AMY GOODMAN: […] Arnie Gundersen, your own background, how you came to be a whistleblower? You’re a nuclear engineer. You worked in Connecticut?
ARNIE GUNDERSEN: Yeah, I had — I have a bachelor’s and a master’s in nuclear. I was a licensed reactor operator, was a senior vice president of a nuclear firm. And I discovered some license violations. This is twenty years ago. I told the president about them, president of the company, and he fired me. I then contacted John Glenn and my local senator, Senator John Glenn, about the license violations. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission came in and found no violations. John Glenn then had the inspector general come in, and they found seven violations and found that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had been taking illegal gratuities from my employer.
Investigators have discovered a half-inch long crack around a nozzle on one of the tanks of the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant, and have attributed the crack to the water leakage that spilled radioactive water into Lake Michigan on May 5.
The plant, which is located on the shore of the great lake and operated by Entergy, was shut down after the water tank exceeded its site threshold and leaked. Authorities say the crack led to about 79 gallons of “slightly radioactive water” spilling from the Palisades plant into the lake, WOOD-TV reports.
The leak came from a 300,000-gallon injection and refueling tank, which floods and cools the nuclear reactor with borated water during refueling outages. It also removes heat from the reactor when there is a loss of coolant by sourcing the safety injection system.
In a 2012 report, the Obama administration announced that it was “jumpstarting” the nuclear industry. Because of the industry’s long history of permitting problems, cost overruns, and construction delays, financial markets have been wary of backing new nuclear construction for decades. The supposed “nuclear renaissance” ballyhooed in the first decade of this century never materialized. And then came Fukushima, a disaster that pushed countries around the world to ask: Should nuclear power be part of the energy future? In the third and final issue in a series focused on nuclear exits, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published by SAGE, turns its attention to the United States and looks at whether the country’s business-as-usual approach may yet lead to a nuclear phase-out for economic reasons.
All 104 nuclear reactors currently operational in the US have irreparable safety issues and should be taken out of commission and replaced, former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory B. Jaczko said.
The comments, made during the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference, are “highly unusual” for a current or former member of the safety commission, according to The New York Times. Asked why he had suddenly decided to make the remarks, Jaczko implied that he had only recently arrived at these conclusions following the serious aftermath of Japan’s tsunami-stricken Fukushima Daichii nuclear facility.
“I was just thinking about the issues more, and watching as the industry and the regulators and the whole nuclear safety community continues to try to figure out how to address these very, very difficult problems,” which were made more evident by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, he said. “Continuing to put Band-Aid on Band-Aid is not going to fix the problem.”
PLYMOUTH, Mass. — The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says a power plant in Massachusetts has lost power and shut down during a massive snowstorm.The NRC says the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth experienced an automatic shutdown at around 9:15 p.m. Friday after losing off-site power. Spokesman Neil Sheehan says the plant has declared an unusual event, which is the lowest level of emergency classification.
by Leuren Moret, Dr. Majia Nadesan and Jim Fetzer (with Major William Fox)
On Friday, 30 March 2012, Dr. Majia Nadesan and Leuren Moret appeared as the featured guests on “The Real Deal” hosted by Jim Fetzer to discuss the radiation effects of the Fukushima disaster and the fashion in which it has been covered up both by the Japanese and the American governments and media. Dr. Nadesan, a professor of communication in the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University, has studied Fukushima extensively. Ms. Moret is an independent geoscientist who has done expert studies on the Fukushima disaster and radiation problems around the world, including depleted uranium. What they had to tell us smacks of politics and public relations and is profoundly disturbing. This is Part II of the original interview, which can be heard here.
Introduction
by Major William Fox
NOTE: I invited Major William Fox (former USMCR commissioned officer), who was instrumental in arranging this interview to prepare an introduction. His key point is that the first line of defense to handle any major crisis is accurate information. Tragically, not only has accurate information been deliberately withheld from Americans regarding the Fukushima crisis, but they have also been steadily fed disinformation. He continues:
The stealth dirty nuclear war currently being visited upon America goes far beyond government and major media disinformation, although there is certainly plenty of the latter as well as the former. Dr. Majia Nadesan stated in this interview,
“In June it was reported in the Japanese press that there was actually melt-through. A melt-through is when the melted corium melts through all levels of containment. And not a single U.S. media — I did a search using EBSCO and using LexisNexis to see if any U.S. media picked up in June the Japanese report about the melt-through, and not one single U.S. media picked up that story. A melt-through means that the situation is out of control. Corium is sinking deeper into the ground while sporadically undergoing `limited criticalities’ and releasing ever more extremely dangerous volumes of contamination into the atmosphere, ground water, and ocean. The entire public in Japan, North America, and elsewhere needs to understand how this situation remains out of control.”
