Nuclear Fools
by digby
It’s clear the anti-regulatory right won’t be happy until their zealotry causes huge numbers of people to die. There’s just no other explanation for this sort of thing:
Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko is a longtime proponent of reforming safety standards at nuclear power plants and was the first chair to win the seat without the support of the industry. The other four members were all strongly backed by the nuclear industry when they were nominated and confirmed.
In early December, the four other commission members wrote a letter to White House Chief of Staff William Daley accusing Jaczko of “increasingly problematic and erratic” behavior.
The letter was made public by Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. All five commission members are scheduled to appear Wednesday before his panel. Issa has requested that a White House representative attend as well.
Jaczko is a former staffer to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who successfully fought off the industry’s effort to use Yucca Mountain in his state as a dumping ground for nuclear waste. Jaczko also worked for Markey, an outspoken proponent of legislation to address climate change and a critic of the industry’s safety record.
The push for nuclear safety reforms was galvanized by the nightmare scenario in Japan, where radioactivity still haunts large swaths of the area around the Fukushima nuclear plant that failed in March 2011.
“The actions of these four Commissioners since the Fukushima nuclear disaster has caused a regulatory meltdown that has left America’s nuclear fleet and the general public at risk,” said Markey in a statement. “Instead of doing what they have been sworn to do, these four Commissioners have attempted a coup on the Chairman and have abdicated their responsibility to the American public to assure the safety of America’s nuclear industry. I call on these four Commissioners to stop the obstruction, do their jobs and quickly move to fully implement the lessons learned from the Fukushima disaster.”
In his own letter to Daley, Jaczko responded to the allegations, Reuters reported. “Unfortunately, all too often, a majority of this current commission has taken an approach that is not as protective of public health and safety as I believe is necessary,” he wrote.
These greedheads won’t be happy until we have one of these:
Mother Jones has been keeping up on the Fukushima news. Here’s just one of many disturbing reports:
Another new paper (open access) in PNAS reports on the distribution of Cesium-137. With its half-life of 30.1 years—meaning it will lose only half its radioactivity in the next three decades—cesium-137 is the most dangerous of all fallout for livestock and hence human life in the area for decades to come. The researchers found Cesium-137 strongly contaminated soils in large areas of eastern and northeastern Japan, whereas western Japan was sheltered by its mountain ranges. Soils and ocean waters between 130–150 °E and 30–46 °N were estimated to contaminated by 5.6 and 1.0 petabecquerels, respectively.
That will happen here if these reckless, avaricious one percenters have their way. If they can’t stop angling to reduce regulations even in the face of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl then they are a true danger to mankind.
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