Since the dawn of the nuclear age in the 1940s, the U.S. public has been subjected to a propaganda campaign to create acceptance for the U.S. nuclear program and the nuclear industry. The New York Times has been a part of this campaign since it was enlisted during the Manhattan Project to build the first U.S. nuclear bombs during World War II.

            General Leslie Groves, the Director of the Manhattan Project, approached Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of the New Your Times to recruit journalist William L. Laurence to work for the Project. Laurence would be paid by the U.S. government while his wife would receive his regular Times salary. When they needed to test a nuclear device at the Alamagordo Test Range in New Mexico, Laurence wrote a piece for the NYT in which he explained that the detonation that lit up the sky for hundreds of miles was really the explosion of a munitions dump.

        Laurence would go on to produce a ten-part series for the NYT extolling the virtues of the Manhattan Project which was published after the U.S. dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan in 1945. The series was published “on behalf of the government” and was distributed “to the press nationwide.” The NYT was not the biggest paper in the U.S. but it had a sterling reputation which the government was counting on to help shape public opinion about nuclear weapons. Laurence continued to promote nuclear power and nuclear weapons for years. He once wrote that nuclear power would “make the dream of the Earth as a Promised Land come true.” His enthusiastic endorsement of all things nuclear became the offical stance of the NYT.

       The NYT was complicit in the U.S. government Cold War cover-up of the dangers of radioactivity to the environment and human heath following the bombing of Japan and the testing of nuclear devices in the South Pacific. Thousands of U.S. servicemen, civilian technicians and miners, civil defense officials, natives in the South Pacific and others were not apprised of the dangers of the radioactive materials that they were working with or exposed to.

       The NYT times was instrumental in convincing the U.S. public that nuclear power was safe and economical. Recently the NYT has been a major cheerleader for the revival of nuclear power reactor construction in the U.S. Even after the disaster at Fukushima, the NYT stated in an editorial, “We suspect that, when all the evidence is in from Japan, it (nuclear power) will remain a valuable tool.”

       For over seventy years, the NYT has been a strong supporter of nuclear power regardless of the steadily mounting evidence that nuclear power is dangerous and expensive. The NYT has been dishonest with the U.S. public with respect to the pros and cons of nuclear power. Thomas Jefferson was a strong supporter of an independent press as being critical to democracy. The NYT has failed in its duty to its readers and to the very concept of an independent press in the U.S.

 

Fukushima’s Nuclear Reactor Fuel Is “Missing.” zerohedge.com

The cleanup of Fukushima’s leaking nuclear plant has been long, expensive, and plagued with problems. gizmodo.com

Russia and Myanmar have agreed to cooperate in nuclear energy, Rosatom said today, during the first of a two-day working visit to the Southeast Asian country by its deputy director general Nikolay Spassky. world-nuclear-news.org

Several people contacted by the Inspector General’s Office of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said they had been contacted in connection to an investigation as to whether the NRC colluded with Pacific Gas & Electric to downplay concerns that the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant could be unsafe in the event of a serious earthquake occurring along recently discovered seismic fault lines. nuclearstreet.com

             Disposing of nuclear waste is a huge problem for the U.S. nuclear industry. In 1982, the U.S. Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The purpose of this act was to review possible sites and then select one site for development. The selected site was the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository which was supposed to permanently sequester spent nuclear fuel rods from domestic nuclear power reactors in old salt mines under Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The government had promised nuclear power plant operators a permanent waste solution by 1999 and was collecting a fee from each power plant operator.

           The Yucca Mountain site development was burdened with political backlash from people and officials in Nevada as well as concerns that the original estimate of ground water movement in the area was much too lowe. In 2009, President Obama cancelled the Yucca Mountain project. By then, the government waste fund had grown to billions of dollars and some nuclear power plant operators are suing for the return of their payments to the fund. Congress recently insisted that the last of the allocated funds for Yucca Mountain be spent as dictated by law.

          It is estimated that if no solution to the waste problem is found within a few years, all the spent fuel pools at all the nuclear power plants in the U.S. will be full and reactors will have to be shut down. There have been calls for  the allocation of funds to temporary onsite storage in dry casks.

