Beyond Nuclear International
The nuclear pandemic
Billions would starve under nuclear war, and millions could be harmed by another nuclear meltdown
A statement from Abolition 2000
Earth Day should be every day, but this year’s marked a major milestone: 50 years! Abolition 2000 has set up a statement to be used in national and international campaigns, initiatives and platforms to advance nuclear disarmament and a sustainable world. Please sign it!
The year 2020 marks the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day and finds the planet facing existential threats like never before in human history.
The threat from climate change is manifesting itself more and more strongly as the years go by through extreme weather events, forest fires on a vast scale, the bleaching of coral reefs, and receding glaciers, among others. This year also sees the world facing a pandemic which, as we speak, is costing thousands of lives every day and seems likely to have an impact on our civilization for years, if not decades to come.
Tropical cyclones and other extreme weather patterns are on in the increase under climate change. (Photo: NASA/Nilfanion at Wikimedia Commons)
Alongside these threats to human existence, however, is the lesser-considered, but more dangerous threat from nuclear disaster, and in this context we recall that the year 2020 also marks the 75th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing an estimated 500,000 people either through immediate incineration by the blast or subsequent death over the following months and years from agonising radiation poisoning.
Fire licks the Chernobyl perimeter
Questions about raised radiation levels linger along with the smoke
By Cindy Folkers
How close to the Chernobyl nuclear plant did the recent forest fires come? Did the smoke that enveloped Kyiv contain dangerous levels of radioactivity? We look at these and other questions about the deadly legacy of the 1986 nuclear disaster.
The recent wildfires in Ukraine and Belarus came dangerously close to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant site. Some burn still; others are smoldering. So, too, are the lingering doubts about denials from the Ukraine government that the fires, which tore through areas of the already radioactive Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, posed no radiological risks to those breathing in their fumes.
These latest fires, in a region where brush and forest fires are a frequent occurrence at this time of year, began on April 4, 2020. At least two were allegedly deliberately set. The fires have burned around 40,000 hectares across Ukraine and Belarus.
The April 26, 1986 explosion and meltdown of Chernobyl nuclear reactor unit 4, showered long-lived man-made radionuclides across large swaths of the Former Soviet States and Europe. A 30-km area around the Chernobyl nuclear site, dubbed the Exclusion Zone, has since been off-limits to human habitation because of the high contamination levels within it.
Firefighters confront the latest blazes in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and beyond. (Photo: State agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone management/Wikimedia Commons)
Consequently, forest fires that occur in radiologically-contaminated areas such as the Exclusion Zone pose a particular danger, remobilizing and redistributing radionuclides by burning the vegetation and soils that had sequestered them.
Indian Point should be “autopsied”
Analysis of closed reactors would reveal dangers of those still operating
By Linda Pentz Gunter
The Indian Point reactors have had numerous problems and near-misses. A close look at Unit 2 would inform the safety status of reactors still running — and ought to prompt their shutdown as well, rather than extending operating licenses to 80 years.
The Indian Point Unit 2 nuclear reactor in New York closes down permanently on April 30. It is a moment replete with good news and golden opportunities that should not be wasted.
As Richard Webster, Legal Director for Riverkeeper, wrote recently in Gotham Gazette, “there will be no problem keeping the lights on when Indian Point closes.” But the question is, with what? Riverkeeper and others have launched a Beyond Indian Point campaign (a good choice of name!) which says that the electricity delivered by Indian Point will be replaced by renewables.
But will, or could be? Despite a ban on fracking in the state, New York still imports fracked gas from Pennsylvania. It is processed at a recently opened giant fracked gas power plant at Wawayanda, just 53 miles from New York City. The plant faced strong local opposition and acts of non-violent civil disobedience, including by actor and Beyond Nuclear supporter, James Cromwell.
There has also been opposition to “A massive, 42-inch, high-pressure gas pipeline [that] was built under the property of Indian Point to carry fracked gas to Canada for export,” posing risks even after Indian Point closes, since its inventory of high-level radioactive waste will remain on site.
So while, even before closing the plant, New York had already made “considerable progress toward replacing Indian Point with demand reduction, additional transmission, and new renewables,” as Webster wrote, Beyond Indian Point has set out to ensure that the Indian Point electricity is indeed replaced by a mix of renewables, energy efficiency and conservation.
Indian Point has been dubbed “Chernobyl-on-the-Hudson.” (Photo: Tony Fischer/Wikimedia Commons)
The women who told Chernobyl’s story
And the charity that sees those consequences first hand
By Linda Walker
Three great women writers have done so much to tell the story of Chernobyl. Their focus was not on the accident itself, but its impact on the people of Belarus and Ukraine.
