Speaking at the Nuclear Africa conference in Johannesburg, Ms Peters said the government was willing to implement a nuclear energy programme with the urgency it deserved.

She acknowledged that the cost of the planned nuclear power programme had escalated but said the authorities had already included a price increase in their plans.

According to the minister, the delay in launching the nuclear power plant construction programme was due to the government’s desire to ensure South Africa obtained maximal industrial participation from the programme, which would help fulfil the objectives of the Industrial Policy Action Plan.

The Department of Energy’s Integrated Resource Plan 2010-30 includes 9.6GW of nuclear power.

“There is political will in this country to use nuclear for peaceful purposes,” Ms Peters said. “The reason we have to include nuclear in our plan is because we want to reduce coal and our economy is energy intensive.”

She added: “Nuclear creates an opportunity for us to create jobs that would be decent and sustainable. We want careers. Nuclear provides an opportunity for careers, not just jobs.”

On the possibility of the Eastern Cape developing into an energy hub, she said: “The Eastern Cape has positioned itself as an energy hub — wind, solar, but also the potential of shale gas. If you add the cherry on the top, nuclear, this makes the province an industrial hub.

“We also want you to organise more events in the area. Conduct surveys into the industrial capacity (of the province), not just in Gauteng. I would like to see a nuclear training centre set up in the Eastern Cape.”

The government said recently that it wanted private-sector participation in large infrastructure programmes, including nuclear projects. It cited an example of the renewable energy independent power producer procurement programme, which attracted R46.6bn worth of investments from the private sector in 2012-13.

600 total views, no views today

Sessions were held in Saskatoon and Regina earlier this week to discuss the same topic. The NWMO provided the FSIN with $1 million over three years to fund the nuclear waste sessions.

While Friday’s session was open to First Nations people but closed to the media, participants spoke with the Daily Herald during a break in the day’s agenda.

Bobby Cameron, vice chief of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations (FSIN), said the purpose of the meetings has always been the same.

“That’s to inform and educate our First Nations people on nuclear waste management, the storage and transportation,” he said. “We have nothing to hide. We invite our First Nation folks to come out and raise their concerns.”

Twenty-one communities in Saskatchewan and Ontario have expressed interest in accepting the NWMO’s plan to build a nuclear waste repository, with those in Saskatchewan currently in the first phase of step three — an 18-month to two-year process.

Cameron clarified that there are far more communities in Ontario that are interested, with only three out of the 21 being in Saskatchewan.

“As I said in my opening comments this morning, there are far more communities interested in Ontario than there are in Saskatchewan. It’s not set in stone that waste is going to be stored here in Saskatchewan,” Cameron added.

The NWMO is in the midst of searching for a site to store millions of used nuclear fuel bundles, which are currently being stored on an interim basis at various facilities around the country.

While Pinehouse, Creighton and English River First Nation are being considered, there has been opposition shown toward the proposal by residents of those communities.

Citing environmental concerns, Cameron said he is aware of the opposition that exists.

“To tell you the truth, I represent 74 communities, and the consistent message out there is the majority of them don’t agree with nuclear waste management and the safety of it — and I speak on behalf of them,” he said.

Used nuclear fuel is created from the generation of electricity in nuclear power plants. One nuclear fuel bundle, which is roughly the shape and size of a fireplace log, can power up to 100 homes a year.

While Cameron conceded that the deep geological repository would bring jobs, he said one must assess the pros and cons of the plan.

“The pros being the jobs, the revenue it’s going to generate and the cons being nothing’s more important than our land [and] nothing is more important than our water,” Cameron said.

“In 40 or 50 years, many of us are going to be dead,” Cameron continued, noting that after speaking to aboriginal communities, the bottom line is that it isn’t worth it.

“Do we want to leave jobs and money or do we want to have a nice clean healthy environment, so our kids can enjoy it every day?” he asked rhetorically.

Cameron shared more of his perspective on the possible environmental effects of a long-term repository.

“You look at the uranium mining here in northern Saskatchewan — the tailing ponds and the pollution that it’s causing our lakes up in the north,” he said. “It’s to a point now where some of our people can’t even eat the fish in some of those lakes up there. The potential is there for sure.”

Regardless of whether they are stored in Saskatchewan, however, the bundles must be stored somewhere.

