Antinuclear

Stop SpaceX from crashing rockets in the Pacific

Hawaii should not be a collateral sacrifice zone for a private space company working for the pentagon

 Hawaii needs to have input on SpaceX ocean-landing plan, STAR ADVERTISER. By Lynda Williams, APRIL 27, 2023

The world watched aghast as SpaceX blew up its own spaceship on April 20, four minutes after launch due to engine failure. Even though the mission was not completed, Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, claimed it was a success because the real goal was for the rocket to clear the launch pad at the spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas.

What most folks don’t know or realize is that Starship was always going to blow up when it crashlanded in the Pacific Ocean, just 62 nautical miles north of Kauai and a few hundred miles east of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument.

In the next test launch, which Musk boasted will happen in the next few months, the world’s largest spaceship will descend toward Earth in free fall and blow up upon impact with a force of a ton of TNT as fuel ignites in a great explosion. On a second and third launch test, Starship will break up in the atmosphere and tumble down and crash-land in a debris field several hundred miles southwest of the island chain.

SpaceX obtained a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) commercial space launch license (experimental permit), rubber-stamped by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) without any consultation of Hawaii’s people because, according to an email I received from the FAA: “No in-person public outreach was conducted in Hawaii as the Starship vehicle was planned to land outside of range for impacts to the residents of Hawaii.”

First of all, that is assuming everything goes exactly according to the plan, which we have all just witnessed doesn’t always happen. If the Starship goes off course by even a few degrees, the consequences could be catastrophic to Hawaii.

Secondly, I think most folks in Hawaii would agree that 62 miles north of Kauai is considered Hawaii culturally if not legally, and that is way too close for what is essentially a rocket bomb to crash-land.

SpaceX was not required to do a full environmental impact study (EIS), but a much-weaker environmental assessment (EA) that only requires the analysis of “nominal operations” or bestcase scenarios. Why was that allowed when the worst-case scenarios are so catastrophic?

In the EA, rather than doing a detailed analysis of the potential impact to marine mammals protected by the Endangered Species Act, NOAA wrote a “Biological Opinion” that argued “less than one” animal would be harmed by a 100 ton steel rocket exploding with the energy of a small nuclear bomb.

It came to that conclusion because it analyzed only one “nominal” scenario in which the rocket hits the water exactly horizontal to the surface with the fuel tanks orientated on top, which is impossible to control or predict. If the explosion is above water, NOAA argues, only a fraction of the energy will be transmitted into the ocean and travel deep enough to harm any of the 30 endangered species of whales, sharks, turtles, monk seals, dolphins and rays in Hawaii.

The EA has many unsubstantiated claims, such as no animals would be near the surface of the water during the crash — even though most are mammals that surface to breathe air.

It ignored the fact that Humpback whales migrate through the target “action area.” It assumed that most of the debris will be large enough to sink to the bottom of the ocean without encountering and injuring animals — but if any does drift into the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, then the Coast Guard would be sent to clean it up.

This alone is reason to contest the EA and demand an EIS since NOAA and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs co-manage Papahanaumokuakea and OHA should have been consulted, but was not.

The FAA and NOAA analyses are flawed, and both are failing in their duty to protect the people of Hawaii from extreme corporate and federal government abuse.

Hawaii must not become collateral damage and a colonized sacrifice zone for the government’s privatization of the space program and a billionaire’s personal ambition and corporate profits.

At minimum, the FAA must suspend the SpaceX license, conduct a full EIS and include the residents of Hawaii in the review process. The best plan is to ban SpaceX from trashing people and planet in Musk’s ego trip to Mars.

ISLAND VOICES

April 29, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Chernobyl anniversary offers a bleak look at what may await other Ukrainian nuclear plants

A huge steel and concrete sarcophagus covers the site of the meltdown. Under its dome, called the New Safe Confinement, lie 200 tons of lava-like nuclear fuel, 30 tons of highly contaminated dust and 16 tons of uranium and plutonium that continue to release high levels of radiation.

