A Two-Pronged Appeal
Colleagues in our dual areas of focus – EMFs & nukes – need your support. For more on how non-ionizing and ionizing radiation both poison the gene pool, please see our recent post: It’s the DNA, Stupid! – Nukes & EMF/RF Digest 7-16-2012
Sandi Maurer, Director of the EMF Safety Network has announced her organization is bringing suit against the California Public Utilities Commission “for failing to address serious Smart Meter issues, including health and safety impacts, and FCC compliance.”
(Photo by Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images)
Kimberly Roberson, Founder of the Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network, and author of Silence Deafening, Fukushima Fallout … A Mother’s Response, has mounted a campaign on IndieGoGo on food safety in the US, human health and how citizens informed about Fukushima can change the world.
Sandi needs to raise $25,000 for legal costs ASAP attorneys, James Hobson and Joshua Nelson of Best, Best and Krieger are representing the Network in the California First Court of Appeals. Scroll down for details. $10-$100 from you will help and you can do it below, or right here.
Kim is aiming to raise $9,000 in order to disseminate key information that will help inform readers who may not realize the considerable dangers and consequences of a post-Fukushima nuclear powered society, while at the same time providing powerful tools for transitioning to a safer world. Scroll down for Kim’s explanatory video.
Cartoon by Jim Heddle EON
Why We’re Suing the CPUC
Sandi Mauer – Director, EMF Safety Network
On June 7th, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) denied the EMF Safety Network Rehearing Request on the grounds that, “the evidence does not support re-opening a review of Smart Meters.” Because the Rehearing Request is denied we can now sue the CPUC for failing to address serious Smart Meter issues, including health and safety impacts, and FCC compliance.
The CPUC has buried it’s head in the sand!
The CPUC rubber stamped PG&E claims of Smart Meter safety!
Although no new evidence can be added to the lawsuit in Appeals court, this lawsuit is important because it could force the CPUC to address the issues it has been ignoring.
The CPUC has NEVER addressed the health and safety impacts of Smart Meters. They’ve only provided an opt out with a penalty!
We need to raise $25,000 for legal costs ASAP! Attorneys James Hobson and Joshua Nelson of Best, Best and Krieger will represent us in the California First Court of Appeals. The lawsuit will be filed by the July 11 deadline.
If every customer on PG&E’s delay list would donate 15 cents, we’d have it covered! Considering we probably won’t reach those 177,000 people, if people donate $10-$100 this will help! Please give whatever amount you can!
DONATE NOW! https://emfsafetynetwork.org/?page_id=2127
(You do not need a Paypal account to donate! See the ‘Don’t have a PayPal account?’ section to the left of login box and click on link to use your credit card.)
The results of suing the CPUC, if we win, will be that the Court will mandate the CPUC to address our original EMF Safety Network Application which includes:
Re-opening both of the Smart Meter proceedings (D.06-07-027 and D.09-03-026) Evidentiary hearings on radiation health, environmental, and safety impacts Review of actual Smart Meter program performance An independently prepared RF Emissions Study
Inching towards justice! THANKS TO ALL YOUR EFFORTS!
Sandi Maurer
Silence Deafening, Fukushima Fallout… A Mother’s Response
By Kimberly Roberson
Campaign for an engaging new book that explores Fukushima Daiichi’s impact on food safety in the US, human health and how citizens will change the world.
A CALL TO ACTION: Facts are facts. There have been at least three major nuclear power disasters to date: Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, and Fukushima Daiichi in 2011. Radioactive fallout has extremely long term consequences. There are also many smaller nuclear accidents and near misses every year. Do we wait for another major nuclear catastrophe, or do we act now?
The world changed dramatically on March 11, 2011. Fukushima Daiichi’s unprecedented THREE nuclear meltdowns and continuing deadly radioactive fallout signaled that Japan and the world would be forever changed. Previously I had learned much about radioactive waste issues while working for Greenpeace in the US. I also studied holistic nutrition and worked in the nutrition field before becoming a mother. I used to think it was a bit of an unusual resume leap, going from radioactive waste to then nutrition and motherhood, but on March 11, 2011 those worlds collided and bonded together. What my experiences brought to the table was startling clear: radioactive fallout from nuclear power and food do not mix, and innocent children are especially at risk.
HOW YOU CAN HELP: These days the publishing world shifts responsibility primarily to the new author for not only creating the book but for distribution as well. I’m appealing to the good people here on Indiegogo to help raise $9,000 for this campaign. As a contributor, you will a) help to create a national advertising campaign and materials to provide a platform for myself and others to speak out on this urgent issue; b) a print edition for bookstores around the US in conjunction with the PR campaign and c) seed money to research the companion book to “Silence Deafening..” on mindful health in a Fukushima world. Read more.
For more on the Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network, you can also follow FFAN on Facebook.
“How Smart Are Smart Meters”
Reported by Spencer Michels, PBS News Hour
The eight-minute, fifty-second segment broadcast on 7-20-2012, included 3:42;25 of the industry point of view, 3:05;14 of activists’ point of view, and 48 seconds of exclusive EON footage assembled over the past 3 years. Our comments, a transcript snip, as well as viewer and reader comments are below. Here is a link to Spencer Michels’ blog. But first, if you haven’t seen it, take a look.
PBS News Hour reporter Spencer Michels fell into the deceptive trap cleverly laid by the industry pushing wireless technologies.
Spencer, who lives in Marin County, California, one of the main epicenters of the original pushback against the wireless ‘smart’ meter plan, told us he’s wanted to do a story on ‘smart’ meters for the last two years.
But he fell for the industry ‘dueling science studies’ confusion tactics and the lure to accept the word of so-called ‘authorities’ and ‘experts.’ (i.e. Every time an independent researcher does a study showing biological effects from RF exposure, the industry funded doubt machine underwrites a study to deliberately show opposite results through the way the study is constructed. This is not valid science, but unless one has the ability to read studies and spot the obvious flaws, a beginner to this issue can understandably be confused. This follows a pattern of deception mapped out by the cigarette companies that prevented cigarettes from being outlawed or even sanctioned against for over 50 years.)
News Hour reporter Spencer Michels interviews Valeri Hood (rt) and Mary Beth Brangan (back to camera)
We appreciate the opportunity to present some of our reasoning (albeit in a very simplified form) to the mainstream audience of PBS but hope that we have a chance to rebut the inaccuracies, spin and outright lies presented by the ‘experts’ and PG&E and to have our own experts interviewed on PBS News Hour in the future.
Some of the more glaring inaccuracies: 1) 56 cities and counties in California officially passed some kind of objection, ordinance or moratorium to the forced installation of wireless ‘smart’ meters – not 12 as reported by Michels. 2) The World Health Organization, the WHO, May 31, 2012 classified the RF used in ‘smart’ meters as a class 2B possible carcinogen. An outdated 2005 WHO statement was given by the so-called ‘expert’ Macari, and he even misrepresented that 2005 statement. 3) PG&E’s Helen Burt assured Michels that PG&E hasn’t sold anyone’s data gleaned from their meters. However, California Public Utility Commissioner Timothy Simon said in a public meeting that the CPUC hopes to sell the data to interested third parties. The reason they haven’t yet is that the system to do so hasn’t been completed. She also contended that only 30,000 customers want to opt out and that the rest are ‘engaged’ with the technology. We know that many, many thousands of customers have filed complaints and many more wanted to opt out but couldn’t afford the hefty fees to do so. We also know that PG&E lies about numbers that don’t favor them.
Though we linked to them in a previous blog edition, I want to repeat two especially good recent overview statements by our independent experts on RF who are truly concerned about the effects of RF pollution on public health so you can recognize the spin, lies and misinformation more clearly.
And the American Academy of Environmental Medicine July 2012 statement re RF health effects and ‘smart’ meters. In January they wrote a letter to the CPUC calling for a moratorium on ‘smart’ meter installation. Their July statement goes even farther. Download the PDF here.
Fairly Unbalanced
By James Heddle
Longtime Bay Area-based News Hour producer Spencer Michels and his crew deserve credit and thanks for getting this issue on the mainstream airways, a goal Michels says he has been pushing for over the past two years. We understand the constraints in which he works and appreciate his team’s technical professionalism. They have mastered the form of News Hour reporting.
‘Could have been worse,’ was Mary Beth’s immediate comment. ‘Hey, it got the issue out there,’ said a respected media analyst friend. ‘Just getting the discussion onto mainstream media is major.’
Ok. But, still. It reminded us of why we don’t have a television and never watch the PBS News Hour. Polished, superficial, formulaic and, well, lazy. Not what one would call ‘probing investigative journalism.’ But that, as the saying goes, is ‘what the traffic will bear.’
‘You know too much,’ Michels told Valeri and Mary Beth in the pre-recording discussion in Valeri’s Fairfax home. You’ve got to keep it succinct and simple. We know your arguments. We know their arguments. We’re just going to pair them off and that’s our report. Uh huh. That’s balanced journalism for you.
But – not surprisingly, given their roster of sponsors – the underlying News Hour pattern is clear…once you see it. Simple as A, B, C. In this case, it goes like this: (A) ‘smart meter’ opponents’ views are presented in simplified bites; (B) industry spokespeople ‘rebut’ them with unsubstantiated assertions; (C) however, activists don’t really get the chance to rebut the industry ‘rebuttals’ or challenge their assertions with actual, factual data.
The resulting take-away impression is this: the activists’ critique has been debunked on every point and the industry has all the answers. End of inquiry.
Here’s my favorite egregiously erroneous statement from an alleged ‘expert,’ Dean of Engineering and Computer Science at the California State University, Sacramento, named Emir Jose Macari, who Michels says, ‘…was part of the California Council on Science and Technology, a team that reviewed the literature on electromagnetic emissions, including radio frequency waves, or RF, a study often cited by PG&E.’ [ None of the CCST committee were biologists or RF specialists nor did they consider any of the massive amount of science that was presented to them by experts whose studies show adverse health effects from RF radiation. They refused to even include it in their review, though it amounts to thousands of pages of peer-reviewed science that spans over 50 years and includes much gathered by the U.S. military! ]:
SPENCER MICHELS: Macari demonstrated for us how the emissions from a smart meter can be monitored. He says those emissions are very slight.
EMIR JOSE MACARI [holding an exotic-looking metering device the read-outs of which we can’t see next to a lone, unhooked up ‘smart’ meter in the middle of a sidewalk ]: So, I could also be measuring emissions on my cell phone.
SPENCER MICHELS: So, how does it compare?
EMIR JOSE MACARI: Well, this is so much higher.
SPENCER MICHELS: Really?
EMIR JOSE MACARI: But — by 20 times higher than what a smart meter does.
No mention here of the facts that (a) cellphone exposures are voluntary, while ‘smart meter’ exposure is involuntary, imposed without consent by the utility; (b) cellphone exposures are intermittent depending on use, while ‘smart meters’ pulse continuously 24/7; cellphone exposures are localized to the head, while wireless meters give virtually continuous whole-body exposure. No mention of mesh networks – i.e., emissions from all surrounding neighborhood meters ‘chirping’ to each other other 9,600 to 190,000 times per day as they transmit data among themselves and to a collection point receiver.
As a result, residents are exposed to a constant pulsing field of microwaves in their home (and more if they have close neighbors) and outside as well from the interconnecting mesh network of RF signals. e) No mention of the situations of banks of multiple meters on apartments or businesses f) no mention of reflections of signals from hard surfaces and the resulting ‘hot spots’ where exposures are intensified g) no mention of the increase of RF exposure if people actually have ‘smart’chips in their appliances that are also pulsing signals within the home 24/7; h) no mention of how the ‘dirty electricity’ from the meters transformers the SMPS, gets into the household wiring and adds to the total field of pulsing VHF and RF microwaves, etc., etc.
Finally (i) no mention of the ‘hackability’ of wireless ‘smart’ meters and a regional or national energy grid based on them. [See, for example, Smart grid vulnerability could give hackers free electricity Because cooling systems at the country’s 104 nuclear reactors are dependent on power from the grid to keep running, such hackability makes them all vulnerable to accidental and maliciously caused meltdowns.
As we reported in a previous blog on the inaccuracies in the California Council on Science and Technology ‘report’, a chart from independent researcher Dan Hirsch of the Committee to Bridge the Gap tells the ‘whole-body’ story:
Comparison of Radio-Frequency Levels to the Whole Body from Various Sources in IJ W/cm2 over time (corrected by Daniel Hirsch, Committee to Bridge the Gap, & UCSC Nuclear Policy lecturer, for assumed duty cycle and whole body exposure extrapolated from EPRI/CCST SmartMeter estimated levels at 3 feet).
The viewer comments below point out some of the other inaccuracies in the PBS segment.
Adding dubious gravitas to the report, EON Co-Director Jim Heddle (rt.) makes a cameo appearance.
Data Makes Me Drowsy
News Hour producer Spencer Michels’ blog on this topic follows much the same pattern as the video piece. He concludes that there are boring-to-read studies on both sides. Its up to opponents to prove the meters pose risks. Proponents don’t have to prove the meters are safe. He ends his commentary with this plaintive lament:
“So what is a home owner or a cellphone user, to say nothing of a journalist, to make of these dueling scientific and almost [sic] scientific statements? You could read studies till you fall asleep (which wouldn’t take long) and you still wouldn’t know the answer. Harm from wireless signals — especially from smart meters — hasn’t been proven or dis-proven, [oh, really?] though those who object to wireless signals probably need to document more scientifically their ailments. The burden of proof, given the prevalence of wireless devices, seems to be on them. [This really is infuriating after he was given so much documentation that he found so boring that he didn’t look at it seriously. And why not have the burden to prove safety be on the government officials and industry operatives who are rolling out this humongous boondoggle without public discussion or impartial, independent testing?]
And that leaves us with one choice [only one?]: present as much evidence as possible in the space available [8 minutes]. Indicate the possible risk [in a simple-minded, superficial way], and the fact many [un- and mis-informed] people are taking that risk — if in fact it is a risk. And examine and evaluate who is making the studies, a tough, lengthy job [too much for a busy News Hour journalist with, according to him, virtually unlimited global research and telecom resources]. Then hope you won’t be assaulted by someone with more studies “proving” his point of view.” [ Yet this is exactly why industry funds studies designed to purposely get no results and thus to confuse. See Henry Lai’s and B. Blake Levitt’s refutation of the CCST report for example:https://www.smartmeterdangers.org/index.php/position-statements/180-henry-lai-smart-meters ]
Meta-studies of studies on this and other serious public health and safety issues involving corporate profits [see our blog Sowing Doubt, Reaping Profit ] indicate that industry-funded studies are designed to manufacture pseudo-uncertainty, while truly independent studies find serious and mounting evidence of biological and medical harm. The responsible, common-sense action would be to apply the precautionary principle, i.e., when in doubt, don’t.
