Radiation levels have surged at Fukushima plant to 100,000% of previous record high. enenews.com

Residents near the Sendai nuclear plant in southern Japan vote today whether to resume operations at the facility, highlighting a conflict between Japanese who benefit from the largess of the industry and those who don’t. bloomberg.com

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has started a Special Inspection to review the circumstances surrounding the loss and peeling of coating in areas of the plant’s torus. pennenergy.com

North Korea probably has the capability to produce a nuclear warhead that could be mounted on a rocket, a top U.S. commander said Friday, moving it closer to building a nuclear missile. foxnews.com

European Union heads of state have agreed targets for the EU to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, raise efficiency and deploy renewables by 2030. world-nuclear-news.org

Britain’s Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre has taken delivery of two new machining centers. world-nuclear-news.org

Ontario Power Generation told a federal advisory panel that the deep geologic repository for nuclear waste under the shores of Lake Huron is not a significant risk to the environment and will not violate the rights of native Canadians. nuclearstreet.com

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it had approved a 40-year license for dry spent-fuel storage at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Lusby, Md. nuclearstreet.com

         In a previous post, I related a story from my own past about nuclear power. Many years ago, in a family conversation, I said “I am sure that engineers can design a safe nuclear power reactor. The problem is that we have to depend on the nuclear industry to be ten times as honest and competent as it has ever been to make it safe to use nuclear power.” In many of my blog posts, I have mentioned the problems that government regulatory agencies have had regulating the nuclear power industry in their respective countries. I have also mentioned many instances of incompetence and deliberate breaking of rules and regulation on the part of nuclear power plant operators. Today I am going to cover another two recent incidents involving the nuclear industry that support my concerns.

        Bechtel National and URS Energy Construction are two nuclear contracting firms working on a plan for a radioactive waste treatment plant at Hanford for the U. S. Department of Energy. A URS whistleblower named Donna Busche was fired when she raised concerns about the safety of the design the contractors were working on. The DoE has requested that the two companies provide over forty five hundred documents relating to the firing of Busche. Bechtel and URS have refused to provide the requested documents. The companies claimed that the documents are protected under attorney-client or attorney work-product privileges. URS also decided on their own that some of the requested documents were not relevant to the DoE investigation. The contracts that were signed for the eleven billion dollar project clearly state that the contractors are legally bound to turn over any requested documents relating to the project, including attorney privilege documents, upon request. With respect to the current dispute, lawyers for the contractors claim that the documents clause of the contract is too broad and is unenforceable. Both contractors claim that they value a “culture of safety” but don’t seem to want to explain why they fired someone who was raising safety concerns.

         Tetra Tech (TT) is a nuclear contractor for the U.S. Navy. TT has been awarded over three hundred million dollars worth of contracts for radioactive waste cleanup for the Navy. TT is currently working on cleaning up radioactively contaminated soil at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco. Hunters Point is a eight hundred and sixty six acre piece of prime waterfront property. It is being developed for urban housing, retail and recreation uses and is one of the biggest such developments in the U.S. Hunters Point is a superfund cleanup site with petroleum fuels, pesticides, volatile organic compounds and radiological materials from a nuclear laboratory and from decontamination of Naval ships. A report last April found that TT had falsified soil sample reports. Samples that were supposed to come from underneath a radiological laboratory were actually taken from other locations that had already been tested and were found to be free of radioactive contamination.

        Here we have three major U.S. nuclear contractors who are either refusing to release requested documents or falsifying test samples for contamination. I wish that I could say that these are exceptional stories but, unfortunately, they are not rare. We cannot afford to risk the dangers of nuclear power with such behavior in the nuclear industry.

Artist’s concept of development at Hunters Point in San Francisco:

Arnie Gunderson says that Fukushima is polluting entire Pacific Ocean. vimeo.com

Experts warn of volcano destroying Japan at any moment, causing nation’s extinction and destroying their nuclear reactors. enenews.com

Workers have entered the cocooned former plutonium-producing F Reactor at the Hanford site in the USA for the first time in six years to conduct a scheduled inspection. world-nuclear-news.org

The Baltiysky Zavod in St Petersburg is on schedule to deliver the first floating nuclear power plant to its customer, Russian nuclear power plant operator Rosenergoatom, in September 2016, the shipyard’s general director Aleksey Kadilov said today. world-nuclear-news.org

 

 

(Please read yesterday’s Part 1 before this article.)        

        All of the agency representatives from the Navy, Seattle Parks, WA Dept. of Ecology and WA Dept. of Health at the meeting at the Mountaineer’s Club in Magnuson Park basically said the same things: There was never a great danger from the radioactive contamination, the contamination is being cleaned up properly and there will not be any danger when the cleanup program is done.

        Representative Pollet begged to differ with the agency reps about what constituted a “safe level” of contamination to leave behind. He also raised the issue of exposure times. The agency people were working on a “recreational use” standard that said if someone used the park two hours a day for five days a week over the course of the year, their exposure would not endanger their health. The Navy was going to clean up the contaminated areas so that the exposure of recreation use would result in a 15 milliRem dose.

        Pollet pointed out that a 15 milliRem dose could pose a health problem and that the EPA had rejected using that standard years ago. For comparison, the standard for the Hanford Cleanup was more stringent than that and it was basically an area of scrub grass along the Columbia River. The Hanford plan was based on ensuring low exposure for a residential area where someone might be outside for ten hours or more every day for a year. The irony is that there is low income housing in Magnuson Park and hundreds of people live there including children.

        When pressed on the question of where the 15 milliRem standard came from, the rep from the WADoH said that that was the cleanup limit because it was impossible to cleanup any more than that because you could not detect radioactive contamination below the natural radiation levels in the area. Rep Pollet stated that that was not true and once again repeated that the EPA standards and the work at Hanford already require that lower levels of radioactive contamination be left behind at a cleaned up site.

       There were a lot of questions about the safety of the people living in the low income housing who were being urged to grow their own food in pea patches in Magnuson Park. These people will definitely be in the Park for more than a few hours a day. The rep from Seattle Parks was very confident that there was absolutely no danger from growing food in the Park because the Parks Department had brought in outside soil for the pea patch garden area. Some in the audience were not reassured and pointed out that contamination from below the imported soil could be brought out by heavy rains and possibly drawn out of the soil by growing plants.

      There were questions about the origin of the cesium and strontium that were also detected in the soil near one of the old buildings. The rep from Seattle Parks said that there could be strontium in the paint for the gauges in the planes. She also said that the cesium could have come from gauges. My research found that that strontium was not used in radioluminescent paint. Neither was cesium. An audience member suggested that the cesium and strontium might have been washed off planes returning from monitoring the testing of nuclear devices in the Pacific in the 1950s.

       Rep Pollet and members of the audience demanded that a citizens advisory board be created and hold regular meetings with public access. If rep Pollet had not been there to counter some of the statements of the panel of “experts,” the audience would have left with the impression that experts agreed that the cleanup was going just fine. However, there are plans for the Navy to conduct a search of historical records and to do more testing in other areas of the Park in the future. There is no guarantee that all the contamination has been found.

One of the contaminated buildings at Magnuson Park:

Radioactive material from Fukushima will keep coming across to North America for centuries. enenews.com

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Thursday that the country would build its third nuclear power plant within five years and that it would be a 100 percent domestic project. nuclearstreet.com

A windy day with several nuclear reactors off line in Britain resulted in an unlikely turning of the tables with more electricity in the country generated by wind turbines than nuclear power for a day. nuclearstreet.com

U.S. regulators on Monday took the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Browns Ferry power station off a watch list after forty-one months and scheduled a conference to review flood protection safety at Arkansas Nuclear One. nuclearstreet.com