DOD Embraces the Green Giant While Keystone XL Looks Increasingly Unattractive
Posted: January 27, 2012 Filed under: Environment, Environmental Protection, Gulf Oil Spill, health hazard, toxic waste, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics | Tags: Department of Defense, going green, Keystone Pipeline, renewable energy, tar sand oil 9 Comments
Frankly, I was surprised by President Obama’s comments in his SOTU address about the Department of Defense’s solar program, a project that would not only provide energy to military installations but generate enough additional energy to supply ¾ million American households.
Well, lo and behold, this is not idle chatter.
Turns out ground has been broken on a 13.78-megawatt solar power system at the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, CA. The project is expected to provide over 30% of the facility’s annual energy requirement and save an estimated $13 million in costs over the next 20 years. This is in keeping with a larger strategic plan to reduce the Defense Department’s reliance on foreign oil, shrink its annual $4 billion energy bill and ensure energy security in the event of a natural disaster or other unforeseen events [sounds ominous].
A year-long study indicated that of DOD’s huge landholdings in the Mojave and Colorado deserts, across which seven military bases in California were considered– Fort Irwin, China Lake, Chocolate Mountain, Edwards, Barstow, Twentynine Palms and El Centro—and two in Nevada [Creech and Nellis], 30,000 acres were deemed suitable acreage for solar production. Future facilities could produce 7 gigawatts of electricity. To put this in perspective that’s roughly equal to 7 nuclear power plants, sufficient to supply full electricity to the 5 California bases 30 times over, enough in excess to supply 780,000 California households.
This push for renewable energy use by the military has also been taken to the battlefield, namely Afghanistan. Last year, the 3rd Battalion 5th Marines began operating with Ground Renewable Energy Networks, Solar Portable Alternative Communications Energy Systems, LED lighting systems, Solar Shades, and Solar Light Trailers. In addition to reduced fuel savings, reports indicate that alternate energy use in remote locations decreases resupply convoy runs and subsequently the danger of IED attacks. Lives saved is a definite plus.
But there’s more. Army installations force-wide have implemented a 2020 goal of net-zero energy consumption, which means reducing energy consumption, and then producing power through renewable sources.
Kristine M. Kingery, director of the Army’s sustainability policy, said pilot installations in the program are “striving toward” goals the Army wants met by 2020. “With Net Zero, the idea is not just replace the energy with renewables,” Kingery said. “It’s the reduction, the repurposing, conservation and efficiency. Reduce usage, and replace what you are using with renewables.”
As the largest institutional energy consumer in the world, the Defense Department is providing a major infusion of funding for research and development and application of renewable energy projects, including advanced biofuels, the world’s largest rooftop solar project involving 127 bases, advanced fuel cells and advanced grid technology, just to name a few.
What I find remarkable about all this activity is how DOD’s push puts the Keystone pipeline controversy in an entirely different light.
As you may recall, the Republican objection to President Obama’s recent rejection of Keystone’s proposal was presumably all about jobs. The numbers have been wildly overstated. The State Department, at best, estimated 5000-6000 temporary construction jobs created, not the 100,000 jobs Speaker Boehner recently cited. Or the 250,000 that TransCanada finally arrived at. But more importantly, claims have been made that the pipeline would help break our dependence on foreign oil. This, too, has been proven patently false since the tar sand crude, once refined, had already been contracted for export to Latin America and Europe. Even the material for the pipeline [primarily steel] was being supplied not by American suppliers but by India.
This a classic battle–the old vs. the new. And who is leading the way? The United States Military, an institution of conservative values, has taken the bull by the horns and said: Time to move on, boys. The Era of Conservation and Renewable Energy is at hand.
There’s also the environmental impact of the pipeline, the danger of a leak, something pipeline supporters have openly mocked. What is rarely mentioned is that tar sand oil requires heat and pressure to move the sludge-like material along its 1700-mile journey from the Alberta sand fields to Texan refineries. Tar sand oil is toxic and very corrosive, making leaks far more likely.
What could happen?
Unfortunately, we’ve had a graphic example of exactly what could and did happen. In Michigan, a tar sands leak, estimated at over 800,000 gallons, polluted 30 miles of the Kalamazoo River, July 2010.
And Quelle Surprise! There was a resultant cover up.
Recall the Gulf of Mexico, BP and the environmental disaster of nightmarish proportions.
Then remember that the United States Military has clearly gotten the message and acted upon it: The Age of Fossil Fuel, the rush for Black Gold is coming to an end. The way forward financially and security-wise is colored Green.
Which would you rather see–this?
Or this?
Personally? I’ll take door number 2 and follow the generals into the future.
Profiting from Torture, War, Outing CIA agents, and Ruining America
Posted: August 30, 2011 Filed under: Central Intelligence Agency, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Crime, cyber security, Democratic Politics, Diplomacy Nightmares, Domestic terrorism, toxic waste, U.S. Military | Tags: Dick Cheney 18 Comments
Now, ask me how I really feel about the dueling book tours of war criminals Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld?
Better yet, ask me why I disagree with President Obama who hasn’t said anything about the Dark Lords’ Book Tours and still thinks we should just put all this behind us?
MSNBC and NBC interviewed the vile creature that was our vice president, and I’ve actually watched the interviews. One of the most disgusting parts of the book and of the interviews was his continued plea for exoneration of Scooter Libby for all the lying and law breaking he did to cover up Cheney’s role in the outing of Valerie Plame. He continues to point the finger at Colin Powell for the investigation and seethes about Dubya’s refusal to pardon Libby. He also characterizes Condoleeza Rice as “tearful” for her public apology on the 16 words that drove Joe Wilson to the op-ed pages to try to stop the incredible mistake that was and is the Iraq war. If there ever was a reason to never bring Republicans back to a realm where they can influence the foreign policy of the U.S., Cheney is out there making that case right now. How can so few people cost one nation so much in lives and treasure and then be allowed to go out and profit from their reckless, stupid, costly, deadly ideology and policy?
Here’s a link to The Atlantic to remind us “Why Americans Loathe Dick Cheney”. There’s a huge, long list that includes Halliburton, spying on Americans, indefinite detentions, torture, and the radical view of executive power that haunts us today. Each item on the list comes from a long list of books that investigated Cheney’s misdeeds and each of them should be enough to start a righteous Justice Department investigation of his actions while in office. Here’s the conclusions from author Conor Friedersdorf.
Dick Cheney was a self-aggrandizing criminal who used his knowledge as a Washington insider to subvert both informed public debate about matters of war and peace and to manipulate presidential decision-making, sometimes in ways that angered even George W. Bush.
After his early years of public service, he capitalized on connections he made while being paid by taxpayers to earn tens of millions of dollars presiding over Halliburton. While there, he did business with corrupt Arab autocrats, including some in countries that were enemies of the United States. Upon returning to government, he advanced a theory of the executive that is at odds with the intentions of the founders, successfully encouraged the federal government to illegally spy on innocent Americans, passed on to the public false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and became directly complicit in a regime of torture for which he should be in jail.
Glenn Greenwald got a jump on the corporate media by publishing his diatribe in Salon on Thursday. Oh, wait the corporate media is being somewhat deferential to grab the interviews. Greenwald lists the results of the poison fruits of elite immunity. While CNN is fretting about the dying Lockerbie bomber who killed hundreds, here’s what’s going on with Dick Cheney, who is responsible for the senseless deaths of hundreds of thousands.
That’s what happens when the Government — marching under the deceitful Orwellian banner of Look Forward, Not Backward — demands that its citizens avert their eyes from the crimes of their leaders so that all can be forgotten: the crimes become non-crimes, legitimate acts of political choice, and the criminals become instantly rehabilitated by the message that nothing they did warrants punishment. That’s the same reason people like John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales are defending their torture and illegal spying actions not in a courtroom but in a lush conference of elites in Aspen.
