Beyond Nuclear International
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.
Invest in healthcare not militarization
A statement from the International Peace Bureau
IPB is calling for a dramatic reduction of military spending in favour of healthcare and meeting social needs. Sign their petition to the UN. (Link also provided at the end of this article.)
The world’s oldest peace NGO, the Nobel Prize-winning International Peace Bureau (IPB), has called on G20 world leaders to send a message of peace and solidarity to the world as they address the global health emergency.
This is a time to open a new page in global relations, to put geopolitical tensions to one side, to end proxy wars, for a ceasefire in those many conflicts around the world all of which stand to hamper a global solidarity effort.
We have to lift the shadow of war and military brinkmanship which has blighted global cooperation in recent years and work to ensure that a spirit of peace and solidarity prevails.
Humans are paying a terrible price for the diversion of funds away from health and welfare and into military spending. (Photo: “India, 2013” by Juanlu Sánchez/Creative Commons)
The IPB has long drawn the world’s attention to the increasing velocity of the global arms race.
Our communities are paying a high price for an arms race that has diverted resources from the basic health and welfare needs of the people.
We are all paying a heavy price for failed leadership and misplaced market-driven practices that have weakened our means to address this emergency, which has hit the weakest hardest.
Nuclear disarmament in fraught times
Balancing faith and hope in a time of violence
By Emily Welty
Before the Covid-19 assault, there was saber-rattling of the nuclear kind, and escalating violence around the world. Much of that has sadly not abated. But Emily Welty, traveling the world on her sabbatical, reflects on the hopeful signs, and inspiring people, she has encountered.
Working on nuclear disarmament feels like the intersection of two ventricles of the human heart awash in equal amounts of despair and progress. The whir of panic about the dangers of nuclear weapons and the encouraging movement towards a nuclear-free world both felt accelerated during the first weeks of 2020.
Nuclear saber-rattling and a political assassination that escalates violence both latent and overt between the United States and Iran; the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moving the Doomsday Clock forward to one hundred seconds before midnight; nuclear states showing little introspection or shame about their stockpiles of horrific weaponry.
Nonetheless, rousing symbols of prophetic hope of a more generous, interdependent, trusting, and creative world abound. New York City, one of the largest cities in the world, had a hearing on January 29 to consider divestment from nuclear weapons and reaffirm the city as a nuclear weapon-free zone, joining other major cities taking local action on nuclear disarmament such as Toronto, Los Angeles, and Melbourne.
The majority of millennials support banning nuclear weapons entirely according to the latest poll from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Some days it feels difficult to hold both of these truths in one human heart—the devastating risks and the courageous progress made by ordinary citizens to ameliorate these threats. For religious people, holding these tensions together in our souls and addressing them with our work is fundamental to our identity as people of faith who manage to live amidst suffering while not losing sight of the ultimate expectation that the world is beloved and meant for sublime goodness.
Pope Francis’ visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki embodied the delicacy and skill of addressing both impulses. The pope’s denouncement that the use as well as the possession of nuclear weapons is a “crime not only against the dignity of human beings but against any possible future for our common home” acknowledges the serious moral violation of these weapons.
Released from silence
Atomic veterans struggle to find words as they recall the pain of a past secret
By Linda Pentz Gunter
A new film — The Atomic Soldiers — lets the veterans who witnessed the Hood test in Nevada tell their own stories. But the painful memories sometimes choke their recollections, leaving long and moving silences in place of words. “You don’t send 14,000 troops through ground zero and not call it anything but genocide,” says one.
The Atomic Soldiers, Morgan Knibbe’s profoundly moving 22-minute documentary, opens with silence. The camera focuses on a series of veterans of US atomic testing, and each of them looks back, some directly at the camera, some unable to. Their pain is palpable. When they begin to speak, the emotion in their voices swells.
Although each man was exposed to the radiation blasted from the US atomic tests more than 60 years ago, it’s clear that the experience sears through each of them like it was yesterday.
It is the pain not only of the very real physical suffering, but of their involvement in the tests themselves, which they were forced to keep entirely secret. “I never told anybody. Not my parents, not my brother, not my best friends, not my wife. Nobody,” says Rex L. Montgomery (none of the veterans is captioned during the film but they are identified at the end.)
You can watch the film here:
Lecciones nucleares del coronavirus
No hay lugar para la nuclear en tiempos de pandemia y caos climático
By Linda Pentz Gunter
No hay nada como encerrarte en tu propia casa, junto a tus seres queridos, para centrarte en las crisis que asedian el mundo más allá de tus puertas y ventanas.
Y hablamos de crisis en plural porque, aunque ahora nos centremos en el coronavirus, existe otra, gigante, que se acerca con la promesa de una devastación mucho mayor, y que sin embargo no genera el mismo tiempo de reacción inmediata. Se trata, claro está, del cambio climático.
Pensar en el coronavirus desde mi despacho, tranquilo, sin el ruido del tráfico llegando desde la calle y con el canto de los pájaros como fuente de distracción, me conduce inevitablemente a pensar en la crisis climática, ya que guarda una importante conexión con el covid-19. En ambos casos, necesitamos reconocer el problema; después, nos tienta pensar que se solucionará por sí solo; más adelante, que igual no será tan malo como dicen; al poco, admitimos que la situación es muy preocupante, pero no queremos hacer todo lo necesario para solucionarla; finalmente, nos toca confrontar una crisis que ya es imposible de mitigar.
La negación parece ser uno de los grandes logros humanos. Es por eso que existe la energía nuclear. Será tan barata que no nos cobrarán por ella. Ningún accidente puede ocurrir. Ya solucionaremos la cuestión de los residuos.
Storm surges and sea level rise are an inevitable risk to all coastal properties, but especially nuclear power plants. (Photo: Creative Commons)
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