Industry-funded studies seem to reflect the result of corporate strong-arming. Lai reviewed 350 studies and found that about half showed bioeffects from EM radiation emitted by cell phones. But when he took into consideration the funding sources for those 350 studies, the results changed dramatically. Only 25 percent of the studies paid for by the industry showed effects, compared with 75 percent of those studies that were independently funded.
It is thus that the media masses are misled, mired in manufactured doubt and alleged ‘uncertainty.’ It has been the same story with pesticides, nuclear pollution, tobacco, asbestos, GMO and climate change, to mention just a few issues – until the evidence of harm is undeniable and it’s too late.
But, hey. Let’s look on the bright side. Like our media analyst friend says, at least this mainstream media organization is showing that there’s an argument going on in the public sphere about the wireless ‘smart grid’ concept.
This week’s ‘smart meter’ segment was intended, according to Michels and Woodruff, to ‘balance’ another one, which aired the previous Friday. Take a look:
This is a gee-whiz promo piece on the Pecan Street ‘smart grid’ demonstration project in Austin, Texas – one of 130 similar projects currently going on in 44 states. Pecan Street is a model housing development built on what used to be an airport. Here’s a peek at what life in a ‘smart grid’ community is supposed to be like.
From Elizabeth Kelly
Josh, I am so grateful to you, Mary Beth and Val for your incisive and heartfelt statements on this PBS show. The good news is that PBS covered this issue. The bad news is that their coverage of our side was weak and inaccurate. He who has the gold rules the world…
I just posted this statement to www.electromagneticsafety.org
https://www.electromagneticsafety.org/
On July 20, 2012, PBS NewsHour interviewed California activists opposed to smart meters. They also interviewed representatives of the California Public Utilities Commission, Pacific Gas and Electric Corporation and, an industry scientist. Somehow, they neglected to interview anyone from the American Academy of Environmental Medicine – https://www.aaemonline.org/
https://www.aaemonline.org/ (scroll down home page to find smart meter recommendations.) While we appreciate the interest PBS has shown by its coverage, we would have preferred equal time had been given to the point of view held by both sides of this complex issue and, more factual accuracy.
For example, more than 56 California cities and counties oppose smart meters, not a dozen; the World Health Organization classified radio-frequency radiation as a possible carcinogen in 2011, which belies the statement that “there is no proof of any evidence of harm”, the WHO report of 2005 said that electro-hypersensitivty was not a disease but a health condition, cause unknown: and, independent engineers have tested cell phone signals and compared them to smart meter signals and state that cell phone signals are not stronger than smart meter signals.
Smart meter signals carry a unique pulse modulated digital signature that creates an almost constant involuntary exposure condition for people in their homes. These transmissions are causing neurological problems in some people and domestic animals.
Smart meters were placed on the market without a premarket assessment to assure health and safety protections and do not carry an Underwriters Lab label, which would signify industry approval.
The 2005 Federal Energy Policy Act called for the utilities to invite customers to “opt in” to smart meters, signifying that Congress did not intend to make customers pay in order to “opt out.” Let the public debates continue.
from Melissa Levine
This morning I left a message at 703-998-2138 (Newshour contact)–Michael Getler.
I then reposted my comments and added an additional about possible censorship. Even though I sent in my first comment almost 24 hours ago–nothing’s been published. However, they have managed in that time to publish a comment from a J.V. Hodgson whose message to people who are concerned is basically–we live in a wi fi world–so tough luck.
I also viewed last week’s video on the smart grid. Judy Woodruff promised that this week’s story would show the other side. (So she is someone else to write)
They did publish for that story over 40 comments. One was Michelle’s (hers was one of the strongest). I am a bit suspicious that they sifted through those comments, also–as many seem a bit tame.
From Shane:
Oh, yeah, that was particularly obnoxious [the Michels comment re reading studies putting you to sleep]!!
What would have happened if people had found the literature on cigarettes, lead, asbestos, RBST, etc. only snooze-worthy?!
And they have the nerve to cal themselves journalists…what a travesty.
I think this merits contacting PBS directly at a higher level, though I’m not sure what department this would be.
One of our list members contacted KPFK back in November 2011 and said she would be canceling her membership/contributions if they did not at least respond to her request to cover SMs. The very next day she was contacted and an interview was set up with Cindy Sage. It was an effective strategy.
1. While ignoring the evidence and reports of people falling ill from the Smart Meter, CPUC employee claims the Smart Grid will prove “large economic benefit for most rate payers efficiencies in the long run”. The purpose of the CPUC is to “ensure that consumers have safe, reliable utility service at reasonable rates, protecting against fraud and promoting the health of California’s economy”. Key word: SAFE
2. So-called RF expert says “World Health Organization put out a report in 2005 saying there is no evidence of any harms to human beings from these technologies”. It seems that our “expert” forgot that the WHO changed their position on May 31, 2011 classifying RF radiation from cell phones (and Smart Meters) as a 2B level carcinogen. “The WHO/International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B), based on an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer, associated with wireless phone use.” [ But the IARC decision also added that all devices operating in the same frequencies, like ‘smart’meters, are included in the Class 2B category as possible carcinogen. Ed. ]
3. Our RF expert is shown supposedly measuring emissions from a Smart Meter placed in the middle of a walkway. Is this for real? How is this Smart Meter showing a reading on this guy’s RF meter when the Smart Meter is NOT EVEN CONNECTED TO A POWER SOURCE!
4. The PGE employee Ms. Burt says “Our customers own their data. We do not own their data.” This is admission of unauthorized data theft by PGE.
5. Two separate systems have to be maintained according to Mr. Michels. Those using a Smart Meter pay for one system. However, those using the system that has been in place for the past 30 years have to pay for maintaining that system as well as the Smart Meter system. Those retaining a safe analog meter must pay for a Smart Meter and metering system that due to their health (such as pacemaker wearers) cannot use. Could this be discrimination?
The same PBS reporter [ Ray Suarez, who introduced the ] Smart Meter piece also wrote a piece 2 years ago on the Chinese hacking the internet. I just posted this on my Facebook wall:
PBS reporter does a report on cybersecurity and 2 years later on Smart Grid…with NO connecting the dots. No comments allowed at PBS.
Our entire utility metering and control system is currently being transitioned to a wireless IPv6 mesh network. In other words, our electricity, gas and water will be on a HACKABLE wireless network. The hub of this system starts in your home with a Smart Meter which is a transmitting computer complete with an upgradable Zigbee microchip, flash memory and 2 radio signals (one operating at 900 Mhz and one at 2.4 Ghz).
There are millions of data points that can be hacked and taken over by our enemies. Where were the microchips made? Who has access to the software code? Do we really think the Chinese haven’t considered hacking into our utilities?
On July 20, 2012, this same PBS reporter did a report on Smart Meters and the Smart Grid. There was no mention of a “smart” grid’s security vulnerabilities and how former CIA Director Woolsey calls this a wireless smart grid “really really stupid”. Is the public really getting their monies worth at PBS (Public B.S.)?
‘An 18-minute diversion of Internet traffic through China has raised security concerns around the world — especially for governments and people in critical infrastructure — and raises new concerns for online shoppers just ahead of Cyber Monday.
From Isis:
I know it’s hard to look at this in much positive light …. But as far as mainstream coverage goes (and PBS is more mainstream media than it’s not), this was actually very successful, I think. It could have been better, for sure, but it also could have been a lot worse, and frankly, I expected it to be. You all did really well, considering what you had to work with. Thanx for putting yourselves through the ordeal, and it was wonderful to see you all, virtually as it was.
As bad as it was, I think that ‘scientist’ who cited the 2005 WHO position kind of did us a favor. He made it so incredibly easy to make him look bad by citing the much more recent WHO position. Unfortunately I think most people only watch the broadcast and don’t go online to look at comments, but I think this glaring error should be used to put pressure on PBS to give us more air time to debunk the BS. I think all those contact options – comments, emails to the reporters/administrators, Facebook/Twitter, etc., should be utilized to their fullest….
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Or…just:
The world mapped onto a DNA model. chemicalgraphics.com Both nuclear and electro-magnetic radiation permanently damage DNA
Different Mechanisms, Same Result: Pissing in the Gene Pool
As we’ve noted in these pages before, the reason we cover both nuclear and electro-magnetic technologies is that the radiological pollution they both emit (ionizing and non-ionizing, respectively) cause the same result, albeit by different mechanisms: they damage the DNA of all living things.
Caught in the Cross-Fire
The take-home is this: As both these forms of radiological pollution proliferate across the planet, the genetic health and integrity of all future generations of humans and all other lifeforms are foreclosed forevermore by the misguided actions of power-holders in the present generation.
Informed popular opposition to the spread of both these deadly technologies is growing around the globe as more and more people realize that – literally – the future is in our hands.
In this Edition…[Updated]
you’ll find updates in print and video on recent nuclear events around the world and summaries of the current science on the risks of so-called ‘smart’ electro-magnetic and microwave technologies.
…The statutes of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) oblige the organization to take decisions that are politically imposed upon it. These may be less costly, but they are medically unacceptable. These statutes serve as a reminder that the principle objective of the IAEA, which is a UN agency, is « to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world”.
In order to achieve its objectives, the IAEA cannot admit that these serious and common illnesses were caused by ionising radiation, because once known, it would prevent the development of the nuclear industry throughout the world.
The IAEA is therefore a poor source of advice for national health authorities; it denies the health catastrophe and gives priority to economic considerations; its statutes forbid attributing to, or associating serious illness with, radiation. Incorrect estimates delay the evacuation of communities that have been highly exposed to radiation. It was almost incomprehensible that at Fukushima there was no distribution of stable iodine to the population that would soon be under threat. Such a preventive measure would have been welcomed, as Keith Baverstock showed in Poland after Chernobyl.
The first victims of a serious nuclear accident are and will be children, with an increase in allergies and an aggravation of infectious diseases, which become chronic and involve serious complications. Professor Titov showed that in Belarus, the immune system was profoundly altered after the accident. Both white blood cells and gamma globulins were altered. This needs long term monitoring. Research needs to be done on the autoantibodies directed against beta cells in the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas, or against cells in the thyroid gland. Hashimoto’s thyroiditis has the same aetiology as Type 1 diabetes, both of which increased after the nuclear accident. At Chernobyl, this form of diabetes affected younger and younger children. This diabetes did not exhibit the same characteristics as the Type 1 we find in our countries. So it is an illness caused by ionising radiation. Other diseases of the endocrine system affect the sex glands, with problems occurring in young girls at puberty and with male sterility. Read more…
Protesters stage a rally against the restart of a nuclear reactor, in Tokyo, Monday, July 16, 2012. AP
Published on Monday, July 16, 2012 by Common Dreams Over 100,000 Protest Nuclear Restart in Tokyo
On hottest day of the year, protesters call for Prime Minister Noda to quit
– Common Dreams staff
Over 100,000 protesters took to the streets in central Tokyo on Monday to protest the country’s return to nuclear power. The demonstration was one of the largest if of its kind since Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda announced that the country would restart its reactors last month.
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN July 05, 2012
Lambasting both Tokyo Electric Power Co. and the prime minister’s office, the Diet’s task force investigating the accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant recommended an overhaul of the government’s crisis management system.
“The accident was not a natural disaster but was apparently a man-made disaster,” the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC), headed by Kiyoshi Kurokawa, said in its final report released on July 5.
The panel concluded, “The crisis management system of the prime minister’s office and the regulatory authorities did not function.”
The conclusion of a report of a Japanese parliamentary panel issued last week that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster was rooted in government-industry “collusion” and thus was “man-made” is mirrored throughout the world. The “regulatory capture” cited by the panel is the pattern among nuclear agencies right up to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Read/Download an English version of the report here.
…The current IAEA director general is Yukiya Amano of Japan. In Vienna at the heaquarters of the IAEA, marking the first anniversary of the Fukushima disaster in March, Amano said: “Nuclear power is now safer than it was a year ago.”
Really?
Shuya Nomura, a member of the Japanese investigation commission and a professor at the Chuo Law School, was quoted in the New York Times as saying that the panel’s report tried to “shed light on Japan’s wider structural problems, on the pus that pervades Japanese society.” And, noted the Times, he added, “This report contains hints on how Japanese society needs to change.”
Those “wider structural problems” are far wider than Japan; ¬they are global. The “regulatory capture” cited in the Japanese panel’s report has occurred all over the world¬ with the nuclear industry and those promoting nuclear power in governments making sure that the nuclear foxes are in charge of the nuclear hen houses. The “pus that pervades Japanese society” is international. With some very important exceptions, people have not adequately taken on the nuclear authorities. And we all must. The nuclear promoters have set up a corrupt system to enable them to get their way with their deadly technology. They have lied, they have connived, they have distorted governments. The nuclear industry is thus allowed to do whatever it wants. The nuclear pushers must be firmly challenged and they and nuclear power must be stopped.
Japan’s ‘man-made’ nuclear fiasco
A report released last week by the Diet’s Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission backs what many members of the public have long believed: The fiasco at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant was “a profoundly man-made disaster — that could have and should have been foreseen and prevented.”
The findings of the 19-member commission were based on a six-month investigation that included 900 hours of hearings and interviews with 1,167 people as well as nine visits to the Fukushima No. 1 power plant and three other nuclear power plants. In an unprecedented and most welcome move, the panel sought maximum information disclosure by opening up all 19 of its commission meetings to the public and broadcast all but the first one on the Internet in Japanese and English. The commission also dispatched teams overseas to confer with experts in the United States, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and France.
The Fukushima nuclear accident, concluded the panel, “was the result of collusion between the government, the regulators and Tepco, and the lack of governance by said parties. They effectively betrayed the nation’s right to be safe from nuclear accidents.” The commission identified the root causes of the accident as “organizational and regulatory systems that supported faulty rationale for decisions and actions, rather than issues relating to the competency of any specific individual.”
The commission asserted that the direct causes of the accident were foreseeable prior to the March 11, 2011, disaster. But Tepco, the regulatory bodies, and the trade and industry ministry promoting nuclear power failed to develop the most basic safety requirements, including assessing damage probability, preparing for collateral damage containment and developing evacuation plans.
Friends of the Earth
WASHINGTON – July 13 – The problems with the steam generators at the San Onofre nuclear reactors are the most severe found in comparable generators across the U.S. nuclear industry, according to a new report commissioned by Friends of the Earth. The report by Fairewinds Associates also analyzes a leaked Southern California Edison document, which shows that despite assertions by Edison and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, thousands of tubes inside both San Onofre reactors are severely damaged and both reactors should remain shut down.
LOS ANGELES (AP) – Federal regulators Thursday disclosed the most detailed information to date on damage at California’s idled San Onofre nuclear power plant, where scores of tubes that carry radioactive water have eroded at an alarming rate.
The detailed data, posted obscurely on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission website, has implications for the future of the seaside plant that has been offline since a tube break in January released traces of radiation.
The records provide the first close portrait of how heavily damaged some tubes have become in a short time, and hint at the challenge faced by operator Southern California Edison to get the reactors running again. Edison officials had no immediate comment.
Thanks to Donna Gilmore SanOnofreSafety.org https://sanonofresafety.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/tubespluggedchart.pdf
San Onofre’s Steam Generators: Significantly Worse than All Others Nationwide
Fairewinds Associates
Wed, Jul 11, 2012
Client:Friends of the Earth
Presended to:General Public
Thanks to Rachel Johnson – From the Nukes Forever Department: Coming soon to a location near you:
The good old NRC has provided us with a map of… Location of Projected New Nuclear Power Reactors
Thanks to Donna Gilmore of SanOnofreSafety.org
Here are new whistleblower comments from former SANO employee. I found these on this SANO steam generator article today.
Look. This problem existed in their previous Steam Generators. Alot of tube wear around the anti-vibration bars or batwing supports. Alot of wear……. leaks too. The problem was never fully addressed, along with the monumental safety implications. I tried to address it, but I will not get into that at this time. This problem was also accompanied by fuel cladding breeches (failed fuel). It was a radiological mess. SCE was not fully upfront with the NRC about this problem and other issues, and now they are paying the price. From my experience, significant fuel cladding breeches in Unit 2 will appear in November – December 2012 based on a startup of Unit 2 in August 2012. This is all based on past experience and modeled as such. The Xenon and Krypton offgasing from the cladding failures will be beyond the plants capacity to pr…ocess. In PWR’s where fuel cladding is compromised, xenon gas (from the failed fuel) emits gamma rays, which then decays to Strontium 90 and various isotopes of Cesium settling out on the ground, all with 30 year half lifes. Krypton is another mean beast. This is emitted mainly out the plant vent stack. Some of it is controlled, but at times, the pressure diaphrams can burst on the pressurized tanks and the release is uncontrolled. In addition, the irradiated U235 and UO2 can escape the primary system, with a degraded secondary barrier (steam generators) as fast as the atmospheric conditions prevail in any reactor shutdown or anticipated transient. Even though, there are Technical Specification Limits on primary system Iodine activity, walkdowns by NRC inspectors must be mandatory around the RCS sampling system penetrations and radiation monitors to ensure operability and correct sampling alignment. Furthermore,…read more
Fukushima’s radioactivity found in California kelp; levels spiked, then disappeared.
Kelp off Southern California was contaminated with short-lived radioisotopes a month after Japan’s Fukushima accident, a sign that the spilled radiation reached the state’s coastline, according to a new scientific study. Scientists tested giant kelp from the ocean off Orange County and other locations after the March, 2011 accident and detected radioactive iodine at peak concentrations 250-fold higher than levels found in West Coast kelp before the nuclear accident. “Basically we saw it in all the California kelp blades we sampled,” said biology professor Steven Manley of California State University, Long Beach. The radioactivity had no known effects on the giant kelp, or on fish and other marine life, and it was undetectable when the kelp was tested again a month later. Iodine 131 “has an eight-day half life so it’s pretty much all gone,” Manley said. “But this shows what happens half a world away does effect what happens here. I don’t think these levels are harmful but it’s better if we don’t have it at all.”
Richard Ling/flickr Some radioactive material probably accumulated in fish that eat California's giant kelp – including señorita, pictured above. There is no data on what iodine 131, which has a half life of only eight days, might do to fish.
Some radioactive material probably accumulated in fish that eat California’s giant kelp – including señorita, pictured above. There is no data on what iodine 131, which has a half life of only eight days, might do to fish.
By Marla Cone
Editor in Chief
Environmental Health News
March 30, 2012
LONG BEACH, Calif. – Kelp off Southern California was contaminated with short-lived radioisotopes a month after Japan’s Fukushima accident, a sign that the spilled radiation reached the state’s coastline, according to a new scientific study.
In a bizarre footnote to the final implementation of the privately funded MLPAI “Initiative,” Pacific Gas and Electric Company has asked the California Fish and Game Commission for a “scientific collecting permit” to possibly “cleanse an extensive swath of the ocean – virtually sterilized of living creatures” (Comm. Richard Rogers) – within a “Marine Protected Area” off the Central California Coast.
After the Fish and Game Commission adopted the final North Coast leg of the Marine Life Protection Act “Initiative” in Eureka, California on June 6, 2012, the next item on their agenda was a request from P.G. & E. for a “scientific collecting permit” – to allow the blasting of 250 decibel air cannons, within the Central Coast’s Point Bushon ‘Marine Protected Area.’
According to the P.G.&E. representative at the meeting, the proposal calls for a 240 ft. ship to tow a quarter-mile wide array of twenty 250 decibel “air cannons,” along a 90-mile stretch of California’s Central Coast. The cannons will shoot very loud underwater explosions once every sixty-three seconds, day and night, for 42 days and nights, beginning in September, 2012.
Once the shock waves kill or deafen everything in their path, from the surface to the ocean floor, they will penetrate some fifty feet into the earth’s crust, allowing scientists to map the newly discovered fault lines just offshore from the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant.
(Reuters) – RWE AG, Germany’s second-biggest utility, is abandoning plans to build new nuclear power plants outside its home market, where the government decided last year to phase out nuclear power.
“We will not invest in new nuclear power plants,” incoming Chief Executive Peter Terium said.
ATLANTA (AP) — America’s first new nuclear plants in more than a decade are costing billions more to build and sometimes taking longer to deliver than planned, problems that could chill the industry’s hopes for a jumpstart to the nation’s new nuclear age.
Licensing delay charges, soaring construction expenses and installation glitches as mundane as misshapen metal bars have driven up the costs of three plants in Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina, from hundreds of millions to as much as $2 billion, according to an Associated Press analysis of public records and regulatory filings
On July 5, Japan brought its first nuclear reactor back online, after having been nuclear-power free for two months. Its 50 functional reactors had been taken off line for maintenance but were not restarted due to a groundswell of opposition.
The trailblazer is reactor number 3 at the Oi power plant owned by Kansai Electric Power Co. After stress-testing the reactor, which had been idle for over 15 months, the government had declared it safe and had given permission for the restart. It’s expected to reach capacity in a few days.
All Pressure, All Places, All The Time
Albertans learned a very important lesson when Bruce Power cancelled its plans to build nuclear reactors in Alberta in December 2011: we can stop projects we don’t want in our community.
This book is not about the merits of nuclear power in Alberta. The Fukushima disaster, the unwillingness of the community to host the project, soaring reactor costs and Atomic Energy of Canada Limited’s (AECL) repeated failures and eventual fragmentation put an end to that debate.
This is about the corrupt and self-serving practices of industry, governments and academia we encountered in Alberta while scrutinizing Bruce Power’s nuclear proposal. It is also a “how-to” book for communities who have to deal with major issues or threats.
Spreading the word: Shuntaro Hida, who treated hibakusha for decades, is interviewed last month at his home in Saitama Prefecture. KYODO
By MEGUMI IIZUKA
Kyodo
A 95-year-old retired doctor is continuing to warn of possible health dangers to residents near the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant after some of them developed symptoms similar to those afflicting atomic-bomb survivors he treated for decades. More than a year after the nuclear crisis erupted, Shuntaro Hida is busy giving lectures and interviews to make people aware of the danger of inhaling, drinking or eating radioactive substances.
Jeremiad for Belarus
Revisiting the accident “that could never happen here”
text and photograph by Hope Burwell
Published in the March/April 2004 issue of Orion magazine
…Like most Americans, I hadn’t thought much about Chernobyl since the spring of 1986. Slowly the name “Chernobyl” became just another echo of the horrible nuclear events in recent memory, an anniversary sound bite, the subject of an occasional documentary.
Then in the fall of 2000, the Frankfurt International School, where I was teaching, asked if I’d join a delegation to Cherikov, a small town in southeastern Belarus.
“Belarus?” I asked. “What’s Belarus?”
“The country most contaminated by Chernobyl,” answered a German colleague.
“I thought that was Ukraine,” I said.
She sighed, “Most Americans seem to.”
I REMEMBERED Edward Teller’s response to the news about Chernobyl: “The chances of a real calamity at a nuclear power station are infinitesimally small,” he said on the “ABC Evening News” in late April 1986. “But should it happen, the consequences are impossible to imagine.”
Twenty-three percent of Belarus was contaminated with Chernobyl’s fallout, 32,592 square miles, more land than six eastern states combined. But it isn’t a solid swath of land, nor neat concentric circles emanating from Ukraine. On maps the contamination looks like rusty puddles and large tannin-stained lakes. Color variations denote concentration levels of the radioactive isotope mapped most clearly, cesium-137.
WASHINGTON, DC, July 12, 2012 (ENS) – The same “man-made” problems underlying last year’s nuclear disaster in Japan exist today in the United States, warn five U.S. groups responding to the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission’s report to Japan’s Diet, or parliament.
The Commission found that the accident at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, “…was the result of collusion between the government, the regulators and TEPCO, and the lack of governance by said parties. They effectively betrayed the nation’s right to be safe from nuclear accidents. Therefore, we conclude that the accident was clearly ‘man-made.'”
Abstract
A sequence of global ocean circulation models, with horizontal mesh sizes of 0.5°, 0.25° and 0.1°, are used to estimate the long-term dispersion by ocean currents and mesoscale eddies of a slowly decaying tracer (half-life of 30 years, comparable to that of 137Cs) from the local waters off the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plants. The tracer was continuously injected into the coastal waters over some weeks; its subsequent spreading and dilution in the Pacific Ocean was then simulated for 10 years. The simulations do not include any data assimilation, and thus, do not account for the actual state of the local ocean currents during the release of highly contaminated water from the damaged plants in March–April 2011.
The Nuclear Power Corporation of India (NPCIL) is the sole operator of nuclear power plants in India and is wholly owned and controlled by the government of India.
NPCIL has made it a compulsive habit to lie about the safety of its nuclear power plants. Post every incident (sic), NPCIL covers it by either claiming only a few workers were affected or by blatantly saying the the leaks were of a non hazardous nature.
NNSA to Resume Plutonium Separation at the Savannah River Site’s H Canyon for MOX Fuel
Aiken, S.C. – Just as the Department of Energy touts the closing and capping of two nuclear waste storage tanks this summer in its brimming H Tank Farm – the result of hundreds of millions of dollars in Recovery Act funds – the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) released a statement on July 11, 2012, that proposes to use the crumbling and problem-plagued 430,000-square-foot H Canyon to process tons of weapons grade plutonium, sending additional high level nuclear waste to the H Tank Farm that was supposed to be cleaned up and shuttered. This process will add to the tens of millions of gallons of highly radioactive liquid waste that have made the Savannah River Site, an EPA Superfund site, the most concentrated and dangerous radioactive site in the United States.
WASHINGTON, D.C.///June 27, 2012///Fed up with the undue influence of the energy companies, utilities, lobbyists and other interests that are making it impossible for Washington to move forward decisively in achieving America’s clean energy future, 36 citizen organizations with more than 1.1 million combined members are joining forces to advance a nine-point “American Clean Energy Agenda” and to push for a serious renewable energy agenda no matter who is the next President or which party controls Congress.
As crafted by the groups, the new American Clean Energy Agenda calls for a number of bold steps, including: phasing out nuclear powe r, natural gas, coal and industrial biomass in favor of efficient use of renewable, non-polluting resources; opposition to a “clean energy standard” that includes coal, nuclear, oil, gas and unsustainable biomass; retooling federal “loan guarantees” to make smarter investments in renewable energy; greater emphasis on renewable energy and energy efficiency programs; and avoiding a future in which Americans suffer the consequences of mountaintop mining for coal and fracking of shale gas that is then exported for use in other nations.
Over the past two years, there has been mounting medical and scientific evidence of the grave biological dangers to humans from so-called “Smart” Meters exposure that are being installed by the hundreds of thousands all over North America and Europe. Scientists have been documenting the EMF/RF exposure effects for decades. However, it is only in the last two years, with the constant wireless electromagnetic radiation exposure to these new meters, that other medical evidence (down to the cellular level) has been reported. In the US, there has never been a mandate to force these utility meters on millions of unsuspecting people. There has been no Precautionary Principle used, while corporate greed has abounded. Various utility companies have not told their customers of the dangers. What they told their customers about these new meters was that it would update the grid and help them control individual usage. Customers have not been told about the serious health problems that these RF pulsing meters cause. We have been given no informed consent to this dangerous but invisible exposure.
As a multitude of hazardous wireless technologies are deployed in homes, schools and workplaces, government officials and industry representatives continue to insist on their safety despite growing evidence to the contrary. A major health crisis looms that is only hastened through the extensive deployment of “smart grid” technology.
In October 2009 at Florida Power and Light’s (FPL) solar energy station President Barack Obama announced that $3.4 billion of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act would be devoted to the country’s “smart energy grid” transition. Matching funds from the energy industry brought the total national Smart Grid investment to $8 billion. FPL was given $200 million of federal money to install 2.5 million “smart meters” on homes and businesses throughout the state.[1]
By now many residents in the United States and Canada have the smart meters installed on their dwellings. Each of these meters is equipped with an electronic cellular transmitter that uses powerful bursts of electromagnetic radiofrequency (RF) radiation to communicate with nearby meters that together form an interlocking network transferring detailed information on residents’ electrical usage back to the utility every few minutes or less. Such information can easily be used to determine individual patterns of behavior based on power consumption.
The smart grid technology is being sold to the public as a way to “empower” individual energy consumers by allowing them to access information on their energy usage so that they may eventually save money by programming “smart” (i.e, wireless enabled) home appliances and equipment that will coordinate their operability with the smart meter to run when electrical rates are lowest. In other words, a broader plan behind smart grid technology involves a tiered rate system for electricity consumption that will be set by the utility to which customers will have no choice but to conform.
Dr David O. Carpenter, founder, University at Albany (NY) School of Public Health
Quebec-based magazine La Maison du 21e siecle asked physician David O. Carpenter, former founding dean of the University at Albany (NY)’s School of Public Health, to comment on a letter published in the Montreal daily Le Devoir last May 24. This letter claimed wireless smart meters pose no risk to public health. Some fourty international experts contributed to the following rebuttal.
