I am forwarding to you an opinion-editorial written by Judi
Friedman, a long-time nuclear power expert and activist (her details are
included at the end of the piece.) Please feel free to use and reprint this
piece or to contact Judi for an interview.
Many thanks for your consideration of this work.
Linda Gunter
NIRS
Nuclear Terrorism – A Self-imposed Legacy
By Judi Friedman
We
live in a nuclear age. With that comes nuclear terror – an odious legacy
of the Cold War. Nuclear powers (including the United States) continue to maintain
nuclear weapons on “hair-trigger alert” ready to destroy other
nations in minutes. The U.S.
still possesses 8,000 active nuclear warheads. Two thousand of them are ready
to be launched with only a fifteen minute warning period.
Now
we have traded the Cold War for nuclear terrorism. According to the 9/11
Commission, the Al Qaeda plans for that fateful day included hijacked aircraft
attacks on two U.S.
nuclear power plants. This time we were spared such a catastrophe. But day to
day while atomic reactors keep running, we live with the reality of what such
attacks could do.
We
are surrounded by sitting-duck nuclear targets – more than 100 of them,
mostly east of the Mississippi
in high-density population areas. Reactors and their fuel pools and waste casks
remain inadequately protected. These atomic sites have no protection plan for
attacks from the air. A 9/11-style attack on the Millstone plant in Connecticut could render
the state a sacrifice zone, uninhabitable for millennia. With the 20th
anniversary of the Chernobyl
accident fast approaching, the image of that nuclear wasteland should serve as
a ghostly warning.
Yet,
thirty-six existing nuclear power plants have been approved for 20-year license
extensions while the public was repeatedly denied requests for hearings on the
security vulnerabilities. Thirty-two reactors house their waste fuel pools on
the top story of the reactor building, outside containment and protected only
by sheet metal.
Aging
and increasingly decrepit plants operating longer than they were designed to
run will likely fail. Old machines and parts break down. A reactor breakdown
could cause a meltdown. In 2002 the severely corroded Davis-Besse nuclear
reactor , just 20 miles southeast of Toledo,
OH, came within a small fraction
of an inch of steel from causing a tragic nuclear accident. License extension
applications for 14 nuclear plants are currently under review by the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission. We are allowing ourselves to be the unwitting victims of
our own nuclear terror.
Instead
of ending the nuclear age, the Bush administration plans to expand it. Early
site permits for new reactors are being processed in Mississippi,
Virginia and Illinois
(Chicago is
ringed by eleven reactors already). And with the prospect of huge taxpayer
subsidies footing colossal construction costs, utilities are jockeying into the
starting gate for the biggest cash grab in industry history.
Furthermore,
we are yet to solve the problem of high-level waste produced by reactors with
no safe storage solution on-site or elsewhere. So far, the states of Nevada and Utah
have been singled out for a political mugging. A “permanent”
geological burial site is slated for Yucca Mountain,
NV, while a penniless Indian Tribe – the
Goshute band in Utah – has been singled
out to take “temporary” custody of the waste while the Yucca Mountain
quagmire persists. Nuclear waste cask transportation to these sites could set
up rolling terrorist targets criss-crossing the country through major
population centers for decades.
To
add to the insult, there is an even more insidious threat from nuclear power,
one that stays with us every day that reactors continue to operate and beyond.
The nuclear fuel chain, from the mining, milling and enrichment of uranium
through fuel fabrication and operation in nuclear reactors, despite industry
propaganda, is not “emissions-free.” Every uranium mine, mill
tailing pile, operating reactor and nuclear waste dump “emits”
harmful radiation long after the last watt of electricity is generated.
The
U.S. National Academy of Sciences has established that there is no safe dose of
radiation. There is no longer doubt about the damage that can result from a
single radiation track through a cell. The findings of adverse reactions from
low-dose impacts of radiation in cellular, molecular and DNA levels have been
researched by radiation microbiologists in Great
Britain, Canada,
Japan and the United States.
Not
only do reactors emit, they also leak radiation. Three reactor sites in Illinois have been
leaking large quantities of tritium and other isotopes into ground water. The
Indian Point nuclear plant, 35 miles from midtown Manhattan,
has allowed tritium and strontium-90 to seep into the Hudson
River. We already know that contaminated groundwater at
Connecticut Yankee has been discovered, and strontium-90 has been found in goat
milk five miles from the Connecticut Millstone plant. Strontium-90 is linked to
bone cancer, cancer of the soft tissue and cancer of the blood. Tritium causes
cancers and can damage DNA. We must demand to know what is in the water around
every nuclear plant. To do nothing is to perpetuate this terror.
We
terrorize ourselves and our unborn by tolerating nuclear plants in our midst.
The
United States
even terrorizes the heavens. In January 2006 NASA launched twenty-five pounds
of highly-toxic plutonium from Florida
on a New Horizons space probe to the planet Pluto. It uses plutonium-238, the
most toxic element ever created. An accident – such as the one the
Challenger underwent – could have left central Florida a nuclear wasteland.
The
United States
is in a “War against Terrorism.” If that is really true, then our
most important step is to end the self-imposed nuclear terror at home.
Judi Friedman directs PACE – People’s Action for
Clean Energy, a Connecticut-based volunteer organization working for energy
efficiency, conservation and benign renewable energy. She is a Core Group
member of Nuclear Information and Resource Service.
Judi
Friedman
101 Lawton Road
Canton, CT 06019
(860)
693-4813
jfriedeco@aol.com
Linda Gunter is Director
of Development and Media Relations. She can be reached at: 301.270.6477 ext. 23