Governments Covering Up Nuclear Meltdowns for 50 Years to Protect the Nuclear Power Industry

[Octafish]

Excellent points about the Corporate Overlord class from George Washington's blog:

Governments Have Been Covering Up Nuclear Meltdowns for Fifty Years to Protect the Nuclear Power Industry

Santa Susana
Saturday, March 19, 2011

As a History Chanel special notes, a nuclear meltdown occurred at the world's first commercial reactor only 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles, and only 7 miles from the community of Canoga Park and the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles.

Specifically, in 1959, there was a meltdown of one-third of the nuclear reactors at the Santa Susana field laboratory operated by Rocketdyne, releasing - according to some scientists' estimates - 240 times as much radiation as Three Mile Island.

But the Atomic Energy Commission lied and said only there was only 1 partially damaged rod, and no real problems. In fact, the AEC kept the meltdown a state secret for 20 years.

There were other major accidents at that reactor facility, which the AEC and Nuclear Regulatory Commission covered up as well. See this.

CONTINUED...

http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/

While the nuclear energy biz may be mighty friendly with Washington, that doesn't translate to much like for We the People or Democracy.

[midnight]

1. This monopoly that the energy co. have over our tax dollars has to come to an end....

[Octafish]

2. Ever increasing hidden subsidies to nuclear lobby in USA

The numbers must seem small...

Ever increasing hidden subsidies to nuclear lobby in USA

U.S. Nuclear Subsidies Mask Real ‘Costs and Risks,’ Scientists Say

Sunshine State News
Kenric Ward
March 17, 2011

A report issued just days before Japan’s nuclear-reactor crisis warned that U.S. government subsidies to the industry inject financial instability.”Government subsidies to the nuclear power industry over the past 50 years have been so large in proportion to the value of the energy produced that in some cases it would have cost taxpayers less to simply buy kilowatts on the open market and give them away,” stated the study by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The report — “Nuclear Power: Still Not Viable without Subsidies” — argues that tax breaks and other government-engineered deals fuel a continued rise in costs as the nuclear power lobby demands evermore support from taxpayers.

“Piling new subsidies on top of existing ones will provide the industry with little incentive to rework its business model to internalize its considerable costs and risks,” concluded the Cambridge, Mass.-based Union.
Alternatively, the UCS report recommended adopting market-oriented approaches to uranium mining royalties and waste- management financing, and incorporating the costs of preventing nuclear proliferation and terrorism into economic assessments of new reactors.

The Obama administration is currently proposing $54 billion in new government-backed loan guarantees to facilitate the construction of new nuclear power plants.

U.S. Nuclear Subsidies Mask Real ‘Costs and Risks,’ Scientists Say | Sunshine State News

SOURCE: http://nuclear-news.net/2011/03/18/ever-increasing-hidden-subsidies-to-nuclear-lobby-in-usa/

...to the nuclear power industry lobby.

[DCKit]

3. Now, how do we convince the non-critical thinking, fellow citizens (aka: suckers)...

that we're actually paying TWICE for nuclear power and that solar, wind, hydro and geothermal ARE, in fact, less expensive forms of energy?

Additionally, what would happen if the true, (dollarized) environmental, health and safety costs were dumped right back on the coal industry, in addition to their subsidies from the feds?

We're not going to get any help from the energy industry on alternatives until we stop paying them twice.

[Octafish]

4. Agree. That job once was in the purview of our elected officials.

Now the corporate lobbyists write the legislation. And it shows in the form of socialized risk and privatized gain.

One of the first things Pruneface did was take Jimmy Carter's solar panels off the White House roof.

His "answer" to the energy crisis? "Raise the 55-mph speed limit." Took him a while to get that one, but he did. The point is, Big Oil gets their way -- in matters of war and peace, life and death.

A conundrum: Tea Baggers and Reagan Democrats -- what's the diff?

[MineralMan]

5. Here's some more information on that melt-down:

I posted this several days ago. There are several links in the OP.

[Octafish]

6. Thanks, MineralMan.

Where's the link?

