LLAW’s ‘All Things Nuclear’ #533 (02/07/2024)
LLAW’s ‘All Things Nuclear’ #533 (02/07/2024)
“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”
PG&E’s Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant at Avila Beach Near San Luis Obispo, California, just 12 miles away from the city center
LLAW’s THOUGHTS & COMMENTS (02/07/2024):
The following interesting article tells us just how useless any instructions or directives about preserving your life from a nuclear disaster actually is. It is nice that there are considerate institutions and individually published booklets and other attempts to encourage and comfort you, but whether it’s living close to a seriously damaged nuclear power plant or protecting yourself from a nuclear war, there is no way to adequately prepare for either.
The headline and its in advance conclusion is tells us that only way to protect ourselves is to never allow all anything that resembles a nuclear accident, war, or other disaster happen. So, the conclusion of this recently revived article is spot on, and therefore no matter what you are instructed to do, will probably not do you any good at all, so there is no reason to build a nuclear bomb shelter in your basement, even if you happen to have one. ~llaw
WAGING NONVIOLENCE
PEOPLE POWERED NEWS & ANALYSIS
The only protection from nuclear catastrophe is prohibition
The anti-nuclear protest signs in my basement are a better defense against war and fallout than what any basement bunker can provide.
Frida Berrigan February 6, 2024
This article was originally published by TomDispatch.
What’s in your basement? Mine is full of things I’ve mostly forgotten about — tools I bought for projects I never completed, long abandoned sports equipment, furniture I planned on refinishing ages ago, and unused cans of paint I thought I wanted when someone was giving them away.
We’ve owned this house for nearly 12 years, since just weeks before our son was born. In all that time, I’ve regularly gone down there to do the laundry and store my things (which never seem to stop accumulating). And somehow, it went from being empty when we bought it to chock-a-block full today in a way that would make Marie Kondo’s perfect hair stand straight up.
One day recently, I noticed two booklets attached by a screw with an outdated head to one of the beams under the basement stairs. That roused my curiosity since I had no memory of putting them there and, without laundry to distract me, I tried to free them, using a dozen different screwdrivers, none of which had that old-fashioned head, so eventually I pulled them loose with the claw end of a hammer.
Keep calm and head west
The top one was entitled “Emergency Planning at Connecticut’s Nuclear Power Plants: A Guidebook for Our Neighbors” and was addressed to “Resident.” Nowhere in that 23-page booklet was there a date, but it referred to our power company as Connecticut Light and Power and mentioned Connecticut Yankee, a local nuclear power plant that closed nearly 30 years ago.
We still get a similar booklet every couple of years, because we live seven miles from the area’s remaining nuclear power plant, all too aptly named Millstone and situated on a picturesque peninsula that juts into Long Island Sound. I sat in my kitchen, holding that ancient booklet and listening to the hum of the refrigerator (powered by — yes! — nuclear energy). The current PR line on nuclear power is that it’s a cheap and reliable bridge to renewable energy and a crucial partner in generating a carbon-free future. Here in Connecticut, half of all our power comes from Millstone, which is managed by Dominion Energy.
On its peninsula between Pleasure Beach and Hole in the Wall Beach, Millstone draws 2.2 billion gallons of water from Long Island Sound daily to use in its cooling towers. That water, according to a report from the Yale School of Management, is then returned to the Sound 32 degrees warmer than when it was pulled out. Scientists are now studying warm water plumes from Millstone, Indian Point, and other East Coast nuclear power plants to try to understand their impact on oxygen and nutrient levels in those waters. The Yale report notes that “populations of several commercially important species, including lobster and winter flounder, have steeply declined in Long Island Sound over the past two decades, but scientists are unsure whether overfishing, habitat degradation, disease, or warm water discharge from Millstone is to blame.”
Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant, just about 80 miles due north of Baltimore, my childhood home, suffered a meltdown three days before my fifth birthday. So, I have a visceral fear of cooling towers and nuclear radiation. The booklet I found didn’t exactly allay my anxieties. It suggested that, in the event of a crisis at the plant, we should evacuate along a series of two-lane roads that have only gotten more congested in the decades since that booklet was published. “If possible, use only one car. If you have room, please check to see if any of your neighbors need a ride. Keep your car windows and air vents closed.” It suggested packing for a three-day trip and included a helpful list of things not to forget like pillows and toiletries. The booklet advised calm again and again, offering these (cold) comforting words, “Contrary to some popular misconceptions, a nuclear plant emergency would not be a sudden event. A severe nuclear accident would take considerable time to develop, enabling state and local officials to take the necessary protective actions in a timely fashion.” Tell that to the people of Chernobyl and Fukushima. How much time is time enough?
