Yucca Mountain News Clips
Friday, September 30, 2005
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
September 30, 2005
DOE plans appeal of order to release Yucca document
Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- The Depart-ment of Energy is preparing to appeal an order to make public a 5,000-page draft license application for Yucca Mountain, prolonging a legal fight over access to nuclear waste documents.
The order, issued last week by a panel of three administrative judges for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, "raises in DOE's view complex and important issues" for the waste repository project, department attorneys said.
Attorney Donald Irwin filed a document with the judges this week saying an appeal would be filed Monday.
Energy Department officials did not comment on the notice. DOE attorneys had argued the draft license application was legally shielded from disclosure, a position that was rejected by the judicial panel.
DOE was challenged by the state of Nevada to post the documents onto a pre-licensing Internet site. State officials said they believe the documents contain important clues as to Yucca Mountain's safety for nuclear waste burial.
Public disclosure of the draft, which is said to contain versions of analysis reports and models that DOE will rely upon to defend the Yucca site during license hearings, also figures to give the state's attorneys a head start to form new legal challenges.
The DOE appeal will be decided by NRC commissioners. Commissioner Gregory Jaczko is expected to recuse himself because he worked on Yucca Mountain matters as an aide to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.
A prolonged appeal could add "a couple months" before the Energy Department could move forward on Yucca Mountain licensing, said Charles Fitzpatrick, an attorney for the state.
"I think the (judges') decision was thorough and well-reasoned in every respect, but consistent with DOE's perpetual 'hide the ball' attitude, they will do everything within their legal rights to delay making the material available to the public in general and Nevada," Fitzpatrick said.
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Las Vegas SUN
September 30, 2005
Energy Department wants more time for NRC
By Suzanne Struglinski
<suzanne@lasvegassun.com>
Sun Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department will continue its fight to keep a draft of Yucca Mountain's license application out of the state's hand and has requested more time from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to do its work.
A three-judge panel within the commission ruled Sept. 22 that the department had to turn over the draft to the state, but department attorneys sent a letter to the judges this week notifying them the department will appeal.
The department is finalizing its support material for its license application. That material must be turned in before the application.
The Energy Department argues that having to turn over the draft application and answer further questions the judges have posed is a "significant hardship" for the department.
Nevada and the department's attorneys were supposed to appear before the three Atomic Safety and Licensing Board judges Thursday, but the department requested more time. They will now meet on Oct. 13.
The appeal will go before the five-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Commissioner Greg Jaczko, a former aide to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., has recused himself from voting on Yucca issues until next year because of his previous work against the project.
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Las Vegas SUN
September 30, 2005
Energy Department to ask NRC to keep draft license plan secret
Associated Press
LAS VEGAS (AP) - The federal Energy Department plans to ask the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to overrule a judicial panel's order that it make public a 5,000-page draft license application for Yucca Mountain, officials said.
The order issued by a panel of three NRC administrative judges, "raises in DOE's view complex and important issues" for the waste repository project, department lawyer Donald Irwin said in a document notifying judges that an appeal would be filed Monday.
Energy Department officials in Washington, D.C., did not comment on the notice filed this week.
The judicial panel on Sept. 22 rejected Energy Department arguments that the draft license application was legally shielded from disclosure.
The state of Nevada has challenged the Energy Department to post the documents on a public Internet site set up to catalog documents relating to planning and design for the Yucca Mountain project.
State officials said they believe the draft license application will show the Energy Department knows it cannot safely entomb 77,000 tons of the nation's most radioactive waste 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The Energy Department appeal will be decided by NRC commissioners. Commissioner Gregory Jaczko is expected to obstain because he worked on Yucca Mountain matters as an aide to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.
A prolonged appeal could add several months to the Energy Department timeline for Yucca Mountain licensing, said Charles Fitzpatrick, a lawyer for the state.
Project officials have pushed back a target opening date from 2010 to 2012 or later, amid recent budget shortages and investigations of e-mails exchanged between project scientists discussing possible falsification of scientific data.
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Lahontan Valley News
September 30, 2005
Nuclear power: Americans still haven't warmed up to it
Is it time to seriously think about nuclear energy as the nation's primary power supply?
The future of electrical generation is assuredly not in fossil fuels, which most scientists and even politicians agree are the source of global warming and greenhouse gas emissions. So what does that leave us? Solar and geothermal, while clean and renewable sources of energy, fall far short in supplying the nation with the power it voraciously consumes. Coal is not found in quantities large enough and also produces pollution.
