This situation continues to be an emergency, with increasing radioactive contamination of air, sea, water sources, and land. A news media blackout prevents vital news updates. Many actions are needed to alert the public to this active situation and solve the growing radiation which is harming all life worldwide
TELEVISION EVENT is an archive-based feature documentary that views the dramatic climax of the Cold War through the lens of a commercial television network, as it narrowly succeeds in producing the most watched, most controversial made-for-TV movie, THE DAY AFTER (1983).
With irreverent humor and sobering apocalyptic vision, this film reveals how a commercial broadcaster seized a moment of unprecedented television viewership, made an emotional connection with an audience of over 100 million and forced an urgent conversation with the US President on how to collectively confront and resolve the most pressing issue of the time – nuclear proliferation.
MY TEAM PRODUCED THIS FILM IN THE HOPES OF WAKING UP THE PUBLIC, SO WE DON’T SLEEPWALK INTO THE APOCALYPSE. THE DAY AFTER PROVED THAT, HOWEVER POLARIZED WE MAY BE IDEOLOGICALLY, WE CAN STILL COME TOGETHER, INFORM OURSELVES, AND ACT TO PREVENT THE OBSCENE DEVASTATION CAUSED BY NUCLEAR WEAPONS.” – DIRECTOR, JEFF DANIELS
Check website for schedule and watch on demand on Vimeo ($5).
From Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Energy in Space October 31, 2023
U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel speaks about local seafood inside commissary at Yokota Air Base, Japan[this base is contaminated with PFAS — see note below]
U.S. to feed troops Japanese seafood amid Fukushima radiation fears –Washington has agreed to help offset a Chinese ban on imports following Japan’s release of nuclear wastewater into the ocean
The U.S. government has agreed to buy Japanese seafood for its military to help mitigate the economic fallout from Japan’s decision to release radioactive wastewater from its destroyed Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean.
The American armed forces will sign a long-term contract with Japanese seafood suppliers to help counter China’s ban on imports from Japan, U.S. ambassador to Tokyo Rahm Emmanuel told the media on Monday.
“I’ve served the products to my own children; I continue to eat the products from the Fukushima area,” he said. “I’ve served the fish products to some of the highest elected officials in the United States government and armed forces, and we will continue to stand with our friends in Japan.”
Former U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is among those who dined with Emanuel on Japanese seafood, the ambassador said.
He said the seafood deal begins with scallops from Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s four main islands, but eventually all types of fish will be sold in the commissaries at all 17 U.S. installations in Japan, at farmers markets on some U.S. bases and served on U.S. Navy ships.
This is how much the Biden administration loves our troops. Anything to keep Japan onside for the coming war with China.
Controversial Rahm Emanuel has been President Obama’s Chief of Staff, President Clinton’s Senior Advisor, and Mayor of Chicago.
PFAS Contamination at Yokata Two wells near Yokata Air Base were tested and found to be severely contaminated with PFAS compounds. PFAS spills occurred there between 2010 and 2012, including one 800 gallon spill that seeped into the ground water., but the U.S. Air Force admits no responsibility. Hundreds of area residents have been tested and on average found to have above 20 parts per billion in their blood, “a level the American National Academies of Sciences says is dangerous and merits a barrage of clinical tests to diagnose expected diseases.” PFAS results from mainland Japan, Pat Elder, November 30, 2023 https://www.militarypoisons.org/latest-news/pfas-results-from-mainland-japan
Vistra Energy is demolishing part of the former PG&E power plant at Moss Landing in Monterey County, California, and building a large lithium-ion battery storage facility there. According to very credible reports from people that worked for PG&E and GE, GE built a breeder nuclear reactor for PG&E at Moss Landing in the late 1960s. If true, that could pose significant radioactive contamination risks to demolition workers and the surrounding environment. Demolition must be immediately halted.
The public isn’t aware that a nuclear reactor of any type exists or existed at Moss Landing, but according to sources, GE nuclear power division in San Jose designed and built a breeder reactor for PG&E at Moss Landing in 1968, and it began operation in approximately 1969. It was a very expensive reactor, and it was not for power generation. It operated until the mid to late 1970s when it was shut down for unknown reasons. The control room, and possibly the reactor itself, were underneath the #6 or #7 535-foot smoke stacks. There was an access stairwell to the underground reactor control room, with a metal railing surround. After the reactor was shut down, the control room access was still visible.
