Nuclear Revivalism as a Religious Cult of ‘True Believers’

‘Meltdown at Diablo’ – ArtOfMark Bryan-com

By Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle – EON

‘Save Diablo’s’ Delusional Dimensions

This series is based on our research for participation in a recent Zoom workshop on the current push by nuclear proponents to extend the operation of PG&E’s two Diablo Canyon nuclear reactors beyond their scheduled respective shutdown dates in 2024 and 2025 – – an agreement approved by the California Public Utilities Commission, large majorities in both Houses of the California Legislature, and which Newsom himself had boasted about helping to broker when he was lieutenant governor. It was affirmed by Senate Bill 1090 signed by then-Governor Jerry Brown in 2018.

The full title of the 2016 agreement is “Joint Proposal of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Friends of the Earth, Natural Resources Defense Council, environment California, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1245, Coalition of California Utility Employees and Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility to Retire Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant at Expiration of the Current Operating Licenses and Replace it with a Portfolio of GHG Free Resources.”

The ‘Save Diablo’ campaign not only violates the existing agreement between the utility and citizen organizations, but also requires major exemptions from and revisions in both state and federal laws.

If you can’t or won’t comply with the law, just attempt to change it.

Devilish Details

Ana Matosantos, Cabinet Secretary at the California Governor’s office apparently crafted the legal language of the required exemptions and revisions necessary to extend the plant’s functioning for an indefinite period. In a Joint Agency Remote Access Workshop held on August 12, 2022, she presented what appeared to be an unscripted articulation of the proposal, demonstrating her familiarity with the issues involved.

The eleventh hour plan, launched in the final weeks of California’s 2022 legislative session ending August 31^st, calls for the U.S. Department of Energy to extend an offer for part of a $1.6 million pot of money for operating subsidies for economically distressed nuclear plants to Diablo Canyon under the Civil Nuclear Credit Program. Diablo does not meet the criteria for ‘financially distressed’ under this program.

In addition, another major feature of the Governor’s Proposal is to offer a “forgivable loan” from the state’s General Fund to PG&E – essentially a grant – of up to $1.4 billion to cover the costs “associated with the relicensing” of Diablo Canyon. Although the Governor’s Proposal referred to a “limited term extension,” the fine print calls for the Public Utilities Commission to consider an extension for as long as ten years, until October 31, 2035.

Now that extension has reportedly been extended to 20 years – in order to justify the extremely high expenses involved in reversing the shutdown process at this late date.

Gov. Newsom’s Cabinet Secretary, Ana Matosantos – Workshop screen capture

The clearly brilliant Ms. Matosantos has reportedly been the brain behind California governors from Arnold Schwarzenegger , Jerry Brown, and most recently as Gavin Newsom’s Cabinet Secretary.

Ms. Matosantos is scheduled to leave the Governor’s office at the end of August. So vital have been her services, one recent article was titled, “What Happens When the ‘Indispensable Insider’ of Sacramento Steps Down? .   The article asks, “Can state government survive without her?”

If her alleged multi-pronged law-changing strategy succeeds, she will have left quite a legacy.

Zoom Marathon

In the Zoom call – that went on for 5-and-a-half hours, and was reportedly attended by more than 600 participants – several officials made presentations on the issues.

In case you missed it, the recording of the full event is available with an audio transcript here.

California Senator John Laird thoughtfully laid the background history and the twelve issues that, in his mind, will need to be thoroughly addressed. Senator Laird represents the 17th State Senate District, including all of Santa Cruz and San Luis Obispo counties, the majority of Monterey County, and parts of Santa Clara County. A transcript of his full statement is here.