While nuclear energy is certainly renewable, it can be argued that it really isn't green power in the true sense of the word. Why? Well, Yucca Mountain ought to suffice as the answer. Nevada politicians are fighting the repository's development to see that the byproduct of nuclear energy and weapons development is not stored in Nevada.
That's the problem with nuclear power, it produces waste and not just any waste, but potentially dangerous and long-lived waste. Nuclear energy also has a terrible image problem that has not been rehabilitated much since the Three Mile Island reactor meltdown in 1979.
There are certainly proponents of a greater use of nuclear power generation. An organization pushing for nuclear energy that calls itself, literally, Nuclear Power Now, argues that splitting atoms is the world's largest source of emission-free energy, and the nuclear industry generates only a fraction of the solid waste that is produced by power plants burning coal.
The organization notes that nearly 20 percent of electricity generated in the United States today comes from nuclear power plants, and in 40 years not a single death has been attributed to the operation of a civilian nuclear power plant.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, there are more than 400 nuclear plants located around the world.
No county has embraced nuclear energy quite like France, which generates 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear reactors. It has achieved a high level of self sufficiency that has greatly reduced its dependence on foreign energy sources and fossil fuel.
Maybe France and its widespread use of nuclear power is the future as the clamor about greenhouse emissions grows louder. But we're not quite there yet.
This country certainly has to find a way to deal with nuke waste beyond entombing it in the earth. Only then will nuclear power gain acceptance as a relatively benign source of power.
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Pahrump Valley Times
September 30, 2005
News from around the Silver State
Nevada opposes land withdrawal for Yucca Mountain rail line
The Energy Department has not laid the groundwork to justify restricting public land use along a proposed railroad corridor to the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, Nevada officials said.
The DOE plan for a 308,600-acre land withdrawal across rural Nevada will have broad impacts that have not been studied adequately, state officials said in a formal comment. The proposed action "is not just any land withdrawal," the state said in a seven-page assessment signed by Bob Loux, executive director of the Agency for Nuclear Projects.
"Apart from causing impacts and disruption to existing land users, the proposed action has the potential to negatively affect the environment, grazing allotments, mining and energy development activities," the state said.
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Reno Gazette Journal
September 30, 2005
Sandoval sails through confirmation hearing
Toni Coleman
WASHINGTON -- No senators demanded to know Thursday where Nevada Attorney General Brian Sandoval stands on issues or on how he plans to decide cases if confirmed as a U.S. district judge.
The Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for him and four other nominees drew only one committee member, U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.
"You have my support. Let's hope that that will help you," he told the group.
"He will serve with distinction," U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said during his introduction of Sandoval to the committee. "Brian Sandoval will cause no squabbles. Everyone will vote for him. He is a class act."
During brief testimony, his only opportunity to pitch himself for the job, Sandoval stressed his experience in federal and state courts and promised to "treat all litigants with dignity and respect."
Sandoval, nominated in March, also won praise from Hatch for having support from Reid and U.S. Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev.
"You've accomplished a great thing by getting both of them to testify for you," Hatch said.
Hatch also praised Sandoval for dealing with many high-profile legal issues, being "tenacious" in his efforts to protect the public and maintaining "an open-door policy" as attorney general.
Sandoval, the first Hispanic elected to statewide office, represented Washoe County in the Nevada Assembly and was named chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission by a Democratic governor before becoming attorney general. Although a Republican, he was nominated by Reid twice for the federal bench but turned him down the first time.
"He is somebody who has always bridged across the aisle," said Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev. "There is no question in my mind that Brian Sandoval will meet the standards we have set in the state of Nevada." Sandoval, who represented Nevada in its fight against the federal government over a nuclear waste facility at Yucca Mountain, would replace Judge Howard McKibben on the U.S. District Court of Nevada.
Joined by his wife, three children and other relatives, Sandoval said he appreciated the senators' remarks and was grateful that the committee held a hearing.
The committee could debate Sandoval's qualifications and vote as early as Thursday.
Reid called Sandoval, a rising GOP star who had been mentioned as a future candidate for governor, a "class act" and "the kind of judge we should have."
Gov. Kenny Guinn has picked Las Vegas lawyer George Chanos to replace Sandoval. Chanos, whose clients have included the state Republican Party, plans to run for a full four-year term next year.
In the 2006 election, Chanos would face Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, who has the support of many top Democrats including Reid, former Sen. Richard Bryan, former Gov. Bob Miller and former Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa.
Associated Press reporter Brendan Riley contributed to this report.
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North Augusta Star
September 30, 2005
County sues over MOX delay at SRS
By Philip Lord
The Aiken County Council voted last week to sue the U.S. Department of Energy and Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman over delays in starting construction of a mixed oxide fuel plant at the Savannah River Site.
Following an executive session, the Council held a voice vote in which it was decided to file the federal lawsuit.
County Attorney Robert M. Bell filed the lawsuit Wednesday in federal court, said Council member Chuck Smith, who has been appointed the point man for the County on the issue.
Voting in favor of the motion were Council members Willar Hightower, LaWana McKenzie, Kathy Rawls, Scott Singer and Smith. Abstaining from the vote were Charles Barton, Gary Bunker and County Council Chairman Ronnie Young, according to records. Absent from Tuesday's meeting was Council member Eddie Butler.
The suit claims the MOX project at SRS is more than 12 months behind schedule and that Bodman has not issued a corrective plan to bring the program back on schedule, as required by a 2003 law championed by the late Sen. Strom Thurmond and then Rep. Lindsey Graham, who took Thurmond's seat in the U.S. Senate.
In the 2003 agreement, DOE is to have the MOX plant operational at SRS by Jan. 1, 2009.
"The 2003 defense budget does not allow DOE to grant itself extensions to the 2009 deadline," the Council wrote in a position statement issued by the body. "However, the DOE Secretary's 2005 report stated that DOE would be extending that deadline."
Under language inserted in the bill by Thurmond and Graham, DOE faces a $1 million a day fine for each day the plant is not operational.
"We felt that we had to do this to ensure the economic base and to protect the health, welfare and safety of the residents of Aiken County," said Smith.
The suit asks the courts to require Bodman to send Congress a corrective action plan to ensure the MOX plant is operational by Jan. 1, 2009, to order Bodman to suspend further shipments of plutonium to SRS until he can certify that construction is back on track, and to order Bodman to send to Congress a list of options for removing an amount of plutonium from SRS equal to an amount shipped to the site after April 15, 2002.
Also included in the suit is a request for the federal courts to supervise the construction and operation of the MOX plant to ensure it stays in compliance with federal law.
Tom Clements, who monitors DOE operations for Greenpeace International, said he felt Bodman had met the letter of the law with recent filings.
"DOE has met the requirements of the law," said Clements, who admits his organization has been a critic of the MOX plan from the start.
Clements said the entire MOX program is off schedule due to delays in getting a sister operation approved in Russia, which under a 2000 accord with the United States will destroy 34-metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium, if America does the same.
"It's known that the whole program is way behind schedule," Clements said.
As for material already shipped to SRS, Clements said recent DOE documents show the materials may be processed through the Defense Waste Processing Facility, which will encase the materials in glass for future storage at a long-term repository, which is currently slated for Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
Until a disposition path is identified, Smith said he is uncomfortable with the fact that a recent General Accounting Office report shows storage facilities at SRS are substandard.
Clements said records show DOE has shipped approximately five metric tons of plutonium to SRS from other DOE facilities in recent years. The material is currently being stored in existing structures at SRS.
The Greenpeace advocate said case law concerning waste shipments is not in the county's favor. Former Gov. Jim Hodges lost a federal court challenge to halt shipments of nuclear waste to South Carolina in 2002 before losing a re-election bid to current Gov. Mark Sanford.
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UNLV Rebel Yell
September 29, 2005
New club organizes students against Yucca Mountain
STAND created by Nevada-based Citizen Alert founder
Frances Vanderploeg
Staff Writer
A new club is starting on campus targeted at informing students about political issues in Nevada as well as giving them a chance to advocate what they believe in.
Students have tentatively adopted the name STAND (Students Take Action for New Directions) after one of their parent groups of the same name.
The original idea for starting the club came when a representative of the national chapter of STAND approached Citizen Alert, a Nevada-based grassroots environmental group, in hopes to start a youth organization that would target political issues.
Tony Guzman, who is in charge of public outreach for Citizen Alert, was given the project and is currently acting as facilitator for the group.
"I'm here to provide support and any resources they may need, but eventually it will be student-run," Guzman said.
Though STAND is traditionally a female-based group, Guzman has openly invited everyone to join, including not only males and females but high school and CCSN students as well.
Currently the students are focused on the issue of whether or not nuclear waste should be stored at Yucca Mountain.
In 1997, Nevada Gov. Bob Miller issued a proclamation stating that Sept. 30 would be deemed Nevada Is Not a Wasteland Day, which Nevadans have celebrated ever since.
Citizen Alert has taken the initiative in the past to organize various activities celebrating Nevada Is Not a Wasteland Day and trying to raise awareness about Yucca Mountain.
This year, the holiday happens to coincide with a public hearing being held Oct. 4 by the EPA regarding amendments made to the Public Health and Environmental Radiation Protection Standards for Yucca Mountain.
Essentially, the protection standards lay out what level of radiation can be released from the site without harming anyone.
The original proposal was released in 2001 but numerous organizations, including Citizen Alert, decided to sue the EPA because of their worry that the standards set forth were unsafe.
They won the lawsuit last year, forcing the EPA to amend their proposal. The new protection standards were released earlier this year, but some people feel the amended version is worse than the original, Guzman said.
The standards currently being proposed can be found at epa.gov/radiation/yucca/.
At the hearing, the EPA will be accepting any comments the public may have regarding the new standards. Comments can also be submitted via the Internet or ground mail.
STAND will be on campus Sept. 30 to answer any questions students have on this issue or any others, as well as encouraging them to let the EPA know what they think, Guzman said.
"It's something that's going to affect our generation as we get older," said culinary arts junior Josh Clark.
Generations before have neglected the issue, Clark said, so it is up to younger people to make the difference.
Despite their current focus on Yucca Mountain, STAND plans to also discuss any other issues that may come up, including elections and how the various candidates may affect Nevada. Additional issues to be discussed are education, public health and community issues.
"We want to motivate people to do something," said political science sophomore Owen Sherwood. "A lot of the things we've talked about are issues that need to be advocated."
Meetings for STAND are currently being held Wednesdays at noon in Lied Library. Any students interested in joining are encouraged to contact Guzman at 796-5662.
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Las Vegas Business Press
September 29, 2005
In case you missed it ...
Not in His Backyard
Once-time supporter of the nuclear dump at Yucca Mountain has changed his mind. Utah Republican Robert Bennett told the Senate the nation should rethink the whole idea of a single repository.
Bennett has jointed Nevada representatives in arguing that waste should be stored temporarily where it is at nuclear plants and the problem should be resolved with reprocessing technology.
Critics said the approval for storage facilities on an Indian reservation in the Beehive State may have concentrated Bennett's mind on the problems of nuclear storage.
Bennett is still hoping to salvage something from the project: "I am not one who thinks we ought to just fill Yucca Mountain up with dirt and walk away and leave it," he said.
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ZNet
September 29, 2005
The Health Effects of Nuclear Weapons Complexes:
Sacrificing the Soviet and American public
by Arjun Makhijani
On September 29, 1957, at 4:20 p.m., an enormous explosion in a tank containing highly radioactive waste occurred in the Mayak nuclear weapons plant in the southern Ural mountains of the Soviet Union. The fallout plume spread strontium-90 and other dangerous radionuclides over more than 9,600 square kilometers, which remain contaminated to this day.
Food stores were closed, and more than 1,000 tons of food dumped. Farming was stopped for more than two decades on about 150,000 acres. More than 10,000 people were relocated, and their empty homes were torn down and buried as radioactive waste. Yet, none of the residents were told why. The Soviet government covered up the accident, only acknowledging the devastation in June 1989 as the Cold War was ending.[1]
Surprisingly, the West assisted the Soviet government in its cover-up. In 1976, Soviet dissident biologist Zhores Medvedev published an article in the New Scientist, a British science magazine, about the accident. Instead of denouncing the callous cover-up of the Soviets, however, the chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, Sir John Hill, and other British experts dismissed the story as "rubbish" and "scientific fiction."[2]
The CIA also helped the cover-up. According to a 1959 CIA document, the agency knew that an accident had occurred that resulted in food stores being closed. The resulting food shortages created lines that were "reminiscent of the worst shortages during World War II." They also knew that high officials had been "wearing small radiation counters" while the public had no protection.
Yet, the CIA did not publicize the accident, even though it occurred during the height of the Cold War and at a time that both sides took every opportunity for propaganda advantage. The U.S. government did not condemn the Soviets for the secrecy and destruction of homes without informed consent. Was it because officials in the West feared that the public might raise questions about the possibility of a similar explosion in France, the United Kingdom, or the United States?
Indeed, since the dawn of the atomic age, millions of people in other parts of the world have been affected by bomb production and testing. American, British, French, and Soviet soldiers were ordered to participate in atomic war exercises. Children in the United States have seen their risk of cancers rise from drinking milk contaminated with fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests. Conditions for uranium miners in India are lamentable, and who knows what damage has been caused by nuclear weapons in China, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan?
