THE MORAL IMPERATIVE OF NUCLEAR

The Moral Imperative of Nuclear

I always knew the earth's core was hot, but It was unclear to me exactly why. On some astronomical bodies, such as Jupiter's moon Io , it's flexing due to Jupiter's gravity that causes purely mechanical rubbing heat. In some white stars, it's nuclear fusion. Guess what the earth's internal heat comes from? Good old U235 decay. In the earth's core, the exact, self-same process that runs every nuclear reactor in the world, is the ancient historical process causing earth's volcanoes, and thus all the geothermal power anywhere on the planet. Thus, ...U235 CAUSES our environment. The scope of this news is staggering, in its philosophical implications for environmentalists. It makes environmentalist opposition to human use of U235 fission into a backward cult of avoidance, a kind of meaningless earth-hating tabu, pure superstition, not tied to science, or love of the planet.

It's implication for those who love the planet, and are truly willing to act on that love outside narrow energy politics, is that just as Watson & Crick outed the double helix of DNA as the essence of biological life, Earth-Philosophers must now accept that U235 fission is in point of fact, the white-hot beating heart of Gaia.

Where does that place the American Nuclear Industry, and all it's spokespeople? It places them firmly in the right. Overwhelmingly on the side of the planet. Undeniably historical. Absolutely ethical. Backed up in all their assertions by both of Stephen J. Gould's "Two Magisteria"-- Science, and Religion (both capitalized).

The powerful arguments deriving from nuclear power being what the planet itself does, easily smash all pseudoscience attacks on nuclear as sophistry,... at their widest scope,... nothing but quibbling over means and methods.
Any argument over merest means and methods can be countered by engineering. Engineering can always find new means, new methods. All that is required is optimism, expertise, and funding.

The knowledge that we are right to use U235 is founded on the broadest philosophical stepping stone, a tacit license to proceed, given by the planet itself. Any person then arguing otherwise, is placed in the unenviable debating stance, of claiming that mankind as a race does not deserve to occupy the earth. That assertion is tantamount to a Lemming's call for mass suicide, and is evil nonsense, closely approaching Hitlerian angst in its self-hate, and its Faustian deathwish.

People at large emotionally recognize this Dr. Strangelove inversion displayed by anti-nukes, but cannot easily pin it down. I hereby share it with the U235 outreach community, exposed in all its magnificent simplicity.

Why nuclear? Because Gaia tells us so.
Enjoy

John Sweeney
Buchanan New York

Gaia is Nuclear

Nuclear power is the gift of Gaia’s long past
The heat given in ancient times
By Gaia to her progeny
at Oklo then
At Peekskill now
One and the same
heart of matter
heart of gaia
warmth without fire
spontaneous living metals
warmed by history
to give us life

This planet, called Earth, or Terra, which has awakened as the living being known as Gaia has assembled itself over eons , eons in which examples were layed down for the wise to ponder and learn from. What better way to solve some modern day problem, than to observe what the planet or its life forms has done in the past, under similar circumstances.This outlook might be termed biomimetics, or Gaiamimetics, and its lessons ought to help avoid plans or agendae too uninformed, too unconnected to Gaian reality to succeed.

One incident that happened spontaneously 2 billion years ago, was the formation of the mats of Oklo. Bacterial beings, the earliest known life forms, have formed
mats or nodules around the globe, similar to coral reefs, as both their living homes, and as the historical record of their having existed. In Australia, the nodules of their habitations still exist,in coastal waters, and are known as stromatolites. At Oklo, in Gabon, Africa, similar creatures have left not only mats, but a mineralized historical record of the most surprising kind, a record only decipherable recently, using physical knowlege not available until late in the twentieth century. At Oklo, a deposit of heavy minerals existed in a wet environment, perhaps a stream. For 12 billion years or so, nothing notable occurred, until micro-organisms occupied the inner spaces between grains of this mineral deposit, using it as their home, but also inadvertently acting as a living moderator for certain chemical reactions now enabled to occur within the mineral itself.
On a steady basis, interludes of wetting, drying, growing, and changing occurred, completely altering the raw minerals, to suit the needs of the stromatolite population living within the grains, and leaving (as in Australia) , a permanent record of their having lived. Microbiotic symbiosis between bacteria and an inorganic chemical reaction had created the special conditions required to permanently alter the mineral, and thus write the record of the Oklo mats, in stone, or rather, in metal.The stone, a uraninite oxide, now contains an imbalance of its U238 and U235 metals which is easily recognizable to scientists, as the result of a biological nuclear reactor. The depletion in its 235 species of metal can’t be attributed to any other cause, and could not have happened any other way. The Oklo bacteria created their own living Indian Point. Without the bacteria –unmoderated– the reaction could not have occurred (and did not for 12 billion years before they arrived). Without the warmth of the reactor surrounding them, the bacteria could not have flourished as they did, for an estimated billion years, living high on the hog in their self-heating apartment house, their own self-warming coral reef in a river in Africa, a successful nuclearbiotic symbiosis of the first magnitude, teaching us how to use what Gaia provides– the spontaneous warmth of her own body, contained in her own mineral gift, used locally, in full biomimetic respectfulness,
and Gaiamimetic gratitude, only at the Indian Point Energy Center, our own biomimetic triumph on the Hudson. Far from being an interloper, invading a pristine shore, IPEC is seen in this light to be an environmental savior, using its biomimetics to gather Gaia’s gift, her self warming mineral deposits, cleanly, silently, and naturally, to warm & sustain us like the bacteria at Oklo, rather than burning up the dwindling atmosphere as other power plants, on coal, oil, or gas, will surely do.