His list of gnarly issues included:

1. Safety
2. Who pays?
3. Spent Nuclear Storage
4. Seismic Studies
5. Once Through Cooling Violations
6. Permitting Requirement
7. Community Transition Funding
8. Diablo Canyon Lands Returned to Community Use
9. Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary
10. Date Certain Uncertainties
11. Offshore Wind Development Plans
12. Marshall Plan for Renewables Development

Senator Laird concluded, “I don’t see a pathway to Diablo’s Canyon continued operation unless each of these elements is addressed.  No proposal can be complete without that….” That suggests that, as Grandma used to say, “Many a slip between cup and lip.”  There’s a boulder-strewn thicket of red tape impediments to get through to keep Diablo making more deadly nuclear waste radioactive virtually forever.

Succeeding speakers from the California Energy Commission and the California Independent Systems Operator (CAISO) presented what seemed to many viewers to be a cheery, if subtle, sales pitch for extension, laced with repeated protestations that ‘assured safety’ is their overriding priority.

It is worth noting here that CAISO is not, as its name implies, a government agency. According to Dun & Bradstreet, it is a corporation and is part of “the Management, Scientific, and Technical Consulting Services Industry.” It is a business with contractual obligations to export electricity to other states. That’s why it is said to be mainly responsible for the August 2020 blackouts. It had reportedly miscalculated its demand projections and, although it had the capacity to meet California’s sudden in-state demand, it had instead sent the power out of state in order to fulfill its existing business contracts. This could happen again, with or without Diablo in operation.

Please watch the video and read the transcript and draw your own conclusions.

What we see as a charm offensive was supported by glossy graphics based on hypothetical modeling purporting to show that, without Diablo’s output, California’s energy supply may well be doomed very soon.

Workshop screen capture purporting to show looming energy shortfall without Diablo.

This is a myth that will not die.

Graphic credit: Women’s Energy Matters based on government data.

As far back as 2013, the late Barbara George, Founder/Director of Womens Energy Matters, described in our video California’s Unnecessary Nukes her discoveries as a professional intervenor on behalf of the public interest at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), showing private utilities’ resistance to energy efficiency, conservation and clean energy technologies in a state that already had an excess of power – without nuclear reactors.

Diablo is No Protection Against Blackouts

That was then, and this is now. Figures have changed.

Proponents of extending Diablo Canyon’s operation for up to 20 more years argue that the plant’s two aging and embrittled reactors, located over 13 intersecting earthquake faults in a tsunami zone, operated by serial felon Pacific Gas & Election (PG&E) are necessary backups to prevent power outages in the state.

But the following chart, created by Donna Gilmore of SanOnofreSafety.org based on official government data, conclusively demonstrates that relying on Diablo as a buffer against blackouts is a foolish course.

Diablo is not a dependable power source.

‘Saving Diablo’ Means Gambling with California’s Economy and Safety.

Graphic: Donna Gilmore – SanOnofreSafety.org

Public Comments

In the recent Diablo Zoom workshop, following the official statements, the duration of the marathon meeting was filled with 2-minute public comments from remote attendees.

According to viewer and testifier Jan Boudart of Illinois’ Nuclear Energy Information Service (NEIS.org), her tabulation showed that, “About 95 made comments: 48 were in favor of keeping it open, 51.6%; 42 were in favor of closing it, 44.1%; 4, I couldn’t tell their opinion, 4.3%.” This would show the effectiveness of the ‘Save Diablo’ campaign’s year long, well-funded psyop propaganda begun in 2016 by recent unsuccessful candidate for governor, Michael Shellenberger. Other viewers observed that many of those who spoke in favor of the proposal could be seen to have personal vested interests in nuclear energy.

National Implications

The fact that so many participants Zoomed in from around the country suggests that citizens as well as corporate strategists see famously anti-nuclear California as the identified bellwether state with a target on its back.  The motto, “As goes California, so goes the country” takes on ominous implications.

As the nationwide push to bailout nuclear utilities and put aging reactors on life support goes forward, cracking California is seen by revivalists as a keystone in their agenda.

Incentives even included a last-minute offer from Gov. Gavin Newsom to give Pacific Gas & Electric Co. a $1.4-billion ‘forgivable loan.’ Desperate nuclear recidivism in action.

