Beyond Nuclear International
What happened at Santa Susana?
A 1959 meltdown and a 2018 fire compounded a tragedy
By Carmi Orenstein
When the United Nations Human Rights Council officially recognized access to “a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment” as a basic human right earlier last October, it was an acknowledgement fifty years in the making. It was backed by an international grassroots effort, with the journey to the final vote including the voices of more than 100,000 children around the world and multiple generations of allies pushing against powerful corporate opposition.
Just about the time that this half-century-long campaign to enshrine the right to a safe environment kicked off, a story about the horrific violation of this same human right and its cover-up emerged in a community near my own childhood home in Southern California. In 1979, a UCLA student named Michael Rose uncovered evidence of a partial nuclear meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Lab (SSFL) in the Simi Hills outside of Los Angeles. The SSFL, formerly known as Rocketdyne, played key government roles throughout the Cold War, developing and testing rocket engines and conducting experiments with nuclear reactors. Today, as the result of a recently published peer-reviewed study that represents the dogged efforts of both professional researchers and a team of specially trained citizens, we have solid evidence of the spread of dangerous contamination from that site.
Working with nuclear safety expert and then-UCLA professor Daniel Hirsch, Rose discovered documentation that the partial nuclear meltdown had occurred at SSFL twenty years earlier in 1959, releasing up to 459 times more radiation into the environment than the infamous meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania. Unlike the Three Mile Island facility, the SSFL reactors lacked containment structures—those tell-tale concrete domes that surround commercial nuclear power plants to prevent radiation spread in case of a nuclear accident.
In addition to the 1959 meltdown, at least three of the site’s other nuclear reactors experienced accidents (in 1957, 1964 and 1969), and radioactive and chemical wastes burned in open-air pits as a matter of practice. A “hot lab,” which may have been the nation’s largest, was also located at SSFL, and, in 1957, it burned and was known to have spread radioactivity throughout the site. A progress report from the period states, “Because such massive contamination was not anticipated, the planned logistics of cleanup were not adequate for the situation.”
Read MoreA big win for Yeelirrie
Cameco delays mean uranium mining permit not extended
By Maggie Wood, Acting Executive Director, Conservation Council of Western Australia
On April 6, we celebrated a huge step forward in our sustained campaign to keep the door closed to uranium mining in Yeelirrie.
The Minister for Environment has rejected an application by the Canadian mining company Cameco to extend their environmental approval for the Yeelirrie uranium mine.
The approval was controversially granted in 2017 in the dying days of the Barnett government and required Cameco to commence mining within five years. They have failed to do this and now they have failed in their bid to have this time extended.
This is a huge win for the local area, the communities nearby and for life itself. The special and unique lives of the smallest of creatures, endemic subterranean fauna found nowhere else on earth, would have most likely been made extinct had this project gone ahead, according to the WA EPA.
For over five decades Traditional Custodians from the Yeelirrie area have fought to protect their Country and community from uranium mining. Over this time they have stood up and overcome three major multinational mining companies – WMC, BHP and now Cameco.
We have stood united with communities to say no to uranium mining and this consistent rejection of the nuclear industry in WA has helped secure the sensible decision to not extend the approval.
“It is possible to stand up to multinational companies and stop major mining projects from destroying sacred lands and environments – we do that from a base of strength in unity and purpose, from persistent and consistent actions and most of all perseverance against all odds to stand up for what is right …” – Kado Muir, Tjiwarl Traditional Custodian.
Read MoreExtreme torture
Irish Sea to be site of seismic blasting at cost of sea life
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Imagine being subjected to ear-shattering blasts every ten seconds, twenty four hours a day for four straight weeks? By any metric, that would qualify as the most appalling form of torture.
But that is exactly what is about to be inflicted on whales, dolphins, seals and other marine creatures in the Irish Sea if a new wave of opposition cannot stop it.
The Irish Sea is already the most radioactive sea in the world, in large part a result of decades of radioactive discharges from the Sellafield reprocessing facility on the Cumbrian shoreline.
Now, Nuclear Waste Services (NWS) has contracted a company called Shearwater Geosciences to blast its undersea seismic airguns off the Cumbria coast this summer, calling it “scientific research”.
NWS, a division of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, is tasked with finding a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) to accommodate the millions of tons of radioactive waste left over from Britain’s commercial nuclear power program.
Estimates put the cost of the project — paid by taxpayers of course — at between 20 billion to 53 billion pounds.
NWS has been exploring sites exclusively in Cumbria, either close to the coast or extending up to the 22km outer limit of UK territorial waters. The seismic blasting is designed to test the geology beneath the seabed for suitability for an undersea nuclear waste dump.
Read MoreProfit in a time of war?
Westinghouse lands in Ukraine to ink new nuclear deal
By Linda Pentz Gunter
You might think that being in the middle of a war, the last thing you would be contemplating is building more nuclear power plants. But that hasn’t stopped Energoatom, the Ukrainian state nuclear operator.
Earlier this month, Energoatom inked a new agreement with Westinghouse of all companies, the American corporation that went bankrupt trying to build four of its AP1000 reactors in South Carolina and Georgia. The two in South Carolina were canceled mid-construction, while the pair in Georgia are years behind schedule and billions of dollars over-budget.
But like a good corporate vulture, Westinghouse has swooped into Ukraine, to grab a golden opportunity. Already the supplier of nuclear fuel to almost half of Ukraine’s reactors, the company now plans to increase that commitment to all 15, replacing Russia’s Rosatom; to establish a Westinghouse Engineering and Technical Center; and, craziest of all, build nine new AP1000 reactors there.
Westinghouse already has the contract to build more reactors at the 2-reactor Khmelnytsky nuclear power plant, which remain partially complete. Under the deal, Westinghouse will work first on Khmelnitsky 3, which is 75% complete, before taking on the 25% complete unit 4. Talks this month also evaluated Westinghouse building two more reactors at the site.
Fifteen operational reactors in a war zone — seven of them are apparently still running in Ukraine — is already risk enough. If even one of those reactors were fully breached, or its fuel pool caught fire or suffered an explosion — whether from an attack, accident, or meltdown due to gird failure — the amount of radioactivity released would dwarf the 1986 Chornobyl disaster.
Read MoreIn the name of Indigenous rights
Time to take nuclear power out of the ban treaty
What follows is a policy paper written by Mari Inoue with the Manhattan Project for a Nuclear-Free World, with input from members of the Affected Communities and Allies Working Group, including Adrian Monty, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, Linda Modica, Kathleen Sullivan, Michel Lee, and Yukiyo Kawano. It calls for the references to nuclear power in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) to be deleted. Endorsed by more than 45 US organizations, the paper, reproduced below, calls for equity and justice and due consideration for Indigenous Peoples, none of which can be achieved as long as nuclear power operations remain endorsed by the TPNW. Specifically, wording in the treaty states: “Emphasizing that nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of its States Parties to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination”.
Introduction
These policy recommendations are endorsed by 45 civil society groups from across the United States. As groups that are active in the United States where the original Manhattan Project unleashed the violent atom, we believe that we have a social responsibility to raise our deep concerns and provide recommendations to reduce the extreme dangers associated with the use and testing of nuclear weapons as well as the development, production, and storage of nuclear weapons and radioactive waste.
Expected Policy Outcomes
We recommend that states parties adopt a declaration and an action plan with specific commitments to implement the articles of the Treaty as outcome documents based on the following key messages and policy commitments, with the intention to fulfill their legal obligations under the Treaty.
We recognize the groundbreaking nature of the Treaty that declares that “any use of nuclear weapons [would be] abhorrent to the principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience” and “would be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, in particular the principles and rules of international humanitarian law.” We are immensely grateful for the novel recognition of the disproportionate impact of radioactive violence on Indigenous Peoples, women and girls, for naming and recognizing the suffering of hibakusha and nuclear test survivors. We also commend the Treaty’s fundamental shift from a Cold War narrative of the doctrine of deterrence to humanitarian and environmental consequences of nuclear weapons where the development, testing, production, possession, deployment, use, and threat of use is outlawed for the first time since the dawn of the Atomic Age.
Read More‘Unacceptable, deplorable and criminal’
Bringing nuclear weapons into any war should be unthinkable, not a present danger
By Ray Acheson
At the outset of his invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that other countries “will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history” if they intervened.
A few days later, he ordered Russian nuclear forces to be put on a heightened alert status. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev later outlined possible scenarios for the use of nuclear weapons and Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said that maintaining “readiness of strategic nuclear forces” remains a priority. A Russian government spokesperson has since said that Russia would only consider the use of nuclear weapons if there was an “existential threat” to Russia.
The words and actions of Putin and other Russian officials have elevated the risks and dangers of nuclear war back into mainstream consciousness. But the threat of nuclear weapons is not limited to the Russian government. Eight other governments—those of China, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, and the United Kingdom and the United States—also possess nuclear weapons, and US nuclear bombs are stored on the territory of five other North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) members—Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Turkey.
Each and every one of these bombs is a threat to peace and security. Nuclear weapons are not abstract “tools” that maintain global peace and security. They are weapons of mass destruction. They create instability, enable horrific violence, and risk life on the planet. As the Human Rights Committee declared in 2018, nuclear weapons “are of a nature to cause destruction of human life on a catastrophic scale that is incompatible with respect for the right to life.”
Yet it seems as if mainstream media and so-called experts from nuclear-armed countries are trying to normalise this threat, suggesting that yes, Putin might use nuclear weapons, and maybe the consequences wouldn’t be as bad as some suggest.
The technostrategic-speak of “tactical nuclear weapons”
There have been many demands for NATO to impose a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine to end Russia’s airstrikes against Ukrainian cities, with little regard for the fact that this could very well lead to the use of nuclear weapons by Russia or all-out nuclear war. Instead, some politicians and commentators are suggesting that a no-fly zone is worth the risk of Russia using what are misleadingly called “tactical” nuclear weapons. Others are escalating the rhetoric of potential nuclear war, arguing that Putin is “irrational” and likely to use them, or that the Russian government sees a nuclear exchange as a “viable strategy”.
Read More
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