The U.S. Government loves to demand that other countries hold their political leaders accountable for serious crimes, dispensing lectures on the imperatives of the rule of law. Numerous states bar ordinary convicts from profiting from their crimes with books. David Hicks, an Australian citizen imprisoned without charges for six years at Cheney’s Guantanamo, just had $10,000 seized by the Australian government in revenue from his book about his time in that prison camp on the ground that he is barred from profiting from his uncharged, unproven crimes.
By rather stark contrast, Dick Cheney will prance around the next several weeks in the nation’s largest media venues, engaging in civil, Serious debates about whether he was right to invade other countries, torture, and illegally spy on Americans, and will profit greatly by doing so. There are many factors accounting for his good fortune, the most important of which are the protective shield of immunity bestowed upon him by the current administration and the more generalized American principle that criminal accountability is only for ordinary citizens and other nations’ (unfriendly) rulers.
Even George Will says that Dick Cheney–at the very least–owes the world and the US an apology.
Five hundred and sixty five pages and a simple apology would have been in order in some of them. Which is to say, the great fact of those eight years is we went to war—big war, costly war—under false pretenses. And…to write a memoir in which you say essentially nothing seriously went wrong…if I wrote a memoir of my last week, I would have things to apologize for.
From what I can tell from these bits and blurbs from the interviews with NBC, Cheney thinks everything he did was right and every one else is wrong. This includes the President he served and the people he served with maybe the exception of Donald Rumsfeld. It’s a little odd, don’t you think, that Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Dubya can’t leave the country for fear of being sent directly to The Hague to be tried for Crimes against humanity? Yet, Cheney can’t think of one thing that he wasn’t right about.
If you can stomach it, here’s a Youtube of NBC’s ‘exclusive” with Dick Cheney. Isn’t this just ducky? Oh, and his book is up there on the bestseller list now. How on earth could we let this vile creature out on a rehabilitation tour and enrich him for his inhumane agenda?
Oh, and just in case you’re inclined to give our President a Break, here’s a little reminder on something from Wikileaks via Jonathan Turley and David Corn from 2010 w/ht to Susie Madrak.
One of the little reported details from the latest batch of Wikileaks material are cables showing that the Obama Administration worked hard behind the scenes not only to prevent any investigation of torture in the United States but shutdown efforts abroad to enforce the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture. This includes threatening the Spanish that, if they did not derail a judicial investigation, it would have serious consequences in bilateral relations. I discussed these cables on Countdown.
For two years, President Obama has worked to block the investigation of torture under the Bush Administration — even as both Dick Cheney and George Bush publicly admit to ordering waterboarding of suspects.
David Corn in Mother Jones has an interesting posting today on the issue.
A “confidential” April 17, 2009, cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department discloses how the Administration discarded any respect for the independence of the judiciary in Spain and pressured the government to derail the prosecution of Bush officials. Human rights groups around the world had called for such enforcement in light of Obama promise that no torturers would be prosecuted and Holder’s blocking of any investigation into war crimes.
The Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners had filed a demand for prosecution with Spain’s National Court to indict former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; David Addington, former chief of staff and legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney; William Haynes, the Pentagon’s former general counsel; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy; Jay Bybee, former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; and John Yoo, a former official in the Office of Legal Counsel. It had a compelled factual basis that these men ordered or facilitated war crimes — a record that has only become stronger since this confrontation.
American officials pressured government officials, including prosecutors and judges, not to enforce international law and that this was “a very serious matter for the USG.” It was Obama’s own effort at creating a “Coalition of the Unwilling” — nations unwilling to enforce treaties on torture and war crimes when the alleged culprits are American officials.
Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) joined the embassy’s charge d’affaires in the secret campaign to block the prosection of Judge Baltasar Garzón.