Few nuclear-weapon states have provided much information about the harm caused by their nuclear weapons establishments. For example, information about the intense fallout from French nuclear tests in Polynesia is coming to light only this year. The typical reaction of these establishments has been to deny damage, cover up problems, and simply assert national security requirements to be taken on trust, promulgated by fiat, or both.
The problem is by no means at an end, even leaving aside plans in the United States and other nuclear-weapon states to make more nuclear weapons. For example, poor radioactive waste disposal practices throughout the Cold War threaten some of the most important water resources in the United States. These include putting high-level liquid radioactive wastes from reprocessing into tanks that have leaked a million gallons into the ground near the Columbia River and dumping plutonium-laden wastes into unlined pits above Snake River Plain Aquifer, northeastern Idaho's sole aquifer.
Avoiding and Permitting Fallout
Efforts to keep damaging information about nuclear weapons hidden from the public began early. The very first nuclear test on July 16, 1945, led to severe fallout and hot spots of radioactive contamination 32 kilometers from the site. The affected people were not informed even after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nor were they evacuated. A fallout cloud hung over much of southeastern New Mexico in the days following the test, but even 60 years later, there has been no official investigation of the health effects. Col. Stafford Warren, a medical doctor in the Army who was the chief of radiation safety for the test, recommended that future tests should not be done within 240 kilometers of human habitation. The recommendation was ignored, with tragic effects.
In 1950, the United States had considered setting up a weapons testing site in North Carolina at a coastal location that would have allowed most fallout to land in the ocean. Instead, the United States chose to set up a continental nuclear weapons test site in Nevada with the knowledge that a western location would blow fallout over most of the country. The federal government risked the health of its citizens in large part to make life more convenient for weapons scientists at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory and to avoid the political difficulties of acquiring coastal private property through eminent domain.
When the site became operational, tests were conducted when the wind blew away from Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The result was ubiquitous fallout over most of the rest of the continental United States. The government reassured a skeptical public that it would provide ample warning of any dangers. Yet, it did not share the results of its 1950 research, which had shown that milk would be contaminated by fallout. Cows would eat grass on which iodine-131, an intensely radioactive fission product, had been deposited. The iodine-131 would concentrate in the milk. Growing children who drank the milk would get large doses of radiation to their thyroids, creating a risk of cancer and other thyroid diseases.[3]
Rather than address these realistic concerns, the military dismissed them. The opinion in military circles was that the public in the United States had a "hysterical and alarmist complex" about radiation that needed to be corrected to enable the United States to proceed with its testing activities. In internal documents, Department of Defense officials said the process of correction "would be a matter of reeducation over a long period of time." The objective was in direct contradiction to the advice given by Warren in July 1945: the "reeducation" was supposed to go on until "the public will accept the possibility of an atomic explosion within a hundred or so miles of their homes." At that point, the establishment of a test site in the continental United States would no longer be a problem. [4] People would then "feel at home with neutrons trotting around" and presumably become comfortable with nuclear tests nearby. It was after all, as the safety preparations were being done in December 1950, "the most important angle to get across."[5]
The cover-up was a spectacular success, although the fallout was intense. After two nuclear tests (Shot Harry and Shot Nancy), 1,420 lambing ewes and 2,970 lambs in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona died of severe radiation injuries.[6] In the lawsuit that followed,[7] the government's representatives provided what the judge nearly 30 years later concluded was "false and deceptive" representations, withheld information, and provided other information "in such a manner as to be deceitful" and, in sum, "manipulated" the court by "convoluted actions."
In 1997, when the National Cancer Institute acting under congressional directive assessed milk contamination, it found that fallout from the tests would eventually cause between 11,000 and 212,000 thyroid cancers. The cancer risk fell primarily to those who had been children, with girls being at twice the risk of boys. Those who believed that they were leading healthy farm lives by drinking fresh milk got the highest doses.
An atomic Kodak moment was playing out in a parallel political and economic universe in the very same period. The photographic film company found its film was getting fogged because the corn husks it was using to make packaging had become contaminated with fallout. Kodak threatened to sue. The government quickly provided data on anticipated patterns of fallout to Kodak and the rest of the photographic film industry so they could protect their products.[8] Was it because Kodak knew too much? Was it because film was more precious than milk?
As a way to avoid publicity and lessen the political consequences, the United States and other countries also often tested weapons in areas home to foreign subjects or minority populations. The United States located its test sites in the Marshall Islands and on land claimed by the Western Shoshones in Nevada. The Soviets located their major test site in the land of the Kazakhs, near Semipalatinsk. The British conducted their tests on native lands in Australia and on Christmas Island in the Pacific. The Chinese located theirs on minority lands in western China. The French test sites were in the colonies in Algeria and Polynesia.
According to France's conservative newspaper, Le Figaro, although fallout was anticipated and the genetic risk for the native population was considered greater than that for the general French public, "a preventive relocation of the people of the Gambiers [archipelago] was ruled out for political and psychological reasons." Further, the evacuation of old people and children "who comprised a large fraction" of the population was considered "the most difficult," so they were left in the path of the fallout.[9]
To be sure, the cover-ups were not entirely successful. Public protests in the 1950s and concerns about contamination of mother's milk and baby's teeth with strontium-90 were central to the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and the United States signed in 1963. In a real, practical sense, the first arms control treaty was an environmental one. Yet, China and France did not sign. The French did not stop atmospheric testing until 1974; the Chinese did so in 1980.
Moving tests underground did not end the problem, even though it did greatly mitigate the problem of radiation doses from short-lived radionuclides such as iodine-131. Large amounts of plutonium, iodine-129, cesium-135, and other long-lived radionuclides remain underground at the test sites. They possess the potential for migration into water bodies in the long term. No cleanup method has yet been devised.
The frequent claims of safety and lack of deleterious health effects of nuclear tests are perhaps most clearly contradicted by military plans to use fallout as a terror weapon. The fallout from the first ever underwater test at Bikini in July 1946 was so ubiquitous and so insidious in its effects that the Joint Chiefs of Staff evaluation of the military aspects of the tests concluded that fallout may constitute a weapon of war. Of the long-term effects of the radioactivity, the 1947 evaluation stated that the contaminated areas: irregular in size and shape, as wind and topography might form them, would have no visible boundaries. No survivor could be certain he was not among the doomed, and so added to every terror of the moment, thousands would be stricken with the fear of death and the uncertainty of the time of its arrival."[10]
Overall, estimates of cancer fatalities due to the global radiation doses from the atmospheric nuclear testing program of the five nuclear-weapon states that are parties to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and that are also the only permanent members of the UN Security Council, which gives them veto power over global security decisions, run into hundreds of thousands between the start of testing in 1945 and the end of the 20th century.
There are considerable uncertainties in the risk of cancer death from exposure to low levels of radiation, but all careful scientific evaluations, including the most recent ones, have concluded that every increasing level of exposure to radiation produces an incremental risk of cancer. The range of estimates of cancer deaths as a result of testing fallout, using the official U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cancer risk coefficients, is between about 200,000 to more than half a million.[11] The number of cancer cases, including thyroid cancer, which has a low fatality rate (about 5 percent), would be considerably greater. No sound global estimate of cancer incidence is possible because no study comparable to the 1997 U.S. National Cancer Institute study has been carried out on a global scale. Indeed, even the thyroid cancer risk in Canada due to testing in Nevada has not been evaluated, although it is apparent from the National Cancer Institute study as well as the similar dietary patterns between Canada and the United States that people in several parts of Canada would have been significantly affected.
Further Dangers
That was not the only damage caused by nuclear weapons establishments. There are many other examples. Some from the United States include:
• From the 1940s into the 1970s, more than 23,000 people were subjected to radiation experiments, many without their informed consent. They were administered by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, NASA, and the Department of Veterans Affairs for purposes including determining the biology of radiation intakes, developing radiation weapons, and determining radiation's effects on military personnel performance on the battlefield. One experiment involved feeding oatmeal with radioactive trace elements to more than 100 boys at a Massachusetts school. Others included testicular irradiation experiments on prisoners to determine what doses induce sterility and experiments on pregnant women. In 1993, after learning of a particularly troubling series of experiments involving the injection of plutonium into unknowing subjects, then-Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary remarked, "The only thing I could think of was Nazi Germany."[12]
• A quarter of a million armed forces personnel participated in nuclear weapons tests in the United States alone. They were marched into ground zero, they scrubbed plutonium from the decks of contaminated ships, and they flew planes through the mushroom clouds to sample them and to test how pilots might function in a nuclear war environment. It took until the end of the 1980s for the U.S. government to recognize the harm and begin a compensation program.
• During the Cold War, more than half a million weapons complex workers in the United States were exposed to radioactivity and chemicals in the course of their work. In the early decades, many were exposed without proper information or training, with authorities sometimes hiding the risks so that hazard duty would not have to be paid, among other reasons.[13] The atomic weapons establishment did not actually calculate radiation doses to workers received due to inhalation and ingestion, even though data were being collected and analyzed in the form of urine samples. Congress passed a compensation program for nuclear weapons workers in October 2000.
• During the 1950s, it was well known that exposure to radon and its decay products in unventilated mines was a health hazard and increased the risk of lung cancer, but the AEC, the Department of Energy's predecessor, did not require that the mines be ventilated, choosing instead to emphasize production.[14]
Even today, people who live along the Savannah River and use its water downstream of the Savannah River Site, a nuclear weapons materials plant, are drinking water contaminated with tritium, which is radioactive hydrogen. This contamination level is at about 5 percent of the present-day drinking water standard. However, these standards are set for a grown male, called "standard man," and they do not consider the effects of radioactive water on developing fetuses. They do not consider miscarriages and other non-cancer effects. No removal is planned of the source of the tritium contamination, which lies in the unlined pits and trenches where radioactive waste was dumped in cardboard and wooden boxes. Unless the long-lived and especially risky wastes, such as liquid high-level wastes in tanks, are recovered and stabilized and isolated from the human environment, the risks will persist.
The most recent insult from the nuclear establishment comes via the Environmental Protection Agency. Its Office of Radiation and Indoor Air has proposed standards for geologic isolation of highly radioactive commercial and military wastes for the very long-term (beyond 10,000 years) for the proposed Yucca Mountain, Nevada site that would set radiation protection back decades. The proposed rule is far more lax than any other Western country. By allowing a radiation dose of 350 millirem per year, women exposed over a lifetime would have a 1 in 30 chance of getting cancer as a result [15]. If radioactivity leaks are at the higher end of estimated values (resulting in a dose of about 2,000 millirem per year), the lifetime risk for women of getting cancer due to the exposure would be about one in five.
Some argue that that we need not worry about radiation doses at times so far into the future. There are other risks that are far greater here and now and in the coming years, decades, and centuries. Indeed., there are. The main risk exposed by the reasoning behind the proposed Yucca Mountain standard and other recent backsliding on nuclear waste management is that the government is willing to jettison rules and norm designed to protect the public, no matter how well established, to accommodate powerful political and financial interests, including in the nuclear industry. Yucca Mountain has repeatedly been demonstrated to be a site that is unlikely to meet the government's rules for radiation protection. But instead of trying to find a new site, those rules have been changed at least three times in major ways, the most recent being the EPA proposal for acceptable levels of long-term exposure.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been similarly affected in other nuclear-weapon states. The main difference between them and the United States has been that the United States has been more open and hence has, under public pressure, acknowledged a wider scope and depth of harm, although that task is still far from done. India has strict secrecy laws surrounding its nuclear weapons activities, much like France and the United Kingdom. The least is known about China, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.
It is a remarkable fact of nuclear weapons history and radiation risk that every nuclear-weapon state has first of all harmed its own people in the name of national security. For the most part, they have done so without informed consent.
Nor is the damage confined to nuclear- weapon possessors. Uranium for nuclear weapons was mined in many non-nuclear-weapon states. France got its uranium in large measure from its colonies, where working conditions in mines were -- and continue to be -- scandalous. The United Kingdom got its uranium partly from Namibia. The Soviets got much of their uranium from vast operations in Eastern Europe, notably in East Germany and the former Czechoslovakia. Health and environmental problems have typically been serious, so far as independent evidence indicates, but have usually been officially denied.[16]
The statement of then-Deputy Secretary of Energy W. Henson Moore at Rocky Flats in June of 1989 at the end of the Cold War was a kind of mea culpa about this. Nuclear weapons production, he told The Washington Post, has been "a secret operation not subject to laws... no one was to know what was going on." He added that "the way the government and its contractors operated these plants was: This is our business, it's national security, everybody else butt out." The "everybody else" he was referring to was not a foreign power, but the people of the United States. Other countries have not had a comparable confession, although their nuclear establishments have been as high-handed and their people have likely suffered similar kinds of consequences.
In a reverse of the doctors' dictum to "first do no harm," nuclear weapons establishments have first harmed the people of their own countries, as well others around the world. They have shown a readiness to harm. Given the nature of the problem and its main sources, the permanent members of the UN General Assembly and the UN Security Council should call for a global truth commission to investigate the harm that nuclear weapons production and testing have done and continue to do to people all over the world.
ENDNOTES
1. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), Plutonium: Deadly Gold of the Nuclear Age (Cambridge: IPPNW Press, 1992), chap. 4.
2. Ibid.
3. Pat Ortmeyer and Arjun Makhijani, "Worse Than We Knew," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November/December 1997.
4. IPPNW and IEER, Radioactive Heaven and Earth: The Health and Environmental Risks of Nuclear Weapons Testing in, on, and Above the Earth (New York: Apex Press, 1991), chap. 4.
5. Barton C. Hacker, Elements of Controversy: The Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons Testing 1947-1974 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), p. 43.
6. Philip L. Fradkin, Fallout: An American Nuclear Tragedy (Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1989), p. 148. See also a history of nuclear testing.
7. IPPNW and IEER, Radioactive Heaven and Earth, p. 59.
8. Ortmeyer and Makhijani.
9. "Polynésie: Le Mensonge Nucléaire," Le Figaro, May 19, 2005.
10. IPPNW and IEER, Plutonium, p. 143 (U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff evaluation of the 1946 tests at Bikini Atoll).
11. The total committed dose equivalent to the global population through the year 2100 is estimated at 544 million person-rem. IPPNW and IEER, Radioactive Heaven and Earth, p. 37. The doses are much larger if estimated for longer periods, mainly due to the very long-lived radionuclides, of which the most important is carbon-14, which gets into food and becomes incorporated into our bodies and all ecosystems. Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,730 years, meaning that significant amounts will remain for tens of thousands of years in the atmosphere in the form of radioactive carbon dioxide, to be taken up by plants. Carbon-14 also occurs naturally, created mainly by the interaction of cosmic rays with nitrogen in the atmosphere.
12. Arjun Makhijani and Ellen Kennedy, "Human Radiation Experiments in the United States," Science for Democratic Action, vol. 3, no. 1 (Winter 1994).
13. Arjun Makhijani, Bernd Franke, and Hisham Zerriffi, "Preliminary Partial Dose Estimates From the Processing of Nuclear Materials at Three Plants During the 1940s and 1950s," 2000. Available online.
14. Arjun Makhijani and Lisa Ledwidge, "Back to the Bad Old Days," Science for Democratic Action, vol. 11, no. 4 (September 2003).
15. Press release of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, August 9, 2005, on the web.
16. Arjun Makhijani, Howard Hu, and Katherine Yih eds., Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production and Its Health and Environmental Effects (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995 and 2000), chap. 5.
Arjun Makhijani is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland. He is the principal editor Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production and Its Health and Environmental Effects (MIT Press: 2000). This is an expanded version of an article that appeared in Arms Control Today (July-August 2005).
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Provo Daily Herald
September 29, 2005
Bill blocking Utah waste site not introduced
N.S. Nokkentved
Daily Herald
Legislation that Sen. Orrin Hatch says would block shipments of highly radioactive spent reactor from rolling through Utah County has not actually been introduced.
"The draft of the bill that we received from Legislative Counsel did not reflect what we intended for the bill," Hatch spokesman Peter Carr said in an e-mail Wednesday.
"We are still working with them to ensure that the bill's language is correct before we introduce the bill."
Hatch's office last week said he introduced the legislation the day after Sen. Bob Bennett announced that he had dropped his support for a proposed federal waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev.
Bennett's announcement made Hatch's more timely, and he had planned to introduce the bill anyway, Carr said last week.
But the bill was never introduced, Carr said Wednesday.
The legislation would block sending spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors to private sites such as one proposed on the Goshute Indian Reservation in Skull Valley.
Much of the waste going to that facility would roll through Utah County.
Hatch declined to join Bennett in opposing Yucca Mountain, saying doing so would alienate the Bush administration and others who are in a position to block the proposed spent fuel storage facility in the Skull Valley.
On Sept. 9, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the license for the project that would bring 44,000 tons of spent fuel to Utah -- over the objections of Utah officials.
The project, proposed by the Minnesota-based Private Fuel Storage LLC, still needs the approval of the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Indian Affairs -- agencies under the authority of the Bush administration.
Hatch's proposed bill also calls for a study of alternatives to disposal such as reprocessing, storing the waste on site, and storing the waste at existing federally-owned sites. It also calls for a study of reprocessing spent fuel, an expensive process that extracts still usable uranium and plutonium from spent fuel.
N.S. Nokkentved can be reached at 344-2930 or at nnokkentved@heraldextra.com.
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State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects
www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/
nwpo@nuc.state.nv.us
775-687-3744
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