PLAYING WITH NUCLEAR FIRE: Most Dangerous Cover-up in American History



Introduction
Just about every headlining news story these days has two sides to it: The side the Bush administration and his corporate pals WANT you to see and the side you NEED to see – but invariably don’t, at least not if you rely on mainstream sources.

To illustrate my point, is, in two sections, the most terrifying story you may read this year…. but one you SHOULD have read long before now.



What the Bush Administration Wants You to Know: Terror from Beyond, Money for Trains

The last week of January 2002 and the first week of February, the two of the top stories being passed out like Happy Meals at the Drive-thru Window of Corporate News are: 1. The grave danger of nuclear weapons being used by unknown rogues from unknown locations on the U.S. and how we should be very, very afraid, and 2. Amtrak, despite ticket sales that have been through the roof for the past 5 months, is going bankrupt and needs a massive infusion of taxpayer bucks to keep going.

What you NEED to Know: the Nuclear Threat is Here, It Is Made in the U.S., and It Will Be Traveling by Rail

Missing from prominent play in the news is the ongoing story about Yucca Mountain and the nuclear wastes that the Bush administration and the nuclear power plant barons want to haul there via rail. But, this is indeed the real story – the one that the planted stories above are trying to hide. This details of this “little project” are being hammered out right now behind all but closed doors while the public’s attention is diverted by trumped up threats of rogue nuclear threats and plugs for “Amtrak money” – money that will be promptly funneled into the awaiting pockets of the nuclear fuel barons.

Where the Nuke Plants Stand in the Infamous Bush “Energy Plan”

A big part of the Bush energy plan is revitalizing the nuclear fuel industry. This industry has earned the public’s suspicions for good reason. But even more problematic than bad image (that fear has never stopped an oil or coal baron, so why should it stop a nuke king?) is the practical problem of what to do with the industry’s chief demon: nuclear wastes, most especially spent fuel rods. No one on the planet has figured out a permanent, truly safe way to dispose of this high level (level 4) nuclear waste.. So, for years, the spent rods have been accumulating in special pools and/or special metal and concrete “dry” casks at the facilities where they were used.
To make the nuke business profitable, the reactor folks need to do two main things: Relicense aging plants (which are now almost paid for after 30 years, but starting to deteriorate) and get rid of existing and future spent rods cheaply. Thanks to Bush, relicensing is going ahead rapidly even as I write this – despite unanticipated problems found at the plants. Just fix ‘em up sometime (wink wink) and we’ll slap a seal of approval on it so you can crank ‘er back up, is the Bush “oversight” method. One nuclear plant manager said he was frankly amazed at how quickly plants were being sped through the relicensing process – in fact, in some cases, surrounding communities aren’t being notified of relicensing until it is too late.
Now Bush is helping his nuke baron friends solve problem number 2: spent fuel. Here’s the plan:
The industry will load the most dangerous materials on Earth onto everyday freight trains and send them rumbling across 43 different states, past 109 cities with populations greater than 100,000 and off to Nevada to a holding area beneath Yucca Mountain that may ultimately leak radiation, according to many geologists and nuclear experts. This transport plan does not call for a few shipments once in a while. Not even once every month or so. Nope - we are talking about 96,300 shipments of spent nuclear fuel moving in a daily procession from civilian nuclear power plants and from the Department of Energy’s weapons facilities. At all hours. In all conditions. Over rails that could never be rendered 100% secure. All in all, 70,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste (mostly spent rods) will pass within ONE MILE of 60 million Americans.

Sound too incredible to be true - like exaggerated “environmentalist hysterics?”

I only wish it was. But no, these are just the facts, ma’am. And they are taken from technical sources, chief among them the “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,”  http://www.bullatomsci.org/issues/2002/jf02toc.html a publication originally started by Albert Einstein and several other of the planet’s most advanced thinkers and scientists (you notice I did not make those two things mutually inclusive). These guys know their stuff. Certainly a whole lot better than a pack of over-the-hill white guys with MBAs and law degrees who currently call themselves our “leaders.”

So just what is high-level nuclear waste and, in particular, spent nuclear fuel rods?  http://www.citizen.org/documents/hlrw-nir.pdf


The uranium used as fuel in nuclear reactors comes in the form of long (at least a few meters) rods. Once in the reactor, these rods undergo fission, the breaking down of the uranium atoms through intense bombardment with other particles. The energy release is intense - when a rod is removed, the material is up to one million times more radioactive than it was before being used. In fact, spent fuel rods are the most dangerously radioactive substances on the face of the Earth and account for more than half of all the radioactivity generated since the bomb was dropped in Hiroshima. Anyone standing anywhere near a rod without protection will receive a fatal dose of irradiation with a few seconds.
Spent fuel rods are immediately placed in pools that are 40 feet deep and enclosed by concrete and steel walls at least 4 feet thick. Incredibly, most of these pools are above ground, and far more vulnerable to attack and accidental disasters, such as a fire, than the reactors themselves. If the rods are exposed to the air, which could happen if a crack caused enough water to leak from the pools, the rods would emit a blast of heat that would exceed 1,000 C. A catastrophic fire would be ignited that would trigger a nuclear disaster far worse than Chernobyl. Worst of all, a spent rod-induced fire cannot be extinguished by any known means and would roar on for days.
Fuel ponds contain a byproduct in the form of the isotope cesium-137, an intensely radioactive material that, once leaked, is absorbed into the food chain. Security experts at the NRC say that in a spent fuel building fire with just one pond involved, more cesium-137 would be released than the sum total of all the cesium-137 released by all the atmospheric nuclear weapons tests ever conducted in the Northern Hemisphere. An area of at up to 29,000 square miles around the site of such a fire at the largest pools would be rendered uninhabitable, according to a senior physicist for the Institute for Resources and Security studies. Among the events that could lead to a pool fire: leakage, evaporation, siphoning, pumping of the water, aircraft impact, earthquake, the dropping of a dry cask (a concrete and steel container used to store rods once they are removed from the pools), reactor accidents, or an explosion in or near the pool building.
Meanwhile - incredibly! - nuke plant owners, encouraged by Bush, are clamoring for
permission to make their spent fuel ponds bigger so they can hold more rods.
Yet, at the same time, almost nothing is being done by the Bush administration to secure these facilities. In France, anti-aircraft missiles are deployed around the fuel ponds, while Germany makes sure its rods are stored in the most advanced dry casks available. Homeland security ought to earn its name and deploy forces around nuclear facilities, not around anti-globalization marchers.

Instead, Bush wants to ram through a plan to truck spent fuel rods across country, very possibly through YOUR community. As one scientist with the Nuclear Information and Resource Service put it, the scheme amounts to playing radioactive Russian roulette on wheels. It may be Ok, but then…. it might not – a game the nuclear industry folks call a “low-risk, high-consequence” scenario. The dry casks that the rods are placed in following removal from the pools are sturdy enough – as long as nothing goes really wrong. They are designed to withstand an “engulfing fire” burning at 1,475 degrees F for 30 minutes.  http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:wWopr6hQcsEC:www.em.doe.gov/ftplink/ntp/factsheets/pakageperformance.pdf+spent+fuel+rod+pool+fire+&hl=en However, if a train were to have an accident in a tunnel which resulted in a fire, the casks would be useless. In fact, if the train that derailed and burst into flame in the tunnel in Baltimore last summer had been carrying spent fuel rods in dry casks, a large area of Baltimore would be but a soot stain on the map. That tunnel fire burned at at least 1,500 F for many hours – quite sufficient to have turned the derailment into an event that could have dwarfed the 9/11 disaster. The entire city of Baltimore would have been rendered uninhabitable in the aftermath – at least for those who survived.
Incredibly enough, although Bush has rammed the Yucca mountain facility down the throats of everyone in the nation, he has failed to make any provisions for special rail routes or trains. Instead, the present plan calls for all nuclear fuel casks to be shipped in general freight service. Although the casks can survive a variety of crash scenarios, they are not designed to withstand high-temperature tunnel fires – which account for some of the worst rail disasters over the decades. Instead, Bush’s energy plan calls for the trains to be up and running for Yucca mountain laden with their potentially lethal loads BEFORE the final routes are disclosed to the public – through whose communities the trains will run.

So, does it come as any surprise that Bush is using the press to direct the public’s attention AWAY from the nuclear threat he himself is creating and instead direct it to a vague, exotic terrorist threat? The real joke here is that he is doing nothing of any significance to mitigate the threat of a terrorist attack on nuke plants.

As for the Amtrak bankruptcy scam. This is clearly an effort by the administration to railroad through billions in aid to the railroads so that new lines for facilitating the transport of spent rods (and also coal see article) can be put in place without public input, using the public’s money (which the public, of course, thinks is being spent in the name of passenger rail services). And of course, anyone who complains will be written off as “undermining national security” or an “alarmist.” Yep, like yelling, “Look out!” as a piano careens from the tenth floor toward a crowd on the sidewalk is being an “alarmist.”
I for one find our own nuclear industry and its pals in Washington a lot more threatening than a vague, shadowy figure crouched in a cave somewhere trying to figure out how to put together a “dirty bomb.” In fact, his dirty bomb wouldn’t do as much damage, if he did figure out how to put it together, as one spent fuel pool fire or one dry cask train tunnel fire.

How on Earth are we supposed to believe that a train crossing hundreds of miles is going to be safe when as of 1998, not one nuclear facility was able to pass even the most liberal of security tests? To summarize the dismal results of the Operational Safeguards Response Evaluation, even given a half-year’s advance notice, and beefing up their security force by over 50%, security at all plants failed. I mean, REALLY failed. IT took mock terrorists only 17 seconds to breach the access control barrier at one plant – the highest score went to Maine Yankee, which held the terrorists off for 45 seconds! But not to worry. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has corrected the problem. Now, any companies failing the tests can now simply test themselves! Yet almost every article that has been written about this horrific lapse of security has been done AFTER Sept. 11. After it COULD HAVE BEEN too late.  http://chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0110050267oct05.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed


After September 11, new NRC chairman Richard Meserve tried to get the commission to call out the National Guard and air defenses to protect reactors and upgrade all security regulations, especially those focused on spent fuel pools. The response, despite strongly worded warnings from responsible Congresspeople (there are about 4 of those)  http://www.house.gov/mckinney/news/pr011003.htm: not one change has been made. A bill proposed by Senators Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, Jim Jeffords, Joe Lieberman, and Congressman Ed Markey that would have required the NRC to improve security has been blocked by industry lobbyists. We don’t need more security, the unbelievable scumbags at the Nuclear Energy Institute now tell us, because, after all, Chernobyl wasn’t all that bad! (I am not making this up!!). Are you starting to get the impression that the energy industry, be it an Enron or a Nuke, could give a royal shit about anyone – or anything – except itself?
I can summarize this no more elegantly than to quote Daniel Hirsch of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a Los Angeles based nuclear policy organization: “And why has the NRC not imposed upgraded security requirements? Put bluntly, the NRC is arguably the most captured regulatory agency in the federal government, a creature of the industry it is intended to regulate…The NRC’s principal interest is in assisting the industry, keeping regulatory burdens and expenses to a bare minimum, and helping to jumpstart the nuclear enterprise.”
So the next time I hear Bush telling us all how hard he is working to protect us from a nuclear threat…you will pardon me while I puke.



Example 2:

What the Media, the DOE and the Pentagon wanted you to see: Chinese Scientist Illegally Downloads Computer Files, Breaches National Security

December 10, 1999 - Wen-ho Lee arrested for "stealing secrets" at Los Alamos.  http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/wenholee991210.html Case dragged on through 2000, unresolved until Dec. 12, 2000, huge focused placed on possible "quiet espionage" going on at nuclear facilities...



What You SHOULD HAVE Been Told: Nuclear Security Is a Major Disaster Waiting to Happen

Between 1998 and early 2000, several major tests were conducted of the security of the nation's most vulnerable nuclear storage areas and the safety of nuclear weapons and weapon's grade uranium and plutonium being transported over the public highway system.

