The radiation catastrophe at Fukushima Daiichi and Mayor Karl Dean's "essential" travel

Since I last posted on Mayor Dean's trip to Japan on Friday in the immediate wake of earthquakes and tsunamis, things continue to get more critical for the island nation with the number of Japanese missing or dead topping 5,000. Tonight at a nuclear power plant 135 miles from Tokyo (where Mayor Dean and his family are staying) plant workers and news media have been ordered to evacuate because radiation has reached 400 times the legal limit. To compound the disaster, winds are reportedly blowing from the leaking plant toward Tokyo, and Geiger counter readings in Tokyo rose to "worrisome" levels at one point.

As the situation gets more and more grave in Japan's crisis, the questions a handful of us have been asking about the wisdom of Karl Dean's mission to Japan become even more poignant.

I am not the only blogger raising these issues. Catherine McTamaney blogged an impressive list of reasons why Mayor Karl Dean's trip to Japan right now is outrageous. They are all worth a read, but I particularly wanted to draw your attention to her point that Japan's cultural code of honor would have obligated Mayor Dean's hosts to say "yes" if he had asked whether he and his family should have come to Japan last Friday in the wake the quakes. The ball really was more in the Mayor's court to take the initiative and postpone this ill-advised trip while assuring Japanese officials of support during these catatrophes.

Scientific American: Coal Ash More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste

Burning coal into fly ash creates a cocktail of concentrated uranium and thoreum 100 times more radioactive than nuclear waste. People in Tennessee and Alabama who live around coal plants experience higher levels of radiation than do those who live around nuclear plants. And so what if the fly ash is unleashed in a massive flood across the ground in those surrounding neighborhoods? Perhaps massive radiation exposure?

UPDATE: The following editors note has been added to the original article today:

Editor's Note (posted 12/30/08): In response to some concerns raised by readers, a change has been made to this story. The sentence marked with an asterisk was changed from "In fact, fly ash—a by-product from burning coal for power—and other coal waste contains up to 100 times more radiation than nuclear waste" to "In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy." Our source for this statistic is Dana Christensen, an associate lab director for energy and engineering at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as well as 1978 paper in Science authored by J.P. McBride and colleagues, also of ORNL.

As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage.

A dirty little secret TVA might not want to mention?

A commenter at NPR says that the Kingston ash sludge flood could contain a Pandora's box of nuclear wastes and that a savvy reporter with a Geiger counter might open it:

Your news piece on the coal ash spill in Tennessee had a laundry list of heavy metals that could be in the ash. I found it interesting that uranium and thorium were not listed as part of the heavy metals. That coal contains trace amounts of uranium leads to an annual release into the environment of 1,360 tons of uranium and 3,348 tons of thorium according to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This is more uranium than is consumed by the nuclear power industry in a year. A typical coal plant emits over 5 tons of uranium in a year. (http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html) It would be interesting journalism to take a geiger counter down to the spill area in Tennessee and measure the millirems at the spill site versus normal ambient radiation. 

Coal use for 50% of our nation's electricity comes with many environmental externalities not currently accounted for in its cost however the radiation danger is one of them not normally discussed as yet another danger. (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste)

Instead of just uncritically passing along TVA public relations material, why can't mainstream reporters earn the title "journalists" and do some more snooping around to confirm or deny independently the toxicity of the ash spill?

Fallout on the Low End of Free Trade

Italy would make Tennessee a nuclear waste receptacle. Since the materials would eventually be dumped in Utah, does that mean transport would come via interstates through Nashville? If so, we've been down a similar road before with respect to the risk to urban neighborhoods before.

Why Does a Governor with No Foreign Policy Experience Assume that a Protest Ahmadinejad Rally is about Her?

Sarah Palin blamed Democrats for a Jewish group disinviting her to speak at a rally to protest Mahamoud Ahmadinejad's appearance at a United Nations assembly next week. Why would she take attention away from the cause of checking Iran's nuclear ambitions in order to put it on her absence? Has her new-found celebrity, her 15 minutes of fame gone to her head?

Some Last Thoughts on Tonight's Council Public Safety Meeting

• CM Megan Barry asked the most direct, soul-searching question of the night when she pondered whether any of those officials speaking to the Council about the Metro Election Commission break-in had any second thoughts on something, anything that they might have done differently. It was frustrating to hear the Director of General Services say that they provide security for people but not necessarily for laptops as it was frustrating to hear the Director of IT address the disconnect between her office and the computer protocols of other departments as it was frustrating to hear Ray Barrett blame the state about social security number insecurities. I appreciate the fact that these people are in difficult positions and to a certain extent they have little authority across departments, but I don't understand why, as Director Whittemore put it, experience had to be the best teacher in this case. It seems to me that an ounce of common sense about security and protocols and confirming that DVRs are operational would have been more valuable than waiting for experience to teach us something in painful retrospect. Do we no longer hire leaders for careful forethought, planning, and prevention?
• Sandy Cole indicated that her office was in talks with Dell Computer to explore technology or knowledge they might be willing to share for tracking down the lost laptops, which were made by Dell. One CM pointed out that Dell owes Nashville a solid for assisting its recent expansion in Middle Tennessee.
• IT Director Cole addressed a question on the lack of encryption on the stolen laptops by saying that, since encryption software is loaded on the same laptops as the information that might have been encrypted then encryption would have done very little. She said that best practices would indicate that sensitive data should never be stored on a hard drive or on a mobile device. No kidding. Does it take an IT professional for Election Commission Officials to see the self-evidence of that? Obviously not, since they didn't listen to Metro IT's advice in the first place.
• CM Emily Evans shares her perspective on tonight's meeting.
• PiTW's PJ Tobia reminds us that the billion-dollar security subcontractor hired by General Services to insure insecurity at MEC, Wackenhut, already has a history of rip offs, lax and botched security at nuclear power plants, and aid to terrorist organizations. I agree with the Council Members who argued tonight that Wackenhut should be relieved of their duties. In fact, may I suggest an investigation into how they got the contract in the first place (to make sure it didn't involve noncompetitive influence peddling or backroom boosterism)? For the life of me, I don't understand why Metro would hire a subcontractor with that track record.
• One CM pointed out that without a police report, credit reporting agencies will charge consumers for credit freezes. For those Nashvillians with access to a computer and printer, Metro has put the police report online here. Now what about those Nashvillians without access to a computer and printer?

Can We Trust TVA in a Deregulated Age?

It is bad enough that the Tennessee Valley Authority can pretty much lay claim to however much utility money it wants from Tennesseans at any time. Now we're supposed to trust that radioactive tritium that they dumped into the environment that we share with them is safe for the public. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is supposed to protect us from nuclear waste, says that the rivers, if contaminated by the tritium, would dilute the material "until its concentration would not be a health and safety issue for the public." Until?! Does that not indicate that TVA dumped dangerous levels already? And why is it okay to use our rivers to dilute radioactive wastes? I am sure that we can now depend on the NRC to fail to monitor radioactive levels and possible leaks of the tritium, or any changes in the health of humans and animals downstream of the dump. The last thing "the nation's largest power company" needs is to be named the defendant in a class action lawsuit, which is a possibility monitoring might bring about.

A big thanks to all those deregulators out there for this undue health risk. Ya'll and your unapologetic faith in the marketplace to protect us make our state a safer place to live. And let's not forget those tort reformers, who are probably even now working to make sure that omnipotent power companies cannot be sued for endangering us and screwing around with our environment.

HT: Knox News