The Yin and Yang of Nuclear Energy

A recent letter in The Japan Times complained that opponents of nuclear power always conflate good nuclear power (electricity) with bad nuclear power (bombs). This blog is guilty as charged, and it’s a valid question to ask, but unfortunately, there are some very good reasons why you can’t have your yin without your yang. Seriously, viewing the photo above of the Fukushim Dai-ichi Unit 3 detonation, who wouldn’t be terrified by both the civilian and military uses of nuclear energy?

To understand why the two co-exist requires a look at the origins of nuclear energy. The history shows that during the days of discovery, no one had the faintest thought of using nuclear fission to boil water, even though it wasn’t too hard to imagine how the chain reaction could be moderated. The history also shows that a vast, expensive infrastructure for building weapons had to exist before nuclear power plants were built – mostly as an afterthought justification for having made the weapons complex.

Consider how hard it has been to get modern civilization off its addiction to fossil fuels. There has been no transformative, massive investment in renewable energy, and the likely reason is that it has no potential for massively destructive weapons that would change the balance of power in the world.

Imagine that the discovery of fission had happened during peacetime. Instead of Einstein writing a letter to President Roosevelt warning that the Germans might build a terrible new weapon, he would have been asking for government subsidies for a new kind of energy that some friends were trying to launch in a start-up company. He would have explained that a multibillion-dollar infrastructure was needed to set up the mining, processing and power stations. Massive fossil fuel-burning generating stations would be needed to run the enrichment facilities. The outcome would be uncertain, and the details worked out along the way. Oh, and by the way, devastating military applications would be possible, but a system of global surveillance could ensure that no nation ever submitted to the temptation to make such a weapon. Furthermore, the used fuel would be the most toxic thing ever known, and potentially a weapon of mass destruction. A way to dispose of it would have to be worked out. Devastating accidents could happen that would have catastrophic effects on populations and food supplies. We don’t yet understand what this stuff does to living tissue, but it’s just a matter of control. What do you think? This could be the way of the future.

The opinion you have about to this speculation depends on your theory of human nature. No one can say what would happen in this alternate reality, but my conclusion is that there is no leader now or ever who would have supported this start-up. The likely response would have been, “Spare me the science fiction nonsense, but tell me more about the weapons.” As it was, the most Einstein ever said about making electricity from nuclear energy was that it was “one hell of a way to boil water.”

Another interesting speculative question is whether any nation would have built nuclear infrastructure if the implications had been thoroughly discussed and put to a vote. The Manhattan Project was carried out in secrecy under the leadership of General Leslie Groves, without the knowledge of Congress, and $2 billion was spent on a massive system of laboratories, mines, factories and enrichment facilities. The political leaders didn’t understand the science or the health dangers, and the scientists naively believed the bomb would be used to deter a Nazi nuclear attack. They were shocked, shocked to realize that the $2-billion bomb would have to be used to justify its cost and to make a show of strength to the Soviets.

The American public has always excused this Manhattan Project secrecy as a necessity of the war, but nonetheless it was one massive blank check that wasn’t really essential. The Americans quickly realized that enormous generating stations and industrial plants were required, not to mention access to lots of uranium ore, and the USSR, Germany and Japan all lacked the prerequisites, under the conditions that existed from 1943-45. America was the only country that had the capacity. By the spring of 1945, Germany had surrendered and General Groves was worried that Japan would be done too before “the gadget” was ready. The outcome of the war would not have been much different without the bomb.

Few historians believe anymore that the atomic bombs were essential to end the war. There was no CNN in those days, so most of Japan barely knew anything had happened. The generals in Tokyo had heard only vague reports of a terrifying new kind of weapon, but they didn’t know enough about it to be scared of it, and they certainly didn’t care about the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was just two more bombed out cities after all the others that had been bombed by conventional methods.

After the Nagasaki bomb the generals still wanted to fight on, and if they had had a chance to call a bluff and see if the Americans would drop another one, they would have found out that there weren’t any more. (The Bikini Islanders still had 11 months to enjoy their homeland before the next bomb was ready for them.) The surrender happened only because some cabinet members were able to get around the military leadership, sneak the recording of the Emperor’s speech out of the palace, and get it on the radio. According to historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, what really got the political leadership to surrender was the entry of the USSR into the war in August 1945. They concluded, predictably, that going with the capitalists would be the lesser of two evils.

As late as 1995 (and still now for a large segment of the population), this was still a wild, revisionist theory in America. A proposed exhibit at the Smithsonian, commemorating the 50th. anniversary of the atomic bombings, was to present a contextualized, multifaceted approach to the interpretation of the history, but political opposition shut it down. It was offensive to veterans to suggest that factors beside the bombs had an influence in ending the war.

The standard defense is that the bombings were justified because they eliminated the necessity of a land invasion in which hundreds of thousands would die. Some even suggested there would have been a million American casualties. The trouble with this reasoning is that it ignores an obvious possibility: pack up and go home if you don’t want to invade. The war was already over. Japan could no longer wage war outside its territories, it could not have held on to Korea and Taiwan, and it was under blockade. The threat of Soviet invasion would have made Japan come begging for an American occupation, which is basically what really motivated the actual surrender. 

   Thus the atomic bombings were a sideshow, but a nice demonstration of American power to usher in the post-war world. The entire Manhattan Project seems like a series of events that spun out of control and went beyond any outcome that anyone imagined at the outset. It expanded like as a headless monster, and the mission creep has continued all the way to Fukushima and the present nuclear standoff with Iran.

