Beyond Nuclear International

The global footprint of nuclear fallout

By M.V. Ramana

The front page of the Times of India of August 7, 1945, carried the headline World’s deadliest bomb hits Japan: Carries blast power of 20,000 tons of TNT. For millions around the world, headlines of that sort would have been their first intimation of the process of nuclear fission on a large scale.

But, a careful stratigrapher, who studies layers in the soil or rock, might be able to discern that, in fact, nuclear fission had occurred in July 1945. The stratigrapher would just have to look for plutonium at Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada, the site proposed as the “golden spike” spot to mark the start of the Anthropocene (recognising the problems with its definition as highlighted in Down To Earth’s interview with Amitav Ghosh).

What happened in July 1945 was, of course, Trinity, the world’s first nuclear weapon test, now familiar to many through the film Oppenheimer. A group of researchers recently reconstructed how the plutonium released during that explosion would have been transported by the wind. They calculated that direct radioactive fallout from that test would have reached Crawford Lake within four days of the test, “on July 20, 1945 before peaking on July 22, 1945”.

Since Crawford Lake is nearly 3,000 kilometres from the Trinity test site in New Mexico, it stands to reason that many other places would also have received radioactive fallout from the Trinity test. Now consider the fact that there have been at least 528 nuclear weapon tests around the world that took place above the ground, plus the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and you can easily imagine how radioactive fallout must have fallen practically everywhere, whether on land or in the oceans.

Not included in the abovementioned list of 528 is the debated 1979 “Vela incident” that most likely involved an Israeli nuclear weapon test with help from South Africa. It is described as debated only because political elites in the United States, whose Vela satellite 6911 detected a double-flash of light that is characteristic of nuclear explosions, did not want to impose sanctions on Israel.

Space agency and bro billionaires conspire to trash the moon

By Linda Pentz Gunter

Russia just crash-landed on the moon. India’s lunar rover is trundling across its surface. Are their intentions purely benign? Just about science? Or something more?

There are no such doubts lingering over US lunar plans, however. The mistakes made on Planet Earth will now be repeated on the moon.

In his fascinating and frightening 2012 book — A Short History of Nuclear Folly — that I somehow maddeningly missed on publication, Rudolph Herzog writes:

“There are places where radioactive substances have no business being. One of them is space.”

Herzog, son of the famous film director Werner, and whose book, written in German, was translated into English in 2013, details a whole panoply of terrifying nuclear accidents and near-misses, including disasters that could have befallen us in and from space.

But no lessons have been learned and no such warnings heeded.

Consequently, we now learn that NASA and the US Defense Department have awarded nuclear weapons company, Lockheed Martin, a contract to build a nuclear powered rocket to speed humans on their way to Mars. 

“Higher thrust propulsion” is what Lockheed Martin is seeking to develop, but is travel speed to Mars really the only motivation? Of course not. The Pentagon admits it is also keen to develop nuclear reactor technology that will power satellites with more “fuel-efficient fuel sources” so that they can maneuver in space in such a way as to “make them more difficult for adversaries to target” reported the Washington Post.

As Herzog recounts in his book, we have been here before, and the outcome could have been catastrophic. In his chapter, Flying Reactors, he recounts how in the 1960s, the then Soviet Union developed miniature nuclear reactors to power their RORSAT military surveillance satellites. At the end of their life they were simply blasted into deeper space where their radioactive load would decay far from human exposure risk. Or, at least, that is what was supposed to happen.

Nuclear plant builder seeks to avoid installing fish deterrent

From Stop Hinkley and Together Against Sizewell C with additional contributions from the Beyond Nuclear International editor

As Hinkley Point C (HPC) power plant is being built in South West England by Électricité de France (EDF), hundreds of thousands of fish living in the Severn estuary, including protected Atlantic salmon, are under threat from the plant’s cooling turbines. The UK Environment Agency (EA) has decided that this wholesale slaughter is perfectly okay.

On August 1, the EA announced that it had removed the requirement to install an acoustic fish deterrent (AFD) at the head of its seawater intake in the Bristol Channel. 

“In doing so, the EA has condemned millions of fish and other marine creatures to their fate of impingement, injury and death adding to the many millions of fish fry, fish eggs, small fish and other marine biota that will be killed when entrained in the cooling system of the plant,” said Together Against Sizewell C (TASC) in a press statement. An identical two-reactor EPR project is targeted for the Sizewell nuclear site in Suffolk.

The HPC Pressurized water reactors will need vast amounts of cooling water for their steam power generation. The intake indiscriminately sucks in huge amounts of living creatures, ranging from marine mammals, crustaceans, fish, eggs and their larvae, most of which won’t survive the journey through 3km of pipe work at high pressure to the condenser and the discharge back to the Estuary.

Consequently, EDF was required in its 2013 Development Consent Order to meet a number of conditions, including the installation of an Acoustic Fish Deterrent (AFD) that generates sound waves to deter sound-sensitive fish away from the water intakes. Although EDF originally proposed the installation of the AFD as part of their environmental protection package, they then proposed to avoid it, despite the fact that the Severn Estuary supports up to 110 fish species, with fish nurseries serving the whole of the Bristol Channel and Celtic Sea and an average of 74,000 wintering birds each year.

EDF claimed the AFD would be too costly and impractical. But rather than evaluating other methods to cool the power plant, EDF instead reduced its original estimates of fish losses to suggest the AFD speakers wouldn’t make much difference after all, so that construction should be allowed to continue without them. It claimed the speakers would add a “minimal benefit” to wildlife and its construction would prove a “safety risk to workers”.  Bear in mind that the amount of fished killed by Hinkley B station was 2.05 tonnes per day.  Hinkley C is likely to kill far more. Apparently, the EA agreed.

Removing this piece of environmental protection will threaten the biodiverse ecosystem of the UK’s largest estuary and designated Special Area of Conservation. It could also set a precedent for future projects like Sizewell nuclear power stations in Suffolk.

Radioactive water dump is just latest example our reckless destruction of habitat

By Linda Pentz Gunter

Much has been made — and rightly so — about the potential impact on human health and the Japanese fishing industry if Japan moves forward with its proposal to dump 1.2 million cubic meters — that’s 1.3 million tons —of radioactively contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean from the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant site.

Unfortunately, this looks likely to happen sometime this month or next despite the worldwide outcry. But when I say “happen”, that rather suggests a one-off dump. Instead, the discharge of these liquid nuclear wastes could go on for at least 17 years according to the Atomic Energy Society of Japan, but likely longer as decommissioning work at the site is expected to take at least 30-40 years.

It is perfectly right and reasonable that the Japanese fishing community sees its livelihood under threat from this proposal. Indeed, it has already taken a hit, as imports of Japanese fish stock to South Korea were down by 30% in May, before the dumping even began. This was clearly driven by jitters around the on-going safety of Japanese fish supplies once those radioactive discharges get underway.

And Pacific Island nations, along with an international team of scientific experts, have equally decried the plan as premature, unnecessary and in need of far greater confidence and further study before such discharges are executed, if ever.

But there is a greater moral issue here, one that speaks to humankind’s reckless and selfish behavior on planet Earth ever since mechanization and the various so-called industrial revolutions began.

For almost three centuries in the developed world, we have continuously and wantonly destroyed vast areas of precious habitat for numerous species. We have clear cut forests, sliced the tops off mountains, broken open the earth to mine minerals, exploded atomic weapons, spewed mercury and carbon into our air, drilled for oil, sprayed pesticides at will and filled the oceans with plastics, to name just a few environmental atrocities.

The toxic mess these activities leave behind has been dumped into rivers, streams, lakes and oceans, or on the lands where the less influential and powerful amongst us live — in the United States almost always in communities of color or on Native American reservations.