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Author Topic: Nuclear Toxic Pollution Today  (Read 51 times)

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AGelbert

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Nuclear Toxic Pollution Today
« on: November 13, 2022, 04:21:38 pm »
NOVEMBER 11, 2022 Ralph Nader Radio Hour

BY RALPH NADER

The Most Toxic Place in America: An Interview with Joshua Frank

Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America is now available in the CounterPunch Store.

« Last Edit: November 13, 2022, 04:23:09 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

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AGelbert

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COUNTERPUNCH

MARCH 3, 2023 BY JOHN LAFORGE

Photograph Source: IAEA Imagebank – CC BY-SA 2.0

Japan to Delay Ocean Dumping of Contaminated Waste Water from Fukushima

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno announced in January that his government would delay its plan to pump over 1.37 million tons of watery radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean from the devastated six-reactor complex at Fukushima-Daiichi. With the country facing harsh international pressure to cancel the dumping, Matsuno acknowledged “the need to gain public support,” for the plan, the Associated Press reported January 12. The wicked water is now being collected in large tanks that were hastily built near the wrecked reactors.

Fierce criticism of the deliberate pollution scheme has come from China , South Korea , other Pacific Rim countries, scientists , environmental groups, UN human rights experts, and the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), an alliance of 17 Pacific island nations. Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also indicated that the government wants a postponement of the dumping operation — designed by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) — until it is “verifiably safe to do so,” Thomas Heaton reported February 16 for Civil Beat.

The PIF, independent states where according to Reuters up to half of the world’s tuna is sourced, was crucial in forcing Japan’s apparent retreat. The PIF warned that    contaminating the Pacific could harm the fishing that its economies depend on. Mary Yamaguchi reported on January 12 for the AP: “Some scientists say the impact of long-term, low-dose exposure to tritium and other radionuclides on the environment and humans is still unknown and the release plan should be delayed. They say tritium affects humans more when it is consumed in fish.” A scientific expert panel assembled by the PIF urged a reconsideration of the dumping “because it was not supported by data and more information was needed,” Ken Buesseler, with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said in January.

Japan announced in April 2021 that it would allow Tepco to pump the nearly 1.4 million tons of liquid radioactive waste into the public commons of the Pacific Ocean beginning in spring 2023. Tepco says it intends to dilute the material and pump it into the sea for the next 30 to 40 years using an underground tunnel now under construction. Media attention has focused on the tritium (radioactive hydrogen) in the wastewater which cannot be removed by Tepco’s (failed) filtering system and has generally ignored mention of the long-lived carbon-14 in the water, which likewise cannot be removed.

Often unreported about the plan is the failure of Tepco’s wastewater filer system, dubbed the “Advanced Liquid Processing System,” which has not removed the dozens of long-lived radioactive substances — including ruthenium, cobalt-60, strontium-90, cesium-137, and even plutonium – that the company said it would filter.

The water becomes radioactively contaminated (150 tons more every day) after being poured over hundreds of tons of melted, ferociously radioactive uranium — and in reactor #3 plutonium — fuel, the hot wreckage amassed deep inside the foundations of the three destroyed nuclear reactors, units 1, 2 and 3. All three suffered catastrophic meltdowns following the Great Tohoku Earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. Some of the contaminated waste is groundwater that reaches the melted fuel after pouring through cracks in the reactors’ foundations caused by the earthquake. Dr. Buesseler Science magazine in 2020, “Many other isotopes are in those tanks still, and over 70 percent [of 1.37 million tons] would have to be cleaned up further before they might consider even releasing….”

Moreover, reactor 3 which was packed with “mixed oxide” fuel made of combined uranium and plutonium, suffered a huge hydrogen explosion at 11 a.m. on March 14, and Tepco announced that on March 21 and 22, in soil collected on the Fukushima site, plutonium was detected. Hydrogen explosions also caused severe damage to reactors 1 and 2, and to the waste fuel pool of reactor 4. (Three additional hydrogen explosions caused severe damage: to reactor 1 on March 11, and to reactor 2 and to the waste fuel pool of reactor 4 on March 15.)

In April 2021, Cindy Folkers, a radiation and health hazards specialist at Beyond Nuclear in Maryland, told Brett Wilkins of Common Dreams, “TEPCO data show that even twice-through filtration leaves the water 13.7 times more concentrated with hazardous tritiumradioactive hydrogen — than Japan’s allowable standard for ocean dumping, and about one million times higher 😱 than the concentration of natural tritium in Earth’s surface waters.”

Secretary Matsuno said in his January statement that the delayed dumping plan “includes enhanced efforts to ensure safety.” This vague reassurance comes from the same authorities that caused the triple meltdown and consequently the worst radioactive contamination of the Pacific Ocean in history; it follows two years of iron-clad declarations from Tepco and government regulators that contaminating the ocean will be safe . The plan to add more radioactive poisons to the Pacific in order to save money has also been approved 🤦‍♂️ by the U.S. government and the UN International Atomic Energy Agency.

John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and edits its newsletter.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/03/japan-to-delay-ocean-dumping-of-contaminated-waste-water-from-fukushima/
« Last Edit: March 04, 2023, 10:01:50 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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CleanTechnica

June 30, 2023 By Michael Barnard 👍


Selected COMMENTS:

cfcfc
As a person who happens to have his undergrad in Psych, the social and psychological non since that has been going on since the FCC gave a license to Fox, has been an observation of a real world global experiment.
Quite a ways back I wrote:
https://fcfcfcwearesolar.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-reality-and-ramifications-of-being.html
It goes back to August 2020 and is targeted at the squatter. But the Psychology applies to any social "event" where an individual gets "conned" into doing something. It could be lying, taking drugs, joining a particular group (Military, Religion, Gang, take your pick) etc... Once the individual commits to "the cause", breaking free becomes very, very difficult. Couple that with the possible financial and social benefit of the "position", and you begin to understand why we have already fallen off the cliff.

AGelbert > cfcfc
Well said.
 Economist Steve Keen: "We need a World War Two mentality to deal with the real breakdown of nature."







 Have you been told by the 😈🦖 Deniers that  CO2 is plant food so MORE CO2 is 😒 "GOOD"? 🙄

Rocky 2
How many ways are there to lie using electrons? Let me count the ways ...
Written words
Images
Videos
Audio
Web
Online reviews
AI
Augmented Reality
Virtual Reality
Metaverse
An incomplete list that grows almost weekly. Too much money to be made twisting the truth.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” Many paths to the same destination.

Agelbert > Rocky 2
Excellent comment!

The 🐍 liars for 🦖 hire have been at this serial disingenuous propaganda for a long tme, but now these morally bankrupt defenders of profit over people and planet are discarding any restraint to their bold faced mendacity.
     


Scott
All of the lifecycle analysis are basically useless. It overcomplicates things and gives people numbers and assumptions to argue over.

The reality is much simpler. We need to decarbonize everything, mostly electrify everything. This needs to be done in parallel. Simple.

So I buy an EV. Now I'm not burning gas. Those emissions are now gone.

Now what about the power source? well maybe some coal plants in the mix. The answer? shut those down , and replace with non carbon sources. Or throw up some solar panels on your roof.

What about the steel used in the EV? answer...let's decarbonize that too. In the meantime keep buying EVs, even if the steel production is dirty, otherwise that steel is going into an ICE or oil tanker or whatever.

Instead if we fixate on lifecycle emissions analysis, and the order of things (eg. can't buy the EV until the grid is perfectly clean, can't clean the grid until the solar panel production is clean, can't build the solar panels until the steel used in them is clean.... etc.. we will never get anywhere)

Margie Lynch-Freshner > Scott
The trouble is that you are being logical and considering the good of the Earth and all the life on it. /s

But for the human race to live, then the fossil fuel industry MUST die. The aforementioned FF industry has no investment in anyone but their stockholders, and perhaps their customers. So they take a tiny bit of their multiple millions of daily profit (each FF company) and invest it in slow-walking the transition.

AGelbert > Margie Lynch-Freshner 
BINGO!





Margie Lynch-Freshner > AGelbert
Stealing these!

AGelbert > Margie Lynch-Freshner
Thank you. I've lots more you can use at my gallery. I just want more and more people to spread the unvarnishd truth about what we are faced with.
https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/index.php?action=gallery

Collectivist Action > AGelbert
"The horror!"
(Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now)

windbourne > AGelbert
One of the bigger problems would be fools like the goon squad. They are pushing to stop O&G drilling in America, while ignoring the fact that more than 1/3 of O&G goes into Chemicals. Oddly enough, the cheap O&G allows us to make such things as inexpensive EVs.
If the west kills off O&G, then we have to be prepared to send ALL manufacturing off to China, Russia, India, etc.
Oh, and neither CHina nor Russia are in a hurry to stop burning Coal or O&G.

Instead, we need to be focused on stopping the BURNING of O&G and Coal. A fast way to stop the shutdown and cause restarting of shutdown coal plants is to make nat gas expensive. A faster way to FORCE the west to increase burning of O&G along with coal, is kill off nuclear power. One of the cleanest forms of energy going. And yet, the goon squad and greens want to kill it off due to a lack of education and irrational FUD.

AGelbert > windbourne
"... more than 1/3 of O&G goes into Chemicals."

That is an inaccurate statement. Over 86% of every barrel of refined crude oil, and nearly 100% of all CH4 gas, are used for FUEL. Petrochemicals are 7.5% at most.

"... nuclear power. One of the cleanest forms of energy going."

There is absolutely NOTHING "clean" about nuclear power.


windbourne > AGelbert
You are as much to blame for AGW as is the far right.
https://cen.acs.org/business/petrochemicals/future-oil-chemicals-fuels/97/i8
5-7%? Nope.

Even asphalt, a chemical, is larger than 2-3%.

As to Nuclear power, it is a CLEAN ENERGY, and thankfully, it WILL BE COMING.
Be it from Russia and CHina, OR from the west with better quality and less chance of failures, IT WILL BE COMING.

In addition, it remains cheaper than is PV/Wind since you NEVER include the costs of storage, backing up with FF, or even the tear-down and disposal.

By 2025, the partners expect to have a facility that will make petrochemicals—9 million metric tons (t) of them—directly from 400,000 barrels (bbl) per day of Arabian light crude oil. Whereas most refineries convert just 5–20% of incoming oil into petrochemicals, some 45% of the output of the Yanbu facility will be chemicals, including olefins, aromatics, glycols, and polymers.

AGelbert > windbourne
Perhaps you will not think this reply to you is relevant to what you posted or your allegations on what is the "best course of action" for our civilization to follow. We are in a very deep pollution generating energy hole. Before you can claim this or that "new" technology can "clean up the dirty energy" now dooming most of the high order mammalian vertebrate species on this planet, including Homo sapiens, to mass die-offs from a severely degraded biosphere, it is common sense to stop digging.

Yes, of course using a larger percentage of hydrocarbon based chemical feedstock to make plastics, medicines, fertilizer and so on is a far better use for them than stupidly burning them for short term profit over planet. However, there is insufficent demand for those products at present to enable the 😈 Giant 🦖 Oil and 🦕  Gas Corporations to  turn away from there environmentally destructive 86% FUEL products ☠️ "business model". The fact that you ignore that irrefutable petrochemical feedstock economic reality is telling.

It is wishful thinking to expect the 🦖 Oil Majors will change their 😈 FUEL based modus operandi any time soon. And brother, WE ARE OUT OF TIME for doubletalk and guile based 🐍 disingenuous 😇 pie in the sky claims.

Furthermore, absolutely all cost benefit studies about ☠️ Nuclear Power Plants evidence that they are NOT carbon neutral, which means they are NOT "clean". I won't get into a back and forth with you about that but I will point out the INSURANCE on the ☠️ Nuclear Power Plants has ALWAYS been Government subsidized (i.e. HANDOUT funded by WE-THE-TAXPAYERS. 👎😠) Private insurers will not touch ☠️Nuclear Power Plant insurance with 10 foot pole because they KNOW the ☠️ risk. Yet, people like you totally ignore that 👎. Don't bother to "explain". Selective 😈 "externalization" of costs is par for the course for all 😈 dirty energy producers. And speaking of the costs of storage "not included" that you were so VOLUBLE about, Tell me, WHO is going to pay for baby sitting "used" nuclear fuel rods for the next CENTURY OR SO❓❗  Are nuclear power plant 😈 operators going to do it? NOT unless we-the-people are FORCED to PAY whatever thay want to charge 💰🤦‍♂️ for nuclear power based electricity. You know that, of course, but I am convinced you could care less, while disngenuously claiming the opposite👎😠.
 

Do you think mining for and "enriching" (an amazingly  Orwellian term for making a radioactive element more toxic in order to enable them to produce fission when molded into a fuel rod) radionuclides is done with "clean" energy? Repeatedly claiming that Nuclear Power is "CLEAN", in CAPS 🙄, no less, while ignoring the pollution produced when mining and refining (AND storing "used" fuel rods for a century or so❗) is irrational.

I've been hearing the "too cheap to meter" BALONEY from the likes of Nuclear power 🐍 proponents since I was a teenager 60 years teenager. It was disngenuous doubletalk then, and it is straight up mendacity now. Thank God most people here at CleanTechnica are not fooled.

I do not know how much they pay you for disseminating this happy talk wishful thinking about technology that does not exist yet, but I guarantee you that, if your recommendations are followed, you will, within LESS than a decade,  rue the day you supported this folly.

Jeremiah 17:9-10 (KJV) The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.

The Librivox Free Audiobook 'Tilda Jane is fiction, but the hardhips and hard hearts portrayed are all too real in human society.
« Last Edit: August 03, 2023, 09:50:15 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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COUNTERPUNCH

AUGUST 25, 2023 BY CHRIS BUSBY

Dr Chris Busby is the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Riskand the author of Uranium and Health – The Health Effects of Exposure to Uranium and Uranium Weapons Fallout (Documents of the ECRR 2010 No 2, Brussels, 2010). For details and current CV see chrisbusbyexposed.org. For accounts of his work see greenaudit.org, llrc.org and nuclearjustice.org.
Is the Release of Radioactive Contaminated Water From the Fukushima Nuclear Site to the Sea Acceptable? Is It Safe? 

Simulated model for dispersal of Cs-137, 81 days after release of water from Fukushima reactors. Source: Geomar.

The Japanese government, having apparently run out of storage space for the million tons of radioactively contaminated water have decided to pour it into the sea. This upsets a lot of people, including the governments of China and Korea, who understandably (on a moral level, perhaps) regard this decision as unacceptable. The Japanese (also the entire nuclear industry, plus the International Atomic Energy Agency, and a long list of self-identified experts) collectively say: no problems, the quantities are very small and pose no risk to health, neither to people nor marine life. The water has apparently been treated to remove the radioisotopes that the regulators believe pose the greatest risk, Strontium-90, Caesium-137, and Carbon-14. But to take out the Tritium is too expensive, and so the radioactive water is largely contaminated with large amounts of Tritium Oxide, in the form of Tritiated water HTO.

Tritium is the largest contaminant in terms of radioactivity, disintegrations per second, clicks on a counter, from the operation of all nuclear energy processes. The neutrons, which are central to nuclear energy, produce Tritium by various processes in reactors, and even outside reactors, where the nuclide, a radioactive form of Hydrogen, is formed by adding neutrons to cooling water and various other processes. Tritium is interesting stuff. Its radioactivity is extremely weak: it emits a very short-range beta electron and itself then changes into Helium-3. What? Yes, it is a form of hydrogen, but shoots off an electron and turns into Helium-3.  But we are mostly made of hydrogen, you say. Just So.

In terms of radioactivity, because the decay electron is so weak, the method that the risk agencies use to quantify radiation effects has classed Tritium as almost a non-event, in terms of health effects. This is most convenient for the nuclear industry, as it means that the exposure limits for Tritium (in terms of Becquerels per litre) are truly enormous, when compared with other radioactive waste. Tritium has a 12-year half life, so it hangs about. And since all life depends on water, and indeed all life mostly is water, hydrogen and oxygen, introducing radioactive water into the environment might seem to be a bad idea.

But No!  The low beta energy of Tritium allows the regulators to argue that the releases of huge amounts to the sea and rivers is safe. But the regulators are wrong. The system of analysis using the concept of “Absorbed Dose” is unscientific, dishonest and at the origin of a huge historic public health scandal that has caused hundreds of millions of deaths from cancer due to badly regulated releases of certain specific contaminants, and this includes Tritium, Carbon-14, Uranium (as particles) and certain other substances produced by nuclear processes. Many years ago, the regulator BEIR committee in USA under Prof Karl Z Morgan tried to change the limits for Tritium, but he was overruled because it would make the operation of nuclear power very difficult. He wrote about this in his book The Angry Genie. He was convinced that Tritium was a serious hazard.

So, lets look a bit closer at the quantities. The water in the tanks contains about 1500Bq/litre. A Becquerel is one decay per second. A litre of this water would produce 1500 clicks on a suitable measuring instrument (not a Geiger Counter, you won’t measure this stuff with a Geiger counter). Does that sound a lot? Would you drink this water? Even if the IAEA say it’s OK? Would They?

The total amount to be released is 1.3 million tons. Or we are told, 22 TeraBecquerel. That is 22,000,000,000,000Bq. Sounds a lot. It is a lot. But of course, the Pacific Ocean is large, and hopefully it will just go away through dilution. And it seems 22TBq, is small compared with the quantities released by the nuclear reprocessing plants in Europe. Sellafield in the UK pumped out 432 TBq a year (20 times more) to the Irish Sea and La Hague in France 10,000TBq/y (450 times). So that’s OK then. The experts say (and you can Google them on the Science Media Centre), or you can believe the IAEA, or the Japanese, that this stuff has never shown any health effects in places where it is poured into the sea. 

Wrong. 

I have spent a lot of my research life on looking at the effects of releasing radionuclides including Tritium to the sea. I spent three years in the late 1990s looking at cancer and child leukemia near the Irish Sea supported by the Irish State. Tritium is measured in surface water. This water is driven inshore to be inhaled by populations living within 1km of the sea. The radionuclides concentrate in the coastal sediment which is also driven ashore. You find the Tritium in fish, in shellfish, in blackberries, everywhere near the Irish Sea, near the Bristol Channel.  My Irish Sea study looked at small areas of Wales between 1974 and 1990 and found a clear and significant sea coast effect on cancer, particularly childhood cancer. I also, from, 1999 to 2006 studied cancer near the Bristol Channel, where there are also significant quantities of Tritium, and again, found a distinct increase in cancer near the sea. About 30% near the coast. That is a lot of ☠️ dead people.

I also studied leukemia in populations living near the nuclear submarine dockyard in Plymouth. Nuclear submarines are contaminated with Tritium and Carbon 14. They released it to the River Tamar and it ended up in the sediment. There was a significant leukemia cluster near the dockyard. This nuclear submarine operation was moved to Scotland some years ago. The Navy have a licence from the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency to discharge Carbon-14 and Tritium (1 million Becquerels a year from about 8 submarines). I have shown in a published paper in 2017 that sailors in nuclear ships in the USA Navy have a 10-fold excess risk of cancer.

There is another clincher: Professor Awadhesh Jha (who I met in Plymouth when I gave my report on the leukemia study, together with the UK Environment Minister Mr Michael Meacher) has studied the effects of Tritium on the genetic development of marine invertebrates living in the Tamar mud. Very small amounts of Tritium have profound effects of chromosomes and on development in these creatures. You can Google his research.

This is a big subject. But one I have studied in some depth. I was expert witness on a case in Korea some ten year ago where I was asked to advise the Korean parliament on the health effects of Tritium. The Koreans use the Canadian CANDU reactors which emit huge amounts of Tritium; there is a big cancer cluster around these sites.

Tritium is very dangerous. It gets inside you easily. It exchanges with normal hydrogen, sometimes it becomes organically (covalently) bound. It causes genetic damage at tiny conventional doses (calculated using the energy per unit mass, Joule/Kg formula of the International Commission on Radiological Protection, employed by the IAEA). Those people living near the seaside near the east coast of Japan, especially the estuaries, need to watch out. Don’t eat anything from the sea, or inside 1km from the coast. The radiation risk model that regulates Tritium is obsolete and wildly incorrect. The experts that say there are no effects in populations living near Tritium contamination need to look out of the window.

Finally, I was told something fascinating about Tritium by a colleague from Germany in 1998. Tritiated water has a much higher freezing point than ordinary water. So, when a fog appears as the air temperature drops. The initial fog is a pure Tritiated water vapour.

But I want to add something here. We have heard a lot about fake news. But there are scientists out there spinning the issue of radiation and health to levels of hysterical nonsense. An outfit called the Science Media Centre was set up by one Fiona Fox in the early 2000s. It was an operation intended to support the polluters and contaminators by fielding 🐍 dishonest scientists posing as experts to head off media stories about public health hazards. In examining this issue of Fukushima and the Tritium, I could not fail to google up three of these “experts” writing for the Science Media Centre on the issue. Tracking down their qualifications and experience as “experts” or their affiliations, was not hard—you can do this yourself. The funniest of the three was a certain Associate Professor 😈 Nigel Marks of Curtin University, Perth (What??Where??). Nigel tells us that on the basis of dose (and I suppose he has done the sums) that a “lifetimes worth of seafood from Fukushima is the radiation equivalent of one bite of a banana”. I am not going to unpack this nonsense—just to point out that it is wrong, dishonest, absurd and tendentious. And to warn everyone against these scientists. The web is stuffed full of 🐍😈 them. The ordinary people are correct to view them as idiots, and to ignore everything they say. Nuclear industry science is cartoon science, based on nonsense, and supported by twisted epidemiology. It is now dead in the water. But not before it has historically killed hundreds of millions of people.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/25/is-the-release-of-radioactive-contaminated-water-from-the-fukushima-nuclear-site-to-the-sea-acceptable-is-it-safe/
« Last Edit: August 26, 2023, 12:05:28 am by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12