A former worker at Moss Landing witnessed small planes periodically flying through the steam of the smoke stacks, presumably taking air samples. That person was told the smoke stack emissions were only steam, but any reactor emissions might have been vented out the tall stacks.
When a person who helped build the reactor later went to work for PG&E in the 1980s and inquired about the reactor and how it was functioning, PG&E employees told the person, “It doesn’t exist,” and “Shut the f*** up or you’re finding a new job”. That next weekend, PG&E filled in the access stairwell with concrete and cut off the metal railing at ground level.
One former employee went to Monterey County Planning Department to research if permits had been issued for the reactor and didn’t find any record of permits. In response to FOIA requests, the NRC also did not find any responsive records on the reactor, meaning they have no records or they have no records they will disclose to the public.
A breeder reactor is for the purpose of making plutonium for the military and for nuclear bombs. PG&E and GE operated a breeder reactor together at Vallecitos beginning in 1957. This type of reactor does not produce energy. One source suggested the Moss Landing reactor was to make off-the-books plutonium.
If the reactor existed, it was operated by PG&E at the same time as the company was operating the Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant, called by Science Magazine “the dirtiest of the nation’s power reactors” [1]. It would have had the same safety problems, the same lack of AEC/NRC oversight, and potentially the same high radioactive emissions and contamination to the surrounding area. The area around the power plant and underground, including any control room and ground water, may be highly polluted with radioactive elements including hot particles and plutonium, considered by experts to be the deadliest of poisons, with no safe level of ingestion or inhalation. Contamination would pose hazards to local residents, to the waterways and ocean, to groundwater, to agricultural products, and to workers on the site.
State, federal, and local authorities have been notified of the situation including NRC, DOE, CDC ATSDR, California DTSC, CalEPA, CDPH, Monterey County EHIB, and the Monterey County Board of Supervisors, but to date, they have taken no known steps to investigate the situation or have refused to do so. Nuclear and environmental experts, civic groups, non-profit organizations, and other resources have also been informed about this situation,
Meanwhile, Vistra Energy continues demolishing equipment and buildings at the site.
Action steps needed now:
— Demolition work at Moss Landing by Vistra and other companies must be halted immediately due to the danger to workers and the surrounding environment from possible contaminated equipment and buried radioactive materials, pending an investigation.
— A thorough and public investigation must take place immediately into the complete history of PG&E’s uses and facilities at Moss Landing and the existence and extent of any radioactive contamination there.
— Removal and remediation of any and all contaminated soils and machinery, including excavation, must be undertaken by licensed professionals with full transparency. And any soil and debris already removed must be tracked and dump sites notified of its possible contamination.
— If radioactive gases were vented through the smoke stacks, their level of radioactive contamination must be assessed.
— The risk of fire and explosion of the lithium-ion batteries onsite adds another element of risk to any onsite radioactive contamination and potential dispersal offsite. This may necessitate the shut-down of the battery energy storage facilities until an investigation is completed.
Letter to Sen. Sam Blakeslee Regarding Diablo’s Recertification
by Cindy Sage 23 March 2011
I have some thoughts for you, as you go after Diablo’s recertification.
Let me tell you what it is like to fly from Singapore to Hong Kong to SF and back to SB in one day. Because of catastrophic radiation threats from ‘the safest nuclear reactors in the world’ in Japan.
Our daughter, her husband and 22-month old evacuated from Tokyo last Tuesday to Singapore via Osaka and Shanghai. They’ve lived in Tokyo for two years, and the baby was born there.
I flew to Singapore for a week to help them.
These are thoughts now, about California, coming back home. Flying back over the green hills of SLO and SB counties from San Francisco, you think “we don’t even have 160 miles between us and Diablo”. That is the distance between Tokyo and Fukushima’s Daiichi nuclear plant that now has four reactors in partial meltdown and thousands of spent fuel rods in empty cooling ponds seeping and belching radiation directly into the air and the seawater. The government acknowledges this will likely continue for weeks and months to come. And, the threat of full meltdown of one, or more, of these four reactors and/or the cooling ponds for spent fuel is not ruled out yet.
Tokyo has thirty million people in one city alone that cannot be moved, or properly informed because they will panic and bring further chaos to an overloaded government.
