[P2P-F] Fwd: After Fukushima: Massive global expansion of nuclear industry under way

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 9:15 PM
Subject: After Fukushima: Massive global expansion of nuclear industry under
way
To: econowmix at googlegroups.com


http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jul2011/fuku-j06.shtml

http://www.wsws.org/category/japan_quake.shtml

translation in french :

http://www.mondialisation.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25681

 ====================
* After Fukushima: Massive global expansion of nuclear industry under way By
William Whitlow
6 July 2011

A report from the Economist Intelligence Unit predicts a massive worldwide
growth in nuclear energy production over the next decade. The impact of the
Fukushima disaster, now being described as the worst industrial accident in
history, is expected to be minimal.

Germany's decision to close its nuclear power stations will be more than
made up for by an expansion of nuclear production in other countries,
according to the report. The Future of Nuclear Energy suggests a 27 percent
growth in output by 2020. The reactors that are planned for China, India and
Russia will add five times the nuclear capacity that the German decision
will remove from world nuclear output.

It takes 15 years to build a nuclear power station, so the projected
increase reflects the estimated output of facilities that are already under
construction. Sixteen new reactors were started in 2010. Ten of them are in
China and the others are in Russia, India and Brazil. Even Japan has resumed
construction work at a new nuclear plant, after further anti-earthquake
measures were put in place. By 2015 one new nuclear reactor is expected to
be coming online every month somewhere in the world.

This massive expansion in the nuclear industry is taking place despite the
fact that none of the safety issues inherent in the production of nuclear
energy have been addressed. Only this week there was an explosion at a
French nuclear power station. The Tricastin power station was recently
criticized by the French national nuclear safety authority, the Autorité de
Sûreté Nucléaire (ASN), which demanded 32 safety measures be put into
operation. EDF, which runs the facility, insisted that the explosion had
taken place in a non-nuclear part of the plant and posed no danger of a
radiation leak. The experience of Fukushima has shown that the failure of
non-nuclear functions such as a loss of power supply poses a danger to the
nuclear reactor. Nuclear power plants are complex engineering systems and no
part of them can be so lightly regarded as non-critical.

All France's nuclear power plants are supposed to have undergone an
inspection following the Fukushima disaster. For one of them to experience
an explosion so soon afterwards, and for EDF to dismiss the incident as
"only a fire," suggests that the industry has learned no lessons from
Fukushima.

The expansion of nuclear power is an international phenomenon, and the
impact of any accident would be international. Yet there are still no
internationally agreed and enforceable safety standards for the industry.
Instead, as the Fukushima disaster has highlighted, national governments and
the nuclear industry collaborate in a secretive manner and connive to cover
up safety issues.

The Guardian recently released emails detailing the collusion between the UK
government and the nuclear industry in the aftermath of the Fukushima
disaster. Two days after the earthquake, British government officials
emailed EDF, Areva, Westinghouse and the industry body, the Nuclear Industry
Association, to warn that Fukushima situation could damage public confidence
in nuclear power. It was not as bad as the television pictures suggested,
the officials stressed:

"Radiation released has been controlled--the reactor has been protected. It
is all part of the safety systems to control and manage a situation like
this."

They invited the industry to send their comments so that they could be
included in government statements: "We need to all be working from the same
material to get the message through to the media and the public."

A concerted propaganda campaign was being planned, with no regard for the
truth or public safety. The nuclear industry and the British government were
working together to suppress the extent of the disaster that was unfolding
in Japan and its potential impact on the rest of the world.

"Anti-nuclear people across Europe have wasted no time blurring this all
into Chernobyl and the works. We need to quash any stories trying to compare
this to Chernobyl," one email said.

Within weeks Japanese officials were forced to raise the level of the
Fukushima accident from a level 4 to a 7, the same as Chernobyl.

British officials clearly saw themselves as fighting a media battle to
defend the nuclear industry, as ministers prepared to announce the
government's plans for new nuclear reactors in the UK.

"This has the potential to set the nuclear industry back globally," one of
the 80 emails released says, "We need to ensure the anti-nuclear chaps and
chapesses do not gain ground on this. We need to occupy the territory and
hold it. We really need to show the safety of nuclear."

A former nuclear inspector told the Guardian that the level of collusion
revealed by the emails was "truly shocking."