Colonel: What’s that you’ve got written on your helmet? Private Joker: ‘Born to Kill’, Sir. Colonel: You write ‘Born to Kill’ on your helmet and you wear a peace button. What’s that supposed to be, some sick joke?... Private Joker: I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir. Colonel: The what? Private Joker: The duality of man. You know – the Jungian thing, sir. Stanley Kubrick (dir.) Full Metal Jacket. 1987

There are problems with speculating about how things might have happened under different circumstances, but it is worthwhile to run such thought experiments. I find it hard to believe that humanity would have first tried to harness nuclear energy for anything other than weapons. The struggle to establish renewable energy has shown that the fossil fuel paradigm would not allow itself to be threatened by such a novel, risky and expensive undertaking as nuclear power, which requires energy inputs from fossil fuels in any case. Using nuclear energy to produce electricity was a side-benefit promoted to soften the criticism of the nuclear arms race and ease the conscience of the scientists who had contributed to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it was made affordable only by the pre-existing infrastructure for weapons. Once nuclear power plants exist, they are all plutonium factories that add to the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation and fill the world with nuclear waste for which there is still no disposal solution. We could imagine a world with nuclear weapons and no nuclear power plants, but not vice versa.

______________

The secret revealed in August 1945 shouldn't be considered to have been a total a surprise at the time. News headlines from 1939-43 (below) told the world about the coming nuclear age, and a Scientific American issue from 1939 (excerpted below the table) recounted the discovery of uranium fission by Otto Hahn in December, 1938. The article explicitly describes the possibility of developing a new kind of weaponry.

Articles about Uranium Fission Reported in The New York Times before Manhattan Project Censorship took hold completely:

·      Vast Energy Freed by Uranium Atom; Split, It Produces 2 'Cannonballs,' Each of 100,000,000 Electron Volts Hailed as Epoch Making, New Process, Announced at Columbia, Uses Only 1-30 Volt to Liberate Big Force. Jan. 31, 1939. ·      The Week in Science; When Uranium Splits Doubtful Source of Power Cancer and X-Rays Neutron Possibilities News Notes. March 5, 1939. ·      Vision Earth Rocked by Isotope Blast; Scientists Say Bit of Uranium Could Wreck New York. April 30, 1939. ·      Release Largest Store Known on Earth A ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ When Separated in Pure Form It Can Yield 235 Billion Volts Per Atom of Its Own. May 5, 1939. ·      New Key is Found to Atomic Energy; Actino-Uranium Is Credited With Power to A Mixture of Physics and Fantasy. March 17, 1940. ·   Vast Power Source in Atomic Energy Opened by Science; Report on New Source of Power. May 5, 1940. ·      Third Way to Split Atom Is Found By Halving Uranium and Thorium; Scientists at University of California Say Cleavage Creates Much Energy -- Tokyo Men Also Report Uranium Fission. March 3, 1941. ·      Scientist Reaches London; Dr. N.H.D. Bohr, Dane, Has a New Atomic Blast Invention. October 9, 1943. ·      Research Institute is Seized in Denmark; Germans Are Expected to Work on New Secret Weapon. December 12, 1943. (List of references made by Korean Minjok Leadership Academy)

Jean Harrington. "Splitting the Atom." Scientific American. October 1939:

 

“These secondary neutrons constitute a fresh supply of ‘bullets’ to produce new fissions. Thus we are faced with a vicious circle, with one explosion setting off another, and energy being continuously and cumulatively released. It is probable that a sufficiently large mass of uranium would be explosive if its atoms once got well started dividing. As a matter of fact, the scientists are pretty nervous over the dangerous forces they are unleashing, and are hurriedly devising means to control them.

It may or may not be significant that, since early spring, no accounts of research on nuclear fission have been heard from Germany — not even from discoverer Hahn. It is not unlikely that the German government, spotting a potentially powerful weapon of war, has imposed military secrecy on all recent German investigations. A large concentration of isotope 235, subjected to neutron bombardment, might conceivably blow up all London or Paris.”

Other sources:

“First Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan; Missile Is Equal to 20,000 Tons of TNT; Truman Warns Foe of a ‘Rain of Ruin.’” The New York Times. August 6, 1945.

Philip Nobile (ed.). Judgment at the Smithsonian: The Uncensored Script of the Smithsonian’s 50th Anniversary Exhibit of the Enola Gay. Marlowe and Co.1995.
The Pacific War Research Society. Japan’s Longest Day. Kodansha. 1968.
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2006.
Ward Wilson. “The Myth of Nuclear Necessity.” The New York Times. January 13, 2013.

from sources posted on Wikipedia: Debate over the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

After the war, Admiral Soemu Toyoda said, "I believe the Russian participation in the war against Japan rather than the atom bombs did more to hasten the surrender." (John Toland, The Rising Sun, Modern Library Paperback Edition, 2003, p.807) Prime Minister Suzuki also declared that the entry of the USSR into the war made "the continuance of the war impossible." (Edward Bunting, World War II Day by Day. Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2001, p.652) Upon hearing news of the event from Foreign Minister Togo, Suzuki immediately said, "Let us end the war", and agreed to finally convene an emergency meeting of the Supreme Council with that aim. The official British history, The War Against Japan, also writes the Soviet declaration of war "brought home to all members of the Supreme Council the realization that the last hope of a negotiated peace had gone and there was no alternative but to accept the Allied terms sooner or later."

Sometimes Satan Comes as a Man of Peace

Of all the things Lance Armstrong’s blood was tested for, was it ever tested for plutonium?

Two guys who knew you had to lie to win. We all know about Lance Armstrong… General Leslie Groves led the secret Manhattan Project to build the bombs that landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He managed to hide a budget of $2 billion from Congress (1945 dollars!), censor all news about the project and the splitting of the atom (which had been reported in mass media before 1942) and conceal the nature of the project from almost all of the thousands of people working on it. He wouldn't have sought forgiveness in a sit-down with Oprah.

