3/11: Japan Marks Anniversary of Meltdowns, Tsunami in Day of Mourning, Protest

On the first-year anniversary of the Fukushima tsunami disaster people gathered in Japan and around the world for a day of mourning and protest.

Agence France-Pressereports:

Japan fell silent on Sunday to honour the 19,000 people killed a year ago when a huge earthquake sent a tsunami barreling into the coast, sparking a nuclear crisis at Fukushima.

Tearful families gathered in the still shell-shocked towns and villages across the country's northeast to remember those lost when the towering tsunami smashed ashore.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/11

Gar Smith - Flare-up: How the Sun Could Put an End to Nuclear Power

Solar energy may soon eclipse nuclear power — only not in the way we hoped. According to NASA, the planet will soon face an outbreak of powerful solar flares capable of collapsing global power grids. Were this to happen, the world's reactors could be left to run wild, overheat, melt down, and explode. As this is being written, the strongest solar storm in six years is barreling toward the Earth at 4 million miles per hour.

The sun's magnetic cycle peaks every 22 years while sunspot activity crests every 11 years. Both events are set to peak in 2013. Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) trigger geomagnetic disturbances (GMDs) — tides of high-energy particles that can disrupt power lines. Since the 1970s, the array of high-voltage transmission lines spanning the US has grown tenfold. NASA warns these interconnected networks can be energized by a solar flare, causing "an avalanche of blackouts carried across continents [that] … could last for weeks to months." A National Academy of Sciences report estimates a "century-class" solar storm could cause 20 times the damage as Hurricane Katrina while "full recovery could take four to ten years."

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/08-7

UCS - Nuclear Regulatory Commission Needs a More Comprehensive Approach to Post-Fukushima Nuclear Safety, Report Finds

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is jeopardizing reform by failing to heed its post-Fukushima task force’s top recommendation to clarify its “patchwork” of regulations for “beyond-design-basis” events that reactors are not intended to withstand, according to a report released today by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). The report, “U.S. Nuclear Power Safety One Year After Fukushima,” also found that the nuclear industry is moving ahead with its own post-Fukushima initiative before the NRC has had time to determine whether it will adequately protect the public.

“The NRC has put the cart before the horse by not addressing its task force’s primary recommendation before doing anything else,” said Dave Lochbaum, director of the UCS Nuclear Safety Program. “By putting it off, the agency has potentially undermined the effectiveness of the other recommendations, which all hinge on this critical issue.”

For example, one of the other task force recommendations called on the NRC to require plant owners to implement measures enabling workers to better cope with a loss of off-site and on-site emergency backup electric power—a “station blackout.” The precedent comes from the NRC’s post-9/11 requirement that plant owners install portable diesel-fueled pumps and generators to protect their facilities from a prolonged station blackout caused by an aircraft attack. However, because the NRC defines an aircraft attack as a beyond-design-basis event, it did not require this equipment to meet high quality and reliability standards or be hardened to withstand other potential events, such as natural disasters. Indeed, post-Fukushima inspections have confirmed that at many plants some of the equipment would not survive earthquakes or floods.

Read More:

http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/nrc-needs-a-more.html

Cindy Folkers - The Demonic Reality of Fukushima

In the days following the March 11, 2011 beginning of the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe, chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano repeatedly reassured the Japanese public, news media, and world community that there was “no immediate health risk” from mounting radioactive releases from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. His choice of words was very similar to the U.S. nuclear power establishment’s during the Three Mile Island melt down of 1979, as captured by Rosalie Bertell’s classic anti-nuclear primer No Immediate Danger? Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth.

However, as the New York Times revealed Monday, Edano and his colleagues at the highest levels of the Japanese federal government were actually worried about a worst-case scenario, a “demonic chain reaction” of atomic reactor meltdowns spreading catastrophic amounts of deadly radioactivity from the three operating units at Fukushima Daiichi (as well as multiple high-level radioactive waste storage pools there), to the four operating reactors and pools at Fukushima Daini (just 7 miles south, which itself avoided catastrophe thanks to a single surviving offsite power line; several offsite power lines were lost to the earthquake, and all diesel generators were lost to the tsunami), to the operating reactor and pool at Tokai (much closer to Tokyo). Regarding such a nightmare scenario, eerily similar to what Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa depicted in Dreams, the New York Times reported:

Read More:

HTTP://WWW.COUNTERPUNCH.ORG/2012/03/02/THE-DEMONIC-REALITY-OF-FUKUSHIMA/

With New Plants Approved, Anti-Nuke Coalition Readies for Fight

As expected, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted this afternoon to extend licenses to build two nuclear reactors at the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia, the first such licenses granted in over thirty years. A statement from the NRC said:

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has concluded its mandatory hearing on Southern Nuclear Operating Company’s (SNC) application for two Combined Licenses (COL) at the Vogtle site in Georgia. In a 4-1 vote, the Commission found the staff’s review adequate to make the necessary regulatory safety and environmental findings, clearing the way for the NRC’s Office of New Reactors to issue the COLs.

The Associated Press reports:

Allison Fisher, an energy expert for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, called the NRC's action — less than a year after the Japan crisis — a step in the wrong direction.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/02/09-4

Karl Grossman - Eminent Domain and the Fight Against Nuclear Power

The nuclear power program in the United States was set up rigged—to allow the federal government to push atomic energy with state and local governments “pre-empted” on most issues.

