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"The market's background radiation was said to be about 39 CPMs. The two peaches, thus, had significantly high radiation contamination equaling over two times site background levels," stated reported EnviroReporter, the  independent news source created by Michael Collins and Denise Anne Duffield in May 2006 featuring work of Collins, a multi-award-winning investigative journalist who specializes in environmental issues and served sic years as a Director of the Los Angeles Press Club and five years as its Judging Chair

"What makes this discovery especially significant is that the 2X background radioactivity detected in these peaches was likely significantly attenuated by their water content; when eaten the exposure rate may be significantly higher. Even worse, it is likely that the detected radioactivity is from a longer half life radionuclide; which when eaten, would irradiate a person from the inside out for potential years to come." (@Potrblog, July 10th, 2011, at 8:05 pm, www.enviroreporter.com/2011/03/enviroreporter-coms-radiation-station/)

Pollet reviewed Iodine 131 numbers released by the Environmental Protection Agency last spring and reported to KING5 TV, "The level that was detected on March 24 was 41 times the drinking water standard." 

EPA says this was a brief period of elevated radiation in rainwater, and safe drinking water standards are based on chronic exposure to radiation over a lifetime, contrary to what independent radiation experts say, including persons such as Dr. Helen Caldicott, the international leading preventionist of nuclear injury, Joseph Mangano, Cindy Folkers, a radiation and health specialist at Beyond Nuclear, Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, and Dr. Alexey Yablokov

In light of the ongoing failure of government to provide critically important Fukushima radiation news, each above named experts have recommended that to survive Fukushima, the public needs to seek information being provided by activists and by websites such as Beyond Nuclear and EnvrioReporter.

Since Japan, a key U.S. ally, had already started its own nuclear power generation program, Washington did not hesitate to seek Tokyo's backing for its request. It was apparent that the United States constructed nuclear reactors without having decided on disposal methods, forcing it to consider dumping them at sea after they were decommissioned.

Japan did not offer a clear answer when it was approached by the United States on the issue. Eventually, however, Washington succeeded in incorporating the clause into the treaty. In 1972, the United States was already dismantling early-stage nuclear reactors that had been used for testing. However, the disposal method of large-scale nuclear reactors for commercial purposes had not been decided although it was an issue that could not be shelved indefinitely.

The official noted that any attempt to bury the reactors on land would invite a public backlash. He also pointed to the financial difficulty of scientifically processing the reactors until the risk of radioactive contamination was totally eliminated. Then, the official said the only other option was to dump them at sea, and asked Japan for cooperation.

According to Kumao Kaneko, now aged 74 and then a member of the Foreign Ministry team involved in the negotiations, Japan did not take specific steps to assist the United States in this delicate matter. Eventually, during the general meeting of countries for the London Convention, the United States proposed incorporating a clause that would enable it to dump nuclear reactors at sea in exceptional cases in which all other means of disposal presented a risk to human health.

When presenting the proposal, the United States made no mention of its intention to dump its nuclear reactors at sea far into the future. The proposal was accepted. In the early 1970s, sea pollution was a huge international issue. Against that backdrop, countries worked feverishly to put the finishing touches on the London Convention. The treaty designated high-level radioactive substances as well as other materials, including mercury and cadmium, as waste whose dumping at sea is prohibited.

In 1993 revisions to the London Convention, the dumping of radioactive waste at sea was totally prohibited. However, the clause that approved of dumping in exceptional cases remained. For this reason, under the London Convention, it is possible for member countries of the treaty to dump radioactive waste at sea if they obtain the OK from the other parties as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency. According to the IAEA, the United States has not dumped radioactive waste at sea since 1970. Instead, it buries decommissioned nuclear reactors underground.

A nuclear engineer who was born in Iran in 1942, Guity is a disappointed American today. "Time bombs," he says, sounding very bitter. "We are sitting on a bunch of ticking time bombs."