The attempt to extend Diablo Canyon’s operation in defiance of citizen opposition, public safety and common sense demonstrates two things:

• Nuclear energy is a quintessentially totalitarian and anti-democratic technology
• Nuclear Revivalism is a religious cult

The late S. David Freeman – who executed more nuclear plant shutdowns in his career than any other nuclear administrator – put it this way:

“You have to understand, the nuclear industry and the people that run it – and I say this advisedly – they have a religious belief in nuclear power.

“So facts don’t interfere. You know, religion is belief.

“They believe in nuclear power, and I’ll tell you how it came about.

“It started off as a guilt trip.

“We got the bomb in World War 2, and President Truman said – right after he found out about it, he said – ‘We’ve got to make something good out of this evil.’

“And so the whole nation started off with civilian nuclear power plants as a gigantic guilt trip.

“And so we overlooked the dangers inherent in it, and we thought we were doing something good.

Freeman knew whereof he spoke from a lifetime of experience.

Freeman was involved in the negotiations that led to the Diablo shutdown agreement – approved by California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), the California Legislature and supported by then Lt. Gov. Newsom – which, Newsom and the nuclear revivalist cultists are now attempting to violate.

Freeman would no doubt strongly advise against it.

We were privileged to shoot video interviews with him in his various roles twice in the course of our documentary productions. In his last interview with us he warned, “We need to phase out and shut down the 104 reactors in America. I will put it very bluntly. We need to kill them before they kill us.” [Emphasis Added]

Freeman was not the only one to identify the cultish aspects of pro-nuclearism.

A Well-Timed Limited Hangout

As if on cue, on August 3, 2022, The New Yorker published Daniel Ford’s article How Safe Are Nuclear Power Plants?.

The subtitle reads: “A new history reveals that federal regulators consistently assured Americans that the risks of a massive accident were “vanishingly small”—even when they knew they had insufficient evidence to prove it.”

New Yorker staff writer Ford is no stranger to nuclear chicanery, having served as executive director of the Union of Concerned Scientists from 1972 to 1979.

He has also published a number of papers, articles and books on the topic, including his 1992 book The Cult of the Atom: The Secret Papers of the Atomic Energy Commission, based on government documents obtained in an intensive FOIA investigation. The AEC was the discredited precursor agency to the current Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

So, Mr. Ford is eminently qualified to review in his timely New Yorker article the 2021 US Government publication by Prof. Thomas Wellock, the official historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (N.R.C.). entitled “Safe Enough? A History of Nuclear Power and Accident Risk.”

Ford notes, “During my on-the-record interview with Wellock, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission public-relations officer sat in, and said that Wellock could answer questions about historical matters but not current agency policy.”

Nevertheless, Ford finds Wellock’s book, “a refreshingly candid account of how the government, from the nineteen-forties onward, [ which] approached the bottom-line question posed in the book’s title.”

Says Ford:

Wellock’s book proffers no evidence that anyone inside the A.E.C. was involved in a criminal conspiracy to hide the risks posed by nuclear plants; he is the agency historian, after all, and not a prosecutor. Instead, there seemed to be an abundance of hubris and cult-like true-believing in the idea of a nuclear future in which the risk of a catastrophic accident was accepted, as a matter of doctrine, to be very low.

Ford also interviewed a former agency staffer named Thomas Murley, who went on to become a director of nuclear reactor regulation at the N.R.C.. Murley told Ford, “We all believed our own bullshit back then.”

What about now? Has anything changed? The current delusional Diablo extension discussions would suggest it has not.

Ford notes:

In the early seventies, the A.E.C. predicted that there would be a thousand nuclear reactors operating in the country by 2000—an estimate that would turn out to be off by a thousand percent, give or take.

In our minds, this is a tribute to the effectiveness of informed public pushback, just like what’s happening now in relation to Diablo.

Perhaps the most telling story in Ford’s article comes from his own experience.

