Footnotes Chapter 8

When it comes to the truth about radiation and health effects, there are no experts who are honest - not in government, not in science, not anywhere. Yet, people would rather listen to liars than challenge their assumptions about the sources of the so-called truth and disregard the purveyors of actual truth on this topic: the non-creditialed self-taught. - Andrew Kishner, May 18, 2013

FUKUSHIMA

Links to all our Fukushima research

LaSalle Nuclear Plant News

May 1, 2013 - Listen to Gail Snyder and Andrew Kishner discuss LaSalle - Podcast program titled 'LaSalle SCRAMS x4; Will Chicagoans Have to Scram?' at Nuclear Hotseat - Also, sign the petition demanding that the NRC revoke LICENSES of operating GE Mark 1 and 2s in U.S.!! - more analyses and news on the menu 'LaSalle' tab

April 30, 2013 - While LaScram ~~LaSalle~~ Falls Apart, Operator Asks NRC If They Can Put a Hemi In It- Exelon is proceeding with a formal request to the NRC for a mega-power boost (aka 'uprate') at the LaSalle plant to increase thermal output by a whopping 12.5%. Also, it has been learned that the culprit of the technical shutdown of LaSalle Unit 1 reactor on April 27th was the same exact valve that failed following a scram in February 2011 due to a welding defect. The recommended fix (buy a new one, duh!) was apparently not heeded; Status: LaSalle 1 is being restarted (at 22%). LaSalle 2 is at 1% power.

April 29, 2013 - Map of eastern U.S. nuclear plants that have no containment vent filters (which is a 'Fukushima lessons learned' that 'wasn't implemented')- enlarge image

April 25-27, 2013 - April 25: LaSalle Unit 2 restart attempt results in a scram - reason: condenser leak. April 26: NRC announces 'Special Investigation' into April 17th events; April 27: during Unit 1 startup process, operators were forced to shut reactor down after leak was detected in the primary containment

April 25, 2013 - Is the NRC and the nuclear industry trying to prevent us from knowing, questioning, something or some things? 'Day 9 of LaSalle Radiation Release Incident

April 19, 2013 - Analysis of safety issues and incident on April 17th at LaSalle by Potrblog.com - link to video

April 17, 2013 - LaSalle County Nuclear Generating Station is hit by lightning - both reactors scram - pressure builds in containment - radioactive gases vented from containment - monitoring fails - vents from Unit 2 not filtered - leaks and other problems not reported until days later - our initial report and our analysis of the types of radioactive gases released in unfiltered vent

¹Test site workers horizontally burrowed nearly 1,800 feet into the limestone rock and inserted a metallic monstrosity like no other: a vacuum-sealed, tapered steel pipe measuring 0.3 miles in length that extended across several 'test chambers.' The pipe had a diameter of just 10 inches at its narrow end; close by was the so-called 'zero room,' which housed the atomic device associated with the 'Mighty Oak' nuclear test. The wide end of the pipe held targets, which presumably were missile warheads. In the mid-sections of the air-less pipe were two 'blast doors,' which were intended to protect the targets - and tunnel section - from blast damage and ultimately radiation. Beyond the test chamber were approximately five additional doors to protect the main tunnel from damage.

²In 1992 a Nevada environmental organization, Citizen Alert, asserted that faulty, counterfeit bolts used in the Mighty Oak test may have led to the failure of several blast doors. A test site spokesman admitted that the bolts had reduced strength at temperatures greater than 500 degrees. (It is clear from published reports that temperatures in the alcove exceeded this max heat capacity of the bolts.)

The DOE actually blamed the Mighty Oak accident on overestimation of rock strength but stopped short of mentioning that the reason the Rainier Mesa rock wasn't stable was because of the weakening effect of years and years of nuclear testing within the geologic structure of the test site. Three hours after 'Midas Myth,' a tunnel test in 1984, the ground on the surface gave way, pulling workers and equipment into the ten-meter deep crater. Twelve test site workers were injured and one died during that accident.

Another theory is that the Mighty Oak test exceeded its expected yield. Since 1986, the DOE has only divulged that Mighty Oak's yield was 'under 20 kilotons' but Greenpeace in 1986 estimated the anticipated yield as 1.3 kilotons. The test likely was higher than 1.3 kilotons.

The actual reason for the Mighty Oak's failure lies in the final investigative report, which is still classified. The DOE, however, has admitted that it may never know the real reason.

³The reason for the accident: the DOE says they don't know, and might never know. But it wasn't due to the counterfeit bolts, they said. And it wasn't do to geological weakening from decades of testing, they also say.²

⁴ Mighty Oak destroyed $32 million worth of 'normally recoverable and reusable' monitoring equipment. The cost to taxpayers of Mighty Oak, not including equipment write-offs, was $70 million. It cost an additional $2.5 million for recovery and mining to get into the tunnel.

⁵ The need to 'get in the tunnel' also had to do with the fact the federal government had other tests lined up for that tunnel. Future tests would require lengthy preparation - massive engineering challenges that would take up to 18 months. Mighty Oak also would slow the momentum of support being built for space defense programs - the Pentagon was relying on demonstrations like Mighty Oak to convince its skeptics.

⁶ Six days after 'Mighty Oak' Energy Department employees noticed that pressure was accumulating between two of the plugged sections - which might have caused another containment failure - and opened up the tunnel for a short 15-minute period to equalize the pressures.

⁷ Xenon-133 and iodine-131 have both about the same weight as gases - of around 6 kilograms of weight per cubic meter of air.

⁸ A ventilation procedure dubbed 'controlled purging,' also known as 'controlled ventilation,' was followed to release airborne radioactivity from the test shaft into the atmosphere. During the first 17 days after the Mighty Oak test, the DOE proceeded with the venting very timidly. They only purged for a total of about 25 hours, or roughly 1.5 hours per day, during those 17 days.

⁹ A sort of 'fractionation,' NuclearCrimes.org posits, may have occurred during the first few weeks within the tunnel before ventilating began. Iodine-131 and Xenon-133 gas settled into alcoves and deeper pockets, while lighter gases (krytpon-85) floated higher. Lighter noble gases were released first, and then followed by Iodine-131 and similarly heavy radioactive noble gases.

The radiation equipment at Medlin Ranch, set up by the EPA, wasn't turned on until 3pm that day and ran for just a half-day.

This peak value of 550 pCi/m³ is about one-sixth of the peak reading downwind of Three Mile Island (of 3,120 to 3,900 pCi/m³) at 375 km from the reactor in Albany, N.Y. This fact comes from an EPA journal article in 1988 titled 'Xenon-133 in California, Nevada, and Utah from the Chernobyl Accident' (Environ. Sci. Technol. 1988, 22, 583-586) that focused on the EPA's fixed 'network' monitoring data and bemusingly made no mention of the xenon-133 special monitoring data collected by their own employer, the EPA, during April and May 1986 including the 550 pCi/m³ value. The article did helpfully mention that snow with 47 pCi/L of I-131 in snow fell NW of Las Vegas on May 7. It also noted that the fixed network picked up positive xenon-133 readings at 2 stations during May 20-27 that was 'still slightly above the network averages before the Chernobyl accident, possibly indicating some fading influence of the Chernobyl xenon.' This - as with the entire article's gist - is an astonishing denial by the article's EPA scientists. The xenon-133 could have been just as easily the non-fading influence of Mighty Oak venting.

This fixed network ringing the test site suffered immensely after a DOE 'coup' in 1998 that exiled the EPA from the monitoring program, reduced the overall scope and size of the program, left only gamma dosimetry at the monitoring stations and installed a DOE contractor, the Desert Research Institute, that now operates the network with highly questionable ability. Read more in Chapter 16. The so-called 'Community Environmental Monitoring Program' network of the DOE is now a sham.

¹¹ A ventilation procedure dubbed 'controlled purging,' also known as 'controlled ventilation,' was followed to release airborne radioactivity from the test shaft into the atmosphere. During the first 17 days after the Mighty Oak test, the DOE proceeded with the venting very timidly. They only purged for a total of about 25 hours, or roughly 1.5 hours per day, during those 17 days.

¹² Had that last blast door failed, another 'Baneberry' would have occurred and millions of Americans would have been exposed to much more dangerous radiation levels.

¹³The EPA left Nevada on May 10 also saying that that levels of Krypton-85 gas were at normal 'background levels'. 1996 DOE report claims 4.3 curies of Krypton-85 gas was released

¹⁴Although public health authorities in the U.S. would blame the 1990s health crisis on tobacco smoke (first-hand and second-hand), they knew what was causing mass-disease. In a 2004 interview on Vancouver Cooperative Radio, Leuren Moret, a former Energy Department employee of two of its weapons labs, told her host, Don Nordin: "They absolutely know everything about the impact on the environment and on human health of what they are doing, and when I worked at Livermore from 1989 to 1991, [before] I finally walked out one day and became a whistleblower, I watched teams of radiation experts leaving that lab monthly, weekly, yearly travelling to radioactive contaminated sites all over the world, taking collections of plant materials and living materials like the fish out of the rivers or the lagoons. [They also studied] the human guinea pigs, people at Chernobyl, at the Pacific Islands where nuclear weapons were tested and even Americans [in the] the nuclear weapons program and the nuclear power plant program....They know everything... These people have developed weapons of mass destruction knowing full well what the health and environmental effects are, and they have spent tremendous amounts of money and effort to hide this from not just the American people, but from the global community. They have constructed a huge and a very connected apparatus of scientists, scientific journals, medical professionals, academic institutions, secret radiation labs, and nuclear weapons laboratories. We have over 550 national laboratories in the United States-I think the number has been reduced maybe to 250, but there were over 3,500 facilities in the United States, which functioned as part of the nuclear weapons complex. There's no way that they don't know everything and the international nuclear-I call them the nuclear Mafia-has mostly been controlled by the United States. It's all to hide the health and environmental effects.' - 'Monday Brownbagger' (Vancouver Cooperative Radio), February 23, 2004

¹⁵According to a document by the ORAU Team NIOSH Dose Reconstruction Project [Technical Basis Document for the Nevada Test Site, 2004], purging continued intermittently through May 19

¹⁷The EPA has said that none of the iodine-131 in America's air and milk in 1986 was from Mighty Oak because of the Department of Energy's filtration attempts. Yet EPA didn't define the types and efficiencies of filters used by the DOE in 1986 nor did they calculate - or attempt to determine - the quantities of iodine-131 in its three states: particulate, inorganic gas and organic gas.⁸ Had they done this, one could determine how well the filtration practices by the DOE worked. Filtration will work better on some types of iodine than others.

¹⁸ One worker received 200 millirems and the other 70 millirems. Decades later, in 2008, the Las Vegas Review-Journal ('Health claim roadblocks end,' 8.14.08) interviewed a test site worker named Fred Dunham who was seven miles east of the tunnel when a controlled release of radioactivity occurred in mid-May. Dunham blamed dioxin exposures and Mighty Oak for the onset of his chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

¹⁹ Into 1987, at the cost of about $2.5 million, test site workers would "drill parallel shafts above the tunnels, then mine down into the affected alcoves, lowering probes to determine the extent of radioactivity remaining in the sealed tunnels." It is unclear when these shafts first penetrated the alcoves and if indeed the 'test chamber' was sealed off - in a delayed reaction - from the rest of the tunnel since the April 10 accident.

In March 1987, the Energy Department went ahead with another underground nuclear test, dubbed 'Middle Note,' near the site of 'Mighty Oak.' Crews were still drilling tunnels "to try and vent the radioactivity" from Mighty Oak "but suspended operations to prepare for the latest test" noted one AP article, which quoted a Greenpeace staffer who thought Middle Note was a repeat of the Mighty Oak test. Greenpeace organizers held a protest at the test site that caused a two day delay of Mighty Oak - the DOE blamed the 2-day delay on 'weather conditions and technical problems.'³

Data on Boise and Spokane milk from EPA's 'Environmental Radiation Data - Quarterly reports.' Montgomery, AL. The single highest iodine-131 measurement in the U.S. in 1986 in milk was collected in Seattle on May 12 and measured at 6,620 pCi/quart ('The Enemy Within,' Jay M. Gould, Fall Walls Eight Windows (Press), 1996, p.59).

²¹ The official story by the DOE, cited in the Energy Department report²² 'DOE/NV-317,' is that Mighty Oak purging released 36,000 curies of xenon-133 along with 2.4 curies of Iodine-131. This means - if we took the official story as gospel - that the DOE filtered all but 2.4 curies of the nearly 18,000 curies of Iodine-131 that would have been created and lingered at stable levels for about three months in the tunnel from Mighty Oak. (18,000 curies of Iodine-131 is the result of a 3 percent fission yield in a 1-2 kiloton nuclear explosion.) Around 250 Curies of Iodine-131 escaped from the Three Mile Island event in 1979.

²² 'Radiological effluents released from US continental tests 1961 through 1992,' US DOE: Las Vegas, NV. Schoengold, C. R., DeMarre, M. E., & Kirkwood, E. M. (1996).

²³ 'Off-site monitoring for the Mighty Oak nuclear test.' Black, S. C., Smith, A. E., & Costa, C. F. (1986).