The failure to report these melt-throughs was followed by the Japanese government’s big lie perpetrated in December 2011 that all the reactors were in “cold shut down,” implying that all the melted nuclear fuel remained safely within their containment chambers and were subject to stable cooling systems which guaranteed against any further criticalities or radiation releases. Nothing could have been further from the truth. .
by Leuren Moret, Dr. Majia Nadesan and Jim Fetzer (with Major William Fox)
On Friday, 30 March 2012, Dr. Majia Nadesan and Leuren Moret appeared as the featured guests on “The Real Deal” hosted by Jim Fetzer to discuss the radiation effects of the Fukushima disaster and the fashion in which it has been covered up both by the Japanese and by the American governments. Nadesan, PhD., a professor of communication in the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University, has studied Fukushima extensively. Moret is an independent geoscientist who has done expert studies on the Fukushima disaster, radiation problems around the world including depleted uranium. What they had to tell us smacks of politics and public relations and is profoundly disturbing. This is Part I of the original interview, which can be heard here:
Introduction by Major William Fox
NOTE: I invited Major William Fox (former USMCR commissioned officer), who was instrumental in arranging this interview to prepare an introduction. His key point is that the first line of defense to handle any major crisis is accurate information. Tragically, not only has accurate information been deliberately withheld from Americans regarding the Fukushima crisis, but they have also been steadily fed disinformation. He continues:
Dr. Majia Nadesan reports in the interview below that on 16 December 2011, The Wall Street Journal wrote that the total radiation dispersed over a broad swath of northern Japan was 15% of what was released from Chernobyl. In contrast, the summary report of the RSMC [Regional Specialized Meteorological Center] Beijing on the Fukushima nuclear accident emergency stated that the total amount of radiation released from Fukushima in the first five days was equal to Chernobyl. In addition, scientists found radio-Xenon levels in the Pacific Northwest at 450,000 times average concentration levels in the weeks following Fukushima — not to mention other dangerous concentrations of radio-nuclides well beyond what any Western Europe countries ever experienced following Chernobyl.
Then we learn from Dr. Nadesan that, “…People in the Pacific Northwest actually inhaled between five and ten hot particles a day in the first month of the disaster — it could take 20 years for cancer to develop or it could take ten years or thirty years. But the significance is that the Western Press in the United States and in Europe as well as in Japan has trivialized the amount of radiation released by using terms like `no acute effects’, `no immediate health effect’…” Dr. Nadesan also comments:
“…If you look at the recently released NRC transcripts, they were projecting the dose to the thyroid of a one year old child, and they had different calculations. But one of their calculations was a thyroid dose of 30 millisieverts just from iodine to the thyroid of a one year old child annualized. And 30 millisieverts is a lot of radiation… clearly there was no effort to make any kind of recommendations to the public to keep their kids inside or to stop drinking milk or dairy, which was found in the wake of Chernobyl to be the primary vector by which small children were exposed to iodine is through milk. And that’s disturbing.”
There’s something called a PNO out, a preliminary notice of occurrence, and the NRC has said that the normal shutdown cooling and the fuel pool cooling were both lost at Oyster Creek and also that there was a loss of offsite power.
So what that means is the nuclear fuel pool started to heat up and Oyster Creek started to bring in some diesel fire pumps, apparently they got the situation rectified before turning the pumps. They were in a position where they were bringing in diesel fire pumps in order to keep the nuclear fuel pool cool because of all the problems they were having as a result of Sandy.
A three judge Nuclear Regulatory Commission Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) today denied a license for the proposed Calvert Cliffs-3 nuclear reactor on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.