In the seventies, an executive with the utility company Florida Power & Light told me that his company had adopted nuclear power so that its leaders wouldn’t be embarrassed on the golf course by other C.E.O.s who had done so.

This suggests that groupthink, social peer pressures, political expediency and going-along-to-get-along are the main determinants of nuclear policy – not rigorous scientific, engineering and ethical principals.

According to Ford:

Wellock’s book notes that some analysts have put forward rough statistics based on the history of the worldwide nuclear industry: the world’s reactors have now been in operation for more than fourteen thousand “reactor-years,” and to date there have been “five core-damage accidents”—Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the three reactors at Fukushima. These numbers, in a back-of-the-envelope sense, suggest that the world should expect one full or partial meltdown every six to seven years. If that estimate is plausible—Wellock presents no challenge to it—then the worldwide nuclear program is slightly overdue for its next big surprise.

On this basis, Ford suggests, “The next meltdown, arithmetically speaking, is just around the corner; the only issue I cannot resolve is where it will occur.”

His top candidates? One of the French nuclear reactors massively afflicted with stress-corrosion cracking, or our country’s most embrittled reactor at Diablo Canyon in Californi

In our next and final installment of this series, The Case Against Extension, we look at why he’s right to point at Diablo. Please stay tuned….

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Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle co-direct the EON, the Ecological Options Network, a 501 (c) 3 organization. The EON feature documentary SOS – The San Onofre Syndrome will be released later this year.

Brangan and Heddle have been reporting on Diablo for over a decade. A page listing links to EON’s series of video reports documenting Diablo’s recent history as it happened can be viewed here.

The Geopolitical and Cosmic Context for the ‘Save Diablo’ PsyOp

Terra-forming Mars.D Mitriy/Wikimedia

By Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle – EON    –   Cross-posted on Substack

FYSA – For Your Situational Awareness – Why Now? Why Here? What’s What?

Before we look at the local, legislative and ideological issues surrounding the ‘save Diablo’ campaign in little ol’ California, we want to draw attention to the larger context in which this sudden desperate state-level push is occurring.

This is not just a cockamamie idea sprung fully formed from the heads of Gavin Newsom and his presidential campaign exploratory committee consultants.

Newsom and his handlers are just bit players in a much bigger game – the American military-intelligence-complex’s long-promulgated ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ agenda. Read More

The interrelated domains of this well-planned and clearly-articulated agenda include air, sea, earth and space. The hubris level involved is truly gobsmacking, so please endure a mounting attack of cognitive dissonance and hang In there a little longer.

Starting at the terrestrial geopolitical level: Since the early days of the psychological operation called ‘Atoms for Peace,’ nuclear enthusiasts have long denied any co-dependent connection between nuclear weapons and commercial nuclear power.

Suddenly, in the last few years they’ve begun to come out of the denialist closet and switched to citing the long-poo-pooed, joined-at-the-hip, symbiotic connection between commercial and military nuclear technologies.

The arch magus of this multi-pronged nuclear renaissance propaganda push is Dr. Ernest Moniz, a former MIT physicist who functioned as Obama’s Energy Secretary and now heads the Energy Futures Initiative, Inc.

EFI’s 2017 Report titled “The U.S. Nuclear Energy Enterprise: A Key National Security Enabler” made this connection clear. The big worry according the report is that a dwindling educational ‘supply chain’ of trained US civilian nuclear power technicians and a decaying commercial nuclear ‘infrastructure’ will impact America’s nuclear supremacy.

The Report notes with alarm:

The most significant potential impact may be on the Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program. Typically, nuclear engineers working on Navy nuclear programs must be U.S. citizens with appropriate security clearances. An educational pipeline that is shrinking, together with an increased proportion of non-U.S. citizens, could pose greater challenges to the Navy nuclear program in the future than it does to the domestic commercial nuclear energy industry. If the prospects for further expansion of the domestic nuclear power are extinguished for the next decade or so, the ramifications for both the educational pipeline as well as the domestic supply chain could be significantly adverse.