Pat Patton, director of aboriginal relations for the NWMO, said the selection of the site will depend on both the approval of the community in which it will be built and whether it’s safe to build the site.

“Towards the end of this year, we will begin to narrow down to a smaller number of communities,” she said. “If they had strong potential they will know and then they will decide if they go to phase two of step three, which would be another two- to three-year process.”

However, Patton said more research must be done to decipher whether the three Saskatchewan communities are geologically suitable for the long-term repository.

“Once we move into phase two, we would have a better understanding, but there are many potentially strong locations in Canada,” she said. “We still need to do a fair amount of study before we would know for sure.”

Patton said 15 of the 18 communities interested in the project in Ontario are currently in step three, with the other three still in step two.

Ashley Marie Wilson, one of many Idle No More Prince Albert organizers, was in attendance for Friday’s session. She expressed sincere discontent over the storage site being potentially built in Saskatchewan.

“I do not stand with this nuclear waste and came here today to get answers to bring to the people, because we need to protect the earth,” she said through tears. “We need to protect the water. It is very important that people know what’s coming if they let this happen and they don’t stand up to do something about it now.

“I encourage everybody to learn as much as they can and put this to a stop.”

540 total views, 1 views today

Canada will produce commercial quantities of medical isotopes without the controversial use of highly-enriched, weapons-grade uranium, the federal government has pledged.

703 total views, no views today

Thus the continued use of HEU at Chalk River is indirectly
sabotaging non-proliferation efforts around the world.
Because of course HEU is perfect for use as a nuclear explosive
material, and the warning time (once the HEU is obtained) is
extremely short.  So no one should be having HEU available
to them — or we will never have the possibility of a nuclear
weapons free world.

The mechanism needed to make an atomic bomb using HEU
is actually quite simple.  It is called a “gun-type” atomic bomb
because all you have to do is fire one piece of HEU into
another piece of HEU and — voilà!  The Hiroshima bomb
was exactly this type of device, and it never had to be
tested ahead of time because was so simple it couldn’t fail
(unlike the Nagasaki bomb that used plutonium — it had
a much more complicated design and had to be tested
in the Nevada desert).

Medical Isotope Production Using HEU

The principal medical isotope we are talking about here is
technetium-99m (Tc-99m), which has a short half-life of only
6 hours.  It is therefore impractical to transport freshly-made
Tc-99m over long distances because the amount of the
isotope will diminish so rapidly that virtually the whole
amount will be completely gone in a matter of days.

So instead, hospitals purchase a “moly cow” made of
molybdenum -99 (Mo-99) — an isotope which has a 66-hour
half-life, and which “decays” directly into technetium-99m.
Thus medical personnel can “milk the cow” — that is, harvest
the technetium-99m — on a daily basis, and use the Tc-99m
for that day’s work.  Because of its longer half-life, Mo-99
diminishes in amount at a much slower rate, and the original
amount will not be completely gone for several weeks.

So the question is, how to get the molybdenum-99 in the
first place?  Well, one way is to use the fact that it is a fission
product of uranium-235.  That means that inside every
uranium-fuelled nuclear reactor, Mo-99 is being produced
all the time — but it is mixed in with dozens of other fiercely
radioactive fission products (such as cesium-137, iodine-131,
strontium-90), activation products (such as cobalt-60, iron-55,
niobium-93m) and transuranic actinides (such as plutonium,
americium and curium).  To get the Mo-99 you have to
dissolve the  fiercely radioactive irradiated fuel in boiling
nitric acid and separate out the tiny amount of Mo-99 by
chemical means, leaving a large volume of highly radioactive
liquid waste.

So to make the job easier, research reactors are used –
no electricity production — and instead of “reprocessing”
the irradiated fuel, special “targets” are introduced into the
core of the reactor made of highly-enriched uranium (93.3
percent Uranium-235) and withdrawn at a predetermined
time so that the “target” can be dissolved in nitric acid etc.
This has several advantages: (1) you can limit the time
the target is in the reactor, cutting down on the superfluous
inventory of other fission products etc; (2) you can vastly
reduce the mass of material that needs to be dissolved
because the U-235 is so concentrated; (3) you can
control the schedule more easily and achieve a kind of
“assembly-line” procedure without shutting the reactor
down.