You enjoy life.
We all, each & every one of us, sleep,
with a chunk of uranium beneath us.
That chunk is known as “Terra” or “Earth” Without the radiating core, Earth would be cold. Therefore we may look on Earth's uranium core as its heart, its "Life", or personalizing a bit, as Gaia herself. The heat of uranium makes the hot volcanic lava beneath us. Would you plunge your hand into the lava?…. Of course not.



HOWEVER …
All these powerful Gaian outpourings are GIFTS!!
Gaia gives, and we are allowed to accept, and use, or die out
and become mere food for whatever creature accepts the gifts.
(Gaia’s first Law).
Neither volcanoes nor uranium are evil,
they are both natural, even supernatural, gifts.
The greenest gifts ever given our humble monkeyrace.
We ought to use them.
Hope to meet you all someday,
and hoist a brandy (organic of course)
to our momma,
Goddess Gaia!




Now, to the Protection of Mother Earth’s Daughters!
6000 Chinese coal miners die on average each year, mining the coal used to create the permanent east Asian atmospheric disturbance which has been visible from outer space for the last decade, the brown death-smog which now grows increasingly worse each year. Not only do the massive mining operations mar the breast of mother earth, causing acid runoffs into streams, killing fish, deforesting entire provinces with irreparable open scars, but the impoverishment & lung disease following stunt the lives of millions, to place the sleeping giant, China, at the forefront of the fossil burning nations. The single technology most protective of mother earth, of the miners, of the atmosphere, of the steams, their fish, their trees, and all the poor people dependent on them, is the gift of the Earth itself, giving heat without burning anything, vastly reducing mining operations by a thousand, or ten thousand orders of magnitude for the same power (thus saving 6000 lives directly),
the minerals used by bacteria ages ago, and used today in the biomimetic triumph on the Hudson, Indian Point.




Closing Indian Point would necessitate the burning of oil, or coal in the USA, on the same scale as in China, shooting us backwards 200 years in one fell swoop, back to the age of “Black Birmingham”, when 100,000 people per year would die of lung disease in England, from the soot clouds of Birmingham’s factories. Mother Earth has given us a way out. Are we to deny its existence out of malicious self pride? Gaia’s self warming minerals are here whether we use them or not. You don’t burn them. You need not even mine any more of them (simply use what we already possess). Simply acknowlege the purity, the pristine invisibility of the Indian Point process, which makes no smoke, buries its own waste in its own casks, emits no greenhouse gas, and asks only to be allowed to continue to protect our mother earth with her own gift.



This is the moral fact of it.
This is the one ethical solution to it.
This is the scientific reality of it.
Any denial of this, is malicious self promotion,
based on malicious misinformation,
and is, in fact,
the knowing promotion of intentional death.

PAPIER MACHE' PANDERING ?

There's a papier-mache' mockup of Indian Point, faithful in many details to the real original Indian Point, and it lives in journalist's communal psyche as a dependable knock. Write a few words about aging, ailing, leaking, distressed, woeful, etc., and you've got yourself a story. It's not even required to leave one's chair to investigate,.... all the needed parameters spring right to hand, out of communal memory of a nice hot purple flashing story angle, and blink on the page, obligingly, for our journalist, drawing attention, readership, and the satisfaction of having served up a palatable piece of work.