TheMillenniumReport.com

The ultimate impact of this could affect the US Full Spectrum Dominance scenario because, as Karl Grossman reports, nukes in space and on the moon and Mars is the next wild frontier.

Grossman reports:

“The New Space Race is Going Nuclear” was the title of a recent hour webinar presented by the American Nuclear Society. The U.S. government is pouring money into the development of space nuclear power—for commercial, exploratory and military purposes—as described in the panel discussion featuring five very enthusiastic advocates of using atomic energy in space….

“So, it’s really an exciting time,” said the moderator for the American Nuclear Society, Jeffrey King, a professor of nuclear engineering and director of the Nuclear Science and Engineering Center at the Colorado School of Mines, and also past chair of the society’s Aerospace Nuclear Science and Technology Division.

“,,, [W]e have now multiple companies—everything from government to the large contractors, small companies to start-up companies all interested in space nuclear power and different aspects of space nuclear power. It’s truly an exciting renaissance time for the field.”

There you have it, folks. That’s the over-arching context for the current California tempest in the Diablo tea pot.

Oh, and one more thing before we return to ground level.

One of the sub-strategies in the ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ agenda is detailed in the infamous 1996 – and recently updated – U.S. Air Force memo titled, “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025.” [See also this commentary. ]

Graphic: USAF

Only a fever dreaming conspiracy theorist would be prone to see any possible connection between this ‘theoretical’ Air Force paper about the military applications of weather modification and the current New York Times’ latest climate crisis fear porn piece (hiding behind a pay wall) entitled “The Coming California Megastorm –

A Different ‘Big One’ is Approaching. Climate Change is Hastening It’s Arrival”

California As a Weather Warfare Target?

No Way! They couldn’t do that. They wouldn’t do that.

The Gray Lady’s mega-disaster scenario, based on computer models – which, of course, we can all trust – sees California as the main casualty in an impending devastating extreme climate event that would terminally eliminate the state as a leading competitor in the global economy or a bellwether in domestic politics.

The subhead reads: “In California, where earthquakes, droughts and wildfires have shaped life for generations, the threat of another kind of calamity is growing: a superstorm that, because of climate change, could be worse than any in living memory.”

So, if you take the NYT seriously as the Fountainhead of Truthiness, why would you want to extend the operation, in target state California, of the most rickety, embrittled and under-maintained aged nuclear plant in the country, surrounded by earthquake faults, being operated by a discredited utility corporation, the serial felon PG&E?

That’s the over-arching context.

In Part 2 of this series we’ll come back down to ground level.

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Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle co-direct the NGO EON, the Ecological Options Network. The EON feature documentary SOS – The San Onofre Syndrome will be released later this year.

Brangan and Heddle have been reporting on Diablo for over a decade. A page listing links to EON’s series of video reports documenting Diablo’s recent history as it happened can be viewed here.

By Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle – EON

The Devils in Diablo’s Details

Munitions and lies are flying around Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power complex – the biggest of its kind in Europe – reminding us once again that all nuclear facilities are always ticking time bombs, and especially when they’re in a war zone.

Meanwhile, California’s last nuke standing – the aptly-named Diablo Canyon – has become a battle zone of its own, as diehard nuclear revivalists fight to resurrect the almost-zombie nuke now scheduled for shutdown in two years.

Because Diablo has been slated for shuttering, the operator, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), has been giving short shrift to inspection, repair and maintenance for several years.

Reversing the shutdown process at this late date could be catastrophic.

If that makes your blood boil, there’s an opportunity to join yours with other opposing voices via Zoom at a hearing this Friday.

Here are some and how- and why-to-get involved links:

Attend and SPEAK
at the Joint-Agency Workshop
on Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant
Your Voice is Vital!

