The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (20 page)

If only BP and the federal government allowed information to flow as freely as the oil, we might well be on the road to dealing with this catastrophe.

March 15, 2011

A Warning to the World

A reporter, describing the devastation of one city in Japan, wrote: “It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts . . . as a warning to the world.” The reporter was Wilfred Burchett, writing from Hiroshima, Japan, on September 5, 1945. Burchett was the first Western reporter to make it to Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped there. He reported on the strange illness that continued to kill people, even a full month after that first, dreadful use of nuclear weapons against humans. His words could well describe the scenes of annihilation in northeastern Japan today. Given the worsening catastrophe at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, his grave warning to the world remains all too relevant.

The disaster deepens at the Fukushima complex in the aftermath of the largest recorded earthquake in Japanese history and the tsunami that followed, killing thousands. Explosions in Fukushima reactors No. 1 and No. 3 released radiation that was measured by a U.S. Navy vessel as far away as 100 miles, prompting the ship to move farther out to sea. A third explosion happened at reactor No. 2, leading many to speculate that the vital containment vessel, holding uranium undergoing fission, may have been breached. Then reactor No. 4 caught fire, even though it wasn’t running when the earthquake hit. Each reactor also has spent nuclear fuel stored with it, and that fuel can cause massive fires, releasing more radiation into the air. The cooling systems and their backups all have failed, and a small crew of courageous workers remains on-site, despite the life-threatening radiation, trying to pump seawater into the damaged structures to cool the radioactive fuel.

President Barack Obama had hoped to usher in a “nuclear renaissance,” and proposed $36 billion in new federal, taxpayer-subsidized loan guarantees to entice energy corporations to build new plants (adding to the $18.5 billion already approved during the George W. Bush administration). The first energy corporation in line to receive the public largesse was Southern Co., for two reactors slated for Georgia. The last time new construction on a nuclear power plant in the U.S. was ordered, and ultimately built, was back in 1973, when Obama was a seventh-grader at the Punahou School on Honolulu. The Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 effectively shut down new commercial nuclear projects in the U.S. Nevertheless, this country remains the largest producer of commercial nuclear power in the world. The 104 licensed commercial nuclear plants are old, close to the end of their originally projected life spans. Plant owners are petitioning the federal government to extend their operating licenses.

These licenses are controlled by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). On March 10, the NRC issued a press release “regarding renewal of the operating license for the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station near Brattleboro, Vt., for an additional 20 years. The NRC staff expects to issue the renewed license soon.” Harvey Wasserman, of NukeFree.org, told me, “The first reactor at Fukushima is identical to the Vermont Yankee plant. . . . There are 23 reactors in the United States that are identical or close to identical to the first Fukushima reactor.” A majority of Vermonters, including the state’s governor, Peter Shumlin, support shutting down the Vermont Yankee reactor, designed and built by General Electric.

The Japanese nuclear crisis has sparked global repercussions. Protests erupted across Europe. Eva Joly, a French member of the European Parliament, said at one protest, “We know how to get out of the nuclear plants: We need renewable energy, we need windmills, we need geothermal, and we need solar energy.” Switzerland has halted plans to relicense its reactors, and 10,000 protesters in Stuttgart prompted German Chancellor Angela Merkel to order an immediate shutdown of Germany’s seven pre-1980 nuclear plants. In the U.S., Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said, “What is happening in Japan right now shows that a severe accident at a nuclear power plant can happen here.”

The nuclear age dawned not far from Fukushima, when the United States became the sole nation in human history to drop nuclear bombs on another country, destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. Journalist Wilfred Burchett described, for the first time, the “atomic plague,” writing: “In these hospitals I found people who, when the bomb fell, suffered absolutely no injuries, but now are dying from the uncanny after-effects. For no apparent reason their health began to fail.” More than sixty-five years after he sat in the rubble with his battered Hermes typewriter and typed his warning to the world, what have we learned?

June 22, 2011

Japan’s Meltdowns Demand New No-Nukes Thinking

New details are emerging that indicate the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan is far worse than previously known, with three of the four affected reactors experiencing full meltdowns. Meanwhile, in the U.S., massive flooding along the Missouri River has put Nebraska’s two nuclear plants, both near Omaha, on alert. The Cooper Nuclear Station declared a low-level emergency and will have to close down if the river rises another three inches. The Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant has been shut down since April 9, in part due to flooding. At Prairie Island, Minnesota, extreme heat caused the nuclear plant’s two emergency diesel generators to fail. Emergency-generator failure was one of the key problems that led to the meltdowns at Fukushima.

In May, in reaction to the Fukushima disaster, Nikolaus Berlakovich, Austria’s federal minister of agriculture, forestry, environment, and water management, convened a meeting of Europe’s eleven nuclear-free countries. Those gathered resolved to push for a nuclear-free Europe, even as Germany announced it will phase out nuclear power in ten years and push ahead on renewable-energy research. Then, in last week’s national elections in Italy, more than 90 percent of voters resoundingly rejected Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s plans to restart the country’s nuclear power program.

Leaders of national nuclear-energy programs are gathering this week in Vienna for the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Ministerial Conference on Nuclear Safety. The meeting was called in response to Fukushima. Ironically, the ministers, including U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Chairman Gregory Jaczko, held their meeting safely in a country with no nuclear power plants. Austria is at the forefront of Europe’s new anti-nuclear alliance.

The IAEA meeting was preceded by the release of an Associated Press report stating that consistently, and for decades, U.S. nuclear regulators lowered the bar on safety regulations in order to allow operators to keep the nuclear plants running. Nuclear power plants were constructed in the U.S. in the decades leading up to the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979. These 104 plants are all getting on in years. The original licenses were granted for forty years.

The AP’s Jeff Donn wrote, “When the first ones were being built in the 1960s and 1970s, it was expected that they would be replaced with improved models long before those licenses expired.” Enormous upfront construction costs, safety concerns, and the problem of storing radioactive nuclear waste for thousands of years drove away private investors. Instead of developing and building new nuclear plants, the owners—typically for-profit companies like Exelon Corp., a major donor to the Obama campaigns through the years—simply try to run the old reactors longer, applying to the NRC for twenty-year extensions.

Europe, already ahead of the U.S. in development and deployment of renewable-energy technology, is now poised to accelerate in the field. In the U.S., the NRC has provided preliminary approval of the Southern Company’s planned expansion of the Vogtle power plant in Georgia, which would allow the first construction of new nuclear power plants in the U.S. since Three Mile Island. The project got a boost from President Barack Obama, who pledged an $8.3 billion federal loan guarantee. Southern plans on using Westinghouse’s new AP1000 reactor. But a coalition of environmental groups has filed to block the permit, noting that the new reactor design is inherently unsafe.

Obama established what he called his Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. One of its fifteen members is John Rowe, the chairman and chief executive officer of Exelon Corp. (the same nuclear-energy company that has lavished campaign contributions on Obama). The commission made a fact-finding trip to Japan to see how that country was thriving with nuclear power—one month before the Fukushima disaster. In May, the commission reiterated its position, which is Obama’s position, that nuclear ought to be part of the U.S. energy mix.

The U.S. energy mix, instead, should include a national jobs program to make existing buildings energy efficient, and to install solar and wind-power technology where appropriate. These jobs could not be outsourced and would immediately reduce our energy use and, thus, our reliance on foreign oil and domestic coal and nuclear. Such a program could favor U.S. manufacturers, to keep the money in the U.S. economy. That would be a simple, effective, and sane reaction to Fukushima.

August 10, 2011

From Hiroshima to Fukushima: Japan’s Atomic Tragedies

In recent weeks, radiation levels have spiked at the Fukushima nuclear power reactors in Japan, with recorded levels of 10,000 millisieverts per hour (mSv/hr) at one spot. This is the number reported by the reactor’s discredited owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co., although that number is simply as high as the Geiger counters go. In other words, the radiation levels are literally off the charts. Exposure to 10,000 millisieverts for even a brief time would be fatal, with death occurring within weeks. (For comparison, the total radiation from a dental X-ray is 0.005 mSv, and from a brain CT scan is less than 5 mSv.) The
New York Times
has reported that government officials in Japan suppressed official projections of where the nuclear fallout would most likely move with wind and weather after the disaster in order to avoid costly relocation of potentially hundreds of thousands of residents.

“Secrecy, once accepted, becomes an addiction.” While those words could describe how the Japanese government has handled the nuclear catastrophe, they were said by atomic scientist Edward Teller, one of the key creators of the first two atomic bombs. The uranium bomb dubbed “Little Boy” was dropped on August 6, 1945, on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, the second, a plutonium bomb called “Fat Man,” was dropped over the city of Nagasaki, Japan. Close to a quarter-million people were killed by the massive blasts and the immediate aftereffects. No one knows the full extent of the death and disease that followed, from the painful burns that thousands of survivors suffered to the later effects of radiation sickness and cancer.

The history of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is itself the history of U.S. military censorship and propaganda. In addition to the suppressed film footage, the military kept the blast zones off-limits to reporters. When Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist George Weller managed to get in to Nagasaki, his story was personally killed by Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett managed to sneak in to Hiroshima not long after the blast and reported what he called “a warning to the world,” describing widespread illnesses as an “atomic plague.” The military deployed one of its own. It turns out that William Laurence, the
New York Times
reporter, was also on the payroll of the War Department. He faithfully reported the U.S. government position, that “the Japanese described ‘symptoms’ that did not ring true.” Sadly, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his propaganda.

Greg Mitchell has been writing about the history and aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for decades. On this anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing, I asked Mitchell about his latest book,
Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made
.

“Anything that nuclear weapons or nuclear energy touches leads to suppression and leads to danger for the public,” he told me. For years, Mitchell sought newsreel footage shot by the U.S. military in the months following the atomic blasts. Tracking down the aging filmmakers, and despite decades-old government classification, he was one of the journalists who publicized the incredible color film archives. As part of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, the film crews documented not only the devastation of the cities, but also close-up, clinical documentation of the severe burns and disfiguring injuries suffered by the civilians, including children.

In one scene, a young man is shown with red, raw wounds all over his back, undergoing treatment. Despite the massive burns and being treated months late, the man survived.

Now eighty-two, Sumiteru Taniguchi is director of the Nagasaki Council of A-Bomb Sufferers. Mitchell found recent comments from Taniguchi in a Japanese newspaper linking the atomic bombing to the Fukushima disaster:

Nuclear power and mankind cannot coexist. We survivors of the atomic bomb have said this all along. And yet, the use of nuclear power was camouflaged as “peaceful” and continued to progress. You never know when there’s going to be a natural disaster. You can never say that there will never be a nuclear accident.

In a poignant fusion of the old and new disasters, we should listen to the surviving victims of both.