Nuclear Meltdown Watch

[Nordic]

Just another reason for a full scale and peaceful revolution. We need to throw all these bums out and make sure they never come back. Our government is in the business of doing nothing but facilitating profit for corporations at all costs, with no oversight or protection for the citizens of their own countries.

These people are not working for us but against us. In extremely dangerous and reckless ways.

And they're called "public servants"?

[charlie meadows]

From above...

This is Oz technology — terribly clever and impressive, but still just the work of a little cowering primate behind a curtain, pulling levers and praying that the damn thing keeps working ‘cos he has no idea how to fix the mess if it doesn’t.

Something very much like this. Time to turn these power plants into museums, so our children's children's children can climb aboard the bus for all-day field trips as a reminder of our folly.

It seems that such wish-fulfillment is easier said than done; but with perfect ease it is easier done than said.

[23]

*plants a seed*

I hope that someone will start a thread on the general nuclear issue.

Regardless of how the situation in Japan ends, the future implications of its future use may be worth some discussion.

[pugzleyca3]

Just another reason for a full scale and peaceful revolution. We need to throw all these bums out and make sure they never come back. Our government is in the business of doing nothing but facilitating profit for corporations at all costs, with no oversight or protection for the citizens of their own countries.

These people are not working for us but against us. In extremely dangerous and reckless ways.

And they're called "public servants"?

They call themselves "Law Makers" and so does media. Serving the public is so beneath them, they have literally done away with the term "public servant" or at least are in the process of doing so.

[eyeno]

Dumping water from helicopters on those spent fuel loads desperately trying to keep it from busting into flames and creating a billowing cloud of radioactivity. If water does the trick i'll be stunned. Probably only sacrificing a helicopter pilots at this point. But maybe it will buy some time for more people to get further away. These are truly desperate measures. Sighhhh....

[justdrew]

[American Dream]

http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/2011 ... harman.php



Nuclear Revival? Lessons for Women from the Three Mile Island Accident
by Karen Charman


For the first time in several decades, serious attempts are underway to build new nuclear power reactors. The public is told that nuclear power is a clean energy source needed to combat global warming, which is caused by burning coal and other fossil fuels. But as the nuclear disasters unfolding in Japan in the wake of the devastating 9.0 earthquake and tsunami are showing, nuclear power can be deadly. These events may well alter the worldwide debate over nuclear power. Whether they do or not, it’s important to look carefully at what happened at Three Mile Island, to date the most serious accident at a commercial nuclear power plant in the United States.



Three Mile Island is about 15 miles south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania's state capitol. The first reactor, Unit 1, began operation in September 1974, and a second reactor, Unit 2, started up in December 1978. Before dawn on March 28, 1979, a combination of mechanical malfunctions and human errors resulted in a partial meltdown at Unit 2, which destroyed the reactor, terrorized the community, and led to decades-long legal battles and still unresolved death and injury claims of more than 2,000 people in surrounding communities.

The day of the accident, before the public was alerted, hundreds of residents living near Three Mile Island reported having had symptoms of radiation poisoning identical to those described by U.S. service members and down winders of atomic bomb blasts. These symptoms included a metallic taste in their mouths; skin rashes and instant sunburn of exposed skin; vomiting and/or diarrhea, which in some cases continued for months; hair loss; and intense weakness and flu-like symptoms.

Some also reported an eerie blue density in the air that lasted for days; a grayish-white ash that fell to the ground (also reported in the Marshall Islands immediately following atomic bomb tests in the Pacific, where the U.S. exploded 106 atomic bombs between 1946 and 1962); an unnatural orange glow above the reactor site; and rust-colored residue in their sinks and tubs, indicating radioactive contamination of the water supply. Several area residents reported the metallic taste and other physical symptoms over the next few years at times they later learned happened to coincide with the venting of radioactive krypton gas during the cleanup.

