[Peace-discuss] Fukushima in America - not if, but when

[C. G. Estabrook]

Another Fukushima? In America? Not if, but when
Alexander Cockburn on the shameful trade-off that keeps nuclear power on the agenda

By Alexander Cockburn
LAST UPDATED 7:24 AM, MARCH 17, 2011

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?"

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.

The late great environmentalist David Brower used to tell audiences solemnly, 
"Nuclear plants are incredibly complex technological devices for locating 
earthquake faults."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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!

In 2009 the New York Academy of Sciences published /Chernobyl: Consequences of 
the Catastrophe for People and the Environment/, a 327-page volume by three 
scientists, Alexey Yablokov and Vassily and Alexey Nesterenko. It is the 
definitive study to date.

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...

"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.

"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."

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".

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.

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.

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.

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/76471,news-comment,news-politics,alexander-cockburn-another-fukushima-in-america-not-if-but-when 

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