Save the dates: "A Mountain of Radioactive Waste 70 Years High: Ending the Nuclear Age," Chicago, December 1-3, 2012

Please save the dates, on the first weekend in December, for a gathering in Chicago, Illinois, to mark the 70th year since Enrico Fermi first split the atom -- in a squash court, under the football stadium at the University of Chicago -- as part of the top secret Manhattan Project, on December 2, 1942. Since then, no permanent, safe location or technology has ever been found to isolate even the first cupful of radioactive waste from the biosphere. And yet we continue to generate more and more -- a mountain of waste 70 years high.

The goal of the Friday evening to Sunday afternoon conference is to educate, inspire, and activate. Diverse expert speakers will be featured, on a range of subject matter, including: radioactive waste; the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe; the inextricable link between nuclear weapons and nuclear power; degraded old and proposed new atomic reactor risks; the Atomic Age's impacts on human beings, and resistance to it; and the way forward without nuclear power and nuclear weapons.

The event will also feature: film screenings/discussions; real-time linkage to, and interaction with, remote participants in Hiroshima, Japan and Takoma Park, Maryland; a commemoration ceremony at the Henry Moore Sculpture (the very spot where Fermi first split the atom); and a possible field trip to Red Gate Woods (a suburban forest preserve, where Fermi's radioactive wastes are buried, next to a bicycle path, under a mound of dirt).

In addition to an excellent networking opportunity, the event will help participants get up to speed on various nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and radioactive waste issues, so we can better fend off the nuclear establishment's expansion plans next year, after the presidential and congressional elections.

For more information, contact David Kraft at Nuclear Energy Information Service in Chicago (neis@neis.org; 773-342-7650), or Kevin Kamps at Beyond Nuclear (kevin@beyondnuclear.org; 301-270-2209x1).

For more background on the radioactive waste issue, see Beyond Nuclear's pamphlet, "A Mountain of Waste Seventy Years High" (see its cover, at left), and visit the Radioactive Waste section of the Beyond Nuclear website.

FENOC weather seals severely cracked Davis-Besse shield building exterior -- 40 years too late

Painters work high off the ground to apply a protective weatherproof coating to Davis-Besse’s concrete Shield Building. Cracks were discovered in the fall that were blamed on the Blizzard of 1978. THE BLADE/AMY E. VOIGTAs reported by the Toledo Blade in an article entitled "Work crews apply waterproof coating to Davis-Besse: Project not silencing critics of plant," the only "corrective action" FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company (FENOC) plans to take, in response to severe cracking of its radiological containment "shield building," is to weather seal the exterior of the steel-reinforced concrete structure -- four decades too late. FENOC blames the cracking on the "brutal Blizzard of 1978,"which Beyond Nuclear has dubbed a snow job -- a charge repeated on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives by long-time Davis-Besse watchdog, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), whose constituents live immediately downwind and downstream from the problem-plagued plant. 

The article quoted both Terry Lodge, Toledo-based attorney representing the bi-national environmental coalition (Beyond Nuclear, Citizens Environment Alliance of Southwestern Ontario, Don't Waste Michigan, and the Green Party of Ohio) battling against Davis-Besse's 20-year license extension, as well as Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps:

"I'm not at all comforted that they discovered an error that never should have happened to the most expensive and safety-significant building on the site," Mr. Lodge said Thursday.

Added Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear, "It's 40 years too late. Weather sealant will not fix the cracks that are there."

As reported by Fox 8 Cleveland, a FENOC spokesman outright lied: “The shield building meets all its design parameters, we have evaluated it for all its parameters, and it is fully operable,” said Jon Hook, the design engineer manager at the plant.

In fact, both the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and FENOC itself have acknowledged that Davis-Besse's severe shield building cracking violates the atomic reactor's design and licensing bases. At an August 9th public meeting in Oak Harbor, OH, an NRC spokesman, with an audible scoff, admitted that NRC has generously granted FENOC until December 2012 to merely come up with a "plan for a plan" to "restore conformance" -- that is, pencil whip the violations, making everything appear okay on paper.  

Hook also told the Toledo Blade the shield building "wasn't coated originally because 'there was no requirement that it be done...'." Why such a basic no brainer as weather sealant was not required -- on the shoreline of Lake Erie, which suffers severe winter weather -- has never been explained, neither by FENOC nor NRC. Further deepening the mystery is the fact that all other -- much less safety significant and expensive -- concrete structures on site were weather sealed. When asked to explain, FENOC spokeswoman Jennifer Young has simply said it was done for aesthetic reasons, as those other structures appeared "splotchy." 

WNWO also reported on this story.

Arnie Gundersen, Fairewinds Associates: "Can Spent Fuel Pools Catch Fire?"

Fairewinds Associates Chief Engineer Arnie GundersenReproduced verbatim from the Fairewinds Associates website: "In this Fairewinds’ feature, Fairewinds Associates Chief Engineer Arnie Gundersen [pictured, left] analyzes a US government national laboratory simulation video that shows nuclear spent fuel rods do catch fire when exposed to air. This simulation video proves Fairewinds’ assertions that nuclear fuel rods can catch fire when exposed to air, and Arnie discusses the ramifications of this phenomena if the Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 spent fuel pool were to lose cooling water. 

The Sandia National Laboratories video in its entirety can be seen here."

Greg Palast: "Fukushima: They Knew"

Investigative reporter Greg PalastFrom Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island, NY in 1986, to Fukushima Daiichi, Japan, in 2011, investigative reporter Greg Palast (photo left) documents that "they knew" that atomic reactor seismic qualifications were not up to real world risks. See Palast's article, "Fukushima: They Knew," here.

"Ukrainian environmentalist brutally beaten to death"

Volodymyr GoncharenkoEJOLT (Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities and Trade) reports the horrific news that, four days after conducting a press conference to warn that 180 tons of dangerous chemical and radioactive industrial waste had arrived at the city of Kryvyi Rih (in the Dnipropetrovsk area of Ukraine), which was likely to be "recycled" into the consumer product stream, 57 year old Volodymyr Goncharenko (photo, left) was brutally beaten to death. He was the Chairman of Social Movement of Ukraine: For the Rights of Citizens to Environmental Security.

As reported by EJOLT, "According to Goncharenko, during the past several years, scavengers have removed from the Chernobyl exclusion zone 6 million metric tons of scrap metal that was subsequently smelted at metallurgical combines and reprocessed into new metal. While in theory each metallurgical combine should be equipped with radiation-monitoring equipment to check all incoming scrap, financial shortfalls have meant this was rarely the case. In 2007 Ukraine ranked eighth in global steel production and steel is Ukraine’s leading export. One can only guess how much radioactive scrap metal has ended up in exported steel."

Pavlo Khazan of the Ukrainian Green Party stated: “We collaborated with Volodymyr for 15 years in professional and public areas. The Ukrainian Green Party has no doubt that the murder was linked to his professional activities.” Although the Ukrainian police have opened an investigation into Goncharenko's murder, Khazan feels that to deliver justice in this case, international attention and pressure will be needed.

Please contact the Embassy of Ukraine, urging a thorough investigation of Goncharenko's murder, as well as for an end to the "recycling" of radioactive metals and other materials into the consumer product stream. In the U.S., the Embassy of Ukraine can be written at 3350 M Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007, faxed at (202) 333-0817, or phoned at (202) 349-2920. Embassies and Consulates of Ukraine elsewhere in the U.S., or in other countries, can also be contacted.

Thanks to Nuclear Energy Information Service in Illinois for alerting us to this story.

Click here to learn more about anti-nuclear resistance to attempts at "radioactive recycling" in North America.