Chernobyl: The True Costs of Nuclear Technology

http://www.ratical.org/radiation/Chernobyl/index.html

http://www.ratical.org/radiation/Chernobyl...rnobylCoSS.html

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Nuclear Power was devised to make the public pay
the high cost of plutonium production, the element needed for nuclear
weapons. Nuclear power IS the most dangerous method to make steam
which generates electric power. The ultimate doomsday machine!

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End of Nuclear Weapons Could Begin at Central Park!
Announce end: Sun Apr 10, 2005 1:13 pm
Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2005 4:13 pm

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The future of nuclear weapons could be decided this year. For the entire month of May, world leaders will meet at the United Nations to review the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). President Bush has signaled that he wants to back-out of agreements made in the Treaty to begin "good faith" negotiations for the total abolition of nuclear weapons. Instead, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is asking for funds to research new nuclear "bunker busters" and smaller more usable mini-nukes.

Our continued reliance on these Cold War weapons sends a dangerous message that their possession is the quickest way to gain international respect. As each new nation tries to join the nuclear club, it brings fresh opportunities for a global conflagration involving U.S. bombing raids and ever more shorn bodies. It invites a future of retribution from terrorists fueled by demonstrations of U.S. domination. We can not bomb our way out of proliferation. Force will not save us from the terrorism of nuclear weapons; only faith can.

In this 60th Anniversary year of the first atomic bombings, the Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are organizing a world-wide campaign of mayors demanding that the U.S. and all other nuclear weapons states begin negotiations this year to eliminate nuclear weapons by 2020. They are bringing a delegation of mayors from around the world to a massive demonstration in New York City's Central Park on May 1st, the day before the NPT conference begins.

We need your help to send a unified message that people of faith intend to fulfill their promises of "good faith".

ï Plan to join thousands of people from around the world in a march past the United Nations and a rally in Central Park on Sunday, May 1st!

ï Ask your mayor to join the Mayors for Peace Emergency Campaign to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons. Tell your Mayor you'd like him to join the delegation of Mayors going to the UN in May: http://www.abolitionnow.org/mayors.html

ï Sign on to the "Open Letter to President Bush from Communities of Faith" asking that the U.S. lead the world in negotiating an agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons under strict and effective international controls. Learn more by visiting http://www.abolitionnow.org/

Visit the following links online:

Visit http://www.abolitionnow.org/
Read about the May 1st Central Park Rally http://www.abolitionnow.org/may1-ny.html

Who you can contact:

Chris Cooper
Director of Communications
ccooper@gracelinks.org
(212) 726-9161

Chernobyl's 19th Anniversary - Media Distortions

The following is the work of John LaForge of Nukewatch:

Today, April 26th is, of course, the 16th anniversary of the Chernobyl
nuclear catastrophe.

"Airborne radioactivity from the Chernobyl nuclear accident is now so widespread
that it is likely to fall to the ground wherever it rains in the United States,
the EPA said."

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, May 1996, p. 38:
"...radiation contamination was detectable over the entire northern hemisphere."

" AP, 15 May 1986:
"State authorities in Oregon have warned residents dependent solely on
rainwater for drinking that they should arrange other supplies for the time being."

The journal Nature has published a study of children born in 1994 to mothers
exposed to Chernobyl's fallout in 1986. Researchers studied 79 families 186
miles from Chernobyl and found never-before-observed "germ-line" mutations:
changes in DNA of the sperm and ovum. Such mutations are passed on from
generation to generation.18

7 At the Union of Concerned Scientists, senior energy analyst
Kennedy Maize, concluded that "the core vaporized" ¾ all 190 tons of fuel,
and all 9 billion curies.8

Former Chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Joseph Hendrie,
concluded likewise, saying "They have dumped the full inventory of volatile
fission products from a large power reactor into the environment. You can't
do any worse than that."9

Nineteen months after the disaster, in Nov. 1987, the U.S. government
officially doubled its estimate of the "background" radiation to which we
are exposed every year.11 [Part 2]


YOU SHOULD ASK FOR AN EMAIL COPY OF MY ARTICLE ON CHERNOBYL FROM EARTH
ISLAND JOURNAL, VOL. 12, NO. 3, SUMMER 1997, P. 28 TOO.

SINCERELY, JOHN LaFORGE
___________
Nukewatch
P.O. Box 649
Luck, WI 54853
Phone (715) 472-4185
Fax (715) 472-4184
Web http://www.nukewatch.com

_______________________________

Chernobyl at Ten: Half-lives and Half Truths

(Part one of two)
By John M. LaForgeã

With a heavy dose of half-truth, the commercial press worked over-time to
reduce the results of the Chernobyl catastrophe to a "nervous disorder"
confined to the C.I.S. and Europe. Understated reports on the 10th
anniversary of the world-wide radiation disaster help the nuclear reactor
industry hold on against overwhelming opposition, in spite of what should
have been the final insult from nuclear power.

The latest psychological "clean up" often went like this. Peter Crane, a
lawyer at the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), said that "...the
explosion... sent a radioactive cloud into the atmosphere of Eastern
Europe." (1) This is a true statement. It merely neglects to mention the
rest of planet Earth.

Reporter Michael Specter wrote that, "The fire which burned out of control
for five days, spewed more than 50 tons of radioactive fallout across
Belarus, Ukraine and Western Russia." (2) This loaded sentence is also
literally true. The fact that the fire burned uncontrolled for two weeks,
after a series of three explosions; that perhaps 190 tons of reactor fuel
was catapulted into the atmosphere; or that the radioactive fallout spread
world-wide ¾ reaching Minnesota's milk for example ¾ doesn't make of Mr.
Specter a liar, only a miser with the truth.

Associated Press (AP) correspondent Dave Carpenter's description ¾ that
"deadly reactor fuel shot into the atmosphere, contaminating some 10,000
square miles and reaching as far as Western Europe" (3) is likewise
"correct," but Reuters News Service reported on 28 Nov. 1995 that the
contaminated areas include about 61,780 square miles.

Carpenter practiced perfect obfuscation in his dispatch, saying of the
reckless nuclearists over there: "In a big lie, Soviet officials. . . first
hushed up the disaster then played down its severity." What is it to
understate the sum of irradiated territory by a factor of six? It isn't the
pot calling the kettle black; it's the cesium calling the strontium a cancer
agent.

Carpenter's AP lullaby was published widely and included the comment that,
". . .those living in the shadow of Chernobyl will be living with its deadly
health and environmental legacy for years." (4)

For years? The word centuries would have been more accurate, if
conservative, since radiation's health affects are multi-generational and
not limited in time. Indeed, some genetic effects appear to be increasing
with each successive generation.

The AP's Angela Charlson went so far as to say the reactor sent "a
radioactive cloud across parts of Europe ..." (5) Understatement of the
overwhelming facts was practiced as well by the editors of The New York
Times, who said on April 21 that the disaster "spewed radiation across much
or Europe" (6) and on the anniversary, that "...a plume of toxic gases &
dust...spread across the western Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and
Scandinavia." (7) Although the contamination of the rest of the world was
hinted at as lately as 6 Oct. 1995, when the Times reported that the
radiation spread across western Russia "and beyond," this uncomfortable fact
is nowadays passé.

The Disaster's in Your Head

While the explosions' long-lived carcinogens ¾ primarily cesium, plutonium,
strontium and iodine ¾ are well known to be deadly for decades and even
centuries, Soviet officials, the U. N's International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA), and U.S. editors have all ridiculed the common sense fear of
Chernobyl's radioactive fallout.

The official Soviet paper Izvestia said in 1988 that doctors in the Ukraine
were, ". . .spending more time on trying to dispel irrational fears than on
treating the effects of radiation." (8)

The IAEA which at first refused to conduct apost-Chernobyl health study,
claiming that all the accident's effects wereconfined within Soviet borders
(9), dared to say in a 1991 study that Chernobyl'shealth effects were
mainly "psychological." This heavily criticized report didn't even consider
the health of the "liquidators," or the evacuees from the 18-mile exclusion
zone, 8,000 of whom are now known to have died from radiation related
diseases. (10)

The IAEA study failed to mention the lengthy latency period for observed
cancer incidence. This cavalier white-wash of the disaster's inevitable
results came from a nominal nuclear watchdog, which in fact is only the most
prestigious booster of nuclear power. "After all the IAEA is in the business
of promoting nuclear energy not discouraging it. For ten years the agency
has attempted to downplay the consequences of the accident," wrote Dr.
Alexander R. Sich in a cover story for the May/June Bulletin of Atomic
Scientists. (11) The IAEA, still sticking in its vacuum, said in 1995 that
any increase in cancer caused by Chernobyl would be "undetectable." (11.1)

Editors across the country have embraced the IAEA's dismissive attitude,
distracting readers with headlines like, "Area Frozen In Fear," "Citizens
Still Suffering Radiation Phobia," and "The Legacy of Chernobyl: Fear is the
Deeper Wound." A dread of radiation doesn't appear irrational in view of
last year's report that "A second catastrophic explosion at the Chernobyl
nuclear plant in Ukraine could happen "at any time," Western scientists have
warned." (12)


Reality Officially Forgotten

A short review of Chernobyl's fallout pattern shows how irresponsible the
late reporting has become. AP, 15 May 1986: "Airborne radioactivity from the
Chernobyl nuclear accident is now so widespread that it is likely to fall to
the ground wherever it rains in the United States, the EPA said." AP, 14 May
1986: "An invisible cloud of radioactivity spewed over the Soviet Union and
Europe, and has worked its way gradually around the world." AP, 15 May 1986:
"State authorities in Oregon have warned residents dependent solely on
rainwater for drinking that they should arrange other supplies for the time
being." Minneapolis Star Tribune, 17 May 1986: "Since radiation from the
Chernobyl nuclear accident began floating over Minnesota last week, low
levels of radiation have been discovered in... the raw milk from a Minnesota
dairy." AP, 4 April 1996: "Plutonium and other dangerous particles released
in the accident...have now found their way to Ukraine's major waterways. ...
'We have billions of tons of radiated earth that can't be dumped anywhere,
and which will pour plutonium, cesium and strontium into Europe for decades,
' [the chief consultant to the Ukrainian parliament's Chernobyl commission]
said." Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, May 1996, p. 38: "...radiation
contamination was detectable over the entire northern hemisphere."