Even using this nasty method for producing Mo-99
inside a nuclear reactor, and then reprocessing, you can
use LEU (Low Enriched Uranium) instead of
High Enriched Uranium (HEU) — it just means it takes
longer and is more expensive, mainly because there is
a much larger mass of material to “reprocess” in order
to extract the Mo-99.  Argentina has been doing it this
way for quite some time.

The alternative to using a nuclear reactor is to use a
“particle accelerator” to produce Mo-99.  There are
various ways to do this, using a cyclotron (a circular
accelerator) or a linear accelerator (one that is
arranged in a straight line).

Inside any particle accelerator, isotopes of various
kinds can be produced by bombarding a “target” of
some kind with a “beam” of very energetic (high-speed)
charged particles.  This is how a university or hospital
can produce most if not all of the isotopes it needs
without the need for a nuclear reactor.  For many years,
starting in 1949, McGill University got all of its isotopes
this way.

Here are some older texts I have written on the subject:

http://www.ccnr.org/isotope_shortage.html

http://www.ccnr.org/isotopes.html

Actually there is an absurdly elevated use of Tc-99m
around the world — it is, in my opinion, GREATLY
over-used!  And by the way, Tc-99m has a half-life of
6 hours, it is true, but it immediately disintegrates to
form Tc-99 (without the “m”) which has a half-life of
210,000 years!!!  So, short-lived it is NOT.

Technical note: In Tc-99m, the “m” stands for the word
“metastable”, which means that the nucleus of the atom
is “excited” and it can only relieve that excitement by giving
off a “gamma ray” — similar to an x-ray but more energetic.
Once that gamma ray has been emitted, however, the
resulting atom Tc-99 (without the “m”) is a very long-lived
emitter of beta radiation, with a half-life of 210,000 years.

It is the gamma radiation from the metastable atoms that
is useful to medical personnel wanting to obtain a clear
picture of what’s going on inside the patient’s body. When
Tc-99m is inserted into the patient’s body, it’s as if you
have an x-ray machine inside the body and all you have
to do is use x-ray film outside the body to “map” the
various structures in the body that are revealed in this
way.

There are only a handful of reactors used to produce
isotopes in the whole world,  The 55-year old NRU
reactor at Chalk River produces 1/3 to 1/2 of all the
Tc-99m used in the whole world!  And it is only a
research reactor with a capacity of 135 megawatts
of heat (MWth).  By comparison, a 1000 MWe power
reactor, in order to produce 1000 megawatts of
electricity, needs to produce about 3000 megawatts
of heat.  So the NRU reactor is not even 5 percent
as powerful as a more-or-less standard power reactor.
It’s a very small “drop in the bucket”.

Does Iran Need HEU to Make Medical Isotopes?

The point is that HEU is Not Needed to produce Medical
Isotopes, but countries like Canada and Belgium have
contributed to the mistaken and dangerous idea that HEU
is a perfectly sensible and legitimate material to use for this
purpose.

This gives Iran a perfect excuse to justify the production
of HEU using Canada and Belgium as examples and justi-
fications.  Whatever Iran’s real intention may be, the use of
HEU for civilian purposes has “blurred the line” between
atoms for peace and atoms for war.  If there were NO
peaceful uses of HEU (as should be the case!) then it
would be crystal-clear that anyone producing HEU has
only one objective in mind : nuclear weapons.

An analogy can be made in the case of India’s first nuclear
explosion (“Smiling Buddha”) in 1974, using plutonium from
a Canadian research reactor that was given to India as a
gift as part of the “Atoms For Peace” initiative, and using the
reprocessing technology needed to extract the plutonium
from the irradiated nuclear fuel, that was given to them by
the USA.  Ironically, the reactor that produced the nuclear
explosive material was called CIRUS symbolizing
Canadian, Indian, and US Cooperation — so maybe the
first Indian A-bomb should have been called a
“Canadian-American-Indian Atomic Bomb”.

Of course Canada and the US were shocked that India
should so betray their trust by using their “peaceful” nuclear
gifts for military purposes.  (Even though the USA was
building and testing nuclear weapons all the time, and
Canada had sold huge quantities of uranium and smaller
amounts of plutonium for use in the American bomb
program without even blinking.)