The only drawback, is that the leaking purple papier mache' model is not the real Indian Point.
The real Indian Point is apparently wearing a cloak of journalistic invisibility, kind of like Harry Potter.
Who built the cloaking device? I must state out front, that I don't believe journalists began the deception on their own... (except for one poor schmuck, who was fired for it). The list of perps is short, 2 organizations, and maybe 8 or 10 individuals, but buoyed by internet chumminess, and the active trading of techniques for capturing press attention, they hovered around their phones, and their letters-to-editors keyboards, and carefully applied papier mache',-- bit by bit, slopping on the bogus concern, the overdrawn and bathetic complaints, until the purple model of the domes rose high enough to obscure the real place ,and a journalistic staple, a dependable hot-button brouhaha, was hatched out of thin air, and activist chutzpah.

Do away with Indian Point? I can't wait! I am sick to death of the lurid claims, the carefully posed mock concern, the politician's sanctimonious puppet acts, mouthing less-than-credible complaints hatched for them by deluded and pushy place-grabbers, the kind of people who sneak to the front of democracy's feeding-line, and eat up all the deliberative attention for their own bogus complaints, leaving the rest of us screwed, annoyed, and without effective politicians, since ours are all tied up mired chin-deep in papier-mache'.

Yes, let us do away with Indian Point immediately--- the papier mache' version, that is.
While the Axis-Of-Anxiety (journalists, politicoes, and activists) fritters away weeks and months in their cute glue-spattered artist's smocks, carefully placing little Al Qaeda action figures on their toy domes, and making "brrrrrr---brrrrr" lip noises, while holding little model airplanes aloft above their papier mache masterpiece, the rest of us have to live here, and not get screwed.

We need an affordable Hudson Valley. That need, slipping ever so steadily out of our grasp, ought not be forgotten by our oh-so-ethical (they say) new Democratic administration, despite Riverkeeper's 5000 name mailing list,....... 5,000,000 of the rest of us need to hold the line, AND DO THEY CARE? Maybe not... you see, we are not pre-captured for them into a convenient voting bloc, like those 5000.

We need the power that the real Indian Point provides us, and I hear no construction plans coming out of Cuomo junior's lips, or new Governor Spitzer's planning office, so I know they have no plans for new power plants.Tell me--- HOW DO YOU ETHICALLY PROPOSE CLOSING INDIAN POINT WITHOUT BUILDING NEW PLANTS?

Short answer--you don't.

Even the National Academy of Scientists told us just that last year,.... but this new administration can only deal with papier mache', and so Cuomo jr. is hell-bent on ignoring both NAS, and us. So...... sadly, indeed, .....that makes new AG Cuomo's latest press-blast against Indian Point into a pandering exercise. Pandering to papier-mache', and a mailing list, while the real Indian Point hums away quietly, powering the last days of Hudson affordability.

If we stripped away the papier mache'---what would we see? We would see an environmentally proactive Entergy Corporation, remaking, improving, and cleaning up the mess Con Ed left here, gathering their national expertise to provide us what we have almost forgotten that we need, helping our communities with charity, volunteers, and positive interaction, maximizing power, minimizing damage, maximizing security, minimizing hype, maximizing value, minimizing loss..... in short..... doing a lot of the functions local and state government might be doing for us---IF THEY WERN'T POSING IN THEIR CUTE LITTLE BERETS AND ARTIST SMOCKS, in front of the big purple papier mache horror castle, for a vid byte to be shown to Riverkeeper's 5000 name mailing list, because Cuomo junior's political ambitions don't end with the state attorney general position!

Therefore, Let us all consider this question:

IS CUOMO JUNIOR'S POLITICAL FUTURE IMPORTANT ENOUGH , TO LET HIM SACRIFICE YOUR FUTURE FOR HIS?