Alla Yaroshinskaya
When reactor No 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant blew up in the early hours of 26th April 1986, it threw millions of curies of radioactive materials into the air, forming a 2km high plume.
Amongst the most dangerous isotopes it released were iodine 131, caesium 137 and strontium 90.
But according to Alla Yaroshinskaya, a journalist whose tenacity was responsible for revealing much of the subsequent cover-up, the most dangerous substance to escape from the mouth of the reactor did not appear on the periodic table. It was Lie-86, a lie as global as the disaster itself.
She visited towns and villages in northern Ukraine 18 months after the accident. The head of the local department of child health told her that they had not found any problems linked to radiation, or any thyroid problems. She had just visited doctors who told her that 80% of the children in their district had thyroid problems.
On land contaminated to less than 15 curies sq/km, agriculture continued as normal. The land in the UK from which farmers could not sell their lambs was contaminated to less than 1 hundredth of this level.
People who continued to live on contaminated land were given extra money for food and free medical care and better pensions, sometimes called the ‘coffin allowance’. Villagers in Ukraine signed an undertaking not to drink milk from their cows, but they were not provided with any clean milk or meat.
(You can watch a three-part interview with 1992 Right Livelihood award winner, Alla Yaroshinskaya below)
Stalking Chernobyl
Where a dose of adrenaline matters more than a dose of radiation
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Chernobyl is a place of loss and abandonment. The Zone is radioactive. So why do people flock there today? Iara Lee’s fascinating documentary goes with them to find out, and reminds us about life there before the April 26, 1986 nuclear disaster.
For most of us, Pripyat — the Ukrainian city that has become an iconic symbol of forced abandonment — summons images of drab, Soviet decay. Pripyat is a place of ghastly tower blocks, rusting playgrounds, a deserted Ferris wheel and peeling paint, its workforce trudging like automata to toil at the doomed Chernobyl nuclear power plant just 2.5km away.
But in the opening sequence of Iara Lee’s new documentary — Stalking Chernobyl; exploration after the apocalypse — we see a very different Pripyat, before the April 26, 1986 nuclear disaster. It is a place of singing and roses, swimming pools and picnics, and dancing babushkas.
And then, as someone in the film says, “On April 26, what had once been our pride became our grief.”
As we now know, and as the film reminds us, the residents of Pripyat did not fully understand the scope of the accident. They were told over an official loudspeaker announcement, with classic Soviet obfuscation, that “an unfavorable radiation environment is forming.” They packed up a few possessions and some food and left, forced into an evacuation that would endure not only for their own lifetimes, but for those of their descendants as well.
At the heart of Lee’s vivid and compelling film is a firsthand look not at those who fled, but at those who feel compelled to journey into the Chernobyl Zone — whether officially as tourists, or illegally as “stalkers” or aficionados of extreme sports. They are an eccentric, often misinformed bunch, in particular the stalkers, most of whom are young men and some of whom appear to be embarked on a kind of vodka-fueled macho right of passage.
Schoolroom in the Zone. (Photo by Thierry Vanhuysse, courtesy Cultures of Resistance Films)
But there are others who are appalled at the desecration of what they see as a mausoleum. As one young man notes, visitors to Chernobyl are staging scenes, bringing in their own props, and posing for gleeful selfies in a place that represents profound loss to those forced to abandon their homes and to those whose family members died during their heroic sacrifice as liquidators.
“They are destroying something that should be untouched,” he says.
Farewell Fessenheim, finally
The long fight to close French nuclear plant ends in relief rather than victory
By Linda Pentz Gunter
France’s two oldest reactors are finally closing. But their waste inventories sit perilously in pools adjacent to a canal, in a seismic area and on top of Europe’s largest groundwater source. Consequently, the Stop Fessenheim movement isn’t closing its doors.
On a sunny October day in 2009, a French border town was put under siege. There was no virus, but there was an invasion of sorts.
Protesters against the continued operation of the Fessenheim nuclear power plant were streaming into town. French authorities weren’t worried about their own citizens, but what they really feared were “rioting” Germans.
We were in Colmar, a town in Alsace, a region that has historically been a source of conflict between France and Germany for more than a century, changing hands several times until finally becoming French again in the waning days of World War II.
Possibly unaware of this, but maybe guilty of watching too many news clips of German protesters at Gorleben, the French police locked Colmar down.
The original protest site in the central Place Rapp was moved to one on the fringes of town adjacent to the station.
The German protesters turned out not to be as fierce as French authorities feared. (Photo: Linda Pentz Gunter)
Helicopters circled overhead, police with dogs (yes, Alsatians) blocked intersections, and trucks with the word “horses” plastered on them idled in side streets.
On the morning of the protest, the only place to get a cup of coffee was in the local butcher shop. Everything else was closed. When the French close their cafes, you know something serious is going on.
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