         The nuclear waste generated by nuclear weapons research, development and manufacture is another issue. The U.S. is still trying to clean up waste left behind at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation from decades of nuclear weapons production. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP)  is a nuclear waste repository in an old salt mine near Carlsbad, New Mexico. It was constructed to receive waste from nuclear weapons work at labs and facilities around the U.S.

        It has been in operation for fifteen years but, as time passed, the procedures became sloppier, record keeping declined, and maintenance fell behind. Earlier this year, a drum of waste from Los Alamos National Laboratories blew up and radioactive materials including plutonium and americium were released into the environment. It will take years and hundreds of million dollars to get the WIPP operating again so it can continue to receive nuclear weapons related wastes.

        The Department of Energy has launched a new initiative for nuclear waste disposal. There are three parts to the new DOE proposal. First, they are going to dispose of spent nuclear fuel rods separately from the wastes generated in nuclear weapons production. Second, they are going to implement a search for a site for permanent disposal of weapons waste Third, they are going to create an interim storage facility to temporarily store spent nuclear fuel rods. They say that the search for these two sites will be “phased, adaptive and consent-based”. Being consent-based means that people and governments in the area of a possible site will be consulted at each stage. It also means that any area that is being considered as a possible site can withdraw from the selection process at any stage.

        Marv Fertel is the head of the U.S. nuclear industry trade group named the Nuclear Energy Institute. He welcomed the new initiative from the DoE but said that as  far as he was concerned, Yucca Mountain was the only legal nuclear waste repository for spent nuclear fuel and that the project should be resumed. Fertel said “The industry acknowledges DOE’s parallel development of a consolidated interim storage facility for commercial reactor fuel in a willing host community and state, and a separate repository for defense waste. These must be developed in the same time frame. Responsible stewardship of used nuclear fuel from the production of electricity with nuclear energy is a priority for our industry and should be for the federal government.”

In the end of this January, the Forestry Agency announced they measured 25,400 Bq/Kg from cedar male flower in Fukushima prefecture. fukushima-diary.com

Tokyo Electric Power Co. and the government have spent 590 billion yen ($4.93 billion) battling the Fukushima nuclear disaster, but problems persist and taxpayers could lose if the situation doesn’t improve, the Board of Audit said. ajw.asahi.com

 1987 report on Israel’s top secret nuclear program released by U.S. in unprecedented move. israelnationalnews.com

An audit in Japan found that more than a third of the $1.6 billion of taxpayer funds spend on cleanup efforts at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station has been wasted, much of it because of the inability to control and contain contaminated water that has been the bane of the cleanup efforts. nuclearstreet.com

         A great deal of world attention is focused on the negotiations between six major powers and Iran over Iran’s nuclear program. Israel is known to have over a hundred nuclear warheads although they publicly deny it. No other Middle Eastern country even has an operational nuclear power reactor.  There are countries in the Middle East which are moving in the direction of acquiring nuclear power reactors which are generally seen as a first step in the creation of nuclear weapons programs. Nuclear weapons are seen by many nations to not just contribute to state security but also elevate the prestige of the nations who have them. It appears that there may be a nuclear arms race underway in that turbulent region.

       The United Arab Emirates starting working on a nuclear power reactor in 2012 and expects to finish it by 2017. They have just completed the concrete dome for the reactor containment building and the overall project is about sixty percent complete.

       Saudi Arabia has recently publicized its plans to construct sixteen nuclear power plants in the next twenty years. A recent visit to S.A. by South Korean officials resulted in the signing of a memo of understanding for S.K. to build two reactors for S.A. S.A. has also been making similar arrangements with China, Argentina and France for reactor construction. S.A. has plenty of oil but would rather sell it than burn it domestically. There are also rumors that S.A. has a standing order with Pakistan for the delivery of nuclear warheads if Iran creates nuclear weapons.

       Jordan has contracted with Russia to build nuclear reactors. Jordan has no oil reserves and little water resources. While nuclear power reactors can help to solve the energy problem for Jordan, they could exacerbate the water problem because of the huge amounts of cooling water required by nuclear reactors.

       Egypt recently announced that it was going to contract with Russia for the construction of a nuclear power reactor near Alexandria. The Russia President said at a press conference following a visit to Egypt, “If final decisions are made, it will mean not just building a nuclear power plant, it means the creation of the entire new atomic industry in Egypt.”