Not Up to Standard

The plant's two units were built at the same time in the 1970s and 80s. Only Unit 1 was placed into operation, after a dramatic delay, while Unit 2 remained unfinished until construction was resumed a few years ago. If Guity had his way, the entire plant, including both units and everything else associated with it, would disappear from the map as soon as possible.

The reason Guity still has trouble sleeping at night is his belief that all of these old mistakes and violations can never be completely corrected.

One of the reasons Guity is so upset is that there is no public debate in the United States over Watts Bar, or nuclear energy in general. It is a non-issue throughout the country, even though, according to Guity, there are plenty of reasons that it should be discussed. The United States has 104 nuclear reactors in operation, more than any other country in the world. Many plants are alarmingly dated -- some are 40 years old or even older. Some 65,000 tons of nuclear waste have accumulated over the decades. As unbelievable as it sounds, the country doesn't even have a long-term plan for the storage and disposal of the nuclear waste being generated every day.

If the second unit at Watts Bar, America's last reactor still under construction, really does go online next year, almost 40 years after building work began, parts of the unit will still date from the time when so many criteria were being violated. In fact, no one, not even the TVA, knows exactly the nature and scope of these violations.

There’s the MOX factor to consider too, the addition of MOX fuel is not included in the model. MOX fuel in reactor 3 may have played a role in the speed of the meltdown and adds plutonium and related isotopes into the releases different than what would be seen with uranium fuel. The report in English, includes a series of PowerPoint slides at the end. *This report also talks at length about ways radiation is absorbed by people, they may not be included in the Japanese language report.

We don't have a lot of experience in this area," said Eric J. Leeds, director of the NRC's Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. "It looks like we'll see a lot of each other over the next few weeks — hopefully not months."

Dominion Virginia Power is eager to get the plant, which can generate enough electricity to power 450,000 homes, operating again. The Richmond-based company is the state's largest electric utility, serving 2.3 million customers.

The NRC began assessing the safety implications of increased plant earthquake hazards in 2005. According to the agency, the potential earthquake hazards for some nuclear power plants in the central and eastern U.S. may be slightly larger than previously estimated.

The earthquake appears to have produced a peak acceleration — its shaking force — of about 0.26 g approximately 24 miles from its epicenter, the NRC said. G is the unit of measurement for acceleration based on the force of gravity. North Anna's rock-based structures are designed to withstand 0.12 g. The power station is about 11 miles from the quake's epicenter. The plant experienced earthquake forces an average of 21 percent greater than it was designed for, according to Dominion Virginia Power. The strong motion passed quickly, lasting no more than 3.1 seconds and reducing its impact, the company told NRC officials Thursday.

North Anna can handle shaking forces higher than 0.12 g in the critical lower frequencies, Dominion Virginia Power said. Most of the plant's critical safety components can actually resist shaking of 0.3 g, the company said, and relatively less-sturdy structures can withstand 0.16 g. "Consequently, safe shutdown components are capable of surviving seismic accelerations in excess of the … design criteria," Eric Hendrixson, Dominion Virginia Power's director of nuclear engineering, told federal regulators.

Based on results to date, Dominion Virginia Power believes all tests and repairs will be completed on Unit 1 by Sept. 22, said Eugene Grecheck, the company's vice president for nuclear development. Unit 2 is going into a planned refueling outage, and the company hopes it could be restarted by Oct. 13. But, warned Jack Grobe, deputy director of NRC's Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, "We're probably going to have to have a series of meetings. I guarantee you're going to get a lot of questions." Among the questions will be the shaking force of the earthquake on the plant.

Dominion Virginia Power still does not know exactly what caused the reactors to trip off-line, officials said Thursday. "There were diverse and redundant trips coming in in milliseconds," said N. Larry Lane, Dominion Virginia Power's site vice president for the power station.

Knowing precisely what prompted the shutdown is critical for validating the safety of the plant's design.