According to recent reports from the nuclear watchdog Beyond Nuclear and several Great Lakes environmental organizations, the NRC is up to its usual practices as an industry captured agency. Collusion and flagrant cover-ups at the Davis Besse nuclear power plant on the shores of Lake Erie and at the Palisades nuclear plant on the shores of Lake Michigan have drawn the ire of Congressmen Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and Ed Markey of Massachusetts who have called on the NRC’s investigator general to investigate NRC region 3 practices and motivations of the NRC in allowing these plants to operate with grave safety concerns.
With respect to Davis Besse it seems like a flashback to the 2002 hole in the reactor head incident documented here, as part of the history of this Nuclear Nightmare between Toledo and Cleveland on the western Lake Erie basin. In 2003 the NRC’s commissioner resigned after the General Accounting Office found the agency guilty of collusion with plant operator First Energy in their attempts to cover-up the seriousness of corrosion issues that brought Davis Besse within 3/16ths of an inch of a core containment breach and catastrophic release of radioactivity. Then congressman Dennis Kucinich led the call of the Inspector General’s office as he is once again after First Energy and the NRC have colluded to downplay the seriousness of widespread cracking that has been discovered over the past year throughout the concrete shield building that houses the Davis Besse reactor.
More than six months after a leaking steam generator tube prompted a complete shutdown of the San Onofre nuclear power plant, Southern California Edison officials announced plans to lay off nearly one-third of its workforce, leading many to wonder if the troubled plant would ever fully reopen.
The company announced Monday a planned reduction of about 730 employees that will bring down staffing at the plant in northern San Diego County to 1,500. Details of the cuts will be worked out later this year, officials said.
Fairewinds Associates was sent a leaked Southern California Edison email informing San Onofre employees it is against company policy to leak documents to Fairewinds.
Title: Shhh… don’t tell!
Source: Fairewinds Energy Education
Author: Patrick’s Blog
Fairewinds Associates was sent a leaked Southern California Edison email informing San Onofre employees it is against company policy to leak documents to Fairewinds.
Subject: Fw: CLARIFICATION REGARDING RECENT NEWS COVERAGE OF OUR PLANT STATUSSubject: CLARIFICATION REGARDING RECENT NEWS COVERAGE OF OUR PLANT STATUS
Paul Gunter, Beyond Nuclear joins Thom Hartmann. All is not well at the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant in California – where federal investigators have found major designs flaws in the plant. Just what kind of risk do these designs flaws pose – and could we be looking at a future nuclear disaster on the West Coast? And are our fish getting more and more radioactive? Should you bring a geiger counter to the restaurant or supermarket yet?
A large Southern California nuclear plant is out of commission indefinitely, and will remain so until there is an understanding of what caused problems at two of its generators and an effective plan to address the issues, the nation’s top nuclear regulator said Friday.
Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, refused to give a timetable as to when the San Onofre nuclear plant could resume operation. He said only that his agency had “set some firm conditions” as to when that could happen.
While traveling in Japan several weeks ago, Fairewinds’ Arnie Gundersen took soil samples in Tokyo public parks, playgrounds, and rooftop gardens. All the samples would be considered nuclear waste if found here in the US. This level of contamination is currently being discovered throughout Japan. At the US NRC Regulatory Information Conference in Washington, DC March 13 to March 15, the NRC’s Chairman, Dr. Gregory Jaczko emphasized his concern that the NRC and the nuclear industry presently do not consider the costs of mass evacuations and radioactive contamination in their cost benefit analysis used to license nuclear power plants. Furthermore, Fairewinds believes that evacuation costs near a US nuclear plant could easily exceed one trillion dollars and contaminated land would be uninhabitable for generations.
Correction: Salt is of Sodium Chloride, and this is a fact that Arnie learned in basic high school chemistry. In this video, Arnie discusses salt water (comprised of sodium chloride) being exposed to neutrons at Fukushima and thus creating Sulfur 35. In the video Arnie said that Sodium absorbed the neutron to become Sulfur, he should have said that the Chlorine absorbed the neutron to become Sulfur. Maggie wishes he would use a teleprompter… oh well – anyone want to donate one? Anyway, chemically speaking, the exact reaction is Cl35 (n,p) S35. Thanks to our viewers who shot us emails about this error!
