Note: This video has been updated.
Aging electrical transformers are susceptible to geomagnetic storms. Many scientists believe we are entering a period of solar maximum when increased geomagnetic activity can take out communications satellites, critical equipment control systems and major electrical transformers causing power outages to as many as 120 million people and lasting for months.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant failure began when backup power generators damaged by a tsunami could not provide power to pumps critical to cooling the reactor cores and spent fuel rod pools. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has now acknowledged that most, if not all, of the 104 nuclear reactors in the US have access to only eight hours or less of backup power. In the event of an extended blackout these reactors, some identical to the GE Mark I reactors used at Fukushima, will begin to meltdown creating a catastrophic uncontainable nuclear emergency.
Chernobyl contaminated the entire northern hemisphere.
Nearly one million people around the world died from exposure to radiation released by the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl reactor, finds a new book from the New York Academy of Sciences published today on the 24th anniversary of the meltdown at the Soviet facility.
The book, “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences)
” was compiled by authors Alexey Yablokov of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy in Moscow, and Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko of the Institute of Radiation Safety, in Minsk, Belarus.
The authors examined more than 5,000 published articles and studies, most written in Slavic languages and never before available in English.
The authors said, “For the past 23 years, it has been clear that there is a danger greater than nuclear weapons concealed within nuclear power. Emissions from this one reactor exceeded a hundred-fold the radioactive contamination of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
“No citizen of any country can be assured that he or she can be protected from radioactive contamination. One nuclear reactor can pollute half the globe,” they said. “Chernobyl fallout covers the entire Northern Hemisphere.”
Their findings are in contrast to estimates by the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency that initially said only 31 people had died among the “liquidators,” those approximately 830,000 people who were in charge of extinguishing the fire at the Chernobyl reactor and deactivation and cleanup of the site.
The book finds that by 2005, between 112,000 and 125,000 liquidators had died.
“On this 24th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, we now realize that the consequences were far worse than many researchers had believed,” says Janette Sherman, MD, the physician and toxicologist who edited the book.
President Barack Obama continues to promote and support the use of nuclear power to meet America’s energy needs. If only one of 104 nuclear reactor fails in the US, the price per kilowatt hour for nuclear power will be unrecoverable.