Tuesday Reads
Posted: April 5, 2011 Filed under: Environment, Foreign Affairs, Japan, Libya, MENA, toxic waste, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics 25 Comments
What's with all the bad news?
Good Morning, politics junkies! Let’s get right to the news.
The best news as far as I’m concerned is that Eman al-Obeidi is still alive and still telling her story. I was so afraid she would be killed if she refused to recant. Read all about it in Wonk the Vote’s late night post from last night.
This story made me laugh out loud. Awhile back, Maine’s right wing tea party nut Governor ordered that a mural that celebrates Maine’s labor history be removed from the Labor Department building. The Governor thinks it’s unfair that the mural didn’t celebrate the bosses along with the workers.
So the mural was removed, but it turns out it had been paid for by a Federal government grant and the feds now want their money back.
Whoops: The governor of Maine’s decision to remove a pro-labor mural from the state’s Department of Labor may cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars, all because he wanted to “send a message.”
Apparently unknown to Maine’s recently elected Republican governor, the mural targeted by his ire was initially paid for by a federal grant — the terms of which he violated by having it removed.
And now, according to the Associated Press, the U.S. Department of Labor has officially demanded reimbursement.
The grant, awarded in 2008 to pay for the 37-foot-long mural, fulfilled 63 percent of the $60,000 historical art project.
If the state decides against putting it back up, they’ll be forced to repay 63 percent of the mural’s fair market value, which has likely gone up since it became a centerpiece in Republicans’ battle against workers.
Bwaaaahahahahahahaha!!
That world famous right wing nut tea party Governor in Wisconsin’s antics are still making news. It seems Scott Walker, who thinks school teachers are overpaid, is not as worried about saving money when it comes to pleasing wealthy donors.
Just in his mid-20s, Brian Deschane has no college degree, very little management experience and two drunken-driving convictions.
Yet he has landed an $81,500-per-year job in Gov. Scott Walker’s administration overseeing environmental and regulatory matters and dozens of employees at the Department of Commerce. Even though Walker says the state is broke and public employees are overpaid, Deschane already has earned a promotion and a 26% pay raise in just two months with the state.
So how did this kid get his big-time job?
His father is Jerry Deschane, executive vice president and longtime lobbyist for the Madison-based Wisconsin Builders Association, which bet big on Walker during last year’s governor’s race.
The group’s political action committee gave $29,000 to Walker and his running mate, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, last year, making it one of the top five PAC donors to the governor’s successful campaign. Even more impressive, members of the trade group funneled more than $92,000 through its conduit to Walker’s campaign over the past two years.
Total donations: $121,652.
According the The Hill, 41 senators have committed to filibuster any spending bill that defunds Planned Parenthood.
The group, led by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), includes thirty-nine Democratic senators and two Independents, Sens. Joe Lieberman (Conn.) and Bernie Sanders (Vt.).
It’s just large enough to sustain a filibuster to block any spending bill that cuts Planned Parenthood funding from passing the upper chamber.
Let’s hope they stick to their guns this time. Frankly, I’ll believe it when I see it.
I’m not sure how many of the people who object to the UN approval of intervention in Libya realize that the UN has had troops in the Ivory Coast for awhile now. Today UN helicopters
attacked President Laurent Gbagbo’s forces in Ivory Coast, destroying their weapons at four places where they had been shelling civilians, a UN spokesman said.
The helicopters fired four missiles at a Gbagbo military camp in the main city of Abidjan, witnesses told Reuters. “We saw two UN MI-24 helicopters fire missiles on the Akouedo military camp. There was a massive explosion and we can still see the smoke,” one said. The camp is home to three battalions of the Ivorian army.
Hamadoun Toure, spokesman for the UN mission in Ivory Coast, said in an email: “We launched an operation to neutralise heavy weapons Gbagbo’s special forces have been using against the civilian population for the last three months. We destroyed them in four locations.”