All failed miserably.
Here are the highlights:
At Los Alamos, there is an area called TA-18 which houses several nuclear burst reactors and tons of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. This area, despite its incredibly dangerous contents, has chronically been under-defended. In 1997, U.S. Army Special Forces were sent in to test security by staging a mock theft of enough nuclear material to build a crude nuclear weapon. In this "game," the commandos were actually able to make it into TA-18 with a garden cart bought at Home Depot and carry off a cartful of "dummy" materials unchallenged. In 1998, needless to say, Los Alamos got an "unsatisfactory rating" for its security at TA-18. However, by the time the report on the security breaches had woven its way to the folks in charge of the facility, the rating had mysteriously been change to "satisfactory," though not one change in security procedure had been made.
Another exercise was conducted in 1998, in which mock terrorists attacked TA-18. But an upper level manager simply tipped off the defenders as to where the attackers were hiding, thus insuring a "satisfactory" report. Despite numerous complaints, the DOE refused to investigate.
Oh, but it gets better.
In 1998, it was discovered that the Energy Transportation Security Division, which is responsible for the safety of the nuclear weapons and weapons-grade uranium and plutonium being shipped by truck across the country, did not take the idea of an attack by terrorists using armor-piercing incendiary rounds seriously and so had not really figured that contingency into their security scheme! However, in 1999, an undercover investigation by the GAO (they had balls back then!) revealed that at least 100,000 rounds of surplus armor-piercing incendiary rounds had been sold by OUR OWN PENTAGON on the open market. Worse yet, the TSD failed several mock attack tests - miserably, in fact, with every single guard being "blown away" within seconds. Later, in 1999, when a mock "terrorist attack" was staged at Fort Hood for the benefit of officials from Washington, the guards were triumphant. Everyone was impressed until they noticed that one of the guards was holding a copy of the attack plans right out in plain sight!
Not one case of this security cheating has been investigated or punished.
The worst "mock blood baths" occurred at Rocky Flats in CO where an estimated 10 tons of plutonium and 7 tons of highly enriched uranium left over from the cold war were all stored until 2000, when they began to ship the stuff off to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in TN. In 1998, 1999, and in 2000, guards not only failed to successfully protect the goods, they managed to shoot scientists, each other, and the test monitors overseeing the tests!
By fall of 1999, needless to say, a major scandal hovered over the Pentagon and the Department of Energy like a nasty storm waiting to happen.
But do YOU remember reading about failed security at nuke facilities? About weapons-grade uranium and plutonium being transported unsafely over the nation's highways? About cheating at the highest level of national security - namely that of the general public?
No? Well, small wonder! You were too busy being bombarded by stories about that "Red Menace" Wen-ho Lee, who was arrested - quite conveniently - in December, 1999, just as the security scandal loomed thickest over the heads of DOE and Los Alamos officials. Instead of hearing about security cheating and failed tests involving real nuclear materials, all we heard about were vague innuendoes about possible info missing from one guy's computer. The only thing that amazes me is that the entire nation wasn't choking on the fumes emitted by this particularly rotten-smelling smokescreen.
But poor Wen-ho Lee was held without good reason for 12 months under deplorable conditions. He never committed any crime, and everyone close to the case knew it. He simply made an easy fall guy for someone well above him in the "food chain" to use in a ruse to keep their own heads from rolling for real breaches of security. Everyone at the facility did the sort of file shuffling and back up downloading that Wen-ho Lee did. But only the "Chinese guy" was singled out. Why? Because making it the “Chinese guy” would play better in the news. It added an exotic touch that would seem more "menacing," more plausible. Hey - the “Chinese guy” ploy almost worked for Bush early in 2001. Instead of admitting to the American public that our spy plane was buzzing (as in spying on) Hainan Island to check out the progress on the site where the Chinese are planning to build a rocket launching facility (as in satellite-carrying rockets), Bush trumped up a "Red Menace" story and cranked out his first round of "American heroes" (the soldiers kept in the bed and breakfast on the island for a few weeks).
In 2001, the DOE tried to move TA-18 to a remote area in Idaho. However, in September, 2001, this request was denied because, according to the papers submitted by Los Alamos, there were NO SECURITY PROBLEMS at the facility that warranted such a move.  http://www.ida.net/users/cab/86.htm Wen-ho Lee was finally released two months later, probably to remove all focus from Los Alamos for the new pro-nuke administration and/or because the holes in the nation's nuclear security had been taped up - on paper, anyway.