Here, learn some truths about nuclear power

As the U.S. Congress debates energy policy, White Nuclear Snowflake provides this summary review of the answers to frequently raised (false) objections to the only feasible solution to the U.S. and worldwide power shortage, nuclear energy.
Q: Aren't nuclear power plants dangerous to public health?
A: In fact, there has never been any nuclear accident in the United States that has endangered the health or welfare of the public. The worst American accident, at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, in 1979, injured no one.
Q: What about the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine in 1986?
A: The severity of that accident was a function of a poor reactor design, and inadequate training of plant personnel. In the United States, oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission provides the standards for reactor design and plant operation, which has contributed to our excellent nuclear power plant safety record.
The new generation of nuclear power plant designs, already being built internationally, feature passive safety systems, which simply shut the plant down if there is an operator error or equipment failure.
By comparison, during 2006, more than 5,000 miners died in China, during the production of the more than 1 billion tons of coal that power its economy. The health of the public in China's cities is also endangered, by the pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
As far as vulnerability to "terrorist" attacks is concerned, there is no public infrastructure that is as well protected as nuclear power plants. There is no scenario under which a release of radiation (which effect in low dosages is, in any case, completely exaggerated), would significantly affect public health.
Q: What do we do with the radioactive waste from nuclear power plants?
A: There is no such thing as nuclear "waste." This is a term used in popular parlance by anti-nuclear ideologues to frighten the public, and its elected representatives. More than 95% of the fission products created in commercial power plants can be reprocessed and recycled. The spent fuel from a typical 1,000 megawatt nuclear plant, which has operated over 40 years, can produce energy equal to 130 million barrels of oil, or 37 million tons of coal.
In reprocessing, fissionable uranium-235 and plutonium are separated from the high-level fission products. The plutonium can be used to make mixed-oxide fuel, which is currently used to produce electrical power in 35 European nuclear reactors. The fissionable uranium in the spent fuel can also be reused. From the remaining 3% of high-level radioactive products, valuable medical and other isotopes can be extracted.
Q: What about the stalemate over burying radioactive spent fuel in the Yucca Mountain geological depository in Nevada?
A: This is an irrational program which is a result of the success of the anti-nuclear nonproliferation lobby in the 1970s. The Department of Energy's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership proposes to spend billions of dollars, and more than a decade in research and development, to develop new, "proliferation proof," reprocessing technologies, under the guise of preventing the spread of plutonium and nuclear weapons, and bury the spent fuel at Yucca Mountain, in the meantime. This delay is unnecessary. Today, Britain, France, Russia, India, Japan, and China reprocess spent nuclear fuel, and technology today can be used here in the U.S. to eliminate the "nuclear waste" problem, in the short term.
Q: But if the United States goes ahead now with reprocessing, doesn't making this technology available increase the risk that other nations will develop nuclear weapons?
A: No nation has ever developed a nuclear weapon from a civilian nuclear power plant. If a nation has the intention to develop nuclear weapons, it must obtain the specific technology to do so. Israel is an example of a nation that has no civilian nuclear power plants, but has developed nuclear weapons.
The nonproliferation argument—that controlling technology will reduce the risk of weapons proliferation—is an historically demonstrable false one. Nations make decisions based on their security and military requirements, not on which technologies are available.
Q: Isn't it the case that nuclear energy is more expensive than fossil, or "alternative" fuels?
A: The radical escalation in the cost of building nuclear power plants in the late 1970s and 1980s was the result of political actions, not economics. Some plants projected to cost less than $1 billion ended up costing ten times that amount, because anti-nuclear "environmentalists," and legal intervenors were given free rein, using specious and ideological arguments, to delay plant construction for years, sometimes, for decades. Where there has been no political interference, new nuclear power plants have been built in 38 months, on schedule, and on budget, such as in Japan.
While it does require less up-front capital investment to build a gas-fired power plant than a nuclear plant, the operational cost over the 30-or-more-year lifetime of the gas plant swings heavily in favor of nuclear power. And compared to coal, the overall economy is not taxed to transport millions of tons of fuel.
In 2002, faced with increasing demand, and after careful economic analysis, the Tennessee Valley Authority decided that it was more economical to spend $1.8 billion to refurbish its Browns Ferry nuclear plant, which had been shut down since 1986, than build a gas-fired unit.
So-called renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind, are not only inefficient because their energy is so dispersed, (see EIR Jan. 19) for discussion of energy flux density), they are so unreliable that back-up power supplies (fossil or nuclear) must be available for any time it is not sunny or windy. So, not only do consumers bear the expense of inefficiency, the entire electric grid system pays the price of having to provide stand-by redundant power-generating capacity to ensure grid reliability.
It was determined in the 1970s, that alternative, "soft" energy sources would only be competitive with fossil and nuclear plants, when energy costs reached a $100/barrel oil-equivalent price. To bring these uneconomical sources on line before then, political decisions were made to spend $20 billion in Federal subsidies for alternative energy, while Federal expenditures for advanced nuclear technologies came to a screeching halt. It has been this irrational investment policy that has made nuclear power "expensive."
Q: How can the large capital cost of new nuclear power plants be financed?
A: There must be a sea-change in economic policy, where the reconceptualization of the Federal budget on the basis of needed capital investment, are the guidelines.
The provision of reliable and affordable electricity, as recognized by President Franklin Roosevelt more than 50 years ago, is not a luxury, but a necessity. For this reason, in the 1930s, the electric utility industry was regulated by Federal and state governments, to protect consumers from financial manipulation and fraud, and to ensure that affordable power would be available to every home, farm, and factory.
The deregulation of the U.S. utility industry, beginning in the early 1990s, has nearly destroyed an electrical energy system that was the envy of the world. Utility companies must have access to low-interest, long-term credit, assurance from government regulators and policy-makers that "environmental" sabotage and delay will not be tolerated; and that a crash effort will be made to rebuild the nuclear manufacturing industry, which has nearly disappeared. These must be approached as a national policy, not dependent upon Wall Street financiers, but by directing resources into infrastructure through fiscal policy.
Q: But the immediate energy crisis is our dependence upon petroleum. How does nuclear energy alleviate that problem?
A: In two ways. In the long term, the only sensible and renewable replacement for petroleum-based liquid fuels is hydrogen. When next-generation, high-temperature nuclear fission reactors (which are under development now in South Africa and China) come on line, splitting water into its constituents elements will make hydrogen available as a versatile and universally available transportation fuel.
In the near term, petroleum consumption could be dramatically reduced through large-scale investment in mass transit and rail. Our decrepit diesel-fueled rail system should be electrified. Half of the nation's truck-hauled freight should be taken off the road and put on the rails. Millions of miles, and hours, of commuters driving automobiles should be eliminated, by using public transportation. A crash program to build conventional intra-city commuter trains, and magnetic levitation (maglev) systems for inter-city transport, would replace finite and polluting fossil fuel-based transport with nuclear power.
Q: But isn't it the case that there is broad opposition to new nuclear plants, and that citizens do not want plants built in "their backyard?"
A: The opposite is the case. Over the past two years, as utilities have indicated they will be applying to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for licenses to build new nuclear plants, communities have been competing with each other, to offer attractive packages to companies, in order to encourage them to build plants in their "backyard."
Last year, resolutions were passed by communities in Louisiana; Oswego, New York; and Fort Gibson, Mississippi, to support the addition of new nuclear reactors to existing nuclear sites. The states of Georgia, Utah, South Carolina, and South Dakota have passed resolutions supporting the building of new nuclear power plants.
At the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant, just a stone's throw from Washington, D.C., the Board of County Commissioners voted last August to offer $300 million in tax breaks to the Constellation Energy Group to add a third reactor at the Calvert Cliffs site. The plant is the largest employer in that Maryland county, and the $16 million it pays in taxes each year contributes 9% of the county's total tax revenue.
In September 2006, Bisconti Research Inc. released the results of a telephone survey, of a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adults, about nuclear energy. The survey found that nearly 70% of those queried support nuclear power, and 68% of those who live near an operating plant, support building a new nuclear reactor at the existing site.
In point of fact, the aging and off-base anti nuclear movement is dwindling fast, most of its heroes now well past retirement age, not in touch with the true wishes of the new, 300,000,000-strong US population, and spouting myths so ludicrous, that many just shrug, and consider them an annoyance to all. However, because a media anxious for controversy always gives them inordinate coverage, they try to maintain an illusion of still being as strong as they were in the 1970's. Except among celebrities, they are not. Celebrities use them as a convenient way to get in front of cameras.Behind the cameras, no "movement" exists.