Build a bunker, survive the fallout (but not the blast)
The second booklet was emblazoned with the all-caps title “FALLOUT PROTECTION FOR HOMES WITH BASEMENT” and was sent to our address in May 1967 by the Department of Defense’s Office of Civil Defense with the descriptor “Family Residing At.” As I leafed through the 60-year-old pages, I realized that the long-time homeowner had screwed it to the underside of the basement stairs in response to a suggestion on the back of the booklet: “For quick reference, hang this booklet in the corner of your basement having the best fallout protection.”
The booklet was personalized for our very basement based on a questionnaire the homeowner must have filled out once upon a time, because we were instructed to follow plans C through F to increase our “Protection Factor,” or PF, from radiation by 40 percent. Any “Home Handy Man,” we were assured, could construct a permanent shelter in the basement or at least pre-plan one to be quickly constructed after a nuclear attack. The booklet also had recommendations for how to improvise a shelter once you were cowering in that post-nuclear basement of yours. It did warn, however, that even if you had indeed constructed one, a “fallout shelter provides only limited protection against blast.”
PREVIOUS COVERAGE
There was, as it happened, no third booklet offering instruction to the home handyman on just how to protect his family from a future neighborhood nuclear blast and, of course, all these years later, there’s no fallout shelter in our basement and no stack of materials to make one with. Still, as someone whose parents were well-known anti-nuclear activists and who’s always feared the possibility of a future nuclear war, I found myself riveted to the spot in the basement of my 1905 home, imagining my family of five seeking shelter here during some kind of nuclear catastrophe. The walls are stones cobbled together with mortar and painted. That painted mortar regularly flakes onto the cement floor, coating it in a sort of crumbly dry snow. We occasionally squirt expanding foam into the holes in the foundation, but there’s still one corner where my kids like to hold their hands and exclaim: “I can feel the breeze” and “it smells like mud right here.” According to our Fallout Protection booklet, that corner is the “strongest” one, so before a nuclear attack, I do hope that I’ll get around to closing up all those holes.
In truth, it would be a mighty grim existence in that basement of ours. Especially if I don’t fix the corner where the kids feel the breeze. There are lots of bikes, a massive canoe and life preservers, plenty of canning supplies, a dehydrator, heat lamps and other accessories for raising chickens, and my husband’s beer-making and distilling supplies. Most of these cool homesteadish things are useless without electricity, heat, or potable water.
The booklet offers no advice on how to supply a fallout shelter with water or beer or anything else, nor does it tell us how long we’d need to be down there. It does say: “Until the extent of the radiation threat in your town is determined by trained monitors using special instruments, you should stay in your shelter as much as possible. For essential needs, you can leave your shelter for a few minutes.” It suggests we get a battery-powered radio.
PREVIOUS COVERAGE
Of course, the information in that booklet is now 57 years old, long before the world of modern media arrived. I could go online and stream untold numbers of DIY tutorials on bunker-building and provisioning. By now, prepping for disasters, whether nuclear, conventional, or farcical is a multibillion-dollar business. You can even attend a weekend course on wilderness survival techniques for $800. However, nothing I read about that class offered guidance on surviving “a war, societal collapse, or some other calamity” with three kids, so I’m probably staying put. A battery-operated radio might not be a bad idea, though.
You can’t hide from nukes
I mostly head down to the basement in a “keep the laundry-train running” fog. Nuclear war is a constant hum in the back of my mind. It’s a fear that won’t go away and that sets me apart from most Americans. It seems as if most of us deal with nuclear issues by — should the thought even occur to us — trying to push them away as quickly as possible. In an annual survey, Chapman University has been tracking American fears for nearly a decade now. Government corruption and economic collapse top the list, which also includes loved ones getting sick and dying. Fears of war are similarly prevalent, but the specific fear that stalks my dreams isn’t there — the possibility that the nightmare that rained down on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing more than 100,000 of them, when the United States became the first and only nation to use nuclear weapons, could happen again.
I know I’m an odd duck with my nuclear preoccupation. Of course, I live in the self-declared “Submarine Capital of the World.” New London/Groton has been building nuclear submarines since the 1950s and the U.S. naval base here is home port to 15 nuclear attack submarines. So that’s one reason nukes are on my mind.