April 26, 2023 by Charles Digges  https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2023-04-chernobyl-anniversar

A little over a year ago, Russian troops abandoned Chernobyl after briefly occupying it during the grim opening days of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. The takeover of the site where the world’s worst nuclear disaster happened thirty-seven years ago this week offered a preview of the reckless disregard for nuclear safety that has characterized so much of this war.

While the site has been left to Ukraine to painstakingly restore since the Russian withdrawal on March 31, 2022, the new anniversary of the Chernobyl plant’s original disaster on April 26, 1986, leaves lingering questions about what, exactly, the world can do when Ukraine’s nuclear infrastructure — or indeed any nuclear infrastructure — is attacked by a hostile neighbor.

The answer, at this point?  Not much — aside from trying to pick up the pieces after the damage is already done.

As it stands, the Chernobyl exclusion zone is still dotted with mines planted by Russian troops when they rolled into the territory, churning up clouds of radioactive dust with hundreds of heavily armored vehicles. The mines have made treacherous any efforts to restore the territory.

Russian troops also dug trenches and set fires in an area known as the Red Forest — a gnarled expanse of irradiated trees — and scorched, according to NASA, some 14,000 hectares of land, filling the air with so much radioactive smoke that it was unsafe for firefighters to quell the blazes.

All the while, hundreds of Chernobyl employees — who oversee the site’s sprawling network of spent fuel storage facilities as well as the enormous efforts to dismantle the radioactive remnants of the exploded No. 4 reactor — were held hostage onsite, prevented from rotating out at the end of their shifts. Five workers were kidnapped and nine were killed, according to The Washington Post.

Those who remained said later that they had tried to keep the Russians from the most dangerous areas within the plant’s territory. But in what many called the worst situation they have seen in the decades since the initial disaster, Chernobyl’s power was cut by fighting, leaving them to rely on diesel generators  for nearly a week to support the critical work of circulating water to cool spent nuclear fuel.

The damage the Russian soldiers did wasn’t purely technical. Doors to offices were ripped off hinges, windows smashed, walls spray-painted with graffiti.

“The poop was the icing on the cake,” Aleksander Barsukov, deputy director of the Chernobyl Ecocenter, which keeps samples of radioactive material collected from all over the world, told The Wall Street Journal after the Russian retreat.

By the time Russian troops pulled back from the plant on March 31, 2022 — amid reports of possible radiation poisoning among their ranks — Chernobyl’s technicians had been held at literal gunpoint at their workstations for more than a month.

During the retreat, according to Ukrainian accounts, Russian soldiers ransacked the site and took anything that looked valuable, looting more than 1,000 computers, and spiriting away dosimeters, software, lab tools, firefighting equipment — and in some cases even household appliances — piling them in stolen Ukrainian trucks.

“Whatever they didn’t steal, they broke,” Chernobyl Information Director Vitaly Medved told the BBC at the time.

Russian soldiers then brazenly mailed much of the booty home from across the Belarusian border. They also made off with radioactive instruments used to calibrate personal dosimeters for Chernobyl staff — substances that can cause radiation burns if handled improperly.

According to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, which has financed much of Chernobyl’s cleanup work since the original 1986 disaster, the Russian Army’s destructive adventure in the world’s most famous radioactive wasteland will cost some €100 million to repair.

The four RBMK reactors at the enormous nuclear station in Chernobyl no longer produce power, but before the invasion nearly 6,000 workers monitored the lasting effects of the disastrous meltdown that took place in 1986, as well oversaw as processing spent nuclear fuel from other plants in Ukraine. In the days before the invasion, all but a few hundred employees were evacuated.

Located just a few miles from the Belarusian border, Chernobyl was one of the first places occupied by Russian troops. Yevhen Kramarenko, the director of the exclusion zone — the  2,6000-square-kilometer area where radiation levels remain high and public access is limited — told The Washington Post that on the first day of the invasion, a Russian general presented himself as the new leader of the station, and introduced employees from Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear corporation.

“I believe that at the time when they came,” Kramarenko told the paper, “they planned to be there permanently, they planned to take control for a long time.”

A sign of things to come?

Even before the occupation, the Chernobyl station had a post-apocalyptic air. It is situated in a dense forest, swarming with mosquitoes and gnats. Pripyat, the city where employees lived before the disaster, now stands empty and is being reconquered by nature.

A huge steel and concrete sarcophagus covers the site of the meltdown. Under its dome, called the New Safe Confinement, lie 200 tons of lava-like nuclear fuel, 30 tons of highly contaminated dust and 16 tons of uranium and plutonium that continue to release high levels of radiation.

Yet while Rosatom may have failed to keep hold of Chernobyl, the same cannot be said about Ukraine’s embattled Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant — Europe’s largest such facility — which once supplied a fifth of Ukraine’s electricity.

Since October of 2022, Moscow claims that it now controls the plant — a claim not honored by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Association, to say nothing of Kyiv.

From then on, Rosatom has begun flooding the Zaporizhzhia plant with Russian staff that it has transferred from its own Kalinin nuclear plant, 545 kilometers across the front to the northeast.

But while Russia asserts the six-reactor facility has been taken over as a protective measure, there is little to suggest that the joining of Russian and Ukrainian workforces is going smoothly.  Only about 2,000 Ukrainian staff members still work at the plant, out of 11,000 before the war.

Indeed, much of Rosatom’s effort to assert itself at the plant has involved arresting and torturing Ukrainian workers opposed to the occupation as it toils to link Zaporizhzhia with the Russian electricity grid.

The plant, which lies on the south side of the Dnipro River next to the nuclear plant’s home city of Enerhodar, is on the front line of the war. Ukrainian troops are just a few of kilometers to the north, on the far bank of the Dnipro, while Russians are holed up in the power plant.Anxieties are high that the area could see renewed fighting in any Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Ukraine accuses the Russians of using the plant as a shield, hoping that the danger of causing a nuclear accident will keep Ukrainian soldiers from firing on them — the first time an atomic reactor has been put in such a position.

“They know Ukrainian troops would not dare to fire back. The nuclear power plant is a perfect hiding place from Ukrainian artillery,” Oleksiy Melnychuk, a former worker at the plant who fled from Enerhodar last July to Ukrainian-held territory, told Politico.eu. The Russians in turn accuse the Ukrainians of ignoring safety protocols and firing on areas near the plant.

The IAEA has inspectors on site and has been trying to walk a diplomatic tightrope to establish a non-military safety zone around the plant. While Moscow says it is keen to do so, Kyiv is leery of any step that could lend legitimacy to the Russian occupation.

Late last month, IAEA chief Rafael Mariano Grossi dropped the idea, and instead is now pushing for both sides to take steps to ensure that the plant isn’t attacked.

Over the last year, four of the station’s six VVER reactors have been put into a cold shutdown to minimize the risk of an accident, while two have been restarted to produce low levels of power to keep the plant operational. The facility needs access to electricity to ensure reactor cooling and other safety functions. However, its links to the Ukrainian grid have been cut six times since last March, forcing the ZNPP to rely on diesel-powered generators for emergency backup power — a situation that IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi has referred to as “rolling the dice.”

“And if we allow this to continue time after time then one day our luck will run out,” he added.

Still, even as events deteriorate, there is little the world can do but watch.

Even Grossi — who heads the world’s most respected nuclear power diplomacy body — has admitted as much. During a meeting of the IAEA’s  35-member board of governors last month, Grossi castigated his colleagues for “complacency” after the latest spate of airstrikes had again cut off Zaporizhzhia’s access to grid electricity.

“What are we doing to prevent this [from] happening?“ a flabbergasted Grossi asked the board. ”We are the IAEA, we are meant to care about nuclear safety.”

Even so, aspirations of pushing out the Russians among plant workers remain high.

“We still hope de-occupation is possible,” Melnychuk told Politico.eu. “You can’t even imagine how ready we all are to return and let our colleagues, working under tremendous pressure and fear, to finally have some rest.”

Unfortunately, the state of Chernobyl offers the clearest glimpse of what they may find if — or when — that time comes.

April 29, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Nuclear waste from small modular reactors – Simon Daigle comments on recent article.

Simon J Daigle, B.Sc., M.Sc., M.Sc.(A) Concerned Canadian Citizen. Occupational / Industrial Hygienist, Epidemiologist. Climatologist / Air quality expert (Topospheric Ozone). 27 Apr 23

A recent article on SMRs in 2022 on potential nuclear waste risks and other proximate information on industrial and hazardous waste streams globally [References 2 to 5] below.

Nuclear waste from small modular reactors. PNAS Publication. Lindsay M. Kralla, Allison M. Macfarlaneb, and Rodney C. Ewinga. Edited by Eric J. Schelter, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; received June 26, 2021; accepted March 17, 2022 by Editorial Board Member Peter J. Rossky.

Simon Daigle comments:

• Development of SMRs have security issues and threats globally according to many experts including Dr Gordon Edwards (CCNR).

• SMR will produce more toxic radionuclides and waste stream analysis for potential SMR wastes streams are unknown in Canada and currently the Canadian government have no plans to complete this analysis yet or confirmed by an environmental impact assessment.
• SMR development and potential nuclear wastes generated will be extremely dangerous and toxic comparatively with current NPP SNF and other LILW [Ref. 1].
• SMR nuclear waste challenges of DGR disposal risks are unknown and are technically difficult to achieve even with safety assurances by governments globally, even more so for current nuclear wastes from NPP and other nuclear waste streams such as medical radiological waste streams.
• On a global scale, industrial and hazardous wastes are mismanaged to a point where poor countries are the favored territories to dump industry’s hazardous and industrial wastes because of poor regulatory or no regulatory legal framework to be followed by industries and corporations [Ref. 5].
• Global governments want to take on industrial and hazardous wastes for a financial benefit with no real ROI (Return on Investment) for any government or taxpayer when industrial waste companies know they can make a profit and unfortunately, the environment and population health in that country are impacted considerably without their own government helping out [Ref. 5]. This is also the case for nuclear wastes independent of point of origin and all coming from the nuclear industry’s operators, and similar industrial and hazardous waste operators on global scale.
• SMR development (and use) will have the same problems in disadvantaged poor or rich country that will accept SMR as a technology, and the result of  a “free for all” dumping ground for nuclear waste that the nuclear industry chooses to dump on will inevitably happen in time. Poor countries are not equipped to deal with hazardous and industrial wastes generally to begin with and especially true for nuclear waste or any potential SMR waste streams.
• Hazardous wastes are already a problem in the province of Alberta. Alberta’s Oil Patch lands are contaminated and polluted to a point where taxpayers are on the hook for 260 billion dollars for the clean-up estimated in 2018 by one Alberta accountability office (Alberta Energy Regulator) [Ref. 2]. This figure is likely even higher in 2023. You could put a “financial” and hazardous caution tape all around Alberta for all the taxpayers in that province.
• If Alberta cannot clean the oil sands and patches, with its hazardous waste legacy coming from the oil industry because of failed financial securities, including the federal government oversight, we will also have a difficult time resolving any SMR nuclear waste issues and existing NPP nuclear waste streams and/or contaminated oil patch lands over decades or millennia as we are already having a difficult time resolving nuclear waste issues in Canada. The short-term benefit has always been profits for corporations and the Alberta taxpayer inherits the legacy waste [Ref. 2]
• International law is clearly inadequate for oil tanker spill accidents, oil platforms, oil exploration, under water gas pipelines, etc. Governments rely on corporate “citizenship” and due-diligence but we have already learned these failures over time with so much damages to the environment and to the population including maritime nuclear waste transport in international waters by nuclear merchants and inadequate insurance and financial securities. [Ref. 4].
• The impact of any nuclear waste accident or incident in open international waters by a nuclear waste operator independent of origin will be the same in the biosphere, financially and ecologically. It is highly likely to occur in time because there is no adequate emergency and contingency plan that exists with international agencies, corporations or governments including adequate financial insurance and securities [Ref. 4] to cover the damages.  Very few international ocean cargo shippers accept to transport nuclear waste to any destinations because of the risks (including threats to security) with inadequate insurance and financial liabilities from any point of origin during an accident in international waters. So, who will pay the damages? No one.
