initially, the company admitted 29 cases of falsification. Eventually, however, it admitted to 200 occasions, over more than two decades between 1977 and 2002, involving the submission of false technical data to authorities. According to the Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), Tepco had attempted to hide cracks in reactor vessel shrouds in 13 units, including Fukushima Daiichi (6 reactors), Fukushima Daini (4 reactors), and Kashiwazaki-Kariwa (7 reactors).
Tepco’s wrongdoings were only revealed as a result of whistle-blowing by a former engineer at General Electric (GE), a company with close connections to Tepco. GE built the plants and has been contracted by TEPCO to carry out inspection and operational matters for decades. Two years earlier, the engineer had reported the safety frauds to the relevant ministry, MITI, the forerunner of the current Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), only to have the government supply his name to Tepco and conspire with the company to bury the information.
Hitachi, which conducted the air tightness checks for Tepco, was also implicated in the manipulation of test results. On two occasions, the pressure readings in Fukushima’s No 1 reactor were unstable, so workers were instructed to inject air into the container to make it appear that pressure was being maintained.
Nevertheless, relying on Tepco’s own calculations, NISA maintained that there should be no problem regarding the safety of the plants. The agency inspects nuclear plants only every 13 months, and leaves the inspection of the shrouds and pumps around the reactor cores to each company.
The LDP government feigned concern at these blatant safety breaches, with Seiji Murat, Vice Minister for Economy, Trade and Industry, declaring the company had "betrayed the public’s trust over nuclear energy". Tepco’s senior executives duly resigned, and their successors formally pledged to take all necessary measures to prevent any further fraud. By the end of 2005, generation had been restarted at all suspended plants, with government approval.
A little over a year later, in March 2007, the company announced that an internal investigation had revealed a large number of unreported incidents. These included an unexpected unit criticality in 1978 and additional systematic false reporting, which had not been uncovered in 2002. Once more, the firm was publicly remorseful. "We apologise from the bottom of our heart for causing anxiety to the public and local residents," Tepco vice-president Katsutoshi Chikudate said. The company was permitted to keep operating.
Several months later, in July 2007, the 6.8 quake that shut down Tepco’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant demonstrated the real nature of the company’s assurances. The earthquake, 10 kilometres offshore from the Honshu west coast plant, caused subsidence of the main structure, ruptured water pipes, started a fire that took five hours to extinguish, and triggered radioactive discharges into the atmosphere and sea. The company initially said there was no release of radiation, but admitted later that the quake had released radiation and had spilled radioactive water into the Sea of Japan. Seismologist Katsuhiko Ishibashi warned that had the epicentre been 10 kilometres to the southwest and at magnitude 7, Kashiwazaki City would have experienced a major emergency.
Amid a public outcry, the government again put on a display of anger. According to media reports, a senior Japanese government official hauled Tepco’s president into his office "for a rare and humiliating verbal caning". The official was "furious" because Tepco management had "initially misled his officials—and not for the first time, either—about the extent of breakdowns at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa".
The 2007 closure of Tepco’s largest nuclear plant contributed to the company posting its first ever losses over the past two years. It is now the world’s most indebted utility, with current net borrowings of $88 billion. This financial crisis has driven management to slash costs and boost output from its other plants, no doubt also at the expense of safety. Tepco’s "2020 Vision" document pledges to "accelerate cost reduction efforts" and raise the non-fossil fuel (mainly nuclear) proportion of its generation from 33 to 50 percent.
The current meltdown and radiation emergency at Fukushima is the inevitable product of the protracted record of Tepco-government collaboration, which is being continued by the present Democratic Party of Japan administration. Prime Minister Naoto Kan, like his LDP predecessors, has publicly professed outrage at Tepco’s repeated cover-ups in this latest—and by far the most serious—disaster. Reuters reported: "Japan’s prime minister was furious with executives at a power company at the centre of the nuclear crisis for taking so long to inform his office about a blast at its stricken reactor complex, demanding ‘what the hell is going on?’.
Kan’s "fury" is purely for public consumption. In recent months, the Kan government has stepped up a campaign to help Japanese power companies, led by Tepco, to win contracts to build nuclear reactors overseas. As part of that push, METI, the parent ministry of the nuclear safety agency NISA, has boasted that Japan maintains a "healthy regulatory environment". Last August, Tepco chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, together with other Japanese power company executives, was part of a delegation, headed by then METI minister, Masayuki Naoshima, which signed deals to build two nuclear reactors in Vietnam.
With the government’s backing, Tepco also remains closely interlocked with other giant Japanese companies. Just weeks ago, on February 23, Tepco and Mitsubishi Corporation formed a partnership to take over the management of Electricity Generating Public Company Limited (EGCO), one of the largest power companies in Thailand.
The company’s recent expansion extends to the US. In May 2010, Tepco announced an agreement for the planned enlargement of the South Texas Project nuclear plant, in partnership with Nuclear Innovation North America LLC (NINA), a nuclear development company jointly owned by NRG Energy, Inc. and Toshiba.
Within Japan, Tepco is planning to open six new nuclear reactors, including units 7 and 8 of the Fukushima Daiichi plant (in 2014 and 2015), and units 1 and 2 of the Higashidori plant, facing the Pacific Ocean in northern Japan (in 2015 and 2018). Last month, residents protested as the company commenced construction, in the dark of night, on two nuclear plants at Iwai Island, in the Inland Sea south of Honshu, Japan’s main island, and close to Kyushu island, where a volcano burst this week.
Scenes of the Iwai Island protest were broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s 7.30 television program on 15 March. The footage was recorded by documentary film-maker Hitomi Kamanaka, who resigned from the state broadcaster NHK after it refused to run her material criticising the country’s nuclear power companies.
Tepco has been shielded by governments and the media for decades because, as the World Socialist Web Site has pointed out ("The implications of the Japanese catastrophe"), the Japanese ruling elite turned to the breakneck development of nuclear power in the late 1960s and early 1970s to shield itself from dependence on imported oil. Now more than 40 years-old, Tepco’s Fukushima Daiichi plant was the very first to begin operational generation, on March 26, 1970.
Tepco’s litany of deliberate violations of the most elementary safety standards, enabled by the collusion of one government after another, is a graphic demonstration of the intolerable danger posed to the world’s population by the capitalist economic order itself, based as it is on the extraction of private profit at all costs.
This document contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. SEED Coalition is making this article available in our efforts to advance understanding of ecological sustainability, human rights, economic democracy and social justice issues. We believe that this constitutes a "fair use" of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond "fair use", you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.