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Study
probes link between uranium and kidney illness
Study probes link between uranium and kidney illness
When two of his relatives started getting sick, he didn’t give
the mine much thought. But when Lewis saw the yellow triangle next to
it on a list of local wells at the chapter house Wednesday evening, a
sign that its waters had potentially dangerous levels of heavy metals
for livestock, he began to wonder.
Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP)
Nuclear experts at the National Academy of Sciences have long questioned
the practicability of the technologies GNEP plans to employ. Currently,
the Government Accounting Office is now reviewing the program. This, however,
leaves legislators with an information gap as they struggle to decide
whether to fully fund the plan, eliminate it altogether, or redirect some
of its funding to the many successful energy programs whose budgets President
Bush is proposing to gut in FY 2008. In particular, major questions have
been raised about the magnitude and costs of radioactive wastes stemming
from the GNEP program.
Based on research by the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, the
report said that of the 2 billion people globally affected by the Chernobyl
fallout, 270,000 will develop cancers as a result, of which 93,000 will
prove fatal.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimates 4,000 people
died as a result of the explosion in reactor number four at the power
plant in the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl on April 26, 1986.
MAJURO (AFP) - Residents from a Marshall Islands atoll exposed to fallout
from US nuclear tests have been awarded more than one billion dollars
of compensation, but may never receive a cent of it.
The Marshall Islands-based Nuclear Claims Tribunal, which issued the ruling
Tuesday, has virtually no money to pay the award and has labeled United
States-provided compensation “manifestly inadequate.”
The incidence of cancer in northern Sweden increased following the
accident at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in 1986. This was the
finding of a much-debated study from Linköping University in Sweden
from 2004.
Decades of secrecy surrounding the Rocky Flats nuclear-weapons plant
have been given human voice through 90 interviews collected and posted
online this spring by the Rocky Flats Cold War Museum board.
The presentation, “The Fragmented Stories of Rocky Flats,”
gathered oral histories from Rocky Flats workers, government officials,
political leaders and others involved with the plant south of Boulder,
which produced tens of thousands of nuclear-bomb parts in the decades
spanning the Cold War.
Walter McKenzie’s assignment toward the end of the Cold War was
to mop up after mishaps at a nuclear weapons factory. With a crew of other
laborers from rural Georgia, he swabbed away leaks and spills inside the
secret buildings, until one day his body became so contaminated with radiation
that alarms at the factory went off as he passed.
Sciam- After 20 years of stagnaion, nuclear energy again finds favor
in the eyes of many energy planners. In contrast with electricity generated
from coal or natural gas, nuclear power contributes little to greenhouse
gas emissions and could therefore help in the effort to reduce global
warming. The establishment of a tax on carbon emissions, which has been
widely proposed as an incentive to move away from fossil-fuel use, would
make nuclear energy even more attractive. Such arguments may ultimately
prove compelling to industrial nations—but to assume that the developing
nations will follow suit is to ignore some important realities.
Reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel and mounting stockpiles of plutonium
pose a significant risk of nuclear proliferation and diversion of materials
to terrorists, a nuclear power fact-finding group said Thursday.
In a report released by the Colorado-based Keystone Center public policy
organization, the group said expansion of nuclear power in ways that substantially
increased the likelihood of the spread of nuclear weapons “is not
acceptable.”
CHURCH ROCK — In the late 1980s, representatives of Uranium Resources
Inc. came to the small Texas town of Kingsville with promises of jobs
and royalties, and a pledge to leave their well water as clean as they
found it.
Scores of landowners signed their acres over, and URI started mining
in 1988. Some say the company has done everything it said it would. Others
say it’s broken every pledge and promise it made.
Dr. Thomas Moore, structural engineer, who has performed forensic investigations
of earthquake damage in many countries, including nuclear facilities in
Japan, says we may be seeing just the tip of the iceberg at Tokyo Electric
in regard to issues of nuclear safety.