• We have yet not cleared the lost nuclear bombs from WWII from the ocean floor so this makes you wonder who will take care of these nuclear wastes and other hazardous materials in time?  Will it be IAEA or other international agency such as the IMO (International Maritime Organization). These hazardous and nuclear wastes, including lost nuclear warheads from WWII, in international waters are left to live on the ocean floor for archeologist to discover the “why they were lost” or “left there” to begin with in time [Ref. 3]. They are all plainly left out of sight for anyone to see. These lost nuclear warheads and similar weapons lost at sea remain a serious explosion hazard and ocean contamination is happening to this very day.
• If we can’t resolve current nuclear waste issues in Canada, and globally, we won’t be able to resolve (ever) new development of SMR technology accompanied with even more toxic nuclear wastes, as history showed us, we simply can’t.
• Similarly, we can’t even resolve our current issues for any hazardous and industrial wastes in Canada or globally, because somehow, somewhere, someone will inherit these wastes indefinitely in their backyard including all of its impacts on the biosphere and the general population. One example is clearly worrisome for Alberta with a 260 billion CDN clean up cost in 2018 in which will remain indefinitely [Ref. 2].
• Industries and governments are spreading hazardous wastes and pollution through a thin layer across the globe (air, water and soil), some thicker in concentration and toxicity in different geographic zones and all for a profit by corporations and industries. The population is always disadvantaged.
• In Feb 2023, one article proposed nuclear energy for maritime shipping and we are now looking at it to decarbonize international maritime transport, such as nuclear merchant ships, while further complicating nuclear risks and harm in international waters with nuclear pollution, risks and harm where insurance and financial securities are inadequate to this very day. [Ref. 4]. This is ridiculous to even consider given the risks and legacy waste generated but this article’s authors are from China where the government is planning to expand the nuclear industry.
• While NPP plants are decommissioning in some countries, we will se more advanced countries looking to take on nuclear waste processing and waste management and all will require land and ocean transportation.
• Air transport of nuclear materials or wastes are possible with air transport according to IATA (International Air Transport Association in Montreal) but are limited to Low Specific Activity (LSA) and Shipping Low-Level Radioactive Waste but we won’t see that happening on a large scale because of the obvious threats. IATA also provides information to irradiated individuals (from a source other than medical diagnosis or treatment) that needs to travel in order to reach a suitable treatment facility and new guidance was provided in 2011 by IATA.
• Usually, airlines do not know about radiation from within the body resulting from diagnostic procedures or may not know about contamination of an individual by radioactive material on the skin or clothes and the aviation industry monitoring these activities are inadequate. Just to add my personal experience, in 2006, I had a flight to New Baltimore (US) (within the US) to conduct an EHS audit for a company, and by curiosity, I noticed one traveller was equipped with medical equipment and I asked the flight attendant if there are any radionuclides in the equipment (with a radioactive symbol) or if the passenger had received oncology radiation treatment recently, and the answer was “I don’t know”! So I picked another seat in a different row but the other passengers were oblivious so I kept to myself the question that I even asked until the plane touchdown.  Yes, people undergoing radiation treatment can be hazardous to family members at home and on flights. I won’t explain today, I will let an oncologist explain if one is brave and keen to explain.
• Self-governance by corporations is not acceptable for nuclear, hazardous and industrial wastes, and that includes the nuclear industry.
• The Canadian Government must adopt and practice better foresight, insight, hindsight, and oversight with SMRs and nuclear wastes with clear Authority, Accountability and Responsibility for Canadians and indigenous peoples, by Canadians and by indigenous peoples.
• Governments are not playing by their own rules as well for preventing the production of nuclear waste, nuclear risks or reducing harm and not even following IAEA’s ALARA principle “As Low as Reasonably Achievable”. It’s ironic and all for profit in which is a clear negative financially from the get go, even decades, for any taxpayer or any government.

April 29, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment