Beyond Nuclear International
From uranium mining to Covid-19
Assaulted by massacres, smallpox, uranium mining, and pipelines Native Tribes are standing up for their rights on COVID-19 protection
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Native Americans have largely been left out of the conversation about COVID-19 even though they have some of the highest infection rates in the country. They’ve been here before; with massacres, smallpox, pipelines, and the ravages of uranium mining whose radioactive releases compromise immune systems.
“We have an 80% unemployment rate,” said Milo Yellow Hair, who lives on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, one of nine which make up the Lakota Nation.
I made him repeat it. That was eight zero. Not one eight. Eighty. In America. Today.
It’s a symbol, to put it mildly, of several centuries of neglect, discrimination and persecution.
The Lakota Nation today contends with a chronic and widespread lack, not only of employment, but of other fundamental rights like running water, electricity, and adequate health care. Its communities are beset with high rates of poverty, alcoholism, drug use and domestic violence. These constitute the legacy of occupations, displacements, massacres, smallpox, fights for freedom crushed, and the imposition of ecosystem-destroying oil and gas pipelines.
Most significantly, perhaps, it is an inevitable result of the harmful legacy of exposures from uranium mining, unique to Native American communities, and which have had a devastating effect on health.
And now there’s COVID-19.
And yet, while some media attention has focused on the disproportionate COVID-19 infection and death rates among African American and Latinx populations, there was almost no mention at the outset of its effect on Native American communities.
Stop EDF’s silent spring!
Birds and other wildlife would be eliminated by EDF two-reactor project on English coast
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Two new nuclear reactors are threatened for the English east coast. The EDF project would destroy precious ecosystems and drive away already rare wildlife. Activists there are now raising funds for scientific expertise to help block any further progress on the reactors, and also, in a separate appeal, to continue the legal fight.
Did you ever hear a bittern boom?
It sounds like a question Dr. Suess might have asked. But that sound, and the bird that makes it, is one of the critically important losses about to befall coastal Suffolk in the UK if French nuclear firm, EDF, continues to press forward with its plans for a new reactor there. The project is called Sizewell C.
Or more accurately, plows ahead. Because what EDF is proposing, and so far not nearly enough people are opposing, is to literally plow under some of the most precious, fragile and unique flora and fauna anywhere in the world. In exchange, it will plant the technically flawed and financially failing fiasco that is its European Pressurized Reactor, directly on the beach there. Two of them in fact. As it is already doing at the Somerset UK site — Hinkley C. To disastrous effects on the surrounding countryside.
We touched on this threat earlier this year in another article. As I wrote there: “The first thing that is likely to happen is that EDF will raze Coronation Wood. It will do this, not because it needs to now. It is not even certain that Sizewell C will go ahead. It will do this for show. The show in question is to prove to the world that the French nuclear industry is alive and well.”
Fortunately, on June 3, Suffolk activists won a crucial round in court that will allow a judicial review of the decision by East Suffolk Council in September 2019 to grant EDF planning permission to cut down the 100 year-old Coronation Wood. The judge granted permission for the challenge to proceed on the basis it is arguable that there were deficiencies within the Environmental Impact Assessment relied upon by the Council in making their planning decision. (Update: As the allowed challenge forced the exclusion of the argument that the proposed development did not satisfy the standard of need required by law to justify a major development in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, TASC has now also launched an appeal on those grounds.)
The otter, a remarkable comeback success story, could be driven away by EDF’s Sizewell C project. (Photo courtesy of Suffolk Coastal Friends of the Earth)
This is a crucial development because, if EDF is not stopped, and Coronation Wood goes, the company will then proceed to desecrate and destroy a remarkable landscape that abuts and traverses the beautiful Minsmere Nature Reserve, managed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
Space Force is no laughing matter
What started as “a joke” his now deadly serious; and just plain deadly
Beyond Nuclear has been publishing a series of informational booklets that, taken together, comprise The Case Against Nuclear Power: Facts and Arguments from A-Z. To date, we have focused on nuclear power on Earth. But with Trump’s ominous creation of the U.S. Space Force, the possibility of nuclear-powered weapons — for the purposes of war — moved one, or possibly several, steps closer. Accordingly, we have shifted our horizons to include the heavens. Our newest handbook is about the Space Force.
Space Force has just launched. On Netflix. It’s a reboot of a chronically bad 1978 TV movie of the same name. The older version featured a crew of astronauts tasked with keeping “the galaxy from getting worse”. It was a comedy, or trying to be. So is the new series, starring Steve Carell, or at least it, too, is trying to be. (If only they had let Armando Iannucci write it).
(None of this is to be confused with the Saturday launch of SpaceX, another topic and possibly for another time).
The Carell series endeavors to poke fun at the real Space Force, an expensive and dangerous reality created by Trump last December. But even that Buffoon in Chief said the idea for an actual US. Space Force started out as a joke.
The Space Force will be wildly expensive and could lead to war — and the use of nuclear weapons — in space. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Consequently, when space is viewed as “a warfighting domain” that could utilize nuclear-powered battle platforms and lasers, we have no choice but to extend our opposition to nuclear power beyond Earth’s boundaries.
