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Another Fukushima? In America? Not if, but when<br>
Alexander Cockburn on the shameful trade-off that keeps nuclear
power on the agenda<br>
<br>
By Alexander Cockburn<br>
LAST UPDATED 7:24 AM, MARCH 17, 2011<br>
<br>
Americans read the increasingly panic-stricken reports of deepening
catastrophe at Fukushima, speed to the pharmacy to buy iodine and
ask, "It's happened there; can it happen here?"<br>
<br>
Along much of California's coastline runs the Ring of Fire which
stretches round the Pacific plate from Australia, north past Japan,
to Russia, round to Alaska, and down America's west coast to Chile.
Ninety per cent of the world's earthquakes happen round the Ring.<br>
<br>
The late great environmentalist David Brower used to tell audiences
solemnly, "Nuclear plants are incredibly complex technological
devices for locating earthquake faults."<br>
<br>
Apparently acting on this piece of sarcastic wisdom, the US has
deployed four nuclear plants near the Ring of Fire faultline,
including two active ones in my home state of California.<br>
<br>
Forty miles up the road from me, in far northern California we had a
boiling water reactor, closed in 1976 because – surprise! – there
was an earthquake from a "previously unknown fault" just off the
coast. Now all we have are spent nuclear fuel rods in ponds, right
on the shoreline, a few feet above sea level, nicely situated for a
tsunami, such as the one that disabled the relief diesel generators
designed to pump emergency coolant in the Fukushima plant. Three
plates meet a few miles west of where I write. We had a 7.1
earthquake in 1992. First moral in the nuclear business: Expect the
unexpected.<br>
<br>
Further south, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, is the
Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, planned in 1968 when no one knew about
the Hosgri fault, part of the Ring of Fire, a few miles offshore.
See moral number one.<br>
<br>
Further inquiry established that there'd been a 7.1 earthquake 40
years earlier, offshore from the plant, completed in 1973. The power
company – Pacific Gas and Electric - said it would beef up defences.
In their haste, the site managers managed to reverse the blueprints
for the new earthquake-proofing of the two reactors, and so the
retro-fit wasn't a total success. Second moral in the nuclear
business: people do mess up.<br>
<br>
Back to the first moral: they recently discovered yet another fault
and are now worried about "ground liquefaction" in the event of a
big quake. In 2008 there was a terrorist attack by jellyfish which
blocked the cold water intake, and the plant was shut down for a
couple of days.<br>
<br>
Head south another 150 miles and we get to the San Onofre plant,
right on the shoreline. In fact I've swum in its shadow, in waters
highly esteemed by anglers because fish gather there, enjoying the
elevated water temp; some also claim the fish there get bigger,
faster. There are storage ponds for spent fuel in a decommissioned
unit in a spherical containment of concrete and steel with the
smallest wall being 6ft thick, just about the same as the ruptured
containment at one of the Fukushima units.<br>
<br>
Further illustration of moral number two was in evidence in one of
San Onofre's two active units, when it was discovered that the
mighty engineering and construction firm Bechtel had installed a
420-ton nuclear-reactor vessel backwards. The nearest faultine is
the Cristianitos, deemed inactive. See moral number one.<br>
<br>
The power company says San Onofre is built to withstand a 7.0 quake
right under the plant. They also constructed a 25ft protective sea
wall, which is half the height of the walls that crumbled like sand
last week along Japan's north-east coast. San Onofre is sea-water
cooled. Environmentalists don't care for that so they plan to build
two cooling towers the other side of Interstate 5, California's main
north-south road, thus immune to jelly-fish attack, but open to
other methods of assault.<br>
<br>
The Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast figures the
probability of an earthquake of 6.7 magnitude or higher is 67 per
cent for Los Angeles, 63 per cent for San Francisco. Up where I
live, in the Cascadia subduction zone, we have a 10 per cent
possibility of an 8.0 or 9.0 force quake.<br>
<br>
There are robust souls who look on the bright side. Some of them are
in the pay of the nuclear industry - President Obama for example,
who took plenty of money from this industry for his presidential
campaign and used his State of the Union address last January to
reaffirm his commitment to "clean, safe" nuclear power. This week,
Obama's press spokesman confirmed that nuclear energy "remains a
part of the President's overall energy plan".<br>
<br>
The United States produces more nuclear energy than any other
nation. It has 104 nuclear plants, many of them old, many prone to
endless shutdowns, all of them dangerous. Take the Shearon Harris
nuclear power station in North Carolina, also a repository for
highly radioactive spent fuel rods from two other nuclear plants.<br>
<br>
It would not even require a quake or tsunami, only a moderately
ingenious terrorist, to breach Shearon Harris's puny defences and
sabotage the cooling systems. A study by the Brookhaven Labs
estimates that a pool fire there could cause 140,000 cancers, and
contaminate thousands of square miles of land.<br>
<br>
The benchmark catastrophe amid peacetime nuclear disasters remains
the explosion in the fourth reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power
station on April 26, 1986, in the Ukraine. Earlier this week Fergus
Walsh, the BBC's medical correspondent, comforted his audience with
the amazing nonsense that by 2006 Chernobyl had prompted only 60
deaths from cancer!<br>
<br>
In 2009 the New York Academy of Sciences published <i>Chernobyl:
Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment</i>,
a 327-page volume by three scientists, Alexey Yablokov and Vassily
and Alexey Nesterenko. It is the definitive study to date.<br>
<br>
In the summary of his chapter 'Mortality After the Chernobyl
Catastrophe', Yablokov says flatly: "A detailed study reveals that
3.8–4.0 per cent of all deaths in the contaminated territories of
Ukraine and Russia from 1990 to 2004 were caused by the Chernobyl
catastrophe...<br>
<br>
"Since 1990, mortality among the clean-up teams has exceeded the
mortality rate in corresponding population groups. From 112,000 to
125,000 liquidators [members of clean-up crews] died before 2005 -
that is, some 15 per cent of the 830,000 members of the Chernobyl
clean-up teams.<br>
<br>
"The calculations suggest that the Chernobyl catastrophe has already
killed several hundred thousand human beings in a population of
several hundred million that was unfortunate enough to live in
territories affected by the fallout."<br>
<br>
Set Fukushima next to Chernobyl and its ongoing lethal aftermath.
Think of southern California or North Carolina. Nuclear expert
Robert Alvarez, who advised President Clinton on nuclear matters,
writes this week that a single spent fuel rod pool - as at Fukushima
or Shearon Harris - holds more cesium-137 than was deposited by all
atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in the northern hemisphere
combined, and an explosion in that pool could blast "perhaps three
to nine times as much of these materials into the air as was
released by the Chernobyl reactor disaster".<br>
<br>
In the past few years there's been an explicit trade-off here in the
US - and in Europe too - between the nuclear power industry and the
many green organisations and prominent environmentalists who are
fixated solely on their hypothesis of humanly caused global warming.<br>
<br>
When the House of Representatives (though not the US Senate) voted
for a climate bill in 2009, the inclusion of a clean energy bank to
provide financial backing for new energy production, including
nuclear, was part of the bargain.<br>
<br>
This shameful pact has got to end. It's over. Look at the false
predictions, the blunders, the elemental truth that Nature bats
last, and that human folly and greed are ineluctable aspects of
man's condition. There's no middle ground. <br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/76471,news-comment,news-politics,alexander-cockburn-another-fukushima-in-america-not-if-but-when">http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/76471,news-comment,news-politics,alexander-cockburn-another-fukushima-in-america-not-if-but-when</a>
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