Secrets of the Deep Future
How Capitalist Energy Crimes Have Screwed Up Our Planet For Longer Than You Will Ever Know... and What You Can Do About It Now
In thousands of earth shattering explosions, most of the mountain tops in West Virginia have been blown up to scrape up the coal that lies within, and along the way bury countless stream beds with tons of debris, and pollute rivers with an alphabet soup of toxic materials. In Pennsylvania, New York and several other states, water laced with toxic chemicals has been pumped deep into the earth through hundreds of wells under enormous pressure to smash up mineral deposits and release natural gas for sale on an upbeat world market, while local water systems become so polluted that, in some cases, it becomes possible to light a flame at your kitchen faucet (as shown on a viral YouTube video).
Meanwhile, an area of formerly pristine wilderness the size of England is being raked clean of life and destroyed in Canada to extract oil from tar sands, the most carbon-intensive and counter-productive oil-producing method yet devised—again to capitalize on a rising market. And now, as BP’s deep-water drilling “accident” in the Gulf of Mexico fades into media forgetfulness, we have the Fukushima nuclear meltdown disaster.
These insults and injuries—combined with the looming, devastating reality of global warming—are all outrageous crimes of a rapacious capitalist system, which puts profits ahead of both people and the planet, and devours nature as though it was “free lunch.” We can fight back if we arm ourselves with a united working-class revolutionary program, but as shown by the debate around nuclear power in the wake of Fukushima, such a unity of program may be a little hard to come by.
A few days after the huge 9.0 earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011, the world was made aware that damaged nuclear reactors at the Fukushima-Daichi plant in Japan were irradiating the earth and threatening to melt down. But from day one, authorities presented false assurances, premature evaluations and outright lies, hoping to cover up this developing disaster.
At first, Japanese authorities told people NOT to evacuate, but to stay inside with the windows closed, only to order an inadequate evacuation in several hours. Later it was reported that the whole prefecture of Fukushima had in fact been evacuated by most people, despite the government’s limited 12-mile evacuation zone.1 For several days authorities squandered opportunities to control the dispersal of radiation, which some scientists say would have only been possible by immediate entombment of the nukes in concrete, as happened at Chernobyl. Now, given a worse-case scenario of the resulting situation, nuclear physicist Michio Kaku concluded that, “Huge parts of northern Japan could be off limits for centuries.”2
Go ahead, eat the bitter fruit of nuclear power
Reports of radiation contamination of water and foodstuffs produced near the plant soon came in—contamination of leafy greens in Fukushima Prefecture, and of water in Tokyo. Furthermore, irradiated water had both leaked and been dumped into the ocean, resulting in contaminations of up to 7.5 million times the “acceptable” dose of radioactive iodine.3
Despite these reports, and despite bans on Japanese food imports spreading around the world, fishers were still fishing in radioactive waters, and Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan ridiculed those calling for an end to nuclear reactors, declaring that produce from the region around the Fukushima plant was safe to eat, despite farmers’ own misgivings about the radiation on their crops!4 This reminds us of George W. Bush’s admonition after 9/11 to “go shopping,” and the EPA’s assertion that the air around the fallen twin towers was safe to breathe. And so it suggests the idea that maybe the rulers of modern capitalist society ARE just as criminally insane as Ghengis Khan or Emperor Nero after all.
Eventually the realities began to be admitted by officials that Fukushima was a “7” (the maximum, as with Chernobyl, which scientists had known all along), not a “5,” on the nuclear disaster scale, as was earlier alleged. In fact, the exposed spent fuel pool at reactor No. 3 had exploded, sending pieces of plutonium-containing spent fuel rods up to two miles away.5 And in June, the Japanese government finally admitted that the radiation emitted from the plant was in fact about twice what had been earlier stated; that one reactor had experienced a fuel containment breach as early as five hours after the earthquake; and that three of the reactors had experienced fuel meltdowns.6
Capitalism can see neither forward nor back…In Japan
In fact the Fukushima-Daichi plants could be called criminally experimental from day one. Designers clearly didn’t know what they were doing by putting back-up generators at the bottom of the plant, where they could be inundated by a tsunami, with the ensuing loss of back-up electrical power; or by locating spent fuel pools high above the reactors, where they could—and did—dry out and explode in a crisis.
Perhaps most instructively, the designers overlooked the lesson of history, which was right before their eyes. Six hundred years ago, based on the experiences of earlier tsunamis no doubt, villagers had placed stone markers which were inscribed with the message, “Do not build any homes below this point.” Villages—and the Fukushima power plants—that were built below these points were wiped out by the tsunami, while hamlets built above them survived.7
…Or in the U.S.
As with the inception and entire history of nuclear energy, deceptive and dishonest pronouncements held sway in the U.S. as well. Perhaps the most brazen such assertion came from Dr. Joseph Oehmen, an MIT professor, who wrote on March 13th, “I repeat, there was and will not be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors.”8 This was a denial of the obvious, which was that radiation from Fukushima was going to spread around the globe. As of April 12th, radiation levels in U.S. milk supplies (of radioactive iodine, which can cause thyroid cancer, especially in children) were reported at 300 percent of the EPA’s allowable maximum, due to the on-going plumes from Fukushima.9
None of this deterred the Obama administration however, which continues to pursue nuclear energy in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, despite major course changes away from new nuclear plant construction in Germany, Italy and now Japan itself.
Obama is continuing a key trajectory of U.S. imperialism, dating back to the World War II era. The United States, the only power (so far) to use atomic weapons, was also the mother of nuclear power development. This was a direct outgrowth of the military nuclear weapons program from day one. “Atoms for Peace” was put together by the Eisenhower administration to make the U.S. look good next to the Soviet Union, which had developed the A-bomb much quicker than the U.S. expected. The U.S.S.R. was looked to by the Third World as an alternative to European/U.S. imperialism in the post-war period, in which anti-colonial uprisings were sprouting around the globe. It wasn’t just about the H-bomb, you see; it was about “peaceful use” of atomic energy! And, it was about U.S. imperialism being able to corner a new international market before the Soviets could get an oar in.
Just after the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb test in 1953, Congress was getting riled up:
“It is possible that the relations of the United States with every other country in the world could be seriously damaged if Russia were to build an atomic power plant for peace time use ahead of us. The possibility that Russia might actually demonstrate her ‘peaceful’ intentions in the field of atomic energy while we are still concentrating on atomic weapons could be a major blow to our position in the world.”10
In war, hot or cold, truth is the first casualty
Right from the beginning however, the warnings were clearly made about both the dangers and problems of splitting the atom to make energy. Writing about future proliferation threats, then Under-Secretary of state Dean Acheson said in 1946 that, “The development of atomic energy for peaceful purposes, and the development of atomic energy for bombs are in much of their course interchangeable and interdependent.”11
Similar pronouncements were made by leaders of the Manhattan Project (developers of the atomic bomb) such as J. Robert Oppenheimer and others, about how the same methods and processes would be involved in both energy and bomb-making. These, and warnings over the basic safety of any industry based on nuclear reactions, were ignored. And as for the economics, no one who knew anything thought nuclear power would be cheap to produce. The propaganda about a “magical” energy source which would be “too cheap to meter” was just that, propaganda, churned out to justify an imperialist drive for a new market, and an edge against a perceived communist threat.
Nuclear capitalists are on welfare
The fact that nuclear power is not cheap is now well known, but it wouldn’t have even gotten off the ground, let alone developed as far as it has, without massive government subsidies. It’s hardly the cup of “tea” for Democratic and Republican small government deficit cutters, one would think, but nuclear power is so heavily supported that even its liabilities are covered. The Price-Anderson Act of 1957, as modified in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, set a limit on the liability of plant operators in the case of a catastrophic accident of $10.9 billion. Actual cost estimates of such an accident at a typical U.S. plant vary from somewhat over two-to over fifty-times this amount. Despite all the government support and what amounts to government insurance against damages, the big burst of nuclear power plant building in the U.S. in the 1960s turned out to be money-losers for GE and Westinghouse, because expected costs of operation were so much higher than estimates from the (since abolished) U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.12
Among the biggest crimes of the nuclear power industry is the deliberate and still-ongoing denial of the dangers of nuclear radiation, particularly long-term low-level exposures. This is first of all a crime of the capitalist class and its power-driven imperialist government, which ignored safety concerns in the drive to build and experiment with nuclear weapons. Atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site caused between 11,300 and 212,000 cases of thyroid cancer, according to a study done by the National Cancer Institute. And just as the potential connection between the nuclear power fuel cycle and nuclear weapons was evident from the first days of atomic power, so were the dangerous effects of radiation. The radioactive Iodine-131 being released in the tests, which caused the cancers, was known to the U.S. government to concentrate in milk, and from there, to be taken up by the thyroid gland. Children were thus at particular risk, but this was of no concern to the government.