AS SOON AS YOU CONNECT via ZOOM or PHONE, RAISE YOUR VIRTUAL HAND TO GET IN THE QUEUE TO SPEAK!!!  We won’t know who else is on but must do our best to pack the meeting and make our points…best to identify as an individual because groups only get 3 minutes each. TALKING POINTS below.

https://mailchi.mp/ccc2a3e23f6d/friday-august-12-urgent-speak-out-against-extending-operation-of-diablo-canyon?e=66882caaf4

Friday, August 12, 2022

4 – 7pm PT

The California Energy Commission (CEC), Office of Governor Newsom, and the California Independent System Operator (ISO) are holding a joint remote workshop to discuss California’s energy situation and the plan to potentially extend the operating license of Diablo Canyon.
 

There will be time allotted for public comment.

It is crucial that hundreds of people attend and/or send comments expressing strong dissent on the proposal to continue operation of Diablo Canyon beyond 2025.

Details for attendance

Written Comments

#     #     #

Mothers for Peace Video Briefing – June 6, 2022

Brilliant presentations all – Tim Judson uses PG&E’s own slides that show why Diablo Canyon should be shut down. Robert Freehling explains how Diablo’s energy is already replaced – several times. And more fascinating talks..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJRZ2CLra_s

Mothers for Peace Press Conference recorded on Zoom on July 21st.

Hope you can take the time to watch. The information from seismologist Sam Blakeslee, Friends of the Earth’s Erich Pica, NRDC’s Ralph Cavanaugh, and former NRC Commissioner Peter Bradford is compelling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE12VgbilRA

The Industry Point of View

Inside the Fight Over California’s Last Nuclear Power Plant

https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzz87/california-nuclear-power-climate-change

Dive Brief

‘The clock is ticking’: PG&E exploring possibility of keeping Diablo Canyo open to boost reliability: CEO

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pge-exploring-possibility-of-keeping-diablo-canyon-nuclear-open-poppe-ceo/628414/

The Asahi Shimbun Newspaper — July 14, 2022

In awarding a record amount in compensation, the Tokyo District Court held four former executives responsible for their utter failure to prevent a disaster that could have led to “the collapse of our nation.”

The court on July 13 ordered the former executives of Tokyo Electric Power Co. to pay about 13 trillion yen ($97 billion) in compensation to the company for failing to take measures that could have prevented the 2011 triple meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

The ruling said the four defendants–Tsunehisa Katsumata, a former chairman; Masataka Shimizu, a former president; and two former vice presidents, Ichiro Takekuro and Sakae Muto–“fundamentally lacked an awareness of the need for safety and a sense of responsibility that is asked of executives of an operator of a nuclear plant.”

The ruling said that instead of taking the required measures to deal with a possible tsunami, the four put off making decisions on the matter.

A nuclear accident “could lead to the collapse of our nation because the damage would extend over a wide land area and cause enormous damage to the entire population,” the ruling said.

Faced with such a possibility, the ruling said operators of nuclear plants had a social and public interest obligation to prevent an accident even if the possibility was remote.

A major point in the lawsuit was the long-term assessment of the probability of major earthquakes released by the government’s Headquarters for Earthquake Research Promotion in July 2002.

Continue reading →

Why Only Numbskulls Love New Nukes

Source: INES

By James Heddle – By Mary Beth Brangan – EON

A Nuclear Nightmare Bill

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has introduced S.4064 – International Nuclear Energy Act of 2022. Designed to spread American nuclear technology internationally and end prohibition on foreign ownership of nuclear in the US, according to an analysis by the Nuclear Information and Resource Service(NIRS), Manchin’s bill would:

• Create fast-track procedures for deemed civil nuclear exports for countries defined by the Secretary of Energy.
• Expand the Export-Import Bank program on Transformational Exports to include civil nuclear facilities and related goods.
• Create the U.S. Nuclear Fuels Security Initiative to reduce and eventually eliminate reliance on Chinese and Russian nuclear fuels.

The proposed legislation – like the campaign to keep Diablo Canyon, California’s last nuke standing, up and running past its design life – is part of a current concerted push to resuscitate a moribund industry that should be allowed to die before it kills us.