But the unflappable Indians had a perfect come-back.
“This is not a bomb,” they said, “nor is it in any way a
military application of nuclear energy.  It is simply a peaceful
nuclear explosive, or PNE” — such as those that both the
USA and USSR had championed in their own political
spheres.  (e.g. “Operation Gasbuggy”, whereby Americans
planned to use nuclear explosives to tap into large underground
reservoirs of natural gas — fracking on an enormous scale!).

Like dynamite, it was felt that peaceful nuclear explosives
could be used for large scale civic projects — to create
harbours where there are none, or even to build a major
canal like the Panama Canal by exploding a large number
of A-bombs like Chinese fire-crackers.

The language of Peaceful Nuclear Explosives is in fact
enshrined in the text of the Non-Proliferation Treaty:

Article V
1. Each party to the Treaty undertakes to take appropriate 
measures to ensure that, in accordance with this Treaty, 
under appropriate international observation and through 
appropriate international procedures, potential benefits 
from any peaceful applications of nuclear explosions will 
be made available to non-nuclear-weapon States Party 
to the Treaty on a nondiscriminatory basis and that the 
charge to such Parties for the explosive devices used will 
be as low as possible and exclude any charge for research 
and development. . . .
So, of course, India could make a plausible argument
(that nobody, including themselves, actually believed!)
that their first A-bomb was just a glorified stick of dynamite.
They didn’t have to invent this rationale, it was handed to
them on a silver platter….  by the superpowers’ behaviour
and the text of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The same dangerous game — giving a civilian veneer to
an essentially military product — goes for the use of HEU
for medical isotope production.  This practice should be
stopped immediately.

934 total views, 3 views today

Two years to the day following the Fukushima disaster in Japan,First Nations, municipalities and Citizen groups unitetheir voices, asking the Quebec government to announce a moratorium on uranium mines. They also ask the Government to quickly act on its promise to hold a generic environmental evaluation on uranium in Quebec.

221 total views, no views today

ITAP was set up by the Canadian government to invest some C$25 million ($24.3 million) over four years to advance non-reactor-based technologies for Tc-99m supply and optimise the processes to help bring them to market. The three selected projects are to receive a total of C$21.45 million ($20.9 million), with the remaining C$3.55 million ($3.46 million) covering support costs for the program.

Two cyclotron projects, at the University of Alberta and the Triumf consortium in British Columbia, are to receive C$7 million ($6.8 million) each, while the Prairie Isotope Production Enterprise linear accelerator project in Manitoba will receive C$7.46 million ($7.26 million). The three projects have all shown promising results under an earlier Canadian government initiative to diversify sources of Tc-99m using cyclotron and linear accelerator technologies, the Non-reactor-based Isotope Supply Contribution Program (NISP).

According to Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), these projects have shown promising results including small-scale demonstration of Tc-99m production, but more work is required to bring the technologies to commercial-scale production and to meet regulatory requirements.

Tc-99m is the most widely used medical isotope, employed in about 80% of nuclear medicine diagnostic procedures. As the isotope itself has a very short half-life of only six hours, the longer-lived molybdenum-99 (Mo-99) is used to generate Tc-99m at the point of treatment. Mo-99 is produced in a handful of research reactors around the world: the NRU facility at Canada’s Chalk River Laboratories produces around 40% of world supply.

Mo-99 itself also has a relatively short half-life of 66 hours, so reliable, regular supplies of the isotope are essential. However, recent years have seen global shortages when several of the handful of ageing research reactors used to produce the isotope have been out of action, prompting interest in investigating alternative sources.

Tc-99m can be produced directly in a cyclotron by bombarding a molybdenum-100 (Mo-100) target with a proton beam, while linear accelerators can be used to generate Mo-99 by bombarding a Mo-100 target with high-energy X-rays. Such methods are also seen as presenting non-proliferation benefits as they do not require the use of high-enriched uranium either for fuel or targets for isotope production.

302 total views, no views today

The Quebec government will go ahead with public consultations on whether uranium development should be allowed in the province, The Gazette has learned.

A well-placed government source indicated Tuesday that Environment Minister Yves-François Blanchet would travel to Chibougamau later this month or in early April to consult with people in the region before making the announcement, which will also have the effect of a moratorium, halting prospecting and exploration projects now underway.