With so much disparity among so many figures, we may never know the true
dimensions of Chernobyl's radiation bomb.

Notes:

(1) NYT, Op-Ed, 5 April 1996.
(2) International Herald Tribune, 2 April 1996.
(3) Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 14 April 1996.
(4) Minneapolis Star Tribune, 21 April 1996.
(5) St. Paul Pioneer, 27 April 1996.
(6) NYT, 21 April 1996, The Week In Review.
(7) NYT, 26 April 1996, signed editorial by Philip Taubman
(8) Los Angeles Times, 11 Feb. 1988.
(9) In These Times, 22 April 1987.
(10) AP, 23 April 1992; WISE News Communiqué, (Amsterdam) No. 449, 10 April 1996.
(11) Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, May 1996, p. 38.
(11.1) Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June 1996, p. 8.
(12) The London Observer, 26 March 1995; Milwaukee Journal, 27 March 1995.

Half Lives and Half Truths: Chernobyl Ten Years On

By John M. LaForge ã

(Second of two parts)

The 10th anniversary was no party.

"I have seen the beginning of the end of theworld," is how Michael
Mariotte, editor of The Nuclear Monitor, put it after visiting Chernobyl's
doomed landscape, everything dead or dying for miles around. "The end of the
world begins in Pripyat, Ukraine, a once-thriving city of 45,000. Now it
sits crumbling, abandoned, a mute but overwhelming testament to
technological arrogance gone amok."1

Pripyat was the city nearest Chernobyl's Unit 4, the reactor that exploded
on April 26, 1986 and burned dangerously until October, spewing tons of
cancer-causing isotopes around the world.2

Mr. Mariotte is not known for emotional writing in The Monitor, but anyone
who can stand to investigate the unfolding human consequences of the world's
worst industrial catastrophe can understand his choice of words. Izvestia
called it "the greatest technological catastrophe in world history."3

Cancers and other disease caused by Chernobyl's radioactive poisons are
being recorded thousands of kilometers from the reactor site. The ninety
million people who lived in the path of the very worst fallout are learning
the hard way that damage done by ionizing radiation is unrelenting,
cumulative and irreversible.

In the first part of this article (Spring 1996 Pathfinder) I compared the
recent trivialization of Chernobyl's consequences to news accounts that
appeared soon after the explosions and fire. For example, while the
commercial press now tell us that the disaster "spread radiation across
parts of Europe," the fact is that the federal EPA announced in mid-May 1986
that, "Airborne radioactivity from the Chernobyl nuclear accident is now so
widespread that it is likely to fall to the ground wherever it rains in the
United States."4

In this part I look at how much radiation Chernobyl evidently dumped added
to the "background," at official skewing of the its inevitable long-term
effects, and at recent reports of its human health consequences.

Answers are Blowin' in the Wind

How much radiation was released? What percentage of which isotopes were
thrown into the atmosphere. Was it mostly iodine-131? How much of the total
was made up of the far more dangerous cesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium?

Piecing together the truth is a dizzying job of ferreting out bias and
vested interest. The pro-nuclear Time magazine reported in 1989 that perhaps
"one billion or more" curies were released, rather than the 50 to 80 million
estimated by Russian authorities.5 One curie is the amount of radiation
equal to the disintegration of 37 billion atoms ¾ 37 billion becquerels ¾
per second. It is a very large amount of radiation.

The U.S. government's Argonne Nat. Lab has said that 30 percent of the
reactor's total radioactivity ¾ 3 billion of an estimated 9 billion curies ¾
was released.6 And scientists at the U.S. Lawrence Livermore Nat. Lab
suggested that one-half of the core's radioactivity was spewed ¾ 4.5 billion
curies, according the World Information Service on Energy, quoting Science,
6-13-86.

Vladimir Chernousenko, the chief scientific supervisor of the "clean up"
team responsible for a 10-kilometer zone around the exploded reactor, says
that 80 percent of the reactor's radioactivity escaped, something like seven
billion curies.7 At the Union of Concerned Scientists, senior energy analyst
Kennedy Maize, concluded that "the core vaporized" ¾ all 190 tons of fuel,
and all 9 billion curies.8

Former Chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Joseph Hendrie,
concluded likewise, saying "They have dumped the full inventory of volatile
fission products from a large power reactor into the environment. You can't
do any worse than that."9

The Russians and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) claimed in a
1986 report, that 50 million curies of radioactive debris, plus another 50
million curies of rare and inert gasses were discharged. However, the
rocketing incidence of cancers, leukemias and other radiation-induced
illnesses, leads scientists to suspect that the higher radioactive fallout
estimates are likely. Pandemic numbers of thyroid cancers led even the
cautious Dr. Alexander Sich, in his Chernobyl cover story for the May 1996
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to conclude that the "higher [radiation]
release estimates support the conclusions drawn by medical experts."

Geneticist Valery N. Soyfer, founder of the former Soviet Union's first
molecular biology laboratory, analyzed the 1986 report to the IAEA, which
has since been condemned as a cover-up. Dr. Soyfer says that if only 100
million curies were vented, then world "background radiation doubled at
once."10 This claim was unsupported by accompanying evidence, but if
"background" was doubled by 100 million curies, then it was multiplied 180
times by the release of Chernobyl's "full inventory." Nineteen months after
the disaster, in Nov. 1987, the U.S. government officially doubled its
estimate of the "background" radiation to which we are exposed every year.11

Thyroid Cancers: More, Sooner, Untreatable

Dr. Soyfer further discovered that the Soviets focused on and publicized the
fallout's radioactive iodine content, but understated the amounts of other
far more dangerous isotopes. While 10 to 15 percent of the fallout was
iodine-131, the long-lived radionuclides strontium-90 and cesium-137 made up
more than two thirds of the total contamination.12

Furthermore, the Soviet's 1986 estimate of future cancer deaths was based
only on the impact of iodine-131, and then only on external doses. As a
result, the IAEA misled the world about Chernobyl's cancer threat. People
contaminated with iodine-131 ingested it, first by breathing, then by
drinking contaminated milk for six weeks. Thyroid cancer is caused by the
iodine-131. Its rates are today ten times higher than the increase any
scientist had anticipated. The U. N. has said that the number of thyroid
cancers among children in Belarus ¾ where 70 percent of the fallout landed ¾
are 285 times pre-Chernobyl levels.13

The British Medical Journal reported in 1995 that the rate of thyroid cancer
in the region north of Chernobyl¾ Ukraine and Belarus¾ is 200 times higher
than normal, and the (British) Imperial Cancer Research Fund found a 500
percent increase in thyroid cancers amongUkrainian children between 1986
and 1993.14

Fear is growing among physicians treating the young radiation victims,
because the thyroid cancers are appearing soonerthan expected and growing
quicker than usual. Dr. Andrei Butenko, at Kiev Hospital No. 1 in Ukraine,
says of his patients, "Routine chemotherapy seems to have lost its
effectiveness; something has changed in the immune system."15

Cesium's Genetic Assault: the 300 Years War

Cesium-137 contamination is probably Chernobyl's most devastating and
ominous consequence. The body can't distinguish cesium from potassium, so it
's taken up by our cells and becomes an internal source of radiation.
Cesium-137 is a gamma emitter and its half-life of 30 years means that it
stays in the soil, to concentrate in the food chain, for over 300 years.
While iodine-131 remains radioactive for six weeks, cesium-137 stays in the
body for decades, concentrating in muscle where it irradiates muscle cells
and nearby organs.16

Strontium-90 is also long-lived and, because it resembles calcium, is
permanently incorporated into bone tissue where it may lead to leukemia.

The Soviet's acknowledged in 1986 that the influence of cesium-137 on cancer
death rates would be nine times that of iodine-131. They said that the
effects of strontium-90 would "perhaps have, along with cesium-137, the most
important meaning."17


Early Findings Go from Bad to Worse

Exposure to radiation more often results in genetic and reproductive damage
than cancer. These hereditary disorders are unlimited in time, since they
pass from generation to generation in the sperm and ovum. So, as geneticist
Soyfer points out, Chernobyl's enduring biological legacy will be that of
inherited diseases, deformities, developmental abnormalities, spontaneous
abortions and premature births.

Some recent epidemiological studies confirm the worst of these inevitable
effects. The June 25, 1995 Washington Post reported that birth defects in
the areas most heavily poisoned have doubled since 1986.

In a long page one story, the Aug. 2, 1995 New York Times reported that life
expectancy has plummeted in Russia, making it the first nation in history to
ever experience such a public health status reversal. Male life expectancy
is now the lowest in the world (below even India or Bolivia) and, at the
same time, infant mortality rose 15 percent in both 1993 and 1994, and there
are now epidemic rates of heart disease and cancer. dr. David Hoel, an
epidemiologist at the Medical University of S. Carolina, is studying whether
Chernobyl's radiation is a major factor in the spread in cancers and birth
defects. "Everyone assumes the connection," he said.

The journal Nature has published a study of children born in 1994 to mothers
exposed to Chernobyl's fallout in 1986. Researchers studied 79 families 186
miles from Chernobyl and found never-before-observed "germ-line" mutations:
changes in DNA of the sperm and ovum. Such mutations are passed on from
generation to generation.18

Nature has also reported that in Greece, 2,800 kilometers from Chernobyl,
where radiation exposures were far lower than in areas close to the reactor,
leukemia has been diagnosed at rates 2.6 times the norm in young people who
were in the womb when the reactor exploded. The British epidemiologist Dr.
Alice Stewart found long ago that only one diagnostic X-ray to the pregnant
abdomen increases the risk of leukemia in the offspring by 40 percent.19
However, the report from Greece is the first to link Chernobyl's wreckage to
increased leukemia incidence in children exposed in utero.20 The report has
moved some experts to again warn that the low levels of radiation to which
people are exposed every day "could contribute to cancer."

