Nuclear Safety

Dr. John Gofman, a health physicist formerly with the Dept. of Energy, has called for a Nuremberg trial of the nuclear industry over the impacts from the safety standards they have established.

©Louise Franklin-Ramirez Visual Information Project P.O. Box 756 Manassas Park, VA 22111

In 1988 the International committee that oversees the impacts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors called for a 4-16 fold increase in safety standards. The UK went ahead and increased safety protections by 4 fold. The U.S. went on the warpath. Pushing to kill the committee's power. U.S. standards were not increased.

Radiation safety standards, like nuclear waste disposal standards or reactor design have always been in the hands of nuclear insiders. These men have always made economic costs their most important priority when establishing the framework for their "Too Cheap to Meter" technology.

Every U.S. reactor is allowed to legally release radiation into the environment hundreds of times per year. Opponents of the industry have clearly shown that the increased fallout downwind of the reactors has caused damages to human health, especially newborn children.

A battle between scientists on both sides has been raging for decades over the health impacts, best exemplified by the Chernobyl disaster. The International Atomic Energy Agency has been claiming that the ten's of thousands of people who have been effected by fallout from the 1986 disaster are psychologically induced! They are still claiming that only around 100 deaths can be attributed to Chernobyl, rather than the 10,000 plus deaths the Ukraine and Byelorussia have records for.

To protect the nuclear industry from being closed down, their proponents have produced two major economic incentives. The first is the Price-Anderson act that allows them to be the only industry to not have to fully insure itself against accidents (Chernobyl cost $350 billion by 2000 according to the Wall Street Journal). See the Crac II study for the consequences of a melt down at a U.S. Reactor.CRACII: U.S. Reactor Accident Impacts

The second strategy is called ALARA, or "As Low As Reasonably Achievable. This means that if we can't protect the public completely, we will do it at a price that doesn't bankrupt the nuclear industry. ALARA allows the industry to legally pollute the environment. For example, the Diablo Canyon facility was given waivers by the EPA on its discharge permits into the environment, or else it wouldn't have been able to operate legally.

The ALARA principle is being used presently to push through the High Level Nuclear Waste facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Every single nuclear waste facility the U.S. has ever created has leaked.

Even though spent fuel will remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years, the facility will only have to withstand public media exposure for a few years to be built. Opponents call this ALARA sollution "Out of sight -- Out of mind", while the Bush adminstration is calling it the best available science. The best available science for the $75 billion facility has been whittled down from the original 10,000 year safety requirement to less than 500 years. This huge controversy that is being played down by the media has resulted in both republican and democrats in Nevada being completely opposed to the dump. Its not NIMBYism that's driving Nevada's opposition but the hysterical desparation of the nuclear industry that is running out of room to store its high level waste, that would have to shut down pemanently if they don't get Yucca or the Goshute PFS facilities.

And yet, there is an even greater fallout from the impacts of America's nuclear industry: The creation of a nuclear security state. As a result of 9-11-01, Americans woke up to the danger of having hundreds of nuclear targets that could be triggered by terrorists across the country. The push to rationalize a new national security state to protect nuclear reactors from terrorist attacks is a real threat to democracy and human freedom.

The nuclear industry is counting on holding onto its lucrative existance by buying out congress and the mainstream media. In fact General Electric was the proud owner of NBC.