One hundred and sixty miles away is less than one day’s airflow up the SLO and Santa Ynez valleys to major population areas.
Remember the SB fires? Burning upslope and inland by day, and back downslope at night, carrying fire, smoke and ash in an endless zig-zag pattern? Remember only the rain could really stop the fires? In Tokyo, the rain will bring down the radioactivity. During the Gap fire, we sat at Playa Azul at an outdoor table, and the ash fall was so thick it coated the food and floated black in the margaritas. We had to leave the food on the table and go because we couldn’t breathe and couldn’t eat it.
For a week, people in Tokyo prayed that 160 miles was far enough away. Heck, its the distance from Bakersfield to LA, right? I heard that from seriously smart, educated Americans, waiting it out. But events have to unfold, and the chaos involved and unnecessary anguish are heartbreaking for the families. The slow leakage of information that prevents stampeding and improves the government’s ability to control events also sacrifices many in the process.
“Our expectations had a scientific basis, but conditions were exceeded.” VP of TEPCO, Tokyo Electric Power Company, March 23rd, CNN interview.
Based on the now-demonstrated failure of at least four of Japan’s nuclear reactors to withstand ‘design’ events that were calculated on the basis of only one catastrophic failure at a time, we know this kind of thinking is outdated and monumentally risky for California as well. Japan planned for earthquakes, but not multiple, cascading events that ran out of control, prevented planned emergency responses, and caused them to throw away the rule-book in favor of ‘hail mary’ passes like flooding with seawater, one helicopter squirt at a time. Japan’s TEPCO didn’t even realize for a week that they had cooling ponds running dry that held thousands of leaking radioactive spent fuel rods. Because they couldn’t even get into or close to their own plants to survey the damage.
Not until the effort was militarized, and people could be ordered to go into the hot zone did we begin to see the damage, and understand the colossal breaches of containment and destroyed plants and cooling equipment. That is not in the rule-book. They had no response. Now, Daiichi’s reactor 3 in chronic, uncontrollable release-mode, and it contains plutonium as well as radioactive cesium and iodine. The other three reactors are in partial meltdown, and even government press releases say they cannot rule out complete meltdowns as yet.
Japan continues to deal with the aftermath – major aftershocks, continuing loss of power, loss of back-up power, loss of triple-backup power, fires, radioactive meltdown and seepage, intentional steam releases of radioactive materials directly into the air to prevent catastrophic hydrogen buildup, inadvertent radiation releases from explosions that happen on a regular basis anyway, the spreading plume, the hopeful weather patterns carrying the radiation ‘somewhere else’, the inevitable recirculation of radiation back over Tokyo and central Japan, the lack of equipment to properly test air, water, food and the people evacuating the hot zones.
What pieces of information are reliable? What is the subtext of unfolding US Embassy and State Dept and military advisories? What ‘indicators’ do you hold out as the trigger for “what to do next”? Do you wait until the US government moves the USS George Washington aircraft carrier out of Yokohama as happened Monday, because it is SOUTH of Tokyo? Is that a bad sign? Do you wait for the US State Department to issue potassium iodide pills to all employees and their dependents as happened Monday? Or, the radiation is twice the infant limit in Tokyo groundwater as happened Tuesday? If you wait, will the trains and planes be full, and ticket prices quadruple normal fares – effectively prohibiting travel for families with kids? What can you believe? What is hype or spin? What does it mean when the evacuation zones seem to be based more on what the government can handle sheltering people, rather than what the radiation levels should be dictating? You can’t effectively evacuate 30 million people all at once, even if the exposures are extreme and otherwise dictate that it should be done immediately.
Getting, judging, and reacting to incomplete, conflicting and incomprehensible information is an impossible task for people in a crisis, who are also dealing with emergency flights, emergency housing, trains that don’t run, sick babies, traveling spouses, planes that are full, empty store shelves, bank accounts that cannot be accessed due to power outages, overloaded telecom systems that don’t work, aftershocks, grief, fear, passports that can’t be located, cell phones that are cancelled or don’t work in other countries, missed connections in foreign airports where there are no diapers, no food, no sleep, no information, wondering if/when people will not be allowed to fly if they test positive for radiation contamination. When is it too late to evacuate? IF you go back, can you get out again?