A NEW ERA DRAWS NEAR

Do we need a new petition, asking us to shut down our infrastructure?

In 2002, when Indian Point discussion was current, and relevant to ongoing public events, Mr. Ross Weale jr. started a "Close Indian Point" petition. With great effort, utilizing every associated activist group then in operation, teams of canvassers were sent out with clipboards, through the entire region , in a maximum signup effort, with over 100 core canvassers gaining about 8000 signatures. This was the high tide of anti Indian Point concern, and the high tide of activist cross-cooperation, and it garnered 8000 signatures. Never closed, that petition sits online with about 10,000 signatures, the last 2000 having dribbled in, in the intervening 5 years, through the few web activism sites still remaining, the response diminishing steadily over time.

Simultaneously with Mr Weale's creation, a pro-Indian Point petition was begun by those friendly to Indian point. That petition quickly and easily garnered 13,000 signatures, thanks to the efforts of town residents, friends, and workers at or around the plant. It too sits online today, now abandoned, after the 13,000 to 8,000 drubbing given to the supposed "widespread anti coalition" at its own high point in early 2003. There was no further need to demonstrate that the greatest possible efforts of the naysayers, had met up with an almost casual landslide from the silent majority, had definitively lost, and had walked away, sadder but wiser.

What has changed?

The isolated gaggle of bloggers now proposing a new petition, is obviously unaware of this minor piece of local history, and that is sad. However, general feelings in the populace are moving away from nuclear jitters, and swinging toward taxation anxiety, and lifestyle anxiety , in the tough years after Iraq, and into 2007, when what had seemed assured previously, now looks to evaporate in a tide of lost Mirant tax suits, skyrocketing school taxes, a broken housing bubble, and a massive campesino invasion from central America, putting the very stability & viability of the region at risk.

Who is it, that is asking us to revisit the worst months of our lives, the months after September 2001, for strategies on living in 2007 and beyond? We need NEW strategies, ones that ought to be looking to better lives ahead, putting all the shibboleths of the discredited Bush regime behind us forever, especially any false terror fear, or malicious faux "activism", abused covertly for personal power, or gain.(or for no good reason at all).

The monumental impossibility of ever building new infrastructure is becoming more and more clear, as the TZ bridge sits crumbling, route 9 remains a relic of the 1920's, routes 119 and 35 are totally overwhelmed with no enlargements in sight, and White Plains itself sinks slowly into semi-permanent ghetto-hood, despite "renewal" after "renewal", and the jewel in Westchester's crown, the Southern Westchester Children's hospital, gets spun off, simply because it was planned in an earlier, more deep-pocketed time, and we simply can no longer afford it, or anything else like it.

So let us not be so anxious to dig ourselves into a bond-issue hole, inside a lost-electricity trench,
holding a still-radioactive non-producing Indian Point, while new avalanches still unseen, of the 2010's, and the 2020's bury us, and all our future hopes.

We must use what we have to survive. We must manage it , use it, and protect it. To do otherwise would be foolhardy at best, and criminal at worst. Let Indian Point be.

INDIAN POINT-WHO SAVES US FROM OUR 'SAVIORS' ?

It is truly wonderful that the Westchester board of legislators has the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to petition for an Independent Safety Assessment of Indian Point, and they certainly have the right to express their wishes, even if it is more a matter of being politicked from above by Mike Kaplowitz, rather than asked from below (by their constituents) to do so.

However,... I believe what is at question here, can only be answered in part by NRC, even if they double the size of their agency,.. and move the entire NRC staff up to Buchanan to boot for ten or more years to do so.

What is NOT being assessed, is the credibility of promoters' claims (Mr. Kaplowitz among them) that there is actually any useful result for such an ISA, no matter which way it turns out. Sending the same inspectors back to Indian Point one more time, after they leave later this week, can turn up nothing they have not found yet, in some 50 years of inspecting the place. Sending new or unfamiliar inspectors to try to learn 50 years worth of engineering in six months is an invitation to a boondoggle, and a nonsense result. What is being ignored, the huge stinking purple elephant in Mr. Kaplowitz' living room, is the 50 years' worth of evidence that Indian Point is already safe, already up to code, already well inspected, and that inspecting it further does not therefore arise from any real world evidence. Reality has assessed Indian Point since 1955, and found it up to providing clean silent energy safely and without incident. Can politician Kaplowitz, angling for a Spitzer appointment, assess Indian Point any better than the 20 million ratepayers who have happily paid their bills since Eisenhower was our president? I truly doubt it, polymath that Mike K. might be--- real estate mogul, Westchester County whip, and now self-convinced safety & security genius for the northeast region. In fact, I think Mr. K. might just be spreading his talents a bit thin here, and that of late, his interest pretty clearly diverges from the public interest in this (meaning the peoples' interest).

So where do our county legislators turn, for an Independent Sincerity Assessment, of Mr. Kaplowitz' motives, and judgement? Unfortunately, there exists no NRC to regulate overeager personalities, whose command of a board room may just equate to a monster pillaging of the region's affordability--- to pay for a golden-tongued ego's rise to state office. Where do our legislators turn for an Independent Credibility Assessment of dangers that never seem to materialize? To whom can they turn for an Independent Viability Assessment of Westchester's tax rate, and electricity rate structure, once they pull the plug on the common man, for the sake of well-dressed "angry angels" in five years happily dividing up the Hudson shore for more sterile condo projects, while the blackouts multiply, and the stable core of Westchester's population empties out into the south, and the midwest?

In these areas of inquiry, an independent assessment is sorely needed.



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THE GHOST IN THE FISHES

Why would strontium be found in 4 fish, and not found in 8 other fish? Why would a reputable lab find 7 times less (or more) strontium, than another reputable lab? Is there a conspiracy, with Doctor Strangelove secretly irradiating some fish in his underground lair, and then releasing them in the Hudson at Troy, to mislead us all, for political purposes? Are the strontium tests themselves unreliable as performed, and should we not take their results as "scientific proof" of anything?

To educate myself, I googled "Strontium test protocols" , and waded in, reading half a dozen DOE documents so dense, that 3 or 4 cups of coffee are definitely recommended for anybody else so inclined.One document is Sr-03-RC, Vol.1, HASL-300, 28th edition "Strontium 90 in Environmental Matrices".

This is DOE's own short description:
Strontium is separated from calcium, other fission products, and other natural radioactive elements.Fuming HNO3 (fuming nitric acid >86% pure) separations are used to remove the calcium and most of the other interfering ions.Radium, lead and barium are removed with BACRO4, (barium chromate).Traces of other fission products are scavenged with iron hydroxide adsorbent. The sample is isolated and Yttrium ingrowth is allowed to occur, 97% ingrowth taking place in 14 days. After ingrowth Yttrium/Strontium equilibrium has been attained, the yttrium 90 is precipitated as a hydroxide and then converted to an oxylate for counting on a low background gas proportional beta counter. Chemical yield is determined with a strontium 85 tracer by counting in a gamma well detector.

Got all that?

This being a Department of Energy test procedure, it is geared to gross amounts of strontium, in such places as the Hanford atom bomb plant in Washington. The procedure for testing soil states: "Weigh out enough soil to generate an activity at least 10 times background (ideally 100 times) into an appropriate container....."

In order to get a good test run, the technician is being advised to use enough sample, to have 100 times the background radiation, just to begin. No Hudson river fish ever had anywhere near this level, in fact by this warning alone, the test ought not to have been run. (background is the level a geiger counter reads, when it is nowhere near any radiation). As a matter of fact, by geiger counter alone, the Hudson fish had NO DETECTABLE ACTIVITY. (When frisked, the fish were clean).

So was there ever strontium in any fish to begin with?
Maybe not.

The ground beneath Indian Point is not soil, not aggregate gravel, It is solid ancient rock, straight down to China, rock with no interstices, except from fracture cracks induced by the blasting to build Indian Point. The fracture cracks, not being geological in origin, do not go anywhere, but exist in a small circle around each blast location, So, rather than some "pool" existing, or some "groundwater" (as you might find in some midwestern area, like the oglala aquifer) there actually is no pool, and there is no groundwater (no aquifer-- All drinking water in the area is piped in from upstate reservoirs.)
What does sit beneath Indian Point is a solid rock mass, with microscopic fracture cracks of very short length, centered on the Indian Point excavation profile. Water from plant activities over the last 50 years has entered the fracture cracks, and now exists within tiny feathered spaces inside solid rock, kind of the way your 3 fingers exist in the holes in a bowling ball, but just imagine the solid part of the bowling ball being 1000 feet across, and 1000 feet deep, and imagine the finger holes shrunk down to a millionth of an inch in diameter. The trapped water is not going anywhere, is not free, and is not connected (as far as anyone knows) with any geological flow channel able to move it anywhere.THAT'S why it was able to collect, and be found. It's in a jar.
Looking globally at the 3 dimensional outline of the "jar" (the part of the bowling ball that's drilled out) you get the misnomered "plume" of some 350 feet, a non-plume because it is just a virtual object, an autocad outline of those drill samples where microscopic water is trapped within rock. Actually, the whole thing, plume, and non-plume are all solid rock.
"Cleaning the Rocks"
Right now Entergy, using the virtual "plume" as a drilling guide, is emptying the "plume" with suction shafts, and reverse pumping these shafts, to draw whatever is in the feathered cracks BACK UP to a treatment station, and to draw whatever is seeping down toward the feathered cracks OUT through the suction shafts. Meanwhile, at the top, in the old Con Edison fuel pool where the original leak happened in 1996, Entergy has set up a cleaning station to remove all radioactive stuff from the water by chemical absorption means, thus removing any potential future leaks, and when they are done, the entire fuel pool will be dried, hermetically sealed, emptied, epoxied, fitted with permanent sensors to note any recurrances, and retired, empty of any fuel, with the fuel going to dry casks, or Yucca mountain. Finito, strontium leak.
If and/or when Entergy leaves, this cleaning operation will cease. It is not mandated by law, and Entergy is doing it to be a good enough neighbor to be able to run their revenue making units a few more years for us....NRC has not ruled on these leak issues elsewhere, and is actually looking to Entergy to invent the new technological framework right here, in their proactive and environmentally helpful suction & cleanout routine. If NRC likes it, they may make all the other nuke plants do it too. If Entergy is politically prevented from finishing it, no nuke plant anywhere will be forced to do it, and NRC will probably drop it, and not return to it. So everybody better let their single environmental hero in this--Entergy-- do its job, or misguided activism will have had the effect of crapping up the environment permanently, around EVERY nuclear plant. So, that kinda covers the "strontium plume" issue.There actually IS no water plume. It's solid rock, with water trapped inside in micro-cracks.