Blanchet has been weighing whether to ask the Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement, Quebec’s environmental evaluation agency, to study the issue, or whether some other consultation process would be used. That’s because the BAPE does not have jurisdiction in areas of northern Quebec governed by the 1975 James Bay Northern Quebec Agreement.

It remained unclear Tuesday whether the BAPE would be chosen to carry out the consultations.

Daniel Breton, Parti Québécois environment minister before Blanchet was named in November, said he favoured a BAPE probe on uranium.

Ugo Lapointe, of the environmentalist group Québec meilleure mine, which campaigns for responsible mining and is opposed to uranium development, said there is a precedent for a “generic BAPE,” allowing the agency to examine a larger issue, such as water use, that would allow Quebec to ask the BAPE to evaluate the impact of uranium mining in Quebec.

The BAPE usually evaluates specific development projects before they are authorized by the province.

Lapointe organized a news conference in Quebec City on Monday where aboriginals, environmentalists, a Gaspé mayor, and a doctor who warned that uranium mining is a threat to public health, called for a moratorium as well as a consultation on uranium mining.

Université Laval engineering professor Michel Duguay warned at the news conference that there is no safe storage plan for nuclear waste, which remains dangerous for 1,600 years.

The Grand Council of Crees (Eeyou Itschee) called for a moratorium on uranium development last August.

There has been uranium exploration and prospecting activities at about 70 sites across northern Quebec, but the most advanced site is the Matoush project, being developed by Strateco Resources Inc. of Boucherville.

Matoush is located about 275 kilometres north of Chibougamau and 210 kilometres northeast of Mistissini.

The project has cleared a federal environmental review and has the approval of the Canadian Nuclear Regulatory Commission but the Crees, saying Matoush has not passed the test of “social acceptability,” are withholding their approval.

Strateco is suing Blanchet, in his role as Quebec’s environment minister, calling on him to override the Cree veto.

kdougherty@montrealgazette.com

370 total views, 2 views today

But no one knows how to shut off radioactivity.  If we
knew how to shut it off there would be no radioactive
waste problem.  And radioactivity generates heat, called
decay heat, that cannot be shut off.  That unstoppable
heat will drive the temperatures higher and higher unless
the heat can be removed as fast as it is produced.  For
that you need pumps, or some way to keep flooding the
irradiated fuel with water — for years — to prevent the
radio active waste from overheating due to decay heat.

All the damage to the Fukushima reactors is self-inflicted,
caused by the inexorable heat from the radioactivity inside.
Because there is no electricity, there is no cooling.

First the water boils, producing steam.  Then the metal
cladding of the fuel starts burning — stealing  oxygen
from  the superheated water molecules and releasing
the hydrogen  atoms as an explosive gas.  When the steam
is released — to  prevent overpressuring and rupturing the
reactor vessel — the  hydrogen gas is also released and
causes a violent explosion  when detonated by the tiniest
spark.  This blows the outer  walls and roof of the reactor
building to kingdom come.

And  temperature continues to climb until the ceramic fuel melts
at a temperature of 5000 degrees F, or 2800 degrees C.  All of
this is happening not because of the shock of the earthquake,
not because of the hammer blow of the tsunami wave, but
simply because there is no electrical power available.  (The
backup power supplies were “shorted out” by the presence of
water and steam  where there should not have been any water
or steam.)  A total station blackout  leads to a core meltdown.

Here’s what unit 1 looked like after the radioactive heat from
the so-called “spent fuel” had done  it’s work — after the
hydrogen gas explosion:

When you look at such pictures, it is important to realize –
this is self-inflicted damage.  This is damage that the recator
did to itself.  It is not the direct result of outside forces.

The irradiated fuel in the spent fuel pools at Fukushima
gives off less decay heat because the fuel has been out of
the reactor for more than two years — so it takes days of
gradual warming for the boiling point to be reached.  But
the water in each pool is quite radioactive, and so is the steam
and vapour rising out of it.

65 total views, no views today

 Moreover, with current retrenchments at Pelindaba, we are told that Emergency Services may also be endangered. More whistle-blowers in the nuke industry are needed, but above all an insistence by the SA public that the secrecy, non-transparency and non-accountability of the nuclear industry be stopped forthwith. Tragedy of this situation is that our toothless compromised and co-opted NNR, or shall we say National Nuclear Rubber-stamper, is privy to much information about the transgressions of the nuke industry that will never be made public…the incident below is likely to be used to justify the inflated salaries of NNR officials, growing criticism and their cries for more funding from government!

SA nuclear corporation in hot water over ‘breach of security’

Documents show the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation failed to timeously register a ‘breach of security’ at one of its facilities in April with the National Nuclear Regulator

Source:  http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=175798

THE South African Nuclear Energy Corporation (Necsa) failed to timeously register a “breach of security” at one of its facilities in April with the National Nuclear Regulator, according to documents in Business Day’s possession.

Although Necsa did later register the “nuclear occurrence” on June 1, it did not comply with the regulator’s directives, and did not include remedial and corrective actions within the specified time frame. The regulator has taken Necsa to task for its “lack of seriousness and urgency” regarding the incident.

As South Africa looks to ramp up its nuclear programme, nuclear security and safety are in the spotlight, with critics citing these points as key reasons not to develop the nuclear industry in South Africa.

In April, the regulator suspended the receipt of nuclear waste from Necsa and the Koeberg power station, following noncompliance by the corporation at its Vaalputs nuclear waste storage facility.

A source involved in South Africa’s nuclear industry described the April security breach as “serious”, but the regulator yesterday said it did not qualify as such according to incident classification, as “a serious incident would have involved exposure of workers and/or the public to a harmful release of radiation”.

Neither Necsa nor the regulator would divulge details about the incident. Van Zyl de Villiers, Necsa’s group executive for strategy and performance, said yesterday: “A reportable incident that pertained to a security breach occurred on the said date…. The incident has been fully investigated by Necsa, and the (regulator) is in possession of a report together with remedial actions proposed by Necsa.”

A letter from the regulator to Necsa, dated June 25, notes that it had to instruct Necsa to report the April 28 occurrence and submit a report within 72 hours. While Necsa did submit a report, the letter states, it was 10 days after the deadline and did not contain remedial and corrective actions.

Moreover, the regulator directed Necsa to explain, by June 27, “Necsa’s lack of seriousness and urgency in responding to this breach of security (and) why Necsa conducts an investigation … only after the (regulator) has directed them to conduct such an investigation, and more so conducting the investigation after the deadline for submitting the report”.

The regulator’s CEO, Boyce Mkhize, said yesterday “the issue of deadlines is … always a subject of mutual engagement between the regulator and the operator and the (regulator) is quite satisfied that a comprehensive response has been submitted”.

This is a much more conciliatory tone than that adopted in the letter sent to Necsa and signed by T Tselane, the senior manager for compliance assurance and enforcement at the regulator. One consequence of noncompliance, noted in the letter, is that the regulator “reserves the right to pursue prosecution of this matter with the relevant authorities”.

But Mr Mkhize said there would be no prosecution. Mr de Villiers said Necsa had submitted a “detailed follow-up report” on July 6. This “included a root cause analysis as well as remedial, corrective and preventative actions already taken”.

wilds@bdfm.co.za

Source:  http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=175798

122 total views, 1 views today

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/samuel-s-epstein/nuclear-power-causes-canc_b_251057.html

Cancer prevention expert, professor emeritus at Univ. of Illinois School of Public Health, Chicago

Nuclear power, frequently mentioned as one option for meeting future energy needs, would pose a health threat to Americans if a meltdown occurred. But despite meltdowns at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and many other near-miss accidents, there is another dirty little secret the nuclear industry doesn’t want you to know.

Cancer risk from nuclear plants aren’t just potential  risks, they are actual  risks.

Every day, reactors must routinely release a portion of radioactive chemicals into local air and water — the same chemicals found in atomic bomb tests. They enter human bodies through breathing and the food chain. Federal law obligates nuclear companies to measure these emissions and the amounts that end up in air, water, and food, and to report them to federal regulators.

However, nuclear advocates consistently claim that these releases are below federally-permitted limits, and thus are harmless. But this thinking is a leap that ignores hard evidence from scientific studies. Now, after half a century of a large-scale experiment with nuclear power, the verdict is in: nuclear reactors cause cancer.

