Consultation sur le projet de décision relative aux réexamens de sûreté des INB

Subject: 11/92 interview with Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass, author of Secret Fallout
Summary: discussing events since 1981 in the history of nuclear technology
Keywords: nuclear industry's true health costs are fastidiously suppressed


DTR: Lie # 2 is, "A nuclear power plant cannot explode."

EJS: Well it did of course. It did in fact in the case of Chernobyl and we nearly had similar explosions in some of our own reactors in this country. We had a meltdown within the reactor that just by the grace of God failed to penetrate the steel vessel at Three Mile Island. And huge amounts of radioactivity have been discharged in the clean-up since then.

DTR: Lie # 3: "No one was injured or died as a result of the Three Mile Island accident."

EJS: We now estimate a few hundred thousand people have already died as a result of Three Mile Island and that in the United States alone, forty thousand people died from Chernobyl thousands of miles away. We believe--and Doctor Gofman and I agree--that millions of people will eventually die from the Chernobyl accident, prematurely.

DTR: Over time.

EJS: Over time. Over the next twenty-thirty years.

DTR: They mention the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. What is that organization, I've never heard of that one.

EJS: It's a private organization organized by the industry in order to train their operators better. They go around and look at the various reactors and issue internal reports warning the utilities about bad practices in order to be able to prevent another Three Mile Island. It's a self-preservation technique and that's what they're trying to do. But unfortunately these reports are not publically available.

DTR: So there is information in the reports that is damaging but they're not,

EJS: Oh yes. In fact I had an occasion to see one in Syracuse just a few years ago and it was extremely damaging because it pointed out all the defects at a certain plant up there called the Nine Mile Point Plant. It is clear that if these reports are released to the public and fully explained that there would be an outcry for stopping these reactors immediately.

DTR: And as they say, "All the medical and scientific evidence gives nuclear power plants a clean bill of health." And of course that's all the reports that they chose to cite or that haven't been suppressed.

EJS: Absolutely. Sure. Because the government is desperate and has always been desperate to protect its ability to build bombs which requires the operation of nuclear reactors and which requires us to keep the permissible discharge limits very high so you can continue to do underground testing in Nevada, and to have plants operate all the time. This has been going on for decades and people didn't know about it.

For instance, hearings held by Senator John Glenn a few years ago disclosed that there was a meltdown at the Savannah River nuclear reactor which was a tritium-producing reactor for hydrogen bombs and had been completely kept quiet. In fact, as Gould and Goldman show in Deadly Deceit they falsified the meteorological measurements, the radioactive measurements, and the measurements of strontium-90 and were actually high when they were nearby, but they showed that for the station nearest Savannah River there was practically no radioactivity in the air, but all around the area there were huge releases into the air recorded. So they were manipulating the data in order to protect the secrecy that was essential in order not to have the public demand an end to the bomb-building.

DTR: They say, "Even if you lived right next door to a plant you would receive less that 0.1 millirem a year."

EJS: As I told you, the typical doses that actually have been reported in the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation--just the external dose--were as high as 30 or 50 millirem per year. For the case of the Connecticut reactor I calculated that the internal doses to the bone marrow to children were hundreds of millirems per year. So these are just total lies--simply like the same principal that Goebbels used in Germany that if you make a lie big enough the people will finally believe it.

DTR: Or cause "an average exposure of less that 1.5 millirem to people within fifty miles of the plant."

EJS: It's all false because you can take the milk from Oswego, New York, or from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and ship it into downtown Brooklyn and the Bronx, and then the people in the course of a year--a fetus might get thyroid doses of hundreds of millirems to the developing thyroid. Because there is no inverse decline with distance away from the plant when you transport it in a tank truck. Which by the way they don't consider in their environmental impact statements. I testified on this at the TVA hearings held by the opponents to reactors in Tennessee some years ago--it must have been somewhere in the middle seventies--in which I discovered that they leave out of their calculations of the population dose the radioactivity that comes out of the stack and gets on the land and is washed into the water like agricultural fertilizer so that they don't have to include the population downstream drinking the water as receiving any dose.

En 1981 l’expert reconnu Dr Ernest Sternglass a publie le livre “Secret Fallout”.

http://www.nucleardemolition.com/SF.pdf

Il ecrivait:

"Directly out of the business of nuclear weapons came the business of nuclear power, heralded in our country with the slogan, Atoms for Peace. Even that innocent-sounding slogan is part of the endless pattern of public deception that surrounds the entire nuclear enterprise. Let me interject a present example that poses the relationship nicely. In our country the entire hydrogen bomb enterprise—both R and D and production—is not under the Department of Defense, but the Department of Energy. It goes, not into the Defense budget, but the Energy budget. It is by far the largest item in that budget, consuming well over one-third of it. The next largest item in it is nuclear power.

"Nuclear power and nuclear weapons are two sides of the same coin. Nuclear power is life threatening in three independent ways, each in itself formidable.

"First is the threat of accident in nuclear power plants. This book tells in some detail the story of the accident at Three Mile Island. But one didn’t have to wait for that to know that nuclear power plants—unlike what the public has been told—are thoroughly accident-prone. Those great realists, the American insurance companies, refused from the beginning to insure nuclear power plants. Hence we have the Price-Anderson Act, renewed by Congress every 10 years since 1957, which lays the bulk of the liability in the event of nuclear accident on "the government"—i.e., on the taxpayers.

"The second life-threatening property is that every nuclear reactor now in operation produces the artificial element plutonium-239 as by-product. This is not only, as already said, perhaps the most toxic substance known. It is also the most convenient material from which to make fission bombs. The "trigger quantity"—the smallest amount from which one can make a workable atom bomb—is 2 kilograms, 4 2/5 pounds. You could carry that, and safely, in a grocery bag. To make a Hiroshima size bomb would take 6-7 kilograms, say about 14 pounds. You’d need a shopping bag for that. Every nation that now possesses a nuclear reactor can, if it chooses, begin to make nuclear weapons. It is expected that within the coming decade perhaps a dozen more nations than now possess them will exercise this option. It should be added that plutonium provides the trigger at the core of all hydrogen bombs, and in some also the shell.

"The third life-threatening aspect of both nuclear power and weapons involves the disposal of nuclear wastes. No one knows what to do with them. The periodic meetings of international experts have so far yielded no credible solution.

"In my opinion the entire nuclear enterprise, both power and weapons, represents a wrong turn for humanity, a development that cannot be tamed, that remains life-threatening not only in all its present manifestations, but all future developments that have been contemplated.

"Meanwhile the public is subjected to a continuous barrage of propaganda and misinformation designed to reconcile it to an increasingly problematical and expensive support of both nuclear power and weapons. The weapons, ostensibly for our security, are of course the principle source of our insecurity; and the nuclear power, that we are told we need for energy, supplies in 1980 only about 12% of our consumption of electricity, hence only about 2% of our total energy consumption, at a still unreckonable cost in both health and money."

Je vous prie de lire de P108 dans Secret Fallout – le chapitre “The Minds of the Children” (Les Esprits des Enfants)

"It was shortly after reading another story in the papers about how the United States and the Soviet Union had failed to agree once again on a treaty to halt all underground nuclear tests that my attention was caught by an article in The New York Times about an apparently unrelated subject. The report dealt with the fact that in 1975 the scores in the nationwide Scholastic Aptitude Tests had dropped by the largest amount in two decades. While there had been a more or less steady decline in both the verbal and the mathematical scores since the mid-1960s, generally by no more than 2 or 3 points, the average verbal scores had suddenly dropped 10 points in a single year. Since our son was taking the S.A.T. tests that year, I read the article with more than casual interest.

"Suddenly the question flashed through my mind: When were these young people born or in their mother’s womb? Most of them were 18 years old when they graduated from high school. What was 18 taken from 1975? It was 1957, the year when the largest amount of radioactive fallout ever measured descended on the United States from the highest kilotonnage of nuclear weapons ever detonated in Nevada.

JUST AS IN THE CASE OF THE BANEBERRY TEST, THE RADIOACTIVE IODINES MUST HAVE GONE TO THE THYROIDS OF THE INFANTS IN THEIR MOTHER’S WOMB, WHERE IT WOULD RETARD THEIR GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT EVER SO SLIGHTLY SO THAT IT WAS NOT READILY NOTICEABLE, AND ONLY WHEN THE CHILDREN WERE TESTED 17 TO 18 YEARS LATER ON A NATIONWIDE SCALE WOULD IT SHOW UP IN A SHARP DROP IN INTELLECTUAL PERFORMANCE.

Dans un entretien en 1992 il a avertit contre les dangers des retombees de l’Iode 131 emanantes de chaque centrale nucleaire. Ces retombees, meme en concentrations tres faibles, possedent un effet nefaste sur le cerveau de l’enfant pas encore ne, dans la matrice. Ils tombent sur les herbes, sont ingestees par les vaches et sont ensuite ingestees par les etre humains. Je suppose que la seule merci pour les Francais est qu’ils buvent pour la plupart du lait sterilise et l’Iode a temps pour se deliner – est-ce la raison pourquoi le lait pasteurise a pratiquement disparu en France?


DTR: On a final somewhat philosophical note in all this, you wrote in Secret Fallout how, if the information can't get out, it's as if the immune system of a body is suppressed and it can't adequately deal with what's going on.

EJS: That's right. So a society is bound to destroy itself if it continues to suppress this information. And what will very likely happen is simply as follows: Since the people in China have practically no nuclear reactors and Japan is fortunate in having no milk and cheese in its diet, it will probably be the case in the next ten to thirty years, the east Asian nations will, the island nations like Japan, Taiwan, the islands of Indonesia, will become the dominant countries in the world because they won't have children who will be crippled from birth. They will have children who will be born full, normal weight and will have no impairment of their ability to do mathematics and computer programming and calculation and reasoning skills.

[Ce qui va arriver fort vraisemblablement est tout simplement comme suite: Puisque les Chinois n’ont a peine des reacteurs nucleaires et les Japonais n’on pas du lait et fromage dans leur regime, pendant les 10 a 30 annees a venir les nations de l’Orient … vont devenir les pays dominants du monde pour le raison qu’ils n’auront pas des enfants estropies des la naissance. Ils auront des enfants nes avec plein poids, aucune dommage a leur aptitude pour faire mathematique, programmation, calcul et capacite de raisonner].

DTR: As well as themselves to be able to produce healthy babies.

EJS: That's right. And so if you produce healthy babies, you have a good chance to advance economically and industrially and be very highly competitive compared to countries like Russia, and England, and the United States that have poisoned themselves and continue to poison themselves in order to hang on to a technology that they created as a result of the cold war".

Qui peut contredire la verite de ces paroles pratiquement 20 ans plus tard? La Chine est vraiment sur le point de devenir le leader mondial. La capacite et aptitude pour les sciences et l’education en general n’a pas cesse de diminuer depuis les annees 60s dans l’Occident. Le taux de fertilite aussi. Si vous avez visite l’Orient, vous ne pouvez qu’etre saisi par l’energie et dynamisme des pays. C’est maintenant reconnu que la concentration du plomb des emissions automobiles jusqu’aux annees 80s avaient aussi un effet nefaste sur la psychologie des enfants, beaucoup plus sensibles que les adultes, entrainant la delinquance et criminalite dans les villes. La France reconnait la Saturnisme toujours, que l’Angleterre a oublie. On ne peut pas meconnaitre concentrations faibles – ils sont catalytiques bien entendu comme dans tous les processus chimiques industriels.

En France, 25% de la population va mourir du cancer, souvent avant l’age de 65 ans. D’ou vient cette epidemie?

Donc compte tenu toute l’evidence, la seule reglementation humaine est d’interdire les centrales nucleaires et les remplacer avec energie completement propre – aeolien et solaire (thermique). Les consequences d’un accident sont si affreuses, entrainant une complexite dans la conception des centrales sans precedent et donc un cout sans pareil, il n’y a aucune justification du tout quand il y a des alternatives sans aucunes consequences du tout qui aussi donc n’entrainent pas des sauvegardes si complexes qui ne peuvent jamais etre 100% efficace – surtout du au imprevisibilite des transitoires energetiques liees a la nature intrenseque de l’energie nucleaire et leur emplacement sur la planete. Ca c’est ppourquoi on ne peut jamais le dompter et pourquoi un Accident Grave peut toujours intervenir, n’importe quelles precautions.

Et les consequences affreuses de l’energie nucleaire ne se relevent pas seulement en cas d’accident – tous le temps ils emettent les dechets gazeux et liquids avec les consequences pour meme nos cerveaux prevu par Dr Sternglass.

Continuer avec l’experience nucleaire est de semer notre et votre propre mort.

Sinceres salutations