Even the stodgy New York Times has reported that "cancers are now believed
to be the result of smaller [radiation] doses, and the amount of damage
inflicted by a given dose is now believed to be
larger."21

In a related study, two U.S. geneticists analyzing animals inside Chernobyl'
s 6-mile radius found that small rodents known as voles "sustain an
extraordinary amount of genetic damage." The study found that "the mutation
rate in these animals is...probably thousands of times greater than normal."
Two findings called "ominous" were, first, that one-third of the mutations
that the scientists expected to see were not even detected ¾ probably
because they were lethal. "It could be that the animals were never born,"
said Dr. Robert Becker of Texas Technical Univ. Second, "the vole mutations
were cumulative, increasing with each succeeding generation." Both
researchers doubted that any species could sustain such a mutation rate
indefinitely.22

Acceptable Whole-Earth Poisoning

The extent of Chernobyl's radioactive, biological and ecological damage, and
the depth its psychological and economic devastation are incalculable.

What everyone does know about nuclear reactors is that they have a record of
whole-earth poisoning, and that their potential for more of the same is
considered acceptable ¾ authorized in advance. This potential, for unlimited
and uncontrollable radiation "accidents," has been deliberately developed,
promoted, protected, ignored and then denied, or forgotten.

Sadly, denial and forgetfulness only make another Chernobyl inevitable.

Notes:

1 The Nuclear Monitor, newsletter of Nuclear
Information Resource Service (NIRS), April 1996.
2 St. Louis Post Dispatch (SLPD), 7-23-90.
3 SLPD, 4-26-90.
4 Associated Press, 5-15-86.
5 Time, 11-13-89.
6 The Chicago Tribune, 6-22-86.
7 "The Truth About Chernobyl," Critical Mass: Voices for a Nuclear-Free
Future, Ruggiero and Sahulka, Eds., 1996 by Open
Media, p. 127.
8 Not Man Apart, the journal of Friends of the Earth, March 1987.
9 The Minneapolis Star Tribune, 5-19-86.
10 SLPD, 4-24-87.
11 The New York Times, 11-20-87.
12 SLPD, 4-24-87.
13 The New York Times, 11-29-96.
14 The Washington Post, 3-25-95.
15 Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 12-12-94.
16 Caldicott, H., Nuclear Madness, 1994, Norton, p. 137.
17 SLPD, 4-24-87.
18 The New York Times, 4-25-96.
19 Caldicott, Ibid., p. 43.
20 St. Paul Pioneer, 7-25-96.
21 The New York Times, 6-23-96.
22 The New York Times, 5-7-96, B6. --end--

(Part One ran in NUKEWATCH The Pathfinder, Summer 1996, part Two in Winter
1996/1997 EDITION; an edited compilation of both parts is published in Earth
Island Journal, Summer 1997, EIJ, 300 Broadway, No. 28, San Francisco, CA
94133.)

CHERNOBYL CANCER STUDY

New paper on cancer rates in Belarus confirms
LLRC's predictions

The Swiss Medical Weekly has published findings
from the Clinical Institute of Radiation Medicine
and Endocrinology Research, Minsk, Belarus showing
a 40% increase in cancer between 1990 and 2000.
The researchers used data from the National Cancer
Registry, established in 1973. They compared the
post Chernobyl period with rates before the
accident on April 26, 1986.

Relative Risks all have high statistical
significance. Increases in the various oblasts
(regions) were:

Brest 33%
Vitebsk 38%
Gomel 52%
Grodno 44%
Minsk 49%
Mogilev 32%
Minsk city 18%
all Belarus 40%

The authors note that increases in breast cancer
are happening earlier in populations in the more
highly contaminated regions (Gomel and Mogilev)
than in less contaminated Vitebsk. This dose
related difference in the time lag for
radiation-induced cancers is known from other
studies and is most marked for breast cancer.

In 2001 Chris Busby reported to the Belarus
government that cancer would increase by 125% over
the lifetimes of the exposed population (
http://www.llrc.org/belarus.htm ). Now, 18 years
after the accident, 40% of that increase is apparent.

For evidence of increases in non-malignant
disorders see http://www.llrc.org/chernobyl.htm -
summaries of 100 papers from the affected
territories.

The Belarus paper is freely available for download
as a pdf:-
http://www.smw.ch/pdf200x/2004/43/smw-10221.pdf

Richard Bramhall
Low Level Radiation Campaign
bramhall@llrc.org
The Knoll, Montpellier Park
Llandrindod Wells,
Powys LD1 5LW U.K.
+44(0)1597 824771
07887 942043
--------------------------------
RADIATION .ORG
http://www.radiation.org/reading/index.html

(maximum credible) accidental dupe deleted

So you were in the radioactive rain?

Do you have any longterm effects 10 years later? If this is not too personal.

This is the original essay from which the edited version, published in the March 15, 1993 issue
of The Nation, was taken. It is reprinted here with permission of the author.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chernobyl and the Collapse of Soviet Society

By Jay M. Gould
March 15, 1993

http://www.ratical.org/radiation/Chernobyl...rnobylCoSS.html

Chernobyl: Insight from the Inside, by Vladimir M. Chernousenko,
Springer Verlag, Berlin New York, 1991

Memoirs, by Andrei Sakharov,
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1990

The Petkau Effect: Nuclear Radiation, People and Trees, by Ralph Graeub,
Four Wall Eight Windows, New York, 1992


A heartbreaking report on the hidden dimensions of the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 was published in Germany in 1991, written by the Ukrainian nuclear physicist chosen to "liquidate the consequences" of the accident. The book may never be published in the Ukraine or Russia and the author, Vladimir Chernousenko, now dying of radiation poisoning along with thousands of others involved in the emergency cleanup, has been dismissed from his post in the Ukrainian Academy of Science for telling the truth.

Along with comparable revelations in Sakharov's recently published Memoirs, the treatment of Chernousenko suggests that the former Soviet Union, by casting out its greatest scientists, suffered from the same terminal disease that ultimately destroyed the Hitler regime.

Both Sakharov and Chernousenko were punished for revealing a secret kept from the public from the earliest years of the Nuclear Age, having to do with the lethal effects on the immune system of ingesting manmade nuclear fission products.Richard Rhodes, in his classic history of the making of the atom bomb [1], relates that as far back as 1943 Enrico Fermi approached Robert Oppenheimer with the suggestion that if they could not develop the bomb in time, the same purpose would be served by dumping strontium-90 which he was generating at his pilot reactor at the University of Chicago over the German land-mass. Oppenheimer then discussed the proposal with Edward Teller who agreed that their animal studies would indicate that radioactive strontium would enter into the food chain and be deposited "dangerously and irretrievably in bone" and kill perhaps 500,000 persons. The plan was discarded because they could not be sure the desired deaths would occur quickly enough. After the bomb was developed, the military did not want an atomic explosion associated with the possibility of biological damage so the animal studies remained classified until 1969.

The publication in English of Andrei Sakharov's Memoirs informs us that he too came to the conclusion that the nuclear bomb was primarily a biological weapon, although this fact has been studiously passed over by all the highly laudatory reviews it has received. As the developer of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, Sakharov was the most eminent and authoritative nuclear scientist to reveal these secrets, which lie at the very heart of the origins of the Cold War.

In Chapter 14 Sakharov writes that after the success of his 1955 Soviet H-Bomb test, he "worried more and more about the biological effects of nuclear tests. . . . The long-term biological consequences (particularly atmospheric testing, in which radioactive fallout is dispersed throughout the hemisphere) can be predicted and the total number of casualties calculated with some accuracy."

Considering only such fission products as radioactive carbon, strontium and cesium, he calculated that genetic damage, plus the immediate and delayed damage to immune systems would accelerate the deaths of between 500,000 to one million persons for every 50 megatons of nuclear explosive power. An important consideration was what he termed "nonthreshold effects", by which every radioactive particle released had a statistical probability of doing damage to either the DNA of a cell or to the immune system, by low-level internal radiation from ingesting such particles. He also predicted that radiation would accelerate the mutation of microorganisms, leading to the inference that persons with damaged immune systems would in time succumb more easily to these new strains.

He states (page 201):
" I posited that cancer and damage to the body's immune system (resulting in premature death) may also be due to nonthreshold effects. . . . I also suggested that a global increase in mutations of bacteria and viruses (irrespective of the cause of the mutations) might have been an important factor in the spread of such diseases as diphtheria in the 19th century, or the influenza epidemic, and that low-level radiation might further increase the rate of mutations."

Sakharov was permitted to publish this article in 1958 [2] because of Khruschev's interest in a bomb test moratorium. He tells of his consternation and outrage when in 1961, without warning, he was told that Khruschev, after a fruitless meeting with President Kennedy in Vienna in 1961, had decided to detonate several H-Bombs, which were later rated by the National Resources Defense Council as equivalent to 402 megatons of explosive power, equal to 25,000 Hiroshima bombs [3]. When he finally had a chance to express his opposition to these tests that he estimated would cause perhaps 8 million premature deaths, he relates in Chapter 15 how he was publicly humiliated by Khruschev as politically "naive". He thereafter lost all authority as a member of the Soviet nuclear establishment.

Chernousenko's revelations on the enormous health effects of the Chernobyl accident offer the greatest possible validation of Sakharov's ominous predictions. He begins by demolishing many Chernobyl myths offered by the Soviet authorities and eagerly accepted by the international nuclear establishment. The accident was not the result of operator error, but resulted from major errors of design affecting 15 other Soviet reactors. In contrast to the widely accepted belief that only 31 persons died from exposure to high radiation levels in the effort to contain the emissions, Chernousenko asserts that between 7,000 and 10,000 volunteers have already died from such high intensity exposure.

But his most serious charge is that the accident released the lethal contents of 80 percent of the reactor core rather than the 3 percent figure announced to the world. This means that the true extent of the potential damage had been understated by orders of magnitude!

Chernousenko estimates that the radioactivity released was equivalent to more than one curie for every person on earth, i.e. more than one trillion picocuries per capita, to use the unit in which radioactivity concentrations in milk and water are customarily measured.