The nuclear weaponizing of space has, to date, captured too little attention among politicians and the press. The new Beyond Nuclear booklet — The U.S. Space Force and the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear war in space— is intended, in some small way, to help redress that imbalance. You will find it on our Handbooks page.
Make Nuclear Great Again?
The claim that nuclear power is needed for national security is a masked money-grab
By Linda Pentz Gunter
The US Department of Energy’s assertions about Russian and Chinese supremacy in the nuclear sector is reminiscent of the “Commie plot” rhetoric of the 1950s. But it’s a thinly disguised ploy to feed at the federal subsidies trough and revive a moribund industry.
A few years ago I attended two days of the Nuclear Deterrence Summit, held just outside Washington, DC. In my defense, I’ll say it was a necessity. I really wanted to get inside how these people think. There was plenty of talk about the need for nuclear weapons, their range and potency, all done with a calm equilibrium devoid of conscience. It was chilling.
But it was also the theatre of the absurd. At one point there was actually talk about a “missile gap.” The Russians were getting ahead. This must be stopped. Was I on the set of a remake of Dr. Strangelove? Was this General ‘Buck’ Turgidson railing about “commie plots” and “mineshaft gaps”?
Life, as it turns out, is routinely stranger than any fiction. Turgidson is still with us, and he has extended his brief to include “civilian” nuclear power plants in the competition with the “Ruskies” and now, the Chinese.
U.S. Energy Secretary, Danny Ray Brouillette, whose parents, in christening him, must have intended a future for him at the Grand Ole Opry, recently bemoaned on air that “We’ve lost our leadership both on the technology side and on the market side… to the Russians and the Chinese”. That vanquished pre-eminence in both the development and export of nuclear technology, is “a national defense issue.”
So great is this national emergency, that I received an alert in my email inbox from the DOE trumpeting a new report that aims to set this foundering ship to rights.
The US Department of Energy announces its new plan to make nuclear great again.
Nowhere to run to
Michigan floods expose impossible challenges of mass evacuations during Covid-19
By Paul Gunter
Two dam failures and major flooding in central Michigan, which also prompted a low-level emergency notification (scroll to NCR event #54719) at a nearby nuclear research reactor in Midland, have exposed the almost impossible challenge of evacuating people to safety during simultaneous catastrophic events.
The sudden need to evacuate large numbers of people from severe flooding — also threatening to compromise a Dow chemical facility that uses a research reactor — during a time of national lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, raises serious questions and concerns about the emergency response readiness and the viability of evacuation that might simultaneously include a radiological accident.
Michigan authorities were forced to face a “no-win compromise” between protecting the public from exposure to Covid-19 while at the same time moving people out of harm’s way after heavy rains caused failures at the Edenville and Sanford dams, leading to devastating floods.
The Dow plant insists there have been no chemical or radiological releases, but the situation will be evaluated once floodwaters recede. Fortunately, no full-scale commercial nuclear power plant was in the path of the Michigan floods.
Operating nuclear power stations are required by federal and state laws to maintain radiological emergency preparedness to protect populations within a ten-mile radius from the release of radioactivity following a serious nuclear accident. These measures include mass evacuations.
The prospect of evacuating during a triple-threat nuclear emergency, natural disaster and pandemic, raises serious concerns about practicability. (Photo: Adam Melancon/Creative Commons)
However, many communities around the nation’s 95 commercial reactors are presently sheltering-in-place at home as a protective action during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Fukushima’s radioactive water problem
Water should be stored at nuclear site, not dumped in the Pacific
By Linda Pentz Gunter
We are republishing this story this week, as the Japanese government is now threatening the imminent dumping of the radiologically contaminated water, stored at the Fukushima nuclear site, into the Pacific Ocean. The article below provides the background on this issue and the alternative choices. Our Japanese activist friends are urging us all to sign onto their petitions — there is one for groups to sign and one for individuals — asking the Japanese government not to dump 1.2 million cubic meters of radioactive water into the ocean. Japan civil society groups and Fukushima fishing unions are strongly opposed to this needless ocean discharge. Groups please sign here. Individuals please sign here.
Original article, published September 15, 2019, follows:
Last week, Japan’s then environment minister, Yoshiaki Harada, made news with a pronouncement that wasn’t news. The storage tanks at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear site, filled with radioactive water, were reaching capacity. By 2022 there would be no room for more tanks on the present site. Japan would then have to dump the radioactive water stored in the tanks into the Pacific Ocean, he said.
Although likely unrelated to those remarks, a day later, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe dispatched 19 of his cabinet ministers, including Harada. Harada was replaced as environment minister by rising star, Shinjiro Koizumi, the son of former primer minister, Junichiro Koizumi. Both father and son are opposed to nuclear energy, and on his first day in office, the younger Koizumi told reporters that he believed Japan should end its use of nuclear energy and close its nuclear power plants.
Shinjiro Koizumi, Japan’s new environment minister, says Japan should cease using nuclear power. (Photo: R2d2ki for Wikimedia Commons)
“I would like to study how we scrap them, not how to retain them,” Reuters reported him saying. This is a surprising position from someone inside the fervently pro-nuclear Abe government and it remains to be seen whether he will be allowed to translate his position into policy.
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