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There is No Safe Dose of Radiation
The shutdown Dairyland Power Reactor in Genoa, Wisconsin in the
process of
being decomissioned. The reactor is
located on the bank of the
Mississippi River where the utility expects to be storing irradiated fuel rods (high level nuclear "waste")
in steel and concrete
"dry casks" within two years.
Wisconsin's
Nuclear
Debate
Think nuke power is safe? Think again
John LaForge, Nukewatch staffer
The [ Madison, Wis.] Cap Times, Friday, Feb. 5, 2010
<http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/column/article_a0657d52-2b98-5550-b830-cf2dc4b6a610.html>
Your recent report “No nukes for now,” by Lavilla Capener and Mike Ivey, states without qualification that Wisconsin’s two nuclear facilities “have operated quietly and safely since the 1970s.”
It is easy to prove this statement false.
Every U.S. government agency that regulates radiation exposure agrees that there is no safe level of exposure.
The Environmental Protection Agency says, “There is no level below which we can say an exposure poses no risk. ... Radiation is a carcinogen. It may also cause other adverse health effects, including genetic defects in the children of exposed parents or mental retardation in the children of mothers exposed during pregnancy.”
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says, “The radiation protection community conservatively assumes that any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer and hereditary effect.”
The National Council on Radiation Protection says that “every increment of radiation exposure produces an incremental increase in the risk of cancer.”
Many people do not know that radioactive contamination of the environment occurs daily from the normal operation of nuclear reactors. Reactors can’t even operate without regular, legally permitted -- as well as accidental and prohibited -- releases of radioactively contaminated water and gas, such as tritium, Xenon, Krypton, and even strontium-90 and cobalt-60. Radioactivity is vented every day in order to control the pressure, temperature and humidity inside reactor cores and to keep radiation levels from exceeding exposure limits for nuclear reactor workers inside. The workers’ exposures are a necessary evil of reactor operations, and are allowed under statute, but they’re all unsafe and increase the workers’ risk of cancer.
Wisconsin’s reactors at Point Beach and Kewaunee spew radiation like all the others. In fact Wisconsin’s reactors have a particularly unsafe record of operations, when compared to the other 101 reactors operating across the country. Only four “Red Findings” -- the most serious safety failure warning the government issues -- have been issued in the history of the NRC. Two of the four went to Point Beach.
One Red Finding included a $325,000 fine for 16 safety violations, including the potentially catastrophic May 1996 explosion of hydrogen gas, “powerful enough to upend the three-ton lid,” inside a loaded radioactive waste cask. The NRC said Point Beach operators were “inattentive to their duties,” were found “starting up a power unit while one of its safety systems was inoperable,” and had failed to install “the required number of cooling pumps.”
Regarding human exposures, Kewaunee and Point Beach have both contaminated surface and groundwater with radioactive releases, some unlawful. In 1975, Point Beach Unit 1 leaked approximately 10,000 gallons of radioactively contaminated water, which flowed into a retention pond and from there into groundwater. In 1997, another 10,000 gallons of radioactive water ran eventually into Lake Michigan. That year, Unit 2 had a leaking discharge pipe that contaminated a stream and Lake Michigan. In a 2005 case, a Point Beach worker was convicted in federal court of knowingly making false written statements to the NRC. Nukewatch has compiled a list of 27 such accidents between 1995 and 2009.
In 2006, Kewaunee workers found radioactive tritium in the groundwater below the facility. The leak rate was unknown, and the operators could not find the leak’s source but were investigating. Groundwater cannot be decontaminated and tritium persists in the ecosystem for about 120 years.
The bio-accumulation of these long-lived radioactive elements from nuclear reactors is a threat to human health, especially when mixed into unknown, untested cocktails with many of the 75,000 other toxic chemicals that are routinely poured, sprayed or dumped into the soil, water and air every day.
Since nuclear reactors can’t operate without exposing us to radiation, none is safe. Instead, all of them are permitted to expose workers and the public to an increased risk of cancer.
-- John LaForge of Luck is on the staff of Nukewatch and edits its quarterly newsletter .
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Wisconsin has no “moratorium” on building nuclear reactors. Indeed, Republicans blocked passage of a moratorium in 1983.
Rather, Wisconsin state statute 196.493 merely sets out two conservative requirements for building new reactors:
1) There must be a federal facility for high-level radioactive waste from all reactors; and 2) The cost of a reactor’s construction, operation, decommissioning and waste disposal must be “economically advantageous” compared with “feasible alternatives.”
This fiscally conservative statute has capped the number of Wisconsin reactors at three. Alternative, gas-powered generators currently cost one-fifth that of new nuclear reactors, and they don’t need a disaster evacuation plan. No federal nuclear waste dump has been tested or opened. The Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel said editorially Feb. 21, 2004, as if to sound reassuring, “the country's best minds are working on the waste issue."