Chances are good, gentle reader, that you are going to have to sit next
to someone in the coming year who will assert that nuclear power is the
solution to climate change. What will you tell them? There’s
so much to say. You could be sitting next to someone who hasn’t really
considered the evidence yet. Or you could be sitting next to scientist
and Gaia theorist James Lovelock, a supporter of Environmentalists for
Nuclear EnergyTM, which quotes him saying, “We have no time to experiment
with visionary energy sources; civilisation is in imminent danger and
has to use nuclear-the one safe, available,
energy source-now or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our
outraged planet.
(The PDF Report) Cover Supporters of nuclear power claim that the security
risks can be managed. However, this briefing paper clearly shows that
a worldwide nuclear renaissance is beyond the capacity of the nuclear
industry to deliver and would stretch to breaking point the capacity of
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to monitor and safeguard
civil nuclear power.
U.S. national security kept the public in the dark about using of highly
enriched uranium at a Tennessee nuclear fuel processing plant.
The leak turned out to be one of nine violations or test failures since
2005 at privately owned Nuclear Fuel Services Inc., a longtime supplier
of fuel to the U.S. Navy’s nuclear fleet.
The public was never told about the problems when they happened. The
Nuclear Regulatory Commission revealed them for the first time last month
when it released an order demanding improvements at the company, but no
fine.
BBC News
Scientific opinion is divided on the impact of Chernobyl on wildlife
The idea that the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power
plant has created a wildlife haven is not scientifically justified, a
study says.
Recent studies said rare species had thrived despite raised radiation
levels as a result of no human activity.
But scientists who assessed the 1986 disaster’s impact on birds
said the ecological effects were “considerably greater than previously
assumed”.
The ecological effects of the Chernobyl disaster on animals are considerably
greater than feared, a study suggests.
Recent conclusions from the UN Chernobyl Forum and media reports concerning
the effects of radiation from the nuclear power plant has left the impression
that the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is a thriving ecosystem filled with
an increasing number of rare species.
But surveys of breeding birds at forests around the site found the
abundance of species decreased with rising level of radiation.
Professor Anders Moller and colleagues at the University of South Carolina
recorded 1,570 birds representing 57 species and found their numbers were
reduced by more than half when comparing areas with the highest amount
of radiation with those that had the normal background level.
Dayton- Contaminated documents buried in a radioactive waste landfill
in New Mexico won’t be needed to determine if cancer-stricken workers
from a former nuclear weapons plant in central Ohio are eligible for federal
compensation, government occupational health officials said.
But advocates for the workers maintain the buried logbooks and safety
reports could help prove workers were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation.
The Department of Energy had estimated it would take 18 months and
$9 million to unearth the documents - including a dozen pallets of cardboard
boxes, six 55-gallon drums and 11 safes containing classified records.
Gaps in Global Database Blamed on Regulators; A Scare in Bulgaria
To inform the public about nuclear-plant mishaps, a United Nations agency
in 1989 helped create a Richter-like scale rating them from zero to seven.
Chernobyl was pegged as a seven. Three Mile Island
rated five.
How many mishaps have occurred over the years — and is the rate
getting better or worse? It’s hard to know. That’s because every
day, the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency deletes from its
Web
site any rated incident that’s more than six months old. The agency
says it doesn’t want to penalize more-forthcoming countries by making
it look like they have poor safety records.
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Nuclear Power Safety Politics
Bush and the nuclear industry have launched a global campaign
to promote nuclear power as the world's savior for climate change and
our addiction to foreign oil.
First Draft index
Introduction
- Nuclear Power is safe
- Who Will suffer again
- Cleaning up a dirty house
- Chernobyl and the big lie
- Scandals
- No body died!
Introduction
Bush's attempt to restart both the nuclear weapons and
commercial power infrastructures started with Cheney's
Energy Task force, which was quickly followed by their May
2001 National Policy Act. died on due to the invasion of California
and the now infamous Phil
Gramm-Enron waiver. The real commercial reboot came with the August
passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 where over $4 billion was given
to the nuclear industry to mount a massive campaign to promote nuclear
power as the Climate Change savior. The act was soon followed by the
Katrina disaster that flooded New Orleans and the country in high gas
prices, which in turn brought up our dependence on foreign oil.