Trying to evaluate what may be the greatest single accident in human history, Chernousenko likens the historical impact of the accident to Pompeii. The radiation released was roughly equivalent to the explosion of one thousand Hiroshima bombs. At Hiroshima 140,000 persons were instantly vaporized by the heat and blast from a single bomb of 15 Kilotons of explosive power. There were no such victims at Chernobyl but the numbers exposed to high radiation levels and whose lives will thereby be cut short are only a tiny fraction of the many millions now ill from having ingested food, milk and water contaminated by the accident and widely distributed throughout the Soviet Union.

Chernousenko offers the first set of figures available on the great wave of morbidity that has seized the Soviet population after 1986. At first mainly concentrated in the three Soviet Republics of Byelorussia, the Ukraine and Russia, where the bulk of the emissions settled on more than 100,000 square kilometers, the refusal of the Soviet authorities to recognize the true extent of the contamination of farmland has since spread radiation illness to all the former Soviet republics.

He asserts that in Byelorussia, which was hardest hit, there is hardly a child today not suffering from some immune deficiency disease, either cardiovascular, lymphoid or oncological, and in the three biggest provinces of the Ukraine a medical investigation of the public health, conducted in 1989, indicated that the health of every second resident was damaged.

Chernousenko states that the proportion of the Soviet population whose immune resistance has been affected by contaminated food and water from radioactive areas continues to increase. In the most contaminated provinces, the incidence of immune deficiency diseases has doubled or tripled since 1985 and is now spreading to all other areas consuming contaminated food. A proper reponse to the accident would have required a complete and immediate evacuation of the areas too contaminated for continued human habitation. A similar evacuation did take place in wartime, but the Soviet authorities ignored the basic truth that Sakharov had first enunciated about the biochemical mechanism by which ingested radiation destroys the immune response.

Chernousenko makes it clear that it was Chernobyl's massive secondary insult to human immune systems that sickened Soviet society in the most literal sense. The effects of the Chernobyl accident were also apparent in the small but statistically significant excess mortality reported at the time in the US and Western Germany[4] [5], but in the Soviet Union there was also a profound plunge in labor productivity as morbidity rates climbed. Thus it was mortal illness rather than the sudden discovery of the virtues of the free market that dissolved the Soviet state.

To fully understand why the Soviet authorities and indeed those of all nuclear nations had so fatally ignored Sakharov's warnings, one must review the way in which the use of nuclear weapons became the bedrock of national defense policies that could not permit the free flow of the scientific evidence of its dangers to world health.

For example, Sakharov's 1958 paper can now be seen to have offered the first explanation of the greatest epidemiological mystery of our times. Mortality rates in the U.S. and in the advanced western European countries flattened out during the years of atmospheric bomb tests, after a half century of steady peacetime annual improvement, and only resumed a moderate rate of improvement after the Partial Test Ban was signed in 1963. In the 1980s, with the continued routine and accidental emissions from military and civilian reactors, mortality rates are again on the rise in the major nuclear nations. In the US, for example the mortality rate dropped at the average annual rate of 2 percent each year for the first half century, and then rose from 9.2 deaths per 1000 persons in 1954 to 9.6 in 1963, a period in which the NRDC estimated that the US and USSR released into the biosphere fission products equivalent to 40,000 Hiroshima bombs.[3]

From 1979 to 1988, the US mortality rate has again risen by 7 percent, reversing the decline registered in the 1970s. So rapid is the current deterioration that by the year 2000, mortality rates may rise to the levels reached in the early 1970's, if this trend continues.

According to the United Nations Annual Demographic Yearbooks, in the US, UK and France mortality rates for the most productive component of the labor force -- those between the ages of 25 to 44, has been deteriorating since 1983 for the first time since World War II.[6] In the U.S. this anomalous trend for American males in this age group was acknowledged by the Atlanta Center for Disease Control in a recent article in the American Journal of Public Health and attributed to AIDS, although the article admitted that in states with high AIDS mortality rates, there are "associated" abnormal increases in septicemia, pneumonia, pulmonary tuberculosis, diseases of the central nervous system, heart and blood disorders, drug abuse and "other immune defects".[7]

Persons in this age group were born between 1945 and 1965 and were therefore most heavily exposed in utero to the low-level bomb test radiation that most worried both Sakharov and Linus Pauling too, who expressed similar concerns in No More War, also published in 1958, for which he earned his second Nobel Prize in 1962.[8]

The Sakharov thesis has been confirmed by a report by the Canadian pediatrician, R.K.Whyte, published in the British Medical Journal in February, 1992, attributing some 320 thousand excess neonatal deaths (babies dying within the first day and first month) since 1950 in the US and UK to bomb test radiation.[9]

Further confirmation is available from a review of US data showing the rise since 1945 of the percentage of live births that survived birth in the bomb test years but weighing less than 5.5 lbs. For example, when the US first transferred bomb testing from the Pacific to the Nevada Test Site in 1951, the percentage of low birthweight infants in Nevada that year rose by 70 percent![10]

It now seems clear then that the atmospheric bomb tests caused sufficient harm to developing hormonal and immune systems to justify Sakharov's fear of future immune deficiency epidemics. Radiation physicists Sternglass and Scheer have observed that the AIDS epidemic first emerged in the wetlands of Africa in the early 1980s, which 20 years earlier had registered the highest Strontium-90 levels in human bone in the world after recieving heavy fallout from the atmospheric bomb tests. Thus they cite fallout as a cofactor in the impairment of immune response that could emerge later when young adults encounter the new mutated strains of sexually transmitted viruses.[11]

A recent issue of Science delineates the enormous public health crisis set off by the increasing resistance to antibiotics of those mutating microorganisms responsible for AIDS, tuberculosis, shigellosis, salmonella, toxic shock syndrome, Lyme disease and many other old and newly emerging infections.[12]
Immune deficiency problems of the kind anticipated by Sakharov can also be seen in the epidemic rise, since 1950, of cancer and septicemia mortality among older persons. Mortality from septicemia, or blood poisoning, the quintessential immune deficiency disease of old people, had been almost too rare to be recorded in 1950. Since then it has risen fifteenfold, and can be considered to be the Aquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome rate of old people.

The Petkau Effect also explains what happened to the many millions of persons in the former Soviet Union forced to continually ingest food and water contaminated by Chernobyl; they do not necessarily get sicker and sicker, for most of the damage is done by the initial exposure when the dose reponse rises most rapidly. Sakharov envisioned that the statistical probability of any one person ingesting fallout radiation was so small that no one premature death could be attributed to fallout with complete certainty. But continual exposure to radioactive food and water as in the Ukraine and Byelorussia raises, by a large factor, the probability that any one person will be adversely affected.

Graeub also shows that industrial wastes ionized by radiation becomes far more harmful to humans and plant life, so that we can make the inference that even before Chernobyl public health in the Soviet Union was poor. For example, the Soviets stopped publishing mortality statistics acceptable to the United Nations after their civilian power reactors started to come on line in the early 1970s. But for every premature death there may be many excess numbers of illnesses, which are difficult to define and record. But as mortality rates begin to rise, the corresponding morbidity rates would probably exhibit a "multiplier" effect that would help explain why medical costs in the major nuclear nations (including the US as well as the former Soviet Union) will increase explosively as labor productivity declines, a relationship generally ignored by economists.

The three books reviewed here thus offer a key insight to the baffling mystery of why Soviet society collapsed so quickly after 1986, with a suddenness that completely upset the world's geo-political balance, leaving even the CIA bereft of its raison d'etre. It is the sad fate of the Soviet people to have made great sacrifices in stemming the German Fascist tide in World War 2, and comparable sacrifices in warning us now of the dangers of future Chernobyls of our own. The US and the UK have already experienced similar nuclear disasters in 1957 (Windscale in England), in 1970 (a meltdown at the Savannah River Nuclear Weapons plant, first revealed by Sen. Glenn in 1988) and in 1979 (Three Mile Island).[13] Chernousenko's book should prepare us for the nuclear horrors that may come with another such catastrophe, if we do not heed Sakharov's warning and put an end to all forms of nuclear emissions released into the environment.

References
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

R.Rhodes, The Making of the Atom Bomb, A. Knopf, 1986, p.511

A.Sakharov, "Radioactive Carbon from Nuclear Explosions and Nontreshold Biological Effects" Soviet Journal of Atomic Energy, July, 1958, vol.4 #6.

R.S.Norris, T.Cochran, W.Arkin, "Known U.S. Nuclear Tests", Washington, D.C., Natural Resources Defense Council, 1988. Cf. also the NRDC Nuclear Weapons Handbook, Vol IV, Harper & Row, New York, 1989 p.373

J.M. Gould, E.J.Sternglass, "Low-level radiation and mortality", Am. Chem Soc., Chemtech, Jan. 1989, Washington, DC.

J.Scheer, G.Luning et al, "Early infant mortality in West Germany before and after Chernobyl", The Lancet, Nov. 4, 1989, p.1081-1083.

The secular decline in the percentage of total deaths accounted for by those aged 25 to 44 has served as a significant indicator of the general well being of the most productive component of the population and labor force. For example in the U.S. this percentage had declined fairly steadily, from 11.3 in 1940 to 5.4 in 1983, but then rose to 6.6 in 1989, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics. The corresponding percentage in France, according to the 1990 United Nations Demographic Yearbook, rose from 4.26 in 1983 to 4.71 in 1987, and in the United Kingdom, from 2.42 in 1983 to 2.61 in 1988. No comparable data were available from the Soviet Union.

J.W.Buehler, O.J.Devine, R.Berkelman & F.M.Chenarley, "Impact of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic on Mortality Trends in Young Men, U.S.", Am. J. Public Health, Sept. 1990, vol.80, #9.

L.Pauling, No More War, Dodd Mead, New York, 1958.

R.K.Whyte, "First-Day Neonatal Mortality Since 1935: A Rexamination of the Cross Hypothesis", Br. Med. J. vol.304, Feb. 8 1992. pp.343-346.

Vital Statistics of the United States, 1950 and 1951, Natality section, US Public Health Service, Washington, D.C. In 1951 the percentage of live births weighing under 2500 grams (5.5 lbs) in Nevada was 17 as opposed to 10 in 1950.

E.J.Sternglass, J.Scheer, "Radiation exposure of bone marrow cells to strontium-90 during early development as a possible cofactor in the etiology of AIDS," Philadelphia, PA. Am. Assn. Advancement of Science, Annual Meeting, May 29, 1986.

