John Gofman vs. the Nuclear Cowboys Dr. Strangelove’s NemesisCounter Punch By FRED GARDNER and SHOBHIT ARORA January 2, 2008 - “Dr. John Gofman left us in 2007 at the age of 88. Edward Teller called him ‘the enemy within’ the nuclear research establishment because Gofman warned the public about the dangers inherent even in peaceful uses. (Teller was proud of his own sobriquet,’father of the H-bomb’ Peter Sellers used Teller as a model when he played Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s great black comedy.) ……………………………………………………..The worst-case scenario is this. Ever since its inception, the Atomic Energy Commission –then called ERDA, then called DOE– has had one thing in mind. ‘Our program is sacrosanct’ And they recognize, as I’ve recognized, that their entire program will live or die based upon one thing.If the public should come to learn the truth about ionizing radiation, nuclear energy and the atomic energy program of DOE is going to be dead. Because the people of this country –and other countries– are not going to tolerate what it implies. The key thing –it’s everything in the DOE program– is:’We must prove that low doses of radiation are not harmful..’ They have been conducting a Josef Goebels propaganda war, saying there’s a safe dose when there has never been any valid evidence for a safe dose of radiation. Yet the DOE and others continue to talk about their ‘zero-risk model’…………………………Gofman:The answer is this: ionizing radiation is not like a poison out of a bottle where you can dilute it and dilute it. The lowest dose of ionizing radiation is one nuclear track through one cell. You can’t have a fraction of a dose of that sort. Either a track goes through the nucleus and affects it, or it doesn’t. So I said ‘What evidence do we have concerning one, or two or three or four or six or 10 tracks.’ And I came up with nine studies of cancer being produced where we’re dealing with up to maybe eight or 10 tracks per cell. Four involved breast cancer. With those studies, as far as I’m concerned, it’s not a question of ‘We don’t know’ The DOE has never refuted this evidence. They just ignore it, because it’s inconvenient. We can now say, there cannot be a safe dose of radiation. There is no safe threshhold. If this truth is known, then any permitted radiation is a permit to commit murder……………………………………………….’.
………………………….”.Don’t buy the nuclear sales pitch - Aspen Daily News Roger Herried – 22 June 07 “……………Moore is not a founder or co-founder of Greenpeace. …………………. Moore and his behavior in the late 1970s wreaked havoc on Greenpeace. Moore has had nothing to do with environmental issues for over 15 years. He’s been using the last 15 years to promote the logging industry and other polluters.The idea that the nuclear industry would hold up such a flagrant example is astounding. One of the real founders of Greenpeace called him a Judas! For anyone with their eyes open, short sales pieces by paid industry spokespeople that have millions of federal pork to spend promoting a plan to get billions more from us, please, if there was ever a time not to trust someone, it is the nuclear industry, during George ‘let’s make a deal on Iraq’s oil’ Bush’s administration.In Feb 1984, Forbes magazine called the nuclear industry the largest financial disaster in U.S. history. The big picture on nuclear power includes the ugly truth that nuclear power and weapons are linked at the hip, and enjoys second to none subsidies that go back over 50 yearsYou wouldn’t know it unless you live in Nevada, that the plan to dump high level waste at Yucca Mountain is facing opposition from both parties there. You wouldn’t know it that when Bush promised not to let Yucca Mountain go ahead unless there was good science that proved its safety. With that promise George Bush won the 2000 election and Nevada’s electoral votes were enough to make the difference in who would be president………………..The nuclear industry wants you to allow the federal government to subsidize private companies to build a new generation of experimental reactors. What will the real cost be? Once they get a hook on your wallet, we all know what a blank check is! The first time around they said it was gonna be too cheap to meter. In 1966, California’s Diablo Canyon was estimated to cost just over $350 million to build two reactors. Twenty years later the construction costs totaled $5.8 billion, with an additional $7 billion in financing costs. The utility got every penny of those costs from the government and ratepayers, plus a profit. The result? California’s rates nearly doubled over a six-year period…………………………..”
. .The spin over the joint nuclear energy plan THE HUFFINGTON POST by Alex Raksin 25/4/07 - “……………….in my over 20 years in journalism ……I have never encountered a slicker spin than the administration’s announcement today, April 25, of a ‘joint nuclear energy action plan’” between the United States and Japan…….it will ’safely and securely, allow developing nations to deploy nuclear power to meet energy needs’and shower lavish financing on companies that agree to ‘construct… nuclear power plants in the United States for the first time in 30 years,’including a promise that U.S. taxpayers will generously compensate any companies that lose money on the deals. The plan, the biggest deal that Bush’s $405-million ‘Global Nuclear Energy Partnership’(GNEP) has scored to date, also makes a host of other promises, from ‘reducing the number of required … waste depositories to one for the remainder of this century”to ‘enhancing energy security, while promoting non-proliferation.’………………………………………. Robert Alvarez, President Clinton’s top energy advisor from 1993-99, released a study documenting the many ways in which the Administration’s nominally ‘environmentally friendly’ GNEP program could become a deadly and costly fiasco…………………….the GNEP would allow large quantities of cesium 135 — a radionuclide with a half life of 2.3 million years — to be disposed in the near surface and pose serious contamination problems for many thousands of years. …………………Despite the Energy Department’s claims that recycling of reactor spent fuel will solve the nuclear waste disposal problem, a small fraction is likely to be recycled.DOE’s plans include the landfill disposal of tens of thousands of tons of recovered uranium. ……………………………the Bush administration had asked Department of Energy officials to bar citizens from commenting on GNEP after April 4.But nuclear safety proponents successfully pressed officials to extend the deadline to June 4, leaving all Americans free to submit their views either to their federal legislator or directly to the administration by contacting Timothy A. Frazier by phone (866-645-7803) or email (GNEP-PEIS@nuclear.energy.gov).You might assume — as most of my good friends are wont to do — that you are too small and powerless to stop the GNEP juggernaut, I have news for you: But you’d be wrong. continued belowThe Bush administration had asked Department of Energy officials to bar citizens from commenting on GNEP after April 4. But nuclear safety proponents successfully pressed officials to extend the deadline to June 4, leaving all Americans free to submit their views either to their federal legislator or directly to the administration by contacting Timothy A. Frazier by phone (866-645-7803) or email (GNEP-PEIS@nuclear.energy.gov).So far, the nation’s legislators and many reporters have been asleep at the nuclear reactor control panel.You can help wake them up by asking them to zero out the budget for the GNEP program that Alvarez’s study shows to be ludicrously impractical.Or you could go further and suggest that the leftover funding be diverted into the scores of demonstrably cost-effective and environmentally safe energy-generating alternatives, such as geothermal and hydropower, that the president — incredibly enough — is now actually pressing legislators to de-fund in next year’s budget.”NUCLEAR POWER ON THE WEB From greenhouse to greenhouse Gerry Wolff 11 April 2007 “Things that appear on the web about nuclear power seem to fall into four main categories:1. Rather bland pro-nuclear articles, typically in minor newspapers, suggesting that the problems with nuclear power are largely in the past, that it is quite safe and, that it is the way to cut CO2 emissions. Most of these articles are very inaccurate and seriously misleading as you will see if you compare them with what Helen Caldicott has to say in her excellent book ‘Nuclear power is not the answer.’2. Seemingly factual reports saying things like ;Such and such nuclear power station produced record output recently or that it has come back on stream.;These reports are probably accurate but they don’t seem to serve any other purpose than raising the profile of nuclear power in the public mind and suggesting in a comforting way that this technology is busy producing the electricity we need so we can rest easy in our minds.3 With Google alerts set on ‘comprehensive’ so that it searches all kinds of web pages and not just news, I have come across a number of blogs preaching a very pro-nuclear line. They all look suspiciously professional in their web design and all have a rather similar layout. They do look to me like things that have been set up deliberately to spread the pro-nuclear word.4 Fortunately, there are some reports and articles that present a more accurate view of nuclear power and its many problems.All of these kinds of articles, reports or blogs provide an opportunity to correct misleading information about nuclear power and raise awareness of a major alternative. “
Tags: nuclear, nuclear spin