Under current plans, the operation to remove the fuel from both units should be completed in 2013. After most of the structures at Oldbury have been removed, the site will enter the 'care and maintenance' stage of decommissioning around 2027, after which the reactor is left to cool. Final site clearance activities are scheduled between 2092 and 2101.   The last two remaining Magnox reactors currently in operation in the UK are at Wylfa site. The two 490 MWe units there are scheduled to shut down at the end of 2012.   Horizon Nuclear Power - a 50-50 joint venture between RWE nPower and EOn UK - plans to submit a planning application for a new nuclear power plant at Oldbury around 2014. According to the company, "Given the right market conditions, and subject to a final investment decision, preliminary works could begin in 2016, followed by main construction from 2019." Horizon is yet to decide which of the two available reactor designs - Areva's EPR or Westinghouse's AP1000 - it would like to build.

NOTHING happend to the fuel in the pools at Fukushima. I would like to see some evidence other than the word of an activist who frightens kids for a living to support Gunter’s rant about peices of fuel being ejected miles away. From the looks of that video, the fuel didn’t move an inch. There is also a poll associated with the article. The poll discloses that it is completely unscientific, since it allows anyone to vote and is not based on randomly selected participants. However, I think that the results as of 0315 this morning are pretty amusing since the antinuclear opinion piece has been posted for nearly a week.

95% disagree with “Beyond Nuclear”. Let’s make it 99% by Rod Adams on October 14, 2011 in Antinuclear activist, Politics of Nuclear Energy, Unreliables, Wind energy Share0 One of the more powerful concepts that I studied in college was called “groupthink.” The curriculum developers in the history department at the US Naval Academy thought it was important for people in training to become leaders in the US Navy learn to seek counsel and advice from as broad a range of sources as possible. We were taught how to avoid the kind of bad decision making that can result by surrounding oneself with yes-men or fellow travelers. The case study I remember most was the ill fated Bay of Pigs invasion where virtually the entire Kennedy Administration cabinet thought that it would be a cakewalk. If Patricia Miller had bothered to do the fact-checking required by journalistic integrity she would have come across this video showing 30 feet of water above the fuel at Fukushima with all of the fuel bundles exactly where they’re supposed to be.Aside: Don’t we live in an amazing world? I just typed “Bay of Pigs groupthink” into my browser search box and instantly hit on exactly the link I needed to support the statement above. It even cites the book we used when I was a plebe in 1977, more than 33 years ago. End Aside. Not everyone, however, has the benefit of early leadership lessons about the danger of believing that a small group of likeminded people can provide actionable advice. Some of the people who are most likely to be victims of groupthink are those who adamantly oppose the continued safe operation of emission-free nuclear power plants. The writers who exclusively quote members of that tiny community have also fallen into the groupthink trap.  On October 8, 2011, the Berkeley Patch, a New Jersey based journal that regularly posts negative stories about Oyster Creek, featured an article titled Petitioners to NRC: Shut Down All Fukushima-Like Nuclear Plants . Here is a snapshot of the masthead, the headline and the lede. The article is a diatribe that quotes people on the short list of frequently quoted antinuclear activists including Paul Gunter, Michael Mariotte, Kevin Kamps, Deb Katz and Dale Bridenbaugh. The author faithfully reproduces some of their best attempts to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt using untruths about the actual events at Fukushima. For example, the article uses the following example of how antinuclear activists are still trying to spread the myth that the used fuel pools at Fukushima caught fire. Oyster Creek – the oldest nuclear plant in the United States – has generated over 700 tons of high-level radioactive waste, Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear said. “Granted that some of that has been moved into dry cast storage, but the pool remains full to its capacity,” Kamps said. “And this was a re-rack capacity. Much later in terms of quantity of high level radioactive waste than it was originally designed for.” This represents 125 million curies of radioactive cesium-137 and the NRC has reported that up to 100 percent of the hazardous material could be released from a pool fire, Kamps said. “I would like to point out that Fukushima Daiichi units one, two, three and four combined in terms of the inventory of high level radioactive waste in their storage pools does not match some of these reactors I mentioned in terms of how much waste is in these pools,” Kamps said. “So the risks are greater here for boil downs and the consequences of a radioactive fire in these pools.” Fortunately, the people who are not a part of the antinuclear community are finally beginning to recognize their own strength and to realize that they do not have to remain silent while the lies are being spread. Here is how a knowledgable commenter responded to the above segment of the article: If Patricia Miller had bothered to do the fact-checking required by journalistic integrity she would have come across this video showing 30 feet of water above the fuel at Fukushima with all of the fuel bundles exactly where they’re supposed to be.

“It took a really extraordinary event for 95 percent of the people in the world to know about it,” he said. “If they know about Fukushima, they know about Mark 1 reactors exploding in the air and releasing toxic radiation across the world and they know that’s not a good thing. Something has to be done to make sure that never happens again.” I could not let that one pass without a comment; I am quite sure that Mariotte has once again fallen victim to the fact that he surrounds himself with people who echo his own prejudices. Here is my response.

Marriotte makes an interesting statement by he claiming that “95% of the people in the world” know about Fukushima. That statement might be true about the people in the United States, where advertiser-supported television news programs covered the events with breathless hype for several months. I am pretty sure that you would have a difficult time finding anyone in China, central Africa, the Asian subcontinent, South America or the Middle East who can even pronounce Fukushima, much less know anything about GE Mark 1 containments. Most of them would not even know that they should be worried about radiation because they have never been taught to be afraid of something that they cannot smell, feel, taste, or hear especially when it occurs at levels that have no chance of making them sick within their expected lifetime. Mariotte, Gunter, Kamps, Katz and Bridenbaugh are all members of a vocal, but tiny group of people who have been carrying the water of the fossil fuel industry for decades by opposing nuclear energy, the only real competitor it has. They are victims of groupthink who believe that their neighbors in Takoma Park are representative of the whole world.

Just before making this comment, I voted in the unscientific poll associated with the article. 95% say that Oyster Creek should keep on powering New Jersey homes and businesses. They are not impressed by the Beyond Nuclear FUD; they like clean electricity.

Assuming about five years for construction it can be expected that reactors will be coming online around 2012 at double today's rate of five per year, with this to rise to one per month around 2015.

Fukushima impact

Despite a return to form for nuclear power in 2010, the impact of the Fukushima accident, not only in Japan but around the world, will significantly reduce the amount of electricity generated by nuclear power plants in 2011.

According to data released by the Japan Atomic Industry Forum (JAIF), only 17 of Japan's 54 nuclear power reactors were in operation in mid-May. They represented around 15,500 MWe, or 31%, of the country's total nuclear generating capacity.

Regulations are loosened, and reactors are back in compliance."That's what they say for everything ...," said Demetrios Basdekas, a retired NRC engineer. "Every time you turn around, they say, 'We have all this built-in conservatism.' "The crisis at the decades-old Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear facility in Japan has focused attention on nuclear safety and prompted the NRC to look at U.S. reactors. A report is due in July.But the factor of aging goes far beyond issues posed by Fukushima.

Commercial nuclear reactors in the United States were designed and licensed for 40 years. When the first were built in the 1960s and 1970s, it was expected that they would be replaced with improved models long before their licenses expired.That never happened. The 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, massive cost overruns, crushing debt and high interest rates halted new construction in the 1980s.Instead, 66 of the 104 operating units have been relicensed for 20 more years. Renewal applications are under review for 16 other reactors.As of today, 82 reactors are more than 25 years old.The AP found proof that aging reactors have been allowed to run less safely to prolong operations.

Last year, the NRC weakened the safety margin for acceptable radiation damage to reactor vessels -- for a second time. The standard is based on a reactor vessel's "reference temperature," which predicts when it will become dangerously brittle and vulnerable to failure. Through the years, many plants have violated or come close to violating the standard.As a result, the minimum standard was relaxed first by raising the reference temperature 50 percent, and then 78 percent above the original -- even though a broken vessel could spill radioactive contents."We've seen the pattern," said nuclear safety scientist Dana Powers, who works for Sandia National Laboratories and also sits on an NRC advisory committee. "They're ... trying to get more and more out of these plants."

Sharpening the pencilThe AP study collected and analyzed government and industry documents -- some never-before released -- of both reactor types: pressurized water units that keep radioactivity confined to the reactor building and the less common boiling water types like those at Fukushima, which send radioactive water away from the reactor to drive electricity-generating turbines.The Energy Northwest Columbia Generating Station north of Richland is a boiling water design that's a newer generation than the Fukushima plants.Tens of thousands of pages of studies, test results, inspection reports and policy statements filed during four decades were reviewed. Interviews were conducted with scores of managers, regulators, engineers, scientists, whistleblowers, activists and residents living near the reactors at 65 sites, mostly in the East and Midwest.

AP reporters toured some of the oldest reactors -- Oyster Creek, N.J., near the Atlantic coast 50 miles east of Philadelphia and two at Indian Point, 25 miles north of New York City on the Hudson River.Called "Oyster Creak" by some critics, this boiling water reactor began running in 1969 and is the country's oldest operating commercial nuclear power plant. Its license was extended in 2009 until 2029, though utility officials announced in December they will shut the reactor 10 years earlier rather than build state-ordered cooling towers. Applications to extend the lives of pressurized water units 2 and 3 at Indian Point, each more than 36 years old, are under NRC review.Unprompted, several nuclear engineers and former regulators used nearly identical terminology to describe how industry and government research has frequently justified loosening safety standards. They call it "sharpening the pencil" or "pencil engineering" -- fudging calculations and assumptions to keep aging plants in compliance.

Cracked tubing: The industry has long known of cracking in steel alloy tubing used in the steam generators of pressurized water reactors. Ruptures have been common in these tubes containing radioactive coolant; in 1993 alone, there were seven. As many as 18 reactors still run on old generators.Problems can arise even in a newer metal alloy, according to a report of a 2008 industry-government workshop.

Neil Wilmshurst, director of plant technology for the industry's Electric Power Research Institute, acknowledged the industry and NRC often collaborate on research that supports rule changes. But he maintained there's "no kind of misplaced alliance ... to get the right answer."Yet agency staff, plant operators and consultants paint a different picture:* The AP reviewed 226 preliminary notifications -- alerts on emerging safety problems -- NRC has issued since 2005. Wear and tear in the form of clogged lines, cracked parts, leaky seals, rust and other deterioration contributed to at least 26 of the alerts. Other notifications lack detail, but aging was a probable factor in 113 more, or 62 percent in all. For example, the 39-year-old Palisades reactor in Michigan shut Jan. 22 when an electrical cable failed, a fuse blew and a valve stuck shut, expelling steam with low levels of radioactive tritium into the outside air. And a 1-inch crack in a valve weld aborted a restart in February at the LaSalle site west of Chicago.

* A 2008 NRC report blamed 70 percent of potentially serious safety problems on "degraded conditions" such as cracked nozzles, loose paint, electrical problems or offline cooling components.* Confronted with worn parts, the industry has repeatedly requested -- and regulators often have allowed -- inspections and repairs to be delayed for months until scheduled refueling outages. Again and again, problems worsened before being fixed. Postponed inspections inside a steam generator at Indian Point allowed tubing to burst, leading to a radioactive release in 2000. Two years later, cracking grew so bad in nozzles on the reactor vessel at the Davis-Besse plant near Toledo, Ohio, that it came within two months of a possible breach, an NRC report said, which could release radiation. Yet inspections failed to catch the same problem on the replacement vessel head until more nozzles were found to be cracked last year.