This collusion is not confined to Britain. In Japan, the extent of the
Fukushima disaster has been consistently downplayed from the beginning.
According to former Minister for Internal Affairs Haraguchi Kazuhiro, the
figures from radiation monitoring stations in Japan are up to three decimal
places higher than those that have been made public.

Experts are becoming increasingly concerned about the implications of
Fukushima for public health. Nishio Masamichi, a radiation treatment
specialist and director of the Hokkaido Cancer Center, expressed his "grave
concern" in the business journal Toyo Keizai. In an article entitled,

"The Problem of Radiation Exposure Countermeasures for the Fukushima Nuclear
Accident: Concerns for the Present Situation," he gave a detailed breakdown
of the health risks to workers at the plant and to residents in the
surrounding area.

The health official had initially joined in calls for "calm," but now he has
accused the Tokyo Electrical Company (TEPCO) of hiding the truth of the
disaster and putting the survival of the company before public health. He
condemned the government for raising the legal radiation exposure limit for
nuclear workers from 100 millisieverts to 250 millisieverts per year. The
workers at the plant are "not even being treated like human beings," he
wrote.

Workers are forced to sleep and eat on the wrecked site, increasing their
risk of inhaling or ingesting contaminated material, when only half an hour
away there are empty hotels where they would face a reduced risk of
exposure. The emphasis of the company, he stated, is on preventing the
workers from running away, not on protecting their health.

The company has given workers broken radiation monitors, he claimed. It is
not using whole-body monitoring to assess the level of internal radiation
exposure. Nor have different types of radiation, such as alpha rays from
plutonium and beta rays from strontium, been measured. No special measures
have been taken to protect workers from the MOX (Mixed Oxide fuel) at the
number 3 reactor. Iodine is being given to the workers, but they should also
be taking Radiogardase (Prussian blue insoluble capsules), according to
Nishio.

Nishio criticized the measures that the Japanese government has taken to
protect the local population. A 30-kilometer radius has been evacuated, but
he pointed out that the danger of contamination is not even and depends on
topography and weather. Some areas outside this zone have produced high
radiation readings.

Some contamination readings were suppressed, he wrote: "It is only
conceivable that the high rate of radiation released was not reported
because of fears of a panic."

The legally permitted level of radiation exposure in Japan is 1
millisieverts a year for people who do not work in the nuclear industry. But
the Japanese government has raised this to 20 millisieverts following the
Fukushima disaster. Nishio stated that this amounts to "taking the lives of
the people lightly." He warned that this is too high for children and called
for special measures to monitor strontium levels, which can affect children
because their bones are still developing.

Japanese citizens have no means of measuring their personal level of
exposure. Nishio particularly stressed the danger of internal exposure to
long term high levels of radiation. Comparisons cannot be made with external
exposure in a controlled medical environment, he warned. The health effects
of internal and long term exposure are unpredictable and largely unknown.

Fukushima city is home to 300,000 people and is outside the evacuation area.
Residents are resorting to measures such as digging up their gardens and
scrubbing their roofs with soap and water in an effort to remove
contamination, after areas of high radiation were detected.

"Everything and everyone here is paralyzed, and we feel left on our own,
unsure whether it's actually safe for us to stay in the city," one mother
told Reuters.

The authorities are removing top soil from school grounds, but there is no
general plan to remove contaminated material from parks, open land or
private gardens. Nor is there anywhere safe to dump it once it is removed.
There is no precedent for the scale of the decontamination effort that will
have to be made to make the area affected by the Fukushima disaster safe.

The global implications of the Fukushima disaster are only just becoming
apparent and are still not the subject of official comment. In June TEPCO
revised its estimate of the amount of radiation that was emitted in the
first week of the disaster. They admitted that it was double their previous
estimate for amount emitted in the entire accident.

Most of the additional radiation was in the form of "hot particles" --tiny
particles of cesium, plutonium, uranium, cobalt60 and other radioactive
materials. Individual hot particles are too small to be detected by a Geiger
counter. But they pose a serious risk of cancer because they can become
lodged in the lungs or gastrointestinal tract, where they bombard a
localized area of tissue over a long period of time.

Independent scientists who have inspected air filters removed from vehicles
in Japan suggest that residents of Tokyo were breathing in approximately 10
hot particles per day during April, immediately after the crisis began. In
the area around the plant, the levels would have been 30 to 40 times higher
and across the Pacific in Seattle levels equivalent to 5 per day have been
detected.
*



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