The nuclear power waste dilemma is so daunting, so complex and overwhelming that 50 years of research has failed to produce an answer. The shut-down Genoa reactor on the bank of the Mississippi River, and the operating Point Beach and Kewaunee sites on the shore of Lake Michigan have, through default, become high-level radioactive waste storage sites. No one wants this dangerous and deadly waste in their backyard.
AB 555 co-sponsor Phil Montgomery thinks the current law’s restrictions “are so out of line with reality that you could never meet them.” The reality is that nuclear power cannot be economically beneficial.
Private insurance corporations refuse to sell policies to reactor operators. Professional insurance assessors looked at nuclear reactors and decided their risks are too big. That’s reality.
The reality is that the federal Price Anderson Act provides government (single payer) reactor accident insurance at taxpayer expense to cover nuclear accidents. The vast majority of people in the U.S. do not use nuclear energy, but everyone pays the cost. Communities across the country have paid with their health and environment. Every step of the radioactive chain for nuclera power, i.e. the mining, milling, fuel fabrication, reprocessing, storage and reactor sites themselves have atrocious histories of contamination.
No new nuclear reactors, not here in Wisconsin, not anywhere.
Take time to work for an energy future that does not leave a deadly scrap pile for hundreds of thousands of years.
The Spring 2008 issue of the Nukewatch Quarterly contains a 4-page pull-out section aimed at educating legislators about nuclear power.
The following pages take you to the information in pdf format. Contact Nukewatch for newsprint copies of the current Quarterly.
Page 5
Nuclear Power: Throwing Gas on the Fire of Global Warming
Nuclear Industry Subsidies Robbing Climate Change Crisis of Real Solutions
U.S. Can Cut CO2 Emissions 28% & Save Money, Without Nukes
Fewer Nukes, Better Health
Page 6
Wis. Reactors Unsafe at Any Speed
Operators Repeatedly Failed, Faulted, Fined
What's the Cost of Nuclear Power?
By Cassandra Dixon
Page 7
Yucca Mountain: A Scientifically Unsound Nuclear Waste Plan
Nuclear Proponents Ignore Uranium Mine Waste, Devastation
Page 8
Groundwater Contamination from Nuclear Reactors Goes Nationwide
Footnotes and Sources
Enviro' Groups Agree: No Nukes
Wisconsin Lawmakers Taken in by Nuclear Industry PR Machine
2008 Presidential Hopefuls on Nuclear Power
Wisconsin Should Look To Clean Energy Sources
Wisconsin Greens Oppose New Reactors
Nuclear Power = Racism
Federal Nuclear Subsidies
Nuclear is NO Solution to Global Warming/Climate Change
California Rejects Nuclear Power
Yucca "Proposed High-level Radioactive Waste Dump" May Never Open
Yucca Mountain is Deeply Flawed
Nuclear official’s stark farewell: Scrap Yucca
One page pdf articles and factsheets
Spring 2008:
Nuclear Reactor Construction Costs
Some Critical Experts on Nuclear Power Operations
Groundwater Contamination by U.S. Reactors
Nuclear Subsidies Undercutting Answers to Climate Crisis
Unsafe Operations: Wisconsin Reactors often Reported and Fined
The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Burial Proposal
Pros and Cons of the Repeal:
“Lift the moratorium on new nuclear plants”
By Michael Corradini,
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Op/Ed, Oct. 29, 2007
Rebuttal
Alfred Meyer, Program Director of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, offered these points in response to Corradini,
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
Nov. 6, 2007
State should look to truly clean energy sources
Joe Mangano executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, a research and education group based in New York.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Oct. 29, 2007
Nuclear Power:
No Answer to Climate Crisis
* Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy , Fall 2007
http://www.ieer.org/carbonfree/CarbonFreeNuclearFree.pdf * By Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D., president, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. This study was a joint project of IEER and the Nuclear Policy Research Institute.
* Too Hot To Handle, The Future of Civil Nuclear Power, July 2007
www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk * By Frank Barnaby and James Kemp, Oxford Research Group, London
* Residual Risk: An Account of Events in Nuclear Power Plants Since the Chernobyl Accident in 1986 , May 2007
http://www.greens-efa.org/cms/topics/dokbin/181/181995.residual_risk@en.pdf * By Rebecca Harms, European Parliament, Brussels; Union of Concerned Scientists, USA; Institute of Risk Research, Austria; Ok ö -Insititut, Darmstadt, Germany.
* Why A Future for the Nuclear Industry Is Risky , January 2007
llowe@iccr.org or www.iccr.org * By Peter Bradford, former NRC commissioner and David Schlissel, Synapse Energy Economics, Inc.
* Nuclear Power No Solution to Climate Change , December 14, 2006
http://list.web.net/lists/listinfo/energy-vision * By the Pembina Institute
* Insurmountable Risks: Can Nuclear Power Solve the Global Warming Problem?
August 2, 2006 http://www.ieer.org/sdafiles/14-2.pdf * By Brice Smith in Science for Democratic Action, Institute for Energy & Environmental Research, Volume 14. (A 55-page summary, “Insurmountable Risks: The Dangers of Using Nuclear Power to Combat Global Climate Change, ” is available from IEER.org.)
* Nuclear Power ¾ Not Worth the Risk , April 2006
www.cnduk.org * A CND briefing by Hugh Richards, Dawn Rothwell and Rae Street, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, submitted to the British Energy Review Consultation, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, England.
* Nuclear Power ¾ Myth and Reality: The risks and prospects of nuclear power , 2006
http://www.nirs.org/mononline/nm644.pdff * By Gerd Rosenkranz, for the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
* Unfair Aid: Subsidies Keeping Nuclear Energy Afloat Across the Globe, June 30, 2005
http://www.nirs.org/mononline/nm630_31.pdf * From the Nuclear Monitor, #630-631; a publication of World Information Service on Energy (WISE) and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service (NIRS).
* Nuclear Power: No solution to climate change , February 2005
www.nirs.org/mononline/nukesclimatechangereport.pdff * From Nuclear Monitor, Nos. 621 & 622; A report from the World Information Service on Energy (WISE) and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service (NIRS).
* Comparing Greenhouse-Gas Emissions and Abatement Costs of Nuclear and Alternative Energy Options from a Life-Cycle Perspective , November 1997
http://www.oeko.de * Uwe R. Fritsche, Coordinator, Energy & Climate Division, Ok ö -Insititut, Germany; paper presented at the Conference on Nuclear Energy and Greenhouse-Gas Emissions, Tokyo.
-- Compiled by Nukewatch, providing news and information on nuclear weapons, power, waste and nonviolent resistance.
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Help Keep More Nuclear Reactors Out of Wisconsin
Please contact your State Legislators and urge them to Vote No on any Assembly Bill that would weaken or repeal the common sense state law that protects the public from unnecessary new nuclear power reactors in Wisconsin (state statute 196.493).
If passed, the repeal would encourage more nuclear power in Wisconsin and increase the likelihood that the state will become a national high-level nuclear waste dumpsite.
If passed, the repeal would eliminate two legal requirements that must now be met before new reactors can be built in Wisconsin:
1) That a federal nuclear waste storage site must be in operation; and 2) that reactor-generated electricity must be economically advantageous to the ratepayer compared with alternatives.
A special Nuclear Power Committee and the Wisconsin Legislative Council have recommended repeal of these precautionary, conservative requirements. Their effort is part of an industry push for more reactors radioactive and waste production nationwide. Pro-nuclear propaganda has it that nuclear power is “cheap” and “carbon free.” But nuclear waste management will cost hundreds of billions of dollars over a period of at least 300,000 years; and the mining, milling and production of reactor fuel creates millions of tons of carbon pollution that the industry ignores.
The proposed Yucca Mountain dump site in Nevada is unfit and should never open. One Nuclear Regulatory Commission member said Feb. 7, 2007 that the Yucca project must be scrapped. This would put Wisconsin higher on the list of potential dump sites, especially if tons of new waste is produced by new reactors.
The time to express your opinion is now. Please call, write, email and/or visit your legislators as soon as possible.
Call the Legislative Hotline at 800-362-9472
Senate: (608) 266-2517
State Assembly: (608) 266-1501
Below you can find a sample letter. Contact your representative to keep more nuclear reactors and more deadly radioactive waste out of Wisconsin.
Date ___________
Dear Representative/Senator ____________
Please vote No on any repeal of state statute 196.493 ― a common sense law that protects the public from unnecessary pollution and nuclear waste.
If passed, the repeal would encourage the building of more nuclear reactors in Wisconsin and increase the likelihood that the state will become a national high-level nuclear waste dumpsite.
If passed, the repeal would eliminate two legal conditions that must now be met before new reactors can be built in Wisconsin:
1) That a federal nuclear waste storage site must be in operation and accepting waste fuel; and
2) that reactor-generated electricity must be economically advantageous to the ratepayer compared with alternatives.
A special Nuclear Power Committee has recommended (March 5, 2007) repeal of these precautionary and fiscally conservative requirements. Its effort is part of an industry-wide push for more reactors (and waste production) nationwide.
Pro-nuclear propaganda has it that nuclear power is “carbon free” and “cheap.” But the mining, milling and production of reactor fuel creates millions of tons of carbon pollution and greenhouse gases that the industry ignores, and nuclear waste management will cost hundreds of billions of dollars for at least 300,000 years.
The proposed Yucca Mountain dump site in Nevada is unfit and should never open. A Nuclear Regulatory Commission member said Feb. 7, 2007 that the Yucca project must be scrapped. This puts Wisconsin near the top of the list of potential national dump sites, especially if thousands of tons of new waste is produced by new reactors.
On April 12, the state of California rebuffed a similar attempt to repeal conditions on reactor construction. Wisconsin should do the same. Please vote No on repeal of State Stat. 196-493.
Sincerely, ______________________________________
Name
Address
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