Blog
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Geiger Readings for April 20, 2013
Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on April 20, 2013
Ambient office = .090 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .099 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain = .102 microsieverts per hour
Zante currants from local grocery store = .047 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .110 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .087 microsieverts per hour
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Radioactive Waste 24 – Legacy Waste in the English Channel
There is a lot of nuclear waste around the world that was just dumped and forgotten. Some of it is buried and some is in bodies of water. Sometimes there is an incident such as the cancer cluster in the United States in an area when nuclear work was done during the Cold War and then shut down and forgotten. Sometimes people find old records that point to a forgotten dump. And on other occasions, someone stumbles across the old dump.
Between 1950 and 1963, over twenty eight thousand fifty-five gallon steel drums containing radioactive waste were dumped into the English Channel by the British and the Belgians. The drums contained an estimated seventeen metric tons of waste. They were dumped into an underwater valley known as Hurd’s Deep, north of the island of Alderney. The British barrels were estimated to contain as much as fifty eight trillion Becquerels of radioactivity. The European has a safe limit for drinking water of ten Becquerels per liter.
The reasoning was that, of course, the steel would rust and the containers would open. This would release the waste which would then be mixed and diluted by the seawater so that it would no longer be dangerous. The natural world’s ability to deal with toxic human waste has been overestimated many times and this case is one of them.
German journalists have located and photographed intact barrels of radioactive waste, dating from the dumping in the Fifties and early Sixties. Over fifty years have passed since these barrels were dumped and the predicted rusting away has not occurred. The German journalists believe that there may be many more intact barrels in Hurd’s Deep. Environmental activists in Germany’s Green Party demands that the barrels be removed from the channel and disposed of properly. The German government has responded to past complaints about ocean dumping by stating that their monitoring of the Channel has indicated no significant radioactivity over the dumping area.
Ocean dumping of nuclear wastes has been banned by international treaty for twenty years. The record of the creation of safe permanent underground repositories for nuclear waste has been rather poor. The United States estimates that it will be at least 2048 before there is a permanent U.S. repository for nuclear waste. In the meantime the waste is piling up in the fleet of U.S. reactors. Now we find that some older attempts to dump radioactive waste in a safe way have failed. My fear is that more and more areas of land and water will become radioactive contamination zones, unsafe for human activities. These zone will not be cleaned up because there will be no government or private funds available for such work.
English Channel – red dot is area when barrels were found:
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Geiger Readings for April 19, 2013
Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on April 19, 2013
Ambient office = .070 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .085 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain = .126 microsieverts per hour
Asparagus from local grocery store = .067 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .077 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .061 microsieverts per hour
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U.S. Government Deliberately Exposed Citizens to Radiation
Many people in the United States know that the Nazis performed horrible and often lethal experiments on prisoners. Lesser known are equally horrific experiments carried out by the Japanese during World War II. While we are reluctant to accept that the United States Government would ever experiment on U.S. citizens without their permission or even knowledge, there are known incidents of such experiments. The CIA carried out experiments where they dosed unsuspecting people with psychedelic drugs to see how they would respond in the early 1960s. Generally these experiments were not physically harmful, but one man committed suicide after being dosed with LSD. Unfortunately there were other experiments that were much more dangerous.
Twenty years ago, a group of documents were declassified by the United States Government which covered over two thousand experiments on over twenty thousand people over a period of sixty years. Subjects included ordinary civilians, prisoners, federal workers, hospital patients, pregnant women, infants, disabled workers and military personnel. Many of the test subjects were poor, sick, elderly or terminally ill. These experiments were detailed in a book by Eileen Welsome titled The Plutonium Files. Most of the experiments consisted of feeding the subjects a radioactive material to discover the short and long term effects of radiation on the human body. Most of the time the subjects were not told about experiment or asked for their consent.
Documents about the experiments were classified by the United States Government. I wish I could say that the motivation for the classification was for national security but unfortunately there is a memo from a Colonel in the Army Corp of Engineers in 1947 that says otherwise. ““It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans and might have adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits.” So it was not a matter of protecting the country from enemies but protecting the government from its own citizens with legitimate complaints.
