by Robin Klein and Paul Koberstein

Even more perplexing is the local wave of support for doing so. What we thought would be a slam-dunk, no way to fluoride in Portlandia, is turning out to be a contentious, heated campaign with well funded supporters facing aggressive savvy foes. The ‘science’ supporting the purported benefits and the alleged harm caused by the proposed fluoridation is simply not clear. There are some things that are known, however.

First up, effectiveness. It is well-known that some level of fluoride prevents cavities. However the amount required to prevent cavities depends on how it is applied. All agree that topical application in concentrations higher than those proposed in the drinking water is most effective. Serious questions are raised on whether the small amounts proposed to be added to drinking water would provide any benefit at all. Oregon Health Association OHA, Oregon’s lead agency on public health issues, supports fluoridation, citing the Center for Disease Control CDC’s task force findings. OHA conducted its own review of Oregon dental health yet OHA declined commenting to Cascadia Times on Portland’s Channel 2 KATU report of OHA’s recent Smile Survey numbers which indicate Portland area kids are getting fewer cavities than other areas in the state regardless of whether those communities fluoridate.

From the KATU Problem Solvers report on the OHA survey:

• 53.7% of the kids in the non-fluoridated areas had one or more cavities
• 52.03% of kids in fluoridated areas had one or more cavities
• 47.81% of kids in the Portland water district (which is currently fluoride-free) had one or more cavities

Looking at these results, it is hard to argue a case for fluoridation. Cascadia Times asked OHA to reconcile the numbers.

Cascadia Times Q&A with OHA spokesperson Jonathan Modie:

1) As Oregon’s public health agency, does OHA recommend or support the practice of fluoridating Portland’s public drinking water?

Meaningful collaboration between dental and medical providers, public health programs, schools, and others with a strong interest in oral health will be needed to support policies and programs to prevent dental disease in children. With that goal in mind, the Oral Health Program at the Oregon Health Authority’s Public Health Division recommends five effective community-based preventive measures:

Oral health care in coordinated care organizations (CCOs);
Early childhood cavities prevention;
Community water fluoridation;
School-based fluoride supplement programs in areas without community water fluoridation;
School-based dental sealant programs.

The Community Preventive Services Task Force recommends community water fluoridation based on strong evidence of effectiveness in reducing dental caries across populations. Evidence shows the prevalence of caries is substantially lower in communities with CWF. In addition, there is no evidence that CWF results in severe dental fluorosis.

2) What is the rationale for fluoridating or not fluoridating? How can public health be benefited or harmed ?

Community water fluoridation is an evidence-based practice recommended by the Community Preventive Services Task Force based on strong evidence of effectiveness in reducing dental cavities across populations. It is an effective, affordable, and safe way to protect children from tooth decay and is recognized as one of the 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20th century. Water fluoridation complements but does not replace other efforts to improve oral health. After communities fluoridate their water supplies, the percentage of children in the population with at least one cavity decreases by about 15%, on average, compared to before water fluoridation. The average number of cavities experienced by children in the population also is reduced when community water fluoridation is initiated. Water fluoridation is a valuable tool in addressing oral health disparities, since everyone benefits from it regardless of age, income level, or race or ethnicity.

3) Based on the OHA Smile Survey results published by KATU and Willamette Week, it appears that Portland fares better than other cities regardless of whether their water is fluoridated or not. Please help us to reconcile these numbers if fluoridation of public drinking water is encouraged.

I won’t speak to the analyses done by KATU and the Willamette Week. I can tell you that while results in 2012 appear improved from the worsening oral health status seen between 2002 and 2007, the burden of oral health problems among school-age children in Oregon remains substantial. Cavity rates among 6– to 9-year-old children in 2012 were generally at or above 50% throughout the state of Oregon, with one region in southeast Oregon experiencing cavity rates that were substantially higher than the rest of the state. All other regions — including Multnomah County — had cavity rates that were similar to the statewide average of 52%.

_________________________________________________________________

Is Portland arguably any worse? Nothing solid here.

Next, safety. Is drinking fluoridated water harmful? At the proposed concentration, harm has not been demonstrated. At higher concentrations mottling of teeth can occur, otherwise known as fluorosis,  as well as a host of other harmful effects including reduced brain function, endocrine disruption, thyroid problems, and possible bone deterioration. That does not mean however that residual, milder or long-term damage would occur, nor should such damage be ruled out with the proposed fluoride additive. Cited studies are limited in scope and conclusions. Studies on environmental safety are even more scarce. At much higher concentrations salmon migration is affected, even blocked. Studies of the impacts of the proposed lower levels in the already contaminated Willamette and Columbia Rivers have not been done. For that reason the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission CRTFC cautions against adding fluoride to the already overburdened ecosystem.

“In the Portland area, fish are exposed to many pollutants, including those from the Portland Harbor superfund site. With so many chemicals already impacting the capacity of the aquatic ecosystem, it is important to more thoroughly understand not only fluoride’s possible direct effects, but also how fluoride might contribute to the entire toxic burden these fish face. More research is also needed on any potential interactions between chemicals of concern on the ecosystem itself… Any environmental actions Portland makes has the potential to affect the migration of salmon destined for Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.” — CRITFC

Even less sufficiently reviewed are the impacts to the ecosystem of the source and impurity of the fluoride chemicals that would be added to public water. The proposed plan would use a fertilizer by-product fluorosilic acid containing trace amounts of heavy metals, lead and arsenic.

Okay, so the findings are iffy. What options then, do those who don’t want to ingest fluoride have, should the ballot measure pass? Turns out they better not be poor folk. To avoid ingesting fluoridated water, one would have to either buy bottled water or invest in a costly filtration system. The most common filters, like popular Brita or Pur, don’t do the job. Cost savings in dental care are touted in favor of fluoridated water. However, increased costs to avoid the stuff have not been considered. Given the divisiveness on this issue, that’s going to mean increased costs to a whole lot of people if the measure passes, a likely boon to bottled water companies, and leave many others with no choice but to drink fluoridated water.

Fluoridated water is no substitute for affordable quality dental care and investment by the state in children’s oral health. Throwing fluoride in the drinking water for cheap doesn’t substitute for topical fluoride treatment, avoidance or banning of harmful sugars, promotion of oral hygiene, and preventative dental care. Seems to us that everyone would be happy if the state just provided free tubes of fluoride toothpaste to Portland kids, in much the same way free kids bike safety helmets are handed out at local hospitals. More effective, cheaper for everyone, and safe.

We keep wondering still, who is behind this push to fluoridate? Crazy theories and accusations aside, established practice and conventional wisdom appear the most likely culprit. And the spinmeisters are in force in Portland on both sides of the issue. But Portland progressives are savvy, question authority and the status quo.

Unless science has proven beyond any doubt, that fluoridating public water is 100 percent safe and provides justifiable benefits, we shouldn’t be doing it. The science simply is not clear.

C’mon Portland, what are you thinking?

The post Adding Fluoride to Portland Drinking Water? Really? appeared first on Cascadia Times.

By Paul Koberstein and Robin Klein

(Updated)

The documents reveal that General Electric had not fully tested its then brand-new nuclear reactor technology when it introduced its first reactor in Eureka, Calif., in 1958.

GE engineers soon figured out that the company’s reactors had a number of defects, but it would be many years before GE let the public in on the secret. The old court documents show that for the next 16 years, while the GE engineers busily worked on understanding the bugs in its nuclear-powered machines, GE kept on selling them to unsuspecting electric utilities around the world with the idea of fixing them later, placing the defective machines in the backyards of communities without their knowledge or consent – a practice one federal judge later likened to a “sophisticated form of Russian Roulette.”

One of those communities was Richland in South Central Washington state, about 150 miles east of Portland and Seattle. Another was Fukushima, Japan, where in 2011 the same bugs that worried the GE engineers a half-century before contributed to three reactor explosions.

Moreover, GE inserted a clause into its sales contracts that limited its liability if defects were found in the reactors — defects that GE already knew were there. One federal judge found GE’s insertion of this clause into one of the sales contracts “unconscionable” and refused to enforce it.

An “unconscionable” bargain,” US District Judge Alan A. McDonald said, is one “such as no man in his senses and not under delusion would make.”

GE, the third largest corporation in the world, has designed and built dozens of nuclear reactors around the world. One of the utilities in the United States that bought a GE reactor was the Washington Public Power Supply System, or WPPSSS, for its nuclear plant near Richland.

Three General Electric nuclear reactors exploded at Fukushima in 2011. The only commercial nuclear reactor in the Northwest is almost a carbon copy of the Fukushima reactor.

But now it is clear that the retrofits did not fully correct all the problems with the GE reactors. In 2011 the Russian Roulette gun finally went off at Fukushima, Japan, where the three nuclear reactor explosions spewed tons of dangerous nuclear radiation across the countryside.

The Fukushima plants are almost a carbon copy of GE’s plants in the United States, including Columbia Generating Station.

Recently the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ordered another fix, but many questions still remain. Citizen groups are calling on the NRC to shut down CGS as well as all other GE reactors.

GE built six similar models of its boiling water nuclear reactor — the BWR 1–6 — and three sizes of containment buildings to protect the public from radiation coming off the reactors — the Mark I, II and III.

In 1974, GE publicly admitted that in certain accident and non-accident situations, its smallest nuclear plant, the Mark I, and the slightly larger Mark II, could be subjected to “newly discovered” physical pressures that could structurally damage the steel containment and the equipment inside it. Later, GE acknowledged similar problems with the much larger Mark III model.

 However, as the old court documents make clear, GE’s top nuclear engineers had been expressing serious misgivings about the stability of the containment buildings long before 1974.

In memos to their superiors that go back as early as 1964, the engineers questioned whether the reactors could remain stable during an accident scenario nearly identical to the one that unfolded a half-century later at Fukushima. However, they feared that a massive pipe break, rather than an epic earthquake and tsunami, would be the event that triggered the disaster.

The documents also remind us that in the 1990s, GE settled a series of claims made by utilities that had bought GE’s nuclear equipment and later had to rebuild them. At least 10 of GE’s nuclear power plants in the US were said to be defective (see the list at the bottom of this page), equal to one-fourth of all GE nuclear power systems that were ever operated in the United States.

At least four of the disputes led to lawsuits. The lawsuits accused GE of knowingly selling defective reactors as well as committing various other acts such as breach of contract, racketeering and fraud as part of a marketing scheme to foist the reactors upon unsuspecting utilities and the public without their knowledge of the defects or their consent.

In their complaints, the utilities claimed each type of GE containment building — the Mark I, II and III — was defective.

The Richland nuclear power plant, its BWR-5 reactor and its Mark II containment structure were built from 1973–1983. The owner was then known as the Washington Public Power Supply System, a consortium of 27 publicly-owned utilities in Washington state. The plant is situated on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the most radioactively contaminated site in the country. Hanford, a former nuclear weapons factory, is owned by the US Department of Energy, which leased a portion of the site to WPPSS for operating the commercial nuclear power plant.

In 1999, the nuclear power plant was renamed the “Columbia Generating Station.” The new name, which replaced “Washington Nuclear Plant 2,” obscures the fact that nuclear fuel is what is used there to make electricity.

The name “Washington Public Power Supply System” is gone too. The utility consortium, hoping to rebrand itself in the wake of the financial disaster it created in the 1970s and 1980s, is now called “Energy Northwest.” The old WPPSS (usually pronounced “whoops” for obvious reasons) failed spectacularly while trying to build five nuclear plants at the same time in the 1980s. All but one were cancelled. Construction costs exploded and WPPSS defaulted on $2.25 billion worth of construction bonds in what at the time was the largest municipal bond collapse in US history.

Meanwhile, WPPSS and General Electric couldn’t agree on who was liable for paying to fix the plant’s defects. In 1985 WPPSS sued GE for $1.2 billion. WPPSS claimed that in 1971, when it bought the reactor from GE for $110 million, GE failed to disclose its knowledge about the reactor’s defects. A decade later, WPPSS had to spend another $297 million to rebuild it, delaying the initial start-up by 18 months.

In 1990, during trial in US District Court, Judge Alan A. McDonald said he heard “unrebutted evidence” that GE had falsely claimed that its nuclear plant hardware was “proven and tested” before it was placed on the market.

The proceedings were declared a mistrial after a jury wasn’t able to reach a unanimous verdict. Judge McDonald ruled that WPPSS could base its complaint against GE on negligent misrepresentation rather than on fraud and breach of contract. A second trial was about to start in 1992 when a settlement was reached.

As the Seattle Times reported at the time, GE settled the case for $134.9 million worth of goods and services, but paid no cash. However, GE agreed to increase the power output of the WPPSS reactor by 50 megawatts, an increase that could generate about $16.5 million worth of electricity in a year.

Documents from the case show that GE intended to conduct full-scale tests of the plants only after utilities began operating them in the backyards of communities like Richland, and the neighboring Kennewick and Pasco.

“The Court can only view that as a fairly sophisticated form of Russian roulette,” McDonald wrote.

Russian Roulette is a potentially lethal game of chance in which a player places a single round in a revolver, spins the cylinder, places the muzzle against his head, and pulls the trigger.

In 2011, a quarter-century after Judge McDonald issued his warning about General Electric’s deadly nuclear power game, and a half-century after GE’s engineers expressed their own concerns, the Russian Roulette bullet finally went off. Three GE reactors exploded at Fukushima, devastating the northeastern part of Honshu, the largest island in Japan and spreading contamination as far south as Tokyo, a distance of nearly 150 miles, or about the same distance from Hanford to Portland or Seattle.

The radiation was released in amounts that are known to cause several deadly types of cancer, which can take up to twenty years to develop, and can harm the health of future generations by causing genetic mutations.

Dr. Helen Caldicott, the Australian medical doctor and anti-nuclear activist, estimates that 2.5 to 3.5 million people could eventually die from cancer caused by the Fukushima radiation release.

The Fukushima accident also contaminated the the North Pacific Ocean with large amounts of radioactive fallout that will persist for generations.

The people living near nuclear accidents or releases are often called “downwinders” because the air they breathe has often been contaminated by pollution from a source located upwind. Residents of the Tri-Cities in South Central Washington know well what it is like to be a downwinder. Since World War II, they have lived downwind from the highly polluted Hanford Nuclear Reservation and its now-closed nuclear reactors and bomb factories. They have suffered a series of health problems as a result.

A Fukushima-like explosion at the commercial nuclear plant would make previous contamination seem like child’s play: causing serious health effects, forcing massive evacuations of cities and towns, contaminating the Columbia River and its salmon runs, and rendering vast stretches of prime agricultural land uninhabitable for centuries.

Large portions of the United States are potentially at risk as well. Most of GE’s nuclear reactors are located near population centers east of the Mississippi River. More than 58 million people live within 50 miles of a GE nuclear reactor.

Why the GE plant failed at Fukushima and the NRC’s response

The nuclear power plants discussed here are known as boiling water reactors. There are 35 boiling water reactors currently operating in the United States and five that are defunct. Each was made by General Electric. Many of the other 68 plants in the US are known as pressurized water reactors and have had serious problems themselves. Westinghouse, a major manufacturer of these competing designs, has also had to fend off a series of lawsuits filed by its customers.

A schematic of the typical General Electric Mark I Boiling Water Reactor., which is slightly smaller than the Mark II model. The Mark III is larger yet.

Nuclear fission occurs within a long, skinny structure made of reinforced steel, with a concrete shell, in the shape of an upside-down incandescent light bulb. Known as a “containment vessel,” this structure contains a single nuclear reactor. Directly adjoining the containment vessel at Columbia Generating Station are 327 tons of still-highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel rods that sit in a pool of water above the reactor – six stories above ground and much less heavily protected than the reactor itself. As Dr. Caldicott points out, this irradiated fuel is about 1,000 times more radioactive than fresh fuel.

Hot, highly pressurized radioactive gas and steam fill up the empty spaces in the containment vessel. The vessel’s job is to contain its contents of gas, steam and radioactive particles so they don’t escape to the outside environment.

In the boiling water reactor models produced by GE, pumps deliver water to the reactor to cool it down as well as to produce steam that turns the turbines that generate the power.

Equipment in the plant is designed to condense the hot steam back into water. Because the Fukushima plants lost power after the earthquake and tsunami, they were unable to condense the steam. They could neither pump water needed to cool the reactors, nor control the pressure of the gas and steam filling the containment.

The most volatile of the gases in a nuclear containment structure is hydrogen, which is created when the zirconium cladding, or the outer covering of the nuclear fuel rods, becomes overheated while in contact with water or steam. At Fukushima, hydrogen and other gases built up at extreme pressures and began escaping through small gaps in the containment structures. The hydrogen found a spark three times, literally blowing the top off of three of the reactor buildings, further breaching containment, and spreading dangerous radioactive particles throughout northeastern Japan, the region, and around the northern hemisphere.

On March 19, 2013, in response to the Fukushima accident, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission ordered utilities to install vents that would release the pressure of hydrogen and other gases during a nuclear accident. Instead of requiring more robust vents and filters to prevent radioactive particles from escaping in a worst-case accident, as recommended by the NRC staff, utilities will be allowed to consider alternatives that get enough cooling water the reactor to avoid such a worst-case accident.

The Commission overruled the staff recommendation and decided, in a 4–1 vote, not to require the filters because of opposition from the nuclear power industry, which claimed they would be too expensive.

The WPPSS reactor in Hanford as well as many other plants now must still spend tens of millions of dollars to comply with the new, somewhat weakened, NRC order.

Only Allison MacFarlane, chair of the commission, voted in favor of the filtered vents. “My decision reflects, in part, my experiences during a recent trip to the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan,” she said. She said she traveled through deserted villages past homes and businesses that have overgrown with weeds since the accident.

She said it all underscored “the impact of the accident from a nuclear plant.”

David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists, said that, if installed, “the filters would remove 99 percent of the contamination.”

Moreover, Charles K. Johnson, director of the Joint Task Force on Nuclear Power for Oregon and Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility, stated, “this half-measure upgrade is unlikely to prevent a hydrogen explosion and a massive release of radiation in a worst-case scenario.”

As Paul Gunter of nuclear power opponent Beyond Nuclear put it, “Venting an accident without a filter” is like “fire-hosing downwind communities with massive amounts of radiation.”

It appears the Columbia Generating Station will still pose a safety risk to the public and the region even after the installation of vents is completed in 2016, as scheduled.

Meanwhile, another serious unresolved problem with GE plants has emerged: the discovery of gas bubbles trapped in the pipes of the emergency core cooling system. These bubbles can disable or damage the pumps when they are trying to cool the superheated reactor during an accident. If the pumps ingest enough air, “the pumps may become inoperable,” according to a study of the issue by scientists at Purdue University.

Since the pumps rely on the water they are pumping to provide lubrication and cooling, a pump that is trying to pump air can overheat causing its casing to thermally expand, exceeding tolerances.

“Since these components typically have tight tolerances, a significant amount of thermal expansion will cause these tolerances to be exceeded,” said an NRC engineer, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation by his employer.

Most significantly, the NRC has not found a solution to the gas bubble problem. Nevertheless, it allows the GE plants keep on running. The results could be catastrophic.

GE’s 12-year cover-up

At the time WPPSS bought its reactor, GE‘s engineers acknowledged in memos that they didn’t fully understand certain “phenomena” that occurred during the steam condensation process. As one GE engineer wrote in 1964, the steam condensation process was “the least understood” aspect of GE reactors.

The GE engineers had other worries as well, including mysterious vibrations which they had observed. In 1968, the manager of GE’s Systems Conformance Engineering Unit said the vibrations could not be explained without “very expensive large-scale tests.”

In 1970, the manager of GE’s Advance Systems & Analysis Design Unit noted that GE was trying to “dump” the vibration problem onto unsuspecting customers like WPPSS. He predicted however, that WPPSS and other utilities would fail to find a solution and that GE would eventually be called upon to conduct “a rescue operation.”

Also in 1970, engineers wrote about a different, potentially serious phenomenon: the “severe jumping and banging” they had observed when pressurized steam was injected into a massive water cooler known as the torus. The torus, located beneath the reactor, is part of the plant’s system to condense water and reduce pressure. Engineers saw the torus literally “jump off the floor,” as the New York Times described the phenomenon in 2011.

Were any of these concerns communicated to WPPSS prior to the sale? Apparently not. Federal District Court Judge McDonald wrote that WPPSS had “submitted uncontroverted evidence that nobody from GE ever told the Supply System about any concern GE had about the adequacy of the containment.”

GE engineers continued to voice concerns about its plants after the company sold the reactor to WPPSS. A 1975 memo from a GE engineer named Henry E. Stone noted that a variety of failures, technical problems and serious structural defects at GE reactors still had not been resolved. The memo was labeled “strictly private” and “GE confidential: Subject to protective order, Zimmer litigation.”

In response to Stone’s memo, A.J. Bray, general manager of GE’s nuclear reactor division, was taken aback by what he described as the memo’s “negative tone.”

“If any of our customers ever get a copy of this, we are in real trouble,” Bray wrote. “All of the comments may be true, but why does GE have to put it into print to ruin a business?”

The “Zimmer litigation” was a reference to a lawsuit filed by Cincinnati Gas & Electric over defects at its Zimmer Nuclear Plant, located on the Ohio River east of Cincinnati. GE never intended for the Bray memo to be released, but it was filed along with several other confidential documents in open court by lawyers for the plaintiffs, a breach of a protective order, which GE had expected would ensure confidentiality.

But an alert reporter for the local newspaper took notice, and soon stories began appearing about an alleged “12-year cover-up” of a “secret report” which contained “undisclosed safety problems,” according to a two-volume, 1200-page document produced in 1987 by GE about the history of its containment structure problems.

The GE history said the “misleading” newspaper articles “raised concerns in communities where GE BWRs (boiling water reactors) are in operation.” The confidential documents also proved troublesome when utilities and public officials in other states began demanding copies.

GE’s 1987 allegedly exhaustive history was full of holes. For example, the company neglected to give credit to the whistleblowers who raised questions about the plants’ safety in the 1960s and 1970s, leading to the repairs in the 1980s.

Zimmer, a Mark II GE plant near Cincinnati, never produced a single watt of nuclear power. Before the plant opened in 1983, it was converted to coal. The Zimmer plant, the world’s only nuclear power plant converted to a coal-burning facility, is now the largest single-unit coal-powered facility in the US.

Putting Profits First

The old court documents had been long forgotten when Daniel Pope, a professor at the University of Oregon, dug them up in a Lexis-Nexis search while doing research for his 2008 book, “Nuclear Implosions: The Rise and Fall of the Washington Public Power Supply System.”

When the New York Times wrote about the defective GE reactors in 2011 during the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima accidents, it made no mention of the old court documents. The writer recalled that some utility companies had thought about suing GE during the 1980s, but he failed to mention that some utilities did, in fact, file lawsuits — including two in New York State — Long Island Light and Niagara Mohawk Power. The New York Times even wrote a brief story about one of the lawsuits when it was filed in 1988. More information about the LILCO case can be found here.

However, the 2011 Times article did describe several other interesting documents, including a few from NRC officials critical of GE.

The Times reported that in 1972, Stephen H. Hanauer, then a safety official with the Atomic Energy Commission, recommended that the Mark 1 system be discontinued because it presented “unacceptable safety risks.” The Times added that, “Among the concerns cited was the smaller containment design, which was more susceptible to explosion and rupture from a buildup in hydrogen — a situation that may have unfolded at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.”

Also in 1972, Joseph Hendrie, who in 1977 became chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the successor agency to the Atomic Energy Commission, said the idea of a ban on this type of reactor “was attractive,” the Times reported.

But Hendrie added that a ban on GE’s technology particularly at this time, “could well be the end of nuclear power.’

One can assume that an industry that put profits first, ahead of safety and full disclosure, would have strongly resisted any effort to shut it down.

As GE general manager A.B. Bray says, the disclosure of damning facts can “ruin a business.” GE had invested billions of dollars in nuclear technology and had much to lose. GE sold 42 reactors in just two years in the early 1970s, which is more than the total number of boiling water reactors now in operation in the United States.

After hearing the case for seven years, Judge McDonald, a Ronald Reagan appointee who died in 2007, concluded that GE did not disclose its doubts about reactors to WPPSS because it “was concerned about its market position, profits and potential liability.”

Reginald Jones, CEO of GE, assured a group of security analysts in 1975 that he saw nuclear power as the future of energy and that GE would continue to invest in it. “And as long as we can make these investments, and contain our risks, then we’re going to continue with this strategy.”

Neither Energy Northwest nor General Electric responded to a request for comment on this story. In the past, each has said that GE nuclear plants are safe.

Others, such as Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear, disagree. “The Mark I and Mark II boiling water reactors are aging and deteriorating with fundamentally flawed containment systems,” he said.” They are inherently dangerous. These reactors should be immediately closed.”

This list shows the names of nuclear power plants and their owners that pressed claims against General Electric for defects in their reactors. The 10 plants on this list represent a quarter of all GE boiling water reactors ever sold in the United States. Source: Various media reports.

The post From the Pacific Northwest to Fukushima: the long, tragic trail of failed General Electric Nuclear Plants appeared first on Cascadia Times.

She dedicated herself to writing about environmental issues, which often resulted in the preservation of things that she cared about passionately, most notably our ancient forests. She was never an activist, but she didn’t have to be to be effective. Instead of screaming slogans or carrying signs at rallies, she quietly dredged up facts, and let the facts speak for themselves.

She did her most notable work for The Oregonian when the timber industry and their friends in Congress were hell-bent on liquidating the last of the Northwest’s grand ancient forests that once blanketed the landscape from Northern California to Canada.

The fight was about more than trees. The existence of hundreds of wildlife species — like salmon and the spotted owl — that depend on the old forests were at stake. But all the industry could see were billions of dollars of inventory standing on the ground, and it aimed to turn it all into profits. But then Kathie Durbin came along and exposed their plot.

In times past, The Oregonian along with other mainstream newspapers, had always reported stories about forests in terms of timber production and dollars per board feet. Kathie changed the terms of the debate.

“The story of the Pacific Northwest’s vanishing virgin forests is written on its mountains, in its foothills and along its river valleys,” she wrote in one of her most memorable pieces, a six-part series entitled Forests in Distress that The Oregonian published in September 1990.

“It’s a story best read from the air, where 140 years of logging has torn the deep green carpet that once covered the land into a tattered quilt of large and small clear-cuts, threaded together by thousands of miles of logging roads. In the Northwest, the timber industry is running out of places to cut.”

The old-growth debate had captured the nation’s attention. She continued,

Now the Northwest is facing basic truths: The forests do not go on forever. The land has limits. Past and present stewards of the Northwest’s forests have failed in many ways to safeguard and conserve them for the benefit of future generations.

A powerful new conservation ethic has taken hold, not just in the Pacific Northwest but nationwide. Americans want their forests to produce abundant wildlife and fish runs, pure drinking water and pristine rivers, scenic beauty and wilderness solitude, as well as wood.

Oregon is in the throes of a painful but long-predicted transition from an economy built on the wholesale harvesting of its virgin forests to one more complex and diversified. Washington, which is far less dependent on timber-driven jobs, has nearly completed that transition.

The hard reality confronting this region in the fall of 1990 has been building for half a century.

As a co-author of Forests in Distress, I shared some of the work, but most of it was Kathie’s. As Jim Britell of the Audubon Society said in 2011, “The series Forests in Distress was probably the turning point in the long battle over the fate of our forests. If you two never did anything else, that contribution to ours and other species by itself would more than justify two lives,” Britell said.

Kathie went on to write for the Vancouver Columbian and authored three books, including Tree Huggers, Victory, Defeat and Renewal in the Northwest Ancient Forest Campaign, as well as books on the Tongass National Forest of Southeast Alaska and the Columbia River Gorge. Material from all three books appeared in Cascadia Times.

Environmental journalism has lost a towering presence. But our ancient forests will continue to stand forever, a monument to the hard work of many people, including especially Kathie Durbin.

Click here for the full text of Forests in Distress

The post Remembering Kathie Durbin appeared first on Cascadia Times.

Clearly “Blackfish,” a disturbing expose of SeaWorld’s 30 years of shameful management and capture of orca whales, begs for policy change. It begs for ending such practices, for shutting down SeaWorld and freeing all the Willys. “Blackfish,” named for what Canadian first nations call orca whales, might have been the most emotional film at Sundance. It was painful to hear of mother whales screaming for their babies, and that whale life-spans are cut short in captivity to one-third of those in the wild.
Early in the documentary the whale brain is examined, showing an enlarged region governing emotion and how greatly it extends beyond the human brain’s emotional center. The whale is a super-feeling mammal. According to one of the early fishermen who captured baby whales for SeaWorld, the clever whales would try to trick hunting boats by hiding the babies and splitting them off from the larger group which would swim off in another direction as decoy. Fighting back tears, he said capturing those whales was the worst thing he’d ever done. The film also interviews many trainers and their families and even a former SeaWorld director, keying off horrific ‘accidents’ where whales attacked, and in some instances killed, trainers. SeaWorld has denied any fault in placing trainers’ lives in jeopardy. Never mind that confining such a massive, intelligent, emotional, ocean-ranging creature to a swimming pool might make it insane. Incidents of whales attacking humans in the wild are almost unheard of and never fatal. Lots of tear-wiping and sniffling in the press screening. A call to action if ever there was one, “Blackfish” leaves the viewer with the conviction that no whale should be held captive. Ever.

Sadly, this story is not entirely new. The documentary “The Cove” and the blockbuster “Free Willy” brought widespread attention to the folly of holding whales captive. Still, change has not happened.

Then there was one of the most important, eye-opening films for bewildered American audiences who wonder why it’s gotten so much harder to get by in the last fifty years. Post Occupy, “Inequality for All” recounts what’s caused the US economy to spin downward, and explains the elements needed to regain a robust economy. In short, one gets from the film that nearly everyone in America is struggling on some level, the 99% we are so familiar with. We ARE poorer and less educated than a generation ago, the average American male actually gets paid FEWER dollars than the average male did thirty years ago, while the top 1% have tripled their pay. An interview with one refreshingly candid, ridiculously wealthy CEO revealed that he paid 8% taxes on his earnings last year, while a typical working mom, having trouble making ends meet, paid 30% of her wages. At the core of the problem is the lack of investment in the working middle class. Fewer dollars go to subsidize education, healthcare, homeownership, and local manufacturing. Partly because we didn’t invest in a skilled workforce, manufacturers increasingly build overseas in search of not just cheap labor, but skilled labor. At the same time the tax breaks, given to very rich starting back in the seventies, have resulted in the funneling of wealth to the top 1% and away from the middle class. The middle class has been vanishing. Also, interestingly, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich points out that the top 1% are primarily CEOs. Most doctors, for example, don’t make the cut. The film delivers a course in current economics in an easy format including lively lecture excerpts from the outspoken celebrated economist Reich. The entire film showcases Reich teaching us what has happened. He is nothing short of inspirational, and succeeds in inflaming us over the injustices taking place for decades that are only now becoming understood by the average Joe.

Lastly, the moving thriller “The East,” isn’t a documentary at all but an exciting fictional Hollywood-esque movie about a secret eco-terrorist group that targets CEO’s of corporate giants and their cronies who make their fortunes forsaking environment and public health, by dosing them with their own medicine. Literally. An FBI undercover agent investigating the group quickly becomes sympathetic, as does the audience, despite the group’s weirdo extremist cult ways. Message? Activism is good. Extreme action is called for in cases of cruel, widespread harm caused as collateral for profit by a few fat cats. But the film stops short of blessing violence as the answer, and is careful to show the ugly consequences of eye for an eye ‘justice.’ Entertaining if not influential, “The East” reflects, en pointe, popular sympathies of our times.

All three of these compelling films are well-executed, powerful, moving and reflect public concerns. But still, will they motivate action? Or is it the other way around? Are they a reflection of growing audience concerns making for timely entertainment? We’ll have to see. I’m guessing a bit of both. Documentaries “Blackfish” and “Inequality for All” explain problems that we need to know about in order to fix them. While the feature “The East” makes necessary radical change exciting drama. A sign of activist times. That’s a good thing. I learned so much. It’s like, see these films, have fun, get fired up, and get educated.

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Slick, with a budget of over $1 million, “Pandora’s Promise” is a provocative breeze to watch. Taking cues from effective leftist eye-opening documentary styles, think Michael Moore crossed with the Academy award-winning anti-nuke film “Deadly Deception,” one can see why accomplished director Robert Stone’s “Pandora’s Promise” made the cut into this year’s Sundance Film Festival. And, indeed Sundance anticipated the controversy that’s bound to ensue.

“Pandora’s Promise” jumps off global warming fears and our world’s insatiable accelerating demand for more energy. Real concerns to be sure. The film further makes the case that radioactivity is nowhere near as bad for us as we’ve been told, claiming that man-made radioactivity from nuclear accidents is not so prominent, nor widespread in the environment, nor has it caused any significant harm. Acknowledging mistakes made historically in the decision to use light water nuclear reactors, the film vigorously promotes breeder reactors. Breeder reactor technology, such as the Advanced Liquid Metal Reactor ALMR, was deemed too dangerous and too costly by the Clinton administration.

The film calls for nothing short of a nuclear revival using the next generation of nuclear reactors which would be inherently safe, according to the film.

In praise of nuclear power, the film shows the waste from all past nuclear power plant operations together would fill no more than a ten-foot high football field, arguing the physical footprint of the waste is small compared with other energy production, as though occupying space in a landfill is the concern when it comes to radioactive waste. Of course the real concern is the radioactive content and the potential breach of containment. No mention of the waste volume and hazard in mining and milling uranium for fuel, and in the “recycling” process advocated for breeder reactors — a process which has produced millions of gallons of high-level radioactive waste at defense facilities such as Hanford in Washington State, with no solution for stabilization or storage. And no mention that a miniscule amount of plutonium for example can harm vast numbers of people and persists in the environment for ages. That’s why we made the stuff for nuclear bombs. And, plutonium is supposed to be kept under careful inventory. The film shows tons of plutonium only taking up a fraction of the football field, doesn’t look like much.

Filming takes us around the globe to nuclear accident sites at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. In all, asserting few to zero victims as a result of the breaches of containment at those facilities, citing many world health organizations’ long-term studies in the case of Chernobyl.

“Pandora’s Promise” asserts solar and wind are not the answer to global warming because the technologies have not advanced to producing enough energy to fill the gap between growing energy needs and the necessary reduction/elimination of fossil fuel reliance, making a big deal out of the fact that they are not a constant supply. No sun in winter and wind doesn’t blow all the time. Power storage technology is not mentioned. Neither are recent breakthroughs in solar implementation internationally such as a University of Delaware study that shows how a major electrical grid, 1/5 of the US power, could operate 99.9% on renewables by 2030; the Island of Tokelau became the world’s first 100% solar-powered country; Saudi Arabia announced last May its massive solar power undertaking in the desert; and Germany exceeded 50% solar in November, with record low costs. All these developments emerged in the last year. Perhaps filming finished before they were reported.

Ironically the short film “The Secret of Trees” about an innovative new design that mimics how real trees use sunlight in a more efficient configuration than current panel geometries, opened the Sundance press screening of “Pandora’s Promise.”

The film further makes claims nuclear power is cheap, without addressing publicized reports showing its exceedingly high costs and subsidies. Perhaps life-cycle costs to the taxpayer were not included. Historically until recently, few dollars have gone toward developing renewables. One can only imagine if solar and wind received development funding similar to what went to nuclear power. Even with smaller subsidies, the growth of wind generation in the US and the world is vastly outpacing new nuclear — and this is expected to continue.

Most undermining, the choices for interviewees. Why weren’t thoughtful interviews of recognized experts/critics on nuclear energy and ALMR’s (Dr. Arjun Makhajani and Amory Lovins come to mind) presented? Instead Stone interviewed advocates like novelist Gwyneth Cravens, Argonne Labs nuclear physicist Charles Till, Jim Hansen NASA director concerned with global warming, pioneer nuclear engineer Len Koch, disillusioned environmentalists Michael Shellenberger and Ted Norhaus, and Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand. Brand can hardly be considered an environmentalist, as he advocates for such far out ideas as allowing amateur tinkerers to do genetic engineering experiments in their garages. This group is juxtaposed with footage of rabid, seemingly paranoid enviros with brief generic clips of recognized outspoken environmental leaders like Ralph Nader, Bobby Kennedy Jr., and Dr. Helen Caldicott. The only one asked to reflect on the film’s subject was Caldicott, her hurried comment was sought at a public function. This does not demonstrate good journalism.

As acknowledged in the film, the nuclear industry is utterly reliant on containment. There still is no real solution to the waste problem, rather a claim that the radioactivity is not all that harmful and a message that any risks of leaching and proliferation are small and worth it.

If there is a criticism of Sundance in this case, it is in the failure to recognize the film’s journalistic shortcomings. The film fails to deliver a single interview of a legitimate expert representing so many people commonly disenchanted with the nuclear industry. Yet pulpits are given to an odd range of voices supporting a new generation of abundant nuclear power production as the solution to halt global warming. The result of such shortcomings is a propaganda piece.

If there is a valid takeaway from this well-made production, it’s driving home the immense need for more energy production and elimination of fossil fuel use.

Robin Klein is a journalist with a bachelors degree in physics, who formerly held a seat on the federal Hanford Advisory Board, reviewed nuclear issues at the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state and the use of mixed oxide fuels in advanced nuclear reactors.

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Last week, in an annual tradition at the White House’s North Portico, President Obama pardoned two turkeys, named Liberty and Peace, allowing them to spend the holidays with members of their families back in Minnesota.

But the chances that these turkeys’ brothers and sisters will live to see the holidays aren’t great. Every year, 45 million turkeys are killed at Thanksgiving, plus another 22 million served up for Christmas.

The holidays are even less festive for some turkeys that are sold under the Butterball brand. In a video filmed surreptitiously at five Butterball farms in North Carolina and leaked to the group Mercy for Turkeys, workers are shown kicking and stomping on birds, breaking their fragile wings and necks. The suffering birds, which are denied veterinary attention, are thrown onto the ground on top of other turkeys, or into crates.

It was the Los Angeles-based group’s second investigation into Butterball’s practices in less than a year. After the earlier investigation, two employees plead guilty to cruelty to animals. Butterball is the world’s largest producer of turkey meat.

Butterball officials did not respond to a request for comment. But Butterball is not the only turkey producer with inhumane practices.

According to the animal rights group PETA, the overwhelming majority of turkeys are raised in industrial operations that produce 100,000 birds or more a year in crowded warehouses where they produce massive quantities of waste.

These operations feed the turkeys a steady diet of antibiotics to speed up their growth and help protect them in their crowded, unsanitary living conditions, creating ideal breeding ground for dangerous antibiotic-resistant superbugs that can infect humans.

The post The War on Turkeys appeared first on Cascadia Times.

On Election Day, Karl Rove threw a fit on Fox News because the vote counts being reported out of Ohio didn’t add up the way he and the Romney campaign thought they should.

It was all part of a pattern. Rove was among many Republicans who all year long had been denouncing public opinion polls because they showed Barack Obama was winning, even though the polls were based on widely accepted statistical models. One right-wing website became popular among conservatives because it had found a way to “unskew” the polling numbers so that they matched the right-wing spin.

Lying about facts is commonplace in American politics. Facts can be easily manipulated, especially in the heat of a campaign. But lying about the numbers is much harder, and those who try are much more easily exposed, like the guy with the unskewedpolls.com web site who was forced to eat a hearty serving of crow right after the election.

Republicans may think they are entitled to their own facts, but not to their own math. Exposing their numerical deceptions is easy, even for a former president from Arkansas.

“I came from a place where people still thought two plus two equals four,” Clinton said in his convention speech.

In the end, Republican misadventures with numbers mattered little. Obama collected more votes, and no amount of spin could change that. Rove’s guy lost, and that was that. In politics, as in sports, the scoreboard doesn’t lie.

This leads us to the great unanswered question of American politics: Why is it that Republicans are so bad at math? Republicans have been trying to skew the math in a number of other ways, but they have been twisting nothing so vital than the statistics that show our climate is dramatically changing. The well-funded Republican climate-denial machine has been up and running for years.

One guy who is working hard at unskewing the climate deniers’ bad math is journalist Bill McKibben, who last week launched his “Do the Math” tour of several American cities. We caught up with him in Portland, Oregon, where he drew a packed audience to a downtown venue in addition to hundreds of others who watched the presentation on live video streamed to a nearby college campus.

His “Do the Math” tour continues this week with stops in Portland, Maine, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia and next week in Washington, Durham and Atlanta. For more information, check out McKibben’s web site at 350.org.

As McKibben puts it, skewing the climate numbers to fit a political agenda, as the Republican Party has been doing, will lead to inaction, a very dangerous course. The consequences of our failure to stop carbon dioxide releases to the atmosphere are likely to be gruesome and deadly. If we don’t implement effective strategies to curb those releases, we will face an “essentially impossible future,” he wrote last summer in a widely read article in Rolling Stone, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.”

McKibben wrote that three simple numbers are all we need to allow us to “understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position.” As we will see, he also refers to a fourth that is equally significant and disturbing.

The first of these numbers is 2° Celsius – about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

In the last 100 years, the average global temperature has risen by about 0.8° Celsius, an increase that has already done a great amount of damage. Summertime sea ice in the Arctic has nearly entirely melted, and the atmosphere is holding significantly more water, causing devastating storms worldwide that have become far more frequent and powerful. And as a related effect, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic.

McKibben acknowledges that a 2° C temperature rise might be too much, given the damage already inflicted by the much smaller rise seen to date. But there is not much we can do to keep temperatures below 2° C, given the vast amount of carbon dioxide already emitted. McKibben sees an increase of 2° C as inevitable. Further increases are likely, but don’t have to be.

McKibben calls 2° C the “bottomest of bottom lines.”

The second number is 565 gigatons.

That’s the amount of future carbon dioxide emissions that would bring about a temperature increase of 2° C. If we release anything more than 565 gigatons, we can forget about retaining a planet that’s anything even remotely like the one we’ve got.

The third number is 2,795 gigatons.

That’s the amount of future carbon dioxide emissions that would enter the atmosphere if the world’s entire known oil, gas and coal supplies are burned in our cars, furnaces and power plants. It includes all the known inventories of the big oil companies – Shell, Chevron, BP, Conoco-Phillips and Exxon.

If all of that carbon dioxide were to be released, a 2° C temperature increase would be just a distant, fond memory.

This third number was derived by a group of London economists and accountants who combed through the energy companies’ proprietary databases. It is five times the 565 gigaton limit.

McKibben compares the two numbers to getting drunk and getting drunker. The difference between the two numbers is like blowing a .08 in a breathalyzer test measuring alcohol consumption, and blowing a .40. A .08 means you’re drunk. At .40, if you’re not dead, you’re in a near-death stupor.

Which brings us to a fourth number: $25 trillion.

This number represents the total profits that the big energy corporations expect to derive from burning all of their fossil fuels. No wonder the Republican Party and its oily patrons are trying to skew the math. It’s not a number they are eager to announce.

In fact neither political party would even touch global warming as a topic during most of the recent presidential campaign. No one was willing to discuss global warming, that is, until a giant hurricane swamped Manhattan – an event McKibben specifically predicted in his Rolling Stone article three months before it happened.

Moreover, neither of the two candidates wanted to talk about the huge profits that would be lost, or the lifestyle changes we will have to make, once we get real about climate.

Not that the oil companies would have much of a planet left on which to spend those trillions. Who would have thought we’d lose the planet to greed? As Bill McKibben says to anyone who will listen, do the math.

The post Unskewing the climate math appeared first on Cascadia Times.

A doe and her fawns browse in the hood. Ruth Oclander photo

http://portlandtribune.com/sl/114989-overlooked-nature-in-the-nopo-bluffs

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This is the Cosumnes River, the last undammed river flowing down the western flank of the Sierra Nevada Mountains into California’s Central Valley. It is being ripped to shreds by unlawful gold and gravel mining, risking one of the valley’s few healthy runs of chinook salmon.

“Healthy,” however, is a relative term. The population of wild, fall-run chinook salmon in the Cosumnes River near Sacramento has dropped by half in recent decades as illegal mining grew and grew along its banks. Most of the Central Valley’s other salmon runs are in far worse shape.

California could lose not only the salmon to the illegal mining, but a source of clean water and recreation for generations.

In the Cosumnes, miner Joseph Hardesty never met an environmental law he wouldn’t defy. For this, he has won the unsolicited admiration of Tea Party sympathizers everywhere.

He now faces 23 counts of breaking a wide variety of environmental laws. and faces trial in El Dorado County in June along with business partner Rick Churches.

Read my story of the “Rebel Miner” in the Sacramento News & Review.

http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/home

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The federal agency is proposing to truck thousands of loads of hazardous radioactive wastes to Hanford for disposal, despite strong opposition from both Oregon and Washington to adding anything to Hanford’s still-out-of-control radioactive and hazardous wastes.

Washington’s environmental regulatory agency, which oversees waste disposal at the site, must give its permission before the federal government can bring more wastes to Hanford. The federal Department of Energy has two proposals to use Hanford as the national waste dump for mixtures of highly radioactive and hazardous chemical wastes.

Trucking, environmental advocates claim, subjects unknowing citizens to immediate and possibly extreme risks of radiation exposure. Gerry Pollet, attorney and director of Heart of America Northwest, pointed out that the state has no authority over how much radiation is allowed to be emitted from the trucks traveling to Hanford, and emphasized that shielding would not be protective enough.

A number of people at the hearing demanded that if the federal government is allowed to bring more radioactive wastes to Hanford, citizens must be notified when shipments roll through their communities so they “can get the hell out of there.”

A similar hearing took place the previous evening in Seattle.

The US Department of Energy estimates that trucks transporting radioactive wastes on Northwest roads to Hanford would cause over 800 adults to die from cancer from the high levels of radiation emitted — and this is with no accidents.

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