National cancer committee second meeting in Chicago area

NAS will host the second committee meeting for analysis of cancer risks near NRC licensed facilities will be on April 18 & 19 at the Chicago Marriott Southwest, Burr Ridge, IL (outside of Chicago). Members of the public are welcome to attend the open session on Monday April 18 from 9:25AM to 9PM , which will also be webcast. The webcast link for this meeting will be made available on the project site on the morning of the 18th. According to the current agenda, public comment will begin at 7:30 PM. We encourage you to attend and provide comments. Beyond Nuclear has a summary and links from the first meeting and more background on this committee and the study question.

Official reports on condition of Fukushima Daiichi still conflicting

According to the Washington Post, Japanese nuclear officials had enough monitoring data as early as March 16 regarding the March 11 nuclear disaster to make the determination that the radiation releases were  on par with a Level 7 accident, a "major nuclear accident" by the International Atomic Energy Agency scale. The Level 7 rating is based on the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe in Ukraine indictating that serious public health and safety conditions existed not only in Japan but potentially spreading internationally.  At the time however, those same Japanese officials were publicly stating that there was no "immediate health concerns" from the ongoing and mounting radiation releases.

"Their response has  been extremely regrettable. The government is being very careful not to cause unnecessary panic, but they are being too cautious," said Professor Hironobu Unesaki at Kyoto University Research Reactor Institutte.

In fact, the same such "cautious" release of information during severe nuclear accidents releasing dangerous levels of radioactivity has been the historical standard for the entire global nuclear industry.  It was three days following the March 28, 1979 Three Mile Island accident before Governor Thornberg got enough conflicted information together from the NRC and  Metropolitan Edison Company to "advise" pregnant women and young children to evacuate a 5 mile radius around the melting Unit 2 reactor. And it was a nuclear engineer in Sweden that first reported a radioactive plume days after Chernobyl Unit 4 reactor had exploded more than a thousand miles away in Ukraine.

Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power

Free copies of Beyond Nuclear board member Karl Grossman's first book on nuclear power, Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power, are now available on the web. Just go to www.thepermanentpress.com and click on the box providing for a free download of the book. It's full of facsimiles of government documents, some long secret, about the the dangers of nuclear power. And Karl has written a new preface in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

Non-violent direct action protest at EdF HQ in London

Investigative journalism uncovers multiple radioactive leaks from U.S. reactors across the country

As the Beyond Nuclear April 2010 report, "Leak First, Fix Later," first revealed, radioactive leaks of tritium are pervasive and persistent at U.S. reactors. Now, the Asbury Park Press (NJ) in a special investigative report finds that despite millions of gallons of radioactive leaks from compromised buried pipes at US nuclear power reactors, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has failed to issue one fine for the contamination of groundwater and drinking water aquifers. Furthermore, tritiated water, despite a short half life, is by no means harmless as it can metabolize in the body, thereby remaining far longer and causing cell damage leading to cancer. Tritum can pass the placenta barrier. As the Beyond Nuclear report then stated, "Clinical investigations have demonstrated that once mother and child are exposed there is no difference between the tritium concentration in fetal tissue and maternal tissue."