The French are helping out too. Of course the massacres have already happened there….
The BBC is reporting that the presidential residence in Abidhan has been “taken.”
Forces loyal to Alassane Ouattara, the country’s internationally recognised president, said they had taken the building after a day of fierce combat.
A spokesman for Mr Ouattara, Patrick Achi, told the BBC it was not yet clear whether Mr Gbagbo had been inside.
Earlier, UN and French helicopters attacked targets near the residence.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the attacks were ordered to defend civilians and were not a declaration of war on Mr Gbagbo.
Hmmmm…protecting civilians…”not a war.” That sounds familiar somehow. Nahhh, I must be imagining it.
Yesterday the Daily Mail reported that two of Gaddafi’s sons have offered to “get rid of their father” if Saif can take over for him.
The opposition forces won’t accept that, but there are definitely negotiations going on to remove Gaddafi. The UK has announced that any defectors from Gaddafi’s regime will be treated fairly, and Scottish authories are meeting with defector Moussa Koussa regarding the Lockerbie bombing.
In Japan, Tepco is dumping highly radioactive water directly into the ocean.
Tepco began discharging 11,500 tons of water yesterday, enough to fill 4 1/2 Olympic-sized swimming pools, to make room to store more highly contaminated fluids. The United Nations nuclear watchdog said the partial meltdown at the station was a result of “errors” from the time a March 11 quake and tsunami knocked out pumps used to cool reactors and spent fuel.
Meanwhile, even more toxic water is still leaking from damaged reactor core. What a mess!
That’s about it for me. What are you reading and blogging about today?
Japanese Officials Admit They Are Making No Progress
Posted: March 30, 2011 Filed under: Food, Foreign Affairs, Japan, toxic waste, Water, We are so F'd | Tags: cesium-137, contaminated food, contaminated water, Fukushim Dai-Ichi, Fukushima nuclear plant, Nuclear Contamination, radiation 30 Comments
Chernobyl disaster: will it happen again?
The Guardian reports that radiation levels are rising in the ocean near the Fukushima nuclear plant, and Japanese officials admit they basically have no real solution for the apparent meltdown and/or meltdowns of the four damaged nuclear reactors.
The country’s nuclear and industrial safety agency, Nisa, said radioactive iodine-131 at 3,355 times the legal limit had been identified in the sea about 300 yards south of the plant, although officials have yet to determine how it got there.
Hidehiko Nishiyama, a Nisa spokesman, said fishing had stopped in the area, adding that the contamination posed no immediate threat to humans. “We will find out how it happened and do our utmost to prevent it from rising,” he said.
Good luck with that. The battle to control the reactors could go on for years.
The battle to control the slow-motion meldowns could take years, according to this Reuters article.
Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. has conceded it faces a protracted and uncertain operation to contain overheating fuel rods and avert a meltdown.
“Regrettably, we don’t have a concrete schedule at the moment to enable us to say in how many months or years (the crisis will be over),” TEPCO vice-president Sakae Muto said in the latest of round-the-clock briefings the company holds.
Back to the Guardian piece:
Robert Peter Gale, a US medical researcher who was brought in by Soviet authorities after the Chernobyl disaster, said recent higher readings of radioactive iodine-131 and caesium-137 should be of greater concern than reports earlier this week of tiny quantities of plutonium found in soil samples.
But he added: “It’s obviously alarming when you talk about radiation, but if you have radiation in non-gas form I would say dump it in the ocean.”
Wonderful. The Japanese eat a lot of fish, don’t they?
Radiation measured at a village 40 kilometres from the Fukushima nuclear plant now exceeds a criterion for evacuation, the UN nuclear watchdog said.
And a Japanese nuclear expert has warned crews may have to keep pouring cooling water onto the stricken reactors for years.