That’s what the State of Vermont was confronted with last week as a federal judge blocked the state’s attempts to shut down the accident-plagued Vermont Yankee nuclear plant.

But there’s a way around this federal nuclear fix—the use by states of their power of “eminent domain.” That’s a legal principle going back centuries and is how, commonly, states condemn property for a highway right-of-way if the owners refuse to sell.

The application of the state’s power of “eminent domain” to nuclear power was pioneered in New York State in the 1980s—and was how the completed Shoreham nuclear plant was stopped from opening. That ended the scheme of nuclear promoters to turn Long Island into a “nuclear park” with seven to 11 nuclear plants.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/23-0

Harvey Wasserman - We May Yet Lose Tokyo… Not to Mention Alaska… and Now Georgia, Too

As the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approves a construction/operating license for two new reactors in Georgia, alarming reports from Japan indicate the Fukushima catastrophe is far from over.
Thousands of tons of intensely radioactive spent fuel are still in serious jeopardy. Radioactive trash and water are spewing into the environment. And nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen reports that during the string of disasters following March 11, 2011's earthquake and tsunami, Fukushima 1's containment cap may actually have lifted off its base, releasing dangerously radioactive gasses and opening a gap for an ensuing hydrogen explosion.

There are some two dozen of these Mark I-style containments currently in place in the US.

Newly released secret email from the NRC also shows its Commissioners were in the dark about much of what was happening during the early hours of the Fukushima disaster. They worried that Tokyo might have to be evacuated, and that airborne radiation spewing across the Pacific could seriously contaminate Alaska.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/10-2

Matthew Stein - Why a Likely Natural Event Could Cause Nuclear Reactors to Melt Down and Our Grid to Crash

There are nearly 450 nuclear reactors in the world, with hundreds more either under construction or in the planning stages. There are 104 of these reactors in the USA and 195 in Europe. Imagine the havoc it would wreak on our civilization and the planet's ecosystems if we were to suddenly experience not just one or two nuclear meltdowns, but many more of them. How likely is it that our world might experience an event that could ultimately cause multiple reactors to fail and melt down at approximately the same time? Unless we take significant protective measures, this apocalyptic scenario is possible.

Consider the ongoing problems caused by three reactor core meltdowns, explosions and breached containment vessels at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi facility, and the subsequent health and environmental issues. Consider the millions of innocent victims who have already died or continue to suffer from horrific radiation-related health problems ("Chernobyl AIDS," epidemic cancers, chronic fatigue, etc.) resulting from the Chernobyl reactor explosions, fires and fallout. If just two serious nuclear disasters, spaced 25 years apart, could cause such horrendous environmental catastrophes, it is hard to imagine how we could ever hope to recover from hundreds of similar nuclear incidents occurring simultaneously across the planet.

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/153833/why_a_likely_natural_event_could_cause_nuclear_reactors_to_melt_down_and_our_grid_to_crash

Amitabh Pal - Renewables Now Surpass Nuclear Power in the US

This is a good way to get 2012 rolling: A recent report reveals that for the first time renewable sources have outdone nuclear power in the United States.

“Renewable energy sources—wind, water, solar and others—passed nuclear generation as a share of U.S. power in September, according to the Energy Information Administration,” reports the San Francisco Business Times. “The EIA report showed 6.944 quadrillion Btus, or ‘quads,’ of energy generated from renewable sources in the first nine months of 2011, compared with 6.173 quads from nuclear power.”

Now, the “renewable” category here is a bit of a catch-all, since it includes sources that are somewhat dubious from a clean energy standpoint, such as biofuels. But, still, the fact that nuclear power is now contributing a smaller amount to the national grid than renewables is of major significance. We are on our way to a green energy future faster than many of us had imagined

Read More:

http://www.progressive.org/renewables.html

Harvey Wasserman - 2012 Is the Year to Finally Bury Nuke Power

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harvey-wasserman/2012-is-the-year-to-final_b_1180444.html

The year 2012 has opened with news that Fukushima's radioactive cloud may already have killed some 14,000 Americans, according to a major study just published in the International Journal of Health Services.

Germany and Japan, the world's third and fourth largest economies, along with numerous others countries, have definitively turned away from the "Peaceful Atom."

But it hasn't yet been buried. That's up to us. And 2012 is the year to do it.

We are already very close. The mythical "Nuclear Renaissance" has been gutted by Fukushima, low gas prices and the escalating Solartopian revolution in green energy. Solar panels, wind turbines, sustainable bio-fuels, geo-thermal, ocean thermal, increased efficiency and much more have simply priced atomic energy out of the market.

There is virtually no private money to build new reactors -- except where there are huge government subsidies and guarantees. In 2012 we must make those all go away.

Likewise, there are increasingly powerful grassroots movements focused on shutting reactors that still operate. Germany has shut 7, and the rest will be gone by 2022, if not earlier. In Japan, just 11 of more than 50 reactors now operate. Because local governments can prevent nukes from re-opening once they go down for refueling, Japan could emerge from 2012 without a single nuke on line.

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