       Nuclear power reactors cost in the neighborhood of five billion dollars to construct. Poor nations like Egypt and Jordan may have trouble paying for the nuclear power reactors that they are in the process of ordering. S.A. has plenty of money to pay for reactor construction. However, they have consistently resisted pressure from the U.S. to promise not to divert any technology or radioactive materials from power reactors to nuclear weapons development. They have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty but their fear of Iran may cause them to ignore their treaty obligations.

       The U.S. and the other nations negotiating with Iran have concerns about Iran’s nuclear program that go beyond Iran. If a reasonable agreement can be struck with Iran to slow down uranium enrichment and allow inspections in return for a relaxation of the current stiff international sanctions, the U.S. and the other nations involved in the Iran negotiations hope that that will prevent a potential nuclear arms race in the region. On the other hand, if the negotiations fall apart and Iran is seen to continue efforts that appear to be aimed at obtaining nuclear weapons, the neighboring countries may feel that their only choice is to develop their own nuclear weapons.

Public support for nuclear energy in the USA is increasing with more than two-thirds of citizens favorable towards it, according to a new survey commissioned by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). world-nuclear-news.org

The underground tunnel in which the Full-scale Emplacement Experiment (FE Experiment) will be carried out at the Mont Terri Rock Laboratory in Switzerland has been sealed and monitoring has begun. world-nuclear-news.org

A senior official in Turkey’s energy ministry said that a seven-year build for the country’s first nuclear power reactor would mean that the official schedule calling for an operational start in 2019-2020 was already infeasible. nuclearstreet.com

Media in Jordan have reported that the country’s government will soon sign a deal with Russia’s state-owned nuclear power giant Rosatom that stresses the commitment to build two nuclear reactors at a cost of $10 billion. nuclearstreet.com

         I have posted several articles about small modular reactors (SMRs). So far, they only exist as designs and some test systems. The idea is to manufacture standardized parts in a factory to take advantage of economies of scale and standardization. They are designed to produce up to three hundred megawatts of electricity each. The modules are shipped to the site of the power plant and assembled.

        There are multiple approaches to the design of SMRs and different companies are exploring these designs. The U.S. Department of Energy has been investing funds in this research. This new type of reactor is also being studied in the U.K. and the Republic of Ireland to help meet future energy needs. The Nuclear Free Local Authorities (NFLA) in the U.K recently published their assessment of the prospect of SMRs. Their conclusions apply to the situation in other countries as well.

         No one has commercialized an SMR yet. None of the SMR designs has even been finalized. The licensing procedure for these SMRs will take five to ten years at least. There is no solid cost estimate for a commercial version of a SMR but, contrary to previous assumptions, preliminary estimates suggest that the SMRs will not be cheaper per watt than the current large scale reactors.

          One of the big problems with SMRs is the fact that their manufacture will require a “massive supply chain.” This supply chain will have to be created before a single SMR can be put into operation. The utility rate payers will ultimately have to fund the supply chain. However, in order for that to happen, the manufactures of SMRs will need many orders for their product. There has been no rush to order SMRs so it is sort of a chicken and egg thing. They need to be able to manufacture the SMRs to get orders but they need to get orders to finance the manufacture. Research on SMRs has been losing momentum because of the lack of a market for them.

         Even if a design is chosen and a manufacturing facility is constructed with the requisite supply chain, there are other potential problems for SMRs. While the concept of standardization and production lines has worked  very well to supply our modern age with many industrial and consumer products, it also has a great vulnerability. If mistakes are made in a design or in the conversion of the design to a finished product, then those mistakes will be present in all of the SMRs from that plant based on that design. Some design problems can take years to show up in nuclear reactors. If a potentially dangerous flaw surfaced after dozens of SMRs were constructed, shipped, installed and turned on, it would be very difficult to fix. It would not be liking recalling some cars because of a flaw in the engine. The tools that were needed to construct an SMR would be back at the factory. Repairs in the field would be complex and very expensive, if they were even possible once the reactor had been operating and was radioactive.

       The cheerleaders for SMRs are vocal and very enthusiastic but there are very serious questions about the viability of the whole SMR concept. Public and private money would be better spent on renewable alternatives such as wind and solar power.

Artist’s concept of a small modular reactor: