Censored 2012 (16 page)

Student Researcher:
Courtney Rider (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator:
Keith Gouveia (Sonoma State University)

Sources:

Student Researcher:
Nzinga Dotson-Newman (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator:
Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)

Sources:

Student Researcher:
Ashley Myers (San Francisco State University)

Faculty Evaluator:
Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University)

Student Researchers:
Alyssa Andrews (Florida Atlantic University); Courtney Rider and Keith Garrett (Sonoma State University); Rashanah Baldwin, Maureen Foley, and Monica Macellari (DePaul University)

Faculty Evaluators:
James Tracy (Florida Atlantic University); Eric Williams and Ervand Peterson (Sonoma State University); Marla Donato (DePaul University); Mickey Huff (Diablo Valley College)

C
orporate media frame environmental issues, disasters, and especially health outcomes as isolated events, denying what even today’s school children know about the complex interconnectedness of the world’s ecosystems and the effects on individuals within them. Of particular concern to Project Censored are the ways that environmental waste and contamination, and its subsequent effects, are ignored, wrongly framed, or deeply flawed and misrepresented by the corporate media. Examples include the global spread of superbug bacteria, the emerging Lyme disease epidemic, oil and toxic dispersant contamination from the British Petroleum (BP) oil explosion disaster, and the unfolding effects of one off the world’s worst nuclear reactor accidents since Chernobyl, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants in Japan.

Half of the United States’ newly elected Congress members deny climate change, and the federal government has released big polluters from oversight and accountability. Analyses of corporate responsibility and the
true cost to human health and the environment are rarely addressed. For instance, after provoking the worst environmental disaster in American history, BP ultimately got off the hook; the company continued drilling throughout the disaster and installed new rigs within a year. The fundamental connection between reckless corporate behavior and its impact on the environment was ignored, with dire consequences for humans and the planet. Environmental catastrophes are framed as isolated events, with a beginning, maybe a bit of passing human interest, and an end, and the ongoing environmental damage seldom hits the press.

Middlebury College professor and
350.org
campaign founder Bill McKibben reminds us that it is vitally important to connect the dots among massive weather events, government negligence, corporate greed, and environmental degradation of land, air, and oceans. But what happens more often is that media “greenwashes” dirty energy sources (coal, gas, nuclear power) as “clean”—a particularly dangerous notion because it belies the threat they pose to our planet and human health.

Radiation—whether from naked body scans at airports by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA); or the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan; or Indian Point, one of America’s most dangerous nuclear plants—affect health and well-being. No levels are safe. There is nothing “clean” about it. And nuclear power leaves a byproduct that is toxic for millennia and is capable of killing hundreds of thousands of people. Yet, industry backers are promoting a “Clean Energy Standard,” to endorse nuclear power. They champion nuclear energy as carbon-free and, therefore, pollutant-free. This proposal suffers from three fundamental misconceptions: 1) that pollutants other than carbon dioxide are irrelevant when defining “clean energy,” 2) that because radiation is invisible and odorless, it is not a toxic pollutant, and 3) that nuclear power is carbon-free. These statements are not true. The earthquake and tsunami in Japan are a stark reminder of the risks inherent in nuclear power. Recently, the Japanese government admitted to three full nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima.

Fukushima is now considered equal to, if not worse than, the catastrophe at Chernobyl. The devastation at Chernobyl forms the basis for estimates of the number of deaths from radiation and cancer. With thirty-one deaths directly attributed to the accident, projected outcomes include the following:

Tragically, the Japanese now face similar consequences, as will, inevitably, human populations and environs near future nuclear reactor meltdowns anywhere in the world.

As a result of the Fukushima disaster, American concern for the safety of nuclear power facilities in the US has intensified. However, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the federal agency responsible for ensuring that US nuclear plants are operated as safely as possible, gets mixed reviews. In a March 2011 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) report,
The NRC and Nuclear Power Plant Safety in 2010: A Brighter Spotlight Needed
, UCS’s Director of Nuclear Safety Project David Lochbaum examined fourteen “near misses” at US nuclear plants during 2010 alone, then evaluated the NRC regulatory response in each case. The report revealed a variety of shortcomings: inadequate training, faulty maintenance, poor design, and failure to investigate problems thoroughly. Clearly, the failures in oversight of all US nuclear reactors represent major problems affecting the safety and “cleanliness” of nuclear energy.

One of the NRC’s most egregious oversight problems concerned Entergy’s Indian Point nuclear power plant on the Hudson River. One of the five most dangerous nuclear reactors in the United States, Indian Point made headlines for its faulty emergency cooling system that was deemed “certain to fail” by nuclear engineers. According to engineers, the head company Entergy has known about these mechanical issues and lackluster nuclear meltdown plan for over six years yet has continued to downplay its controversial meltdown scenarios, as well as the need for repairs on their cooling system. The NRC has known about these hazards since 1996 but has joined Entergy in claiming that there is no rush to fix them because a breakdown isn’t likely. Indian Point is only about thirty miles from Manhattan. A nuclear accident could expose millions of Americans to cancer-causing
radiation. Despite safety hazards and security risks, the Obama administration continues to back nuclear energy as clean and carbon-free.

The myth of carbon-free nuclear energy was endorsed by Entergy’s campaign for Affordable Energy and Economic Justice in response to protesters’ demands to close Indian Point. The campaign advertised nuclear energy as a clean alternative to coal with benefits including revitalizing impoverished neighborhoods and maintaining good health through the prevention of respiratory illnesses. Campaign representatives used fear and misinformation to gather support for keeping Indian Point open and in business. Entergy’s alliance with politicians such as Hillary Clinton—who accepted affiliated campaign contributions—has also allowed the plant to operate with little oversight. Corporate media support this dubious conception. Matthew Daly of the Associated Press wrote, “The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission said inspections conducted after the Japan nuclear crisis found reason for concern, although it continues to believe that the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors are safe.”

Inspectors found that many plant operators have neither done enough to train their staff on the voluntary emergency guidelines nor updated their procedures, said Eric Leeds, director of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. The guidelines—intended to contain or reduce the impact of accidents that damage a reactor core—were put in place in the 1990s.

“While overall we believe plants are safe … we are concerned that our inspectors found many of the plants have work to do in either training their staff on these procedures or ensuring the guidelines are appropriately updated,” Leeds said.
¹

According to the Associated Press and the NRC, proper safety training at nuke plants will keep us safe. The NRC story received widespread coverage in the corporate media in the US.

A crucial detail to those promoting nuclear power as “clean” is corporate media’s rubber stamp of the myth that nuclear power is carbon-free. But nuclear power is not carbon-free—it releases small amounts of radioactive carbon. Building nuclear facilities is carbon-intensive and requires enormous amounts of concrete, steel, and carbon-based fuels for transport of materials. The nuclear fuel chain necessary to operate and support reactor operations (e.g. uranium mining, processing, enrichment,
and fuel fabrication), as well as the millennia of radioactive waste storage, all result in substantial and unavoidable carbon emissions.

The nuclear food chain itself is a massively polluting process. Nuclear power results in water pollution because reactors require large amounts of water to cool their red-hot nuclear cores—some twenty thousand to five hundred thousand gallons per minute are diverted from rivers, lakes, or oceans, then spewed back out again, discharged five to ten degrees warmer than when it went in, causing havoc among marine environments and affecting downstream industrial uses and drinking water.

Carbon dioxide is not the only pollutant to be considered when assessing a “Clean Energy Standard”; singling it out ignores fifty years of accumulated knowledge of the effects of other long-lasting and toxic pollutants, not least of which are the carcinogens released by radionuclides from nuclear reactors: Tritium, Strontium-90, Ceisim-137, Plutonium-239, and dozens more. It doesn’t take an accident to become contaminated by them. Nuclear reactors emit radiation into our air and water as part of their routine operations, made all the more dangerous because it cannot easily be detected or avoided. The 2005 report from the US National Academy of Sciences indicated that no safe level of radiation exposure exists—every exposure increases the risk of cancer, birth defects, and other disease. The NRC’s adoption of the Linear No Threshold Hypothesis (LNTH) to calculate risk is conservative: any increase in dose of radiation, no matter how small, results in incremental increase in risk. As corporations and media dismiss science that does not support their interests, ignoring how ecosystems function and how pollution is spread, they neglect to address bioaccumulation, the process by which the concentration of many contaminants increases as one moves up the food chain.