We, the undersigned are a group of scientists and health professionals who together have coauthored hundreds of peer-reviewed studies
Dr David O. Carpenter, founder, University at Albany (NY) School of Public Health
on the health effects of electromagnetic fields (EMFs). We wish to correct some of the gross misinformation found in the letter regarding wireless “smart” meters that was published in the Montreal daily Le Devoir on May 24. Submitted by a group Quebec engineers, physicists and chemists, the letter in question reflects an obvious lack of understanding of the science behind the health impacts of the radiofrequency (RF)/microwave EMFs emitted by these meters.
Abstract
The meltdown and release of radioactivity (ionizing radiation) from four damaged nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Nuclear Facility in Japan in March 2011 continues to contaminate air and ocean water even 1 year later. Chronic exposure to low-dose ionizing radiation will occur over large populations well into the future. This has caused grave concern among researchers and the public over the very long period of time expected for decommissioning alone (current estimate from official sources is 30–40 years based on TEPCO in Mid-and long-term roadmap towards the decommissioning of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power units 1–4, 2011) and the presumed adverse effects of chronic, low-dose ionizing radiation on children, adults and the environment. Ultimately, radioactive materials from Fukushima will circulate for many years, making health impacts a predictable concern for many generations (Yasunari et al. in PNAS 108(49):19530–19534, 2011). There is long-standing scientific evidence to suggest that low-dose ionizing radiation (LD-IR) and low-intensity non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation (LI-NIER) in the form of extremely low-frequency electromagnetic fields and radiofrequency radiation (RFR) share similar biological effects. Public health implications are significant for reconstruction efforts to rebuild in post-Fukushima Japan. It is relevant to identify and reduce exposure pathways for chronic, low-dose ionizing radiation in post-Fukushima Japan given current scientific knowledge. Intentional planning, rather than conventional planning, is needed to reduce concomitant chronic low-intensity exposure to non-ionizing radiation. These are reasonably well-established risks to health in the scientific literature, as evidenced by their classification by World Health Organization International Agency for Research on Cancer as Possible Human Carcinogens. Reducing preventable, adverse health exposures in the newly rebuilt environment to both LD-IR and LI-NIER is an achievable goal for Japan. Recovery and reconstruction efforts in Japan to restore the communications and energy infrastructure, in particular, should pursue strategies for reduction and/or prevention of both kinds of exposures. The design life of buildings replaced today is probably 35–50 years into the future. Cumulative health risks may be somewhat mitigated if the double exposure (to both chronic low-dose IR from the Fukushima reactors and LI-NIER [EMF and RFR] in new buildings and infrastructure) can be dealt with effectively in early planning and design in Japan’s reconstruction.
Remotely controlled radiofrequency (RF) waves in the microwave range have been used and abused as stealth weapons against everyday citizens including those in the U.S., British physicist and former military microwave specialist Barrie Trower told the International Center Against the Abuse of Covert Technologies (ICAACT) in an exclusive London interview by ICAACT co-founder Lars Drudgaard.
Trower, who became an agent specializing in the intelligence arena after his retirement from the military learned of the technology’s use both against and to promote Olympic athletic performance when he was consulted by a sovereign country with athletes participating in the upcoming Olympic Games.
(NaturalNews) It is well known that many people are sensitive to electromagnetic pollution. Wi-fi gives them headaches. Being near high-voltage power lines can bring on migraines. Using a cell phone unleashes similar symptoms. Until recently, there was no medically-understood mechanism by which electromagnetic waves could be sensed by humans. But now, thanks to some fascinating science summarized here, that mystery may be closer to being solved.
Scientists from the University of Munich, led by geophysicist Michael Winklhofer, say they’ve located and identified “internal compass needles” in the noses of rainbow trout. These are called magnetosensory cells, and they turn out to be far more sensitive to magnetic fields than anyone previously thought.
July 12 Court says PUC didn’t resolve smart-meter health issues
Because the meters already are installed, it’s not clear what the practical effect of the court’s decision may be.
By Tux Turkel tturkel@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer
PORTLAND — The Maine Public Utilities Commission failed to resolve health and safety issues related to Central Maine Power Co.’s installation of smart meters and should now do so, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court has ruled.
In a decision released today, the court sided with smart-meter opponents, who argued that utility regulators ignored their legal mandate to ensure the delivery of safe and reasonable utility services.
At the same time, though, the court didn’t agree with the view of opponents that the meters violated constitutional issues related to privacy and trespass.
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David Freeman, former Director of the TVA, addresses a news conference on the San Onofre nuclear shutdown.
The Fukushima/San Onofre Connection
This is a packed edition folks. We’ve been on the road for the last several weeks, generating more video and reporting than we can keep up with posting. This is a sampling of the harvest. We hope you’ll find it a rich, informative and galvanizing scan. More to follow. Let’s hear it for a Nuclear Free California! And that’s just for starters… [ We haven’t been ignoring ‘smart meter,’ wifi pollution issues, but that’s for another blog. Stay tuned. ]
As thousands march in Japan protesting the start-up of the Oi reactors; and a panel rules the Fukushima disaster was ‘man-made;’ Friends of the Earth Special Consultants David Freeman and Arnie Gunderson are joined by Committee to Bridge the Gap President Dan Hirsch in a critique of the joint NRC/Southern California Edison report-to-the-public on San Onofre’s faulty steam generators; Cecile Pineda reveals the nuclear utilities’ PR playbook; Mae-Wan Ho and Peter Saunders blow the whistle on the WHO/IAEA connection; the L.A. Times calls for the permanent shutdown of San Onofre; and Chris Busby denounces the flawed ‘schoolboy’ plan to ‘dispose’ of nuclear waste in explosion-prone canisters under the Baltic Sea. Exclusive EON video reporting is combined with other sources. Scroll down, as they say, for ‘all that and more.’
Notice: EON is honored to host major organizer and Fukushima survivor, Chieko Shiina and Professor Rebecca Jenisson, 6 pm, Friday July 13. They will speak at a dinner at The Station House Cafe, Pt. Reyes Station, CA – $25.00
RSVP to: marybeth@eon3.net
Chieko Shiina
Chieko Shiina was an organic farmer and B & B owner until the Fukushima disaster.
Afterwards, she organized the women’s sit-in in Tokyo which became Occupy Tokyo
and gained international attention to the plight of the multiple and ongoing meltdown’s victims. Both Chieko and Professor Jenisson of Kyoto Seika University, will share the truth of the horrors being experienced by the Japanese people as a result of the criminal mismanagement of the catastrophe and how people are responding.
Cover-Up Charged at Ailing Seaside Nuke
Are the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and Southern California Edison (SCE) collaborating in keeping from the public the root malfunction cause of the two faulty Mitsubishi steam generators that have kept the reactors in a shutdown that started last January? Are the so-called ‘watchdog’ agency and the investor owned utility trying to deflect justified public fears in the hope of starting the aging reactors up again despite serious problems? That’s what Friends of the Earth‘s special consultants David Freeman and Arnie Gundersen say in response to a recent joint NRC/Edison public meeting in San Juan Capistrano. Nuclear policy expert Dan Hirsch agreed as he challenged officials to supply ‘real numbers’ in place of vague assertions.
Please see video clips below.
Donna Gilmore of SanOnofreSafety.org addresses a news conference on the San Onofre nuclear shutdown.
Local residents have already got the picture: as Donna Gilmore of SanOnofreSafety.org asks “These steam generators are defective and not repairable. We don’t even need the energy from these plants, so why are we risking our communities, the future of California and the breadbasket of the nation for energy we don’t need? It’s insane.”
Some local residents see the aging reactors and their faulty new steam generators as 'lemons' that need to be decommissioned.
Opaque Transparency
It was a well attended, heavily managed – and heavily policed – event in which NRC and Edison representatives ‘shared the interim findings’ of their on-going investigation of the steam generator malfunctions and fielded questions from the audience in order to demonstrate ‘transparency’ and ‘rebuild public trust.’ The meeting seemed to follow with creepy exactitude the playbook laid out by Frank Luntz of Luntz Global, ‘a powerhouse in the profession of message creation and image management.’ Here’s his advice to clients:
“Remember: ‘It’s not what you say. It’s what people want to hear.'”
Fran Luntz is the principal of Luntz Global, a man with a wide reach and author of the bestselling “What Americans Want – Really.” He has put words in the mouth of every two-bit snake oil salesman who’s ever run for office. But on the subject of nuclear energy, he waxes particularly eloquent. ‘Americans aren’t concerned about nuclear energy since Fukushima,’ he counsels members of the industry, ‘they are [merely] anxious’ And here’s the good news from Frank: ‘their anxiety can be manged, controlled and addressed,’ (but presumably not in that order). All you have to remember when talking about the absolute beauty of nuclear power is that although uncertainty has grown since Fukushima, ‘the light (for the industry) is yellow, not red.’ They need to hear you’re ‘learning lessons from Japan,’ in every way, and every day. And ‘going forward’ (a red-flag clue a bromide is about to be delivered) there’s going to be ‘even more accountability and even better safety.’ All around. Your responsibility is to educate them (if that is indeed possible), by reminding them that you are ‘committed to the relentless pursuit of safer nuclear energy.’ Let them know they ‘have a right to know the FACTS about nuclear energy…and that [you] have the responsibility to tell [them] openly and honestly’
But ‘talk about radiation as little as possible.’ Or if you must talk about it, say ‘we are committed to safely containing radiation in every nuclear facility. We don’t take chances. We used layer upon layer of redundant protection.’ And above all, ‘you need to invest time and language in building up the stringent oversight of the NRC.’ Frank follows up this generous advice with a list of ‘Do not says’ and ‘Do says.’ Example: ‘never refer to the NRC as a government agency.’ Say, ‘the NRC, the independent watchdog regulator.’
What’s at Stake for Stakeholders
The subtext of the local controversy over San Onofre nuclear power station is this: The promoters of a national and global ‘nuclear renaissance’ insist that nuclear-generated electricity is necessary and indispensable. With most of Japan’s nukes now off-line and Germany committing to close its own nukes down, decommissioning San Onofre’s two nukes (and better yet Diablo Canyon’s as well) would be a big loss of credibility for their agenda. If no blackouts or brownouts occur this summer with San Onofre shut down, the public might catch on that (a) California already has an excess of electrical capacity WITHOUT nuclear power and, (b) conservation, efficiency and renewables can more than replace the percentage of power now supplied by nukes.
Here are two charts that tell the story:
From Donna Gilmore of SanOnofreSafety.org
According to NRC data San Onofre boasts the worst safety record of all U.S. nukes
In this news conference held June 18, 2012 in San Juan Capistrano, CA. before a Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) public report on conditions at Southern California Edison’s currently shut down San Onofre nuclear reactor facility, international environmental organization Friends of the Earth (FoE.org) called for a full adjudicatory hearing on the safety risks of the aging, ailing plant located in a tsunami zone near the intersection of several active earthquake faults. Calling the NRC investigation faulty and flawed speakers including FoE Energy and Climate Director Damon Moglen; former Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Director David Freeman; nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds.org; Donna Gilmore of SanOnofreSafety.org; and local mother of three, Crystal Coleman, reported on some of the reasons Edison’s nuclear generating station has the country’s worst safety record and demanded release of information and documents they charge are being withheld by the utility.
Before speaking in a recent Friends of the Earth 6-18-2012 news conference in San Juan Capistrano, Ca., nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds.org tells EON why San Onofre’s new, ill-designed steam generators were doomed to fail…and why he thinks Southern California Edison is ‘hiding the ball.’ The Southern California Edison nuclear generating plant is located in an urban area between L.A. and San Diego of 8 million people, in a tsunami zone, near intersecting active earthquake faults and has the worst safety record of all the 104 U.S. reactors.
Dan Hirsch, President of Committee to Bridge the Gap and former Director of the Program on Nuclear Policy at U.C. Santa Cruz, challenges officials of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and Southern California Edison disclose specific data on the damaged steam generators at the San Onofre nuclear generator, which has been shut down since January. The NRC was giving an interim report to the public on its investigation of the malfunction. Environmental groups suspect a cover-up of problems at the aging, ailing nuclear facility, located in a tsunami zone near several active earthquake faults in an area between L.A. and San Diego populated by 8 million people.
After listening to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and Southern California Edison officials report to the public on steam generator malfunctions that have kept the two San Onofre nuclear reactors shut down since January, nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds.org, speaking as a special consultant to Friends of the Earth (FoE.org), points out the flaws in the official account. The Southern California Edison nuclear generating plant is located in an urban area between L.A. and San Diego with millions of people, in a tsunami zone, near intersecting active earthquake faults and has the worst safety record of all the 104 U.S. reactors.
Some Recent Related Stories
L.A. Times EDITORIAL San Onofre’s cloudy future Can the damaged nuclear power plant be repaired and restarted? And if so, what then?
These are dark days at the San Onofre nuclear plant just south of Orange County. Both of its reactors have been shut down for more than four months, when abnormal “thinning” was discovered in the tubes of recently installed steam generators. Neither reactor will come back on line this summer, and after that, it’s still unclear whether one or both will be switched on again and if so, at full power or partial — or whether they’ll stay shut for the foreseeable future….
…The decision about whether to start up the reactors is essentially an engineering issue. But the bigger policy question for both Edison and regulators is the long-term future of the aging plant. San Onofre’s two current reactors have been operating since 1983 and ’84, respectively; the license for both expires in 2022. (Unit 1 was retired in 1992.) Edison says it has not yet determined whether to seek a 20-year license extension, a process that it would have to begin in 2017 to be completed in time.
It should not. Instead of spending the next five years figuring out how to keep the plant going indefinitely, Edison should be using that time to develop other ways to generate the needed power, especially from reliable, sustainable sources such as solar and wind….
…Nuclear energy has been a relatively cheap source of power and one that doesn’t contribute to global warming, but the energy is not worth the long-term risk. As we have said before, California, with its network of earthquake faults and the environmental health of the ocean to consider, is the wrong place for such plants. Now is the perfect time for Edison, and the state as a whole, to begin the planning for a non-nuclear future. Read more
California energy officials are beginning to plan for the possibility of a long-range future without the San Onofre nuclear power plant.
The plant’s unexpected, nearly five-month outage has had officials scrambling to replace its power this summer and has become a wild card in already complicated discussions about the state’s energy future.
That long-range planning process already involves dealing with the possible repercussions of climate change, a mandate to boost the state’s use of renewable sources to 33% of the energy supply by 2020 and another mandate to phase out a process known as once-through cooling, which uses ocean water to cool coastal power plants, that will probably take some other plants out of service.
“Some of the weaknesses we have in the infrastructure [of Southern California] are laid bare by San Onofre,” said Steve Berberich, chief executive of the California Independent System Operator, the nonprofit that oversees most of the state’s energy grid.
Berberich and other energy leaders gathered in Los Angeles on Friday for a meeting convened by the California Energy Commission looking at long-term plans for California’s power grid. Read more
Hundreds of thousands of protesters showed up at the door of Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s residence on Friday, lining the streets of central Tokyo to express outrage over the continued push for nuclear reactor restarts in the country.
Shareholders of Japan’s electricity companies voted on Wednesday to reboot nuclear power throughout the nation, despite widespread public opposition.
Noda approved the restarts of two reactors at Kansai Electric’s Oi plant on June 16, but his pro-nuclear stance has prompted weekly protests outside of his residence. Friday’s protest was perhaps the biggest yet. Organizers estimated the turnout to be over 200,000 people, according to Japan Times.
Japan had shut down the last of its 50 nuclear facilities in early May, following continued public disapproval of nuclear power after last year’s disaster in Fukushima, which continues to plague the region with record levels of nuclear radiation. Read more
– Common Dreams staff
The Oi nuclear plant’s reactor No 3, in the western Fukui Prefecture of Japan, was switched back on Sunday evening in opposition to public outrage and a growing anti-nuclear protest movement throughout the country.
Hundreds of protesters blocked the road to the front gate of the power station on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, as they faced off against riot police and pledged to stay there day and night, reports Al-jazeera.
However, plant operator, Kansai Electric said Sunday it already had enough workers on hand for the restart.
Last month Noda ordered the restarts of reactors No 3 and No 4, at the Oi plant, as he continued his campaign of hooking the country back onto nuclear power.
Up to 200,000 protesters had gathered Friday evening in central Tokyo, chanting, “No to nuclear restarts” outside of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s home. Read more
A partial list of non-cancer health effects of human exposure to radiation:
Downs Syndrome
Hydrocephaly
Microhydrocephaly
Cleft Lip and Palate
Epilepsy
Kidney and Liver Damage
Thyroid Disease
Low Birthweight
Increased Infant Mortality
Increased Stillbirth
Genetic Mutations/Chromosomal Aberrations
Spinal Defects
Congenital Malformations
The future of nuclear energy depends on the industry finding somewhere to put the high level waste. This is radioactive for millions of years and must be isolated from the environment.
The hitherto intractable problem was apparently solved by the Swedish nuclear industry who proposed a plan to encapsulate it in copper canisters and bury it in tunnels 500m underneath the Baltic Sea at Forsmark.
The full environmental impact report was released last year; the government requirements are that the company SKB show that the waste will not emerge from the canisters between 100,000 years and 1 million years.
After studying the report in detail it became clear that the design was flawed because it did not include consideration of the Helium gas produced from the alpha emitters. The volume of gas in each canister would cause it to explode long before 100,000 years resulting in the contamination of the Baltic Sea by the equivalent of 2000 Chernobyl accidents. Back to the drawing board!
Click here for a PDF of the Busby study…
Pandora’s Canister: A Preliminary examination of the Safety Assessment SR-Site for the SKB proposed KBS-3 Nuclear Waste Repository at Forsmark Sweden and associated activities relating to the disposal of spent nuclear fuel
Submission to:
The Swedish Land and Environmental Court, Unit 3, Nacka District Court, Case No Case M 1333-11
Swedish Radiation Protection Agency, Strålsäkerhetsmyndigheten, reference numbers: SSM2011-3522 for repository application SSM2011-3833 for Clink application
Nuclear Shutdown
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho and Prof. Peter Saunders
Please forward widely to your political representatives
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Now or never
“We lost Japan,” said Rie Inomata, who works as an interpreter [1].
“I feel guilty and sorry for the children. They did not choose nuclear power plants, they did not choose to be born; but it is them that have to suffer in the future.”
“By not protesting against nuclear power I allowed this accident to happen. If we go in the same direction, I don’t see any future.”
“If we [are to] make a difference, we must decide now, it is now or never.” Read more
A parliamentary panel investigating the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan last year have placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of plant owner TEPCO and government regulators by saying the crisis was “clearly man-made.” Though the plant was crippled by an enormous tsunami generated by a powerful earthquake, the panel concluded that key warnings were ignored and preparations that could have been implemented were disregarded out of self-interest.
“They effectively betrayed the nation’s right to be safe from nuclear accidents,” the panel’s report said. “Therefore, we conclude that the accident was clearly ‘man-made’.”
Read More
The report was submitted to the heads of both chambers of the Diet on July 5. It can be read in Japanese on the NAIIC’s website (https://www.naiic.jp/).
“We plan to make an English version of the final report to show it to the world,” said head of the commission, Kiyoshi Kurokawa. Read more
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Or…just:
Scroll down for a rich digest. But first, listen to these women and check the actions you can take to support them. Their issue is our issue. Its a planetarian issue, and they are appropriately appalled! Let’s join them. Women’s “Die-In” against the Restart of Ooi Nuke Plant (Jun/07/2012)
Published on Jun 10, 2012 by tokyobrowntabby2
On June 7, 2012, about 70 women including 10 women from Fukushima did a “die-in” in front of the Prime Minister’s Official Residence to protest against the restart of Ooi Nuclear Power Plant. Before the die-in, 10 Fukushima women visited the Cabinet Office and met with officials to submit a letter of requests addressed to Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda. This video clip shows the words from the Fukushima women and part of the die-in. On the very next day, June 8, 2012, Prime Minister Noda held a press conference and declared he would restart Ooi Nuclear Power Plant.
The original video (https://youtu.be/ODNhDhw_-VY) created by OurPlanet-TV (https://www.ourplanet-tv.org/?q=node/287). OurPlanet-TV is an independent net-based media and welcomes donations.
Akio Matsumura is a renowned diplomat who has dedicated his life to building bridges between government, business, and spiritual leaders in the cause of world peace. He is the founder and Secretary General of the Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human Survival with conferences held in Oxford, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto, and Konya.
I was amazed when I heard that one million Japanese had read our article that introduces Ambassador Mitsuhei Murata’s courageous appeal at the public hearing of the House of Councilors of Japan and Robert Alvarez’s famous figure that there is 85 times greater Cesium-137 at Fukushima than at Chernobyl accident. People from 176 nations have visited our blog and Ambassador Murata and Robert Alvarez have been quoted in online and print media in many of them. Despite this global attention, the Japanese government seems to be further from taking action to deal with the growing dangers of Fukushima Dai-ichi. In April I flew to Japan to meet with government and opposition party leaders to convey how dangerous the situation is. Ambassador Murata and I met with Mr. Fujimura, Chief Cabinet Secretary, who assured us he would convey our message to Prime Minister Noda before his departure for Washington to meet with President Obama on April 30. It was to our great disappointment that the idea of an independent assessment team and international technical support for the disaster were not mentioned publicly. I was also astonished to hear that many Japanese political leaders were not aware of the potential global catastrophe because they were not told anything about it by TEPCO. I find it difficult to understand their mindset. Why would the Japanese political leaders think it appropriate to depend on one source (with an obvious and inherent conflict of interest) to judge what issues have resulted from the Fukushima accident and who is most appropriate to handle it? As a result of this myopia, Japan’s leadership lacks a clear picture of the situation and has little idea where it is steering its country and people. read more
Actions to take now:
Our Japanese brothers and sisters need our support in their fight to keep Japan’s nukes shut down – especially the Oi reactor –
Japan’s citizens are calling for international solidarity at Japanese embassies world-wide. Join us in solidarity with the Japanese people on Friday, June 22, 2012, at 3:00 p.m. at the Japanese Embassy in downtown L.A. to help bring volume to their voices!
Friday, June 22, 2012, at 3:00 p.m. Consulate-General of Japan in Los Angeles
350 South Grand Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90071
ACTION: We will gather at 3:00 PM with signs. We will deliver a letter to the Prime Minister’s representative and at 4:45 we will participate in a Die-In, where we will re-enact what it is like to suffer from deadly radiation exposure. Body painting will be available to make people look like we are bleeding from our orifices (symptom of radiation exposure).
Please note that we wish these protests to be absolutely civil and peaceful, and to fully observe the sovereign rights of the Japanese embassies abroad.
This Solidarity Action was called for by Hideyuki BAN, Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center (CNIC), Kanna MITSUTA, FoE Japan, Aileen Mioko SMITH, Green Action Daisuke SATO, No Nukes Asia Forum, Akira KAWASAKI, Peace Boat, Kaori IZUMI, Shut Tomari. There will be coordinated actions in solidarity by No Nukes NW of Portland, Oregon, in San Francisco by No Nukes Action Committee and in NYC.
The energy of our walk is still circulating in California and you can help, even if you are far away.
(1) Tuesday June 19, the Berkeley City Council is voting on its resolution to close down California nukes and replace with clean energy. (The last vote was postponed to allow support to grow) If you’re in the area, please come to a rally with Joanna Macy and Daniel Ellsberg at 6 pm before the Council meeting at 2134 MLKing Way and stay on to help influence the vote. Again, if you can’t make it–no matter where you are–you can email the Council members with the easy system in the “alert” section of the following website: https://www.nuclearfreecal.org/nfcnet/category/alerts/ (Click on “Tell Berkeley to vote YES,” then on “sample email,” then on “click here.”)
(2) On Saturday June 22, activists will gather in San Francisco at the Japanese Consulate from 3-5 PM (50 Fremont St/Mission St. San Francisco) to support the moving protests in Japan that have called on the prime minister NOT to reopen the Ooi nuclear plant there. These protests have been huge and not covered by Japanese media. In California simultaneous actions in LA and SF on the 22nd will support the Japanese activists as part of a world-wide effort. The theme is “Shut Down, Not Meltdown: Keep Japan Nuclear-Free/Keep All Nuclear Plants Shut Down in Japan
Scientist, scholar, activist, author Dr. Rosalie Bertell
No Nukes Pioneer
This edition is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Rosalie Bertell {April 4,1929 – June 14, 2012}, author of the 1985 classic NO IMMEDIATE DANGER: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth, and the 2000 work Planet Earth: The Latest Weapon of War. A Critical Study into the Military and the Environment. She has been a mentor and inspiration for generations of activists, including us. Her recent and relevant Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe: A Message from Dr. Rosalie Bertell is here. For more, see articles below. Eds.
Some highlights in this edition The FCC is set to review its EMF exposure guidelines for the first time in 15 years. Will it rubber stamp obsolete standards that are far behind the curve of current science?
The NRC has been overruled for the first time by an appeals court and ordered to revisit the environmental impacts of storing tons of highly radioactive used fuel rods on site at nuclear reactors…even for 60 years after the reactors have been shut down. Whatcha gonna do with that hot stuff?!
Secretary of War – oops, of Defence – Leon Pannetta joins cyber security experts in pointing to the internet as the new ‘battle space’ and foreseeing a possible ‘cyber Pearl Harbor’ for U.S. communication, financial and energy systems. So the question follows; how ‘smart’ is a hackable wireless national energy grid based on hackable wireless ‘smart meters?’
Trouble-plagued San Onofre nuclear reactor is down at least through August. Surrounding communities are fighting to keep it that way for good. Will its power be replaced by efficiency and renewables or dirty energy?
Meanwhile Japanese are fighting the restart of the Ooi nuclear reactor against massive industry and government pressure, and Fukushima continues spewing its poisons across the world by wind and water currents.
Canadian Prof. Tony Hall puts it all into properly appalled planetarian perspective in his new must-read article Fukushima Daiichi: From Nuclear Power Plant to Nuclear Weapon
Print and video report summaries and links on these and many other stories follow below. A Two-Pronged Blog
You’ll notice that this blog has a dual focus.
We’re focusing on the movement to keep San Onofre shut for good. Based on past experience and cosmic trend-watchers, what’s good for California is likely to be good for every body else. And shutting down California’s nukes, at San Onofre and Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo, would be a major contribution to consigning the global zombie nuclear industry to its hardened sarcophagus.
We’re also focusing on the human health effects, multiple safety, privacy and security risks of proliferating wireless technologies, and the fact that nuclear reactors and their on-site used (and super radioactive) fuel rod cooling pools are both dependent on getting electrical power from the outside/off-site power grid. That rickety, aging grid is being made totally vulnerable to malicious hacking and potentially nationally catastrophic cyber attack by the spread of the wireless so-called ‘smart grid’ and the forced mass installation of electro-magnetically polluting, hackable wireless ‘smart meters.’
Although different biological mechanisms are involved, both nuclear (ionizing) radiation and electro-magnetic (non-ionizing) radiation can irreparably damage the DNA of humans and all living things. This two-pronged attack on the essential components of all life on earth demands all humanity’s attention and action.
So that’s the double-helix integrating subtext of all this blog’s entries – the synergizing dangers of ionizing and non-ionizing radiation exposure.
Ooi Vey!
Just as Southern California Edison is pushing to restart San Onofre despite massive safety and energy glut contraindications, so the Japanese government (no doubt pressured by the international nuclear mafioso) are pushing to open the Ooi reactor by Monday despite massive domestic and international public opposition. [Sign the NIRS ‘don’t do it’ petition here.]
It’s not hard to see the core underlying issue here. If nukes can remain off-line through the summer in California and Japan without brownouts and blackouts, the public will wake up to the fact that – as the following chart from WomensEnergyMatters.org shows – California has an excess of energy capacity and WE DON’T NEED NUKES, we need ‘negawatts,’ i.e., conservation and efficiency.
Not good PR for the salesmen of the delusional, corporate-driven, tax-payer-funded, never-gona-happen global ‘nuclear-renaissance-is-necessary-to save-the-planet’ scenario.
So, in this edition of our blog you’re going to find a rich selection of stories adding up to a birds-eye view of the current lay of the wireless/nuclear landscape.
We’re off to the SouthLand to cover the NRC’s findings on the San Onofre nuke imbroglio. Watch for our video report in our next post. Scroll on down and check out some of What’s Currently What on these vital issues….
The EON Team
The Eds. on the beach at San Onofre Photo: Barbara George/WEM
“There are a lot of capabilities that are being developed in this area,” said Panetta, who served as CIA director in the past. “I’m very concerned that the potential in cyber to be able to cripple our power grid, to be able to cripple our government systems, to be able to cripple our financial system would virtually paralyze this country. And, as far as I’m concerned, that represents the potential for another Pearl Harbor as far as the kind of attack that we could be the target of using cyber.
“For that reason, it’s very important that we do everything that we can, obviously, to defend against that potential,” said Panetta.
The Fukushima Debacle is Only in Its Infantcy
The growing realization that the worst of the Fukushima debacle lies in the future rather than in the past puts in sharp relief the pertinence of Einstein’s observation. Indeed, the prophetic nature of Einstein’s warning is starkly reflected in the failure of so many in government, in the media, in the academy, and especially in the richly-funded inner sanctums of the nuclear industry to respond appropriately to the terrifying implications of what is going so terribly wrong at Japan’s spewing Fukushima #1 power plant.