A Mounting Pyramid of Catastrophes

If Wikipedia is to be believed, “Globally, there have been at least 99 (civilian and military) recorded nuclear power plant accidents from 1952 to 2009…. At least 57 accidents and severe incidents have occurred since the Chernobyl disaster, and over 56 severe incidents have occurred in the USA.”

The seven-level International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) was introduced in 1990 by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).[An official disaster minimization scale?]

Level 5, 6 and 7 disasters – those with more than ‘Local Consequences’ – tend to occur every 5-10 years.

Fukushima happened in 2011.

We’re overdue for the next biggie. How really bad does ‘Major’ have to be?

The Past is Prologue

Here’s a brief historical timeline of unheeded wake up calls. [Main source]

Kyshtym, Russia 1957 – Level 6

Windscale Fire (Sellafield), UK 1957 – Level 5

Santa Susanna – 1959 – a partial meltdown occurred at the Boeing-Rocketdyne nuclear testing facility, about 30 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Experts rate it as worse than Three Mile Island’s Level 5. The incident released the third greatest amount of radioactive iodine in nuclear history.

Experimental Power Station, Idaho USA 1961 – Level 4

Saint- Laurent, France 1969 – Level 4

Three Mile Island Accident, Pennsylvania USA 1979 – Level 5

Buenos Aires, Argentina 1983 – Level 4

Chernobyl, Ukraine 1986 – Level 7

Goiania Accident, Brazil 1987 – Level 5

Tokaimura, Japan 1999 – Level 4

Fukushima, Japan 2011 – Level 7

Nuclear Denialism – The Legacy of the Nuclear Age So Far

Add in the global pollution from 2 decades of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing in the last century and its clear the planetary gene pool and ecosystem will never be the same.

Consistent low-balling of costs, environmental and human health impacts and the recurring denialist claim that, “relatively few accidents have involved fatalities,” is demolished by the actual in-depth and long-term data.

A leading example is the book, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, by Alexey Yaablokov, V. Nesterenko and A. Nesterenko, published in 2009 by the New York Academy of Sciences. Lead author Yablokov had been State Councilor for Environment and Health and a member of the Russian Academy of Science.

As the late, great, biostatistician and nuclear impacts researcher Rosalie Bertell reported at the time,

The authors abstracted data from more than 5000 published articles and studies, mostly available only in Slavic languages and not available to those outside of the former Soviet Union or Eastern bloc countries. The findings are by those who witnessed first-hand the effects of Chernobyl. This book is in contrast to findings by the World Health Organization (WHO), International Atomic energy Agency (IAEA) and (United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) who based their findings on some 300 western research papers, and who found little of concern about the fallout from Chernobyl.

While the most apparent human and environmental damage occurred, and continues to occur, in the Ukraine, Belarus and European Russia, more than 50 percent of the total radioactivity spread across the entire northern hemisphere, potentially contaminating some 400 million people.

Based on 5000 articles, by multiple researchers and observers, the authors estimated that by 2004, some 985,000 deaths worldwide had been caused by the disaster, giving lie to estimates by the IAEA and World Health Organization.

All life systems that were studied – humans, voles, livestock, birds, fish, plants, mushrooms, bacteria, viruses, etc., with few exceptions, were changed by radioactive fallout, many irreversibly. Increased cancer incidence is not the only observed adverse effect from the Chernobyl fallout – noted also are birth defects, pregnancy losses, accelerated aging, brain damage, heart, endocrine, kidney, gastrointestinal and lung diseases, and cataracts among the young. Children have been most seriously affected – before the radioactive Chernobyl releases, 80% of children were deemed healthy, now in some areas, only 20% of children are considered healthy. Many have poor development, learning disabilities, and endocrine abnormalities.

The government of the former Soviet Union previously classified many documents now accessible to the authors.

Dubious Sources

For their fallacious factoids, denialists cite nuclear tech data from the very international agencies charged with promoting the nuclear industry: The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation ( UNSCEAR.)

