From the days of the Hudson Bay Company, the indigenous peoples in what became the country of Canada have been move off ancestral lands, exploited for their resources, their cultures deliberately destroyed and their health, well-being and environments undermined.

           Deline is a small village of Dene people on the shore of Great Bear Lake in the North West Territories. Radium was mined on the shore of the lake from 1934 to 1939 and a uranium mine was opened in 1943 that operated until 1962. Most of the workers in the mine were men from the Dene tribe who carried bags of radioactive uranium ore up out of the mine. Radioactive tailings from the mining operation were dumped directly into the lake and were also used as landfill without regard to the health of the Dene or impact on the environment.

          The uranium mine was opened under emergency War regulation which make retroactive compensation and mitigation very difficult to achieve in court. The mine was operated by a Canadian Crown corporation and the refined uranium was exported to the United States for the Manhattan Project. Once again, the miners were given no warnings about the dangers of handling these toxic radioactive ores so they took no precautions with respect to their water and food.

           In 1975, young miners from Deline were recruited to work on a government training program. They were not given gas masks to protect them from the threat of radon gas exposure. In 1997, ten young men from Deline were recruited to help clean up some hot spots of radioactive soil in Sawmill Bay, a community in the area. They were not told of the dangers of the work but what they have learned since has them fearing serious contamination of land, water and animals in their area which threaten their health and survival.

           Deline is known as the “village of widows” because most of the men who worked as laborers in the mines have died of some form of cancer. The women were left to raise their children without their husbands and fathers to bring support the families. This has resulted in them becoming dependent on welfare. The children are raised without access to the wisdom and traditional knowledge of their missing male elders. This is destroying their ability to understand and continue their ancestral ways.

          In 1998, the Dene First Nation went to the Canadian government with a demand for compensation and mitigation. After a five-year study, the government concluded that there was insufficient evidence that the radioactivity from the mine was responsible for the high level of cancer deaths in the village. In other similar situations with uranium mines on indigenous peoples lands, there is evidence that economic considerations have been influencing government denials of health and environmental dangers of uranium mine in spite of mounting scientific validation of such dangers.

         This is not just a historical question of redressing old injuries to indigenous peoples in Canada. There are plans to expand uranium mining on tribal lands.

             When explorers and settlers arrived in North America, their diseases and wars reduced the Native American population by an estimated ninety percent over a few generations. This left vast areas of the country unpopulated and ripe for exploitation. Numerous treaties were struck with Indian Tribes giving them rights to their ancestral lands. Unfortunately, the U.S. government repeatedly broke those treaties. The Indians were eventually driven onto relative small reservations in desolate areas. The fiction has been maintained until the present that these reservations are independent sovereign nations within the United States. Indian Reservations in the United States are administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the Department of the Interior.   

         After World War II, the U.S. government was moving forward with both a nuclear weapons program and a commercial nuclear power program. Uranium was needed for both these programs. In 1948, the Atomic Energy Commission created a program to stimulate domestic uranium production. Fixed prices were guaranteed for purchase of uranium, initial production from new mines would be received bonuses above the fixed purchase price and air and ground surveys were conducted in order to locate new reserves of uranium ore. A great deal of ore reserves were located in the Four Corner area, where the states of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah meet. There Navajo Indian Reservation is located in this area.

          Many uranium mines were opened on or near the Navajo Lands. The U.S. government wanted the uranium, the Navajo were desperate for employment and the mining companies wanted the profits. Unfortunately, the contracts for the leases and royalties were poorly written and little money found its way to the Navajo Nation. The workers were not warned about the dangers of working in poorly ventilated uranium mines. Many miners suffered injury and even premature death from radiation exposure. Horrible damage was done to the environment around the mines with pollution of land, surface water and aquifers that fed wells.

         The Navajo Nation fought back against the health threat and finally won regulations for radiation exposure after thirty years. They fought over environmental damage and instituted new policies for regulating new mines and reclamation of old mining sites.  They also worked on the contracts for leases and royalties to insure that they would benefit from the extraction of resources from their lands.

         With minor variations, this pattern has been played out on other reservations where uranium ore was found. After years of exploitation, injury and environmental damage, tribes have fought back with varying success against the impact of uranium extraction and processing on their tribal lands. The U.S. government once again has failed to keep its promises and obligation to the Native Americans who live on reservations. There is much more to be done to redress this most recent injury done to Native Americans.