Time crumbles thingsNuclear plants are fundamentally no more immune to aging than our cars or homes: Metals grow weak and rusty, concrete crumbles, paint peels, crud accumulates. Big components like 17-story-tall concrete containment buildings or 800-ton reactor vessels are all but impossible to replace. Smaller parts and systems can be swapped but still pose risks as a result of weak maintenance and lax regulation or hard-to-predict failures.Even mundane deterioration can carry harsh consequences.For example, peeling paint and debris can be swept toward pumps that circulate cooling water in a reactor accident. A properly functioning containment building is needed to create air pressure that helps clear those pumps. But a containment building could fail in a severe accident. Yet the NRC has allowed safety calculations that assume the buildings will hold.

In a 2009 letter, Mario V. Bonaca, then-chairman of the NRC's Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, warned that this approach represents "a decrease in the safety margin" and makes a fuel-melting accident more likely.Many photos in NRC archives -- some released in response to AP requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act -- show rust accumulated in a thick crust or paint peeling in long sheets on untended equipment.Four areas stand out:

Brittle vessels: For years, operators have rearranged fuel rods to limit gradual radiation damage to the steel vessels protecting the core and keep them strong enough to meet safety standards.But even with last year's weakening of the safety margins, engineers and metal scientists say some plants may be forced to close over these concerns before their licenses run out -- unless, of course, new regulatory compromises are made.

Leaky valves: Operators have repeatedly violated leakage standards for valves designed to bottle up radioactive steam in an earthquake or other accident at boiling water reactors.Many plants have found they could not adhere to the general standard allowing main steam isolation valves to leak at a rate of no more than 11.5 cubic feet per hour. In 1999, the NRC decided to allow individual plants to seek amendments of up to 200 cubic feet per hour for all four steam valves combined.But plants have violated even those higher limits. For example, in 2007, Hatch Unit 2, in Baxley, Ga., reported combined leakage of 574 cubic feet per hour.

"Many utilities are doing that sort of thing," said engineer Richard T. Lahey Jr., who used to design nuclear safety systems for General Electric Co., which makes boiling water reactors. "I think we need nuclear power, but we can't compromise on safety. I think the vulnerability is on these older plants."Added Paul Blanch, an engineer who left the industry over safety issues, but later returned to work on solving them: "It's a philosophical position that (federal regulators) take that's driven by the industry and by the economics: What do we need to do to let those plants continue to operate?"Publicly, industry and government say that aging is well under control. "I see an effort on the part of this agency to always make sure that we're doing the right things for safety. I'm not sure that I see a pattern of staff simply doing things because there's an interest to reduce requirements -- that's certainly not the case," NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko said in an interview.

Corroded piping: Nuclear operators have failed to stop an epidemic of leaks in pipes and other underground equipment in damp settings. Nuclear sites have suffered more than 400 accidental radioactive leaks, the activist Union of Concerned Scientists reported in September.Plant operators have been drilling monitoring wells and patching buried piping and other equipment for several years to control an escalating outbreak.But there have been failures. Between 2000 and 2009, the annual number of leaks from underground piping shot up fivefold, according to an internal industry document.

4. Consistency. Solar and wind power are intermittent. But the wind often blows when the sun doesn't shine. Existing hydropower and natural gas plants can fill in the gaps. Denmark manages intermittency by relying on Norwegian hydropower and has 20 percent wind energy. Today, compressed-air energy storage is economical, and sodium sulfur batteries are perhaps a few years from being commercial. Smart grids and appliances can communicate to alleviate intermittency. For instance, the defrost cycle in one's freezer could, for the most part, be automatically deferred to wind or solar energy surplus periods. Likewise, icemakers could store coldness to provide air-conditioning during peak hot days. The United States is running on an insecure, vulnerable, 100-year-old model for the grid -- the equivalent of a punch-card-mainframe computer system in the Internet age. It's a complete failure of imagination to say wind and solar intermittency necessitates nuclear power.

3. Production. Nuclear power does produce electricity around the clock -- until it doesn't. For instance, the 2007 earthquake near the seven-reactor Kashiwazaki Kariwa plant in Japan turned 24/7 electricity into a 0/365 shutdown in seconds. The first of those reactors was not restarted for nearly two years. Three remain shut down. Just last month, an earthquake in Virginia shut down the two North Anna reactors. It is unknown when they will reopen. As for land area and the amount of fuel needed, nuclear proponents tend to forget uranium mining and milling. Each ton of nuclear fuel creates seven tons of depleted uranium. The eight total tons of uranium have roughly 800 tons of mill tailings (assuming ore with 1 percent uranium content) and, typically, a similar amount of mine waste. Nuclear power may have a much smaller footprint than coal, but it still has an enormous waste and land footprint once uranium mining and milling are considered.

5. Oil. The United States uses only a tiny amount of oil in the electricity sector. But with electric vehicles, solar- and wind-generated electricity can do more for "energy independence" now than nuclear can, as renewable energy plants can be built quickly. Luckily, this is rapidly becoming a commercial reality. Parked electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids in airports, large businesses, or mall parking lots could help solve intermittency more cheaply and efficiently. Ford is already planning to sell solar panels to go with their new all-electric Ford Focus in 2012. We don't need a costly, cumbersome, water-intensive, plutonium-making, financially risky method to boil water. Germany, Italy, and Switzerland are on their way to non-nuclear, low-carbon futures. Japan is starting down that road. A new official commission in France (yes, France!) will examine nuclear and non-nuclear scenarios. So, where is the Obama administration?

The imposition of requirements that seem unnecessary and unfair can affect commercial decision-making by the affected country.  Such conditions put U.S. commercial contracts and jobs at risk. Moreover, if the country does not use U.S.-based technology, fuels or services, the value of conditions in the 123 agreement (i.e., consent rights) would be lost. Some U.S. leaders are proposing a prohibition on uranium enrichment and reprocessing as part of all bilateral nuclear energy agreements for cooperation.  Ensuring enrichment technology and reprocessing technology are used only for peaceful purposes is a paramount goal for government and industry. But U.S. 123 agreements are neither the best, nor in most cases, the appropriate mechanism to achieve that goal. 

Multilateral agreements are more appropriate mechanisms for policy regarding the global challenge of nuclear proliferation.  Promising mechanisms include the decision by the International Atomic Energy Agency to establish a uranium fuel bank, potential nuclear fuel lease/takeback contracts, and other multilateral, institutional nonproliferation arrangements.  In addition, the Nuclear Suppliers Group (an international body of 46 nuclear technology supplier nations that sets standards for commercial nuclear trade) recently adopted new clear and strict criteria for the transfer of nuclear energy technology.  These institutional controls do not require the receiving country to cede sovereign rights, which the U.S. government and other countries with civilian nuclear energy programs would never give up. 

Fast-growing electricity needs in developing countries and concern about air quality and climate change are stimulating significant global demand for nuclear energy.  Sixty-six plants are being built worldwide and another 154 are in the licensing and advanced planning stage. U.S. suppliers are vying for business around the world – including China, Poland and India.  Continued U.S. leadership in global nuclear safety and nonproliferation matters go hand-in-hand with a strong presence in the global marketplace.  Both are critical to our national and global security.  We must continue to participate in worldwide trade and nonproliferation policy discussions, or cede leadership in these areas to other governments and industrial competitors.  Unless we choose engagement, America will lose tens of thousands of jobs and other benefits such trade has for our economy while forfeiting the nonproliferation benefits that 123 agreements are intended to achieve.

BIO- Everett Redmond is director of nonproliferation and fuel cycle policy at the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, D.C.

Reading Dr. Boice’s testimony will take around ten minutes of your time. It is well worth your while. Here is part of Dr. Boice’s summary: The lasting effects [of the Fukushima meltdown] upon the Japanese population will most likely be psychological with increased occurrence of stress-related mental disorders and depression associated not necessarily with the concern about reactor radiation, but with the horrific loss of life and disruption caused by the tsunami and earthquake. In the headline-driven hysteria that has characterized coverage of the Fukushima issue, the tens of thousands killed and hundreds of thousands made homeless by the quake and tsunami have been all but forgotten by the western media.