Welcome. This is James Corbett of The Corbett
Report with your Sunday Update from the Centre
for Research on Globalization at globalresearch.ca
on this 3rd day of July, 2011. And now for
the real news.
A series of disasters, potential disasters,
bad news and worrying studies over the course
of the past week have brought public attention
back to the issue of radiation and its attendant
health risks, and further exposed how governmental
agencies that are supposed to protect the
public have in fact knowingly put the public
at risk and even colluded with the very industries
they are supposed to be “regulating.”
Last Sunday, a wildfire started in New Mexico
that grew to a 162 square mile inferno and
came within 50 feet of the grounds of the
Los Alamos National Laboratory that was the
birthplace of the atomic bomb. The site is
an historical testing ground for nuclear weapons
and a storage area for about 20,000 barrels
of nuclear waste. The disaster exposed the
remarkable fact that this nuclear waste was
stored not in a secure containment facility,
or even in a solid building, but in a “fabric-type
building” that would be quickly consumed
by the fires.
In addition to the risk of the nuclear waste
burning up in the fire and sending radioactive
materials into the atmosphere, Joni Arends
of the Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety
has pointed out that the fire could stir up
the nuclear-contaminated soil on lab property
where nuclear experiments have long been conducted.
In either event, harmful radiation could pass
into the jet stream to be distributed across
the United States and beyond.
As a recent report from the Alliance for Nuclear
Accountability documented, the site has been
the disposal ground for some 18 million cubic
feet of radioactive and chemical solid wastes
since 1943, as well as 899,000 curies of so-called
transuranic waste, including plutonium. Liquid
wastes from the plant were discharged into
the canyons, initially with little treatment
whatsoever.
Winds have now shifted the fire away from
the facility and initial air samples from
the inferno have indicated there has so far
been no catastrophic release of radiation
in the area, but it is unclear why no basic
precautions were in place to secure the nuclear
waste at the facility prior to the fire or
what such measures, if any, are being contemplated
in the wake of this emergency.
Also last Sunday, flood waters from the Missouri
River reached the containment buildings of
the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station. A levee
protecting the site's electrical transformers
gave way and the plant was forced to switch
on emergency generators in order to continue
cooling the nuclear reactor.
Although officials are maintaining that the
plant is still functioning and is not in meltdown,
the incident has raised serious questions
about the facility and its preparedness for
just such an event. Just last October, nuclear
regulators warned that the Fort Calhoun plant
“failed to maintain procedures for combating
a significant flood” and newly released
documents reveal workers were still scrambling
to plug holes where flood water could potentially
get into the facility as late as last week.
It is unclear what, if any, punitive actions
the plant's operator will face for their negligence,
or if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is
even concerned. Commission director Gregory
Jaczsko said last week that “all the plants
in the U.S. have been been designed to deal
with historically the largest possible floods,”
seeming to imply that the Fort Calhoun situation
was not dangerous by definition and that the
NRC had full faith in the plant despite its
documented safety violations.
This is in line with an AP investigation last
month that found that American federal nuclear
regulators have been working with the nuclear
industry to ensure that reactors passed safety
inspections by repeatedly lowering safety
standards for the plants or failing to enforce
existing standards. The investigation showed
that a myriad of documented problems at nuclear
power plants across the country, from failed
cables and busted seals to broken nozzles,
dented containers and rusty pipes, were routinely
resolved by claiming that existing safety
standards were too conservative. When valves
were found to be leaking, for instance, the
standards were simply changed to allow for
more leakage, in some cases 20 times the original
limit.
Meanwhile in Japan, where three of the reactors
at the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
plant have been confirmed to have been in
full meltdown since the very first days of
the tsunami-induced disaster, the first series
of health checks of area residents are already
revealing suprising and troubling results
about radiation exposure in the area. Tests
of 15 Fukushima residents between the ages
of 4 and 77 have revealed radioactive cesium
and iodine in their urine.
[video]
The tests also indicate that residents have
been exposed to between 1 / 5 to 3 / 4 of
their yearly allowable radiation dose in just
two months.
Now, documents are beginning to surface confirming
what many have been alleging since the start
of this crisis: that governments the world
over have been conspiring with the nuclear
energy industry to downplay the significance
and ramifications of the Fukushima disaster.
Just last week, emails released under the
Freedom of Inforrmation Act show how the Departments
of Business and Energy in the UK government
were coordinating their response to the Japanese
disaster with companies like EDF Energy, Areva
and Westinghouse to ensure the accident did
not interfere with plans to build a new generation
of nuclear power plants in Britain.
The emails reveal how the Department of Business,
Innovation and Skills was emailing the nuclear
firms on the 13th of March, as the crisis
was still unfolding, to assure them that “radiation
released has been controlled – the reactor
has been protected,” a surprisingly definitive
description of the events at Fukushima that
have now been shown to have been categorically
wrong, as reactor 1 had in fact melted down
in the first 16 hours of the disaster, with
2 and 3 also melting down in the following
days.
They also show how the BIS intimated that
comments from the nuclear industry would be
worked into the departments briefs to ministers
and government statements: “We need to all
be working from the same material to get the
message through to the media and the public.”
In other radiation-related news, an entirely
different set of emails among government officials
obtained under the Freedom of Information
Act last week reveal that the National Institute
of Standards and Technology, the very same
organization that has refused to release the
data that its model for the collapse of World
Trade Center 7 was based on because it would
“jeopardize public safety,” has accused
the Department of Homeland Security of lying
about its findings on the safety of the full
body scanners being used in airport screening
by the TSA.
The email reveals how NIST rebuked DHS head
Janet Napolitano for claiming in a USA Today
op-ed that:
“AIT machines are safe, efficient, and protect
passenger privacy. They have been independently
evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration,
the National Institute of Standards and Technology
and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory, who have all affirmed their safety.”
According to the email, however, NIST was
angry at this mischaracterization of their
work, pointing out that “NIST does not do
product testing. [And] NIST did not test AIT
machines for safety.”
As it turns out, not only did Napolitano lie
about NIST's certification of the scanner
safety, but she also lied about the Johns
Hopkins backing of her position. An internal
document produced by Johns Hopkins for the
DHS shows that far from “affirming the safety”
of the technology, the University in fact
warned that the scanners as designed produces
an area around the machine that exceeds the
general public dose limit for radiation exposure.
Napolitano's op-ed was widely criticized at
the time because Dr. Michael Love, the head
of an X-ray lab at Johns Hopkins warned just
two days before the op-ed was published that
“statistically someone is going to get skin
cancer from these X-rays.”
