Gary Null’s film on the dark and deadly world nuclear experiment appears to be exciting, powerful and infomative.
Will report more after attending the premiere in NYC in early August.
Knocking on the Devil’s Door (trailer)
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Category Archives: History of nuclear power
Why Fukushima is worse than Chernobyl
To summarize a few key points:
- The radiation risk model used by the ICRP is too simple. It treats internal (that is inhaled or ingested) radiation emitters the same as external radiation emitters. Busby is convinced that internal radiation exposure can be “up to 1,000 times more harmful than the ICRP model.”
- Using the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) Busby calculates approximately 200,000 excess cancers within the next 50 years. Half will be diagnosed within 10 years. The ICRP model predicts 2,838 excess cancers. “The eventual yield will therefore be another test of the two risk models,”
- Many studies done after Chernobyl showed much greater cancer rates than the ICRP model predicted.
- “There will follow increased rates of ill health, including cancer and birth defects, which will be proportional to the overall air concentration. High in Japan, low in USA, and very low in Europe….”
- “I believe that in the explosions at Fukushima Daiichi, huge amounts of spent fuel were blown sky high. The ground contamination out to 100 km at Fukushima is worse than Chernobyl, the dose rates higher. And Fukushima has contaminated Tokyo with 35 million people. The population of the 200 km radius is also enormous, about 10 million. Most of the Chernobyl stuff fell away from big population centers. Luckily it went north and west and not to Kiev which is south. Fukushima is still boiling its radionuclides all over Japan. Chernobyl went up in one go. So Fukushima is worse.”
Chris Busby was interviewed by Norimatsu Satoko and Narusawa Muneo for the Asia-Pacific Journal. He is Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR), Visiting Professor in the School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Ulster, and Guest Researcher at the Federal Institute for Crop and Soil Research, Julius Kuehn Institute, Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants in Braunschweig, Germany.
Japan’s PM vows to get Japan off nuclear power
“We will aim to bring about a society that can exist without nuclear power,” said Japan’s Prime Minister Nato Kan on Wednesday in a televised address to Japan’s citizens.
He continued, “Through my experience of the March 11 accident, I came to realize the risk of nuclear energy is too high. It involves techology that cannot be controlled according to our conventional concept of safety.”
35 of Japan’s 54 reactors are offline at the moment. They include reactors damaged or stopped by the earthquake and tsunami, as well as those closed for routine repairs. If reactors that continue to come offline for maintenance are not restarted, Japan has the potential to be off nuclear power by April 2012.
From the Washington Post
Stop business as usual!
Please tell your Senators to say no to new nuclear power plants
The nuclear industry would like to pretend Fukushima never happened. Bills are arriving in the Senate to spend more of our money on new nukes. The industry is still calling it “clean power”. Call them out on their lie and demand your Senators do the right thing. Contact your Senators via Democracy in Action or
Directly at senate.gov.
Renewable Energy beats Nuclear Power in the US for the First Time
This is big news: the amount of energy produced from renewables has surpassed nuclear energy production for the first quarter of 2011.
Renewables include hydroelectric power and biomass energy production, two forms of energy production many environmentalists find objectionable. However, the greenest energy technologies, solar, wind and geothermal, are gaining in percentage. Forbes 7/7/11
Facts to use when discussing nuclear power
Want some nuclear power facts at your fingertips?
Study these 20 facts and be ready to spread the word
Here are two interesting facts from the article by Peace and Justice Online that are not well known: See all the facts.
• “Following the Three Mile Island accident, infant death rates increased dramatically in Pennsylvania’s nearby capital, Harrisburg. About 2,400 families sued, based upon the health impacts, which included cancer, leukemia, birth defects, stillbirths, sterility, malformations, open lesions, and hair loss. The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture documented an increase in the death rate among farm animals and wild animals in the area surrounding the nuke.”
• “Although the generation of electricity through nuclear reactions does not produce carbon emissions, reliance upon nuclear power does significantly contribute to the release of carbon into our atmosphere. This is due to the substantial carbon emissions produced by the mining, transport, and processing of the fuel, as well as by the construction and decommissioning of the plant. Nuclear power is not the solution to global warming.”
Nuclear power is unforgiving
Dr. Hannes Alfven was against nuclear power. He wrote that the only way it could work is if the following conditions were always in place:
Perfection by people in charge
No acts of God
IN 1972 Dr. Hannes Alfven wrote theses things in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Read entire article in Karl Grossman’s latest blog post
Reactor roulette in the USA
A list of 7 extremely close calls at US reactors is compiled and described in an article in The Week.
Check out The Week for details of each near miss.
The reactors locations and owners follow:
- 1. Peach Bottom, Delta, Pa. (Exelon)
- 2. Indian Point, Buchanan, N.Y. (Entergy)
- 3. Vermont Yankee, Vernon, Vt. (Entergy)
- 4. Diablo Canyon, San Luis Obispo, Calif. (Pacific Gas & Electric)
- 5. Brunswick, Southport, N.C. (Progress Energy)
- 6. Calvert Cliffs, Annapolis, Md. (Constellation Energy)
- 7. Wolf Creek, Burlington, Kansas (Wolf Creek Nuclear)
Japan in Wonderland: How the nuclear propaganda machine tricked a country
How did the Japanese fear of all things nuclear (after Hiroshima) evolve into acceptance?
Huge amounts of money have been spent to promote the idea that nuclear power is safe and necessary in Japan. From government mandated school textbooks to building with Disneyworld-like attractions the Japanese were conditioned to believe that Japan’s plants were totally safe. NYT
Radioactive tritium is leaking at 48 nuclear power sites in the US
Three quarters of U.S. commercial nuclear power sites are leaking radioactive tritium. Although most leaks appeared to have stayed within plant boundaries, drinking wells have been contaminated near two plants in Illinois and near one plant in Minnesota. So far the levels do not exceed federal standards, however many scientists and organizations, including The National Academy of Sciences are convinced that any amount of additional radiation increases ones risk of cancer. See AP report.