“Companies like Eastman-Kodak were warned of fallout patterns so that they could protect their film stocks, but no such warnings were given to farmers or families so that they could protect their children.”13
No comparable study of the effects on Canada or Mexico, which were known to have also received fallout, were done by the National Cancer Institute or any U.S. government agency. The atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and the lies and deceptions that went along with it, were, like the bombs themselves that were dropped on an already-defeated Japan in 1945, all about the mad drive of the U.S. to ensure its dominance, and destroy the Soviet Union.
Low-level radiation, high-level lies
The main dangers of radiation, particularly high-level bursts as in a bomb, or in the fallout from a nuclear weapons test, were known in the late 1940s and 50s. And while other aspects of the radiation issue had to be learned, there is absolutely no excuse today for the on-going lies about low-level exposures. We are bombarded with messages of “nothing to worry about” from Fukushima in the U.S., and the government doesn’t even issue reports on radiation levels. Yet it has been conclusively shown by scientists such as physicist Ernest Sternglass and many others, that not only is there no safe dose of radiation, but low level doses, including levels only slightly above “normal” background radiation, “do not extrapolate into lower rates of cancer and other diseases.” Moreover, Sternglass reports in “Nuclear Radiation and the Destruction of the Immune System,”
“Doses delivered slowly and continuously over extended periods of time, such as from the ingestion or inhalation of fission products, are hundreds of times as damaging as short, high intensity exposures at the same small total dose produced by a brief X-ray.”14
Sternglass has confirmed this through numerous studies of the raw data, starting with the effects of fallout from atmospheric testing, and from extensive review of the data from the Chernobyl catastrophe of 1986, in which he found that low-level radiation spreading from the site caused a measurable increase in mortality almost immediately.
“Infant and fetal mortality rates as far from Chernobyl as Germany and the U.S. increased significantly in the period immediately following the arrival of the fallout, just as they had done during the period of atmospheric weapons testing.”
In the above-mentioned paper, Sternglass reports specific results that show this from around the country and world. The reason for these results dates back to research as early as 1972 which showed that the dominant biological damage from low doses at very low rates is produced by toxic, short-lived excited molecules, called “free radicals,” a single one of which can destroy a cell by rupturing the cell membrane.
“The action of free radicals is a far more efficient process” than direct hits to the DNA, which is what happens in short-term high doses. “As a result, radioactive releases from nuclear bomb testing and normal as well as accidental releases from nuclear plants, turn out to be hundreds- to thousands-of-times more serious than is presently maintained by the nuclear industry.” On-going, low-level releases from normally-operating nuclear power plants are also documented to have shown increases in cancer, premature under-weight births, high levels of Strontium-90 in baby teeth and autism in people living near power plants.15 So, for every nuclear power plant in the world, and there are hundreds, there is now an uninhabitable (or not safely habitable) zone, which will be there for uncountable thousands-of-years.
The long-term threat: spent nuclear fuel
Which brings us to the topic of the spent nuclear fuel pools (and occasional dry cask storage units), which surround all of these plants. No one has come up with a solution to the problem of spent fuel rods, so they sit in these pools, which are mostly not inside containment structures like the reactors are, and which, in the wisdom of the designers, were not supposed to be there very long at all. The pools need to be kept filled with water to keep them from over heating, exploding, and releasing radiation (as happened at Fukushima-Daichi No.3).
No nation, in fact no one, knows what to do with this stuff. Secure burial has always been considered the best solution, but the U.S. was at the head of the pack with Yucca Mountain disposal site in Nevada, and that has now been cancelled. Other countries’ plans are less further along and equally dubious. The problem with Yucca Mountain, aside from local opposition including from native peoples whose land would be compromised, is similar to what is happening beneath the Nevada Test Site (NTS), as a result of underground nuclear testing.
Nevada test site: radioactive rubble seeps poison
The original Department of Energy (DOE) plan assumed that the heat from nuclear warhead explosions underground (921 of them) would fix the plutonium in the rock (which is now in an area of radioactive rubble the size of Rhode Island). But this analysis failed to take into consideration the action of small amounts of plutonium suspended in water, which would then gradually move downhill, which in this case, is toward Las Vegas. Of course, reaching Las Vegas could take this polluted water a few thousand years, but since the half-life of Plutonium-129 is 24,000 years... you do the math.
The Nevada legislature has taken the first step in demanding compensation from the federal government for radioactivity in the water table beneath the Nevada Test Site, (Los Angeles Times, June 10, 2011). Will there even be a Nevada legislature by the time the polluted water reaches Las Vegas?
The same problem has cropped up in numerous cases, such as Hanford, Washington, for instance, the location of one of the early weapons facilities. The Department Of Energy’s early estimates were wrong again, and fission products and other radionuclides from leaking high-level waste tanks have been found to have reached the water table below Hanford, in some cases after just 60 years. Similarly, with Yucca Mountain, original estimates of the possibility of water penetration into the storage facility topped out at 20,000 years, leading the DOE to conclude that “there would be no release of radionuclides from Yucca Mountain into the biosphere within the first 10,000 years...” But subsequent findings in the 1990s showed that, “what was supposed to be a dry repository was now found to be potentially far wetter than expected.”16
Yucca mountain can’t contain it
Even if Yucca Mountain had been a suitable site, it would not have been enough. The projected amount of spent fuel that would need storage by 2012—the earliest projected date for the opening of the Yucca Mountain facility—was 67,500 metric tons. Yucca’s maximum was 63,000 metric tons.17
Has mankind opened a Pandora’s box here? No, capitalism opened this box, and mankind will suffer from that for longer than any of us will ever know. Consider that spent nuclear fuel contains: Strontium-90, with a half-life of 28 years; Cesium-137, half-life 30 years; and Plutonium-239, with a half-life of 24,000 years. (These are combined with some Technetium-99, half/life 212,000 years; Cesium-135, half/life 2.3 million years; and Iodine-129, half/life 15.7 million years.) Add into this frightening brew the depleted uranium which has been spread all over Iraq and Yugoslavia in the form of weapons remains—depleted uranium has a half-life of 4.468 billion (that’s billion with a “b”) years—and you begin to have an idea that capitalism, with its total disregard for the future beyond this year’s bottom line, has compromised the rest of humanity’s existence.
160,000 years and still glowing death
Let’s run that by again, using only one example. Plutonium-239 is perhaps the most poisonous substance known to humanity. Any sizable dose kills instantly, and one microscopic particle lodged in the lung can cause cancer. Its half-life is 24,000 years. But “half-life” means that only half of it degrades to another form, giving off radiation in the process, while the other half remains waiting to degrade at any moment. Bottom line: of the amount of plutonium ready to go to Yucca Mountain in 2012, after 160,000 years there would still be more than four-and-a-half metric tons of radioactive Plutonium-239, enough to make nearly 570 nuclear bombs if recovered.18 In other words, this waste could still be spread around the planet in hundreds of no-go zones near dead nuclear plant sites in... 160,000 years or more! Think about it. The modern human species (homo sapiens) has only existed for at most 130,000 years!
As for depleted uranium, its half/life (nearly four-and-one-half billion years) equals the life span of the earth itself! As with other substances, a very long half/life means an extremely slow and weak rate of decay. Depleted uranium (which is essentially U-235, the naturally found uranium) is so weak that a piece of paper, or human skin, stops its radioactive penetration. But the inhalation or ingestion of the smallest particle presents a different story. All manner of diseases can be caused by a small particle lodged in the body, because the slow, low-level radiation repeatedly impacts the surrounding organs. Used in armor and munitions, this stuff gets pulverized and dispersed around the area in which it is used, and the medical record, particularly among Iraqis, is mounting.
Capitalism: destroying nature, destroying the future
Thus capitalism has succeeded in compromising our human future for longer than we’ve existed on the planet, and in some ways, for longer than the life of the planet itself. Yet some still would say, “someone will come up with a solution eventually.” And even if some partial solutions do arise, needless to say, this is the height of arrogant hubris. This isn’t the only problem with which capitalism has saddled humanity’s future. Global warming now looms over us as a certain prospect, as capitalist governments around the world, particularly the U.S., dig in their heals to protect their bottom line and ignore the future.
Since the dire after effects of human atom-splitting (read capitalist nuclear criminality) will last for hundreds-of-thousands, or millions- or billions-of-years, conscious humans of today, lacking the answers that the capitalists should have had, must at least examine the consequences. One of the controversies around Fukushima involves the question of what was the real cause. This boils down to natural disaster, versus bad planning and unpreparedness on the part of the industry. Thus the “real” problem at Fukushima was the failure of the electrical back-up system for the cooling apparatus, not the tsunami. Back-up electrical systems can be knocked out in many ways, it is said: blizzards, tornados, etc. Of course this was human failure both in bad design and in getting into nuclear power in the first place. But now that we’re in this mess, we must consider the future nuclear “legacy” to humankind in its entirety. And in this view, natural disasters offer a greatly expanded menu of possibilities.
A long, dark shadow is cast
Humanity’s future—never considered by those that started down the nuclear road—depends in a big way on a stable, capable society in place to deal with the leftover nuclear plants and waste dumps, to make sure people are protected from them, and they are kept from exploding or otherwise getting worse. But what is human society going to look like over the next 160,000 years, and will it even be around to deal with all the leftover problems of the 20th and 21st centuries?
The first problem is global warming, which is also caused by the capitalist system, and “natural” only in its many manifestations. Oceans will rise perhaps as much as 25 feet in a couple centuries, water sources will be depleted, human migrations will be massive, agriculture will have to be reinvented, and weather patterns and even ocean currents will be dramatically altered. At worst, the human species could be on the brink of extinction, the surviving few barely making do with a subsistence agricultural society. Through all this instability, those nuclear waste dumps are still going to be there, and dozens of them are going to have to be moved up away from the rising oceans.
“The development of atomic energy for peaceful purposes, and the development of atomic energy for bombs are in much of their course interchangeable and interdependent.”
Let’s assume that humanity survives the next two- or three-hundred years; the rest of our 160,000 years or more of waste dumps containing radioactive plutonium stretch out before us. On that time scale, based on the geological record, vast earthquakes, tsunamis and mega-volcanoes are possible. Tsunamis caused by volcanic landslides are the worst; Japan had one reaching a 330-foot wave amplitude that killed 15,000 people in 1792. And mega-volcanoes have threatened humanity in the past. One in particular, the Toba explosive eruption of 74,000 BCE, sent an estimated 1,000 cubic kilometers of material skyward in a plume that reached 25 kilometers high. It is thought to have devastated world climate, and brought the nascent human species almost to its knees. Perhaps 10,000 individuals survived through this. A similar event could occur within 160,000 years into the future, as there are many candidates for new mega eruptions on a long time scale. Will humanity be ready to deal with that and with the disruption, flooding or exposure of the still remaining nuclear waste dumps that could ensue from such an event?
Look at the big picture
All of this is not meant to focus our minds on a distant and possibly out-of-control future, but rather to see the big picture, starting with an understanding of the depth of depravity that the capitalist system represents. This system has rendered the future more and more dubious with its rapacious pursuit of profits, over both humanity and nature. The fossil fuel based and nuclear energy industries of capitalism are the leading edge of a mindless destructiveness that must be stopped. We must focus our energies around an anti-capitalist program that envisions how the working class can remake society to eliminate fossil fuel and nuclear power industries and replace them with clean, renewable energy sources on a world scale. To do this, we must not pick and choose between the alternatives presented to us by the system, but instead fight for a program built around the real needs of working people and all of humanity.
Viewed from this standpoint, it is disappointing to see that a left wing muck-raking journalist such as George Monbiot, has succumbed to the siren song of “clean” nuclear energy, and to do so explicitly in the wake of Fukushima, in order to ward off the specter of coal power. Monbiot, who once looked favorably on the prospects for renewable energy, now derides them as being based on a return to a primitive pre-industrialism that has its own environmental problems and cannot replace modern industry. But renewable energy sources, particularly wind and solar, working in a coordinated overall plan with wave energy, geothermal and other sources, are hardly pre-industrial. An increasing number of observers are coming to the conclusion that such a program could be workable. See for instance a recent piece in Scientific American, based around a 2009 Stanford University study.19
The problem for both Monbiot and the Scientific American authors and others in the environmental movement is that they frame their arguments within the possibilities of capitalism. While Monbiot and other “green” pro-nukes (James Lovelock, author of Gaia, preceded Monbiot in this) endorse one of the most dangerous and destructive industries in the capitalist arsenal, environmentalists such as the Scientific American authors naively assume that capitalism can be persuaded to change its ways. Environmentalists such as the Scientific American authors cite the economic transformation in the U.S. in World War II, forgetting that this top-down transformation was in the service of imperialist war, not in serving the true needs of people.
Only one way forward: revolution
A transformation of the economy and industry such as the Scientific American authors suggest is technically feasible, but could only be brought about by overthrowing capitalism and revolutionizing society from top to bottom. Seizing the assets of the capitalist ruling class, and putting them to use rebuilding old industries and setting up new ones will be necessary in order to make a renewable future come into being soon. Time is of the essence, because the longer we wait, the worse the effects of global warming/nuclear accidents will be.
Many socialists, especially at times such as the present, in the wake of a major disaster, tend to focus on one target demand, such as “abolish nuclear,” without tying that into an anti-capitalist whole. Simply abolishing nuclear, while necessary, is not enough. Stopping offshore oil drilling, the ravaging of rainforests and other natural landscapes by big oil, mountain top removal by the coal industry, and fracking for natural gas are all equally urgent demands. Getting rid of all of these industries, including nuclear is vital, but only within a plan of developing new jobs and new industries in the renewable sector to replace them.
The Trotskyist Transitional Program, based on the entire programmatic history of the Marxist communist movement, offers a framework for formulating programmatic demands, which address the immediate needs of the working people in a revolutionary way. Though forgotten or turned into a set of reform demands by many avowed revolutionaries, (many of whom support the nuclear industry out of mistaken belief that the workers can simply take over existing capitalist industry and run it for peoples’ needs) the Transitional Program shows concretely how the real needs of working people and all humanity can only be achieved through revolutionary means. In the critical case of addressing global warming and nuclear atrocities while raising, not lowering the living standards of workers and poor, a transitional approach would begin by calling for the expropriation under workers control of all the big extractive and energy corporations, as well as the major manufacturers in the transportation sector, and organize a complete retooling and conversion of these industries into building a new, renewable infrastructure under a national/international plan that coordinates local efforts with general needs. Such a program would require workers to come to power with their own revolutionary party, counterposed to all capitalist parties, and capable of forming a workers’ government.
1 Eileen Miyko Smith of Green Action Japan, on Flashpoints, KPFA Radio (www.kpfa.org), May 4th 2011.
2 Michio Kaku, Physics Professor at the City University of New York, on Flashpoints KPFA, April 12, 2011; and on Democracy Now!, WBAI NY, April 13, 2011.
3 KPFA Evening News, April 5, 2011.
4“Japanese nuclear plant hit by fire and third explosion,” The Guardian, March 15, 2011, quoted in Mitchel Cohen, Is it too late to save this planet? www.mitchelcohen.com
5 Arney Gundeerson, “Fair Winds”, on Flashpoints, KPFA, April 27, 2011.
6“Radiation Understated After Quake, Japan Says,” New York Times, June 6, 2011.
7 Jay Alabaster, Associated Press, “Tsunami-hit towns forgot warnings from ancestors,” April 6, 2011; quoted in Mitchel Cohen, Is it too late to save this planet? http://www.mitchelcohen.com
8 Quoted in Keith Harmon Snow, “Nuclear Apocalypse In Japan,” March 18, 2011, www.consciousbeingalliance.com
9“Radiation levels in U.S. milk now 300% of EPA maximum,” Natural News, April 12, 2011, www.naturalnews.com
10 Sterling Cole, chairman of the Joint Committee On Atomic Energy in the U.S. Congress, 1953, quoted in Brice Smith, Insurmountable Risks, RDR Books/IEER Press, 2006, p.iv. Brice Smith is a physicist and senior scientist at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, www.ieer.org
11 Dean Acheson et al, “A Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy,” March 16, 1946, in Brice Smith, op cit, p. 100
12 Brice Smith, op cit, pp 7 & 194-95.
13 Brice Smith, op cit, p 101. Smith refers the reader to Ortmeyer and Makhejani, “Worse Than We Knew,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nov/Dec, 1997 for more on this history.
14Ernest J Sternglass, “Nuclear Radiation and the Destruction of the Immune System,” in No Nukes, a Red Balloon Collective and Brooklyn Greens Pamphlet. See www.mitchelcohen.com. Sternglass is a former research director at Westinghouse, and chief technical officer of Radiation and Public Health Project, RPHP. www.radiation.org
15 Sternglass, on “Your Own Health and Fitness,” KPFA radio, March 29, 2011.
16 Brice Smith, op cit, p. 243-44, and 255
17 Brice Smith, op cit, p. 238
18 Brice Smith, op cit, P. 238
19 Mark Z Jacobson and Mark A Delucchi, “A plan to power 100 percent of the planet with renewables; wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world’s energy, eliminating all fossil fuels. Here’s how,” Scientific American, October 26, 2009. Find a more detailed discussion of the same general idea in Arjun Makhijani, “The Technical and Economic Feasibility of a Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free Energy System in the United States,” March 4, 2009, www.ieer.org
11 Dean Acheson et al, “A Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy,” March 16, 1946, in Brice Smith, op cit, p. 100