The claim that low doses of radiation are harmless has always been just a claim. It led to practices like routine diagnostic X-rays to the pelvis of pregnant women, until the work of the University of Oxford’s Dr. Alice Stewart found that these X-rays doubled the chance that the fetus would die of cancer as a child. Many studies later, independent experts agreed that no dose is safe. A 2005 report by a blue-ribbon panel of the National Academy of Sciences reviewed hundreds of scientific articles, and concluded that there is no risk-free dose of radiation.

Federal health officials, who should be responsible for tracking cancer near nuclear reactors and analyzing their nuclear contaminants, have ignored the dangers. The only national analysis of the topic was a 1990 study mandated by Senator Edward Kennedy, and conducted by the National Cancer Institute. But this study was biased before it even got started.

A January 28, 1988 letter to Senator Kennedy from National Institutes of Health Director Dr. James Wyngaarden brazenly declared “The most serious impact of the Three Mile Island accident that can be identified with certainty is mental stress to those living near the plant, particularly pregnant women and families with teenagers and young children.” Not surprisingly, the study concluded there was no evidence of high cancer rates near reactors. No updated study has since been conducted by federal officials.

With government on the sidelines, it has been up to independent researchers — publishing results in medical and scientific journals– to generate the needed evidence. Studies were limited until the 1990s, but the few publications consistently documented high local cancer rates near reactors. Dr. Richard Clapp of Boston University found high leukemia rates near the Pilgrim plant in Massachusetts. Colorado health official Dr. Carl Johnson documented high child cancer rates near the San Onofre plant in California.

Columbia University researchers showed that cancer cases within a 10 mile radius of the Three Mile Island plant soared 64% in the first five years after the 1979 meltdown. Following the federal government’s party line, they claimed that “stress” rather than radiation caused this increase. But the cat was out of the bag. Dr. Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina published a paper using the same data confirming the radiation-cancer link.

Joseph Mangano, MPH, MBA, Executive Director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, has authored 23 scientific articles since the mid-1990s documenting high local cancer rates near nukes. One study showed child cancer exceeded the national rate near 14 of 14 plants in the eastern U.S. Another showed that when U.S. nuclear plants closed, local infant deaths and child cancer cases plunged immediately after shutdown.

Other publications by Mangano have shown rising levels of radioactive Strontium-90, emitted by reactors, in baby teeth of children living near reactors, which were closely linked with trends in childhood cancer rates.

The young aren’t the only ones affected by reactor emissions. New evidence has examined adult rates of thyroid cancer, a disease especially sensitive to radiation. Thyroid is the fastest-rising cancer in the U.S., nearly tripling since 1980. This evidence proves that most U.S. counties with the highest thyroid cancer rates are within a 90-mile radius covering eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and southern New York. This area has 16 nuclear reactors (13 still in operation) at 7 plants, the densest concentration of reactors in the U.S.

A November 2007 article on U.S. child leukemia deaths updated the 1990 National Cancer Institute study and showed local rates rose as nuclear plants aged — except near plants that shut down.

A nationwide study of current cancer rates near nukes is sorely needed. In May this year, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) quietly announced it was commissioning an update of the 1990 National Cancer study. This sounds like a positive step. However, the NRC has long been a harsh critic of any suggestion that reactors cause cancer. This is not surprising, since the Commission receives 90% of its funds from nuclear companies that operate reactors.

Rather than ask for competitive bids for the cancer study, the NRC simply handed the job to the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education. Oak Ridge is an Energy Department contractor in the city that has operated a nuclear weapons plant for over half a century. The “Institute” is merely a front for pro-nuclear forces. It has no record of publishing scientific articles on cancer rates near reactors. The whitewash is on.

Several steps must be taken urgently. President Obama, who will appoint replacements for 2 of the 5 NRC commissioners later this year, should select independent members — not the yes men for the nuclear industry who have run the NRC for so many years. The NRC should bow out of the cancer study. Finally, Congress should appropriate funds supporting a truly independent study on cancer rates near U.S. reactors. The American public deserves to know just what these machines have done to them, so that future energy policies will better protect public health.

Samuel S. Epstein, M.D. is professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health; Chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition; and author of over 200 scientific articles and 15 books on cancer, including the groundbreaking 1979 The Politics of Cancer, and the 2009 Toxic Beauty.

63 total views, no views today