Newly released neutron data from three University of California San Diego scientists confirms Fairewinds’ April analysis that the nuclear core at Fukushima Daiichi turned on and off after TEPCO claimed its reactors had been shutdown. This periodic nuclear chain reaction (inadvertent criticality) continued to contaminate the surrounding environment and upper atmosphere with large doses of radioactivity.
In a second area of concern, Fairewinds disagrees the NRC’s latest report claiming that all Fukushima spent fuel pools had no problems following the earthquake. In a new revelation, the NRC claims that the plutonium found more than 1 mile offsite actually came from inside the nuclear reactors. If such a statement were true, it indicates that the nuclear power plant containments failed and were breached with debris landing far from the power plants themselves. Such a failure of the containment system certainly necessitates a complete review of all US reactor containment design and industry assurances that containments will hold in radioactivity in the event of a nuclear accident. The evidence Fairewinds reviewed to date continues to support its April analysis that the detonation in the Unit 3 Spent Fuel pool was the cause of plutonium found off site.
Third, the burning of radioactive materials (building materials, trees, lawn grass, rice straw) by the Japanese government will cause radioactive Cesium to spread even further into areas within Japan that have been previously clean, and across the Pacific Ocean to North America.
And finally, the Japanese government has yet to grasp the severity of the contamination within Japan, and therefore has not developed a coherent plan mitigate the accident and remediate the environment. Without a cohesive plan to deal with this ongoing problem of large scale radioactive contamination, the radioactivity will continue to spread throughout Japan and around the globe further exacerbating the problem and raising costs astronomically.
Two new reactors by Westinghouse (Toshiba) are to be added to the Vogtle Nuclear Plant’s existing two reactors in Waynesboro, Georgia, population of about 5,800.
Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Nuclear Safety, welcomed the approval, and added, “Nuclear energy has helped curb our reliance on dirty fossil fuels and has helped reduce harmful air pollution that damages health and causes climate change.”
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Thursday approved construction of the first new nuclear reactors to be built in the United States since 1978. The commission’s board approved the decision by a 4-1 vote, with its chairman Gregory B. Jaczko casting the dissenting vote.
Fairewinds was retained by the AP1000 Oversight Group to evaluate the AP1000 design for flaws that are now evident as a result of the nuclear accidents at Fukushima. The NRC’s refusal to thoroughly examine these flaws is reminiscent of the Atomic Energy Commission’s refusal in 1972 to thoroughly examine the innate flaws in the GE Mark 1 containment systems that failed at Fukushima. The AP1000 Oversight Group is demanding that these design flaws be remedied prior to design certification, lest history repeat itself.
The U.S. government’s top nuclear regulator said Monday that no one has died as a result of exposure to radiation from Japan’s Fukushima Daiiche nuclear power plant, which was hit by a tsunami in March.
He did say that some people died at the plant as a result of the tsunami itself.
“What we know right now, there have been no fatalities we are aware of that are directly related to radiation exposure,” said Gregory B. Jaczko, the chairman of the U.S Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “I believe there were a few workers who were killed at the plant because they were performing work and when the Tsunami hit, they lost their life.”
Under special nuclear cooperation agreements, the United States sent 38,580 pounds of enriched uranium and plutonium to more than two-dozen foreign agencies and is unable to account for 36,000 pounds of the material.
The Government Accountability Office report says these 27 cooperation agreements, set up to facilitate cross border research, have no accountability and the U.S. has no way to enforce control.
Because there is no reporting process in place, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has been visiting nuclear storage sites overseas when permitted, but has not regularly visited countries with the greatest risk of proliferation.
From the visits conducted through 1994 to 2010 U.S. teams learned countries met international security guidelines only 50 percent of the time.
Trying to pin down the missing 36,000 pounds of material the NRC and the Department of Energy (DOE) have made inventory agreements with five U.S. partners, but the other 22 have refused.
The DOE has tried to bring back much of the material to the states, but aside from failing to definitively find it, the agency is limited by its own Global Threat Reduction Initiative which won’t allow it.
Dominion Virginia Power said Friday it won’t restart the two nuclear reactors at its North Anna Power Station rattled by the Aug. 23 earthquake until the company is convinced it is safe.
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