Competitive sport is thought to be a safe and healthy expression of humanity’s tendency toward political and military domination. Yet as in war and realpolitik, we see in sport the quest for power, we see greed trampling over ethics, we see enmity, hypocrisy and duplicity. Sorry, tell me again why we thought this was the healthy side of humanity’s competitive spirit. By now we should see in the endless sports scandals that it might have been a mistake to think that sport is a benign form of competition. We see that the logic of competition, in sport, business, finance and politics, unavoidably fills the top rungs with those whose strategy was cheating concealed under a veneer of honor and righteousness.

Lance Armstrong’s tragic fall from grace should indicate that the flaw is not in him but in us. We placed no upper limit on competitive tendencies we support, and this necessitated that the best cheaters and most ruthless competitors would rise to the top. If it hadn't been Lance, it would have been someone else who was willing to cheat, clever enough to avoid detection, and ruthless enough to destroy friends and teammates who blew the whistle.

Lance Armstrong’s strategy was exactly the same as all states that have acquired nuclear weapons. They make a pretense of being upstanding global citizens, but the long game is to lie, cheat and deny long enough to ultimately prevail. Israel, for example, knows what Iran is doing because Iran is playing with Israel’s nuclear playbook.

It should be obvious that the lust for power itself is the problem, and the human race should be taking a cognitive leap in its evolution by curtailing the glorification of competition, even in sport. Let’s tie ourselves to the mast as we sail past the sirens that tempt us toward our own destruction. We got Lance to sit down with Oprah and confess his sins, and this is likely to be the first step in his losing all the financial assets that we bestowed upon him. It’s too bad we can’t do the same thing to hypocrites on the world stage who spend hundreds of billions of dollars renewing their nuclear arsenals while they mouth platitudes about keeping the world safe.

A good way to change the world might be to change what we think of as acceptable outlets of competitive impulses. We should all be disgusted enough with the doping scandals and the excessive financial rewards of professional sport (the “amateur” Olympics included). It’s time that we valued sporting events that emphasize health, joy and participation over spectating. There would still be winners and losers, but if we developed cultural beliefs that the prizes should be small and the winners be humble, there is a chance this attitude might spill over into our economic systems and international relations.

Lance Armstrong’s story is connected to the nuclear arms race in another way. There is a possibility that his cancer was caused by plutonium, the ultimate symbol of man’s competitive excess. If it was not by plutonium, it was by any of the other evils that have contaminated the environment. But this is a subject in his life story that seems to have received no attention.

People don’t like to speculate about the causes of a particular cancer, and understandably so. There is nothing to be gained for an individual in brooding over past mistakes or blaming parents for where they lived or what they fed their children. Cancer doesn’t leave a calling card telling “this tumor brought to you by hexavalent chromium” or whatever the cause may be.

The emphasis in charity foundations, like Armstrong’s Livestrong, has been mostly on helping patients and funding research for “finding the cure.” This is fine, as people have a right to donate their money to whatever causes they wish, but it is curious that we give so little thought to eliminating the causes of cancer. As Bob Dylan said, “sometimes the devil comes as a man of peace.” Our heroes and noble causes have ways of blinding us to the important questions like, “Why was testicular cancer almost unknown before the nuclear age?” Our expectations have lost touch with formerly common sense understandings of nature and human nature. We should be outraged that a young man got cancer, but not surprised that he cheated to win. Did you really think he won the Tour de France clean when all the other top riders had been busted for doping? Did you really think it was normal for teenage boys to get testicular cancer?

There have been studies on plutonium in animals, and there is a shameful history of experiments on uninformed, and sometimes captive, human subjects (see Eileen Welsome’s The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War). It is known that plutonium accumulates in the gonads at high levels and causes tumors, and that this can happen while it exists at low levels elsewhere in the body. This finding prompted experts to suggest that existing standards were a poor way to measure whether a person was at risk from occupational exposure.

It is known that plutonium can travel on the wind, and not just in dirt particles. This important difference was found by Carl Johnson when he analyzed house dust in homes southeast of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons factory in Colorado.

It is known that nuclear facilities and nuclear contamination were spread throughout North America during the age of weapons testing and production. Some sites were giant factories like Hanford and Oak Ridge, while others were sub-contracted cottage industry metal shops that existed secretly in residential areas of small towns. There are some sites that are extremely contaminated national sacrifice zones, from which the contamination spread out to surrounding communities. No place was unaffected. We all have plutonium in our bodies.

Lance Armstrong grew up in Plano, Texas, and famous American plutonium factories nearby were in Amarillo, Texas (523 km to the west) and Crescent, Oklahoma (where Karen Silkwood worked, 326 km to the north). Experts at the Department of Energy would say it is impossible that there was a risk at these distances, but there are many unanswered questions about plutonium contamination, and all the places where it was produced and transported are unknowable. If I were Lance Armstrong, I’d be curious to know more.

But of course Lance had other goals. He would have damaged his brand value with corporate sponsors if he had raised uncomfortable questions about the US government’s environmental contamination and its liability for cancer cases.

In the same way, researchers had nothing to gain by pursuing epidemiological studies of plutonium. You would think doctors would want to check for the element in every testicle and ovary removed from cancer patients, but the large-scale research required would need government funding, and the government has no motive to fund research that might conclude it is liable for damages in thousands of cancer cases. Researchers know this and don’t even bother to apply for grants.

This historical record shows how long it took tobacco companies to admit the health damage cause by their products. Eventually, they had to pay $206 billion to the state governments that sued them for health care costs. In the case of plutonium contamination, there are no powerful state agencies to act as plaintiffs. They and their contractors are the defendants. The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act of 2000 provided compensation to “energy workers” but government responsibility for the health effects on the general population has never been acknowledged. If Lance Armstrong wants to redeem himself, this is an area he could devote himself to. This time he might realize the virtues of walking the path of the unsung, unsponsored hero.

Supporting sources – quotations and comments:

1.

Leslie Fuger. “From Potatoes to Plutonium.” Boise Weekly. March 16, 2005.

“According to a 2004 report by the National Center for Environmental Health of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there is abundant evidence in areas surrounding the Los Alamos National Laboratory - the site after which INL's [Idaho National Laboratory] complex would be modeled - that hazardous emissions are escaping the facility despite DOE's best efforts to contain it. The CDC concluded that the soil surrounding LANL contains as much as 100 times more plutonium than was previously estimated. According to the same report, Los Alamos County has an abnormally high rate of breast, melanoma, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, ovary, prostate, testicular and thyroid cancers, and Los Alamos residents, even those who have never worked at the lab itself, have more plutonium in their bodies than any one other county nationwide.”

2.
C. V. Beechey, D. Green, E. R. Humphries & A. G. Searle. “Cytogenetic effects of plutonium-239 in male mice.” Nature 256, 577 - 578 (14 August 1975); doi:10.1038/256577a0

“Green et al. have recently shown, however, that plutonium reaching the testis after intravenous injection of 239Pu citrate into CBA mice concentrates in the interstitial tissue, outside the seminiferous tubules. They calculated that the average dose rate to spermatogonial stem cells, in which genetic damage can accumulate, was about 2–2.5 times that to the whole testis. In these circumstances, the genetically significant dose is higher than the average tissue dose, which is that normally used for protection purposes.”

3.

Len Ackland. Making a Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West. 1999.

Dr. Carl Johnson's work is discussed on pages 182-183. He found plutonium concentrations in house dust were higher than in soil - showing that plutonium particles did not stay bound to heavier dirt particles. They could travel through the air much farther than was previously thought. Carl Johnson also found levels in soil, in an area planned for housing development, that exceeded the government limit by a factor of 7. 

4.

Michael Castleman. "Why Johnny Can't Have Kids." Mother Jones. April 1982. pages 14-18.

“20 common industrial chemicals have been linked to human reproductive impairment.”

“Testicular cancer rates have doubled among whites and tripled among blacks since 1950… it has become one of the most common solid malignant tumors in men aged 15-35… A century ago, testicular cancer was virtually unheard of in men under 50. By 1960, men under 25 accounted for 12 per cent of cases. Today they account for more than 26 per cent.”

This article also referred to Carl Johnson’s work near Rocky Flats. He found that upwind from the site there were 17 cases of testicular cancer, while downwind there were 40. Skeptics responded that the finding was inconclusive because cancer clusters can be randomly distributed in patterns that are meaningless. (If you throw 1000 pennies into the air over an empty parking lot, they won’t land evenly spaced. They will cluster in some places.) But perhaps the randomness of clusters is not the issue. The futility of looking for geographical patterns is evident when we realize that there is no longer an untouched control group to compare to. There is no pure population. Chemical and radiological causes are confounded with those associated with lifestyle, diet and “genetics,” and I put this term in quotation marks because when genetic damage, in an individual or across generations, is caused by radiation and toxins, there is nothing about it that we should fatalistically accept as “naturally occurring” mutation.

5.

Testicular Cancer and Exposure to Ionizing Radiation. JSI Center for Environmental Health Studies

“Rate of testicular cancer incidence was very high in Los Alamos County, while mortality was  very low. Los Alamos County ranked highest in the incidence of testicular cancer among the 33 counties in New Mexico from 1970 to 1996. In recent years, about one to two cases have occurred annually in the county.

There was a consistent increase in incidence between 1984 and 1997.”

6.

Catherine M. Richards. Cancer Incidence and Mortality in Los Alamos County and New Mexico 1970-1996.

“LAC [Los Alamos County] residents experienced an 82% elevation in testicular cancer when compared with the New Mexico state reference population.”

“Cancer incidence rates that were significantly elevated in LAC when compared to the state reference population rates included breast, melanoma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, ovary, prostate, testis (significant at the 90% confidence interval), and thyroid cancers.  Cancer mortality rates that were significantly elevated in LAC when compared to the state reference population rates include breast cancer.”

The author of the paper wrote that rates were “significantly elevated,” but noted, “When studying small populations, for example LAC, the small number of cancer cases results in unstable incidence and mortality rates, large confidence intervals, and a loss of determination in whether a rate is really statistically significant.”

8.

Eileen Welsome. The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War. 1999.

9. Processed Uranium from Oxford, Ohio. Washington Nuclear Museum and Educational Center. September 15, 2010.

For a fuller description of this example of America’s nuclear cottage industry in Oxford, Ohio, see: Robert R. Johnson. Romancing the Atom: Nuclear Infatuation from the Radium Girls to Fukushima. p. 98-139. 2012.

10.

Ward Wilson. “The Myth of Nuclear Necessity.” The New York Times. January 13, 2013.

11.
Ward Wilson. "The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan - Stalin Did." Foreign Policy National Security. May 29, 2013.

12. Wikipedia: List of Doping Cases in Cycling. Hundreds of incidents listed, from 1880s to 2012.

13. One-nut truck nuts.

Great Lakes Nuclear Dump

(revised April 4, 2017)

More forgotten history that hides in plain sight: It's not a stop for the Japanese tourists who visit Niagara, but they might be interested to know. The shores of Lake Ontario and the Niagara River are the resting place for high-level radioactive waste left over from the project to build the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. Who knew?

While growing up in Toronto, or visiting home as an adult, I have taken many day trips to Niagara Falls. It is a great place for getting lost in contemplations of geological time and the more recent history of human habitation. One can think about the Ice Age scraping out the Great Lakes, or imagine the first French explorers coming up the river with native guides in the 17th century. Later, slaves escaping from plantations took the Underground Railroad, and crossed the Niagara River to freedom. The N.A.A.C.P, at first called The Niagara Group, began in 1905 in a hotel on the Canadian side because hotels on the American side were segregated. A statue on the American side commemorates Nikola Tesla and the 1895 launch of the first large-scale AC power system in the world. This heralded the industrialization of the area on the American side.

In the early days of electricity, there was a cost advantage in setting up close to the source of power, so American investment in heavy industry flowed into the area. On the Canadian side, the power was sent to points farther away. Thus the difference between Niagara Falls, Ontario and Niagara Falls, New York: One is Canada’s front yard, welcoming visitors from the more populous south. On the Canadian side it is all resorts, wineries, casinos and tended gardens. On the other side is America’s backyard industrial zone, a day’s drive from the front entrance in New York City.

The Ice Age carved out the Great Lakes, and ten thousand years ago the falls were five kilometers farther north toward Lake Ontario. One can look forward the same length of time and wonder how the falls will be then, and what kind of civilization will exist. On a warm summer day you can meditate like a zen monk to the roar of the water, all that water set in motion by the eternal energy of the sun.

The industrial history of the area can also lead one to these thoughts of eternity because, in another astounding example of “secret” history hiding in plain sight, one of the world’s many intractable nuclear waste dumps can be found beside the Niagara River in Lewiston, New York. Hardly anyone is aware of it, even though it stopped being a state secret long ago.

The site is described in Ginger Strand’s Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies [1] and more recently in Tom Zoellner’s Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock that Shaped the World. [2], but there is surprisingly little about it to be found in mainstream journalism.

In the summer of 2011, I came across a report by WIVB, a Buffalo, NY television station, about a Niagara Falls road project that had been held up because of high radiation levels discovered by a contractor on the project. [3] The report is somewhat confusing because some of the people quoted seemed to be alarmed by the discovery, while the mayor said, “The project is not a remedial project for removing radioactive materials wherever they’re found. It’s a road construction project in which radioactive materials that are under the road are being removed, and so there are limits to the bounds of the project.”

In other words, everyone involved was supposed to know the contamination existed, and residents with contaminated properties were out of luck because the project focused only on the road. Strangely, the report failed to explain why the area was contaminated. This might be because the issue is so well-known to locals that it need not be mentioned. This is, after all, the home of Love Canal, one of the most famous cases of industrial pollution in the world. The area has been so damaged by industry that health studies of the radiation are inconclusive because the high rates of cancer are also caused by chemicals.

Another explanation for the lack of context in the news report is that the relevant information has just gone down the memory hole, and the journalists may not know or care to investigate why the road is radioactive. People who worry about the legacy of nuclear waste give a lot of thought to the possibility that people in the future may lose contact with the knowledge of the hazards left by their ancestors. This report is evidence that this change is already underway.

There is some hope to be found in the fact that a year before this TV report, two writers for a Buffalo arts weekly were up to the task of doing some real journalism. Geoff Kelly and Louis Ricciuti made the connection to the debris left by the Manhattan Project, quoted precise figures of the radiation levels–which were astoundingly high–and pointed out that, just as we have seen in Fukushima, the contract went to a local company with no capabilities in radiological cleanup. Their work also covers the stories of Manhattan Project workers who suffered health consequences that went unrecognized and uncompensated. They reported on many instances of contaminated soils being moved about improperly, or lands being sold and developed without proper remediation. [4] (See notes [5] to [9] for additional articles by these writers and by other journalists who have reported on radioactive contamination in Niagara Falls.)

To look deeper into the truth of such matters one can’t expect much from local media which is always hesitant to publish news that will tarnish the reputation of the town and damage the economy. One has to turn to a local, concerned expert who has fought the battle and recorded details on a personal blog or journal. James Rauch, author of Tonawanda Nuclear Site Info (TNSI), seems to be just such a local hero. [10] His extensive site gives this summary of the Manhattan Project nuclear waste dumped in the Niagara Falls area:

[The term] K-65 residues [refers to] the uranium mill tailings resulting from a uniquely concentrated uranium ore discovered before WW II in Katanga province (Shinkolobwe) of the former Belgian Congo, now Democratic Republic of Congo… This ore, dubbed “K-65”, had a record 65% uranium content. It also held very high concentrations of thorium and radium, and their decay products, including radon gas, which are retained in the tailings (residues). The very high concentrations of these extremely toxic, long-lived radionuclides present in these wastes prompted the National Academy of Science’s National Research Council to categorize them as indistinguishable in hazard from High-Level Waste in its 1995 report. The K-65 ores were refined as a key part of the Manhattan Project during World War II at the Linde Ceramics Plant at Tonawanda, NY, and at the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in St. Louis… The Linde “K-65 residues” were transported to a storage silo built at the federally-appropriated Lake Ontario Ordnance Works site outside of Lewiston, NY, a short distance from Niagara Falls. [9]

The report by the National Academy of Science concluded with the points below (among others not cited here):

1.  There is no immediate hazard to the off-site public from the residues in their present configuration.

2.  The high-level residues pose a potential long-term risk to the public, given the existing environmental conditions and future unpredictability, if they are left permanently at the NFSS.

3.  The proposed actions of replacing the interim cap with a “permanent” cap and of long-term site maintenance and monitoring do not address the potential risks to the public for the long periods of time commensurate with the duration of that potential risk.

4.  The present and potential future interactions between the NFSS and disposal sites adjacent to the NFSS, where non-radioactive toxic chemical and landfill wastes are currently disposed, have not been addressed adequately.

5.  Current site monitoring activities are inadequate for the determination of long-term site integrity and potential future risks to the public… [11]

What this means is that the Niagara Falls Storage Site (NFSS) poses the same risk that the infamous Hanford facility in Washington inflicts on the Columbia River. Unless a better solution is built, soon or sometime within a century, and for a long time afterward, a plume of radionuclides will flow through the groundwater into Lake Ontario. Nothing is being done about this, and considering present conditions in the USA, it is doubtful that the country will have the competence for the task in 2085.

Sixty kilometers across the lake in my hometown, I suspect very few of Toronto’s four million residents know anything about this blowback from Hiroshima and Nagasaki that has been dumped on their Great Lakes border. Ironically, there is a campaign now underway called Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump, but it is focused on opposing the proposal to create a permanent storage site near Lake Huron for low-level waste from Canada’s nuclear power plants. The people behind this campaign may not realize the full extent of the problem they have taken up.

International Institute of Concern for Public Health
(IICPH) released the Great Lakes Nuclear Hot Spots Map

Notes

[1] Ginger Strand, Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies (Simon and Schuster, 2008).

[2] Tom Zoellner, Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock that Shaped the World (Penguin 2010).

[3] Luke Moretti, “Concerns over Falls Road Fill Radiation,” WIVB Television, Buffalo, NY. August 31, 2011.

[4] Geoff Kelly and Louis Ricciuti, “The Cult of Nuclearists,” Artvoice, May 12, 2010.

[5] Geoff Kelly and Louis Ricciuti, “The Bomb that Fell on Niagara,” Artvoice, September 24, 2008.

[6] Geoff Kelly and Louis Ricciuti, “Greenpac Reveals Radioactive Waste Issue at Niagara Falls Mill,” Artvoice, August 1, 2013.

[7] John R. Emshweller and Jeremy Singer-Vine, “A Nuclear Cleanup Effort Leaves Questions Lingering at Scores of Old Sites,” Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2013.

[8] Ralph Blumenthal, “Big Atomic Waste Site Reported Found Near Buffalo,” New York Times, February 1, 1981.

[9] Libbe Halevy, “Nuclear Hotseat #270: Niagara Falls’ Dirty Nuke Secrets w/Lou Ricciuti...” Nuclear Hotseat #270, August 24, 2016.

[10] James Rauch, Tonawanda Nuclear Site Info.

[11] Safety of the High-Level Uranium Ore Residues at the Niagara Falls Storage Site, Lewiston, New York (National Academy of Sciences. Commission on Geosciences, Environment and Resources, 1995).

The Debt Crisis is the Energy Crisis

Who's going to take a haircut on the national debt?

Why Japan's debt can never be repaid

If the 1,000 trillion yen national debt were a 50-year mortgage, the homeowner would have to pay down an average of 20 trillion yen in principal every year. Right now, the Japanese government has an income of 42 trillion, and 10.5 trillion of that goes to interest on the debt. To start paying off the debt, it would have to pay 20 trillion per year, leaving just 12 trillion to pay for defense, health care, education and so on. However, the current budget is 103 trillion, meaning that present spending obligations force the government to borrow an additional 61 trillion yen and forget about ever paying down the principal. The GDP and the tax base could never expand enough to generate the funds necessary. We could conceivably wish for high levels of inflation over the next few decades, which would make debt payments affordable, but the levels of inflation necessary could have some unpleasant downsides. Economists like to debate whether it is really a good idea to “inflate your way out of debt.” In the future, the government could be in the same position as a retiree who bought a bungalow for $20,000 in 1955 which is now worth $400,000.

But if inflating your way out of debt were so simple, why wouldn't the government consider going all in with this thought experiment, something which is no stranger than the trillion dollar coin:

The government could print a new set of currency bills, all with double the face value of old ones. All old bills could instantly be exchanged for the new bills. Every old 10,000 yen bill could be freely exchanged for a new 20,000 yen bill. The government would simultaneously run a computer program through the bank system and double the value of all deposits. Of course, all wages and prices would instantly double, including the price of foreign currencies, but - most importantly - all debts public and private would remain at their previous values. (It's no longer just Africa that needs a debt jubilee.) In this case, it would be glaringly obvious that creditors were being forced to take a haircut, and they would react by ceasing to lend or charging much higher interest rates, with a preference for short-term contracts with this newly unreliable debtor. If they were foreigners, they might want to retaliate with military force, as has happened in previous cases of national default. In any case, it would now be much easier for the government to start paying down its debt, and if it were not easy enough, this experiment could be run at different values. The currency could be tripled or quadrupled in its value. There would be no upper limit.

But hey, I’m no economist. What do I know? Yet is seems to me that the present policy of setting a mild 2% inflation target is just this very same scenario enacted in timid slow motion, and unlike the scenario above, there is no guarantee that it will inflate wages and liquid assets for working folk - which is probably the reason "serious people" would find it absurd. But the 2% target is so far short of what is necessary that there is no hope of it solving the problem. If a country is saying that it needs to inflate its way out of debt, it is tacitly announcing default.

In some sense, it doesn't really matter. Money and financial crises are just reflections of the physical world. This is why they so easily adopt physical phenomena like nuclear meltdowns as their metaphors. The debt crisis is the symbolic representation of the energy and environmental crisis. The national debt is like nuclear waste and greenhouse gases. Everyone knows the un-repayable burden is being passed on to future generations, but we choose not to apply elementary school math skills, do the above calculations and face the real problem. (Note that the largest number in the 50-year mortgage example was only four digits.) For more simple math exercises, see Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.

Further reading, if you want to take it from a couple experts:

“It is not guaranteed that a state can inflate its way out of debt. The danger is all too real that more inflation hits the costs and the revenues of the state in a way which widens the gap or deficit. The only ways out of excessive debt are to remove the deficit and grow the economy.”

-John Redwood. Can You Inflate Your Way Out of Debt? December 12, 2012

http://johnredwoodsdiary.com/2012/12/23/can-you-inflate-your-way-out-of-debt/

“Turn next to whether it [inflating your way out of debt] will work. Inflation will do little for entities with floating rate liabilities (many households that borrowed near the peak of the boom) or relatively short term liabilities (banks). The US government, with debt duration of about 4 years, is unlikely to benefit much from a surprise inflation unless it is huge [bold emphasis added]; and the bulk of its promises are social security and healthcare that cannot be inflated away [because they are indexed to inflation]. Even distressed households that have borrowed long term could be worse off – with unemployment likely to subdue nominal wage growth, and higher food and fuel prices cutting disposable income.”

-Raghuram Rajan. “Why We Can’t Inflate Our Way Out of Debt.” The Financial Times. August 15, 2011. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4f8b84d8-c72d-11e0-a9ef-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2HuYrwtib

Prime Minister Abe on the Saturday Morning Cartoons

Until a couple years ago Japan’s national broadcaster had a weekly news program for children called Kodomo News. It featured fun, hands-on graphics like the ones in the photo above, and explanations of complex world events, with all their background history given in terms ten-year-old could understand. A veteran male journalist played the role of father and lead explainer, while a female journalist played a supporting role of mother, commenter and questioner. Three intellectually precocious children were chosen to play the role of the children in this “family.” Everyone knew they were not a real family, but the journalists were referred to as okaa-san and otou-san (mom and dad) as they made a pretense of being a family. 

Aside from the blatant paternalism, it wasn’t a bad show. My children gained a pretty good understanding of the conflicts in the Middle East, for example, and various other current events that appear in the daily news. Without such explanations, the news is just a constant stream of random, de-contextualized chaotic events, for children and adults alike. This, in fact, was the reason the show was cancelled. Audience research revealed that children weren’t watching. As the elderly came to make up a greater share of the population, more of them were at home tuning in to Kodomo News, and they loved the clear explanations of issues which, during their busy careers, were most likely heard about as random bites of information that told them nothing about why the information was relevant and newsworthy.

The cancellation of Kodomo News seemed to come with a realization that the adult news audience might as well be treated like children all the time. This picture above comes from an NHK News program that aired between 8:30 and 9:30 AM on Saturday January 12, 1013, and you can see that it kind of looks like Saturday morning cartoons. There is Prime Minister Abe in the top right corner commanding the levers of the economy, directing the Bank of Japan to start printing money and aiming for an inflation and employment target. Money is going to flow from the Bank of Japan to banks, then it will be loaned out to private companies or spent on public works projects, and the economy will be stimulated. It’s all so simple a ten-year-old could understand it, right?

The guest panel of experts provided some critical commentary and asked some challenging questions about whether workers could really expect wage gains to come quickly with this inflation target. In general, however, the whole show came across as a sestumeikai (explanation meeting), the sort of meeting where those in control of the message explain how things are going to be. A setsumeikai is not a discussion, debate or negotiation. This one-hour discussion never touched on the enormous national debt that can never be repaid, nor did it mention energy policy. Last year, the crushing expense of increased imports of fossil fuels, necessitated by the shutdown of nuclear plants, was said to be a fatally serious problem in the economy. This year, under the new so-called "Abenomics," a weak yen is apparently the savior, even though it makes fossil fuel imports more expensive. The plan seems to be that energy issues are out of the discourse until the LDP safely gets a majority in the Upper House next summer. After that, they can really get going on their agenda. For the next few months they will be dazzling the nation with PR campaigns trumpeting everything they are doing with their $116 billion stimulus budget. So far, the plan is working.

The panelists on yesterday’s morning show also never touched on the underlying cause of economic problems: the inverted demographic pyramid. Abe and the LDP are harking back to the early 1960s, thinking that if they host the Olympics again they will usher in another fantastic era of economic growth. They have falsely attributed a causal relation just because the Olympics and economic growth were once observed to have occurred one after the other. They conveniently ignore other factors of the time such as that Japan was starting from a much smaller GDP that had a lot of potential for growth. The nation had a baby boom, a young work force, and the economic stimulus provided by American economic growth and American spending on the Cold War, and the Korean and Vietnamese Wars. In any case, from this point forward, a repeat of the quadrupling in energy consumption is not possible or desirable, and this leads to another remarkable flaw in the LDP fairy tale: climate change doesn’t exist.

Perhaps the most alarming statement I heard on the NHK program was that the host said Abenomics promises interest rates will not increase as a result of this policy of a weakening yen and inflation. Most homeowners in Japan opt for one-year or three-year mortgage contracts at about 1.5% in order to save the extra one percentage point they would pay to lock in at 2.5% for 25 years. No one alive now has any experience with a high interest rate environment. Homes and condominiums in Tokyo still, after the bubble pop of 1991, cost upwards of $500,000, and most people can afford them only at the very low rates. A tripling of that 1% rate would be bring on a lot of home foreclosures, and the government would default on the national debt in the same way.

Today New York Times Japan correspondent Hiroko Tabuchi tweeted on this topic, asking who is right on Japan: J. Kyle Bass (hedge fund analyst who protected his investors from the 2008 housing crash), or Paul Krugman (NYT writer and winner of a Nobel in economics). J. Kyle Bass thinks Japan is headed for higher interest rates and default, while Paul Krugman seems to think debt is irrelevant and Abenomics is a “worthwhile Japanese initiative” that, “on the macro level” is something America should envy. Time will tell.