Rooted in old and outmoded motifs of perception, officialdom’s failure to identify the proliferating menaces in this unprecedented convergence of circumstances has extremely grave implications. What is being done and, more importantly, what is not being done at Fukushima nuclear plant #1 tragically illustrates Albert Einstein’s pivotal observation that the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our old ways of thinking.
A major obstacle blocking proper perception of the Fukushima debacle’s true nature has its origins in a propaganda meme going back to the 1950s. Initiated by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower with his “Atoms for Peace” speech at the United Nations in late 1953, this propaganda meme seeks to disassociate entirely the dual compartments within the nuclear industry.
While the global public has been fooled into thinking that the supposedly civilian branch of the nuclear industry is totally separate from its dominant military branch, this distinction is really a phantom.From its inception the deployment of nuclear energy to generate electricity was designed to give PR cover to the hugely lucrative and totally immoral business of building nuclear weapons. Indeed, to this day the bomb builders draw some of their ingredients such as tritium for their weapons of mass destruction for the operation of nuclear power plants.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) was asked to re-evaluate its plan for spent fuel storage after a federal appeals court threw out a rule that would allow nuclear plants, including Oyster Creek Generating Station, to store radioactive waste on site for up to 60 years after a plant shuts down.
“This is an important victory for the people of New Jersey, on an issue that has significant public health and safety implications, and also the potential to negatively impact the state’s environment,” said Bob Martin, Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia unanimously decided that the NRC did not fully evaluate the risks associated with long-term storage of nuclear waste, the Associated Press reported. Appeals court rejects waste storage at nuke plants
By MATTHEW DALY, Associated Press – Jun 8, 2012
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court on Friday threw out a rule that allows nuclear power plants to store radioactive waste at reactor sites for up to 60 years after a plant shuts down.
In a unanimous ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not fully evaluate the risks associated with long-term storage of nuclear waste. The court said on-site storage has been “optimistically labeled” as temporary, but has stretched on for decades.
The decision puts the Obama administration in a bind, since the White House directed the Energy Department to rescind its application to build a final resting place for the nation’s nuclear waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain and cut off funding two years ago. An alternative site has not yet been identified.
The ruling also adds a new wrinkle to an ongoing dispute that has confounded federal officials for more than 30 years: What to do with the radioactive waste produced by nuclear power plants?
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission plans to ask whether its standards protect people from mobile-phone radiation, a question it hasn’t posed in 15 years, as people use smartphones for longer, more frequent calls.
Julius Genachowski, the agency’s chairman, is asking fellow commissioners to approve a notice commencing a formal inquiry, Tammy Sun, a spokeswoman for the agency, said in an e-mailed statement. The notice won’t propose rules, Sun said.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will conduct a formal review of the U.S. cell phone radiation standards according to a Bloomberg news report: FCC. Wireless Devices and Health Concerns.
An FCC spokesperson emailed a statement to a Bloomberg reporter that is truly alarming. Her message suggests that the FCC has already decided that the current standards are fine, and will conduct a review to rubber stamp the 1996 FCC guidelines:
“Tammy Sun, a spokeswoman for the agency, said in an e-mailed statement. The notice won’t propose rules, Sun said.
‘Our action today is a routine review of our standards,’ Sun said. ‘We are confident that, as set, the emissions guidelines for devices pose no risks to consumers.’”
The Bloomberg article cites a major review of the literature conducted by our research center in which we found an association between mobile phone use and increased brain tumor risk especially after 10 years of cell phone use:
Ongoing troubles at Southern California’s San Onofre nuclear power plant have galvanized area residents, city officials and environmental groups—putting an emphatic end to a complacency that was unusual for a densely populated region with a nuclear plant in its midst.
These days, public meetings about San Onofre are jammed with residents and media outlets. Local groups are calling for the plant’s closure, city councils are demanding assurances about safety, Friends of the Earth and other national groups are re-engaged, and the actions and statements of both the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and operator Southern California Edison (SCE) are being examined like never before.
It was weird—and disconcerting—to see the front page of The Washington Post the other day devoted to cyber security and the vulnerabilities of industrial control systems. In a series of articles in the Post, much of the discussion around ICSs that we’ve provided in these pages was echoed and amplified.
Bottom line: They’re connected. They’re vulnerable. Utilities in the United States should harden their defenses and understand the nature of threats that are only likely to increase.
In “Cyber Search Engine Shodan Exposes Industrial Control Systems to New Risks,” reporter Robert O’Harrow Jr. described how a programmer developed a search engine named “Shodan” that finds and “exposes” online devices. The Shodan website’s tagline is “Expose Online Devices: Webcams. Routers. Power Plants. iPhones. Wind Turbines. Refrigerators. VoIP Phones.” Wait, did that list mention power plants, along with iPhones and refrigerators? Yes.
Oh, and, here’s a pop quiz: What’s the most common ICS in the power industry? (Answer: SCADA, or supervisory control and data acquisition.)
More from the Post on what the Shodan programmer found with his new toy:
“Uncounted numbers of industrial control computers, the systems that automate such things as water plants and power grids, were linked in, and in some cases they were wide open to exploitation by even moderately talented hackers.
“The rise of Shodan illuminates the rapid convergence of the real world and cyberspace, and the degree to which machines that millions of people depend on every day are becoming vulnerable to intrusion and digital sabotage.”
The difference between corporate computer networks and industrial control systems and the potential impact of hacking is pretty crucial, as one ICS source told us about this time last year.
In “Cyber Security and Control Systems,” Joe Weiss, principal at Applied Control Solutions, LLC, said, “IT systems don’t kill people. Control system problems have killed people.”
(Weiss initiated the control system cyber security program at the Electric Power Research Institute in 2000 and wrote the book, Protecting Industrial Control Systems from Electronic Threats.)
That column explained: “According to Weiss, IT professionals don’t understand ICS. Operations personnel may understand ICS, but not IT and its cyber security implications. That’s one disconnect. Another: responsibility for the integrity of ICS at electric utilities tends to be splintered among various roles, in contrast to the chief information officer’s clear mandate for IT cyber security, he said. Further, IT cyber incidents leave a forensics trail that can be reconstructed after the fact, while ICS incidents leave only physical evidence without a clear forensics trail.
“Historically, the overriding concerns of those developing industrial control systems was their usefulness, reliability, safety and cost, Weiss said. And the control system engineer’s traditional role is to “keep things running,” he added. Making ICSs remotely controlled via Ethernet over local area networks and their microprocessors updatable by this method led to their present vulnerabilities, he argued.
“Flexibility and security pull in opposite directions,” Weiss told me.
Those are the stakes and that’s an abridged history of concerns around ICSs. So, what do we know about the nature or number of actual attacks? The Post report said that 120 “incident reports” from October 2011 to April 2012—a six-month period—equaled the number for all of 2011. I.e., the numbers of documented attacks are increasing. However, noted the Post, “companies are under no obligation to report such intrusions to authorities.”
… A skeptic might ask—and folks tell me that utility executives are among the skeptics—if ICSs are so vulnerable, then where’s the example of a successful disruption?
Ah, that’s where Stuxnet and Duqu and now Flame come in. We documented the approach taken by Stuxnet and its still-unknown sponsors to Iran’s nuclear centrifuges in “Stuxnet’s Lessons Learned.” That was followed by “‘Duqu Reminds Utilities of Unfinished Cyber Work.” And now comes “Flame,” the focus of a news article last week, “Cyberattacks on Iran – Stuxnet and Flame,” in The New York Times. A related discussion panel among international cyber security practitioners debated whether the U.S.—the most capable of launching such attacks—was also the most vulnerable to similar strategies by its enemies.
No doubt much work is taking place behind the scenes. Perhaps solutions are being developed in secret while vulnerabilities are trumpeted publicly, leading to a skewed sense of the actual risks and management thereof.
On the other hand, if skeptical utility executives really are waiting for a major domestic incident as a proof point before taking action, we’re in for quite a ride.
More background is available in these articles:
“SCADA Vulnerabilities, Redux?”
“Cyber Expertise Lacking?”
“Security, Part II: Control Systems and IT Systems”
Phil Carson Editor-in-chief Intelligent Utility Daily pcarson@energycentral.com
Mike Smith | Jun 10, 2012 Intelligent Utility
As utilities have waded into the data-heavy post-Smart Grid era, utility leaders from across the enterprise are seeing that there is value in all of that data beyond simply managing the volumes of data and getting it to the right people. This, of course, is where analytics is proving to be a “game changer” at many utility organizations.
We’ll be discussing these and other issues at Utility Analytics Week.
Turning the volumes of data into actionable intelligence is what the analytics game is all about, and utilities are finding more ways to do score points in this game on a seemingly daily basis. The examples range from new business processes for managing assets predictively to segment and targeting customers for new programs to re-shaping the load curve, and more. These examples—and countless others—are all dependent on the ability to move the organization from using all of that data to report “what happened” to operating predictively by taking the knowledge from the historical data and changing business processes based on this knowledge. When done well, the improvements across customer, financial, operational, and regulatory requirements can be significant.
Intelligence chiefs have warned that plans to install smart energy meters in every house will leave families vulnerable to terrorist attacks.
According to the Government’s listening agency GCHQ, the plans will create a ‘strategic vulnerability’, giving foreign computer hackers the opportunity to target individual homes, municipal buildings and even whole districts.
Described by security experts as the ‘modern day equivalent of a nuclear strike’, hackers would be able to switch off meters from overseas, cutting off targets from the national grid. Read more
25′ Al Jazeerah Nuclear Waste Debate with Arnie Gundersen
Inside Story Americas – Going nuclear
Allison Macfarlane, President Obama’s nominee to head the body that regulates Nuclear Safety in the US is a geologist and expert on nuclear waste disposal though she describes herself as a nuclear agnostic. If confirmed, she will replace Gregory Jaczko whose 8 year tenure was plagued by battles with the industry and Congress as he attempted to bring in new safety regulations. The United States is home to nearly a quarter of the world’s commercial nuclear reactors.
A 'buckyball,' named for inventor Buckminster Fuller
Godards’ Journal has just put out an excellent 17 minute video debunking the recent MIT study claiming that their low radiation level test demonstrated why the country should reduce the need for evacuations following a nuclear disaster. A brief summary of his findings was that the MIT testers only dosed their lab mice for 35 days, and then made unsubstantiated statements that such low levels could continue not to cause any harm. Goddard found a 2009 study showing just the opposite of the MIT claims.
And of course the real issue here is that this study was done by the physics department at MIT that had gotten millions of dollars from DOE, including a study designed to win public acceptance for reducing the need to reduce evacuation zones.
Roger Herried
Abalone Alliance Clearinghouse archivist
Energy Net
Millions of Southern Californians and tourists seek the region’s famous beaches to cool off in the sea breeze and frolic in the surf. Those iconic breezes, however, may be delivering something hotter than the white sands along the Pacific.
Buckyballs.
According to a recent U.C. Davis study, uranium-filled nanospheres are created from the millions of tons of fresh and salt water used to try to cool down the three molten cores of the stricken reactors. The tiny and tough buckyballs are shaped like British Association Football soccer balls.
Water hitting the incredibly hot and radioactive, primarily uranium-oxide fuel turns it into peroxide. In this goo buckyballs are formed, loaded with uranium and able to move quickly through water without disintegrating.
High radiation readings in Santa Monica and Los Angeles air during a 42-day period from late December to late January strongly suggest that radiation is increasing in the region including along the coast in Ventura County.
The radiation, detected by this reporter and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, separate from each other and using different procedures, does not appear to be natural in origin. The EPA’s radiation station is high atop an undisclosed building in Los Angeles while this reporter’s detection location is near the West L.A. boundary.
…Southern California is still getting hit by Fukushima radiation at alarmingly high levels that will inevitably increase as the main bulk of polluted Pacific Ocean water reaches North America over the next two years….
…The main wave of water-borne radiation from the meltdowns, including highly mobile uranium-60 buckyballs, is surging across the Pacific along the Kuroshio Current, second only to the Gulf Stream for power on the planet…
…no federal agency, department or administration is doing anything to sample and analyze water from the Pacific. Fish aren’t being tested for contamination, either….
…These radionuclides and buckyballs make up the goo inexorably crossing the Pacific, which may just have begun to impact our shores. Yet not a nickel of state or federal money is spent monitoring it. We are on our own in this Fukushima nightmare.
Costs are mounting for the months-long outage at the San Onofre nuclear plant and any possible solutions, as investigators examine steam generator damage — and it’s unclear who will end up paying the bill.
With the reactors set to be offline through August, the additional expenses will likely exceed $200 million — and would be substantially higher if recently replaced steam generators need extensive work and San Onofre provides reduced or zero power generation for an even longer period.
The outlays include the expense of securing power contracts and daily electricity purchases while the plant is offline — a bill expected to exceed $100 million by itself — and the cost of repairing or replacing the equipment. It also includes items such as increased regulatory oversight and customer-funded incentives for energy conservation.
State utility regulators will review any extra expenses for “reasonableness” before they are passed on to customers, said Jennifer Manfrè, the spokeswoman for Southern California Edison, which operates San Onofre in northern San Diego County. Right now, she added, “it’s not a matter of counting costs, it’s a matter of operating safely.”
The electricity produced by the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station — up to 2,200 megawatts at any given time — is so integral to powering daily life in Southern California that government and industry officials have implemented plans to avoid power shortages this summer.
WASHINGTON — When the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee meets on Wednesday to consider President Obama’s choice to head the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, three themes are likely to dominate the questioning: waste, waste and earthquakes.
Video: MIT Evac Zone study debunked
Godards’ Journal has just put out an excellent 17 minute video debunking the recent MIT study claiming that their low radiation level test demonstrated why the country should reduce the need for evacuations following a nuclear disaster. A brief summary of his findings was that the MIT testers only dosed their lab mice for 35 days, and then made unsubstantiated statements that such low levels could continue not to cause any harm. Goddard found a 2009 study showing just the opposite of the MIT claims.
And of course the real issue here is that this study was done by the physics department at MIT that had gotten millions of dollars from DOE, including a study designed to win public acceptance for reducing the need to reduce evacuation zones.
Roger Herried Abalone Alliance Clearinghouse archivist Energy Net
Japan's Oi nuclear power plant in Fukui prefecture, where two reactors may be restarted. (Photo: Kepco/EPA)
Published on Thursday, June 14, 2012 by Common Dreams Japan One Step Closer to Nuclear Restart; Reactors Likely to be Turned On by Weekend
Japanese mayor approves plan to restart nuclear power plant
– Common Dreams staff
A nuclear energy restart in Japan has moved one step closer today, after Shinobu Tokioka, the mayor of Oi, a town in Fukui prefecture, said he had been persuaded to support the restart of two nuclear reactors at the Oi nuclear plant.
Japan’s Oi nuclear power plant in Fukui prefecture, where two reactors may be restarted. (Photo: Kepco/EPA) Following an appeal from Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, and an approval from the local nuclear safety commission, the Mayor of Oi effectively approved the restart.
The restart now needs only one more voice of approval from Issei Nishikawa, the governor of the prefecture of Fukui, which includes Oi; he is expected to approve the restart on Friday.
Over 1300 residents of Fukushima filed a criminal complaint on Monday against 33 people including Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) executives and workers in government organizations saying that they are responsible for negligence over the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster and should go to jail.
Caption: A group of Fukushima Prefecture residents are seen on their way to the public prosecutors office to file a complaint over the Fukushima nuclear disaster, in Fukushima on June 11. (photo: Mainichi) The groups says that the officials failed to adequately prepare for the nuclear disaster, despite the well-known risks of earthquakes and tsunamis in the area.
“The Fukushima nuclear accident is the worst corporate crime in Japan’s history and caused significant damage to the life, health and assets of the people of Fukushima and the rest of Japan,” the group, the Plaintiffs Against the Fukushima Nuclear Plant, said on its website.
At a news conference where the group and their lawyer addressed a crowd after submitting the complaint, Ruiko Muto, the 58-year-old head of the group that submitted the complaint, said, “We want to restore our power by having prefectural residents come together as one, saying, ‘We’re not staying silent.'”
“We lost our homeland, filled with beautiful nature, and our irreplaceable community. We shoulder the heavy burden of a divided local community and we are sitting in the midst of a suffering which shall never end,” the group lamented.
Mothers in Fukushima, Japan, worry that the food and milk that they must feed daily to their infants and children may one day kill them. Is that a fear that an American parent can even begin to fathom? That because of the secrecy, the intransigence and, ultimately, the criminality of your own government, you might be unwillingly killing your own children by feeding them produce contaminated with radioactive fallout? And yet, that is life in Fukushima Prefecture today.
You are a grandmother whose grandchildren can never visit you. You are a farmer whose crops are too contaminated to sell. You are a teacher who must tell children to jump into the school swimming pool’s cesium-laced waters. You are suffering ailments not unlike those found among populations exposed to the Chernobyl fallout. And whether your sufferings are physical or mental they are all equally real and equally serious and they are all caused, one way or the other, by the devastating nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima Daiichi that, far from being over, could actually get worse. Much worse.
25′ Al Jazeerah Nuclear Waste Debate with Arnie Gundersen
Inside Story Americas – Going nuclear
Allison Macfarlane, President Obama’s nominee to head the body that regulates Nuclear Safety in the US is a geologist and expert on nuclear waste disposal though she describes herself as a nuclear agnostic. If confirmed, she will replace Gregory Jaczko whose 8 year tenure was plagued by battles with the industry and Congress as he attempted to bring in new safety regulations. The United States is home to nearly a quarter of the world’s commercial nuclear reactors.
The head of the Nuclear Energy Institute yesterday said he was optimistic that California’s San Onofore nuclear plant would again start producing electricity and denied that the US industry was troubled by high costs and safety concerns after Fukushima.
Marvin Fertel, the president and chief executive of the Nuclear Energy Institute, said: “I’m optimistic that it will be restored to full power. If they plug in less than full power it will be for the right reasons.” Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future Issues Final Report to Secretary of Energy
Contact: John Kotek (202) 460‐2308
WASHINGTON, Jan. 26, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — The Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future today released its final report to the U.S. Energy Secretary, detailing comprehensive recommendations for creating a safe, long-term solution for managing and disposing of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste.
The report is the culmination of nearly two years of work by the commission and its subcommittees, which met more than two dozen times since March 2010, gathering testimony from experts and stakeholders, as well as visiting nuclear waste management facilities both domestic and overseas.
The commission, co-chaired by former Congressman Lee H. Hamilton and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, was tasked by Energy Secretary Steven Chu with devising a new strategy for managing the nation’s sizable and growing inventory of nuclear waste. Scowcroft and Hamilton said they believe the report’s recommendations offer a practical and promising path forward, and cautioned that failing to act to address the issue will be damaging and costly.
“The majority of these recommendations require action to be taken by the Administration and Congress, and offer what we believe is the best chance of success going forward, based on previous nuclear waste management experience in the U.S. and abroad,” the Commissioners wrote in a letter to Chu that accompanied the report. “We urge that you promptly designate a senior official with sufficient authority to coordinate all of the DOE elements involved in the implementation of the Commission’s recommendations.”
The report noted that the Obama Administration’s decision to halt work on a repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is the latest indicator of a nuclear waste management policy that has been troubled for decades and has now reached an impasse. Allowing that impasse to continue is not an option, the report said.
“The need for a new strategy is urgent, not just to address these damages and costs but because this generation has a fundamental, ethical obligation to avoid burdening future generations with the entire task of finding a safe, permanent solution for managing hazardous nuclear materials they had no part in creating,” the Commission wrote in the report’s Executive Summary.
The strategy outlined in the Commission report contains three crucial elements. First, the Commission recommends a consent-based approach to siting future nuclear waste storage and disposal facilities, noting that trying to force such facilities on unwilling states, tribes and communities has not worked. Second, the Commission recommends that the responsibility for the nation’s nuclear waste management program be transferred to a new organization; one that is independent of the DOE and dedicated solely to assuring the safe storage and ultimate disposal of spent nuclear waste fuel and high-level radioactive waste. Third, the Commission recommends changing the manner in which fees being paid into the Nuclear Waste Fund – about $750 million a year – are treated in the federal budget to ensure they are being set aside and available for use as Congress initially intended.
The report also recommends immediate efforts to commence development of at least one geologic disposal facility and at least one consolidated storage facility, as well as efforts to prepare for the eventual large-scale transport of spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste from current storage sites to those facilities.
The sensitive issue of mobile base stations has made it to the parliamentary agenda, with Parliament’s Social Affairs Committee due to discuss the issue at length on Tuesday. The discussion will revolve around the potential threat posed to children.
In addition to interested parties from the public, the meeting will hear from representatives from the Ministries of Health, Education, Infrastructure and Communications, the Malta Communications Authority, Mepa, environmental NGOs, and the countries three mobile telephony providers.
A concurrent online petition, which calls for mobile base stations situated on rooftops across the country to be removed from within at least 10 metres from children’s bedrooms, drawn up by Prof. Peter Xuereb, describes the current practice as a “human experiment”. Referring to Tuesday’s Social Affairs Committee, the petition’s organisers say, “We intend to speak there and question the mobile phone operators, who deny that there is any evidence of risk such as to bring into play the ‘precautionary principle’.
“This,” the petition states, “would require them to find alternative sites and remove the many hundreds already sited within 10 metres of the bedrooms of children, elderly people, and sick and other vulnerable people all over Malta.
“For three years they have ignored the growing evidence, including European Parliament resolutions that call on the authorities and operators not to site these on schools and so on. How can it then be right to site them in densely populated residential areas, without consultation or consideration of viable (if less profitable and effective − commercially) alternatives; and this on their own admission?”
The petition − which can be viewed and signed at
www.avaaz.org/en/petition/STOP_MOBILE_PHONE_ANTENNAE_BEING_SITED_WITHIN_15_METRES_OF_KIDS_BEDROOMS_IN_MALTA− adds, “Please help us break through this cynical barrier − you could be saving health and even lives down the line. Stop this human experiment now, in Malta and in other countries”.
Smartphone pictures pose privacy risks
Pictures you’ve e-mailed or uploaded from your smartphone could leak information that can threaten your safety or that of your children.
Visit https://tinyurl.com/smartphonerisks to read much more on this
Debated in Congress on antennas, electromagnetic pollution and health effects
06/07/2012
Organized by the Popular Unity bloc was held in the annex building of the Chamber of Deputies a public hearing to discuss the effects they have on the health of people.
The national deputy Antonio Riestra, Popular Unity bloc, presented by the legislator of Buenos Aires in Buenos Aires for all UP Laura Garcia Tunon and neighborhood organizations autoconvocados held a public hearing on the effects on the health of the population, Electromagnetic pollution from phone masts, FM, Wi-Fi and other devices.
In opening the hearing, Rep. Riestra said that “although not yet know all the aspects of this problem, it is clear that safety standards limiting radiation levels in almost every country in the world, seem to be thousands of times higher than the levels at which the risk actually disappear or be minimized. “So, estimated that” new approaches are needed to find alternatives that do not pose the same level of health risk, while it is time tothose changes. ”
“As people became aware of the effects on health when installing antennas in neighborhoods, the lawsuits brought against these authorizations, the complaints filed with the municipalities were increasing. And this happens not only in Argentina , multiply global social and environmental movements that seeks review of regulations and protection of human health, “the national legislature.
On this point, Riestra submitted to debate the bill of his own which he said, “establishes minimum budgets for environmental protection in the matter, according to the rules set forth by Article 41 of the Constitution guaranteeing the right to health and to live in a healthy environment. The Office is authorized to issue such rules in order to match the floor of environmental regulation across the country. Each province can from there pass laws stricter but not more lax. ”
In this month’s issue of Connection Magazine (Monterey, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, San Mateo County) www.connectionmagazineonline.com They published two article I sent:
Healthy Planet Section p. 6, 8 Smart Meter News Alert: World Health Organization Radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation emitted by Smart Meters is a possible carcinogen.
American Academy of Environmental Medicine
Calls for immediate moratorium, hearings on health impacts, immediate relief for those requesting it by restoring analog meters. “FCC guidelines are obsolete and inadequate for providing public health standards.”
Santa Cruz County Health Department
“FCC guidelines are irrelevant…No current, relevant public safety standards for pulsed RF involving chronic exposure of the public, nor of sensitive populations, nor of people with metal and medical implants that can be affected by localized heating and by electromagnetic interference.’’
Austrian Medical Association
“The planned area-wide introduction of so-called ‘smart meters’, can lead to health consequences…Who is liable in the event of health problems and diseases caused by the increased field exposure on the part of the Smart Meter?… The Austrian Medical Association strictly rejects another, in this case actually state-mandated, expansion of the Electrosmog exposure on the Austrian population.
Dr. Yolanda Gilli, Swiss Parliament
“How do you intend to preventatively protect the Swiss population against such radiation?
How high do you estimate the economic costs, for example as a result of the increase of multi-system diseases in area-wide introductions of smart grids?”
City of Ojai
“There is a growing body of evidence which calls into question the safety of smart meters due to the potential health risks they pose, especially to children. “
San Francisco Sierra Club
Calls for moratorium and investigation into “safety, accuracy, and necessity of wireless meters…Smart Meters may require more energy for production, operation and disposal.”
Alameda County Green Party
Calls for moratorium; issues of safety, accuracy, potential radio interference for first responders, impacts to wildlife.
Green Party of British Columbia
Calls for moratorium, public hearings, and health studies
Union of British Columbia Municipalities
Calls for moratorium and investigation
John Rowe, Exelon
“… it costs too much, and we’re not sure what good it will do. We have looked at most of the elements of smart grid for 20 years and we have never been able to come up with estimates that make it pay.”
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan
“The utilities want to experiment with expensive and unproven smart grid technology, yet all the risk for this experiment will lie with consumers.
…disappointing results that reinforce what Rowe already knows. On hot summer days, people continue to run their air conditioners no matter how much information they have from their smart meter.”
Blake Levitt, Chellis Glendinning
“How is it that so many intelligent, inside-the-beltway environmentalists are buying into an eco-health-safety-finance debacle with the potential to increase energy consumption, endanger the environment, harm public health, diminish privacy, make the national utility grid more insecure, cause job losses, and make energy markets more speculative?
Answer: by not doing their homework.”
Parenting, Kids and Education p. 28
Microwaving Our Children
Apps for tots. iPads for play. Teething on Smart Phones. Baby monitors in cribs. Smart Meters on bedroom walls. Wi-Fi in schools. Broadband initiatives. Cell towers in school yards.
Microwaving our children. Exposing their brains, eyes, developing neurological and immune systems, hearts, organs, glands, cells, DNA, testes and ovaries, and bone marrow to potent biologically-active microwave radiofrequency radiation.
Children absorb far more radiation in their brains and eyes than adults. They have thinner, softer craniums. Girls carry all the eggs at birth they will ever produce. Children’s neurological and immune systems are developing. What will be the results? The Russian NCNIRP warns of early onset dementia, cancer, and other problems. Scientist Leif Salford calls exposing all of us to this wireless technology the largest biological experiment ever. And without our informed consent.
What’s already known about this radiation is that it damages DNA, causing single strand and double strand breaks. It causes sperm damage and dysfunction. It causes cellular stress. It increases the risk for cancers and tumors. It can cause seizures. It affects hormone production. It affects heart function. It damages the blood-brain barrier which keeps toxins and other substances out of the brain, increasing the risk of stroke, auto-immune diseases, and dementia. It may damage the blood-placental barrier. It alters brain waves and affects brain function. There are links to autism, ADHD, Alzheimer’s, stroke. It causes changes in the blood, like rouleau formation, where RBCs clump together, raising the risk of thrombosis. There are environmental impacts to birds, bees, amphibians, trees, and plants.
In February, the Austrian Medical Association issued a report calling for “normal” limit benchmarks ten million times lower than FCC guidelines. In 2010, an article in the Santa Clara County Medical Association Bulletin summarized some of the research, and in August 2009, the journal Pathophysiology devoted the entire issue to EMF/RF research. By 2003 in Germany, over 2000 health care professionals signed the Freiburg Appeal, warning about health changes related to wireless technology use. In 2008, the Russian National Committee on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection warned that our children’s future is at risk from cell phone use. In France, Austria, Taiwan, Switzerland, England, Belgium, Israel, and by the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, actions are being taken to warn and protect the public and protect children.
But not in America. Military and Industry pressure, FCC, EPA, and FDA complicity, junk science (e.g. the Danish cell phone study), and mainstream media silence keep the public thinking everything is fine. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, and a catastrophic health crisis waits around the corner.
The World Health Organization declared this radiation a Class 2B carcinogen last year, in the same category as DDT and lead. Is that what we want for our children? What an enormous cost our society is willing to pay for these “convenient” devices. How convenient is a brain tumor or a damaged child?
Wireless technology – boon or disaster. It’s our children and our future that is at stake.
For more information,
Citizens for Safe Technology www.citizensforsafetechnology.org
Cellular Phone Task Force www.cellphonetaskforce.org
Escuela Sin Wi-fi www.escuelasinwifi.org — Spanish
Radiation Education www.radiationeducation.com — by and for kids
H.E.S.E. Project www.hese-project.org — multi-lingual
[Editor’s Note: As managing principal of Smart Buildings, Jim Sinopoli discusses the benefits of using a microgrid to generate power.]
Centralized power plants have been around since the 1880s. More than a century later, we’re starting to see growth of microgrids — decentralized or distributed generation of power at individual buildings, primarily through renewable sources such as solar panels or wind turbines. With microgrids, real estate developers, building owners or the local community builds the power grid for their large development, industrial park, campus or even an entire neighborhood. No longer just a new concept, microgrids have moved beyond the pilot phase – they are now.commercialized with roughly 300 microgrids operational worldwide.
Overview
Within a microgrid are small power generators such as traditional fossil fuel generators, photovoltaic, wind and fuel cells. Different sources of power generation improve the microgrid’s reliability. The microgrid may be able to operate independently (such as in remote villages or military bases) or it could be connected to a larger utility power grid, in which case the microgrid then appears as one customer to the larger grid. The organization and management of the microgrid could be a cooperative arrangement for a community, coordinated by developers, or it may just be a large campus with one owner.
Microgrids improve the reliability of the older grid and the overall power system as well. Locally generated power lessens the burden on centralized generation and related transmission and distribution systems. Energy losses in the transmission process, which are significant in the larger grid, are negligible with a microgrid.
Potential Benefits
Microgrids will soon be a reality for each of us involved with designing, constructing, operating and managing buildings. So why would a developer or building owner be interested in a microgrid? Here are some compelling reasons:
Plant’s problems mobilize local anti-nuclear activists, residents and officials for the first time since the early ’80s.
By Elizabeth Douglass, InsideClimate News [1]
Jun 14, 2012
Home Page Title: Nuclear Mishaps Awaken Activists
Plant’s problems mobilize local anti-nuclear activists, residents and officials for the first time since the early ’80s.
By Elizabeth Douglass, InsideClimate News
Ongoing troubles at Southern California’s San Onofre nuclear power plant have galvanized area residents, city officials and environmental groups—putting an emphatic end to a complacency that was unusual for a densely populated region with a nuclear plant in its midst.
These days, public meetings about San Onofre [3] are jammed with residents and media outlets. Local groups are calling for the plant’s closure, city councils are demanding assurances about safety, Friends of the Earth [4] and other national groups are re-engaged, and the actions and statements of both the Nuclear Regulatory Commission [5] (NRC) and operator Southern California Edison [6] (SCE) are being examined like never before.
San Onofre’s most recent problem—a leak and excessive wear inside its new steam generators—is so troubling that both reactors have been shut down. Last week, SCE said the plant will stay off line through August, extending the outage to seven months and forcing utilities to cover the power loss during hot summer weather.
“It’s a new ballgame out there,” said Rochelle Becker, executive director of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility [7], a San Luis Obispo-based group that focuses on California’s two operating nuclear power plants. “Now you’ve got a community that’s speaking out and that’s not going away, and you’ve got legislators who are concerned.”
This kind of scrutiny has been the norm in communities surrounding nuclear plants in New York, Vermont and even Central California, where the state’s other nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon [8], is located near San Luis Obispo.
Photo: Nuclear Regulatory Commission - Most spent nuclear fuel is stored in pools like this one, with rods typically under 30 feet of water.
In a blow to the nuclear energy industry, a federal appeals court on Friday threw out a rule allowing plants to store spent nuclear fuel onsite for decades after they’ve closed, and ordered regulators to study the risks involved with that storage — 65,000 tons now spread across the country, and growing at 2,000 tons a year.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission “apparently has no long-term plan other than hoping for a geologic repository,” the unanimous ruling stated. “If the government continues to fail in its quest to establish one, then SNF (spent nuclear fuel) will seemingly be stored on site at nuclear plants on a permanent basis. The Commission can and must assess the potential environmental effects of such a failure.”
Nuke Workers Locked Out
THURSDAY JUN 14, 2012 3:12 PM Scabs Brought in To Run Nuclear Power Plant During Lockout in Mass.
BY MIKE ELK
On June 5, a number of replacement workers and outside managers were brought in to operate Entergy’s Plymouth Station nuclear power plant in Plymouth, Massachusetts. While the replacement workers have experience working as technicians in other nuclear power plants in the United States, the union claims that the technicians lack the site-specific experience needed to operate a plant as complex as Plymouth Station. One replacement worker who spoke to Working In These Times worries that a mix of replacement workers and Entergy managers with little experience operating the Plymouth Station could cause a catastrophe.
The lockout of 250 workers began after Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA) Local 369 and Entergy were unable to agree to a contract. Entergy had pushed for the elimination of disability insurance, of life insurance for workers over age 55, and of seniority in the plant, as well as for cuts to workers’ retirement and medical plans. The company also wanted to maintain the right to make unilateral changes to workers’ retirement and medical plans whenever it wanted.
“What we want is protection down the road for our family” says union member John Barilaro. “It’s a risky business and people do get sick. And they really don’t care. They are just concerned about the bottom line.”
By Kate Randall
11 June 2012 – World Socialist Website
Entergy Corporation locked out workers at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth, Massachusetts on Tuesday. The company escorted workers from the plant at midnight, and barred others from entering the plant for the morning shift.
More than 240 members of Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA) Local 369 are affected by the lockout. Several hundred unionized workers, including technical and engineering workers, remain on the job. Entergy is continuing operation of the nuclear facility utilizing contractors and management personnel at a reduced level of staffing, with some reportedly sleeping inside the plant.
Jaymi Heimbuch Technology / Gadgets May 29, 2012
The concern over being aware of radiation contamination has gotten to the point that a new smart phone has been introduced that offers the capability as an accessory. Softbank unveiled a new phone that has a built-in radiation detector.
According to Reuters, “Mobile phone operator Softbank Corp said on Tuesday it would soon begin selling smartphones with radiation detectors, tapping into concerns that atomic hotspots remain along Japan’s eastern coast more than a year after the Fukushima crisis.”
Softbank’s president stated, “The threat from the nuclear accident cannot be seen by the human eye and continues to be a concern for many people, especially for mothers with small children.”
Essentially the phone will have customized IC chips that measure radiation levels in microsieverts per hour. A user can test a location, and keep track of what levels were recorded at each tested location. We can imagine that with the sheer level of fear about contamination, this could be a popular selling feature for the phone. Who knows, we might see the feature pop up in smart phones in other parts of the world as concern over the safety of nuclear power grows.
FROM: Lou Zeller
RE: VICTORY on our petition of nuclear waste disposal
Today the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in our favor on nuclear waste! In NRC parlance, the issue is “waste confidence”; that is, how sure is the industry that it can manage nuclear reactor waste.
The Court vacated the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s waste confidence decision and remanded it back to the NRC for an environmental assessment or EIS on the environmental consequences of failing to establish a nuclear waste repository. Also, the Court ruled for the State of NY that the NRC’s analysis of temporary spent fuel storage impacts at reactor sites was insufficient. The court remanded on both the issues of (a) potential for future leakage and (b) potential for catastrophic fires.
The NRC has put out an advance notice of proposed rulemaking that would allow storage of spent fuel at reactor sites for 200-300 years. Today, the court kicked out two legs of the stool.
On February 10, 2011 Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League helped set this challenge in motion based on our interventions in nuclear power plant licenses. We provided standing and evidence from our license interventions at Bellefonte (AL), WS Lee (SC), North Anna (VA) and Vogtle (GA). The other two clients were Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, and Riverkeepers, Inc.
We thank Arjun Makhijani who provided a very thorough and hard-hitting expert report for our comments on the waste confidence decision and Geoff Fettus at NRDC, who collaborated with Diane Curran on the appellate brief. Most of all, we thank uber-attorney Diane Curran of Harmon Curran Spielberg and Eisenburg, LLP for their dedicated, excellent and tireless work done pro bono for us all.
We appreciate working with Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and Riverkeepers; Teamwork pays off!
Today’s DC Circuit decision and our 2011 letter are attached.
Lou
Louis Zeller, Executive Director
Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League
PO Box 88
Glendale Springs, NC 28629
BREDL@skybest.com
The operator of the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant has been dumping something like a thousand tons per day of radioactive water into the Pacific ocean.
Remember, the reactors are “riddled with meltdown holes”, building 4 – with more radiation than all nuclear bombs ever dropped or tested – is missing entire walls, and building 3 is a pile of rubble.
The whole complex is leaking like a sieve, and the rivers of water pumped into the reactors every day are just pouring into the ocean (with only a slight delay).
Most people assume that the ocean will dilute the radiation from Fukushima enough that any radiation reaching the West Coast of the U.S. will be low.
…Indeed, an island of Japanese debris the size of California is hitting the West Coast of North America … and some of it is radioactive.
[map and animation inserts]
Remembering Rosalie Bertell
Author, distinguished scientist, environmental activist, international expert on radiation, sister of the Grey Nuns
by Dr. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri
“There is no such thing as a radiation exposure that will not do damage. There is a hundred per cent possibility that there will be damage to cells. The next question is: which damage do you care about?” Dr. Rosalie Bertell, 1990
Dr. Rosalie Bertell, author, distinguished American scientist, environmental activist, international expert on radiation, and sister of the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart, died yesterday after a long illness. She was 83. She had been battling cancer over the past two years. According to Sister Julia C. Lanigan, president of the Grey Nuns, Dr. Bertell “was hospitalized this past week for advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.”
In 1984, Dr. Bertell founded the Canadian-based International Institute of Concern for Public Health, dedicated to helping many communities “assess and improve their environmental health status.” She was also a founding member of the International Commission of Health Professionals and the International Association of Humanitarian Medicine. In addition, she was Director of the International Medical Commission on the 1984 Union Carbide methyl isocyanate [MIC] gas leak disaster in Bhopal, India, which investigated the horrific chemical aftermath. The devastation to the environment and people still continues 28 years later.
Dr. Bertell also assisted the people of the Philippines with problems stemming from toxic waste left by the US military on their abandoned military bases, “worked with the government of Ireland to hold Britain responsible for the radioactive pollution of the Irish Sea, and assisted Gulf War Veterans and Iraqi citizens dealing with illnesses caused by the Gulf War. She served as a consultant to local, provincial and federal governments, unions and citizen organizations.”
This morning I learned of the passing yesterday (June 14th, 2012) of Dr. Rosalie Bertell, author of some of the most widely-read articles and books about nuclear issues including No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth. She was 83.
Dr. Bertell was a Grey Nun of the Sacred Heart, the founder of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health (IICPH), the recipient of numerous honors (such as the Right Livelihood Award in 1986) and held several honorary degrees.
In the nuclear industry, every life has an exact value, and every vote can be bought. (That’s one reason so many nuclear waste sites are located in sparsely populated poor communities. It’s cheaper.)
A life’s value is measured in dollars in America, yen, in Japan, euros in most of Europe, and so on. The exact amount is plugged into various computer programs which then calculate the expected loss from an “unexpected” accident.
(That’s why they know not to transport spent nuclear fuel from San Onofre through Los Angeles, and wanted to build a “toll road” to Yucca Mountain instead (State Route 241 extension straight from SanO to Las Vegas/Yucca Mountain). But Yucca Mountain is on hold, and so the toll road, heavily opposed by locals for other reasons, is also on hold. But if Yucca Mountain is ever built, then Route 241 is sure to be bulldozed through shortly thereafter… because of a computer program which puts an exact value on each human life.)
But it is impossible calculate the value to society of the late Dr. Rosalie Bertell, who passed away peacefully from “severe respiratory distress due to advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease” (see below for the official death announcement from GNSH). (You can be sure she was not a smoker; she had merely been breathing our global polluted air all her life. So are you.)
Dr. Bertell was a biometrician, environmental epidemiologist, and cancer researcher. For a decade she was senior cancer research scientist at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute. Dr. Bertell wrote and spoke about Depleted Uranium (“you’re basically throwing radioactive waste at your enemy…”) and many other topics. After the Union-Carbide chemical spill in Bhopal, India, she went there as Director of the International Medical Commission to study the effects of that disaster (the largest non-nuclear industrial accident in history). She also looked into the technical aspects of “HAARP” (America’s “High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program”), of which she wrote in 1996: “The ability of the HAARP / Spacelab/ rocket combination to deliver a very large amount of energy, comparable to a nuclear bomb, anywhere on earth via laser and particle beams, [is] frightening.”
And every so often she wrote to me — about a dozen times in the last 15 years, the last time being about a month after Fukushima. Every letter was a treasure, and two are shown below.
It is impossible to calculate the value of someone who so relentlessly spoke truth to power, science to dogma, fact to falsehoods, and reason to propaganda. And was so technically savvy while doing it.
We will miss Dr. Bertell with all our collective hearts. She was awesome.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
———————————————–
At 09:32 AM 4/13/2011 -0400, the month after Fukushima, Dr. Rosalie Bertell wrote:
Dear Ace,
I am telling people to use distilled water. It can leach out the radioactive heavy metals from cooked products. Fruits can be soaked in it. If there is some internal contamination it is safe to drink even for a pregnant woman. Do not reuse the cooking water but throw it on the ground where no food is raised. Internally keep up hydration so that the nuclear debris does not go back into storage in the bone. See enclosure!
Rosalie Bertell
————————————————-
My favorite letter from Dr. Bertell was this one, of course:
At 02:36 PM 11/27/2008 -0500, Dr. Rosalie Bertell wrote:
Dear Ace, Thank you for sending me a copy of: The Code Killers.
It is quite a work of condensing and making clear what has been very obscure
(deliberately) and complex! I appreciate your work! Thank you! […]
Rosalie Bertell
(The Code Killers is available as a free download from: www.acehoffman.org )
It is with sadness that I‚m writing to inform you that our dear Sister Rosalie died early this morning, June 14, 2012, after a week or so in the hospital with severe respiratory distress due to advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Despite her illness, she remained in good spirits and most interested in all of the works of justice she strove to support throughout her life right to the end. She died very peacefully.
Her funeral Mass will be here at our Motherhouse Chapel on Monday, June 17th at 10 a.m.
We will be remembering all of you as well as Sister Rosalie in our prayers that day, along with all the people who were victims of nuclear disasters and the many other societal ills that were the concerns of her heart and her life‚s work at the International Institute of Concern for Public Health.
Sincerely,
Sister Julia
Sister Julia C. Lanigan, GNSH
President
Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart
1750 Quarry Road
Yardley, PA 19067
215-968-4236
Website: www.greynun.org
Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart
Creating a Compassionate World
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A Two-Pronged Appeal
