I wanted to add a link to this Japanese news report which explains rather succinctly why Meredith Angwin’s assertion of a low cancer risk is based on faulty assumptions. And here’s another!
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Sunday will mark the first anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated northern Japan. It is also the first anniversary of what is arguably the worst industrial accident in history, at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station.
Even though the natural news cycle has pretty much abandoned the Fukushima story, it’s ongoing impacts are far from over, and there continues to be a steady pulse of revelations concerning contamination vectors, bad decision-making, cover-ups, downplays and plain old distortions.
Nuclear nerds have Enformable, which features a wiki-like stream of internal correspondence surrounding the disaster at Fukushima as well as news of “events” occurring at other nuclear plants in the U.S. and abroad.
For the rest of us who need to make sense of it all, there have been the outstanding videos of Vermont’s own Fairewinds Associates, which offer expert analysis and nuclear “education” in easily assimilated units.
Greenpeace has just released a new publication, “Lessons from Fukushima,” which includes a chapter by Fairewinds’ Arnie Gundersen: “Regulatory Capture and the Fukushima Daiichi Disaster,” which focuses on the regulatory failure piece that contributed to the disaster, including conflicts of interest in the regulatory culture and reliance on faulty safety assessment models. It appears that regulators and plant operators alike fell victim to their very own spin efforts in the attempt to gain public support for nuclear energy. Gundersen notes that the very same vulnerability undermines the effectiveness of the U.S. regulatory culture within the NRC.
In a recent televised interview, Gundersen notes that, on March 16, just five days after the Fukushima nuclear accident began, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission relicensed Vermont Yankee. Among the NRC memos concerning Fukushima that have to come to light was a remark made on March 12, 2011, stating that the Mark 1 containment (the design shared by the Fukushima reactors and Vermont Yankee) is the
“worst containment in the world.”
When someone inquired in a follow-up memo if this meant that the NRC would withhold relicensing of VY pending further study of the accident at Fukushima, the response was that relicensing would go ahead as planned but the public announcement would be delayed until the stir over Fukushima had died down.
Meanwhile, the PR engine of the nuclear industry must be working overtime to keep a lid on things
Chemist Meredith Angwin of the Ethan Allen Institute and “Yes Vermont Yankee” put her oar in the water with an op-ed in Friday’s Messenger, anticipating the likelihood that, on this anniversary, some may be tempted to compare Vermont Yankee to Fukushima Daiichi. This, she insists, is utter nonsense, citing the number of reactors at Fukushima and the epic nature of the events preceding their failure as evidence that there is no relationship, while conveniently overlooking the shared design flaws that were central to some of the critical failures that occurred at Fukushima. As Gundersen observes in the video interview, the design flaws and vulnerabilities of Mark 1 reactors have been known to the industry and the NRC for the past thirty years.
But she doesn’t leave it there. Applying a second coat of shineola, she insists, somewhat counter-intuitively, that as a result of the Fukushima accident
“…few (if any) excess cancer deaths can be expected among civilians.”
She wraps it all up with a speech about how many more people have been killed by coal use, apparently completely dismissing any other alternative.
“Coal…nuclear…coal…nuclear.” The devil or the deep blue sea?
We’re supposed to strike our foreheads and cry,
“Of course, how could we be so blind? Much better to allow private number-crunchers to operate badly designed reactors for decades beyond their “sell-by” date, risking the occasional nuclear disaster and racking-up centuries of lethal waste.”
Can I have the check please?
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com…
The apologists for coal and nuclear don’t seem to want us to remember the alternatives.
As Amory Lovins’ new book, “Reinventing Fire” shows – with ample data to back it up – taking a complete systems approach to energy use not only saves energy, it saves the most energy while saving the most money, putting the planet and the economy in the best state moving forward. Not a bad deal!
Efficiency and conservation are the two cleanest and cheapest energy “sources.” They are followed by wind, water, and solar, largely in that order, but site locations and technology changes will cause different ones to be better suited in some places than others. We must invest fully, and rapidly in all those things, as well as smart growth and smart meters. That’s what’s going to give us the best future for our children.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03…
Set aside how much tritium is in a banana or how many glowing exit signs Walmart lost and ponder the massive PR problem the US nuclear industry has and how ill suited their arrogance is to deal with it. The industry demands we trust them yet they fight tooth and nail NRC chairman Jaczko’s modest reforms.
some, over here, may still have their heads in the sand about the effects of radiation, but the people of Japan are discovering the truth the hard way.
I still hear the same wince-worthy tiresome refrain from the pronuclear claque, glossing over & minimizing the entire disaster with Orwellian disinformational doublespeak those of us following these events have become accustomed to.
Fortunately, only the gullible public believe this huge load of crap shoveled tirelessly by those who ride this very long gravy train which is completely reliant upon public funding & capped liability for its parasytical existance & would collapse w/o it.
Nuclear industry including employees making six-figure pay reap the benefit while the the public holds the risk which includes many millions who could be affected by a catastrophic occurrance in the US.
But, there’s a silver lining. Unlike ‘we the people’ in the US, Japanese citizens hold far more power over this industry than we do:
example of the powerful spin cycle in effect to neutralize any public anxiety resulting from Fukushima.