Sometime before December 2009, someone at the New York Academy of Sciences decided to print a Greenpeace sponsored book titled Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment in a publication called the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. The roots of the decision remain murky. Within a few months after…
Dr. Wade Allison, the author of Radiation and Reason addressed the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ) Food Safety meeting on October 3, 2011. Unlike Arnie Gundersen (sometimes misspelled as Gunderson), an unlicensed nuclear engineer from Vermont who has been working hard for several months to encourage an unreasonable fear of radiation, even at…
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which is the responsible federal regulator for natural gas pipelines, has issued the report of its year long investigation of the San Bruno pipeline explosion and fire. That September 9, 2010 event, involving a pipeline located directly underneath a residential area, killed 8 members of the public, injured dozens…
One of the persistent propaganda myths about using nuclear energy is that hypothetical accidents that release radioactive material will have dire consequences that render vast areas of land uninhabitable for centuries. It is a good thing for wolves, deer, and boars that they cannot read antinuclear propaganda or watch television. You see, we have done…
An article titled Backlash Against Nuclear Power Hits the Bottom Line provides some interesting food for thought about the intricate connections associated with the world’s $6 trillion per year energy market. Here is the first quote I want you to ponder. The combination of earthquake, tsunami and human ineptitude produced a fiasco at Japan’s Fukushima…
On September 14, 2011, the BBC aired a documentary titled Fukushima Disaster: Is Nuclear Power Safe?. Near the end of the video, the host makes the statement that it is quite likely that the main health impacts of the event (leaving aside the direct effects of the initiating earthquake and tsunami) will be traceable to…
The six months since Fukushima has brought out a certain class of professional worriers who ignore history to fret about topics that have already been the source of concern for many years. In this particular case, the worriers want to assert that nuclear power plants are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of earthquakes, which are…
In this chapter of the Shoreham saga, Ray has made some clever cuts between assertions about the effects of the Three Mile Island accident from the professional opponents to nuclear energy and to assertions from people who have read the massive quantities of scientific and technical research about the details of the accident and its…
I received a comment yesterday through the Atomic Insights Contact link telling me about a recently produced video titled After Fukushima: The Fear Factor. The source described the work as a report on the media frenzy in the UK following the tsunami attack on the Fukushima region of Japan. As the video describes, less than…
New Data Supports Previous Fairewinds Analysis, as Contamination Spreads in Japan and Worldwide from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo. In his most recent video, Arnie Gundersen calmly, but inaccurately, explains why people should remain fearful of extremely low levels of radiation and radioactive materials. He sounds so knowledgeable and is so often quoted by people who…
Does nuclear energy have a future, in light of the events at Fukushima? Fukushima Daiichi is the six-unit nuclear-power station on the northeast coast of Japan that was hit by a powerful tsunami, preceded by one of the strongest earthquakes on record. The extent of the damage is considerable: The three reactors that were operating…
Update: (January 4, 2013) The NRC’s State of the Art Reactor Consequences (SOARCA) research project was completed in June 2012 and the final report was published in November 2012. For some unknown reason, the NRC web pages that describe the project in detail have no indication that the project was completed and the final report…