M. Cohen, "Epidemiology of Drug Resistance: Implications for A Post-Anti Microbial Era,", B.R.Bloom, C.J.Murray, "Tuberculosis: Commentary on a Reemergent Killer", H.C.Neu, "The Crisis in Antibiotic Resistance", R.M.Krause, "The Origin of Plagues: Old and New", Science, vol.257, Aug. 21, 1992.

Cf. J.M.Gould, B.A.Goldman, Deadly Deceit: Low-Level Radiation High Level Cover-Up, Four Wall Eight Windows, New York, 1991, Chapters 2, 4 and 5.

http://www.sundayherald.com/print42225
Sunday Herald - 23 May 2004

Sheep still contaminated by Chernobyl
Eighteen years after nuclear disaster, ban on Scots farmers selling mutton affected by radiation remains in force

By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor
------------------------------------------

It happened 2500km away and 18 years ago, but it is still contaminating Scottish sheep with levels of radioactivity considered unsafe to eat.
After the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in the Ukraine exploded and spewed radio activity over most of Europe in April 1986, people were assured by the authorities that its effects would be seen off in a matter of weeks.

But new figures released by the government show just how misguided those assurances were. Today 14 farms covering 16,300 hectares of southwest and central Scotland are still subject to restrictions on the movement and slaughter of radioactive sheep.

The concentrations of radioactive caesium-137 from Chernobyl in the animals’ muscles still exceed the safety limit of 1000 becquerels of radioactivity per kilogram. Farmers have to mark con taminated sheep with indelible paint, and must wait until they fall below the limit before they can have them slaughtered for food.

“It is incredible that a small number of Scottish farms are still under restriction 18 years on from an accident that occurred hundreds of miles away,” said James Withers, the spokesman for National Farmers’ Union Scotland (NFUS).

“The initial advice in 1986 was that the effects would be over in a few weeks. It is obviously extremely frustrating and disappointing for the individuals concerned.”

Ten of the farms with sheep restrictions are in East Ayrshire, three are in Stirling and one is in East Renfrewshire. The farmers have not been named. Similar restrictions on the movement and slaughter of sheep still apply down south. In Wales they cover 359 farms totalling 53,000 hectares in Snowdonia and the north, while in England they affect nine farms totalling 12,000 hectares in West Cumbria.

The information was given by ministers in response to recent questions in the Commons from anti-nuclear Labour MP for Blaenau Gwent, Llew Smith. “Chernobyl showed how nuclear accidents are both deadly to those in the area immediately affected, and have an impact thousands of miles away,” he said. “I strongly believe that all nuclear power should be scrapped.

“It has turned out to be the most costly and certainly the most dangerous means of generating fuel.”

Chernobyl was the world’s worst nuclear accident. Errors by control room staff in an old and poorly designed Soviet-era reactor led to a blast which ripped apart the building.

Over several days a massive cloud of radioactivity blew over western Europe, falling to earth wherever it rained. Caesium-137 and other radio active isotopes got into the soil and were then taken up and recycled by grass and plants.

As a result, grazing animals, particularly those in rainy upland areas, became con taminated. As well as sheep, high levels of caesium-137 were detected in deer and grouse.

Chernobyl also triggered an epidemic of thyroid cancers among children in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. According to the World Health Organisation, the accident released 200 times more radioactivity than the US atomic bombs which devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

In the months immediately after the accident, more than 2000 farms in Scotland were subject to sheep restrictions. But by 1991 this had dropped to 60, and by 2001 to 18.

Farmers affected are compensated under the 1986 Sheep Compensation Scheme. The government has paid out £2.8 million to Scottish farmers, including £330,000 over the past five years.

“Our primary concern is to ensure public safety,” said a spokesman for the Scottish Executive. “Monitoring of sheep on affected farms will continue until radioactive caesium levels comply with internationally agreed standards.”

According to environmentalists, there are lessons to be learned from Chernobyl’s legacy. “When nuclear power plants go wrong they tend to go wrong in a big way,” said Duncan McLaren, chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland.

“The fact that Scottish farmers today are still feeling the impacts of this accident should be a warning to all those who think that nuclear power deserves a second chance.”

He said two of the countries that have just joined the European Union – Lithuania and Slovakia – are still relying on old Soviet-style reactors. And that the Euratom Treaty which underpins the EU obliges them to pursue nuclear power.

“Instead of asking these countries to increase their capacity in dangerous nuclear power we should be assisting them to shut these plants and move towards safer, cleaner forms of energy production,” McLaren argued.

He added: “In the run-up to the European elections the public should challenge candidates as to whether they support replacing this outdated treaty with something that will prevent future Chernobyls.”

Posted for educational and research purposes only,
~ in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 ~
See NucNews Links and Archives - http://nucnews.net

Chernobyl Fallout Caused Transgenerational Disease

European Radiation Research 2004, August 25-28,
Budapest, Hungary

http://www.osski.hu/err2004

MUTATION PROCESS IN CHRONICALLY IRRADIATED BANK
VOLE POPULATIONS INDICATES
THE TRANSGENERATIONAL GENOMIC INSTABILITY INDUCED
BY CHERNOBYL FALLOUT

R. I. Goncharova, N. I. Ryabokon

Institute of Genetics and Cytology, National
Academy of Sciences of Belarus
Akademichnaya st, 27. Minsk 220072, Republic of
Belarus;
e-mail: R.Goncharova@igc.bas-net.by

The objective of this investigation is analysis of mutagenesis dynamics in
bank vole populations chronically exposed to low doses of ionizing
radiation in connection with the absorbed dose dynamics and the number of
affected generations over 1986п1996.

Frequencies of different end-points (chromosome aberrations in bone marrow
cells and embryonic mortality) as well as the doserate and absorbed doses
of external and internal irradiation from caesium isotopes were determined
for four populations inhabiting the sites with different ground deposition
of 137Cs (8п═1526 kBq/m2).

It has been first revealed that the main feature of mutagenesis dynamics in
populations of mammals chronically exposed to very low doses of ionizing
radiation is a gradual increase in the rate of somatic mutagenesis and
embryonic lethality over 1п22 generations. At the same time, the dose rate
and whole body absorbed dose decreased in every consecutive generation after
the primary radiation insult in 1986.

The data on chromosome aberrations and embryonic lethality were fitted by
the exponential and linear functions respectively. It means that genomes
of animals from distant generations are more sensitive to the impact of
very low radiation doses in comparison with those of
animals of prior generations.

The fact that dynamics of somatic mutagenesis (by the chromosome
aberration frequency in bone marrow) and embryonic lethality during the
period of the study closely resemble each other is an additional proof for
the persistence of the delayed response.

Thus, enhanced response of distant generations of mammals to low doses of
ionizing radiation is likely to be due to transgenerational genomic
instability.

Abstract 66
================

New Book by Dr. Rosalie Bertell:
http://www.iicph.org/planet_earth.htm


* See also: NucNews Links and Archives (by date) at http://nucnews.net
* (Posted for educational and research purposes only, in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107) *

Resources on Chernobyl:

Graph of Chernobyl Fallout

http://www.nea.fr/html/rp/chernobyl/c02.html

Chernobyl Children's Project

http://www.adiccp.org/

Chernobyl: Ten Years On Radiological and Health Impact

http://www.nea.fr/html/rp/chernobyl/welcome.html

Chernobyl radiation disaster information

http://www.chernobyl.com/

:nuke:

Yes, I was in the rain, and was in the air, the water, eating the food, etc. for 7 years after Chernobyl, but I haven't noticed any longterm effects.

Must be those highly resistant Indian genes! Maybe the European-processed, American-grown tobacco is the antidote.



My American friends used to ask me how I could possibly stay, considering the circumstances: I told them I preferred to subject myself to the physical risks of radioactive fallout in the Regen (German for "rain") over the risks of psychic/psychological (and ECONOMIC!!!) risks of Reaganomics.

Judging from the damage I see in people who preferred to subject themselves to Reaganism, I do believe I made the right choice.

French Finally Confront Chernobyl Risks

Julio Godoy IPS-Inter Press Service, April 1, 2005

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/interna.asp?idnews=28118

PARIS, Apr 1 (IPS) - The French government concealed the enormous risks from radioactive clouds in the weeks following the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in April 1986, new evidence claims.

Official documents presented at a judicial inquiry in Paris this week supported claims made earlier by several independent scientists and by people suffering from cancer, especially of the thyroid glands.

The documents presented at the inquiry include a report by two nuclear scientists, Paul Genty and Gilbert Mouthon based on documents classified earlier as confidential. Their report says French authorities had ”full knowledge” that radioactivity detected in France had surpassed safety levels.

The Central Service for Protection against Ionic Radiation (SCPRI, after its French name) ”obviously concealed information at its disposal, and denied that high risks of contamination existed,” they say. ”As consequence, basic measures such as the administration of iodine (to the population at risjk) were never put in practice.”

The explosion at the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in Ukraine, then a part of the Soviet Union, released numerous radioactive elements including iodine 131, an isotope that attacks the thyroids and provokes glandular cancer. Regular iodine pills are a known antidote.

Other documents that surfaced at the judicial hearings in Paris this week include minutes of government meetings at which officials warned of considerable health risks associated with the consumption of fresh vegetables and milk.

”We have figures (of radioactive contamination) that cannot be made public,” an official had said at the meeting then. He gave an example: ”goat milk: more than 10,000 becquerel per litre” (becquerel is a unit for measuring decay brought on by radioactivity).

European legislation at the time required that all food products containing more than 500 becquerel per litre of iodine 131 be taken off the shelves.

After the explosion at Chernobyl Apr. 26, all European governments ordered urgent measures to protect their people from radioactivity. In Germany the government banned consumption of fresh vegetables for a month, starting May 1986. It also banned fresh milk for children.. All swimming pools were closed, and sports activities in open air were declared dangerous.

The Italian government banned the sale of fresh vegetables starting May 12, and recommended that pregnant women and children under 10 avoid fresh milk. It set up strict border controls on all food products from abroad.

Similar measures were taken across Europe. Austria, Sweden, Denmark and Finland stopped children from playing in open air, and ordered substitution of fresh dairy products by powder milk.

Only France refused to take such measures. On May 6 that year the ministry of agriculture reassured people that ”French territory, due to its distance (from Chernobyl), has totally avoided being affected by the radioactivity.”

In another statement early in May, then environment minister Alain Carignon said the government had found ”levels of radioactivity far below danger, five, ten, hundred times below dangerous levels.”

But the documents presented at the inquiry this week show that French agencies commonly found radioactivity levels of between 2000 and 4000 becquerels per litre in milk and other food products.

The present judicial inquiry was initiated in 2001 by 51 people suffering from thyroid cancer, who associate their illness with the Chernobyl radioactive cloud, and by the Research Commission on Radioactivity, an independent group of scientists who have been studying nuclear contamination in France since the early 1990s.

”Even if we do not have all the conclusions yet, experts shows the dimensions of the cover-up launched by the government of the time,” Emmanuel Ludot, legal representative of some of the victims of thyroids cancer, told IPS.

Ludot said his clients were not expecting any ”confession” from the politicians who mismanaged the case, ”but because the political responsibility is clearly established, the government should create an indemnification fund to aid the victims of the Chernobyl radioactivity to deal with their disease.”

Stephane Lhomme, spokesperson of the group 'Get rid of nuclear power' said the French government had its own reasons for downplaying the risk.

”In France, which has 58 nuclear power stations, and depends up to 80 percent on nuclear power for the generation of electricity, governments do not want to associate nuclear power with health risks,” he told IPS. ”Therefore, Chernobyl was for the government at that time a most unwelcome catastrophe, whose risks had to be concealed, in order to avoid the emergence of people's opposition to nuclear power.”

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Thank you so much theroyprocess for posting this information.

And thank you Cloudy.....for showing some backbone...my compliments.
-----------------

WITNESS TO CHERNOBYL

http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/

Indian genes? American Indian?

If so, this would be classic.

With all of the "stuff" the European invaders caused the Indians to sucumb to, health and otherwise. But yet radio active fallout has no impact on them.

Not to make light of either situation.

Chernobyl: The Nuclear Titanic

There is a strong parallel between the Titanic and Chernobyl. Both were engineered with too much confidence that no disaster could happen to them, and thus with too little effort to build in safety features. Both were also operated recklessly.

The Titanic was built with too few lifeboats, the steel in the hull was too brittle, and the captain continued at full speed when warned of icebergs in the north Atlantic shipping lanes. The resulting disaster claimed 1,500 lives.

Russians have been known to ignore safety rules in their science and technology, which one might expect from a totalitarian society where citizens could not sue for damages and where the government could hide bad news.

Chernobyl type reactors are unstable at low power levels, where the plant manager was running the plant at the time of the accident. In addition, against the advice of the reactor staff, while he himself had no nuclear training, he was conducting an experiment on the turbine and generator. To do his experiment he shut off several control devices that would have automatically turned off the reactor in an emergency. What was he thinking?

After Titanic, U.S. and English maritime laws were tightened to insure safer equipment and practices. There was no cry for shutting down all passenger ships or claims that ships could never be run safely. Likewise, after 9/11 and the total destruction of the World Trade Center there was no cry to ban airplanes. Such logic is only heard from activists against nuclear power.

Nuclear power plants, wherever U.S. type reactors are used, have an enviable safety record. They also save tens of thousands of U.S. lives yearly because they do not emit toxic chemicals into the atmosphere and waterways. And they are the only affordable source of power that can satisfy the demand for future electricity increases without increasing global warming.

Wind and solar energy are a great idea, but no one has come up with a cost-effective way to guarantee uninterrupted renewable energy – only hydroelectric can do that – an most hydroelectric resources are already developed. Solar and wind can only be effectively “stored” for about 24 hours via pumped hydro or heat or battery storage. Hydrogen is thought to be a possible storage option for wind and solar, but hydrogen has a serious storage problem itself.

What will you do when the clouds are black for several days or the wind doesn’t blow, or a climate change induced super storm rips out your solar/wind energy farm? Nuclear power plants are designed to withstand any storm, and will keep on working in all weather conditions, 24/7.

The The Chernobyl Accident - Can It Happen Here?

The Price of Nuclear Illiteracy: www.AmericanEnergyIndependence.com/nuclearliteracy.html

Nuclear Power is the Problem, Not a Solution

Helen Caldicott 13apr05

THERE is a huge propaganda push by the nuclear industry to justify nuclear power as a panacea for the reduction of global-warming gases.

At present there are 442 nuclear reactors in operation around the world. If, as the nuclear industry suggests, nuclear power were to replace fossil fuels on a large scale, it would be necessary to build 2000 large, 1000-megawatt reactors. Considering that no new nuclear plant has been ordered in the US since 1978, this proposal is less than practical. Furthermore, even if we decided today to replace all fossil-fuel-generated electricity with nuclear power, there would only be enough economically viable uranium to fuel the reactors for three to four years.

The true economies of the nuclear industry are never fully accounted for. The cost of uranium enrichment is subsidised by the US government. The true cost of the industry's liability in the case of an accident in the US is estimated to be $US560billion ($726billion), but the industry pays only $ US9.1billion - 98per cent of the insurance liability is covered by the US federal government. The cost of decommissioning all the existing US nuclear reactor s is estimated to be $US33billion. These costs - plus the enormous expense involved in the storage of radioactive waste for a quarter of a million years - are not now included in the economic assessments of nuclear electricity.

It is said that nuclear power is emission-free. The truth is very different.

In the US, where much of the world's uranium is enriched, including Australia's, the enrichment facility at Paducah, Kentucky, requires the electrical output of two 1000-megawatt coal-fired plants, which emit large quantities of carbon dioxide, the gas responsible for 50per cent of global warming.

Also, this enrichment facility and another at Portsmouth, Ohio, release from leaky pipes 93per cent of the chlorofluorocarbon gas emitted yearly in the US. The production and release of CFC gas is now banned internationally by the Montreal Protocol because it is the main culprit responsible for stratospheric ozone depletion. But CFC is also a global warmer, 10,000 to 20,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

In fact, the nuclear fuel cycle utilises large quantities of fossil fuel at all of its stages - the mining and milling of uranium, the construction of the nuclear reactor and cooling towers, robotic decommissioning of the intensely radioactive reactor at the end of its 20 to 40-year operating lifetime, and transportation and long-term storage of massive quantities of radioactive waste. .

Contrary to the nuclear industry's propaganda, nuclear power is therefore not green and it is certainly not clean. Nuclear reactors consistently release millions of curies of radioactive isotopes into the air and water each year. These releases are unregulated because the nuclear industry considers these particular radioactive elements to be biologically inconsequential. This is not so.

These unregulated isotopes include the noble gases krypton, xenon and argon, which are fat-soluble and if inhaled by persons living near a nuclear reactor, are absorbed through the lungs, migrating to the fatty tissues of the body, including the abdominal fat pad and upper thighs, near the reproductive organs. These radioactive elements, which emit high-energy gamma radiation, can mutate the genes in the eggs and sperm and cause genetic disease.

Tritium, another biologically significant gas, which is also routinely emitted from nuclear reactors is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen composed of two neutrons and one proton with an atomic weight of 3. The chemical symbol for tritium is H3. When one or both of the hydrogen atoms in water is displaced by tritium the water molecule is then called tritiated water. Tritium is a soft energy beta emitter, more mutagenic than gamma radiation, that incorporates directly into the DNA molecule of the gene. Its half life is 12.3 years, giving it a biologically active life of 246 years. It passes readily through the skin, lungs and digestive system and is distributed throughout the body.

The dire subject of massive quantities of radioactive waste accruing at the 442 nuclear reactors across the world is also rarely, if ever, addressed by the nuclear industry. Each typical 1000-megawatt nuclear reactor manufactures 33tonnes of thermally hot, intensely radioactive waste per year.

Already more than 80,000 tonnes of highly radioactive waste sits in cooling pools next to the 103 US nuclear power plants, awaiting transportation to a storage facility yet to be found. This dangerous material will be an attractive target for terrorist sabotage as it travels through 39 states on roads and railway lines for the next 25 years.

But the long-term storage of radioactive waste continues to pose a problem. The US Congress in 1987 chose Yucca Mountain in Nevada, 150km northwest of Las Vegas, as a repository for America's high-level waste. But Yucca Mountain has subsequently been found to be unsuitable for the long-term storage of high-level waste because it is a volcanic mountain made of permeable pumice stone and it is transected by 32 earthquake faults. Last week a congressional committee discovered fabricated data about water infiltration and cask corrosion in Yucca Mountain that had been produced by personnel in the US Geological Survey. These startling revelations, according to most experts, have almost disqualified Yucca Mountain as a waste repository, meaning that the US now has nowhere to deposit its expanding nuclear waste inventory.

To make matters worse, a study released last week by the National Academy of Sciences shows that the cooling pools at nuclear reactors, which store 10 to 30 times more radioactive material than that contained in the reactor core, are subject to catastrophic attacks by terrorists, which could unleash an inferno and release massive quantities of deadly radiation -- significantly worse than the radiation released by Chernobyl, according to some scientists.

This vulnerable high-level nuclear waste contained in the cooling pools at 103 nuclear power plants in the US includes hundreds of radioactive elements that have different biological impacts in the human body, the most important being cancer and genetic diseases.

The incubation time for cancer is five to 50 years following exposure to radiation. It is important to note that children, old people and immuno-compromised individuals are many times more sensitive to the malignant effects of radiation than other people.

I will describe four of the most dangerous elements made in nuclear power plants.

Iodine 131, which was released at the nuclear accidents at Sellafield in Britain, Chernobyl in Ukraine and Three Mile Island in the US, is radioactive for only six weeks and it bio-concentrates in leafy vegetables and milk. When it enters the human body via the gut and the lung, it migrates to the thyroid gland in the neck, where it can later induce thyroid cancer. In Belarus more than 2000 children have had their thyroids removed for thyroid cancer, a situation never before recorded in pediatric literature.

Strontium 90 lasts for 600 years. As a calcium analogue, it concentrates in cow and goat milk. It accumulates in the human breast during lactation, and in bone, where it can later induce breast cancer, bone cancer and leukemia.

Cesium 137, which also lasts for 600 years, concentrates in the food chain, particularly meat. On entering the human body, it locates in muscle, where it can induce a malignant muscle cancer called a sarcoma.

Plutonium 239, one of the most dangerous elements known to humans, is so toxic that one-millionth of a gram is carcinogenic. More than 200kg is made annually in each 1000-megawatt nuclear power plant. Plutonium is handled like iron in the body, and is therefore stored in the liver, where it causes liver cancer, and in the bone, where it can induce bone cancer and blood malignancies. On inhalation it causes lung cancer. It also crosses the placenta, where, like the drug thalidomide, it can cause severe congenital deformities. Plutonium has a predisposition for the testicle, where it can cause testicular cancer and induce genetic diseases in future generations. Plutonium lasts for 500,000 years, living on to induce cancer and genetic diseases in future generations of plants, animals and humans.

Plutonium is also the fuel for nuclear weapons -- only 5kg is necessary to make a bomb and each reactor makes more than 200kg per year. Therefore any country with a nuclear power plant can theoretically manufacture 40 bombs a year.

Nuclear power therefore leaves a toxic legacy to all future generations, because it produces global warming gases, because it is far more expensive than any other form of electricity generation, and because it can trigger proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Helen Caldicott is an anti-nuclear campaigner and founder and president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, which warns of the danger of nuclear energy.

* See also: NucNews Links and Archives (by date) at http://nucnews.net *
(Posted for educational and research purposes only, in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107) *

Nuclear Power Used Up More Energy
Than It Delivered To Society !

Nuclear Power was devised to make the public pay
the high cost of plutonium production, the element needed for nuclear
weapons. Nuclear power IS the most dangerous method to make steam
which generates electric power. The ultimate doomsday machine!
------------------

"At the end
of forty years of the US nuclear power program
by 1991, this energy- 381302 MW-yrs -delivered to
society is still less than the gross cumulative
energy invested in nuclear plant construction and
maintenance of 489174 MW-yrs! "

Energy audit of nuclear fuel cycles

By R. Ashok Kumar,
B.E,M.E(Power),Negentropist,Flat 1/13, Telec
Officers' CHS.,Ltd.,Plot 30, Sector 17, Vashi,
Navi Mumbai-400705. Tel:7896209.

Although the gross nuclear capacity of the USA
reached 104820 MW (greater than 150 MW capacity
only considered), less than 20000 MW energy
capacity was in fact delivered to society in
1991(Spread Sheet No.12A: See attachment). This is
derived as follows:Gross cumulative energy
delivered to society (1991)= Megawatt-years/years
= 798370/40=19959 MW or 20000 MW approximately.

The rest was all consumed by the nuclear industry
itself. The actual energy- capacity delivered at
the consumption point was much less. Using a
figure of 0.597 for the plant factor, and 20%
transmission,distribution and conversion loss, the
amount of energy delivered by the programme
amounts to only 9.09% of the energy generated. For
the annual energy invested in the nuclear
programme, the energy generated per year per unit
was divided by a factor of 1.5(R. Ashok
Kumar.1989.The Indian Nuclear Energy Programme:A
Net Energy Analysis. PPST Bull. No.18.March.pp17:
Energy Invested in Waste Storage. See also
Appendix 1,this article.).

Thus as the US
programme of commissioning of the nuclear power
plants progressed from 1952 to 1991 (end of my
study period for the US programme), the average
nuclear capacity added per year was 2621 MW while
the average nuclear industry demand was 12229 MW!
The cost overrun was 4.25.

It is estimated (based
on assumptions given in the appendix) that the
programme started delivering net energy to society
only thirty years after the commencement of the
programme. And while it generated 1283911 MW-yrs
in 30 years,it delivered to society only 30% or
less in a brief period from 1981 only. At the end
of forty years of the US nuclear power programme
by 1991, this energy- 381302 MW-yrs -delivered to
society is still less than the gross cumulative
energy invested in nuclear plant construction and
maintenance of 489174 MW-yrs!

This analysis
assumes only a portion of the energy used for
waste storage and maintenance.This American
civilian nuclear programme cost a total of Rs 45
trillion. This means Rs 45 Crores per Megawatt!
But as we saw above, this programme delivered to
society an energy capacity of 9532 MW per year
over 40 years , with an installed capacity of
104820 MW achieved over 38 years.

As shown above
the US programme needed an additional gargantuan
amount of thermal power to construct the nuclear
facilities.The data for the nuclear capacity
additions were taken from Nuclear Engineering
International, April 1991.

Appendix 1

Nuclear Wastes Unmanageable: An audit of the
Energy Required

As of year 2000, 7925 reactor years of
operation have been completed in sixteen countries
which have operating nuclear power plants (Data
till 1990 have been taken from Nuclear Engineering
International April 1991). Thus the 16 countries
of the world generated by end 1990 in their
nuclear power plants 15714.1 TWh or 1793847 MW-yr.
The corresponding capacity was 290898 MW(337
reactors). Average nuclear capacity was
290898/337= 863.2 MW. All over the world the
number of reactors retired to date is 90 with a
total capacity of 77688 MW. Net capacity on line=
209898-77688=213210 MW. Energy generated by these
reactors from 1991 to 2000 amounts to 213210
MWxlifetime plant load factor of 0.64 x 10y=
1364545 MW-yr.

Therefore the total energy
generated till 2000 from begin of nuclear
programmes= 1793847+1364545= 3158392 MW-yr. The
number of reactor years of operation till end 1990
was 4500. Taking the number of reactor years of
operation to be proportional to the energy
generated yields a total of 7925 reactor years of
opeartion. For this the power required for waste
storage and maintenance is 4.75 MW(thermal). See
Lovins. Technical Bases for Ethical Concern. In AH
Lovins and JH Price. 1975. Non-Nuclear Futures.
Harper-Colophon. p 97. This is at the rate of
1.505 watts per megawatt-year (of gross energy
generated) for waste storage and maintenance.

Now the energy invested in the nuclear power
programmes of the 16 countries till end 1990 was
1793847 x 0.5= 896923.5 MW-yr(See below for
derivation). From 1991 to 2000 units were retired
rather than added. Let us assume that the energy
invested remained at this value (1990 end value).
Then, net energy available after accounting for
the energy invested which included energy for
waste storage and its maintenance for 31500
years(see below) was 3158932-896924= 2261478(The
energy invested 896924, if considered at the bus
bars would be higher).

Thus the number of
additional years of waste storage and its
maintenance which is obtained by dividing the net
energy available 2261478 MW-yr by the power needed
for waste storage and its maintenance 4.75
MW(thermal) is a maximum of 476101 years because
there is a conversion efficiency for electrical to
heat production of 50% to 80%. This is far from
enough for storing wastes for a million years or
more. Thus the nuclear energy programmes are net
energy consumers. The latest evaluation of waste
storage research proclaims this loudly(Institute
for Energy and Environmental Research. May 2000.
Science for Democratic Action. See also R. Ashok
Kumar, op cit. ).
<cut>

An estimate of the fraction of energy
generated debited to investment in the nuclear
power programmes can be done as follows:
Let us take four countries namely,the
USA,France, Japan and Canada. The energy generated
back of the 20% losses is given by the (sum of the
total nuclear industry demand and the net energy
delivered to society )/0.8. This for these four
countries for which the energy audit has been
worked out by the author becomes 2354460 MW-yr.
Details in a separate article. The nuclear
industry demand works out to 1175742 MW-yr which
is 50% of the gross energy generated.

A number of surprises as the nuclear power
programmes progressed over the world.
It must be noted that a number of surprises
have caused retrofits and replacements like the
steam generator premature replacements and the
replaced radioactive steam generators enclosed in
costly sarcophages worldwide. These have
enormously increased the energy invested in these
white elephants.

See also: NucNews Links and Archives (by date) at http://nucnews.net *
(Posted for educational and research purposes only, in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107) *

1) The plutonium from commercial power reactors is not used for weapons.

2) Many more people die and develop diseases in the production and use of coal fired energy than in the use of nuclear energy.

These facts have been pointed out on other posts and more details can be obtained by reading through the various entries on this site.




Wow! Someone ought to tell the people that run nuclear power plants about this one. Here, they thought they were making money selling electricity. They must all have had Arther Anderson as their accountant firm.



Sounds like Ashok thinks they are delivering energy to the public now. They must have finally got it right.

In Spite of Chernobyl

Friday 29th April 2005 SchNews
Nuclear Physics

http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news495.htm

"On the 1 May, me and my parents went to the countryside, to have a nice day
together in the sun and gather some dandelions. We walked around, ran in the
fields, played, dined on the grass and collected a whole bag of flowers.
Happy, tired and covered with dust, we came home. Next evening my father,
who worked in the energy sector, came home pale-faced and brought something
I’ve never seen before. He said it was a ‘dosimeter’ to measure radiation –
a word known to me only from political propaganda of the so-called ‘peace
lessons’ in school. He measured the flowers first, and the dosimeter beeped
madly. We threw them away, as well as the trainers, clothes we’d been
wearing that day. Only at that moment we started to realize what had really
happened on 26 April at Chernobyl– the scale of disaster official propaganda
was silent about. We hardly knew that it was only the beginning of an
endless story, and that we’ll remember the year 1986 forever."

Nearly 20 years on, the legacy of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster rarely
captures headlines here. But the consequences of the ‘peaceful atom’ (as it
was called in official Soviet propaganda) has, according to estimates,
affected more than seven million people. Hundreds of people died from direct
exposure to the high doses of radiation; many more continue to die from
related diseases.

So what was learnt? Not much it seems. Nuclear is back on the agenda in many
of the former Soviet territories still directly suffering from the accident
fall-out -
more....

* See also: NucNews Links and Archives (by date) at http://nucnews.net *
(Posted for educational and research purposes only, in accordance with Title
17 U.S.C. section 107) *

Approximately 5 million people die each air from air pollution due to fossil fuels. They don't get much notice because they die slowly and in many diferent places. Hundreds of millions more are breathing air with contaminants far above health-based standards. If nuclear power came to those places, the health risks would go way, way down.

All the talk of risks of nuclear power without comparing it to what we are now doing is really just a way of priveleging some lives over others.

Who got scared more about Chernobyl than we? Those who were closer to the event.

The Germans got quite frightened. They voted to shut down their Nukes.

Blind Panic is leaving. The pendulum is beginning to swing back. I believe in a few years that Germany will reverse its policy of shutting down its Nukes. They are practical people. They get 30 percent of their electricity from nuclear power.



Note that it was the Chairman of the company that owned the largest wind turbine that was questioning the shutdown of the German Nuke plants. It was a practical man.

Note that it is the politician that wants to continue this program of shutting down the plants. It was a politician.

NPT Treaty [& Other Treaties]:
http://www.cornnet.nl/~akmalten/docs.html

By Karl Grossman:

The key problem concerning the effort to abolish nuclear weapons is that it does not go far enough.
The only true way to end the threat of nuclear weapons spreading throughout this world
is to also put a stop to nuclear power.

Radical? Yes, but consider the even more radical alternative: a world in which scores of
nations can construct nuclear weaponry because they possess nuclear power technology.

There are major parts of the earth -Africa, South America, the South Pacific, and
others - that have now been designated nuclear-free zones.
I submit that if we are really to have a world free of the horrific threat of nuclear weapons and
their use, our long-term goal need be the designation of this entire planet as a
nuclear-free zone - no nuclear weapons, no nuclear power (the other side of the same coin).

Radical? Yes, but consider the alternative - trying to keep using carrots and
sticks, juggling on the road to inevitable nuclea disaster.

That may or may not occur this decade or next but sooner or later, as nuclear power
continues to spread, it will.

A nuclear-free world is the only way, I believe, that humanity will be free of the dark
specter of nuclear warfare.

Some will say putting the atomic genie back into the bottle is impossible. I say anything
people have done, other people can undo.Especially if the reason is good. And the prospect
of massive loss of life from nuclear destruction is the best of reasons.

"All nuclear fission technologies both use and produce fissionable materials that are or
can be concentrated," Amory and Hunter Lovins wrote in their seminal book, Energy/War: Breaking
the Nuclear Link. "Unavoidably latent in those technologies, therefore, is a potential for
nuclear violence and coercion which may be exploited by governments, factions"­and this they
wrote in 1980 decades before 9/11­or "terrorist groups."

"Little strategic material is needed to make a weapon of mass destruction," they went on.
"A Nagasaki-yield bomb can be made from a few kilograms of plutonium, a piece the size of a
tennis ball."

"A large power reactor," they noted, "annually produces, and an experimental critical
assembly may contain, hundreds of kilograms of plutonium; a large fast breeder reactor would
contain thousands of kilograms; a large reprocessing plant may separate tens of
thousands."

Civilian nuclear power technology, they stated, provides the way to make nuclear weapons -
furnishing the materiel and trained personnel.

Indeed, that's how India got The Bomb in 1974. Canada supplied a reactor for "peaceful
purposes" and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission trained Indian engineers.

And lo and behold, India had nuclear weapons.

"Separation of plutonium from spent fuel preceded and facilitated the British, French and
Indian decisions to build bombs," write Amory and Hunter Lovins.
"Nuclear power," they noted, "provided the essential expeditor, and in many cases the
necessary cover."

The myth of the "Peaceful Atom" is just that.

Important to any dream of creating a nuclear-free world is the elimination of the
International Atomic Energy Agency - the global nuclear-pusher.

The IAEA was formed as a result of U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower's 1953 "Atoms for
Peace" speech before the UN General Assembly.Eisenhower proposed the creation of an
international agency to promote civilian applications of atomic energy and, somehow at the
same time, control the use of fissionable material - a dual role paralleling that of the
then U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

In 1974, the AEC was abolished after the U.S. Congress concluded that, in theory and
practice, it was in conflict of interest. Its mission was so involved with promoting nuclear
energy that it was no monitor, Congress decided.

But the IAEA - in the AEC's image - remains with us.

The IAEA's mandate: "To accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to
peace, health and prosperity throughout the world" and, somehow at the same time, "establish and
administer safeguards against the diversion of military purposes of nuclear materials intended
for use in civil nuclear programs; and to establish or adopt health and safety standards."

From its outset, the IAEA has been run by atomic zealots.

Its first director general was Sterling Cole who as a U.S. congressman was an original
member and then chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, as extreme in its promotion of
nuclear technology as the AEC­and also ultimately eliminated by Congress.

Later, Hans Blix became IAEA director general - after, his official IAEA biography
stresses, he led the move against the effort to close nuclear power plants in his native Sweden.

Blix was outspoken in insisting nuclear technology be spread throughout the world -
calling for "resolute response by government, acting individually or together as in the [IAE]
Agency."

Blix's long-time second-in command: Morris Rosen - formerly of the AEC and before that the
nuclear division of General Electric.

After the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster, Rosen rendered this sage advice: "There
is very little doubt that nuclear power is a rather benign industrial enterprise and we may
have to expect catastrophic accidents from time to time."

Rosen is currently the IAEA's coordinator for environmental matters.

As for the current IAEA director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, he too, is a great nuclear
booster. "There is clearly a sense of rising expectations for nuclear power," he told a
gathering in Paris last month organized by the IAEA and entitled "International Conference on
Nuclear Power for the 2lst Century."

And the IAEA has been doing everything it can to fuel those expectations - scandalously
downplaying the public health consequences of nuclear accidents including the Chernobyl tragedy,
promoting all sorts of technology atomic and, with its nearly $300 million budget, encouraging the
spread of nuclear power machinery around the globe.

Selma Brackman's War & Peace Foundation has wisely proposed that the IAEA be replaced with
a World Sustainable Energy Agency.

Individual governments and the UN can - and must - implement the wide use of non-lethal,
renewable, safe energy technologies available now as an alternative to deadly, unnecessary nuclear
power.

Meanwhile, real nuclear non-proliferation, as Amory and Hunter Lovins stated, requires "civil
denuclearization"­as daunting as that may be.

Even Admiral Hyman Rickover, the "father" of the U.S. nuclear navy and manager of the
construction of the first commercial nuclear plant in the world, in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in
the end came to the conclusion that the world must - in his words - "outlaw nuclear reactors."

Rickover in a farewell address told a committee of Congress in 1982: "I'll be
philosophical. Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on earth: that
is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn't have any life - fish or anything.
Gradually, about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet and probably in the
entire system reduced and made it possible for some for some form of life to begin."

"Now," Rickover went on, "when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something
which nature tried to destroy to make life possible.Every time you produce radiation, you
produce something that has life, in some cases for billions of years, and I think there the human
race is going to wreck itself, and it's far more important that we get control of this horrible
force and try to eliminate it."

As for nuclear weaponry, the "lesson of history," said the retiring admiral, is that in
war nations "will use" whatever weaponry they have.

Nuclear power can give any nation nuclear weaponry.

By moving forward with a commitment and goal of eliminating nuclear weapons and nuclear
power, humanity can be spared the threat of nuclear war. Anything else would be,
unfortunately, incomplete and inadequate in the long run. The U.S., which uncorked this lethal
technology, should serve as a model and lead in eliminating the twin scourges.

An impossible dream? No, considering the probable nightmare otherwise as the continued
spread of nuclear power causes the proliferation of nuclear weaponry - and its use inevitably by
"governments, factions, terrorist groups."

***
Karl Grossman is professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old
Westbury and coordinator of the college's Media & Communications Program. A special concentration
for decades has been nuclear technology. Among the six books Grossman has authored are: Cover Up:
What You Are Not Supposed To Know About Nuclear Power; The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program's
Nuclear Threat To Our Planet; Power Crazy; and Weapons in Space. He has given presentations
around the world.

Grossman also has long been active in television. He narrated and wrote the
award-winning documentaries The Push To Revive Nuclear Power; Nukes In Space: The Nuclearization
and Weaponization of the Heavens; and Three Mile Island Revisited, all produced by EnviroVideo. For
the past 14 years, he has hosted Enviro Close-Up, an interview program aired through North America
on the DISH satellite network (Channel 9415), on cable and commercial TV and now video-streamed on
the Internet, too.

His magazine and newspaper articles have appeared in numerous publications.

Grossman is a charter member of the Commission on Disarmament Education, Conflict
Resolution and Peace of the International Association of University Presidents and the
United Nations. He is a member of the boards of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service-World
Information Service on Energy and the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting.

Another country closer to the Chernobyl event was Sweden. How do the Swedes feel today about nuclear power? They voted against it in years past when fear took the nation.



The above was taken from the following link.

Nuclear Power in Sweden

This is another country that I feel is in the process of a reversal in their nuclear power policy. Nuclear energy provides half of their power and these people are seeing that they need it.

Argument Against Nuclear Power

The Argument Against Nuclear Energy

May 1, 2005
WESTCHESTER New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/opinion/...print&position=

To the Editor:

In "The Argument for Nuclear Energy" (letter, April 24), the
licensing administrator of Entergy Nuclear Northeast asserts
that "nuclear energy doesn't spew its waste product into the
environment."

Alas, the opposite is true: nuclear plants release
radioactive particles into the environment on a routine basis.

These "permitted" releases contain a smorgasbord of
radioactive toxins including strontium-90, cesium-137 and
iodine-131. Just like fallout, such "allowed" radioactive
particulates fall, for example, onto grass and are eaten by
cows, which concentrate them in the milk we and our children
drink.

We take up the strontium-90 (with a 28-year half-life),
build it into our bones: then it's ours "for good." Tested
American children with cancer have high levels of
strontium-90 in their baby teeth.

Nuclear energy is not just a disaster waiting to happen;
it's killing us here and now.

Jeff Wanshel
Larchmont
The writer, a playwright, is the author of "Fun in Nuclear
Park."
-------------

Keeping That Special Glow Safe at Home

By C. J. CHIVERS
May 2, 2005 NY TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/02/internat...print&position=

MOSCOW, May 1 - The man carrying the hidden radioactive
material passed among airline passengers at Sheremetyevo
Airport here on an afternoon this year. His briefcase,