All of a sudden Greenpeace and environmentalists who had
been staunchly opposed to nuclear power were the new media stars in
promoting nuclear power. Well, actually, not. The Nuclear Energy Institute
(NEI), the trade association for the industry had created a front group
with Patrick Moore, A Greenpeace renegade, who had been doing PR for
the plastics, logging and pro-nuclear industries since the early 1990's
along with Bush's scandalous former EPA head. No real major environmental
groups that had been opposed had changed its position, although a number
of groups led by EDF and NRDC had formed an alliance with the industry
around climate change issues. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists created
a sensation when it ran a pronuclear ad on the back of its magazine.
Harvard's John
Holdren, formerly a strong opponent of nuclear power had changed
sides, but still held serious reservations about security and fuel-cycle
issues.
Rather than take a skeptical approach to Bush's Renaissance,
the mainstream media openly let the PR industry led by Hill and Knowlton
mount a campaign that shut down any serious public discussion about
the real issues underlying nuclear power. On cue, the global nuclear
industry mounted campaigns across Europe and Australia to reopen the
nuclear option. The well organized opposition that helped play a key
role in stopping nuclear power a generation before had mostly melted
away as the Clinton era had mostly defunded the once sacred cow nuclear
funding at the R&D levels. The really big subsidies to nuclear power
are all hidden away in the fuel-cycle that has long been managed by
the Department of Energy(DOE).
It would be under Clinton that the DOE would face its
biggest battles where estimates of cleaning up the nuclear legacy would
mount into the hundred's of billion's of dollars. With the collapse
of the Soviet Union, there were real hopes of a peace dividend, where
money once spent on making nuclear bombs could be used elsewhere. Battles
to cleanup Hanford, Rocky Flats, Oak Ridge, and other DOE facilities
was set in motion. After years of censorship and militant opposition
the hundred's of thousands of DOE workers who had been contaminated,
losing their lives and health were to be given modest sums of money
to help offset the tragic impacts from working around the most dangerous
substances ever produced.
The real heavy lifting to resussitate the industry focussed
on the massive Chernobyl disaster and its impacts. The accident played
a central role in the collapse of the nuclear industry in Europe and
sealed any further development in the U.S.
guaranteed
Speculators have driven the price of uranium up to nearly
10 times what it was worth prior to the Bush administration, creating
a false appearance that uranium mining could once again be viable. It
will only be a matter of time before the major international mining
corporations like Rio Tinto or the French government sponsored Areva,
Cameco or EDF move in and buy up the most lucrative options.
The Bush Administration and the quasi private U.S. Enrichment
Co. (USEC is the former DOE uranium enrichment infrastructure that was
privatized during Clinton) are currently waging a legal battle to stop
the use of Russian weapons grade uranium (MOX Fuel) to supply commercial
reactors. If they win, there will be a huge new demand for uranium.
Surprise! Another strategic motivation underlying Bush's reopening of
a new cold war front with Russia!
Uranium Mines
Abandoned Tailings
As detailed elsewhere, an extinct industry is being brought
back to life, and done so under one of the most scandalous of histories.
Until the Waxman hearings in October of 2007, all cleanup of the thousands
of long abandoned uranium mines across the southwest had all but ceased
under Bush. The EPA's job of coordinating the cleanup of Dineh AUM's
ceased after a dispute over its refusal to hand over documents to the
tribal government. After spending nearly $1.5 billion to clean up just
26 major contaminated sites by 1999 was projected to start work on another
100 cleanup projects, but has failed to do a single site under Bush.
But what is probably the biggest scandal of all is what happened to
the $8 Billion in federal money the private industry was given in 1988
that has all but disappeared from sight.
So, even though there are far high quality uranium mining
operations in other parts of the world, fully capable of selling uranium
to the U.S. commercial market, there are now thousands of new mining
claims being staked, using the monstrous 1872 Mining Act that allows
private speculators to lay claims to minerals on federal lands at a
huge loss to the public.
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