Then there are those two terrible wars raging right now between nuclear-armed invaders (Russia and Israel) and non-nuclear entities (Ukraine and Hamas). Those nuclear-tinged wars worry me. And am I the only person who noticed that, just recently, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists decided to keep its Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds (yes, 90 seconds!) to midnight? I also read enough to know that our government is going to spend more than $55 billion on nuclear weapons research, development, and testing in 2024 alone. And that figure doesn’t even include the whopping sums being invested in new nuclear delivery systems like Columbia class submarines or the upgrading of the B2 Spirit Stealth Bomber. I can get stuck there sometimes, especially when schools, clinics, and homeless shelters around me are struggling to keep their doors open.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories (including a bonus category at the end for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity that also play an important role in humanity’s lives) as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links to the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear War
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (There is one Yellowstone Caldera bonus story available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (per above). If a category heading does not appear, it means there was no news reported from this category today. There is one Yellowstone Caldera bonus story available, normally, at the end of this Post.
(A reminder, just in case: When linked, the access to the media story will be underlined. If there is no link to a media story of interest you can still copy and paste the headline and lead line into your browser to find the article you are seeking. Hopefully this will never happen.)
TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS (02/07/2024):
All Things Nuclear
NEW
How North Korea started spat between Moscow and Seoul – Ep. 328 - YouTube
YouTube
... all things DPRK — from news to extended interviews with leading experts ... Korean nuclear issues. Arirang News New 2.3K views · 39:23. Go to channel ...
Federal appeals court rules Trump doesn't have broad immunity from prosecution - WMFE
WMFE
All Things Considered · Fresh Air · All Shows A-Z · NPR+ Podcast Bundle · Radio ... John Sauer at the oral argument about whether a president might sell ...
The U.S. is demanding Iran rein in its proxy groups. Is that actually possible? - WAMU
WAMU
Iran's Uranium Enrichment Breaks Nuclear Deal Limit. Here's What That Means · All Things Considered, ... Iran Sticks To Nuclear Deal, But U.S. Says It ...
Nuclear Power
NEW
'Very delicate equilibrium' at Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, IAEA chief warns ahead of visit
ABC News
Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, made the comments in a statement ahead of his scheduled visit to the ...
Contaminated water leak at Fukushima Daiichi : Regulation & Safety - World Nuclear News
World Nuclear News
... nuclear power plant in Japan. The leak has been stopped and Tokyo Electric Power Company said it will check soil beneath the pipe for contamination.
Ongoing Developments In Nuclear Power Generation Thicken Plot for Data Centers
Data Center Frontier
... Energy's nuclear power plant. GEP expects to break ground this year on the data centers, which will be the project's first phase conditioned on it ...
Nuclear War
NEW
The Danger of Nuclear War Has Not Gone Anywhere - Fair Observer
Fair Observer
In the US, we tend to think about fear of nuclear war as a quaint relic from a bygone age. With wars and potential wars between nuclear-armed ...
In Sven Holm's 'Termush,' the wealthy emerge after nuclear war - The Washington Post
The Washington Post
In “Termush,” the Danish writer Sven Holm's 1967 novella, the worst has happened: Nuclear war has engulfed the planet, and it's assumed that ...
The only protection from nuclear catastrophe is prohibition | Waging Nonviolence
Waging Nonviolence
The anti-nuclear protest signs in my basement are a better defense against war and fallout than what any basement bunker can provide.
Nuclear Power Emergencies
NEWS
Belarusian scientist comments on main advantages of nuclear energy
BelTA – News from Belarus
... emergency preparedness, physical and nuclear safety. We provide scientific support for the construction of radioactive waste management facilities ...
Nuclear War Threats
NEWS
Putin's top stooge warns of the 'end of everything' in nuclear apocalypse if Britain and ... - The US Sun
The US Sun
Putin's top stooge warns of the 'end of everything' in nuclear apocalypse if Britain and the West threaten Russia ... threat of war from. 5. Medvedev ...
Putin Ally Warns Of Ballistic Missile Strikes on NATO - Newsweek
Newsweek
... threats against the West. Medvedev has repeatedly warned nuclear war could be the consequence of the conflict in Ukraine and this topic is ...
South Korean president reiterates that Seoul will not seek its own nuclear deterrent
ABC News
... nuclear attack. Tensions on the Korean Peninsula are at their highest ... threats of nuclear conflict with the South. South Korea has responded ...
Yellowstone Caldera
NEWS
Yellowstone Emits As Much Carbon Dioxide as an Erupting Volcano - Newsweek
Newsweek
They found that Yellowstone releases as much CO2 as some volcanoes that are actively erupting, such as its very own Mud Volcano, which is in the floor ...