Great Seal of the Navajo Nation:

          Previous posts have dealt with uranium mining in Australia. In this post, I want to delve more deeply into the impact on and reaction of the Australian Aboriginals to the mining of uranium on Aboriginal land. All indigenous people in the world have a strong identification with their traditional lands. However, the relationship of the Australian Aboriginals to their ancestral lands goes far beyond the usual strong feelings of indigenous peoples. The Aboriginals see themselves as the custodians of the land and over untold generations they have maintained certain aspects of the landscape as a sacred duty.

           When James Cook discovered Australia in 1770, it is estimated that there were about six hundred thousand Aboriginals. After two hundred and sixty years of imported diseases and racial attacks, the population of Aboriginals had dropped ninety percent to around sixty thousand. Murder of Aboriginals was seldom punished. A policy called terra nullius claimed that when Australia was discovered, the land was empty and belonged to no one. This allowed the colonial governments to displace Aboriginals at any time for any reason or no reason. After centuries of horrible treatment, ninety five percent of the Australian voters voted in 1967 for the Australian government to work to repair the damage to what was left of Aboriginal culture and to provide decent treatment for Aboriginals.

         The government set up the Council of the Office of Aboriginal Affairs to study situation and to communication with the Aboriginal communities. However, other branches of the government were slow to adopt the new attitude. In 1971, a judge in the Supreme Court of the Northern Territories ruled that the British claim of sovereignty over Australia had canceled all Aboriginal land rights. In 1973, the Federal Labour Party established a Commission for Aboriginal Land Rights and a special Fund to collect and distribute money to Aboriginals to purchase land. In 1976, the Federal government passed the Aboriginal Land Rights Act that recognized Aboriginal rights to own land in the Northern Territories with certain restrictions. The land had to be unclaimed by anyone else and the Aboriginals had to prove their ancestral right to the land.

         Kakadu National Park is a desolate nature preserve in a remote part of Australia’s Northern Territories. It is sacred to the Mirrar Aboriginal clan whose ancestors were there for thousands of years. It is one of the 20 sites recognized by UNESCO for its cultural and natural value. Uranium was discovered under Kakadu and the Fox inquiry was set up by the Australian government in 1975 to consider uranium mining in Kakadu. The inquiry considered the Mirrar attachment to the land and said that it had to be respected or set aside. The Fox inquiry recommended that the Aboriginal land rights be ignored and that mining be allowed. In 1978, the Australian government chose to override the provision in the Aboriginal Land Rights law that said that the Aboriginals had a right to veto mining on Aboriginal land. Energy Resources of Australia (ERA) was allowed to open the Ranger mine in the Kakadu Park in 1980.  

        To date, ERA has extracted twenty seven million tons of uranium ore from Ranger and has milled sixteen million tons of uranium. The tailings from the mine are highly toxic and will be radioactive for thousands of years. Animals and plants have been killed and higher levels of radiation have been detected in the land and water around the mine. There have been over 100 breaches of environmental regulations by the operators of Ranger.

        Now ERA wants to open another mine in the same area and the Aboriginals are appealing to UNESCO for help. They wanted UNESCO to say that the mining was endangering the Kakadu preserve. UNESCO debated it but decided not to say that the preserve was in danger, partly because the Australian government said that it would ignore any such classification.

        So here we are, three hundred and forty years since the British arrived in Australia and forty five years after the recognition of Aboriginal land rights. But the quest for uranium trumps respect for Aboriginal rights and, once again, their lands are open for exploitation by private corporations. 

 

          A lot of ink has been spilled over the decision of the German government to shut down all the nuclear reactors in Germany by 2020. Concern has been expressed over the impact of the shut down on German’s power needs, the German economy, the reduction of carbon dioxide emission for German power generation, etc. Forbes Magazine had a recent headline about it that asked if the decision was “Insane….or Just Plain Stupid.” The German company Siemens projected that the phase out would cost Germany close to 2 trillion dollars. Major shortfalls in the supply of electricity in Germany were predicted.

           A recent special edition of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists delves into the projected impact of the German shut down. Its conclusions do not support many of the concerns and may signal a turning point in the arguments for and against the worldwide use of nuclear power.

          What has been reported is that although German power generation and carbon dioxide emissions have been dropping since 1990, Germany’s gross domestic products has risen by thirty six percent in the same period, disproving many dire warnings of economic doom caused by the rejection of nuclear power. The nuclear shut down and the support of a move to sustainable alternative energy sources are already showing significant environmental and economic benefits.

         Germany began planning and action towards the nuclear phase-out more than a decade ago. Already, movement to renewable energy has benefited farmers, investors and small businesses. It is anticipated that the changes in energy sources will have only a small and temporary impact on the price of electricity in particular and the German economy in general.

