L'état, c'est MOX

Nuclear waste disposal is the Achilles' heel of the nuclear industry. It can continue only if the public is convinced that a long-term burial solution is possible. However, the interview with Jean-Pierre Petit (translation below) illustrates that the public is being deceived on this point. Powerful nations that cling to their nuclear arsenals and fleets of nuclear power stations are now slaves to the dictatorship of the plutonium economy. Thus the title that refers to the Mixed OXide fuel of uranium and plutonium that the industry is hellbent on using in its reactors. 

L'état, c'est MOX

   

   In February, 2014, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, the American site for burial of military nuclear waste, suffered a radiological emergency that required the evacuation of the facility. The site is too radioactive to enter, and managers, if they know what happened down in the tunnels, are saying little to the public. Shortly before the incident, a truck caught fire in one of the tunnels at the site, but the two events appear to be not related.

These accidents have highlighted exactly what critics have always warned about. The viability of the nuclear industry depends on having such final disposal sites, but they are unproven and vulnerable to accidents such as the ones that happened within a single month at one facility, only fifteen years after it opened.

Critics have warned that disposal containers are likely to corrode, moisture can leak into the site, the ground can shift, or heat can build up and cause fires, explosions or create weaknesses in the containers and support structures. Underground disposal is supposed to be the “walk-away-safe” solution that will give nuclear energy the freedom to expand over the next century as the sensible response to global warming, but the accident at WIPP is more evidence that this solution isn’t a solution at all. The term “passive safety” refers more appropriately to a passive public that has been instilled with illusions of safety.

A critic of the WIPP facility, Don Hancock, was in Toronto in 2013 advising local activists who are opposed to Ontario Power Generation’s plan to build a nuclear waste disposal site on the shores of Lake Huron. He pointed out that OPG looked to WIPP as an example of “industry best practices.” He explained then the known shortcomings of the site, and low and behold, a few months later, the scenario that critics conceived of came to pass. There was an "excursion of material" in the hole, and now the site is too radioactive to work in. The problem might get resolved, but over a year later things are not going well and the future viability of the site is in doubt. The incident underscored the possibility of catastrophes occurring at nuclear waste sites. They won’t keep the wastes safely isolated from the ecosystem for thousands of years, and they may not stay safe long enough for them to even to be loaded to their designated capacity.

The nuclear waste problem is the biggest obstacle faced by the nuclear industry, perhaps bigger than costs and the public’s fear of accidents. Promoters of nuclear would rather the public not think about it. The Japanese government has lately spoken about finally taking action on the problem, but they prefer to be utterly deceptive about the problems involved. They believe it is urgent to have this “cheap” form of energy so that they can compete with countries like South Korea, which supposedly has “cheap” nuclear energy costs. But South Korea too is equally deluded about nuclear waste solutions available to such a small nation. It’s as if both nations want to compete in a race in which there will be no winners.

Coincidentally, just before the accident at WIPP, Sputnik's French language channel interviewed a prestigious French scientist on what he sees as the dangerous and absurd plans France is following in order to perpetuate its nuclear industry. The astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Petit is the former director of Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique, and he is obviously not an antinuclear activist the nucleocracy could scornfully dismiss (as they have been known to do) as "just a language teacher" or a "just a housewife" driven by irrational fear and ignorance. He knows of what he speaks.

The passage below contains a condensed translation of the two-part interview on Sputnik. The questions have been omitted and a few sections in square brackets [ ] have been added to supply the context that was given by the questions in the original.

The original French transcripts are here: Part1 and Part2. I recommend looking at the original source, even if you can’t read French, in order to see the illustrations and graphs that go with the interview.

Nuclear Waste: A Planetary Time Bomb

There is one thing that has ruled in the world since the dawn of time, and that is the formidable mix of greed and stupidity. My personal view is that, for a long time, there has been only 5% of the population who are capable of thinking for themselves, capable of reflecting, and thinking critically, with autonomous moral evaluation based on reason. To them we can add 20% who lack conscience or awareness, who are devoured by their egoism, their ambition and their fear. Thus, someone who belongs to this group feels that pursuing power is a question of survival, for himself and his relations, for his ethnic group, his country, for his position that, in his eyes, confers all rights.

[The remaining 75% of people] can be manipulated toward any end. They can be put to sleep, made afraid, subjugated, turned against other groups or against each other, on a small or large scale. They can be impoverished to extreme levels before they will revolt. In France, a comical drawing has appeared of a new creature created from genetic recombination, what is called a pigeton [half pigeon, half mouton, or sheep]. This animal swallows anything and allows itself to be sheared without protest. They behave collectively, in the millions, and can follow any leader, no matter how irrational he may be.

At this moment, the nuclear technocrats are pushing strongly a project called CIGEO (Centre Industriel de Stockage Géologique) which involves burying high-level nuclear waste in Bure, in the east of France, in the place famous throughout the world for producing champagne. There is already a pilot project there five hundred meters deep in a layer of clay that is one hundred meters thick. There are tunnels there where the state plans to bury the million tons of high-level waste produced by the nuclear industry over the last half-century.

The time span over which the wastes need to be stored is immeasurably longer than the duration of the metal containers that will hold the wastes. They will corrode within a few decades. This goes for the concrete containers as well which won’t last longer than a century.

Assurance is given by experts, the same experts who planned the storage of nuclear wastes in a German salt mine in Asse. They said it was absolutely sure to be a permanent solution “on the scale of geological time.” In France, the nuclear waste project arises from a law passed by a representative from Nord Pas de Calais, Christian Bataille (in office from 1991-2006). He approved, without reservations, the positive conclusions of experts on the Bure disposal plan. This was exactly how he approved the German project in Asse, also in total agreement with experts then. Bataille has what you could call “the hamster complex.” He loves to dig.

In Asse, Germany, the experts assumed the salt deposit was homogenous and stable. They simply forgot that in a mine, half the volume that has to be considered is made up of what you have put in the tunnels and caverns. Salt is hygroscopic. It absorbs water. The experts thought that salt would be an ideal barrier, but it didn’t turn out that way.

It was only a matter of decades before the operation turned into a nightmare. In certain parts of the mine, the movement was ten centimeters per year, so imagine the result after thousands of years. What a great gift for the next 6,000 generations of humans. Water that comes into the site can just as easily flow out later with radioactive particles in it. It can go anywhere into the water table and enter the food chain. There would be no way to stop it.

In Asse, water has entered and covered thousands of waste containers, and they have become unrecoverable. They have to recover the 126,000 containers that are in there. The cost would be enormous, but something has to be done before the pollution spreads to underground water sources in the region.

Nuclear power buys local communities, and the money flows freely. Opponents with technical competence are pressured into silence. To be free, you have to be retired. If not, all forms of pressure are possible.

Billions of euros have been spent just getting to the stage where tests can be conducted. But the storage of wastes with long half-lives poses acute problems. In general, there are two sorts of wastes. There are those that can be called “passive,” like asbestos, and those that can be called “active” that evolve chemically, decompose, and eventually produce flammable gas, and heat. Nuclear wastes obviously belong in the second “active” category. They release heat by their  exo-energetic transmutation. So storage sites require powerful ventilation systems that need to be maintained for centuries. Some wastes that are plastic decompose relatively quickly, releasing hydrogen. When the air reaches 4% hydrogen, it becomes explosive.

In the year 2000, they began to store various types of waste, one of which was mercury, underground at a mine in Alsace. In 2002, a fire broke out. They wanted to get everything out, but they realized it could never be recovered… A fire in a mine is more complicated to manage than a fire above ground. It’s like an oven. The heat has no way out. A small fire can quickly result in elevated temperatures at which the containers begin to melt.

In Bure, a fire would be catastrophic. The wastes are vitrified (in a glass-like state), but glass is not really a solid. It’s a very viscuous fluid. At ordinary temperatures, it can do the job for thousands of years. It is not soluble. But the weak point of glass is its low resistance to heat. At 600°C, the glass will flow and liberate its contents. Underground, this temperature could be reached very quickly. In the mine there are also support structures made of metal and reinforced concrete.  Concrete melts above 1100°. The clay in Bure is also saturated with water. It couldn’t withstand being heated above 70°. The creators of the CIGEO project have great faith in a material called bentonite with which they hope to seal the caverns. It’s a particular type of clay that can absorb water and dilate, but it has the same problem as clay in terms of heat resistance.

Fire hazards come not only from the concern about hydrogen explosions. The plan at Bure is to deposit some elements treated with bitumen, but bitumen becomes fluid at 60° and flammable at 300°. Any way you look at it, this project is absurd.

The only thing to do now is to leave everything on the surface, even for centuries if necessary, as a way to make them less toxic by transmutation. There is no hurry. But the government and the barons of nuclear are exerting an enormous pressure to begin burial by 2015. They want to hide all signs of the nuisance that has accumulated for half a century and given nuclear energy such a bad image. If the CIGEO project is realized, this will be a precedent for nucleopaths the world over, and they will all follow suit, saying, “après moi, le déluge!”

The need to abandon this waste burial project goes hand in hand with the need to stop making more of this infernal nuclear waste. Therefore, we have to conceive of a way to rapidly stop the production of electricity by nuclear energy. It’s difficult to imagine how this could happen. It’s rare to find scientists who criticize these projects. The majority of them are totally indifferent to this problem, and to many other problems as well.

In order to make the plan easier for opponents to swallow, the government is looking for ways to make radioactive waste burial part of a package labelled “energy transition.” Some imbeciles will go along with this in exchange for a few promises of wind turbines and solar panels. We can count on the Socialist Party and the EELV [Europe Ecologie – Les Verts] to go along with such accords.

[To solve this problem] we need a planetary change of consciousness. But in reality, many countries in the world are planning to build nuclear power plants now, including those of the EPR design that run on plutonium. This will lead to a dangerous impasse. There is no solution for the waste, and there is no solution for dismantling power plants. Installations get old, and as they age, radioactivity provokes transmutations, in metal, for example, which then becomes fragile. Many reactions produce helium, which stays in the irradiated material. Helium is inert. It doesn’t chemically combine with anything, so it becomes a hole in a metal crystal. Just by irradiation, a pressurized reactor vessel loses its mechanical resistance. Sooner or later, it becomes unusable. This leads to the problem of the cost of dismantling.

[Instead of facing these problems], we see completely insane plans, and the public ignores their existence. According to the “reasonable trajectory” elaborated by the Parliamentary Office on Scientific and Technical Options, the following plan is foreseen:

·                  Generation II represents 58 reactors presently installed in France.

·                  Generation III is the EPR which will run 100% on MOX fuel, which is plutonium.

·                  Generation IV will be fast-breeder reactors, each containing 20 tons of plutonium, the equivalent of 1000 atomic bombs, and 5000 tons of flammable and explosive sodium.

·                  The construction of the ASTRID prototype has already been approved by François Hollande. Deployment is to commence in 2060 and finish in 2100.

Sources:

Libbe Halevy. “Carlsbad WIPP Radiation Leak with Watchdog Don Hancock.” Nuclear Hotseat Podcast 139. http://www.nuclearhotseat.com/1737/.

Michael Fröhlingsdorf, Udo Ludwig and Alfred Weinzierl. “Abyss of Uncertainty: Germany’s Homemade Nuclear Waste Disaster.” Der Spiegel. February 21, 2013. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-weighs-options-for-handling-nuclear-waste-in-asse-mine-a-884523.html.

Ralph Vartabedian. “Radiation Leak Forces Closure at New Mexico Waste Burial Site.” The Los Angeles Times. February 17, 2014. http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-radiation-leak-20140218,0,2098213.story#axzz2tqBFhqBW.

Sputnik France. Jean-PierrePetit: Les déchets nucléaires, bombe à retardement planétaire. February 17, 2014. https://fr.sputniknews.com/societe/201402171022754764-jean-pierre-petit-les-dechets-nucleaires-bombe-a-retardement-planetaire-partie-1/.

True Lies

There ought to be a word for the kind of truth that is really just an oft-repeated lie. This kind of truth starts off as a bald-faced lie, then goes through a tortuous digestive process in the national psyche, accompanied by lots of cramps and gaseous emanations until it finally emerges as what should be called a truthturd. It then sprouts some lovely turd blossoms that fool enough people into accepting its virtue.

Cases in point: the Tokyo gubernatorial election of February 10th, 2014, and the notion that Japan is doomed to economic failure without nuclear power.

http://www.claybennett.com/

The election was seen as a sort of referendum on nuclear energy in Japan, and the pro-nuclear candidate “won” with a voter turnout that was less than 50% and less than a majority of those votes. The two anti-nuclear candidates had an almost equal number of votes as the “winner.” In a truly democratic system, the result would be thrown out and the election redone until the turnout was high enough to be considered a real reflection of the will of citizens. You could say the citizens were lazy and got the government they deserve, but Tokyo had just been hit with its worst snowfall in decades the night before. In addition, an intelligently designed electoral system would require a runoff to decide a winner with a majority of votes.

After the election results were in, TEPCO coincidentally announced a few days later that its data on some of Fukushima Daiichi’s radioactive leaks had been underestimated by half. Then it turned out that data on 167 samples dated as long ago as 2011 were underestimated because the instruments used maxed out below the actual levels. As was the case with the 2012 national election and the IOC decision on the 2020 Olympics, TEPCO held the bad news so as to not influence political decisions that might have unwelcome consequences for the company.

Also coming right after the election result was known, the press was full of stories about how the national government is now going to press ahead with nuclear reactor restarts by next summer. Everyone, including the journalists regurgitating the government line, seems to have forgotten that Japan now has a new and improved nuclear regulator that is, supposedly, totally independent of politics. Thus, nothing can be restarted if the NRA objects to restarts, and no politician could possibly pass judgment on things like seismic safety, the reliability of old infrastructure, re-education of personnel, or evacuation plans. Right?

The Yomiuri Shimbun ran a story that might as well have been a government press release. It reported, “The government aims to resume operations of nuclear power plants under the plan, after [NOT IF] their safety is confirmed by the ongoing screenings of the Nuclear Regulation Authority.” It is reported like a fait accompli, with the NRA and local prefectural approval assumed as a sure thing.

It must be kept in mind that the Yomiuri was the propaganda arm of the Japanese and American government in the 1950s when President Eisenhower was pushing “atoms for peace” and exports of American nuclear power technology. Nothing has changed. The Yomiuri report was bad enough, but that is not to say that it was much different than others. The New York Times went along for the ride as well.

The media, domestic and foreign, has dutifully reported the lie that Japan’s economy is getting hammered by the extra fossil fuel that electric utilities have to import now that their reactors are off. They fail to report that in the past nuclear accounted for only 20-30% of electricity production, and that the majority of fossil fuel imported is used for other purposes besides generating electricity (transport, industrial uses, heating, cooking). The data shows that the jump in total fossil fuel imports after the nuclear shutdown was about 10-15%, and this is an amount that could be cut with conservation, efficiency gains, and investment in renewables. Furthermore, because of demographics, the loss of dominance in technology exports, and jobs moving to cheaper countries, the economy was moving in a bad direction a long time before the 2011 disaster. It is disingenuous to now blame everything on the loss of nuclear power.

The mainstream view also talks about uranium as if it were a free domestic resource. If we consider energy created by unit of cost, uranium does have an advantage over fossil fuel. However, it still has a significant cost and it has to be imported, which means it doesn’t provide energy security, and it hurts the balance of trade just like fossil fuel imports. Besides the cost of uranium, nuclear energy has huge costs arising from construction, de-construction, insurance, security, and safety assurance. Building and operating a gas power plant amounts a fraction of the cost. Even though the continual cost of importing fuel is a burden, it is at least a cost that is born in the present and not foisted on future generations.

Consumers and businesses are supposed to be begging for the reactors to be turned back on because electric utilities are going to charge 20% more now, and this, apparently, is all because of the nuclear shutdown. Curiously, the 20% matches the 20% devaluation of the yen since Shinzo Abe introduced his “Abenomics,” which of course made imported fuel that much more expensive. And really, is the public supposed to believe that electricity cost is going to come down again after the nuclear reactors are switched back on? Is the Abe government that stupid? Do they think the public is that stupid? Or is the public really that stupid?

The cost of fossil fuel is actually only one of the many daunting costs that electric utilities are faced with. All of the nuclear power plants are being forced to meet new safety requirements. The upgrades are costly, and for some power plants they will be too costly, so safe operation will be deemed impossible. The Hamaoka NPP has built a new seawall as defense against tsunamis at a cost of $1.8 billion, yet there is still the possibility that the regulator will refuse to allow its restart. When the NRA or local governments refuse to allow restarts, utilities will have to pay for decommissioning costs. Then of course, there is Fukushima Daiichi, where the cleanup and compensation costs are growing all the time. Nuclear waste disposal, and the cost of future accidents are not even put into the calculation.

The government and the utilities are being utterly deceptive in failing to disclose how these costs make nuclear-generated electricity much more expensive than what consumers pay now in their utility bills, even with the rate increase included. It seems to be assumed that the government has paid and will always pay for the devastating costs of nuclear energy through general revenue. And general revenue is 50% borrowed money these days, so there's not much difference from the attitude toward nuclear waste. It only looks cheap because the deciders who are alive now will be dead in twenty years and not have to pay the price. The true costs–financial, ecological and moral–have been completely obscured.

The blog Peace and Freedom has some insightful quotes from Japanese officials who are propagating the fear of a nuclear shutdown, but the author failed to critically analyze the assumptions behind them. According to the Institute of Energy Economics in Japan, “… fossil-fuel imports would cause an outflow of national wealth equivalent to 0.6 percent of Japan’s gross domestic product.” The question to ask is how this tiny figure is supposed to be catastrophic, when it is well understood that energy consumption is an indicator of domestic economic activity and resources being turned into value-added goods that are exported. Fossil fuel imports have been the very basis of Japan’s economic miracle. If Japan can no longer work its manufacturing and exporting magic, it’s a sign of a deeper problem with creativity, innovation and competitiveness. It has nothing to do with nuclear energy.

Elsewhere in the article, Hirohide Hirai, director of policy evaluation and public relations at the Economy, Trade, and Industry Ministry, is quoted as saying, “The reliance on the hydrocarbons makes Japan vulnerable from the energy-security perspective. You have to pay a lot, a lot, a lot for LNG imports. If something happens in the Strait of Hormuz today, that makes—oh, I don’t want to think about it.”

Yes, indeed, the world is a scary place. Why not repeat “a lot” just a few more times for us? Mr. Hirai’s horror story could give us all chills on a summer night and lessen the need of air conditioners. One can shudder and get scared about various man-made and natural disasters that would leave populations freezing in the dark, but invoking this “Strait of Hormuz” bogey man is an absurd way to debate energy policy. For one thing, Japan has other supply lines from Russia, North America and Indonesia. And, yes, Japan is very vulnerable to energy supply shocks, as many nations are. That’s just a part of the bargain a nation makes if it doesn’t want to have an 18th century lifestyle. Furthermore, even if every nuclear power plant in the country were operating, the loss of fossil fuel supplies would be more crippling to the economy than the loss of nuclear power. Fossil fuel is the only source of energy for airplanes, trucks and cars, most homes use it for heat and cooking, and it has always supplied (even at the peak of nuclear generation) about 60% of electricity.

The claim that nuclear energy is cheap, green and essential is an utter falsehood, perpetuated by some people who know it, and by others who are too dim to understand the nature of the monster they have created. Who in his right mind in this land of earthquakes and volcanoes, after all that has happened at Fukushima Daiichi, would switch on another nuclear reactor? It's time for everyone to stop and listen to the voices from Chernobyl, like the one who said, “They grabbed God by the beard, and now he’s laughing, but we’re the ones who pay for it.”

Sources:

“10 N-reactor restarts sought by summer.” The Yomiuri Shimbun. February 10, 2014. http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0001019352.

Martin Fackler. “Nuclear Issue in Limbo as Indecision Grips Japan.” The New York Times. February 11, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/12/world/asia/nuclear-issue-in-limbo-as-indecision-grips-japan.html.  

“More Record High Radiation Readings at Fukushima Daiichi.” SimplyInfo. February 13, 2014. http://www.fukuleaks.org/web/?p=12348.

Svetlana Alexievich. Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (1997, published in English by Picador in 2006).

John E. Carey (editor). “Why Japan Can’t Quit Nuclear Power.” Peace and Freedom: Policy and World Ideas. February 16, 2013. http://johnib.wordpress.com/2013/02/16/why-japan-cant-quit-nuclear-power/.

Talkin’ John Birch Fukushima Paranoid Blues

If The John Birch Society is familiar to anyone in 2014, it is probably known only among people who lived through 1940s to 1960s who recall it as the voice of radical conservatism during the Cold War. Among liberal baby boomers it became an object of ridicule and derision for its support of the McCarthy witch hunts and paranoia about the communist threat. Bob Dylan satirized it famously in Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues. In 1963, he was set to perform it on The Ed Sullivan Show, but an executive of CBS-TV forbade it at the last minute, so Dylan walked out and never appeared on the show. Columbia records also chose not to include it on studio albums, and so it was known only through live performances until it appeared in 1991 on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3.

The delay in releasing the song goes to show how The John Birch Society, and the interest in even mocking it, had faded. It also shows that US laws had changed to permit satire (Dylan should perhaps be glad that CBS saved him from being sued). Nonetheless, the society still exists, performing its traditional role in the era of Fox News and paranoid opposition to the perceived “progressive” agenda. However, The John Birch Society now seems to be aware of its brand image problem – its historical association with black-and-white newsreels of Cold War inquisitors persecuting and prosecuting American heroes like Pete Seeger at The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Nowadays, The John Birch Society publishes journals like The New American and buries the name of the society and its ownership of the journal deep within the About section of the website.

If you ever suspected that the promotion of nuclear energy is associated with this brand of radical conservatism, The New American is a source that answers this question. A recent editorial by Rebecca Terrell called Fukushima: Fear and Fallout illustrates how certain strains of conservative ideology are natural fellow travelers with the nuclear industry. The essay also stands as an example of a badly and willfully uninformed journalist writing on a topic that she hasn’t made much effort to learn about.

The arguments Terrell present display a lack of knowledge of the issues, as well as what must be deliberate omissions and distortions. Along the way, she makes breathtaking departures from logic and reality by suggesting that irrational fears of radiation have led to crimes against the unborn, thereby linking anti-nuclear people to being members of the right’s detested anti-pro-life camp. She goes further by accusing anti-nuclear groups and greens of being all-powerful masters of government bureaucracy, now leading a war on industrial society that threatens to “restrict access to clean, plentiful, safe, and affordable sources [of energy] such as nuclear.”

Some might say that there is no point in dignifying editorials like this with a response because they seem designed to bait and infuriate people who are knowledgeable on the issue. Countering this genre of denialism is a game of whack-a-mole, but it’s worth doing because it does influence public opinion, and it is not limited only to the extreme fringe. Highly esteemed scholars like Steven Pinker, who coyly stays out of political debates to avoid declaring his ideological leanings, supports nuclear power. He wrote in The Better Angels of our Nature that the shutdown of nuclear power construction after Three Mile Island was a tragic error and an irrational over-reaction, even though he showed no evidence that he had read up on the matter. As for people who are new to the issue, they may want to believe there is a magic cure to the energy crisis, so there are many who will not question these views unless they are challenged whenever they appear. So, for what it’s worth, I take a stab at it once again.

The only good thing to say about this editorial is that it is comprehensive. For anyone unfamiliar with this genre of pro-nuclear spin, this is the place to see it all. Below, I comment on all the points made and make a brief counter-argument to each one. I don’t go into any of them at length because fuller explanations have been made elsewhere, so there is no point in rehashing what can be easily found in numerous sources. This information can be easily accessed by anyone who is motivated to learn about the valid criticisms of nuclear energy written by experts who have worked long and hard on this issue.

1.     No one died at Fukushima.

Well, actually, they did. Several senior citizens got left behind in the evacuation and apparently starved to death in the abandoned hot zone. Other evacuees died from the stress or committed suicide. Aside from these, it is a certainty that lives of workers on the cleanup site will be shortened due to their radiation exposure.

The main point about the “no one died” argument is that no one died because everyone stayed away from the lethal levels of radiation that have been on the site since March 11, 2011. The ruins of the World Trade Center were cleaned up within a couple years, but Fukushima Daiichi is still a steaming, twisted wreck, and will be for decades, because of the lethal levels of radiation there.

2.  The Fukushima explosions were hydrogen explosions

Terrell describes the reactor building explosions as hydrogen explosions, but this statement demonstrates that she hasn’t been closely following the controversial questions that linger about what really happened. Everyone who is familiar with Fukushima Daiichi knows that the Unit 1 explosion produced white smoke and the Unit 3 explosion produced black smoke in a much more powerful burst. A large volume of black debris shot high into the sky in a mushroom cloud, while the Unit 1 explosion shot outward and was not so alarming. Unit 3 was known to contain MOX fuel (containing plutonium), and TEPCO is rather coy about discussing whether it involved a nuclear re-criticality, as many have speculated. The nuclear industry is loath to talk about this because it would diminish even further the public acceptance of nuclear energy. Terrell chose not to discuss the fact that large amounts of plutonium were dispersed into the atmosphere, nor did she mention the questions about what happened to Unit 3.

3. Pulling the plug on nuclear

Terrell writes, “Not only did Japan pull the nuclear plug, but Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and Belgium all nixed nuclear or canceled future plants in response to the Japanese accident.” Again this shows that she hasn’t bothered to look at the issue in depth or follow recent news. Much of her essay seems to be based on information and perceptions of the crisis that existed in 2011. The Japanese government that was in power in 2012 briefly floated a policy of withdrawing from nuclear over twenty years, but the bureaucratic and business establishment was outraged, and that government was soon gone. The new government led by Shinzo Abe is determined to restart nuclear reactors. As for the other countries in Europe, their decision to abandon nuclear was influenced by other factors besides Fukushima.

4. Citing UN health studies as the final word on Chernobyl

Extreme conservatives like to state that the UN is run by socialist radicals who want to undermine American freedom and take over with a world government, but when it’s convenient and a UN study says something they like, they cite it to support their argument. This is the case with nuclear energy. The horrific shortcomings of the UN studies on Chernobyl have been discussed at length for years. There is no point in rehashing them all here.

In discussing Three Mile Island, Terrell misses the contradiction in what she wrote toward the end of the essay. She contends that the “antinuclear movement has become part of the political establishment” and a “fearful public cowers to… bureaucratic bullying,” but before saying so writes that government studies showed no one was harmed by Three Miles Island. At her convenience, the government is either on her side or it is has been taken over by the enemies of freedom.

5. No strontium or plutonium from Fukushima, reactor vessels intact

Another sign that Terrell didn’t do her research is in the wild claim that strontium and plutonium were not released from the Fukushima meltdowns and that the reactor vessels are intact. Nothing to say here but that these statements are wrong.

6. Tritium

Terrell makes brief mention of the vast amounts of tritium that have been created by the Fukushima Daiichi accident, but then dismisses it as a radionuclide of little concern in terms of its environmental impact.

If one attempts to learn a little about this radionuclide, one can only conclude that it is harmless at the very low concentrations at which it was found in nature before the nuclear age. Little is known about the damage it has caused in real world situations that involve leaks from nuclear facilities because the people responsible for these leaks don’t want to know. From work in the lab, though, scientists know that fractions of a gram in the human body can be deadly, and, with a half-life of twelve years, it bio-accumulates as OBT, (organically bound tritium), a radioactive isotope of a hydrogen atom that can be a part of the many organic molecules containing hydrogen. Tritium is nothing to dismiss casually.

7. Downplaying the health effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Terrell’s worst distortions appear in her discussion of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She cites studies that found that survivors had lower cancer rates than people from other areas, and she concludes from this that this is evidence of the beneficial effect of a little zap of radiation – the hormesis effect. This almost seems to suggest that they should be grateful those bombs were dropped.

Terrell overlooks the fact that the IAEA, the UN, national regulators and the nuclear industry reject the hormesis theory and support the linear-no-threshold model of radiation safety, which states that risk increases linearly with dose and it should be minimized at all times. Many professionals within the industry may privately believe there is something to the hormesis theory, but it will never be adopted as policy for good reasons. One is that it is probably wrong, and the other is that it would encourage a cavalier attitude about radiation exposure.

Terrell’s interpretation of what happened after the atomic bombings in Japan is erroneous for several reasons. First, the radiation studies couldn’t include victims of radiation who died in the blasts. Second, the studies never considered the effects of internal contamination by beta and alpha particles, which affected not only the people who were present at the time of the blast but also those who entered the cities afterwards. The studies that form the basis of the Hiroshima model ignored such people. Finally, the apparent good health of people in the studies may indicate that they were the sturdy survivors. It is no surprise to anyone that many people escape harm after radiation exposure. The case against the nuclear industry is based on the belief that the minority who will suffer should be protected. In the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many people had perished in the first two years before studies even began.

The Hiroshima model of radiation studies has been widely rejected by anti-nuclear groups for good reason because of these and other flaws. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unique incidents of radiological contamination, and it is wrong to apply the model to other phenomena such as nuclear power station accidents or nuclear test sites where people live with nuclear fallout for many decades in different climactic conditions (such as at the Lop Nor site in Western China which receives rainfall to wash away fallout from Chinese weapons tests).

At one point Terrell compares hormesis to the use of pharmaceuticals, saying it all depends on the dose-response curve. We take aspirin for headaches, but avoid taking a lethal dose of it. The trouble with this analogy is that it doesn’t go very far. All drugs are designed to do their work then break down and leave the body. Radionuclides like plutonium and strontium 90 stay in the body and emit cancer-causing particles for many years. The ones which are administered for therapeutic effects must be ones with short nuclear and biological half-lives. When talking about things nuclear, it is best to avoid analogies because there is nothing else quite like radiation.

8. Radiation sickness strikes US Navy personnel

Another glaring omission in the essay is that there was no mention of the hundreds of personnel on the US Ronald Reagan who have suffered severe radiation-related ailments since being stationed offshore of Fukushima in March 2011. Their lawsuit against TEPCO has been featured on Fox News and various media outlets on the Internet. For anyone following Fukushima news, it has been pretty hard to avoid learning about it. The omission is more odd when one considers that it is conservative groups that are always quick to stand up for the troops who put their lives on the line defending freedom. In this case, however, it seems conservatives can ignore the suffering of the people in uniform, if it proves to be inconvenient for other aspects of their agenda.

9. Thyroid cancer in Fukushima

Another glaring omission was the non-mention of the spike in childhood thyroid cancer that appeared last year in Fukushima Prefecture. Although the officials overseeing the screening program said it was too early to see a spike in cases, it turned out that back in the 1990s these people were writing in their studies of Chernobyl that the first cases did appear after two years, not four as they now claim (see this blogpost for further discussion).

10. Nuclear waste

The final omission is the most obvious one: What to do with nuclear waste? Who wants it? Where can it be buried safely for thousands of years? What containers will hold it reliably for even a hundred years? How much is it going to cost? Even if the nuclear industry could operate without further catastrophic meltdowns, these unresolvable questions are enough to demand a halt to the generation of more waste.

11. Leaps of Logic

Toward the end of the essay, Terrell descends into some jaw-dropping hyperbole that connects the anti-nuclear movement to being pro-abortion, anti-freedom and anti-American. She chooses to dwell on the worst exaggerations about Fukushima, failing to notice that the anti-nuclear movement itself has distanced itself from the more extreme conspiracies and dark prophecies about the catastrophe. Then she writes that the anti-nuclear movement is:

... peopled with radical environmentalists using clean air and clean water only as a bait to mobilize the gullible in their campaign to stifle economic growth and control population… The attack on nuclear energy is part of a larger war on industrial society… the manipulated public is willing to sacrifice liberty for a false sense of security — a harbinger of tyranny. In order for liberty to prevail, so must reason.

Anyone who is familiar with the history of nuclear technology would decry instead the liberty that has been stolen for nuclear technology to be established. Freedom has been sacrificed for all aspects of the technology − uranium mining, fuel processing, weapons production and testing, and nuclear waste generating stations (also called power plants) in both their normal functioning and in their accidents. There was never a referendum or public debate about whether to develop nuclear technologies. This decision was made undemocratically and in secrecy. Nuclear technology has been a hazard imposed on local populations wherever it has been implemented. If the continuation of nuclear technology is the pursuit of freedom, it is only the freedom of the powerful to impose their will on the powerless.

12. Demonizing the Victims

The section of the essay I find the most egregiously insulting is in the discussion of “Chernobyl abortions.” Terrell accepted only the UN findings on the health impacts of the disaster, and completely ignored eye-witness accounts, historical documents, and medical studies that had vastly higher estimates of the health damage caused by Chernobyl. However, she was willing to concede one point because it props up the anti-abortion movement, the favorite lightning rod issue of the conservative agenda. So she writes:

Sadly, however, thousands did die in the wake of Chernobyl. According to the IAEA, overdramatized reports of radiation risks to unborn children led to an increase of between 100,000 and 200,000 European babies intentionally aborted by their mothers, who feared they might be carrying “nuclear monsters.” Jaworowski said Chernobyl “sheds light on how easily the global community may leave the realm of rationality when facing an imaginary emergency.”

That “imaginary emergency” involved, of course, the explosion of a nuclear reactor, high levels of nuclear fallout over Europe, and a massive evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people. Terrell herself, in preceding paragraphs, emphasized how dirty and dangerous the reactor was when she wanted to say how much better the American-built reactors at Fukushima were. You see, those nasty Russians were using it as a bomb factory, she suggests, as if to imply that no such factories ever existed in America.

In fact, after Chernobyl, thousands of people had miscarriages, newborns died, and others were born with serious mental and physical handicaps. Some estimates say that in spite of the abortions and miscarriages that occurred, 300,000 children (and I emphasize that they were children, not “nuclear monsters”) were later born with serious disabilities caused by the disaster. Regardless of what one thinks of abortion in normal circumstances, it is just appallingly cold and cruel to judge the actions of parents in this situation as irrational or immoral. The concerns about radiation exposure were real and rational. The fact that “sadly, thousands did die” is squarely the responsibility of the people who built Chernobyl, not of the people victimized by it and forced to make the horrible decision about whether to continue a pregnancy.

The 1991 movie Chernobyl: The Final Warning, tells the true story of Dr. Robert Gale, an American blood specialist, who rushed to Moscow to help with the treatment of firemen who had been the first responders at Chernobyl. He does his best to save Aleksandr Mashenko, and has a few heart-wrenching scenes with his soon-to-be widow, Yelena, who is also in the first trimester of pregnancy at the time. For some reason that the film never explores, she is allowed to spend much time with her dying, highly radioactive husband.

At the end of the film, she comes to Dr. Gale begging for advice. The communist health authorities in Kiev have advised her to have an abortion because the chance of her having a child with a severe birth defect has increased by 50%. Dr. Gale encourages her to go through with the pregnancy while respectfully acknowledging that the decision is hers alone to make and that scientists don’t know what the effects of Chernobyl will be. He gives her the scientist’s usual condescending explanation of basic statistics, reminding her that the increase in the rate of birth defects means a change from 1 to 1.5 per thousand.

The movie ends here, and it’s not clear whether the Mashenkos were a real couple. It seems like they were composite characters whom the filmmakers had to create, either out of respect for the victims or their unwillingness to be featured in the film. Alexandr’s name does not appear on the list of Chernobyl fatalities that is posted on various websites. Yelena’s story matches closely with the account told by another firefighter widow whose husband died in the same Moscow Hospital Six. Lyudmilla Ignatenko was pregnant at the time and admitted having hidden this information in order to be at her husband’s side. This is how she described the birth of her daughter months afterward:

They showed her to me − a girl. “Natashenka,” I called out. “Your father named you Natashenka.” She looked healthy. Arms, legs. But she had cirrhosis of the liver. Her liver had twenty-eight roentgens. Congenital heart disease. Four hours later they told me she was dead. And again: “We won’t give her to you.” “What do you mean you won’t give her to me? It’s me who won’t give her to you!”

So much for probabilities. Dr. Gale appeared in Fukushima in 2011 to give similar reassurances to the workers on the Daiichi site. In 2013 he published Radiation: What It Is, What You Need to Know, which the publisher’s blurb describes as a book that “corrects myths and establishes facts.” The authors “demystify the science and dangers of radiation, and examine its myriad benefits.”

Sources and Further Reading:

Ace Hoffman. The Code Killers: Why DNA and Ionizing Radiation are a Dangerous Mix, 2008. (Free ebook). http://www.acehoffman.org/books/TheCodeKillers.pdf.

Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko, and Alexey V. Nesterenko. “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment.” New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 1181, December 2009.

Alla Yaroshinskaya. Chernobyl: Crime without Punishment. Transaction Publishers, 2011. (Reviewed here.)

Harvey Wasserman. “50 Reasons We Should Fear the Worst from Fukushima.” Ecowatch, February 2, 2104. http://ecowatch.com/2014/02/02/50-reasons-fear-fukushima/

Paul Langley. The Characterization of Chernobyl Findings by Fukushima Medical University’s Thyroid Survey. September 9, 2013. http://nuclearhistory.wordpress.com/2013/09/08/the-characterization-of-chernobyl-findings-by-fukushima-medical-universitys-thyroid-survey/

Perry Chiaramonte. “Sickened by Service: More US Sailors Claim Cancer from Helping at Fukushima.” FoxNews.com, December 20, 2013. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/12/20/sickened-by-service-more-us-sailors-claim-cancer-from-helping-at-fukushima/.

Robert Jacobs. “Radiation Makes People Invisible.” SimplyInfo. January 30, 2014. http://www.fukuleaks.org/web/?p=12245 .

Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Viking Adult, 2011) p. 346.

Svetlana Alexievich. “Voices from Chernobyl.” The Paris Review, No. 172, Winter 2004. http://www.theparisreview.org/letters-essays/5447/voices-from-chernobyl-svetlana-alexievich.

Svetlana Alexievich. Voices from Chernobyl, trans. Keith Gessen (Picador, 2006). First published in Russian in 1997.

A previous blog post containing a list of studies that indicate radioactive contamination has clearly had a negative impact on health. This list is partial, and any motivated and inquiring mind could easily find other researchers whose work presents a refutation of the claims made in editorials such as Fukushima Fear and Fallout.

The Myth of Extra Fossil Fuel Imports Devastating the Japanese Economy

“If asked whether we should increase our reliance on caviar to fight world hunger, most people would laugh. Relying on an overly expensive commodity to perform an essential task spends too much money for too little benefit, while foreclosing more promising approaches. That is nuclear power's fundamental flaw in the search for plentiful energy without climate repercussions, though reactors are also more dangerous than caviar unless you're a sturgeon.”

−   Peter A. Bradford,

former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission*

For almost three years, those with vested interests in the Japanese nuclear industry have promoted a false notion that the extra fossil fuel imports required by the loss of nuclear energy are going to devastate the Japanese economy. The data has been distorted and exaggerated, and the nuclear crisis has been scapegoated for the serious economic, fiscal and demographic crisis that has been forming since long before 2011.

In the last nine months of 2011, with no electricity produced by nuclear, consumption of fossil fuels went from 81.58% to 89.64%. But that increase was caused by an event that came in the third month of the year, so if we extend this trend for three more months, we get an annualized increase up to 92.24%. This jump from 81.58% to 92.24% represents a 13% increase.

Chart 2

(Chart 2 shows the same data as in Chart 1: As it is taught in my son’s grade 8 math textbook, you can manipulate a graph so that a change in a pattern looks a lot more dramatic than it really is.)

So how bad is a 13% increase in fossil fuel imports to the balance of trade and the fortunes of the nation? It’s not small, but it is not quite the devastating change in circumstances that it has been portrayed as. Consumers and middle class workers are forced to absorb such shocks all the time. For example, they have to take salary and benefit cuts, and mortgage rates can increase by 13% on short notice (a seemingly tiny change from 2.500% to 2.825% is a 13% increase). Corporations also have to routinely deal with swings of 10% or more in currency values. And who remembers the rampant speculation in world oil prices in 2007 that sharply drove up fuel costs for everyone, without a nuclear shutdown as the cause? These sorts of price fluctuations are common, and governments usually expect individuals and businesses to just roll with the punches.

I’ve been watching reports about Japan’s energy crunch for the last three years, and I haven’t seen a single report in the commercial media that put fossil fuel consumption in its proper context with something like the simple graph shown above. The data wasn’t hard to find, but reporters have preferred to go along with the official line that the loss of nuclear energy is hammering the economy and causing a steep rise in carbon emissions. It’s funny how no one seemed to worry about the failure to meet emission targets before 2011.

There is an additional factor which casts doubt on the claim about the necessity of nuclear energy. If the extra fuel imports were the critical factor in economic recovery, why would the Japanese government embark on a deliberate policy of currency devaluation? The currency has lost over 20% of its value since 2012, which means the Abe government thought this extra cost could be absorbed along with the 13% extra already paid for fuel imports.

If the extra fuel purchases really are such a problem, there are numerous ways to reduce them. Some analysts think that Japan has maxed out on efficiency gains, but they are usually foreign energy experts who have never seen a Tokyo electronics store with hundreds of appliances and air conditioners switched on just for demonstration purposes. Or they have never seen the state of home heating in the countryside. If you want to know about the state of Japanese energy efficiency, come spend the oshogatsu holiday in a traditional Japanese wooden home.

In addition to efficiency gains, we could consider the taboo topic of restricting consumption. If a nation really is in a crisis, it might be reasonable to ask citizens to drive 10% less, for example. However, no one has figured out how to keep people employed while eliminating arbitrarily defined non-essential uses of energy. Once one starts asking about the necessity of vending machines and illuminated billboards, one quickly comes to grim existential questions about the energy expended in almost all economic activity. Very few people would be left standing if we really had to think hard about what is essential.

Finally, another strategy is to get serious about developing alternative energy and ways to store it. With or without nuclear energy, and with or without climate change (since fossil fuel is a finite resource), renewable energy has to be expanded dramatically.

All of this is obvious to anyone disinterested (that is, not uninterested but free from selfish motive or interest) in the Japanese nuclear and power industries. Westinghouse-Toshiba, GE-Hitachi, Areva-Mitsubhishi, the electric utilities, and the politicians who do their bidding have attempted a great con over the last three years in selling the myth that the Japanese economy will be doomed without nuclear energy and nuclear technology exports. It is the opposite, though. Japan is doomed with them. The risks are too great in a nation of earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis, while the rewards – a 13% reduction in fossil fuel imports − are too small to matter. The share of energy produced by fossil fuel is so large that it is pointless to worry about the small increase or the sacrifices that will be needed for a few years before new technologies and new patterns of production and consumption emerge.

*

Wall Street Journal Reports: Energy. “Should the World Increase Its Reliance on Nuclear Energy?” The Wall Street Journal, October 8, 2012.

Chinese Hibakusha Activist Addresses French Senators

Chinese Nuclear Tests: A voice for thousands of victims invited to the French Senate

January 21, 2014

TRANSLATION by Dennis Riches, 2014/01/22

ORIGINAL SOURCE:

Dominique Leglu, «Essais Nucléaires Chinois: les milliers de morts s'invitent au Sénat français. » Le Nouvel Observateur (blogs), 2014/01/21.

“In 1973, I was just an elementary school student, stunned to see around me and my classmates a glowing powder, as if earth was falling from the sky onto our heads. When I asked the teacher what it was, she told us there had been a storm on Saturn, and that this was the effect.”

The man who spoke these words became a doctor, and he does not hesitate to say now that the dust was radioactive fallout on the city of Urumchi, coming after one of the Chinese nuclear tests at Xinjiang (there were 23 atmospheric tests and 23 underground tests in China.) He doesn’t hesitate to state that nuclear test fallout led to a 35% increase in the rate of cancer in this province in Western China of 20 million inhabitants, compared to the rate in Henan Province (100 million inhabitants) in Central China where there were no tests. He has compiled figures from hospital records, in particular the four main hospitals of Xinjiang.

It is rare in Paris to hear eyewitness testimony about the impact of Chinese nuclear tests on local populations. It is also alarming to hear the witness say that he could not respond to certain questions from the audience because he has been threatened with twenty years in prison if he gives explanations that would be considered as violations of state secrets.

Nonetheless, this Monday, January 20, 2014, forty years after the event described above, this Uighur doctor, Enver Tohti, came to give his testimony in Paris, as he has done in other talks for fifteen years since he first guided British documentary filmmakers (Death on the Silk Road, 1998) to the contaminated zones. At that time, he decided to leave China and reveal this story to the world.

This testimony was given at a quasi-official international symposium, the first of its kind in France, entitled The Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons. The event took place in the basement of the Palais de Luxembourg. There were three roundtable sessions (1) organized by two elected representatives. One was Senator Paris Leila Aichi (EELV Party, Europe Ecologie-Les Verts), who opened the event, and the other was a senator from Polynesia, Richard Tuheiava (Socialist Party), who closed the proceedings. The event was organized by two groups: Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (PNND, with 800 members in 80 countries) and l’Observatoire des Armements.

The date of this event was ironic because on this day the new nuclear accord between Iran and six other nations (US, Russia, China, France, Great Britain, and Germany – all except the latter are nuclear powers themselves) came into effect.

Enver Tohti discussed the results of research by Jun Takada, a physician at Sapporo University of Medicine, with whom he has collaborated for several years on research that examines the health effects of Chinese nuclear weapons tests. They call it Project Lop Nor, named after the geological basin where the tests occurred.

Thanks to the theoretical model developed by the Japanese physician, they were able to estimate the fallout pattern of each test. The images of the simulations, shown at the symposium, indicate that at the time of the two-megaton test of June 17, 1967, a fallout pattern oriented southeast to northwest would have drifted close to the large city of Urumchi (today with a population of 2 million), with a dose of about 2 sieverts. Furthermore, this cloud would have hung in the area for many hours or many days. For perspective, keep in mind that the permitted dose for the population in France, above what occurs naturally or in medical treatments, is 1/1000 of a Sievert for an entire year.

Enver Tohti pointed out that, in contrast with Hiroshima where a “black rain, as well as humidity and condensation, did something to disperse radioactive particles into the ground, in Lop Nor it hasn’t rained for thousands of years, and after the tests the dust has continued to blow in the wind.”

Enver Tohti continued by presenting the results of the Japanese researcher which are based on calculations from his earlier work in Kazakhstan (the location of Soviet nuclear tests). They show that there could have been as many as 190,000 deaths from acute radiation syndrome in the neighboring regions. This is an enormous figure, he says, “more than any estimate of damage from tests done by any other nation.”  This statement came as a shock to this Western audience that wasn’t familiar with the first publication of this news in 2009 (3). It is very difficult to verify, given the difficulty of conducting research in the testing sites.

The speaker added that to this figure we must also include a million victims struck in other ways (tumors, birth defects…), and we must consign ourselves to the long-term effects of this radiation on future generations. Will there be genetic malformations, or numerous induced cancers? He insists here that we don’t know how to compare the health effects of nuclear tests, which were done repeatedly over many decades, with those of the “one-time-only” bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He also protests against the impossibility of Xinjiang victims receiving medical treatment. “Chemotherapy costs $5,000, while the local population earns an average of $1,000 per year.” Nonetheless, he pointed out that an association of veterans of testing has started to stand up for their rights.

One could say that holding this critical event in an official setting rattled the cages of one of the taboos of French society: discussion of the strategic weapon par excellence, the atomic bomb. This event was held, after all, not in a university, nor in an independent association or foundation, but in La Salle Clemenceau of the Senate. But let’s not kid ourselves. It was only a rattling of the cages. France conducted 210 nuclear tests (4) and it will not be represented at the international conference in Mexico February 13-14, 2014 devoted to the health consequences of nuclear tests. Nor will any of the other nuclear powers be represented. The conference in Mexico follows the first conference of this type which was held in May 2013 in Oslo. In contrast with France, where disarmament and the effects of fallout are not on the political radar, these subjects retain the attention of all countries in Northern Europe, Austria, Switzerland, and the 123 states that signed, in October 2013, a UN resolution on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear arms. Yet in France there is only a stunning silence on these issues. A former Socialist Party defense minister, Paul Quilès, wrote less than a year ago a book (5) which risked the crime of lèse-majesté for its title Stop the Bomb.

Notes:

(1) First roundtable: The reality of the impact of nuclear weapons. Moderated by Patrick Bouveret, director of l’Observatoire des armements.

Second roundtable: The humanitarian dimension: the path to re-launching debate at the UN on nuclear disarmament. Moderated by Yann Mens, editor in chief of Alternatives Internationales.

Third roundtable: The role and power of European and French Parliamentarians in the processes of control and disarmament of nuclear weapons. Moderated by Jean-Marie Collin, director of PNND for France.

(2) See the two recent works by Bruno Barillot published by l’Observatoire des armements: Nuclear Tests: the Poisoned Heritage (2012) and Victims of French Nuclear Tests: History of a Combat (2010).

(3) Zeeya Merali, “Did China Nuclear Tests Kill Thousands and Doom Future Generations?” Scientific American, 2009.

(4) In the next blog post we’ll cover the session on the French tests conducted in Algeria and Polynesia.

(5) Paul Quiles, Arrêtez la bombe! (Le Cherche Midi, 2013).

Translator's note:

See also Jun Takada's book about Chinese nuclear tests:

Jun Takada, Chinese Nuclear Tests: Disasters Caused by Nuclear Explosions on the Silk Road (Iryokagakusha, 2009).