‘Small’ Nuclear War Could Trigger Catastrophic Cooling

nuclear weapons, nuclear winter

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“Most people would be surprised to know that even a very small regional nuclear war on the other side of the planet could disrupt global climate for at least a decade and wipe out the ozone layer for a decade,”

By Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience Contributor

30 March 2014

http://news.yahoo.com/small-nuclear-war-could-trigger-catastrophic-cooling-181056235.html

Even a relatively small regional nuclear war could trigger global cooling, damage the ozone layer and cause droughts for more than a decade, researchers say.

These findings should further spur the elimination of the more than 17,000 nuclear weapons that exist today, scientists added.

During the Cold War, a nuclear exchange between superpowers was feared for years. One potential consequence of such a global nuclear war was “nuclear winter,” wherein nuclear explosions sparked huge fires whose smoke, dust and ash blotted out the sun, resulting in a “twilight at noon” for weeks. Much of humanity might eventually die…

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High school student finds radioactive kelp at 145 cpm

Most of the official reports about radiation have said that there have been no significant findings. There was a recent report of    one high school student in Canada likes her sushi, but wanted to be safe.   She convinced her father to buy her a Geiger Counter and she started testing her food.

Armed with a $600 Geiger counter bought by her dad, Delacruz studied a variety of seafoods – particularly seaweeds – as part of an award-winning science project that she will take to a national fair next month.   “Some of the kelp that I found was higher than what the International Atomic Energy Agency sets as radioactive contamination, which is 1,450 counts over a 10-minute period,” she said. “Some of my samples came up as 1,700 or 1,800.”  Delacruz said the samples that “lit up” the most were products from China that she bought in local grocery stores.   Her results caught the attention of judges at the Peace River Regional Science Fair, who moved her project along to the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Windsor, Ont., in May.

If a high school student can find evidence of radiation over 100 cpm, which is regarded as a danger level, how hard can it be to find such problems?   Maybe the officials who report no increased radiation do not want to find increased levels of radiation.

 

 

Global ethical crisis: nukes or life

For a clear discussion of the dangers of nuclear power read this essay by  Mitsuhei Murata, former Japanese Ambassador to Switzerland.  In part he says:

 Today mankind faces a crisis of civilization. The true cause is lack of ethics.  Fundamental ethics would prohibit the abuse and exhaustion of natural   resources leaving, permanently poisonous waste and enormous debt in its  wake. Global ethics requires maternal culture, respecting the environment and  interests of future generations.

There is a conflict now between the forces of destruction and the forces of life.  The atom was split to create a powerful weapon of destruction.   Although the promise was that nuclear reactors were to be safe, the reality of Mayak, Chernobyl, Three Mile Isalnd, and Fukushima has been that are not safe.

Thyroid cancer rates up 30 times in the youth exposed at Fukushima

There was a report in Evacuate Fukushima about thyroid cancer in young people:

By February 2014, a whooping 75 children out of roughly 270 000 are either confirmed or suspected to have contracted the disease. Toshihide Tsuda, a professor of epidemiology at Okayama University: “The rate at which children in Fukushima Prefecture have developed thyroid cancer can be called frequent because it is several times to several tens of times higher” [Based on Japan’s cancer registration statistics from 1975-2008 which show an annual average of 5-11 people in their late teens/early 20s developed thyroid cancer for every 1 million people] “Because there is the possibility that the number of cases could increase in the future, there is a need to implement measures now.”

Seventy-five per quarter million works out to about 300 per million.   Registry data shows one should predict about 10 per million.  The observed rate is then 30 times normal.  These findings are just three years after the event.   The rate is likely to climb for years.

Three Mile Island Followup

There was a recent report of followup of the disaster at Three Mile Island.

A professor with the University of North Carolina School of Public Health led a study of cancer cases within 10 miles of the facility from 1975-85. Dr. Steven Wing’s findings were published in the Journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in November 2003.

According to his report, hundreds of local residents questioned the NRC’s position that high-level radiation exposure as a result of TMI was impossible. People who lived near TMI reported metallic taste, nausea, vomiting diarrhea, erythema, hair loss, deaths of pets and farm and wild animals and damage to plants………………………..Lung cancer and leukemia rates were two to 10 times higher downwind of the TMI reactor than upwind…………………….

The article said that the NRC has said that no one  was injured at TMI.    Hundreds of residents have reported illnesses consistent with radiation sickness occurring at the same time.   This seems to be one more example in which the government is willing to collude with industry to lie to the people.

 

Public Service Board grants permit to Vermont Yankee

There was a report today that the Public Service Board has said that:

 The Vermont Public Service Board on Friday voted to authorize the operators of Vermont Yankee to close down the nuclear power plant by Dec. 31.

Since Entergy has decided to close on that date already, this decision is unlikely to have any impact.  Many activists had been hoping that the Public Service Board would have challenged Vermont Yankee to shut down sooner because of Vermont Yankees’ history of misleading the pubic.

The Connecticut River Watershed Council wrote a response  cited in the article that:

the Board also acknowledged that if the VY Station were going to operate for an additional eighteen years, the evidence put forward by CRWC, VNRC and the ANR might have led the Board to “conclude that Entergy VY had not met its obligation to demonstrate that the discharge would not adversely affect the water quality” of the Connecticut River. The PSB therefore recognized that there are concerns with the VY Station’s thermal discharge.

The question of thermal discharge has been previously discussed on this blog.   Thus, concerns remain on the part of the PSB about Vermont Yankee, but VY is apparently free to do whatever they want.

TEPCO reports death at Fukushima

There was a report in Russian Times that  a worker had died while digging a ditch at the Fukushima disaster:

The operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, TEPCO, suspended the cleanup at the facility after one of the workers died while digging a ditch Friday….A man in his fifties was buried under gravel as he was digging near the nuclear plant’s storage area, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.

      This sounds like a land slide or a sink hole.    It is well known that they have been added tons of water to keep the reactors cool.  Enough water into soil makes so unstable land, and it is prone to collapse.   This is the recipe for mud season, and has been discussed on this blog.   .   One would anticipate that this will be a common problem in the area around the Fukushima disaster.

DIY Electric Clothes drier

    There are many problems associated with  electric clothes dryers.  They require lots of energy.   Note the large 220 Volt circuit breaker.   The EIA reports that clothes dryers use about 6 % of the household energy. Further,  during the winter,  when the temperature gets below freezing, the air in doors of homes gets very dry.  Mucus membranes in the nose dry.   Furniture cracks,  and plants get dry.  Static electricity develops. In this situation consider what happens when  the moist clothes come out of the washing machine. The clothes are placed in a dryer; the moisture is further heated, and blown out of the vent to outdoors.   This moist warm air must be replaced: cold dry air is drawn from outside into the house, and the house gets cooler and drier.  Then the house heat has to  go on to warm the air.  By this process dryers cool homes.   

    Instead, I use an indoor clothes rack to dry my clothes.   Generally, this drying  is a slow process and is one of the complaints about drying indoors.   I use my summer fan on the clothes  on drying rack.  With its gentile breeze the clothes will dry in a few hours, humidity will be added to the air, and heat will not be lost.  

     

Chernobyl forests: decay has been slowed.

There was a recent report in the Smithsonian about the increased leaf litter in the damaged area around Chernobyl.

The team decided to investigate this question in part because of a peculiar field observation. “We have conducted research in Chernobyl since 1991 and have noticed a significant accumulation of litter over time,” the write. Moreover, trees in the infamous Red Forest—an area where all of the pine trees turned a reddish color and then died shortly after the accident—did not seem to be decaying, even 15 to 20 years after the meltdown….“Apart from a few ants, the dead tree trunks were largely unscathed when we first encountered them,” says Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, and lead author of the study. “It was striking, given that in the forests where I live, a fallen tree is mostly sawdust after a decade of lying on the ground.”

The results were telling. In the areas with no radiation, 70 to 90 percent of the leaves were gone after a year. But in places where more radiation was present, the leaves retained around 60 percent of their original weight. By comparing the mesh with the panty hose-lined bags, they found that insects play a significant role in getting rid of the leaves, but that the microbes and fungi played a much more important role.

Other studies have found that the Chernobyl area is at risk of fire, and 27 years’ worth of leaf litter, Mousseau and his colleagues think, would likely make a good fuel source for such a forest fire. This poses a more worrying problem than just environmental destruction: Fires can potentially redistribute radioactive contaminants to places outside of the exclusion zone, Mousseau says. “There is growing concern that there could be a catastrophic fire in the coming years,” he says.

 For much of history,  a disaster ended when the event was over.   Typhoons, forest fires, earth quakes caused catastrophic damage, but then the event was over, and recovery could begin.   Radiation of the environment  is an event that never stops.   A major fire in this litter would be able to send radiation into the atmosphere and around the world.

 

The Truth is a Victim in a Nuclear Society

There was a recent report about Mako Oshidori, who is a journalist in Japan.    She reported about a nurse who works in Fukushima.   The nurse said:

As of now, there are multiple NPP workers who have died, but only the ones who died on the job are reported publicly. Some of them have died suddenly while off work, for instance, during the weekend or in their sleep, but none of their deaths are reported. Not only that, they are not included in the worker death count. For example, there are some workers who quit the job after a lot of radiation exposure, such as 50, 60 to 70 mSv, and end up dying a month later, but none of these deaths are either reported, or included in the death toll. This is the reality of the NPP workers. There is too much pressure for me to write an article on this issue, so not many Japanese people know about it.

She also reports about a Russian who came to visit Fukushima:

This is from when I visited Fukushima Prefecture in 2012 with a Belarusian researcher, Alexey Nesterenko, who is the head of BELRAD.    He was most surprised about an elementary school in Date City, Fukushima Prefecture. As you can see, in the section right by the fence next to the swimming pool, the radiation monitor is registering 27.6 μSv/h.

He asked me if the children at the school had evacuated, and I told him they were in class right then. He was extremely astonished and said that was the radiation level which would necessitate immediate, mandatory evacuation of the children in Belarus. He said he thought Japan was a wealthy country and wondered why children were in class there as if nothing ever happened. This area has an especially high radiation level. There are hot spots like this in Fukushima.

She goes on to report that:

This documents is in regards to various research such as health studies carried out in the disaster areas and the contaminated areas after the Great East Japan earthquake, and it basically says detailed study should not be done without permission for the reason of avoiding burden on the residents. Before this document was released in May 2011, various university researchers and research institutions were in Iitate Village and other heavily contaminated areas in Fukushima Prefecture in March and April. Many research teams left Fukushima after this document was released. Currently, a large-scale health survey in Japan is being conducted only at Fukushima Medical University, designated by the Japanese government. Other studies are hardly being conducted now.

Lastly, I would like to talk about the Act on Protection of Specified Secrets. Last December, the Diet passed the law called the Act on Protection of Specified Secrets, which actually has numerous issues. The government explains the law mostly concerns Specified Secrets about terrorism, but indeed it would punish not only government officials and national researchers who leak Specified Secrets designated by the government but also individuals who instigated the leak. The issue about this act is that it has not at all been decided what constitutes Specified Secrets or what kind of punishments will be applied to those who leak them. The details are to be determined over the course of this year: The only thing determined is that those who leak whatever is considered Specified Secrets, which is undecided at this point, would be punished.

These are multiple specific examples of how the nuclear industry is trying to shape the reality of the nuclear issues.   First, do not collect data.   Second, if incriminating data is found, ignore the results.  Control who collects the data.   Make the data illegal to share.  These issues are the hidden costs of a nuclear society.   The truth must be kept from the people by the government for the corporations.  As Mussolini famously said: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”