           If a major first world country such as Germany can phase out nuclear power completely within a decade with little in the way of economic or environmental cost then major arguments in support of nuclear power have taken a serious blow. Nuclear advocates will find it much more difficult to convince governments and citizens that nuclear power is necessary and inescapable.

           While the future may look bright for Germany, the question has been raised as to how other countries who were buying surplus electricity from will make up the difference. Some of the other European countries who buy power from Germany may consider building more coal or oil fired power plants which will increase carbon dioxide release and offset German reductions. Or they may build more nuclear power plants with all their attendant problems. Hopefully, the example of Germany will inspire them to explore conservation, energy efficiency standards and renewable energy sources as an alternative to both fossil fuels and nuclear power.

          The global nuclear technology industry is very tightly interconnected. Unlike many other sources of energy, if countries that manufacture nuclear reactors and their components or countries that refine uranium into fuel for reactors begin shutting down their nuclear technology involvement, it will become harder and harder for the remaining countries who want to continue using nuclear power to do so. Without a global government, there is no way to stop this trend once it has begun and the report in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists may seen as the tipping point.

From nobelwomensinitiative.org:

           I have discussed spent nuclear fuel in a number of previous posts. I just encountered a study that deals with the current spent fuel rods inventory in the United States and the dangers that it poses. I thought that it would be worthwhile to recap the findings in the study.

            Nuclear reactors employ fuel rods which are steel alloy tubes containing ceramic pellets of enriched uranium. These rods are combined into assemblies of a few hundred and then loaded into the core of a reactor. When the uranium has been depleted to the point where it can no longer server as fuel, the rods are removed from the reactor and stored in a pool of water for a year or more until they become less radioactive. When first removed from the reactor, a typical fuel rod gives off enough radiation to kill a nearby person in seconds. Even after several years of cooling, the rods as still very dangerous.

           The United States has accumulated about 30 million spent fuel rods in the decades of commercial reactor operation. This is about sixty five thousand metric tons of fuel rods. Currently, seventy five percent of the spent fuel rods are stored in the cooling pools near the reactors. About forty percent of the radioactivity in the spent fuel rods is cesium-137. The amount of cesium in the U.S. fuel rod inventory is about twenty times the amount released by all the atmospheric tests of nuclear bombs. This is also about twenty times the amount of cesium-137 released by the Chernobyl accident. A single pool at a U.S. reactor may hold more fuel rods than the combined pools of the reactors damaged at Fukushima last year. The rods in just one of the Fukushima pools are considered a major threat to the world if the cooling system fails.

          These spent fuel rod pools were only ever meant to be temporary storage with the intention being to move the rods to a permanent geological repository like the one planned for Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Unfortunately, Yucca Mountain got derailed by a combination of political and environmental factors. These pools are constructed form ordinary building materials. While they are protected from the weather, they are not secure from more dangerous threats such as major storms, earthquakes or terrorist attacks. There are thirty one U.S. reactors which have spent fuel pools several stories above the ground like the Fukushima fuel pools which are in danger of collapsing from structural damage. They do not have steel-lined concreted covers like the reactor vessels. Another sixty nine U.S. pools are not multiple stories above the ground but they also do not have steel-lined, concrete covers.

          In the last thirty years, U.S. reactors have temporarily lost a large portion of their cooling water for spent nuclear fuel pools. If the rods are exposed to the open air, they will spontaneously burn. There have been eleven incidents since 911 after which the pools were supposed to be made more secure and safer. There are systems in place in the spent fuel pools to prevent a chain reaction from taking place. Corrosion has damages some of these systems in some pools to the point where chain reactions would not be prevented. Fuel rods are being used that have a higher proportion of U-235 and burn hotter than the older rods. The new rods are more radioactive when they are removed from the reactor and they are overloading the cooling systems in the spent fuel pools. The hotter fuel in the new rods can cause the shell of the rod to become brittle and also generate more hydrogen gas which could lead to explosions.

        Many reactors are near major cities in the U.S. If there was a major accident involving spent fuel rods, it could require the evacuation of millions and the abandonment of large urban areas. Thousands of deaths from cancer would result. The damages would run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. The U.S. should immediate begin placing all fuel rods older than five years in dry casks. The cost would be a few billion dollars which is a small price to pay considering the enormous cost in dollars and lives a major accident would cause. These spent fuel pools a major threat to millions of Americans and should be dealt with immediately!

