Take action on Fukushima lessons learned
July 12, 2012 Submit comments and questions to the scientific panel or attend the DC meeting!
Next Thursday, July 19, 2012, at an initial meeting of a National Academy of Sciences panel, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission will discuss its actions following the Fukushima disaster in Japan. NRC is paying for this NAS study. There will be time for public comment and those wishing to attend should contact NAS at fukushima@nas.edu. NAS is taking comments on the committee membership for the next few days ONLY, and general questions on the study can be submitted by the email above. NAS is expecting to release the report in early 2014. Beyond Nuclear will keep you updated as much as possible. No further meetings have been scheduled.
Background: At the recommendation of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Committee directed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to contract with the National Academy of Sciences [NAS] for a study of the lessons learned from the Fukushima nuclear disaster. According to the Senate report, the following areas should be examined:
--the lessons that can be learned;
--the lessons' implications for conclusions reached in earlier NAS studies on the safety and security of current storage arrangements for "spent" [emphasis added] nuclear fuel and high-level waste in the United States, including an assessment of whether the amount of "spent" fuel currently stored in reactor pools should be reduced;
--the lessons' implications for commercial nuclear reactor safety and security regulations; and
--the potential to improve design basis threats assessment.
This study shall build upon the 2004 NAS study of storage issues and complement the other efforts to learn from Fukushima that have already been launched by the NRC and industry. The study should be conducted in coordination with the Department of Energy and, if possible, the Japanese Government. The Committee expects the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy, and the Department of State to assist the National Academy of Sciences in obtaining the information it needs to complete this study in a timely manner.
Reader Comments (12)
Presently, we are seeing a trend. The nuclear power industry is only one industry which has been touched by greed at the expense of everything else.
Fukushima was designed inadequately even by the standards known at the time it was built.
Penn State threw out its 'emeritus' standards to appoint a child molester to a position to garner millions from alumni.
NRC and the nuclear industry harried a Chairman to the point where he resigned his post so that the lessons learned from Fukushima need not cause the domestic industry discomfort.
Big Pharma has hidden results from the FDA to allow a deadly drug into the market.
The trend is clear. We must ask the question: how much does it cost to ignore the rules to allow a dangerous procedure to invade the market?
I wish that I could say,
respectfully submitted,
Marvin Lewis, R. P. E. (Retired.)
marvlewis@juno.com
date is wrong, july not june 19
Please learn from Fukuhima. The government and the nuclear industries have been telling us (people) that to meet the industrial needs of energy, nuclear generation is a must. But we have survived more than a year without nuclear power and are ready to do so.
We shouldn't try to generate enrgy to meet the greed but should change our life to use the energy that is safe and sustainable.
If we live exclusively in the right hemisphere and create worlds of fantasy and delusion unchecked by the left hemisphere, then people in positions of authority will act in a delusional fantasies of ignorance and act upon those delusions, to the danger of themelves and all living things in the face of all and overwhelming evidence of the self-destructive acts being committed. Helen Caldicott call such people truly "wicked" and "evil." I concur.
nuclear energy represents the most flagrant disregard for the rights of others since the waste stays toxic forever just about.If we just make the nuclear industry stand up on their own feet & stop giving them what n other industry gets, government backed insurance there's be no nuclear industry because its an uninsurable risk. They get the profits, we take the risk.And as Henry Geoirge worte in Social Problems, the natural monoplies should be owned by the people any way. GO to www.henrygeorge.org for more on that.
It's NUKING FUTS!
It is sad that meltdowns at nuclear plants didn't dissuade industry from the present path to total radioactivity. It will only take a few plants to fall like Fukishima before all our food will be poisonous. If a plant generator fails, there is no way to stop a meltdown. This is unacceptable, as there are power outages and generators fail. This is made even more probable when the board of directors is greedy beyond the imagings of working class people. People will live with less electricity if less is offered, and feel good about it. I would much rather lose my home to a wayward windmill blade than a nuclear plants going hot. At least I could rebuild my home if I lived through the windmill incident! The mills built into bridges are beautiful and can have multiple support girders to reduce chances of an accident.
For the actual date and contact info to attend public sessions: http://www8.nationalacademies.org/cp/meetingview.aspx?MeetingId=6195
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price–Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act
The Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act needs to be gone through with a fine -toothed comb! It is insanity that I cannot get my property, home and belongings insured should a melt down or other nuclear catastrophe occur. And yet, when something goes awry at a nuclear power plant, it is not the government that bails out the people to evacuate and resettle elsewhere. Nor is it the energy companies that own the nuclear power plants that fund continuing mortgages on our homes that must be paid regardless of nuclear disaster. It is not these entities that pay the health care costs of citizens who incur high radiation contamination. It is and has been the citizens who pay for these mounting costs. And this is why laws and Acts such as this one are nothing but criminal legislation pandering to the nuclear industry in bed with govenrments, for the sole purpose of profit. I am an evacuee of Japan as of April, 2012, after living, working and raising my family there for 25 years. The Japanese food supply is slowly becoming contaminated. The government is bailing out TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company-owners of the Fukushima reactors which have melted down and continue to do so) over funding its citizens' evacuations to safer areas. There is a campaign of lies, deceit and cover up continuing in Japan as communities and families are breaking up due to evacuations and untold friction mentally and emotionally. When societies stay silent on criminal legislation such as this, you welcome disaster such as the Fukushima meltdowns on your own soil. Learn from Fukushima and apply the lessons to the US before history repeats itself!
Do it Today. Sign & Share.
There is presently no contingency plan on the table for evacuating a 50 mile radius around San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), (or any other nuclear power plant, for that matter) should a problem arise. Doing so would mean getting 8.4 million people out of there using Highway 5....good luck with that. Obama spoke out publicly last year after 3/11 calling for a 50 mile radius evacuation zone around Fukushima, for all US citizens.
Why won't he do the same for the US? Gagged by the nuclear industry much?
Time for the public to speak out: Tell NRC to expand nuclear evacuation zones!
org2.democracyinaction.or
This is just a fraction of what happens when governments and the nuclear industry fail to take care of the people, after a nuclear disaster. Chieko Shinna, a Fukushima survivor, has garnered resources to build and staff a drop in clinic for medical and psychological treatment due to trauma of living in highly irradiated environments: http://www.scribd.com/doc/99561836/Fukushima-Clinic-Flyer
Please input the above link into your browser. This is what happens when the people are forced to take matters of life and death into their own hands regarding medical care which won't be funded by the state, nor the nuclear power plant which caused widespread disaster.
how cavalier the us has been about fukushima. half of our radiation monitors were broken down at the time of the accident, and if anyone is measuring radiation besides universities, we'd never know it. the fda approved--and spied on scientists who disagreed with--medical equipment that issued 600-800 times more radiation than other more efficient machines. japan was changing over an unsuitable reactor to MOX fuel with the help of GE engineers. learn lessons? end the corruption? besides just admitting to the dangers of constantly leaking plants? end the practice of building plants on earthquake faults? and what about other natural disasters? what about the dangers inherent in uncontrollable criticality? how about this: end nuclear energy and grow a green economy, really green, not fake green. anyone looking at the nrc incident reports regularly will agree with me. from exploding nuclear bombs in the atmosphere to nuke plants today and god knows what experimentation, we're walking cancer time bombs. END NUKES, dammit!