These agencies have colluded in covering up the real horrors of the DNA altering damage from the multiple nuclear catastrophes over the years. In fact, they have an Agreement, W.H.O./IAEA (Res. WHA 12.40, of 28 May 1959) that states the W.H.O. will defer to the interests of the IAEA before investigating, publishing or taking action on anything to do with nuclear. Therefore the WHO is not independent from the IAEA in the field of research and publications.

And because the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is “an international organization that seeks to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy,” it prohibited true collection and distribution of accurate information about any of the major nuclear disasters. UNSCEAR is part of the efforts to support the nuclear lobby narrative.

The Denialist Pattern

Attempted cover-ups are historically standard procedure. From the beginning, the policy of the U.S. was to block those who attempted to record accurate information immediately after the Japanese bombings. That policy pattern continued for the brave individuals who painstakingly gathered tissue samples and recorded the devastating health damage soon after Chernobyl such as Dr. Bandazhevsky, who had his samples and records destroyed and was also imprisoned by the Belarussian government.

Fortunately we have the work of Dr. Timothy Mousseau, Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina who has recorded years of samples of DNA damage of insects, birds and small mammals in both Chernobyl and Fukushima.

MIT Professor Kate Brown meticulously documented the effects of Chernobyl in her award-winning book, “Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future”. Their research corroborates the thousands of Slavic studies and on the ground reports synthesized by Yablokov et al. These studies and estimates of deaths (900,000 plus) were completely dismissed also. Efforts by others outside of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine to help relieve the suffering of those affected by the Chernobyl disaster were actively blocked by the IAEA.

Details of the horrendous effects of the ongoing triple meltdowns at Fukushima are covered up. Suffering Japanese residents are ignored and their illness claims disputed. The U.S. sailors who were exposed to the heaviest part of the immediate release of Fukushima radioactivity while offshore working to help with rescue efforts after the earthquake and tsunami were totally silenced and denied legal recognition and health assistance, though brave efforts were made by their legal team. Former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi traveled to the US to speak out and support the US sailors’ lawsuit against TEPCO and was moved to tears at the situation. The lawsuits were finally rejected by a U.S. court.

TEPCO intends to dump millions of gallons of highly irradiated water from Fukushima into the Pacific, affecting all life in and around this ocean. Yet because of the political/media cover-up, people are unaware that the triple meltdowns are still occurring and producing at least 300 tons of highly radioactive waste water daily.

These are just some of the cover-ups conveniently ignored by denialist pollyannas.

Then There’s the Stranded Waste Perplex

Thousands of deadly metric tons of radioactive ‘spent fuel’ power plant waste with nowhere to go now sit on nuclear power reactor sites, some of them shutdown and in decommissioning, others still in operation and producing more tons of waste each year.

Approximately 86,000 metric tons are being stored on 54 commercial sites in 28 states. (More deadly waste from weapons production is piling up in more states.

The waste will remain lethal to all living things millions of years, yet it is now stored in flimsy thin-walled metal containers that will last for less then 20 years. Each storage site is a ticking time bomb and a target for terrorist attack.

Still, nuclear pollyannas press on, advocating for ‘advanced nuclear technology’ and small nuclear reactors (SMRs).

So desperate are the nuclear pollys in pleading their case that they have now stopped denying the fact of mutually dependent connections between nuclear power and weapons.

They’ve switched from decades of denying any connection to arguing that the commercial nuclear power industry must be kept alive because it supplies the infrastructure and trained labor pool on which the nuclear weapons industry depends. A long-denied truth which is why the expensive, dirty, uninsurable private nuclear power industry was spawned in the first place, marketed as ‘Atoms for Peace.’

How big a disaster will it take to snap the New Nukes Numbskulls out of their trance?

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Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle Co-Direct EON – The Ecological Options Network, a 501 (c) (3) organization. The EON feature documentary The San Onofre Syndrome: Nuclear Power’s Legacy – a decade in the making – will be released later this year.