 Spent nuclear fuel at Hanford, WA:

          A major problem with government oversight of the commercial sector is something called regulatory capture. The idea is that a government agency that is supposed to be an independent watchdog for the public interest becomes a lapdog for the industry that it is supposed to regulate. This has probably been a problem for as long as there have been governments and businesses. The nuclear industry is no exception and the huge amount of money invested in construction and operation is motivation enough for the nuclear industry to do its best to turn the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission into a tame and toothless regulator.

           The NRC sets standards for procedures, designs and materials used at nuclear power plants. The Browns Ferry plant in Alabama suffered a fire in 1975 that destroyed the electrical wiring for the coolant control system. In 1980, the NRC issued new regulations for fire protection as a result of the Browns Ferry fire. In the face of complaints from the nuclear industry that proven brand name fire barrier materials were too expensive, the NRC approve a series of substandard fire barrier materials over the next 30 years. In 2010, a report was issued by the NRC that claimed that they had finally solved the problem of adequate fire barrier materials but most plants in the US have not complied with the new rules..

When nuclear reactor operators encounter problems at their facilities that could lead to release of radioactivity, they are supposed to report them to the NRC but they often don’t. They may falsify records of equipment and facility tests or they may change their own specifications for what they consider to be safe. Exelon Corporation knew that the pipes that circulate coolant at the Bryon nuclear power plant in Illinois were being corroded and getting thinner and thinner. The pipes should have been replaced but Exelon kept reducing the thickness that was required safe instead. The NRC failed to inspect the pipes for eight years before one of the pipes was broken in a routine cleaning operations in 2007. The NRC also failed to notice that Exelon was repeatedly reducing what it considered to be the safe thickness. In an emergency, these thin pipes could have led to a serious release of radioactivity. When the problem was uncovered, Exelon only got a low level reprimand from the NRC.

           Top officials of the NRC are drawn from the nuclear industry and often return to it after their time at the NRC. There are ethical standards that require NRC officials to recuse  themselves from decisions that would affect the profits of companies with which they have connections. There have been situations where NRC officials have worked on cases involving companies which they had previously contacted seeking employment when they retired from the NRC. This is a blatant conflict of interest but they are seldom confronted or prosecuted over such lapses.

          In Vermont, the state government denied a license extension to the Vermont Yankee reactor which had had a lot of operational problems. The owners of the reactor appealed to the NRC which granted the license extension. A legal battle followed which is still in process. In confrontations with the NRC, reactor operators have been able to get the NRC to back down on regulatory demands. Some of the commissioners who have been appointed to the NRC have strong industry ties and have been vocal proponents of nuclear energy before coming to the NRC.

         There is evidence that the situation has been improving and the recent safety record of the nuclear industry has been better than in years past. However, there are still a lot of reasons to be concerned that the NRC has been and continues to be a victim of regulatory capture. With the possibility for horrible disasters from nuclear reactor accidents, this is not acceptable.

          I have already mentioned in several previous posts problems with TEPCO in particular and the Japanese nuclear industry in general I have covered the Fukushima disaster in March of 2011 extensively. Today I am going to delve into past problems involving Japanese companies that own and operate nuclear reactors.

        In 1988, a drive controller for control rod failed at Fukushima II-4. TEPCO asked Hitachi to substitute another drive controller and to put the serial number from the failed controller on the new controller which did not undergo the usual inspection process. This incident was only reported to the Japanese government by Hitachi in 2007.

         In 2002, TEPCO was involved in a scandal when a whistleblower provided information that showed that TEPCO had falsified inspection records and concealed problems at its nuclear power plants. Operation of the Fukushima I-1 reactor was suspended for a year because of falsification of a test on the seals of the containment vessel. TEPCO was forced to shut down all 17 of its reactors and four executives resigned. TEPCO presented a plan to regain public trust including “increasing transparency, improving company culture and instilling corporate ethics.”

        In late 2006, news of extensive falsification of records and deception with respect to safety at power plants came to light. In 2007, the government ordered all twelve power companies in Japan to submit thorough reports of all problems at their power plants. The reports contained over four hundred incidents at nuclear power plants including over two hundred that involved TEPCO reactors.

        Following the revelations of the mandated government reports in 2007, TEPCO again announced a plan to deal with their problems. Given what happened in March of 2011 at Fukushima and the charges against TEPCO that followed, all their plans for positive changes apparently had little effect. This appears to be a repeating pattern with scandals revealing falsified records, irregular behavior and unreported accidents leading to public censor. The guilty parties promise to do a lot better in the future. Time passes. Then there is another round of scandal, revelation and contrition which does nothing to improve the situation.