Over time, unusually high numbers of both strange and common cancers began showing up among residents, particularly those living in the path of the radiation plumes that crept over nearby communities during the first few days following the accident. Myriad other health problems appeared -- miscarriages, stillbirths, infant deaths, thyroid diseases, various autoimmune disorders, heart problems and the sudden onset of allergies.

Strange Diseases

Becky Mease, a nurse in her late twenties at the time, fled with her husband, eight-month-old daughter Pam, and two other adults two days after the accident, when then Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh suggested that pregnant women and preschool children within five miles of Three Mile Island evacuate. They drove more than 250 miles to Ocean City, Maryland, where they stayed for about three weeks.

Recounting her experience to citizen researchers Katagiri Mitsuru and Aileen Smith in October 1982, Mease said Pam, who had been outside playing in the grass the day of the accident, had gotten violently ill with diarrhea and projectile vomiting about two days after they left. A full battery of tests at a local hospital failed to find any bacteria or foreign organism, which could cause such symptoms, so the hospital staff told them to go to a civil defense station. Mease knew radiation sickness can cause vomiting and diarrhea, so she asked the people at the civil defense office to check their car and belongings with a Geiger counter. “It just went completely crazy… It went like nuts when it went over my pocketbook, too," she said. “They told us to go wash everything down."

Pam's severe diarrhea lasted the entire three weeks they were away. “Her behind was so raw that we just left it lay on diapers. Didn't even put them on after a couple of days," said Mease.

In the summer of 1981, when Pam was two years old, she was diagnosed with severe cataracts in both of her eyes, which her doctor attributed to juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.

The Meases' ordeal was one of thousands area residents suffered in the aftermath of the accident. But the radiation effects weren't confined to humans. The evidence was visible across the landscape, too, with unprecedented numbers of sick and dying farm animals and strangely mutated plants.

Residents Struggle On Their Own

The residents were left to deal with these problems on their own. Nearly four years after the Three Mile Island disaster, citizens frustrated over the lack of help from public health authorities and other government officials went door-to-door to gather health data themselves. Mary Osborne, a longtime Harrisburg resident, was one of the survey takers. “Our door-to-door studies showed horrendous problems everywhere," she said. “At almost every household or every other household we found cancer or some kind of emergency problem, and in some cases, different family members had different cancers." Osborne also noted significant numbers of women who had pregnancy problems, babies with low birth weights, neonatal and newborn deaths, and Downs syndrome.

Despite the fact that the citizens had consulted Dr. Carl J. Johnson, an expert from Colorado, on the effects of radiation and public health, to help design their survey, the government and the nuclear industry dismissed their results as “unscientific." The government and the nuclear industry insisted then and now that nobody outside Three Mile Island was killed or injured as a result of the accident, because very little radiation escaped into the surrounding community, and therefore no injuries or deaths could have resulted from the accident.

But David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer-turned-whistleblower who monitors the U.S. nuclear reactor fleet for theUnion of Concerned Scientists, says radiation monitors on the vent stacks at Three Mile Island went off scale during the accident. The exact amount of radiation released will never be known, he says, because crucial records from the first two days following the accident somehow never surfaced, and not enough radiation dosimeters were deployed in surrounding communities to give a true reading. What is known is that the partial meltdown damaged at least 70 percent of the reactor core and caused more than one-third of its highly radioactive fuel to melt.

Three Mile Island plant owner Metropolitan Edison and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) maintained that ten million curies of radioactive gases were released into the atmosphere from the accident, resulting in an average dose to area residents equal to a chest X-ray.

Lochbaum says that figure is grossly underestimated, because it is based on a measurement of radiation levels on the Three Mile Island site a year after the fact and does not account for shorter-lived radionuclides like iodine-131, which would not have been measurable by that time. Nor, he says, does the official figure include any leakage from the containment building, the concrete dome surrounding the core of the reactor, which is meant to prevent deadly radiation from escaping into the environment in the event of an accident. Lochbaum estimates that at least 40 million curies were released during the accident. Other more recent estimates by former nuclear industry executive Arnold Gundersen calculated the radiation releases at 100 to 1,000 times higher than NRC estimates.

Radiation and Women’s Health

He takes apart even the form of matter itself, he strips energy from mass, he splits what is whole, he takes this force for his own, he says. But what he has split does not stop coming apart. Fractures live in the air, invisible fractures come into his body, split his chromosomes, unravel the secrets in him. -- -- Susan Griffin


Health problems from radiation exposure reported from the Three Mile Island accident and specific to women include a significant rise in pregnancy complications, miscarriages, still births, birth defects, low birth weights of babies born after the accident, and cases of Downs syndrome. Though radioactive elements do have chemical components that determine what organ in the body they affect, it’s important to understand the danger of the radioactivity itself.

Radioactive elements, also known as radioisotopes or radionuclides, are unstable atoms that over time—sometimes as long as several billion years, depending on the radionuclide—become stable. Nuclear radiation expert Rosalie Bertelldescribes ionizing radiation, the release of energy that radionuclides give off, as “an explosion on the microscopic level."

The physics and chemistry of radiation is complicated and involves scores of different elements that behave in different ways depending on what they encounter in the outside environment or where they lodge inside our bodies. All of these “microscopic explosions" are able to break chemical bonds, which enables them to damage or destroy living cells.

The chemical properties of various radioactive elements determine where in the body they will concentrate. Below is a description of some of the organs and tissues most at risk from radioactivity.

Ovaries: Ionizing radiation damage to ovaries can cause birth defects, mutations, and miscarriages in the first and subsequent generations of women exposed. Some of the radionuclides involved are iodine-131, cobalt-60, krypton-85, ruthenuim-106, zinc-65, barium-140, potassium-42, cesium-137, and plutonium-239.

Thyroid: The thyroid, the master gland in metabolism, requires iodine in order to function. If the radionuclide iodine-131 is inhaled or ingested, the thyroid gland will take it up. Thyroid cancer is a particular risk for radiation exposure.

Bones: The bones are damaged by strontium-90, which mimics calcium, radium-226, zinc-65, yttrium-90, promethium-147, barium-140, thorium-234, phosphorus-32, and carbon-14.

Skin: sulfur-35.

Liver: cobalt-60.

Muscle: potassium-42 and cesium-137.

Lungs: radon-222, uranium 233, plutonium-239, and krypton-85.

Spleen: polonium-210.

Kidneys: ruthenium-106.

-Karen Charman

Health studies conducted by the Pennsylvania Department of Health, various federal government agencies, and Columbia University supported the nuclear industry claims. The affected citizens contend these studies were sloppy and included people who should not have been counted, excluded many who should have been, or the researchers did not do the necessary follow-up on people who left the area after the accident. The citizens also say study authors uncritically accepted the premise that not enough radiation was released to cause the illnesses people were experiencing, so that even when higher disease rates were found, they were attributed to other factors such as stress or “lifestyle factors" like smoking, drinking, poor diet, or taking too much anti-anxiety medication.

Nuclear Critics Drowned Out

Some scientists have attempted to find out what really happened to the community after the accident. Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass, a tenured professor of radiation physics at the University of Pittsburgh, immediately sought every relevant health statistic he could find. According to Sternglass, a student of Albert Einstein's who holds several patents on X-ray technology, the health impacts from the accident were unquestionable, significant, and included a sharp spike in infant deaths and hypothyroidism. Dr. Gordon MacLeod, Pennsylvania's Secretary of Health at the time, tried to ensure all health impacts from the accident were fully disclosed. He was fired by then Governor Dick Thornburgh for his efforts. More recently, University of North Carolina epidemiologist Steve Wing reanalyzed the data from the Columbia University study and concluded that people living closer to the path of the radiation clouddeveloped all types of cancersmore frequently. In the areas of greatest fallout, lung cancer rates jumped 400 percent, and leukemia rates climbed 700 percent. These scientists -- and others who question the nuclear orthodoxy -- have all been either drowned out or viciously attacked as biased, unprofessional purveyors of panic with an anti-nuclear axe to grind.

More than 2,000 people participated in a class-action lawsuit claiming injuries against Three Mile Island. Although an unknown number of cases settled out of court with terms that must be kept confidential, in June 1996 the class-action lawsuit was dismissed on the grounds that the plaintiffs failed to prove that the Three Mile Island accident had caused their health problems.

Downwind Across the Nation

Mary Osborne is deeply disillusioned by what she characterizes as a gross miscarriage of justice. “Not a day goes by that I don't think about the accident."

Nearly 32 years later, the Three Mile Island disaster and its aftermath continue to shape the lives of many who were exposed to the radioactive fallout. Three Mile Island serves as a model of what American citizens can expect if another nuclear disaster were to occur. With 104 mostly aging nuclear reactors not only still running but virtually all being granted 20-year license extensions, and, in some cases, permits to generate more power than they were designed to do, David Lochbaum believes that sheer luck rather than good management or serious concern for safety has so far prevented another nuclear disaster. Considering that approximately 190 million citizens live within 100 miles of at least one nuclear reactor, let's hope that luck holds.



Karen Charman is managing editor of the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism. She is also an award-winning independent investigative environmental journalist with a special interest in nuclear issues. Aside from CNS, her work has appeared in World Watch, Sierra, OnEarth, The Nation, FAIR's journal Extra!, In These Times, The Progressive and other publications.

[justdrew]

#5 and #6 are starting to get fucked up now.

where's Harry Tuttle?

[seemslikeadream]

U.S. Concerned Japan Facing Situation That Could Be ‘Deadly For Decades’

The White House is preparing for a situation in Japan that could be “deadly for decades,” a U.S. official tells ABC News.

According to the official, the U.S. believes a larger evacuation zone should be imposed and that the next 24-48 hours are “critical.”

“It would be hard to describe how alarming this is right now,” ABC quoted the anonymous official as saying.

[elfismiles]

I stopped watching this a while back but this week tuned in and this was the episode:

Turnabout

Thomas and Hanson trick Sophia into telling Martinez to remove uranium from a nuclear power plant. As soon as the uranium leaves, Thomas and his men hijack the truck. Sean attempts to team up with Vicky.
Watch Until 04/19/11

http://www.nbc.com/the-event/

... and ...

TSA Records: Some Scanners Emit Ten Times Expected Radiation
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php ... -radiation

TSA Admits Bungling of Airport Body-Scanner Radiation Tests
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/0 ... -bungling/

[8bitagent]

U.S. Concerned Japan Facing Situation That Could Be ‘Deadly For Decades’

The White House is preparing for a situation in Japan that could be “deadly for decades,” a U.S. official tells ABC News.

According to the official, the U.S. believes a larger evacuation zone should be imposed and that the next 24-48 hours are “critical.”

“It would be hard to describe how alarming this is right now,” ABC quoted the anonymous official as saying.

"There is talk of an apocalypse and I think the word is particularly well chosen," European Union's energy commissioner Günther Oettinger said today, according to various reports. "Practically everything is out of control. I cannot exclude the worst in the hours and days to come."

Yipes. I thought Charlie Sheen would be the main big meltdown this month

[23]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/scien ... ml?_r=1&hp
Scientists Project Path of Radiation Plume

A United Nations forecast of the possible movement of the radioactive plume coming from crippled Japanese reactors shows it churning across the Pacific and touching the Aleutian Islands on Thursday before hitting Southern California late Friday.

Health and nuclear experts emphasize that radiation in the plume will be diluted as it travels and, at worst, would have extremely minor health consequences in the United States, even if hints of it are ultimately detectable. In a similar way, radiation from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 spread around the globe and reached the West Coast of the United States in 10 days, its levels measurable but minuscule.

The projection, by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, an arm of the United Nations in Vienna, gives no information about actual radiation levels but only shows how a radioactive plume would probably move and disperse.

The forecast, calculated Tuesday, is based on patterns of Pacific winds at that time and the predicted path is likely to change as weather patterns shift.

On Sunday, the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it expected that no “harmful levels of radioactivity” would travel from Japan to the United States “given the thousands of miles between the two countries.”

The test ban treaty group routinely does radiation projections in an effort to understand which of its global stations to activate for monitoring the worldwide ban on nuclear arms testing. It has more than 60 stations that sniff the air for radiation spikes and uses weather forecasts and powerful computers to model the transport of radiation on the winds.

On Wednesday, the agency declined to release its Japanese forecast, which The New York Times obtained from other sources. The forecast was distributed widely to the agency’s member states.

But in interviews, the technical specialists of the agency did address how and why the forecast had been drawn up.

“It’s simply an indication,” said Lassina Zerbo, head of the agency’s International Data Center. “We have global coverage. So when something happens, it’s important for us to know which station can pick up the event.”

For instance, the Japan forecast shows that the radioactive plume will probably miss the agency’s monitoring stations at Midway and in the Hawaiian Islands but is likely to be detected in the Aleutians and at a monitoring station in Sacramento.

The forecast assumes that radioactivity in Japan is released continuously and forms a rising plume. It ends with the plume heading into Southern California and the American Southwest, including Nevada, Utah and Arizona. The plume would have continued eastward if the United Nations scientists had run the projection forward.

Earlier this week, the leading edge of the tangible plume was detected by the Navy’s Seventh Fleet when it was operating about 100 miles northeast of the Japanese reactor complex. On Monday, the Navy said it had repositioned its ships and aircraft off Japan “as a precautionary measure.”

The United Nations agency has also detected radiation from the stricken reactor complex at its detector station in Gunma, Japan, which lies about 130 miles to the southwest.

The chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory B. Jaczko, said Monday that the plume posed no danger to the United States. “You just aren’t going to have any radiological material that, by the time it traveled those large distances, could present any risk to the American public,” he said in a White House briefing.

Mr. Jaczko was asked if the meltdown of a core of one of the reactors would increase the chance of harmful radiation reaching Hawaii or the West Coast.

“I don’t want to speculate on various scenarios,” he replied. “But based on the design and the distances involved, it is very unlikely that there would be any harmful impacts.”

The likely path of the main Japanese plume across the Pacific has also caught the attention of Europeans, many of whom recall how the much closer Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine began spewing radiation.

In Germany on Wednesday, the Federal Office for Radiation Protection held a news conference that described the threat from the Japanese plume as trifling and said there was no need for people to take iodine tablets. The pills can prevent poisoning from the atmospheric release of iodine-131, a radioactive byproduct of nuclear plants. The United States is also carefully monitoring and forecasting the plume’s movements. The agencies include the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy.

On Wednesday, Steven Chu, the energy secretary, told Congress that the United States was planning to deploy equipment in Japan that could detect radiation exposure on the ground and in the air. In total, the department’s team includes 39 people and more than eight tons of equipment.

“We continue to offer assistance in any way we can,” Dr. Chu said at a hearing, “as well as informing ourselves of what the situation is.”

[justdrew]

so all that talk back when they were launching Galileo about how bad just a pound of plutonium would be was all just hype? In fact aerosolized/particularized uranium/pltuonium oxides just disperse in the air and pose little risk. fascinating.

[seemslikeadream]

US starts evacuating some Americans out of Japan

ShareThis PrintE-mail
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The United States on Wednesday authorized the first evacuations of Americans out of Japan, taking a tougher stand on the deepening nuclear crisis and warning U.S. citizens to defer all non-essential travel to any part of the country as unpredictable weather and wind conditions risked spreading radioactive contamination.

[Julia W]

More monitoring info found from http://www.zerohedge.com/article/intern ... ng-network

http://www.blackcatsystems.com/RadMap/map.html
Readings are in uR/hr for Cs137/Co60
Only detectors with readings in the last 24 hours are displayed

And again
http://radiationnetwork.com/
In cpm's (counts per minute) has been updated to include Hawaii- manual readings so far (and potentially Alaska), scroll to bottom of page. Also, there's a link to a message at the top of the homepage.