Years. That is what multiple sources are now saying. It could take years. So how does it end? We hope for new discoveries that will solve the problem, while the reactors continue to melt down and release radioactive elements into the groundwater and the ocean? Or there is a catastrophic explosion?
Yes, I know the “experts” say that won’t happen, but if workers are going to be struggling with these plants for years, there is inevitably going to be human error. Besides, the “experts” have tried to minimize the dangers all along. Only now is the real truth beginning to come out.
From the Union of Concerned Scientists All Things Nuclear blog:
Today the IAEA has finally confirmed what some analysts have suspected for days: that the concentration per area of long-lived cesium-137 (Cs-137) is extremely high as far as tens of kilometers from the release site at Fukushima Dai-Ichi, and in fact would trigger compulsory evacuation under IAEA guidelines.
The IAEA is reporting that measured soil concentrations of Cs-137 as far away as Iitate Village, 40 kilometers northwest of Fukushima-Dai-Ichi, correspond to deposition levels of up to 3.7 megabecquerels per square meter (MBq/sq. m). This is far higher than previous IAEA reports of values of Cs-137 deposition, and comparable to the total beta-gamma measurements reported previously by IAEA and mentioned on this blog.
This should be compared with the deposition level that triggered compulsory relocation in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident: the level set in 1990 by the Soviet Union was 1.48 MBq/sq. m.
Thus, it is now abundantly clear that Japanese authorities were negligent in restricting the emergency evacuation zone to only 20 kilometers from the release site.
This is bad, folks. Here is a summary of the health effects of cesium-137:
Like all radionuclides, exposure to radiation from cesium-137 results in increased risk of cancer.
Everyone is exposed to very small amounts of cesium-137 in soil and water as a result of atmospheric fallout. Exposure to waste materials, from contaminated sites, or from nuclear accidents can result in cancer risks much higher than typical environmental exposures.
If exposures are very high, serious burns, and even death, can result. Instances of such exposure are very rare. One example of a high-exposure situation would be the mishandling a strong industrial cesium-137 source. The magnitude of the health risk depends on exposure conditions. These include such factors as strength of the source, length of exposure, distance from the source, and whether there was shielding between you and the source (such as metal plating).
Please note that cesium-137, like plutonium doesn’t occur naturally in the environment. When officials and “experts” talk about “background” radiation, they are talking about elements that have been introduced through nuclear tests and nuclear reactor accidents and bi-products. This “background” radiation wasn’t around before the nuclear age, and I personally don’t believe that it has no effect on us.
From NPR: More radioactive material has been found in foods in Japan.
Yesterday, I asked in a comment what is being done with all the contaminated water that is being removed from the Fukushima reactors. Scarecrow addressed this question today at FDL.
They’ve got hundreds of tons of contaminated water preventing workers from getting close enough to pumps, valves, monitors needed to stabilize conditions. So they have to pump this water out and put it somewhere, but where? There are tanks at/near some units that can hold some of it, but not all, and external temporary storage may allow exposure to the atmosphere. Meanwhile, they must keep pumping more fresh water into the reactors and spent fuel storage pools, while more leaks out.
There are large pools of dangerously contaminated water in the turbine buildings adjacent to each reactor buidling, with more leaking in from somewhere, and few places to put it. Just outside the turbine buildings, there are long, deep trenches nearer the ocean and likely filled with water from the tsunami. But they’re now contaminated with radiation and water leaks from the turbine building.
Where can they put all this water? And given varying degrees of contamination, which water should they put where? For example, should they just pump out the least radioactive water in the trenches/pools and dump it in the ocean?
Believe it or not, some people are suggesting putting the water in large ships and letting them float around in the ocean. And what happens if there is a huge storm and the ships are damaged? Honestly, this gets scarier and scarier every day.
Even worse, today smoke was seen at another nuclear plant owned by Tepco!
The company said smoke was detected in the turbine building of reactor No. 1 at the Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant around 6 p.m. (5 a.m. ET).