        The Japanese regulatory organization, the Nuclear Industrial and Safety Agency (NISA), has little power to force regulatory compliance. Part of the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry and charged with promoting nuclear power in Japan, the Agency also has little motivation to crack down on non-compliant companies or to publicize problems. The billions of dollars that flow through the nuclear industry provide plenty of incentive for companies to cut corners, ignore procedures, bribe companies and officials all in the name of increasing profits. These problems are not restricted to Japan. There are similar patterns of behavior in other countries that have nuclear power programs. Nuclear power will not be a safe form of energy until these institutional issues are dealt with.

         When I was just a kid, someone said that I was a cynic. I got a dictionary and looked up the word. Turns out that it comes from an ancient Greek school of philosophy. These Cynics felt that human institutions were perfectible but they had not been perfected yet and they offered constructive criticism. Over the centuries, institutions who do not like to be criticized even when it is justified, distorted the meaning until the present day when the word has overtones of bitterness and harsh criticism.

         The reason that I bring up this personal story is that it reflects how I feel about the global nuclear industry. The institutions that design, build, own, manage and regulate the global network of commercial nuclear reactors may be perfectible but they certainly have not achieved perfection yet. As with all institutions, they are prone to become self-centered and self-serving. Corruption is an ever present danger in any industry that is regulated by government. Owners who feel that they are immune to the human and environmental damage that may be caused by their industries are tempted to cut corners, bribe officials, ignore regulation, etc. in the pursuit of profits. Here are a few examples from this year.

          In April, South Korean prosecutors charged four executives of the Korean Hydro and Nuclear Power with bribery. The charges were related to a lobbyist who collected six hundred thousand dollars from various suppliers to the Korean nuclear industry. The lobbyist guaranteed the suppliers that he could obtain contracts for them from friends in the industry. Although the whole idea of lobbying government officials is questionable, this clearly crossed the line from lobbying to bribery.

         Taiwan impeached four senior executives at the state-owned Taiwan Nuclear Power Company and the former Bureau of Energy director-general in June. The charges were related to procurement corruption that inflated the cost of orders by six billion dollars over what was actually required. Other officials are expected to face impeachment over similar charges.

         In June, Data Systems & Solutions, a company that provides reactor integrity solutions and reactor support services in the US and Europe, agreed to pay a eight million eight hundred thousand dollar fine for bribing officials at a Lithuanian nuclear power plant. The bribes were paid in order to obtain contracts for design, installation and support of instrumentation at the Lithuanian plant. The U.S. Department of Justice objected to a clear pattern of illegal activity that extended over years.

          Some of these cases are excused by the industry on the grounds that they are rare and did not endanger the public. Unfortunately, they are not all that rare and it is difficult if not impossible to know how much they may have endangered the operational integrity of commercial reactors. I remember hearing a lecture by Robert McChesney in which he said that it was common knowledge in the media industry that it was not safe to write about corporate corruption. The unspoken rule was that if you had to write about it then you always said that the problems were related to “a few bad apples” and were not fundamental to the system.

From Nuclear-News.net:

           I have covered Fukushima extensively in these posts but I have just come across something that I had not seen before. There have been recent articles lately about the involvement of the Yakuza in the Japanese nuclear industry and the presence of members of the Yakuza at the Fukushima nuclear plant that suffered the catastrophe in March of 2011.

         The Yakuza are a Japanese criminal syndicate with extensive ties to business and politics in Japan. They are acknowledged and regulated by the government. Their money comes from “extortion, blackmail, construction, real estate, collection services, financial market manipulation, protection rackets, fraud and a labyrinth of front companies including labor dispatch services and private detective agencies. They do the work that no one else will do or find the workers for jobs no one wants.” One Yakuza member said that when a woman reaches the bottom, the only work left is the sex trade. When a man reaches the bottom, the only work left is at nuclear reactors.

          TEPCO, the company that owns the Fukushima plant, has a long history of scandals, corruption, unreported safety problems, doctored documents, altered photographs, etc. A book titled “The Yakuza and the Nuclear Industry,” was recently published in Japan. The author claims that TEPCO was not an anomaly but part of a nuclear industry rife with corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, lax regulation, bribery, lobbyists and unscrupulous companies. And the book claims that the Yakuza was right in the middle of all this.