Now on to the issue of maybe-there-is and maybe-there-isn't strontium in Hudson river fish. The world was blanketed in strontium from 1945 through 1995, when all the nuclear powers tested atom bombs above ground.Future archeologists will date the earth by its pre-strontium, and post strontium layers, just like the pre and post Santorini layers, or the 65 million year ago asteroid hit. It is everywhere, including in Andrew Spano's molars. If Mr. Spano was chopped up and ground to a mush, centrifuged to a paste, cleansed with 8 successive baths of nitric acid, re-centrifuged to a crystalline residue, which was then mixed with ion-free distilled water, boiled for 8 hours, put through a barium chromate reduction, re-centrifuged, dried, and then put through a set of iron hydroxide scavenging runs, and cooked onto the surface of a special stainless steel disk, which was then heat-dried for 2 days, before being isolated in a sealed flask for a month, and then unsealed, and run through a geiger counter looking for a tell tale 20,000 decays per minute beta particle profile, specific to Yttrium, and those Yttrium radiations extrapolated backwards by a very nebulous calculus computation , inferring the PREVIOUS presence of Strontium, from the current presence of its daughter product Yttrium 90, then, depending on whether the lab tech had cleansed and calibrated every solution correctly, run every reaction exactly the right time, not contaminated any step of the 238 steps, and had then computed the back-track correctly, we would get EITHER just background levels OR a level just a wee bit above background. Taking into account the fact that bone & tooth COLLECT strontium, concentrating it by about 5.7 times over background, it means that any ground-up-tooth reading near or just above background actually implies an environmental level BELOW background (by a factor of 5.7), Knowing that any detection of Strontium is by inference, by circumstantial evidence only, and that the minimum detectable level is not friendly to the tester, we now have an explanation of why different labs get different readings. Without the advised "100 times background" sample size, mentioned above, the test is so nebulous, so easy to do "wrong", and so tied to background, that it can't be believed, unless you set up a program of constant fish collection, and constant testing, to generate a body of samples that would screen out individually unsatisfactory test runs..... AND you would need to compare this to a CONTROL COHORT , of "definitely-non-strontium" fish, and run each one of those tests at the same time as each of the "strontium-fish" tests, doing it under the typical double blind protocol, in order to determine where MDL lies (Minimum Detectable Level). Our challenge as a scientific community is to find a control cohort anywhere on the planet. There just might not BE one....Maybe cave fish from deep underground somewhere (provided no strontium rain ever penetrated their cave). The test protocols are tough, making up about a 160 page document altogether.. One surprising and dismaying thing I found was the test procedure for finding strontium in Bikini Atoll fish, was double the length of the test used for finding strontium in freshwater fish. the "Marine Protocol" is much longer and more rigorous, because the dissolved residual actinides in the high mineral content of seawater causes false positives, and must be religiously screened out, by an additional 175 steps not done in the non-marine protocol. Once a person has read up on the marine protocol the fact will hit you, that THE HUDSON RIVER IS BRACKISH! Did the test lab use the Marine Protocol, or the freshwater protocol? Since the Hudson salt line moves up and down river with the tides and the rains, unless a separate "Semi-Marine-Protocol" were devised (AND CORRECTLY APPLIED), a large error trap, one might even say a GAPING ERROR TRAP yawns beneath a single test run, on a much-too-small sample of 12 Hudson fish, done only once and with no control cohort , and a deceptive well-nigh impossible to determine MDL level, depending on just how salty each fish was.

Conclusion? Almost all of these tests so far have been reading technician errors, and mistaken MDL computations, and reporting them out as the possible existence of non-existent strontium. THAT'S why the levels vary, and THAT'S why its supposedly in some fish but not in others. We are reading the technician's inability to validly run the test, on such tiny non-radioactive samples.
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