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Whistleblower pays price for voicing nuke safety concerns, MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, Dec. 15, 2011: Dr. Walter Tamosaitis, Research & Technology Manager for the Waste Treatment Plant processing Hanford’s radioactive waste Walt Tamosaitis, nuclear waste whistleblower and Tom Carpenter, attorney and executive director of the non-profit group Hanford Challenge, talks with Rachel Maddow about safety concerns at the site and the penalties he has suffered as a consequence of speaking about his concerns.

Transcript Excerpts At ~7:00 in MADDOW: Dr. Tamosaitis, can you describe your safety concerns at Hanford [nuclear waste facility in Washington] for the non-nuclear engineers among us? TAMOSAITIS: Yes, ma`am. The major concern is poor mixing in the vessels, the tanks that process the hazardous nuclear waste. And if you have poor mixing in the tank, you can build up solids, the solids can trap hydrogen gas. You can have solids build up on the bottom of the tank which can lead to a criticality. So, trapping a hydrogen gas can lead to a fire or an explosion. And the solids buildup could lead to a criticality.

At ~9:45 in MADDOW: In terms of — Dr. Tamosaitis, let me go back to you. In terms of your safety concerns and, again, speaking to a public that may not be, including myself, all that familiar with the processes you`re describing there, what is the greatest risk that you think is possible here based on corners that you`ve seen cut? Are we looking at something that could be more than the kind of leaks that Hanford has already experienced? Are we talking about something that could be a larger release of radioactive material? TAMOSAITIS: Yes, ma`am. Yes, Rachel, we are. If we have poor mixing, we could trap hydrogen gas, we could end up with a fire or explosion, as we saw on the TV at Fukushima in Japan.

Urging the public to recognize the massive government cover-up of Japan's Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, including the seriously damaged Reactor #3 with deadly plutonium mix fuel, two nuclear whistleblower organizations, Beyond Nuclear and Friends of the Earth, warned this week that the human toll from Japan's Fukushima nuclear event could be comparable to or potentially greater than that of Chernobyl. Independent nuclear specialists are warning that long-term risk of radiation due to internal exposure will be worse due to lies and cover-up of the catastrophe presently used to protect the nuclear energy industry.

Urging the public to recognize the massive government cover-up of Japan's Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, including the seriously damaged Reactor #3 with deadly   plutonium mix fuel , two nuclear whistleblower organizations,   Beyond Nuclear and Friends of the Earth , warned this week that the human toll from Japan's Fukushima nuclear event could be comparable to or potentially greater than that of Chernobyl. Independent nuclear specialists are warning that long-term risk of radiation due to internal exposure   will be worse due to lies and cover-up of the catastrophe presently used to protect the nuclear energy industry. Among nuclear truth advocates presenting information Friday about the health impact of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe was  Cindy Folkers, a radiation and health specialist at Beyond Nuclear, Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, and Dr. Alexey Yablokov, co-author of "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment" and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences

At the same press conference was Dr. Yablokov, who has been holding a daily vigil in front of the World Health Organization headquarters due to its alleged false reporting of Chernobyl.

In KING 5 TV's report Tuesday on high levels of radiation detected in Northwest rainwater, the United States government is accused of continuing to fail to tell the public about Fukushima dangerous radiation blanketing parts of the United States, a coverup that led grassroots projects and independent reporters to gather and present data for public well-being. University of California Nuclear Engineering Department Forum began asking on Tuesday for people in the Los Angles area to come forward with any dangerous radiation readings that may have been detected after local peaches were highly radioactive

UPDATE: July 13, 2011, 11:11pm: The peaches reported on July 12 were bought at "a local market," not Santa Monica Market, according to Environews on Wednesday. An investigation about the source of the peaches is underway.   Right to health denied when United States government hides high levels of Fukushima radiation  In KING 5 TV's report Tuesday on high levels of radiation detected in Northwest rainwater , the United States   government is accused of continuing to fail to tell the public about Fukushima dangerous radiation blanketing parts of the United States , a coverup that led grassroots projects and independent reporters to gather and present data for public well-being. University of California Nuclear Engineering Department Forum   began asking on Tuesday for people in the Los Angles area   to come forward with any dangerous radiation readings that may have been detected after local peaches were highly radioactive . "Our government said no health levels, no health levels were exceeded, when in fact, the rain water in the Northwest is reaching levels 130 times the drinking water standards," said Gerry Pollet from a non-government organization watchdog, Heart of America Northwest.

UPDATE: July 13, 2011, 11:11pm: The peaches reported on July 12 were bought at "a local market," not Santa Monica Market, according to Environews on Wednesday. An investigation about the source of the peaches is underway.   Right to health denied when United States government hides high levels of Fukushima radiation   In KING 5 TV's report Tuesday on high levels of radiation detected in Northwest rainwater , the United States   government is accused of continuing to fail to tell the public about Fukushima dangerous radiation blanketing parts of the United States , a coverup that led grassroots projects and independent reporters to gather and present data for public well-being. University of California Nuclear Engineering Department Forum   began asking on Tuesday for people in the Los Angles area   to come forward with any dangerous radiation readings that may have been detected after local peaches were highly radioactive . "Our government said no health levels, no health levels were exceeded, when in fact, the rain water in the Northwest is reaching levels 130 times the drinking water standards," said Gerry Pollet from a non-government organization watchdog, Heart of America Northwest. A call from the University of California Nuclear Engineering Department Forum for public radiation readings in Los Angeles came after a finding on Friday, July 8th, 2011 was reported that two peaches from the popular Santa Monica local market were confirmed to have sustained radiation levels of 81 CPMs, or greater

This rather mundane looking letter from 2000 talks about a number of concerns going on with the IAEA at that time. One concern was the Bushehr nuclear plant in Iran. “Indications that Russia’s efforts to complete the Bushehr reactor in Iran are plagued with severe safety considerations as witnessed by periodic visits by IAEA experts. ” Recently a whistleblower told that the Bushehr plant was a safety disaster and that it was hobbled together with disparate parts by second string engineers. The US had concerns about the lack of safety assistance at the Mayak nuclear site in Russia. This is similar to the Hanford nuclear site in the US and houses large amounts of volatile nuclear waste. Mayak was the site of an INES level 6 disaster in 1957 that sent a plume of highly radioactive cesium 137 and stronium 90 over a populated area nearby.  This disaster happened due to loss of cooling on a waste tank.

The letter also talked about the financial constraint of needing to spend $3 million dollars to do mandated oversight at the Rokkasho Mura nuclear waste facility in Japan. It also spoke of a severe budget crisis by 2001 as countries were not putting more funding into the IAEA as the demands on the agency were increasing. The 2009 accounting of the IAEA’s budget.

The document's authenticity cannot be confirmed, but nuclear experts see no reason to doubt it. It also echoes fears in the nuclear industry about the safety of a secretive project to which few outsiders have had access. Iran is the only country with a nuclear plant that has not joined the Convention on Nuclear Safety, which obliges signatories to observe international safety standards. Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar. End of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar. Sami Alfaraj, head of the Kuwait Centre for Strategic Studies and an adviser to the Kuwaiti government, said an accident at Bushehr would be a "total calamity for the world", in which nuclear contamination would spew across a wide region.He could not assess Bushehr's safety because Iran's co-operation with its neighbours had been "nil".

"They say trust us, but there's no such thing as trust us in nuclear politics. They are playing Russian roulette not just with us but with the world."Bushehr began in 1975 when the shah of Iran awarded the contract to Kraftwerk Union of Germany.When the German company pulled out after the 1979 Islamic revolution the two reactors were far from finished, and they were damaged during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88.Airstrikes left the containment vessel with 1700 holes, letting in hundreds of tonnes of rainwater.

The regime revived the project in the 1990s, but with one reactor only. It wanted a prestige project to show that the Islamic Republic could match the scientific achievements of the West.It may also have wanted cover for its nuclear weapons program - and the opportunities for personal enrichment the project gave Iran's elite. This time, Iran used Russian engineers, who had not built a foreign reactor since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989. Russia's experts wanted to start from scratch. The Iranians, having already spent more than $US1 billion, insisted they built on the German foundations.This involved adapting a structure built for a vertical German reactor to take a horizontal Russian reactor - an unprecedented operation. Of the 80,000 pieces of German equipment, many were corroded or lacked manuals.

There are foreign nuclear experts who have said the explosion in Reactor 3 on March 14 at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant was a nuclear explosion. But this Japanese engineer and whistleblower at JNES (Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization) Setsuo Fujiwara says there were two explosions at Reactor 3: a hydrogen explosion, and a nuclear explosion at the Spent Fuel Pool.The following is my best-effort translation of the interview Fujiwara did with the SPA magazine, without detailed technical knowledge of nuclear physics, subject to revision.

Federal regulators have been working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nation's aging reactors operating within safety standards by repeatedly weakening standards or simply failing to enforce them, an investigation by The Associated Press has found.Officials at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission regularly have decided original regulations were too strict, arguing that safety margins could be eased without peril, according to records and interviews.The result? Rising fears that these accommodations are undermining safety -- and inching the reactors closer to an accident that could harm the public and jeopardize nuclear power's future.

Examples abound. When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed -- up to 20 times the original limit. When cracking caused radioactive leaks in steam generator tubing, an easier test was devised so plants could meet standards.Failed cables. Busted seals. Broken nozzles, clogged screens, cracked concrete, dented containers, corroded metals and rusty underground pipes and thousands of other problems linked to aging were uncovered in AP's yearlong investigation. And many of them could escalate dangers during an accident.

Despite the problems, not a single official body in government or industry has studied the overall frequency and potential impact on safety of such breakdowns in recent years, even as the NRC has extended dozens of reactor licenses.Industry and government officials defend their actions and insist no chances are being taken. But the AP investigation found that with billions of dollars and 19 percent of America's electricity supply at stake, a cozy relationship prevails between industry and the NRC.Records show a recurring pattern: Reactor parts or systems fall out of compliance. Studies are conducted by industry and government, and all agree existing standards are "unnecessarily conservative."

As if the closing steel mills and automobile manufacturing plants weren't bad enough, some of the oldest, most risky atomic reactors in the U.S. are located in the Midwest. Worse still, they are on the shores of the Great Lakes, putting at risk the drinking water supply for 40 million people downstream in the U.S., Canada, and a large number of Native American First Nations. Altogether, 33 atomic reactors are located on the shorelines of the Great Lakes. Two of the most infamous of these radiologically risky "Rust Belt reactors" are Entergy Nuclear's Palisades in southwest Michigan, and FirstEnergy's Davis-Besse in northwest Ohio.

Last month, U.S. Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), a long-time watchdog on the nuclear industry, wrote the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) about an acidic, radioactive leak representing a "crisis in the control room at the Palisades nuclear power plant." The leakage had been ongoing for a year, and was being "contained" in glorified buckets referred to by Entergy PR spokesman Mark Savage as "catch basins." Although the leak came to light when Palisades was forced to shutdown after its rate reached more than 30 gallons per day, it had been ongoing for months at a rate of 15 gallons per day. The tritiated and borated water is leaking from a 300,000 gallon Safety Injection Refueling Water storage tank, which is safety critical for both reactor core and radiological containment cooling. Whistleblowers contacted Washington, D.C. attorney Billie Pirner Garde, who alerted Rep. Markey, who wrote NRC. The NRC Office of Investigations has launched a probe into potential Entergy wrongdoing. On July 17th, NRC issued a "Confirmatory Action Letter" which enables Palisades to keep operating into 2013, even if the leak increases to nearly 38 gallons per day!

Markey demanded a copy of an internal Entergy report surveying its own workers on "safety culture" at Palisades. Michigan Radio obtained a copy, which reveals "a lack of accountability at all levels," and a workforce deeply distrustful of management, fearful that they will be harassed and punished if they dare to raise safety concerns.

Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the "scientists" at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they'd like it to be. In other words, what these emails confirm is that the great man-made global warming scare is not about science but about political activism. This, it seems, is what motivated the whistleblower 'FOIA 2011' (or "thief", as the usual suspects at RealClimate will no doubt prefer to tar him or her) to go public.

As FOIA 2011 puts it when introducing the selected highlights, culled from a file of 220,000 emails: “Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day.” “Every day nearly 16.000 children die from hunger and related causes.” “One dollar can save a life” — the opposite must also be true. “Poverty is a death sentence.” “Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels.” Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on hiding the decline. FOIA 2011 is right, of course. If you're going to bomb the global economy back to the dark ages with environmental tax and regulation, if you're going to favour costly, landscape-blighting, inefficient renewables over real, abundant, relatively cheap energy that works like shale gas and oil, if you're going to cause food riots and starvation in the developing world by giving over farmland (and rainforests) to biofuel production, then at the very least you it owe to the world to base your policies on sound, transparent, evidence-based science rather than on the politicised, disingenuous junk churned out by the charlatans at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). You'll find the full taster menu of delights here at Tall Bloke's website. Shrub Niggurath is on the case too. As is the Air Vent.

There are battles being fought on two fronts in the five months since a massive earthquake and tsunami damaged the Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan. On one front, there is the fight to repair the plant, operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and to contain the extent of contamination caused by the damage. On the other is the public’s fight to extract information from the Japanese government, TEPCO and nuclear experts worldwide.

The latter battle has yielded serious official humiliation, resulting high-profile resignations, scandals, and promises of reform in Japan’s energy industry whereas the latter has so far resulted in a storm of anger and mistrust. Even most academic nuclear experts, seen by many as the middle ground between the anti-nuclear activists and nuclear lobby itself, were reluctant to say what was happening: That in Fukushima, a community of farms, schools and fishing ports, was experiencing a full-tilt meltdown, and that, as Al Jazeera reported in June, that the accident had most likely caused more radioactive contamination than Chernobyl

As recently as early August, those seeking information on the real extent of the damage at the Daiichi plant and on the extent of radioactive contamination have mostly been reassured by the nuclear community that there’s no need to worry.

Since its formation inside the NRC in 1989, the OIG has fielded thousands of whistleblower complaints and conducted a compelling list of investigations, many exposing abuse and neglect both at the NRC and within the nuclear power industry that led to Congressional investigations and subsequent agency reform. The OIG became legendary for preparing exhaustively detailed, and publicly available, reports of its investigations. Now, Mulley -- along with numerous freelance and non-profit nuclear safety advocates who for years relied on the IG's office as a vital backstop against lax nuclear oversight at the NRC -- all say that the IG's office appears to be broken.

At a time when the safety of the nation's nuclear power industry has come under intense scrutiny -- particularly following what investigators now say was a preventable meltdown at a Japanese nuclear facility hobbled by an earthquake and flood this spring -- the absence of a robust inspector general, say nuclear-safety advocates with organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists, Greenpeace and the Project on Government Oversight, leaves the public more vulnerable to nuclear accidents

Chief among the omissions from the OIG's final report: that NRC staff had known since at least 1990 that the pipes in question inside the Byron nuclear power plant had been corroding, but had consistently failed to take steps to force the plant operator to correct the issue until the pipes ultimately sprung a leak.

Because it appears on the websites of local Fox News stations, one instinctively takes an article titled Insider: Iran Will Be 'Next Chernobyl' with a grain of salt. But its plausibility is undeniable. See if you agree. The first Iranian nuclear power station is inherently unsafe and will probably cause a "tragic disaster for humankind," according to a document apparently written by an Iranian whistleblower. There is a "great likelihood" that the Bushehr reactor could generate the next nuclear catastrophe after Chernobyl or Fukushima, says the document. … It claims that Bushehr, which began operating last month after 35 years of intermittent construction, was built by "second-class engineers" who bolted together Russian and German technologies from different eras; that it sits in one of the world's most seismically active areas but could not withstand a major earthquake; and that it has "no serious training program" for staff or a contingency plan for accidents. The document's authenticity cannot be confirmed, but nuclear experts see no reason to doubt it.

More about the Russian-German incompatibility: "The Russian parts are designed to standards that are less stringent than the Germans' and they are being used out of context in a design where they are exposed to inappropriate stresses," the document says. It goes on to claim that "much of the necessary work for Bushehr is outside the competence of the Russian consulting engineers," who consider the project a "holiday."

What's ironic about this article is that Fox types no doubt view the shoddy-sounding state of Iran's nuclear-energy program as a force multiplier to add to Iran's alleged development of nuclear weapons. Operating in synergy, theoretically they should make the case for attacking Iran. To others though, Iran's possible nuclear-energy troubles eclipse the nuclear weapons threat. Thus is Iran reduced from malevolent to incompetent and not worth attacking. Given enough time, its nuclear program may well blow itself up.