In several studies, pregnant women and children were poisoned with radioactive iron. In another study, prison inmates had their testicles x-rayed to see what does would make them sterile. There were a series of studies where psychiatric inmates and children were injected with radioactive iodine which would threaten their thyroid glands were iodine is accumulated. Mentally disabled children were fed radioactive calcium in oatmeal to track digestions of radioactive materials. Burn victims at the Medical College of Virginia were injected with phosphorus-32 which definitely increased death rates.
As late as 1985, the United States Department of Energy and the United States Air Force conducted experiments where they deliberately caused nuclear reactors to meltdown in Idaho and Utah in order to see how the released radiation would spread in the atmosphere. Estimates of the amount of radiation released indicated that it was many times the amount of radiation released in the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. Planes even dumped radioactive dust around Oak Ridge, Tenn., Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Dugway, Utah between 1944 and 1961.
Many U.S. military personnel were ordered to stand close enough to nuclear tests in the United States to be exposed to serious radiation while not being given complete information about the risk. This could be rationalized as necessary in view of the fact that the U.S. may have become involved in a nuclear war and the military needed to know the effects and range of the radiation from a nuclear explosion. However, the National Cancer Institute found in 1997 that everyone in the country at the time of the nuclear bomb tests in the Southwest was exposed to radioactive fallout. Cancer rates have been rising in the past few decades and it is possible that some of these cases are a result of these radioactive exposures.
We rightly fear the possibility of a nuclear attack from another country or a nuclear terrorism incident perpetrated by foreign or American terrorists. However, it is just not right that we have to fear the repercussions of the deliberate exposure of U.S. citizens to radioactive materials by our own government.
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Geiger Readings for April 18, 2013
Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on April 18, 2013
Ambient office = .070 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .108 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain = .103 microsieverts per hour
Iceberg lettuce from local grocery store = .129 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .060 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .053 microsieverts per hour
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New Japanese Rules for Restarting Reactors
Following the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in Japan, all their operating nuclear reactors were shut down. There has been a fierce debate and many mass protests as the Japanese government and people try to decide what role nuclear energy should have in supplying electricity to their country. Japan has little in the way of natural fossil fuel resources for energy generation which makes their choice of energy sources much more difficult. Nuclear reactors had supplied about thirty percent of the electricity for Japan prior to Fukushima. Nuclear energy had been made a national priority and there were plans to expand to nuclear power generation to forty percent before the disaster. There had been predictions of serious blackouts without the reactors online but they have not materialized yet.
Over eighty percent of the Japanese people no longer trust the Japanese government and private nuclear power plant operators to keep the people safe in the event of nuclear accidents and to report accurately the danger and any release of radiation. There is enormous pressure on the government and nuclear plant operators to reassure the public that nuclear energy can be safe and efficient. New rules have been drafted by the Nuclear Regulation Authority for restarting the Japanese fleet of nuclear reactors. The new rules are now available for thirty days for public comment.
A proposed major equipment upgrade involves filtered vents to insure that if there is a release of steam from a reactor containment building at a boiling water reactor, radioactive particles will be filtered out. This will require a retrofit at all the Japanese boiling water reactor which will take years. This upgrade has been discussed in the United States but the nuclear industry has managed to prevent any such regulation so far, complaining that it would be too expensive. Considering the billions of dollars involved in the nuclear industry, I find that complaint hard to take seriously.
Japan is located at the intersection of four major tectonic plates. It is extremely earthquake prone. The quake that destroyed the Fukushima reactors was about a 7 on the Richter Scale for rating earthquakes. Additional protection from earthquakes and tsunami has been mandated in the new NRA rules. They are not going to start reactors if they are over an active fault line. Currently there are five reactors known to be over such fault lines and they are finding new fault lines under some of their other reactors. Some levees will have to be build around existing plants to protect them from floods.
The Richter Scale is logarithmic so each digit represents a quake that is ten time stronger than the one before. It used to be thought that Japan probably would not have earthquakes in the Richter 9 level until recent research indicates that such huge quakes can occur there. That would be one hundred times the impact of the Fukushima quake. I don’t believe that any of the Japanese nuclear reactors are rated for this intensity of quake.
Fourteen Japanese nuclear plants do not have fire-resistant wiring. Rewiring them may be too expensive to justify and they may have to be shut down.
In the end, Japan may restart some of their reactors based on location, design, age, etc. but some will never be restarted. If they do restart some of their reactors, it may be years until all the new NRA requirements have been met and permission is given. Fortunately, they are not predicting a electricity shortfall for this summer.