Dream On

“Fukushima was almost 200 miles away from Tokyo, and yet Tokyo soil in some places, the ones I just happened to find, would qualify as radioactive waste here in the United States.”

- Arnie Gundersen, Fairewinds Energy Education 2012/03/24

If the image above has any resemblance to another poster, it is completely random coincidence. As UN researchers on the effects of radiation might say, correlation is not evidence of causation. All I want to point out with the design is the fact that according to safety standards of the nuclear industry itself, Tokyo should be considered a “candidate city” for radiological decontamination, and a reasonable completion date might be, let’s say, 2020, but the sooner the better.

Yet of course, this is not going to happen because the Japanese government is busy promoting feel-good projects such as the 2020 Olympic bid as a strategy for making the world forget about radiological contamination and the crushing national debt.

If it was somewhat possible in the past to disagree respectfully and have some amount of sympathy for the difficult challenges the government has had to handle in the Fukushima catastrophe, this sentiment is completely gone now. Lately, the actions and policies of government have become just downright pitiful and embarrassing. One can only feel sorry for the people represented by this government. It has become like the drunk uncle at a family gathering whose antics and ravings just make everyone want to head quietly for the exits.

A case in point is this poster released this week as advertising for the Olympic bid. The anonymous Japanese blogger at ex-skf.blogspot.com translated it thus:

http://tokyo2020.jp/jp/message/

Right now, Nippon needs the power of this dream. Olympics and Paralympics give us a dream. A dream gives us power. Power builds our future. We need this power right now. To be as one. To be strong. Let's tell the world how strong Japan is. Because we're sure the world will be encouraged.

                                                                              

Ex-skf makes the important point that there is nothing lost in translation here. The original text is just as ungrammatical and childish as the English version. It is described as “arrogant gibberish” which “Even the Japanese are dismayed at… It reads like fluffy TV commercial copy by the nation's top ad agency.”

The poster naturally invited ridicule and parody. One anonymous commenter wrote:

Right now, Nippon
needs the power of this delusion.
Olympics and Paralympics give us a delusion.
A delusion gives us false confidence.
False confidence builds our future.
We need this false confidence right now.
To be as none.
To be wrong.
Let's tell the world how wrong Japan is.
Because we're sure the world will be discouraged.
Now, let's [have] 2920 Olympics/Paralympics in Nippon! (It should be safe by then)

It’s interesting to note as well the company that Tokyo is keeping with its Olympic bid. The two other cities that made the cut as candidate cities in the competition (to be decided in September, 2013) are Madrid and Istanbul. These days it is difficult to think of a city or country that has the economic vitality to afford the Olympics, but there are places more qualified than the three that volunteered to join the race. Joining the ranks of Olympic game hosts may be something like joining a nerdish high school club now, ranking in coolness along with wanting to host a World Fair (Did anyone notice the 2012 Expo in Yeosu, South Korea?) The world has moved on. The more democratic and thriving nations, like the Scandinavian countries, are not interested because a bid would not be popular with voters, and those democracies do a better job of satisfying their citizens' wishes and needs.

The London Olympics seemed to put an end to the myth of economic stimulus coming from the games. As much as there are construction jobs, tourists, and increased confidence, these are offset by the negatives of real estate speculation, price gouging, debt, and letdown after the games. Larry Elliot, the economics editor of The Guardian wrote during the London games:

A week in and expectations of a major boost to growth are rapidly being downgraded. There are certainly plenty of overseas tourists in London, but the capital always has lots of foreign visitors at this time of year. Net tourism would be down if the number of potential visitors deterred by horror stories about gridlock and fears about being ripped off exceeded the numbers coming to London for the judo, athletics and beach volleyball. Evidence of half-full hotels suggests this may be the case… Britons appear to be giving London a miss. Some employees have been told to work from home for the duration of the Games, where the temptation to channel surf … may not do wonders for their productivity. In addition, shopping trips to central London appear to have been put on hold, contributing to the stories of empty shops, while the wet weather has led to a last-minute increase in sales of foreign holidays.

After a little more than a century of the modern games, the world seems to be tiring of the spectacle, and the prize is left for the latecomers who haven’t noticed that the world has moved on. I have to wonder if the smart money in the world is snickering privately at this losers’ race. Have at it Istanbul, Madrid, and Tokyo. Knock yourselves out. Everyone else who is still interested will stay home and watch on their widescreen TVs.

A Wikipedia page on the 2020 bids and candidate cities indicates that Toronto, and several other cities that considered bids, withdrew with the global financial crisis cited as the impediment. It’s strange that the three candidate cities didn’t have the same reservations because their economic data is much more dire than that of some of the cities that pulled out.

Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain are lovingly referred to as the PIGS group by their northern neighbors for the wreckage they have caused to the Eurozone. It’s a mystery that Spain can spend money on an Olympics bid after receiving billions of bailout euros. Turkey has a per capita GDP only half that of Japan, and it may soon be dragged into the proxy war of Russia + Iran vs. Israel + the West - the conflict more commonly known as the troubles in Syria. Japan has a horrific debt to GDP ratio that will lead to eventual default, and it should feel a moral obligation to give direct aid (not wishful economic stimulus schemes) to the victims of the triple disaster. With the land in a period of increased seismic activity, and the political establishment staggering toward nuclear plant restarts and a showdown with China, it’s a gamble for the IOC to think Tokyo could be a competent host in 2020.

I’d bet that Tokyo and Madrid are throwing money down a hole because as long as Istanbul can put together a decent proposal, the IOC is likely to think it’s time for an Islamic country to host the games. Until September, I’m hoping that the IOC will do us a favor and pass on Tokyo. This country has enough to suffer through without seven more years of inane, vacuous boosterism.