Smoke could no longer be seen by around 7 p.m. (6 a.m. ET), a company spokesman told reporters.
The Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant is about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, where workers have been scrambling to stave off a meltdown since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems there….
After the dual disasters, Japanese authorities also detected cooling-system problems at the Fukushima Daini plant, and those living within a 10-kilometer radius (6 miles) of Fukushima Daini were ordered to evacuate as a precaution.
What next? Something tells me whatever happens next won’t be good.
Expert Tells Guardian UK: “Japan may have lost race to save nuclear reactor”
Posted: March 29, 2011 Filed under: A My Pet Goat Moment, Foreign Affairs, Japan, toxic waste, We are so F'd | Tags: Cancer, corporate malfeasance, Fukushima nuclear plant, Japan, nuclear meltdown, plutonium 40 Comments
Google photo of Fukushima Nuclear Plant
Ian Sample, science correspondent for the Guardian, writes:
Richard Lahey, who was head of safety research for boiling-water reactors at General Electric when the company installed the units at Fukushima, told the Guardian workers at the site appeared to have “lost the race” to save the reactor, but said there was no danger of a Chernobyl-style catastrophe….
“The indications we have, from the reactor to radiation readings and the materials they are seeing, suggest that the core has melted through the bottom of the pressure vessel in unit two, and at least some of it is down on the floor of the drywell,” Lahey said. “I hope I am wrong, but that is certainly what the evidence is pointing towards.”
The major concern when molten fuel breaches a containment vessel is that it reacts with the concrete floor of the drywell underneath, releasing radioactive gases into the surrounding area. At Fukushima, the drywell has been flooded with seawater, which will cool any molten fuel that escapes from the reactor and reduce the amount of radioactive gas released.
Lahey said: “It won’t come out as one big glob; it’ll come out like lava, and that is good because it’s easier to cool.”….
“The reason we are concerned is that they are detecting water outside the containment area that is highly radioactive and it can only have come from the reactor core,” Lahey added. “It’s not going to be anything like Chernobyl, where it went up with a big fire and steam explosion, but it’s not going to be good news for the environment.”
Last night, ABC News talked to physicist Michio Kaku.
“Apparently, there is a crack, a crack in the vessel by which radiation is escaping,” U.S. physicist Michio Kaku said. “This could mean that if the core begins to melt, we could have a steam explosion, a hydrogen gas explosion like Chernobyl.”
So the nuke guy says it won’t be like Chernobyl, Kaku says it will. I guess we have no choice except to just wait and see.
FYI, here is an earlier interview with Kaku at KATU, Portland, Oregon.
Michio Kaku’s comments came after news that Japanese nuclear experts said they suspect there has been a possible breach at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex.
“This is huge. For the first time, they’re using that dreaded word, ‘breach,’ Kaku said during an interview at KATU’s studios. “Plutonium is the most toxic chemical known to science. A speck of plutonium, a millionth of a gram, could cause cancer.”
No matter how much Tepco and pro-nuke “experts” insist there is no danger to humans from the material that has escaped the plant, there simply is no safe level of plutonium.
The Tokyo Electric Company confirmed that AREVA-manufactured fuel assemblies containing plutonium have at least partially melted down when they said that plutonium was found on five separate sites on the reactor grounds, and they had matched the plutonium signature of fuel produced at AREVA’s La Hague facility. The fuel assemblies were first loaded in the reactor at Fukushima last September and were in Reactor 3 when the 14 meter tsunami overwhelmed the nuclear plant.
Despite the fact that plutonium is one of the most deadly substances in existence, TEPCO has insisted there is no health danger from the plutonium found on site. According to health experts, plutonium particles absorbed in the human body vastly increases the chance of dying from a fatal form of cancer.
The former DOE official said, “NNSA was warned this kind of event could happen and they chose to build the MOX plant anyway. Maybe what Japan is going through will wake up people who can call a halt to this.”
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