Gregory Jaczko: Shut Indian Point down By Roger Witherspoon The former head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said yesterday that emergency plans for a catastrophic event at the Indian Point nuclear power plant are not designed to ensure that residents will escape unhealthy doses of radiation and it would be best if the plant closes down. Gregory Jaczko, who led the five-member Commission during the triple meltdown of Japan’s Fukushima  Daiichi  nuclear station and resigne

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article The large black sailor was naked in the middle of a roped-off area below decks, and he was none too happy. “He kept saying ‘Not my boots, too. My wife just bought them for me.’ But they made him take them off anyway, and he was just there, naked. Then they made him scrub,” recalled Maurice Enis, navigator of the USS Ronald Reagan, one of the Navy’s newest aircraft carriers. “They gave him this really abrasive stuff that we us

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article To the US Government, Operation Tomodachi was just another big humanitarian aid and rescue mission in which the nearest Navy fleet and  many land-based personnel rushed to the aid of an ally in need. In this case, the northeast coast of Japan had been flattened by a massive earthquake and tsunami which destroyed infrastructure and killed some 20,000 citizens. Operation Tomodachi – named after the Japanese word for Friend – be

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article The Department of Defense has decided to walk away from an unprecedented medical registry of nearly 70,000 American service members, civilian workers, and their families caught in the radioactive clouds blowing from the destroyed nuclear power plants at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan. The decision to cease updating the registry means there will be no way to determine if patterns of health problems emerge among the members of the

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article Gregory Jaczko resigned as head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Monday, ending months of open warfare with the staff and the other four commissioners over safety issues and a personal style often perceived as imperious. Jaczko’s departure stills the agency’s lone major voice pushing for increased safety measures at the nation’s 104 nuclear power plants despite the its long-standing aversion to imposing costly fixes on th

The statistics of nuclear reactor meltdowns are stark. Despite improvements in technology and upgrades in safety, on average one of the world’s 500 or so  nuclear power plants suffers a full or partial meltdown every other year. For the millions of people living within a 50 mile radius of a nuclear installation, their odds are 1/1000 of being affected by spreading radiation from an out of control reactor. Last June, as the world watched the metastasizing radiological disaster

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article Operators of the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant have been granted a year’s delay in their required emergency drill inSouth Jerseybecause their state emergency counterparts are still occupied with the aftermath of a summer hurricane and an early fall snowstorm. Michael Pacilio, president of Exelon Nuclear, which operates the plant, was notified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the exercise originally scheduled for S

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article Killing the chickens was the worst. For a 53-year-old organic farmer like Sachiko Sato, killing a chicken was not a novel event.  “We kill chickens for food. We sell chickens. We raise chickens to eat,” she said. “But this was different. This was too much.” She was sitting in the sparse conference room in the Ossining, NY headquarters of the environmental group Riverkeeper, having lunch and recalling the life-changing events

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article As the Japanese struggle to prevent a widening disaster in its nuclear fleet from adding to the natural disaster facing that country, America’s nuclear proponents are struggling to show that such a calamity could not happen here. One Gannett newspaper trumpeted that the local, Indian Point nuclear power plant was designed to withstand earthquakes and would not suffer the same fate as the Fukushima Daiichi plants. The implicat

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article All six nuclear reactors in the New York/ New Jersey metropolitan area are operating “in a manner that preserved public health and safety” and therefore will receive the minimal oversight during the coming year, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission declared in its annual assessment. In separate reviews, the NRC concluded that New Jersey’s Hope Creek, Oyster Creek, and twin Salem Generating Station plants and the two Indian Point

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article Information is vital in times of calamity. Unfortunately, it is difficult to determine the exact status of the situation with Japan’s 10 endangered nuclear power plants since the government is closed mouth and there is no tradition of investigative journalism when it comes to the government backed nuclear industry. The government’s  statements that “small” amounts of radioactive material have been released are at odds with

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article The announcement by the Japanese government that sea water is being pumped into the damaged reactor building at the Fukushima signals the failure of all contingency plans to prevent a meltdown of the fuel in the reactor itself. It leaves open the question of the safety of the hundreds of tons of spent fuel stored nearby in pools 40 feet deep. It is not clear if the structural integrity of the pool has been maintained or if th