People with means and money have nearly insurmountable difficulties. People without means and money simply pray and go into deep denial. They are publicly praised by the government for their fortitude, while they can do nothing but await their fate with stoicism.
A week ago, military dependents and ex-pats in Tokyo working for US, German, French, Spanish and other international corporations were formally advised by their employers it would be prudent to evacuate Tokyo. But, there was no health threat. WHO said so.
Ticket prices skyrocketed in Asian countries. Booking evacuation flights and trains became very difficult to impossible. Families split up. Serviced hotel and apartment units in Hong Kong, Singapore and other flee-zones were snapped up by corporations for evacuated ex-pat families…. the one we stayed in went to 97% occupancy in a week.
These families are now trying to figure out if/when they can return. Hour by hour, day by day, parsing the messages in the media coverage. I did this yesterday. And, all last week. I’m still doing it this morning, by skype. Only uncertainty is certain.
Lessons learned? What I can tell you is that I think Diablo should be shut down now. Period. Taken off-line. The Hosgri fault, and perhaps other unrecognized faults, and the likelihood (not just the remote potential) for major earthquakes, tsunami, loss of cooling systems, and proximity to major population zones are clear indicators now that this plant should be mothballed.
The clear underestimation of design earthquake in the original Diablo design, and the failure to anticipate and provide credible protection against predictable, multiple, cascading natural disasters is basis enough not to recertify, and to take it off-line now. Germany is taking some of its older reactors off-line. Why not California?
We don’t get 30% of our power from nuclear in California. We have other options. Japan does not, so they have to accept rolling blackouts for the foreseeable future. They have to accept the long-term consequences including loss of transportation and public services infrastructure, food and water shortages due to radiation contamination, loss of industrial output, loss of communications, banking, and other vital services, contamination of beef and dairy herds and row crops, and embargos and bans by other countries on the import of leafy green vegetables and dairy products from Japan.
Try that on central coast farmers, ranchers, viticulturists and other growers in the agricultural industry.
Talk to Bakersfield, Fresno and the central Valley growers, too, because they’ll be in the hot zone as well.
Japan doesn’t even have enough meters to measure the safety of food and water. Most people shop everyday for foodstuffs and walk to get there. They have to go outside to live. To re-supply their tiny refrigerators.
When summer comes, can you imagine being inside with your kids, unable to turn on the air conditioning or get fresh air because of radiation contamination? Imagine this in 86 degree weather with 90% humidity?
That is best case, and assumes there is enough power for any air conditioning at all.
PG&E has a similar history of malfeasance and misleading regulators and the public as does TEPCO. The parallels are clear – both utilities have demonstrated failures in maintaining critical infrastructure, conducting required safety tests, and providing honest and timely information to regulators and the public about risks to health and safety. The time for wishful thinking is over.
Sam, you have no idea how comforting it is to know you’ve got the scientific and geotechnical background AND the political position to make this issue a front-burner.
###
Published in the SLO Coast Journal, April 2011
Cindy Sage is an owner of Sage Associates, an environmental consulting firm located in Santa Barbara, California. She is a Research Fellow at Orebro University’s School of Health and Medical Sciences, Department of Oncology, Orebro, Sweden (2008-2010) and Guest Lecturer (2011). Her journal publications appear in Bioelectromagnetics, Biomedicine and Pharmacology, and Reviews on Environmental Health. Her articles have appeared in San Francisco Medicine, the Real Estate Law Journal, Electricity Journal. the German journal Environment•Medicine•Society, the Land Use and Environment Forum of the California Continuing Education of the Bar and has she authored numerous articles on EMF policy and public health issues in contemporary print media. She is an author of the Seletun Scientific Statement (2010), Seletun, Norway. Sage Associates has conducted more than 1000 professional studies since 1982 on projects involving electromagnetic fields (both ELF and RF). Invited presentations have been made in London, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Canada and the United States and include: the Emergency Conference on the Adequacy of the ICNIRP Public Safety Limits (hosted by Coghill Labs at the Royal Society of London, 2007); the London International Leukemia Conference (2004), conference presentations at the Bioelectromagnetics Society annual meetings (1991 – 2006), the First World Congress on Breast Cancer in Kingston, Ontario, Canada (1997), Witness at the International Hearing and contributor to the Global Action Plan for Breast Cancer (1997), presenter at the Etiology Working Group, National Action Plan for Breast Cancer at the Workshop on Electromagnetic Fields, Light-at-night and Breast Cancer Washington DC (1997), and the National Breast Cancer Coalition Fund Environmental Policy Summit in Washington, DC (1998). She is a full Member of the Bioelectromagnetics Society. Ms. Sage is a founder of the BioInitiative Working Group (2006) and co-editor of the BioInitiative Report; A Rationale for a Biologically-based Public Exposure Standard for Electromagnetic Fields (2007). She is co-chair of the Collaborative for Health and the Environment EMF Working Group.
Thursday, November 16, 2023 6-8 PM Mountain Time Unitarian Universalist Congregation 107 W. Barcelona Road Santa Fe, New Mexico In-person and webcast
Panel discussion on the Congressional Nuclear Strategy Commission’sproposed crash program to increase U.S. nuclear weapons production, deployment, and spending by 2035, along with rapid qualitative and quantitative increases in other strategic weapons.
In late 2010, President Obama agreed to a wide-ranging plan to modernize the entire nuclear weapons establishment in negotiations with Senate Republicans over the ratification of New START. That plan involved the serial modernization or replacement of every single U.S. nuclear warhead factory, warhead, and delivery system. Since 2010 this plan has gradually evolved and expanded, and of course it has also greatly increased in cost.
This report makes the claim that unless the U.S. greatly increases its nuclear weapons efforts along with other strategic system acquisitions over the 2027-2035 period, “deterrence” vis-a-vis Russia and China will be lost.
As regular readers of these Bulletins will know, that happens to be the period of time in which Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is expected to make all the new plutonium warhead cores (“pits”) for what these authors hope will be an expanding U.S. nuclear arsenal. Absent new pits from LANL, no altogether new warheads will be possible.
This Thursday, November 16, from 6-8 pm, we will host a nationally-webcast, panel and audience discussion of this new strategic proposal at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Santa Fe, at 107 W. Barcelona Road (map). Panelists will include Peter Kuznick, who will speak on how this plan is being received internationally, Steven Starr, and myself. If you are local, please come in person if you can.
San Luis Obispo, CA, October 4, 2023 — San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace (MFP) and Friends of the Earth (FoE) today deplored a decision of the Commissioners of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for demonstrating a complete lack of concern for the safety and security of the people living near the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant.
Disregarding expert evidence presented by MFP and FoE that the Diablo Canyon Unit 1 pressure vessel is at risk of dangerous embrittlement due to decades of neglect by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) and lax oversight by the NRC technical staff, the Commissioners refused to grant the groups’ hearing request or to order the immediate shutdown of the reactor for comprehensive testing of the reactor vessel’s condition.
Instead, the Commissioners bucked the groups’ shutdown request back to the agency’s technical staff to consider whether to take enforcement action against PG&E.
“We are appalled that the Commissioners are entrusting this important safety review to the same agency staff who for fifteen years has given PG&E repeated extensions of deadlines for essential tests and inspections,” said Diane Curran, attorney for MFP. Curran noted that the groups had intentionally petitioned the Commissioners, as the highest officers of the NRC, to exercise their legal responsibility for oversight of the technical staff.
Nevertheless, the groups vowed to persevere. Hallie Templeton, Legal Director for FoE, said, “We plan to continue our rigorous watchdogging of PG&E and the NRC.” She added, “The Commissioners’ decision has raised a red flag to all of us. Anyone, including California politicians, who thinks the safety of Diablo Canyon can be entrusted to the federal government unquestioningly has just received a big wakeup call.”
Linda Seeley, spokesperson for MFP, renewed the group’s call to the State of California to “go back to the original plan to close Diablo Canyon when it reaches its 40-year operating license limit in 2024 (Unit 1) and 2025 (Unit 2). Enough is enough.”
Trinity – July 16, 1945 – Made possible through the discovery and development of PFAS chemicals.
17th-century depiction of Daedalus & Icarus – Musee Antoine Vivenel, Compiègne, France
In Greek mythology, the tale of Daedalus and his son, Icarus provides a lesson that humanity has never learned. Daedalus created wings from feathers and wax. He warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun for fear that the wax would melt. Icarus took off, exhilarated with the invention, and soared exuberantly toward the sun. His wings fell apart, and Icarus fell to his death.
Remarkable technologies may escape our control and imperil mankind. Two astonishing inventions in 1938 are like Daedalus’ fastening of wings to wax: the splitting of the uranium atom by German scientists and the discovery of per – and poly fluoroalkyl substances, (PFAS) by Dupont chemists in New Jersey.
It’s not a stretch. Both nuclear weaponry and PFAS chemicals are existential threats to humanity. Their development and use are inextricably linked.
Trinity – July 16, 1945
PFAS was developed through the Manhattan Project.
J. Robert Oppenheimer and his crew needed a way to separate uranium to make the bomb. They used fluorine gas for this purpose. The scientists soon discovered that fluorine gas bonds with carbon molecules to make fluorochemicals, the most highly resistant coolants known – and a critical development leading to Trinity.
The Manhattan Project perfected a white powder that could extinguish fires better than any substance ever created. It repels grease, dirt, and water better than anything, ever. Imagine the military applications! PFAS never breaks down. It never goes away. It is bioaccumulative, and it is highly carcinogenic. Most alarmingly, it plays havoc on a woman’s reproductive system. It contributes to a host of childhood diseases. It threatens our immune system, and it has been linked to the spread of COVID 19 and other diseases. It’s in our bodies and our children are born with it.
It was used to manufacture Teflon products and Scotchguard, and waterproofing for a thousand products. It is still used widely. People haven’t gotten the message. PFAS is bad news for all of us.
March 4, 2016 – Firefighters strike a pose reminiscent of the Iwo Jima statue in Washington. A team of firefighters battle a huge fire during a live-fire training exercise at Hurlburt Field, Fla. (Photo: US Air Force)
The military has used PFAS in firefighting foam to extinguish super-hot petroleum-based fires since 1968.
If 500 bases participated in monthly firefighting foam drills from the early 1970’s until the early 2020’s, that might be 500 bases x 12 months x 50 years which comes to 300,000 separate environmental catastrophes. Some bases held fire training exercises weekly. The damage is incalculable, and it is with us forever.
Often, they’d create a 100-foot diameter crater about one to two feet deep; they’d fill it with jet fuel and a cocktail of oils, lubricants, and paints and ignite it. Then, the firefighters would snuff the flames with foam. The firefighters got sick, many with bladder and testicular cancer. The carcinogens from the foam were allowed to seep into groundwater and surface water. Drinking water sources are contaminated, as well as the food, especially the sea food we consume.
Wurtsmuth Air Force Base in Michigan closed 30 years ago but the people in the region cannot eat the local fish or wildlife today because it is poisonous. Food is poisoned by the chemicals worldwide.
Try to comprehend the concept of a highly toxic chemical, comprised of an indestructible fluorine-carbon bond that never breaks down in our bodies or the environment and continuously accumulates in us.
Although billions of people are ingesting the substances in their drinking water, most of the PFAS in our bodies comes from eating contaminated fish and seafood that are loaded with the chemicals. The air, our lungs and our homes are filled with cancerous dust.
The EPA in the U.S. and regulatory agencies around the world are criminally negligent for doing little to protect public health.
Wherever there are nuclear weapons, PFAS is present. Nuclear-powered ships and those carrying nuclear weapons also carry huge quantities of the materials. After training exercises and frequent accidents, the chemicals are sprayed into the sea.
We can’t get rid of it. We can’t bury it. We can’t incinerate it. We don’t know what to do with it and this is the truth. Notions of “cleaning up” PFAS are misguided.
PFAS are the demons let loose from Pandora’s box. All 14,000 PFAS substances are believed to be toxic. The military and manufacturers should be forced to sthe making the compounds while taking measures to begin remediating the catastrophe at a cost that will likely exceed hundreds of billions of dollars.
Rachel Carson is a latter-day prophet!
From Rachel Carson in her prophetic book, Silent Spring, 1962:
“If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals, eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones – we had better know something about their nature and their power.”
The fish are poisoned with PFAS in Japan with some species containing more than 100,000 parts per trillion of PFOS in their filet. The U.S. military is responsible for much of this contamination. I will be travelling to Japan in September and October with three others with Veterans for Peace to address audiences and to test surface waters for PFAS in 20 cities. The U.S. military is not being regulated by states, the federal government or foreign “host” nations. The military’s toxic legacy is shrouded in secrecy. Please help us and make a note that your contribution is for the Japan delegation.
Financial support from the Downs Law Group makes this work possible. The firm is working to provide legal representation to individuals with a high likelihood of exposure to PFAS and other contaminants.
The Downs Law Group employs attorneys accredited by the Department of Veterans Affairs to assist those who have served in obtaining VA Compensation and Pension Benefits they are rightly owed.
If you spent time in the military and you think you may be sick as a result of your service, think about joining this group to learn from others with similar issues. Are you interested in joining a multi-base class action lawsuit pertaining to illnesses stemming from various kinds of environmental contamination? Join the Veterans & Civilians Clean Water Alliance Facebook group. (2.4 K members and growing rapidly.)
The Ottawa River is a Canadian Heritage River that flows for 1300 kilometers from its origin in central Quebec to its confluence with the St. Lawrence River at Montreal.
The Ottawa River is sacred for the Algonquin Anishinaabe People whose traditional territory it defines. In Algonquin it is called Kitchi Sibi, or “Great River.”
The Algonquin People have lived in the Ottawa River watershed since time immemorial. A strong ethic of environmental stewardship is part of their Anishinaabe worldview and they consider it their responsibility to protect the land and water for all life and future generations.
We are fortunate that the Algonquin People take their stewardship responsibility seriously. Right now, they are a strong protective force standing between a giant above-ground nuclear waste dump and the beautiful Kitichi Sibi that supports so many lifeforms and provides drinking water to millions of people downstream.
A multinational consortium (SNC-Lavalin, Fluor and Jacobs) wants to build the seven-story nuclear waste mound on the grounds of the Chalk River Laboratories, northwest of Ottawa, directly across the Ottawa River from the province of Quebec. If approved, it would hold one million tonnes of radioactive and other hazardous waste. The proposed dump is called the “NSDF,” and the proponent is “Canadian Nuclear Laboratories,” a wholly-owned subsidiary of the multinational consortium.
The Chalk River Laboratories site is heavily contaminated from eight decades of nuclear activities including production of plutonium for the US nuclear weapons program. The accumulated radioactive wastes at Chalk River were described in a 2011 Ottawa Citizen article “Chalk River’s Toxic Legacy.†The estimated cost for a proper cleanup is $16 billion. Chalk River Laboratories was privatized by the federal government in 2015 to quickly and cheaply reduce this enormous environmental liability.
The Chalk River site needs to be cleaned up but the proposed giant landfill is not the right approach according to many who have studied the proposal including Algonquin First Nations, retired senior scientists from Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, civil society groups and concerned citizens. The Assembly of First Nations and more than 140 municipalities, including Pontiac County, Ottawa, Gatineau and Montreal have passed resolutions of concern about the proposed project.
Critics say that the proposed site is unsuitable for a dump of any kind. It is located less than one kilometre from the Ottawa River and is surrounded by wetlands that drain into the river. The site is tornado and earthquake prone and the underlying bedrock is porous and fractured.
Other concerns include: — Many of the radioactive materials destined for the dump, such as plutonium, will be hazardous for 100,000 years. The International Atomic Energy Agency says radioactive wastes such as these must be carefully stored out of the biosphere, not in an above-ground mound. — Dioxins, PCBs, asbestos, mercury, arsenic and hundreds of tonnes of lead would go into the dump along with thousands of tonnes of copper and iron and 33 tonnes of aluminum, tempting scavengers to dig into the mound after closure. — The dump proponent is importing commercial and federal nuclear wastes to Chalk River for disposal in the NSDF. These shipments are happening despite a specific request from the City of Ottawa for cessation of radioactive waste imports into the Ottawa Valley. — The mound would leak radioactive and hazardous contaminants into the Ottawa River during operation and after closure. The mound is expected to eventually disintegrate in a process referred to as “normal evolution.” – There is no safe level of exposure to the radiation that would leak into the Ottawa River from the Chalk River mound. All of the escaping radioactive materials would increase risks of birth defects, genetic damage, cancer and other chronic diseases. — The giant pile of leaking radioactive waste would be difficult to remediate. Remediation costs could exceed those of managing the wastes had they not been put in the mound. There are far better ways to manage radioactive waste and keep it out of the biosphere but they cost more money. It would be better to spend the money up front on high quality facilities farther away from a major drinking water source.
The environmental assessment for the NSDF has dragged on for seven years. The final licensing hearing is scheduled for August 10, 2023. The assessment and the decision about whether or not to license the dump are in the hands of Canada’s “captured nuclear regulator,†the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. CNSC staff continue to recommend approval of the dump. An Expert Panel recommended in 2017 that the CNSC not be in charge of environmental assessment for nuclear projects. Participants in the environmental assessment for the NSDF have noted many serious flawsin the process.
Weeklong licensing hearings in June 2022 were to have been the “final” hearings for the NSDF but in a surprise move, the CNSC decided to “keep the record open” for continued consultations with Kebaowek and Kitigan Zibi First Nations, two of the 11 Algonquin First Nations whose people have lived in the Ottawa River watershed for thousands of years and who have never ceded their territory to the Crown or the Canadian government.
During the extended consultations which wrapped up this past spring, Kebaowek and Kitigan Zibi First Nations conducted research at the proposed dump site. They documented extensive threats to their Indigenous rights and to biodiversity in the NSDF footprint in a booklet available online here. Their joint final submission outlines numerous potential legal failures and violations should the CNSC decide to license the NSDF on their unceded territory.
On June 20 at a press conference in Ottawa, Chiefs of Kebaowek and Kitigan Zibi First Nations along with two Algonquin Grand-Chiefs, together representing 10 of the 11 Algonquin First Nations, said very clearly that they do not consent to the construction of the NSDF on their unceded territory and that approving the dump without their consent would contradict the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Earlier in June, their sister First Nation, the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan, signed an agreement with the proponent, offering consent for the NSDF in exchange for economic and business opportunities and a role in monitoring at the site.
This struggle seems destined to play out in the courts over many years. It seems tragic that so much time, energy and money have been expended on such a bad proposal. Canada’s poor nuclear governance system is largely to blame for this; there is literally no one minding the shop other than our captured nuclear regulator, the CNSC and nuclear reactor proponents at Natural Resources Canada.
Thank goodness for our Algonquin brothers and sisters who are standing firm to protect Kitchi Sibi and actually have a good chance to eventually stop the madness.
Lynn Jones is a founding member of the Ottawa River Institute, a non-profit, charitable organization based in the Ottawa Valley. ORI’s mission is to foster sustainable communities and ecological integrity in the Ottawa River watershed.
From Ecological Options Network / No Nukes California Compiled byJames Heddle, Mary Beth Brangan – EON
A view of the dry spent fuel storage facility in the foreground as surfers ride the waves at San Onofre State Beach, CA, April 21, 2022. Credit: Allen J. Schaben/Getty Images
Stranded Spent Nuclear Fuel with Nowhere to Go – A Clear & Present Threat to National Security
A string of pellets cased in the zircalloy cladding is called a fuel rod. Source
It is usually 4-5 meters long. Each rod contains 350-400 pellets. Source
Credit: world-nuclear.org
A human being standing close to an unshielded hot fuel rod would receive a lethal dose of radiation in just minutes. Source
Ten years after removal of spent fuel from a reactor, the radiation dose 1 meter away from a typical spent fuel assembly exceeds 20,000 rems per hour. A dose of 5,000 rems would be expected to cause immediate incapacitation and death within one week. Source
Each canister contains more highly radioactive Cesium-137 than was released from Chernobyl. Source
Even a microscopic through-wall crack will release millions of curies of radiation into the environment states Dr. Kris Singh, President and CEO of Holtec. Source
The San Onofre ISFSI houses 73 vertical Holtec canisters. Source
Another 50 Areva NUHOM canisters sit in a separate, horizontal dry storage facility nearby on-site. Source
These containers do not have NRC approval for transport.
In any case, the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board reports that this spent fuel will not be cool enough to move until the year 2100.
These canisters have a manufacturer’s ‘guarantee’ for only20 years.
Some canisters like these have been shown to fail in less than 20 years. Source
Some of the horizontal canisters at San Onofre are already 20 years old. Source
No Federal central repository for high level radioactive waste now exists, nor is likely to any time soon.
About 88,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors remain stranded at reactor sites, and this number is increasing by some 2,000 metric tons each year. These 77 sites are in 35 states and threaten to become de facto permanent disposal facilities. A proposed new generation of SMRs will produce even more, more toxic forms of waste. Source
Heal Fukushima 