[MineralMan]

7. Sorry. Here's the link to the post, from my Journal.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/MineralMan/133

[Octafish]

8. Fascinating story, yours!

I'll go through each as time permits today.

BTW: I'm in SE Michigan. We almost lost Detroit.

And Toledo.

Neither incident is known by many here. I don't blame the citizenry, I blame the lapdogs and lickspittles of Corporate McPravda, under orders from the national security state.

Thank you for helping spread the truth about nukes and Big Science!

[MineralMan]

9. Yes. There were many

"accidents" in the early days, and almost all were not disclosed.

[freshwest]

12. Wow, thanks for that!

[girl gone mad]

10. k & r

[Octafish]

11. Chernobyl and the Collapse of Soviet Society

Thanks, girl gone mad! Remember Andrei Sakharov? I think he did more to bring down the USSR than anyone, even Gorby.

Chernobyl and the Collapse of Soviet Society

By Jay M. Gould
March 15, 1993

Chernobyl: Insight from the Inside, by Vladimir M. Chernousenko,Springer Verlag, Berlin New York, 1991
Memoirs, by Andrei Sakharov,Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1990
The Petkau Effect: Nuclear Radiation, People and Trees, by Ralph Graeub, Four Wall Eight Windows, New York, 1992

A heartbreaking report on the hidden dimensions of the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 was published in Germany in 1991, written by the Ukrainian nuclear physicist chosen to "liquidate the consequences" of the accident. The book may never be published in the Ukraine or Russia and the author, Vladimir Chernousenko, now dying of radiation poisoning along with thousands of others involved in the emergency cleanup, has been dismissed from his post in the Ukrainian Academy of Science for telling the truth.

Along with comparable revelations in Sakharov's recently published Memoirs, the treatment of Chernousenko suggests that the former Soviet Union, by casting out its greatest scientists, suffered from the same terminal disease that ultimately destroyed the Hitler regime.

Both Sakharov and Chernousenko were punished for revealing a secret kept from the public from the earliest years of the Nuclear Age, having to do with the lethal effects on the immune system of ingesting manmade nuclear fission products.Richard Rhodes, in his classic history of the making of the atom bomb <1>, relates that as far back as 1943 Enrico Fermi approached Robert Oppenheimer with the suggestion that if they could not develop the bomb in time, the same purpose would be served by dumping strontium-90 which he was generating at his pilot reactor at the University of Chicago over the German land-mass. Oppenheimer then discussed the proposal with Edward Teller who agreed that their animal studies would indicate that radioactive strontium would enter into the food chain and be deposited "dangerously and irretrievably in bone" and kill perhaps 500,000 persons. The plan was discarded because they could not be sure the desired deaths would occur quickly enough. After the bomb was developed, the military did not want an atomic explosion associated with the possibility of biological damage so the animal studies remained classified until 1969.

The publication in English of Andrei Sakharov's Memoirs informs us that he too came to the conclusion that the nuclear bomb was primarily a biological weapon, although this fact has been studiously passed over by all the highly laudatory reviews it has received. As the developer of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, Sakharov was the most eminent and authoritative nuclear scientist to reveal these secrets, which lie at the very heart of the origins of the Cold War.

In Chapter 14 Sakharov writes that after the success of his 1955 Soviet H-Bomb test, he "worried more and more about the biological effects of nuclear tests. . . . The long-term biological consequences (particularly atmospheric testing, in which radioactive fallout is dispersed throughout the hemisphere) can be predicted and the total number of casualties calculated with some accuracy."

Considering only such fission products as radioactive carbon, strontium and cesium, he calculated that genetic damage, plus the immediate and delayed damage to immune systems would accelerate the deaths of between 500,000 to one million persons for every 50 megatons of nuclear explosive power. An important consideration was what he termed "nonthreshold effects", by which every radioactive particle released had a statistical probability of doing damage to either the DNA of a cell or to the immune system, by low-level internal radiation from ingesting such particles. He also predicted that radiation would accelerate the mutation of microorganisms, leading to the inference that persons with damaged immune systems would in time succumb more easily to these new strains.
He states (page 201):

" I posited that cancer and damage to the body's immune system (resulting in premature death) may also be due to nonthreshold effects. . . . I also suggested that a global increase in mutations of bacteria and viruses (irrespective of the cause of the mutations) might have been an important factor in the spread of such diseases as diphtheria in the 19th century, or the influenza epidemic, and that low-level radiation might further increase the rate of mutations."