         With their ties to construction, real estate and the financial industry, it should come as no surprise that the Yakuza were involved in the construction and staffing of many of Japans nuclear plants. The author says that subcontractors paid the Yakuza to get construction contracts at Fukushima and that money intended for construction was funneled to the Yakuza.

        When the author went undercover to work at Fukushima, he found that there was a two tier system of employees. The lower tier supplied by the Yakuza consisted of homeless men, unemployable men, men who owed the Yakuza money and even mentally handicapped individuals. Unlike the upper tier of employees who had good radiation protection gear and monitoring, the lower tier got poorer equipment and was not monitored as carefully for radiation exposure. There were reports from Fukushima that some employees were told to cover their radiation badges to reduce exposure readings. This all ties in with older reports I have read where homeless and older poor people were hired to clean up a nuclear spill. They were given mops and bucket and were not told how dangerous the work was.

        In general, the working conditions were horrible with non-functioning temperature monitors and suits that made going to the bathroom or drinking water almost impossible. People often passed out from the heat. The masks did not filter out all of the radiation in the air and were often ill-fitting. If they went to the TEPCO staff doctors, they were given cold medicine. Anyone who complained was fired.

         Many of the workers fled when the tsunami hit Fukushima. A few men stayed behind to try to deal with the disaster and it is claimed that some of them were Yakuza. After the disaster, the government raised the level of acceptable exposure and then even stopped monitoring radiation at all in some parts of the plant. The Yakuza was enlisted to find emergency workers. They went all over Japan to find people, saying “Bring us the living dead, the people that no one will miss.” The workers were poorly prepared and some were threatened when they tried to quit. If TEPCO didn’t know what the workers were going through, they should have. Now that the Yakuza involvement has been revealed, TEPCO claims that they are telling their subcontractors to cut ties to organized crime.

         However questionable the involvement of the Yakuza at Fukushima, the real criminals are the politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen who, through a combination of greed, corruption and incompetence, allowed a preventable disaster to occur which could ultimate threaten human civilization.

Yakuza member  from Jorgo/Open access:

          Several days ago I wrote a post about the impact of Hurricane Sandy on nuclear reactors on in the East Coast of the United States. With respect to a particular reactor, I wrote:

          “Public Service Enterprise Group manually shut down its Salem Unit 1 reactor near Wilmington, Delaware because four of the six pumps that circulate cooling water were no longer functioning.  A lot of grass and debris were brought in by the storm and could have clogged the water circulation system.”

          I concluded that post by saying that the nuclear plant operators had the situation under control and that there was no risk to the public. Since then, I have seen and posted links that call that assessment, especially with respect to the Salem reactors, into question.

          There have been several reports since that post that suggest that there may be problems with the spent fuel pools at the Salem nuclear plant.. Five of the six pumps that circulate cooling water for the Unit 1 reactors were damaged and had to be shut down. One of the cooling pumps for the Unit 2 reactor lost power and shut down.

          When power is lost at nuclear plants or the coolant pumps are damaged, there can be problems with cooling the fuel rods being stored in the fuel rod pool. Without pumps to circulate the coolant in the pool, the temperature rises. If it gets hot enough to boil off the water in the pool, the rods will be exposed to the air and may begin to burn, releasing toxic smoke and particulates into the atmosphere.

          This is a great concern at Fukushima because of the spent fuel pool on the fourth floor of the damaged Unit 4 reactor building. If there is another quake or hurricane and the building collapses, the rods will burn and release huge amounts of radioactivity into the atmosphere. The winds will carry the plume around the planet, threatening everyone in the Northern Hemisphere.

          Salem Unit 2 reactor was in refueling mode with most of the fuel rods in the pool and lost power to one of its cooling pumps. The pump has been repaired and the reactor is back in service. The reports of dangers to the spent fuel rods pool at Salem Unit 21 claim that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was aware of the potential danger but that neither the NRC or the company that operates the plant released that information to the national media.

          . The Salem Unit 1was operating at 100% when the storm hit. Some of the reactor operators on the East Coast choose to reduce the power output of their reactors or to shut them down entirely as Hurricane Sandy approached. Continuing to run at one hundred percent power as a hurricane is approaching is probably not a good idea.

             With the increase in extreme weather events and the experience of problems with the Fukushima tsunami and the flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy, it would be a good idea for the NRC to review its recommended procedures in case of storms and flooding for nuclear plant operators. Information on potential dangers resulting from storm and flood damage need to be communicated to the public in a timely fashion. If we are going to continue to make use of nuclear power for generating electricity, then the government and the industry are going to have to have the confidence of the public.

Salem Nuclear Power Plant: