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In addition to the petition for education, Gary Kahanak, of Arkansas Home Energy Consultants, released another one in support of restarting the Integral Fast Reactor program. This petition was inspired by an open letter to the White House with the same goal, written by Steve Kirsch, of the Science Council for Global Initiatives. The petition states:

Without delay, the U.S. should build a commercial-scale demonstration reactor and adjacent recycling center. General Electric’s PRISM reactor, developed by a consortium of major American companies in partnership with the Argonne National Laboratory, is ready to build now. It is designed to consume existing nuclear waste as fuel, be passively safe and proliferation-resistant. It can provide clean, emissions-free power to counter climate change, and will create jobs as we manufacture and export a superior technology. Abundant homegrown nuclear power will also enhance our nation’s energy security. Our country dedicated some of its finest scientific and engineering talent to this program, with spectacular success. Let’s finish the job we started. It will benefit our nation, and the world.

The release of these petitions was just in time to beat an increased threshold for minimum signatures, from 5,000 to 25,000. That means that if half of ANS members take the time to sign these petitions, we will get a formal response from the White House about their plans for increasing public education on nuclear energy, and moving forward with an important Generation IV technology.

There has been some debate among my colleagues about the value of this approach. Some were concerned about the specific language or content of the petitions, while others did not feel comfortable signing something in support of a particular reactor that is not their preferred technology. Others have voiced that even if we get 5,000 signatures, the White House response will not have any impact on policy. While I understand and respect those points, I want to share why I decided to sign both petitions and to write about them here.

Those of us in the nuclear communications community ask ourselves constantly, “How do we inspire people to get involved and speak out in support of nuclear?” I see these petitions as a sign of success on the part of the nuclear community—we are reaching out and inspiring action from the ground up. Nuclear supporters who are not directly employed by the industry created both of these petitions. In my mind, that is a really wonderful thing. Members of the public are taking independent action to support the technology they believe in.

This brings me to my second reason for supporting these petitions: They represent a genuine change in approach for supporting nuclear energy. Throughout the history of commercial nuclear power generation, most of the decisions and support have come directly from government and corporate entities. This has resulted in a great deal of public mistrust and even distain for nuclear technologies. A grassroots approach may not translate directly into research dollars or policy change, but it has to the potential to win hearts and minds, which is also extremely important.

And finally, there is power in symbolic action

Since the Liberal Democratic Party selected him as prime minister in September 2006, the hawkish Abe repeatedly called for Japan to move beyond the postwar formula of a strictly defensive posture and non-nuclear principles. Advocacy of a nuclear-armed Japan arose from his family tradition. His grandfather Nobusuke Kishi nurtured the wartime atomic bomb project and, as postwar prime minister, enacted the civilian nuclear program. His father Shintaro Abe, a former foreign minister, had played the Russian card in the 1980s, sponsoring the Russo-Japan College, run by the Aum Shinrikyo sect (a front for foreign intelligence), to recruit weapons scientists from a collapsing Soviet Union.   The chief obstacle to American acceptance of a nuclear-armed Japan was the Pentagon, where Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima remain as iconic symbols justifying American military supremacy.The only feasible channel for bilateral transfers then was through the civilian-run Department of Energy (DoE), which supervises the production of nuclear weapons.

Camp David Go-Ahead   The deal was sealed on Abe's subsequent visit to Washington. Wary of the eavesdropping that led to Richard Nixon's fall from grace, Bush preferred the privacy afforded at Camp David. There, in a rustic lodge on April 27, Bush and Abe huddled for 45 minutes. What transpired has never been revealed, not even in vague outline.   As his Russian card suggested, Abe was shopping for enriched uranium. At 99.9 percent purity, American-made uranium and plutonium is the world's finest nuclear material. The lack of mineral contaminants means that it cannot be traced back to its origin. In contrast, material from Chinese and Russian labs can be identified by impurities introduced during the enrichment process.

The flow of coolant water into the storage pools ceased, quickening evaporation. Fission of the overheated cores led to blasts and mushroom-clouds. Residents in mountaintop Iitate village overlooking the seaside plant saw plumes of smoke and could "taste the metal" in their throats.   Guilty as Charged   The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami were powerful enough to damage Fukushima No.1. The natural disaster, however, was vastly amplified by two external factors: release of the Stuxnet virus, which shut down control systems in the critical 20 minutes prior to the tsunami; and presence of weapons-grade nuclear materials that devastated the nuclear facility and contaminated the entire region.   Of the three parties involved, which bears the greatest guilt? All three are guilty of mass murder, injury and destruction of property on a regional scale, and as such are liable for criminal prosecution and damages under international law and in each respective jurisdiction.

An unannounced reason for Cheney's visit was to promote a quadrilateral alliance in the Asia-Pacific region. The four cornerstones - the US, Japan, Australia and India - were being called on to contain and confront China and its allies North Korea and Russia.. From a Japanese perspective, this grand alliance was flawed by asymmetry: The three adversaries were nuclear powers, while the U.S. was the only one in the Quad group.   To further his own nuclear ambitions, Abe was playing the Russian card. As mentioned in a U.S. Embassy cable (dated 9/22), the Yomiuri Shimbun gave top play to this challenge to the White House : "It was learned yesterday that the government and domestic utility companies have entered final talks with Russia in order to relegate uranium enrichment for use at nuclear power facilities to Atomprom, the state-owned nuclear monopoly." If Washington refused to accept a nuclear-armed Japan, Tokyo would turn to Moscow.

Throughout the Pantex caper, from the data theft to smuggling operation, Bush and Cheney's point man for nuclear issues was DoE Deputy Director Clay Sell, a lawyer born in Amarillo and former aide to Panhandle district Congressman Mac Thornberry. Sell served on the Bush-Cheney transition team and became the top adviser to the President on nuclear issues. At DoE, Sell was directly in charge of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, which includes 17 national laboratories and the Pantex plant. (Another alarm bell: Sell was also staff director for the Senate Energy subcommittee under the late Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, who died in a 2010 plane crash.)   An Israeli Double-Cross   The nuclear shipments to Japan required a third-party cutout for plausible deniability by the White House. Israel acted less like an agent and more like a broker in demanding additional payment from Tokyo, according to intelligence sources. Adding injury to insult, the Israelis skimmed off the newer warhead cores for their own arsenal and delivered older ones. Since deteriorated cores require enrichment, the Japanese were furious and demanded a refund, which the Israelis refused. Tokyo had no recourse since by late 2008 principals Abe had resigned the previous autumn and Bush was a lame duck.

The Japanese nuclear developers, under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, had no choice but to enrich the uranium cores at Fukushima No.1, a location remote enough to evade detection by nonproliferation inspectors. Hitachi and GE had developed a laser extraction process for plutonium, which requires vast amounts of electrical power. This meant one reactor had to make unscheduled runs, as was the case when the March earthquake struck.   Tokyo dealt a slap on the wrist to Tel Aviv by backing Palestinian rights at the UN. Not to be bullied, the Israeli secret service launched the Stuxnet virus against Japan's nuclear facilities.   Firewalls kept Stuxnet at bay until the Tohoku earthquake. The seismic activity felled an electricity tower behind Reactor 6. The power cut disrupted the control system, momentarily taking down the firewall. As the computer came online again, Stuxnet infiltrated to shut down the back-up generators. During the 20-minute interval between quake and tsunami, the pumps and valves at Fukushima No.1 were immobilized, exposing the turbine rooms to flood damage.

The Texas Job   BWXT Pantex, America's nuclear warhead facility, sprawls over 16,000 acres of the Texas Panhandle outside Amarillo. Run by the DoE and Babcock & Wilson, the site also serves as a storage facility for warheads past their expiration date. The 1989 shutdown of Rocky Flats, under community pressure in Colorado, forced the removal of those nuclear stockpiles to Pantex. Security clearances are required to enter since it is an obvious target for would-be nuclear thieves.   In June 2004, a server at the Albuquerque office of the National Nuclear Security System was hacked. Personal information and security-clearance data for 11 federal employees and 177 contractors at Pantex were lifted. NNSA did not inform Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman or his deputy Clay Sell until three months after the security breach, indicating investigators suspected an inside job.

The White House, specifically Bush, Cheney and their co-conspirators in the DoE, hold responsibility for ordering the illegal removal and shipment of warheads without safeguards.   The state of Israel is implicated in theft from U.S. strategic stockpiles, fraud and extortion against the Japanese government, and a computer attack against critical infrastructure with deadly consequences, tantamount to an act of war.   Prime Minister Abe and his Economy Ministry sourced weapons-grade nuclear material in violation of constitutional law and in reckless disregard of the risks of unregulated storage, enrichment and extraction. Had Abe not requested enriched uranium and plutonium in the first place, the other parties would not now be implicated. Japan, thus, bears the onus of the crime.

The International Criminal Court has sufficient grounds for taking up a case that involves the health of millions of people in Japan, Canada, the United States, Russia, the Koreas, Mongolia, China and possibly the entire Northern Hemisphere. The Fukushima disaster is more than an human-rights charge against a petty dictator, it is a crime against humanity on par with the indictments at the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals. Failure to prosecute is complicity.   If there is a silver lining to every dark cloud, it's that the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami saved the world from even greater folly by halting the drive to World War III.

Those connections “run pretty deep,” said Kevin Kamp with the watchdog group Beyond Nuclear. “That begins to explain his policy.” Exelon has had ties to some of Obama’s closest advisers.

That would come on top of the .5 billion currently set aside as part of the loan guarantee program started under President George W. Bush’s Energy Policy Act of 2005. Some critics have charged that Obama’s support for nuclear power Dewalt DC9091 drill battery can be traced to his political rise in Illinois, home to Exelon, the nation’s biggest operator of nuclear plants.

Nuclear power already accounts for 20 percent of overall electricity in the United States, and makes up the vast majority of carbon-free energy. But because the cost of building a new reactor is so high — and Wall Street is reluctant to invest with natural gas emerging as a more viable alternative — utilities have turned to the government for assistance. Obama has signaled his desire to help, proposing in his 2012 budget plan an additional billion in loan guarantees to build new plants.

David Axelrod, the president’s longtime political strategist and former White House advisor, has worked for Exelon as a consultant, though Axelrod said Friday he currently has no private clients. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff and now Chicago’s mayor-elect, helped broker the deal that created Exelon when he worked at the investment bank Wasserstein Perella.

Exelon’s political action committee and its employees have given more than 0,000 to Obama’s congressional and presidential campaigns over the years, including ,300 from Exelon chief executive John Rowe, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Since Obama became president, Exelon has sided with the White House in at least one major policy battle — quitting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in protest of the trade group’s opposition to a cap-and-trade energy plan. Exelon declined comment.

Another major nuclear player is Duke Energy, whose chief executive, Jim Rogers, is leading fundraising efforts for the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C. The firm, which slightly favored Democrats in its 2010 PAC donations, has agreed to guarantee a million line of credit for the convention from a local bank.

Duke Energy officials say the effort is purely an economic development initiative. ‘We would do it for the Republicans in 2016 if they would consider Charlotte,” said spokesman Tom Williams. “It’s not a partisan effort at all.”

Overall, Obama has not relied very heavily on energy-related contributions in his political career, and his aides have pledged to continue refusing any corporate PAC donations in the 2012 campaign. Contributors in the energy and natural resources sector gave about .8 million to Obama in 2008, compared to .1 million for GOP candidate John McCain, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The president’s position appears to be in good stead with crucial independent voters, a majority of whom view nuclear as a safe energy source, according to a new Fox News poll. The survey found that a plurality of Democratic voters disagree.

Last year, the White House rejected a request by Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) to enforce a law passed in 2002 requiring that potassium iodide pills be made available to all U.S. citizens living within 20 miles of nuclear plants for use in case of exposure to radioactive iodine.

At the entrance someone has used pink tape to attach a sign to the bare concrete: "Caution! Contaminated material." Behind this sign, used protective suits and masks are stacked in piles that are 4 to 5 meters high. Three Shifts Around the Clock

A stooped-over man in a white and blue uniform leads the way to the far corner, where radioactive dirt is lying in a kind of rubber pool. The man says the dirt was washed off cars that had been close to the reactor. Nearby, someone has taped markers to the artificial turf, much like the ones that runners use to gauge their run-ups. Here, however, workers have written radiation levels on the tape. With every meter that you approach the pool, the radiation levels increase: 4.5 microsievert, 7.0 and then, finally, one meter away: 20 microsievert. The men from the radiation detection team bring new bags full of refuse from the gym out onto this field every few minutes. The work here at J-Village is less dangerous than at the reactor.

By mid-August, 17,561 men had been registered at the Health Ministry as radiation workers. There are plans to monitor their health in a future study. Six of them have been exposed to radiation levels exceeding the high limit of 250 millisievert. More than 400 people have been exposed to levels exceeding the normally allowed 50 millisievert. And TEPCO simply does not know about some of its workers. Despite months of searching, the company can no longer locate 88 workers who were employed in the power plant from March to June. The company had merely handed out badges to contractors without meeting the workers in person. Worker IDs with barcodes and photos have only recently been introduced.

The members of the radiation detection team are now working in three shifts around the clock. He has often seen workers "at their limit -- not only physically, but also mentally." Most jobs are simply dirty work, he says. According to Akimoto, many of his co-workers who work for subcontractors had no choice but to come here. "If they refuse, where will they get another job?" he asks. "I don't know anyone who is doing this for Japan. Most of them need the money." Whenever possible, highly qualified workers like Akimoto are only exposed to comparatively low levels of radiation. After all, they will be needed later.

A Move to Raise Radiation Thresholds In an internal paper, Japan's nuclear safety agency NISA warns that there will soon be a lack of technicians because too many have exceeded their radiation limits. As early as next year, NISA anticipates that there will be a shortage of 1,000 to 1,200 qualified workers, "which will severely affect the work at Fukushima Daiichi and at nuclear power plants throughout the country."

he nuclear safety agency's solution is simple: create higher thresholds. It recommends raising the limits to allow workers to be exposed within a few years to significantly greater amounts of radiation than before.

"There are two types of jobs," says Sakuro Akimoto. "Either you work in J-Village for many hours with less radiation or in Daiichi for fewer hours, but at radiation levels that are 10 to 100 times higher." Akimoto is tall and wiry. He wears his hair short and loves casual jeans. He started working 30 years ago, right after leaving school, for a company that does maintenance work for TEPCO. There are hardly any other jobs in the village where he comes from, which is located near the power plant. On March 11, he was working at the plant and was able to flee in time to escape the tsunami. His village was evacuated. A few weeks later, he says, he received the order to come to J-Village, "whether I wanted to or not." But he says he also felt a sense of responsibility because the plant had brought so many jobs to the region.

Earning €100 Per Day

Hiroyuki Watanabe is a city council member from Iwaki, the city that lies to the south of J-Village. For the past two years, he has been trying to determine where TEPCO recruits its workers. "The structure is dodgy," says Watanabe. "It is amazing that one of Japan's largest companies pursues such business practices." In fact, TEPCO has been using shadowy practices to acquire its workers for a number of years. In 2008, Toshiro Kitamura from the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum criticized the Japanese power company for "outsourcing most of its maintenance work of nuclear power plants to multi-layered contractors." The industry expert's main concern, however, was the safety risk, since these workers are not as familiar with the reactors as permanent employees.

According to Watanabe, TEPCO has budgeted up to €1,000 per person per day to pay the workers. But unskilled workers, he says, often receive only about €100 of that money. "These are men who are poor or old, with no steady job and limited employment opportunities," he says. Some of them don't even have a written employment contract, he contends. When they reach their radiation exposure limit, he adds, they lose their jobs and the employment agency finds a replacement.

Watanabe wants to ensure that all workers are paid appropriately. Even the lowest ranking workers should have a trade union, he says. "If we have a problem, we have nobody to turn to," says a young worker who is eating dinner along with seven co-workers at the Hazu restaurant in Iwaki-Yumoto.

he presence of so many workers has fundamentally changed Iwaki-Yumoto. This small town on the southern edge of the exclusion zone was known for its hot springs, which attracted large numbers of tourists. Now, there are no more tourists, and many residents have also fled. The hot springs are still very popular, though now it is with the workers. Between 1,000 and 2,000 of them live here now, says a hotel owner in the city. There are plans to move many of them soon to new trailers on the playing fields of J-Village. One of the workers in Iwaki-Yumoto comes from the now-abandoned village of Tomioka in the restricted area. He smokes Marlboro menthols, and his arms and legs are covered with tattoos. During the day, he works in front of reactor 4, assembling plastic tubes for the decontamination system.

The hardest thing for him, he says, is the daily trip to work. The bus drives past his house twice a day, passing directly in front of the bar where he used to play pachinko, a Japanese game similar to pinball.

Translated from the German by Paul Cohen

She added that an admiral with NIC suggested she claim the estimate was between 12,000-25,000 barrels per day, noting the apparent disconnect between what the USGS actually found and what they were being advised to say. "Bottom line: if you are at a university, do convince some of your best and brightest to go into science communication," McNutt wrote. "Please."

The money trail can be tough to follow - Westinghouse, Duke Energy and the Nuclear Energy Institute (a "policy organisation" for the nuclear industry with 350 companies, including TEPCO, on its roster) did not respond to requests for information on funding research and chairs at universities. But most of the funding for nuclear research does not come directly from the nuclear lobby, said M.V. Ramana, a researcher at Princeton University specialising in the nuclear industry and climate change. Most research is funded by governments, who get donations - from the lobby (via candidates, political parties or otherwise).

“There's a lot of secrecy that can surround nuclear power because some of the same processes can be involved in generating electricity that can also be involved in developing a weapon, so there's a kind of a veil of secrecy that gets dropped over this stuff, that can also obscure the truth” said Biello. "So, for example in Fukushima, it was pretty apparent that a total meltdown had occurred just based on what they were experiencing there ... but nobody in a position of authority was willing to say that."

This is worrying because while both anti-nuclear activists and the nuclear lobby both have openly stated biases, academics and researchers are seen as the middle ground - a place to get accurate, unbiased information. David Biello, the energy and climate editor at Scientific American Online, said that trying to get clear information on a scenario such as the Daiichi disaster is tough.

"'How is this going to affect the future of nuclear power?'That’s the first thought that came into their heads," said Ramana, adding, "They basically want to ensure that people will keep constructing nuclear power plants." For instance, a May report by MIT’s Center For Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems (where TEPCO funds a chair) points out that while the Daiichi disaster has resulted in "calls for cancellation of nuclear construction projects and reassessments of plant license extensions" which might "lead to a global slow-down of the nuclear enterprise," that  "the lessons to be drawn from the Fukushima accident are different."

"In the United States, a lot of the money doesn’t come directly from the nuclear industry, but actually comes from the Department of Energy (DOE). And the DOE has a very close relationship with the industry, and they sort of try to advance the industry’s interest," said Ramana. Indeed, nuclear engineering falls under the "Major Areas of Research" with the DOE, which also has nuclear weapons under its rubric. The DOE's 2012 fiscal year budge request to the US Congress for nuclear energy programmes was $755m.

"So those people who get funding from that….it’s not like they (researchers) want to lie, but there’s a certain amount of, shall we say, ideological commitment to nuclear power, as well as a certain amount of self-censorship."  It comes down to worrying how their next application for funding might be viewed, he said. Kathleen Sullivan, an anti-nuclear specialist and disarmament education consultant with the United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs, said it's not surprising that research critical of the nuclear energy and weapons isn't coming out of universities and departments that participate in nuclear research and development.

"It (the influence) of the nuclear lobby could vary from institution to institution," said Sullivan. "If you look at the history of nuclear weapons manufacturing in the United States, you can see that a lot of research was influenced perverted, construed in a certain direction."

Sullivan points to the DOE-managed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California in Berkley (where some of the research for the first atomic bomb was done) as an example of how intertwined academia and government-funded nuclear science are.

"For nuclear physics to proceed, the only people interested in funding it are pro-nuclear folks, whether that be industry or government," said Biello. "So if you're involved in that area you've already got a bias in favour of that technology … if you study hammers, suddenly hammers seem to be the solution to everything."

And should they find results unfavourable to the industry, Ramana said they would "dress it up in various ways by saying 'Oh, there’s a very slim chance of this, and here are some safety measure we recommend,' and then the industry will say, 'Yeah,yeah, we’re incorporating all of that.'" Ramana, for the record, said that while he's against nuclear weapons, he doesn't have a moral position on nuclear power except to say that as a cost-benefit issue, the costs outweigh the benefits, and that "in that sense, expanding nuclear power isn't a good idea." 

The Center for Responsive Politics - a non-partisan, non-profit elections watchdog group – noted that even as many lobbying groups slowed their spending the first quarter of the year, the Nuclear industry "appears to be ratcheting up its lobbying" increasing its multi-million dollar spending.

Among the report's closing thoughts are concerns that "Decision-making in the  immediate aftermath of a major crisis is often influenced by emotion," and whether"an accident like Fukushima, which is so far beyond design basis, really warrant a major overhaul of current nuclear safety regulations and practises?" "If so," wonder the authors, "When is safe safe enough? Where do we draw the line?"

The Japanese public, it seems, would like some answers to those very questions, albeit from a different perspective.  Kazuo Hizumi, a Tokyo-based human rights lawyer, is among those pushing for openness. He is also an editor at News for the People in Japan, a news site advocating for transparency from the government and from TEPCO. With contradicting information and lack of clear coverage on safety and contamination issues, many have taken to measuring radiation levels with their own Geiger counters.

"The public fully trusted the Japanese Government," said Hizumi. But the absence of "true information" has massively diminished that trust, as, he said, has the public's faith that TEPCO would be open about the potential dangers of a nuclear accident.

A report released in July by Human Rights Now highlights the need for immediately accessible information on health and safety in areas where people have been affected by the disaster, including Fukushima, especially on the issues of contaminated food and evacuation plans.

A 'nuclear priesthood' Biello describes the nuclear industry is a relatively small, exclusive club.

The interplay between academia and also the military and industry is very tight. It's a small community...they have their little club and they can go about their business without anyone looking over their shoulder. " This might explain how, as the Associated Press reported in June, that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission was "working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nationalise ageing reactors operating within standards or simply failing to enforce them."

However, with this exclusivity comes a culture of secrecy – "a nuclear priesthood," said Biello, which makes it very difficult to parse out a straightforward answer in the very technical and highly politicised field.  "You have the proponents, who believe that it is the technological salvation for our problems, whether that's energy, poverty, climate change or whatever else. And then you have opponents who think that it's literally the worst thing that ever happened and should be immediately shut back up in a box and buried somewhere," said Biello, who includes "professors of nuclear engineering and Greenpeace activists" as passionate opponents on the nuclear subject.

In fact, one is hard pressed to find a media report quoting a nuclear scientist at any major university sounding the alarms on the risks of contamination in Fukushima. Doing so has largely been the work of anti-nuclear activists (who have an admitted bias against the technology) and independent scientists employed by think tanks, few of whom responded to requests for interviews.

So, one's best bet, said Biello, is to try and "triangulate the truth" - to take "a dose" from anti-nuclear activists, another from pro-nuclear lobbyists and throw that in with a little bit of engineering and that'll get you closer to the truth. "Take what everybody is saying with a grain of salt."

Since World War II, the process of secrecy – the readiness to invoke "national security" - has been a pillar of the nuclear establishment…that establishment, acting on the false assumption that "secrets" can be hidden from the curious and knowledgeable, has successfully insisted that there are answers which cannot be given and even questions which cannot be asked. The net effect is to stifle debate about the fundamental of nuclear policy. Concerned citizens dare not ask certain questions, and many begin to feel that these matters which only a few initiated experts are entitled to discuss.  If the above sounds like a post-Fukushima statement, it is not. It was written by Howard Morland for the November 1979 issue of The Progressive magazine focusing on the hydrogen bomb as well as the risks of nuclear energy.

The US government - citing national security concerns - took the magazine to court in order to prevent the issue from being published, but ultimately relented during the appeals process when it became clear that the information The Progressive wanted to publish was already public knowledge and that pursuing the ban might put the court in the position of deeming the Atomic Energy Act as counter to First Amendment rights (freedom of speech) and therefore unconstitutional in its use of prior restraint to censor the press.

But, of course, that's in the US, although a similar mechanism is at work in Japan, where a recently created task force aims to "cleanse" the media of reportage that casts an unfavourable light on the nuclear industry (they refer to this information as "inaccurate" or a result of "mischief." The government has even go so far as to accept bids from companies that specialise in scouring the Internet to monitor the Internet for reports, Tweets and blogs that are critical of its handling of the Daiichi disaster, which has presented a unique challenge to the lobby there.

"They do not know how to do it," he said of some of the community groups and individuals who have taken to measure contamination levels in the air, soil and food

 Japan's government has a history of slow response to TEPCO's cover-ups. In 1989, that Kei Sugaoka, a nuclear energy at General Electric who inspected and repaired plants in Japan and elsewhere, said he spotted cracks in steam dryers and a "misplacement" or 180 degrees in one dryer unit. He noticed that the position of the dryer was later omitted from the inspection record's data sheet. Sugaoka told a Japanese networkthat TEPCO had instructed him to "erase" the flaws, but he ultimately wrote a whistleblowing letter to METI, which resulted in the temporary 17 TEPCO reactors, including ones at the plant in Fukushima.

the Japanese nuclear lobby has been quite active in shaping how people see nuclear energy. The country's Ministry of Education, together with the Natural Resources Ministry (of of two agencies under Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry - METI - overseeing nuclear policies) even provides schools with a nuclear energy information curriculum. These worksheets - or education supplements - are used to inform children about the benefits of nuclear energy over fossil fuels.

There’s reason to believe that at least in one respect, Fukushima can’t and won’t be another Chernobyl, at least due to the fact that the former has occurred in the age of the Internet whereas the latter took place in the considerably quaint 80s, when a car phone the size of a brick was considered the height of communications technology to most. "It (a successful cover up) is definitely a danger in terms of Fukushima, and we'll see what happens. All you have to do is look at the first couple of weeks after Chernobyl to see the kind of cover up," said Biello. "I mean the Soviet Union didn't even admit that anything was happening for a while, even though everybody was noticing these radiation spikes and all these other problems. The Soviet Union was not admitting that they were experiencing this catastrophic nuclear failure... in Japan, there's a consistent desire, or kind of a habit, of downplaying these accidents, when they happen. It's not as bad as it may seem, we haven't had a full meltdown."

Fast forward to 2011, when video clips of each puff of smoke out of the Daiichi plant make it around the world in seconds, news updates are available around the clock, activists post radiation readings on maps in multiple languages and Google Translate picks up the slack in translating every last Tweet on the subject coming out of Japan.

it will be a heck of a lot harder to keep a lid on things than it was 25 years ago. 

In SECY-08-0134, the staff discussed the shift in its approach to developing the regulatory framework for commercial reprocessing facilities. The staff noted that it would defer additional work on regulatory framework development efforts for advanced recycling reactors and focus on the framework revisions necessary to license a commercial reprocessing facility. As a result of this shift, an additional review of the initial gap analysis was warranted. The NRC staff further refined the regulatory gap analysis by focusing on commercial reprocessing and recycling using existing reactor technology. The staff summarized this analysis in SECY-09-0082. The staff's gap analysis identified 14 ``high'' priority gaps that must be resolved to establish an effective and efficient regulatory framework. The NRC staff's regulatory gap analysis considered several documents in its analysis, including: NUREG-1909, a white paper authored by the Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste and Materials, titled ``Background, Status and Issues Related to the Regulation of Advanced Spent Nuclear Fuel Recycle Facilities,'' issued June 2008; correspondence from the Union of Concerned Scientists titled, ``Revising the Rules for Materials Protection, Control and Accounting;'' and a Nuclear Energy Institute white [[Page 34009]] paper titled, ``Regulatory Framework for an NRC Licensed Recycling Facility.''

Standing in Line for Radiation Checks Sasaki's first stop in J-Village is the gymnasium to the right of the main building. Long lines of workers wearing protective suits and masks march up to the building. There are boxes at the entrance of the gym, and Sasaki pulls the plastic covers off of his shoes and places them in the first box. Then the respirator, the white protective suits made of synthetic paper and the gloves are each placed in additional boxes.

A number of workers trudge toward the gym; hardly anyone speaks. Some stumble when they have to stoop over to strip off the plastic covers from their shoes. Others rip off their suits with both hands, as if every tenth of a second counts before they can finally remove the hot and sweaty suits from their bodies. Then they stand in line for radiation checks. Most workers wear only long-sleeved dark-blue underwear under the suits. Those who have to spend particularly long periods in the oppressive heat and humidity are also allowed to wear turquoise vests under their protective suits. These vests contain a coolant designed to protect the men from heat exhaustion. Several workers have already collapsed. In August alone, 13 were admitted to an emergency room set up in front of reactors 5 and 6. A 60-year-old worker died in May, presumably of a heart attack.

A team of workers who have been quickly trained in radiation levels checks each man's exposure. The inspectors are wearing protective suits, blue caps and paper masks. Under the basketball hoop at the end of the gym, folding tables have been set up with four mobile Geiger counters, and next to these are three permanently installed radiometers.

During the check, the workers stand on a mat with an adhesive film designed to capture radioactive particles. Many of the men are young and look as if they are in their early twenties, but a number of weary old men are also among them.

Temporary Workers Doing the Dirty Work One of the workers feels that the public has a right to know what is happening in J-Village. He has decided to speak with SPIEGEL, although he would prefer not to give his name. He will be referred to as Sakuro Akimoto here. On busy days, he says, more than 3,000 workers pass through the radiation detection station.

Every day a brigade is deployed to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in an attempt to bring the stricken reactor under control. The workers toil in sweltering heat and dangerously high radiation levels. The maximum annual dose for workers in Japanese nuclear power plants is normally 50 millisievert. After consulting with the authorities, TEPCO has decided to raise the maximum allowed dose to 250 millisievert, high enough to significantly increase the likelihood of developing cancer.

Some 18,000 workers have helped manage the disaster since March 11. Most of them are not employed by TEPCO, but by subcontractors, who in turn recruit their workers from temporary employment agencies. Before the tsunami, many of these temporary workers had already done their fair share of the dirty work at other nuclear power plants. Most of them are not doing this to save Japan, but to feed their families. Sasaki, the construction worker, has also come for the money. He was approached by a company from Hokkaido in northern Japan where he lives. As a young man, he had helped with major overhauls at other power plants.

Each morning, says Sasaki, he dons his suit and mask in J-Village, and makes a second stop behind the plant's gates. Here he has to put on a lead vest, and over this an additional protective suit made of especially thick material, safety glasses, a mask that covers his entire face, and three different pairs of gloves, one on top of the other. "It is so unbearably hot," says Sasaki. "I feel like pulling the mask right off my face, but that's not allowed anywhere." Nonetheless, there are reports of workers who take off their masks, sometimes to smoke a cigarette. 'It Looks Much Worse There Than on TV'

There are meetings in the morning where every worker finds out what he is doing that day, after which the buses head off to the reactor. Sasaki is only allowed to work one hour per day, or at most 90 minutes, otherwise he will receive an excessively high dose of radiation. Then he heads back to J-Village, and on to his boarding house in Iwaki- Yumoto, where he shares a room with three men. Days like this have him on the go for six hours.

It looks much worse there than on TV," he says. "Like New York after September 11. Destruction everywhere." He hasn't told his family that he works at the plant. He doesn't want them to worry.

He has his own worries. He needs the money, which is just under €100 a day. But if things keep going like this, he says that he will only be able to do the job a few more weeks until he reaches his company's radiation limits.

CPS didn’t just pull nukes out of a hat when it went looking for energy options. CEO Milton Lee may be intellectually lazy, but he’s not stupid. Seeking to fulfill the cheap power mandate in San Antonio and beyond (CPS territory covers 1,566 square miles, reaching past Bexar County into Atascosa, Bandera, Comal, Guadalupe, Kendall, Medina, and Wilson counties), staff laid natural gas, coal, renewables and conservation, and nuclear side-by-side and proclaimed nukes triumphant. Coal is cheap upfront, but it’s helplessly foul; natural gas, approaching the price of whiskey, is out; and green solutions just aren’t ready, we’re told. The 42-member Nuclear Expansion Analysis Team, or NEAT, proclaimed “nuclear is the lowest overall risk considering possible costs and risks associated with it as compared to the alternatives.” Hear those crickets chirping?

NEAT members would hold more than a half-dozen closed-door meetings before the San Antonio City Council got a private briefing in September. When the CPS board assembled October 1 to vote the NRG partnership up or down, CPS executives had already joined the application pending with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A Supplemental Participation Agreement allowed NRG to move quickly in hopes of cashing in on federal incentives while giving San Antonio time to gather its thoughts. That proved not too difficult. Staff spoke of “overwhelming support” from the Citizen’s Advisory Board and easy relations with City staff. “So far, we haven’t seen any fatal flaws in our analysis,” said Mike Kotera, executive vice president of energy development for CPS. With boardmember and Mayor Phil Hardberger still in China inspecting things presumably Chinese, the vote was reset for October 29.

No one at the meeting asked about cost, though the board did request a month-by-month analysis of the fiasco that has been the South Texas Project 1&2 to be delivered at Monday’s meeting. When asked privately about cost, several CPS officers said they did not know what the plants would run, and the figure — if it were known — would not be public since it is the subject of contract negotiations. “We don’t know yet,” said Bob McCullough, director of CPS’s corporate communications. “We are not making the commitment to build the plant. We’re not sure at this point we really understand what it’s going to cost.” The $206 million outlay the board will consider on Monday is not to build the pair of 1,300-megawatt, Westinghouse Advanced Boiling Water Reactors. It is also not a contract to purchase power, McCullough said. It is merely to hold a place in line for that power.

It’s likely that we would come on a recurring basis back to the board to keep them apprised of where we are and also the decision of whether or not we think it makes sense for us to go forward,” said Larry Blaylock, director of CPS’s Nuclear Oversight & Development. So, at what point will the total cost of the new plants become transparent to taxpayers? CPS doesn’t have that answer. “At this point, it looks like in order to meet our load growth, nuclear looks like our lowest-risk choice and we think it’s worth spending some money to make sure we hold that place in line,” said Mark Werner, director of Energy Market Operations.

Another $10 million request for “other new nuclear project opportunities” will also come to the board Monday. That request summons to mind a March meeting between CPS officials and Exelon Energy reps, followed by a Spurs playoff game. Chicago-based Exelon, currently being sued in Illinois for allegedly releasing millions of gallons of radioactive wastewater beneath an Illinois plant, has its own nuclear ambitions for Texas. South Texas Project The White House champions nuclear, and strong tax breaks and subsidies await those early applicants. Whether CPS qualifies for those millions remains to be seen. We can only hope.

CPS has opted for the Super Honkin’ Utility model. Not only that — quivering on the brink of what could be a substantial efficiency program, CPS took a leap into our unflattering past when it announced it hopes to double our nuclear “portfolio” by building two new nuke plants in Matagorda County. The utility joined New Jersey-based NRG Energy in a permit application that could fracture an almost 30-year moratorium on nuclear power plant creation in the U.S.

After Unit 1 came online in 1988, it had to be shut down after water-pump shaft seared off in May, showering debris “all over the place,” according to Nucleonics Week. The next month two breakers failed during a test of backup power, leading to an explosion that sheared off a steam-generator pump and shot the shaft into the station yard. After the second unit went online the next year, there were a series of fires and failures leading to a half-million-dollar federal fine in 1993 against Houston Power. Then the plant went offline for 14 months. Not the glorious launch the partnership had hoped for. Today, CPS officials still do not know how much STP has cost the city, though they insist overall it has been a boon worth billions. “It’s not a cut-and-dried analysis. We’re doing what we can to try to put that in terms that someone could share and that’s a chore,” said spokesman McCollough. CPS has appealed numerous Open Records requests by the Current to the state Attorney General. The utility argues that despite being owned by the City they are not required to reveal, for instance, how much it may cost to build a plant or even how much pollution a plant generates, since the electricity market is a competitive field.

How do we usher in this new utopia of decentralized power? First, we have to kill CPS and bury it — or the model it is run on, anyway. What we resurrect in its place must have sustainability as its cornerstone, meaning that the efficiency standards the City and the utility have been reaching for must be rapidly eclipsed. Not only are new plants not the solution, they actively misdirect needed dollars away from the answer. Whether we commit $500 million to build a new-fangled “clean-coal” power plant or choose to feed multiple billions into a nuclear quagmire, we’re eliminating the most plausible option we have: rapid decentralization.

A 2003 study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimates the cost of nuclear power to exceed that of both coal and natural gas. A U.S. Energy Information Administration report last year found that will still be the case when and if new plants come online in the next decade. If ratepayers don’t pay going in with nuclear, they can bet on paying on the way out, when virtually the entire power plant must be disposed of as costly radioactive waste. The federal government’s inability to develop a repository for the tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste means reactors across the country are storing spent fuel in onsite holding ponds. It is unclear if the waste’s lethality and tens of thousands of years of radioactivity were factored into NEAT’s glowing analysis.

The federal dump choice, Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, is expected to cost taxpayers more than $60 billion. If it opens, Yucca will be full by the time STP 3&4 are finished, requiring another federal dump and another trainload of greenbacks. Just the cost of Yucca’s fence would set you back. Add the price of replacing a chain-link fence around, let’s say, a 100-acre waste site. Now figure you’re gonna do that every 50 years for 10,000 years or more. Security guards cost extra. That is not to say that the city should skip back to the coal mine. Thankfully, we don’t need nukes or coal, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a D.C.-based non-profit that champions energy efficiency. A collection of reports released this year argue that a combination of ramped-up efficiency programs, construction of numerous “combined heat and power” facilities, and installation of on-site renewable energy resources would allow the state to avoid building new power plants. Texas could save $73 billion in electric generation costs by spending $50 billion between now and 2023 on such programs, according to the research group. The group also claims the efficiency revolution would even be good for the economy, creating 38,300 jobs. If ACEEE is even mostly right, plans to start siphoning millions into a nuclear reservoir look none too inspired.

To jump tracks will take a major conversion experience inside CPS and City Hall, a turning from the traditional model of towering plants, reels of transmission line, and jillions of dependent consumers. CPS must “decentralize” itself, as cities as close as Austin and as far away as Seattle are doing. It’s not only economically responsible and environmentally sound, but it is the best way to protect our communities entering what is sure to be a harrowing century. Greening CPS CPS is grudgingly going greener. In 2004, a team of consultants, including Wisconsin-based KEMA Inc., hired to review CPS operations pegged the utility as a “a company in transition.” Executives interviewed didn’t understand efficiency as a business model. Even some managers tapped to implement conservation programs said such programs were about “appearing” concerned, according to KEMA’s findings.

While the review exposed some philosophical shortcomings, it also revealed for the first time how efficiency could transform San Antonio. It was technically possible, for instance, for CPS to cut electricity demand by 1,935 megawatts in 10 years through efficiency alone. While that would be accompanied with significant economic strain, a less-stressful scenario could still cut 1,220 megawatts in that period — eliminating 36 percent of 2014’s projected energy use. CPS’s current plans call for investing $96 million to achieve a 225-megawatt reduction by 2016. The utility plans to spend more than four times that much by 2012 upgrading pollution controls at the coal-fired J.T. Deely power plant.

In hopes of avoiding the construction of Spruce 2 (now being built, a marvel of cleanliness, we are assured), Citizen Oversight Committee members asked KEMA if it were possible to eliminate 500 megawatts from future demand through energy efficiency alone. KEMA reported back that, yes, indeed it was possible, but would represent an “extreme” operation and may have “unintended consequences.” Such an effort would require $620 million and include covering 90 percent of the cost of efficiency products for customers. But an interesting thing happens under such a model — the savings don’t end in 2012. They stretch on into the future. The 504 megawatts that never had to be generated in 2012 end up saving 62 new megawatts of generation in 2013 and another 53 megawatts in 2014. With a few tweaks on the efficiency model, not only can we avoid new plants, but a metaphorical flip of the switch can turn the entire city into one great big decentralized power generator.

Even without good financial data, the Citizen’s Advisory Board has gone along with the plan for expansion. The board would be “pennywise and pound foolish” not to, since the city is already tied to STP 1&2, said at-large member Jeannie O’Sullivan. “Yes, in the past the board of CPS had been a little bit not as for taking on a [greater] percentage of nuclear power. I don’t know what their reasons were, I think probably they didn’t have a dialogue with a lot of different people,” O’Sullivan said.

For this, having a City-owned utility offers an amazing opportunity and gives us the flexibility to make most of the needed changes without state or federal backing. “Really, when you start looking, there is a lot more you can do at the local level,” said Neil Elliott of the ACEEE, “because you control building codes. You control zoning. You can control siting. You can make stuff happen at the local level that the state really doesn’t have that much control of.” One of the most empowering options for homeowners is homemade energy provided by a technology like solar. While CPS has expanded into the solar incentives field this year, making it only the second utility in the state to offer rebates on solar water heaters and rooftop panels, the incentives for those programs are limited. Likewise, the $400,000 CPS is investing at the Pearl Brewery in a joint solar “project” is nice as a white tiger at a truck stop, but what is truly needed is to heavily subsidize solar across the city to help kickstart a viable solar industry in the state. The tools of energy generation, as well as the efficient use of that energy, must be spread among the home and business owners.

Joel Serface, with bulb-polished pate and heavy gaze, refers to himself as a “product of the oil shock” who first discovered renewables at Texas Tech’s summer “geek camp.” The possibilities stayed with him through his days as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley and eventually led him to Austin to head the nation’s first clean-energy incubation center. Serface made his pitch at a recent Solar San Antonio breakfast by contrasting Texas with those sun-worshipping Californians. Energy prices, he says, are “going up. They’re not going down again.” That fact makes alternative energies like solar, just starting to crack the 10-cent-per-killowatt barrier, financially viable. “The question we have to solve as an economy is, ‘Do we want to be a leader in that, or do we want to allow other countries [to outpace us] and buy this back from them?’” he asked.

To remain an energy leader, Texas must rapidly exploit solar. Already, we are fourth down the list when it comes not only to solar generation, but also patents issued and federal research awards. Not surprisingly, California is kicking silicon dust in our face.