CONTINUED...

http://ratical.org/radiation/Chernobyl/ChernobylCoSS.html

Despite what ABCNNBCBSFixedNutNoiseworks doesn't tell me, I pray the people of Japan and the island of Honshu are in the clear.

The United States of America could use a Sakharov. Perhaps if they weren't so well paid...

[freshwest]

13. Great information to transform the discussion. Thanks

[crickets]

14. K&R

[Octafish]

15. Japan nuclear firm admits missing safety checks at disaster-hit plant

Thanks, crickets! Didya see this on the tee vee? I didn't. And it wasn't on the radio or in my noose-paper.

Japan nuclear firm admits missing safety checks at disaster-hit plant

Documents show operator failed to carry out mandatory checks at Fukushima Daiichi and allowed fuel rods to pile up

Justin McCurry in Osaka
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 March 2011 13.42 GMT

The power plant at the centre of the biggest civilian nuclear crisis in Japan's history contained far more spent fuel rods than it was designed to store, while its technicians repeatedly failed to carry out mandatory safety checks, according to documents from the reactor's operator.

The risk that used fuel rods present to efforts to avert disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant was underlined on Tuesday when nuclear safety officials said the No 2 reactor's storage pool had heated to around boiling point, raising the risk of a leakage of radioactive steam.

"We cannot leave this alone and we must take care of it as quickly as possible," Hidehiko Nishiyama, of the nuclear and industrial safety agency, said.

According to documents from Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the company repeatedly missed safety checks over a 10-year period up to two weeks before the 11 March disaster, and allowed uranium fuel rods to pile up inside the 40-year-old facility.

CONTINUED...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/22/japan-nuclear-power-plant-checks-missed

Gee. It seems like storing the spent fuel was such a problem, TEPCO stacked it past "safe" levels. I wonder if the US nuclear industry would never do that?

[crickets]

17. Thanks for that link- bookmarking.

The news coverage has been spotty at best. It's not all the media's fault, given the dangerous nature of the situation and the unreliability of their sources. But they just don't seem to pushing very hard beyond the headlines. It's tough to figure out how to deal with this when data from the ground is missing, withheld, or garbled and you just know TEPCO and the Japanese government are in a combination of "don't panic the populace" and CYA mode.

The power plant at the centre of the biggest civilian nuclear crisis in Japan's history contained far more spent fuel rods than it was designed to store, while its technicians repeatedly failed to carry out mandatory safety checks

I really don't think this is as unusual as people would like to believe.

Nuclear power plant accidents: listed and ranked since 1952

"The information is partially from the International Atomic Energy Authority - which, astonishingly, fails to keep a complete historical database - and partially from reports."

I'm surrounded by family and friends who think TMI was just a hiccup, and everything in Japan will be back under control and in full cleanup mode in a matter of weeks. It's too far away to ever affect us and everything will return to status quo. The two nuke plants in our state, one of which is a GE Mark1? "Oh, those plants have been there for decades with no problem. (Not entirely true.) They'll be fine! We need them. Japan will handle their problems. What's for dinner?" It's surreal. They know better, but no one wants to think about the unthinkable.

My heart goes out to the Japanese people- they have hard choices to make and they deserve the truth. I don't think they're going to get it.

[robertpaulsen]

16. Octafish, your journal rocks!

I've been on vacation in Oregon, visiting relatives that don't have internet access. It was a nice break, even though we were constantly checking the situation in Japan (relatives there have moved south of Tokyo as a precaution). But I missed DU and especially your contributions. As an LA resident, this is history I should be, but was not aware of. Thanks for keeping on bring Deep History to light!