Sidney Goodman wrote

Sidney Goodman wrote:

Hello:

When I lived in Connecticut, one of my neighbors was the Chief Financial Officer for a company that built nuclear plants. He told me that one day he asked the director of research, “Are these plants really safe?” The director answered, “ If the public knew what we were up to, they would put a stop to it.”
I just wrote a book, which reveals what the industry doesn’t want you to know.
The book is called “Asleep At The Geiger Counter.”
Dr. Helen Caldicott, founding president of “Physicians for Social Responsibility” read the manuscript and wrote, “ Asleep at the Geiger Counter is an excellently researched book by an engineer deeply concerned about the direction in which some science is taking the world. It is a personable account, easily accessible and from my perspective I found the reading fascinating."
A Geiger counter measures radioactivity. Radioactivity bombards living cells with zillions of tiny bullets. High doses kill cells.Low doses don’t kill the cells, but damage them slightly, scrambling genes. This can cause cancer and other diseases later on.
The nuclear folks want you to think that low doses are perfectly safe, and might even be good for your health. If you can believe that, I’d like to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.
There is no such thing as a safe dose. Natural background radioactivity has killed millions of people over the years. Doses added to that by the nuclear industry have contributed greatly to the sharp increase in cancer over the past fifty years.
Nonsense, say the nuclear folks, that is all anecdotal evidence.
I met an inspector for the Millstone nuclear plant in Connecticut. He was fired because he refused to falsify data about the poisonous emissions from the plant. Millstone leaked so much poison, there was a 55% increase in cancer downwind of Millstone, in a five-year period. Anecdotal evidence of course!
Anecdotal evidence: that’s what our government told the Mormon population whose people were dying like flies from the low dose fallout of nuclear weapons testing. The was so much evidence, the Mormons sued our government. They won their case. Some anecdote!
You may have heard the often-repeated government report that nobody died from the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania. They said that not enough radioactivity was released to do any harm. The fact is that they never knew and do not want to know how much was released. More radiation was released than they will ever admit.
When independent radiation chemists flew to the scene of the accident, their Geiger counter needles went off-scale, as they neared Harrisburg in the air. There was too much radioactivity for their meters to read.
Nuclear power and other nuclear programs come from our nuclear weapons program. The horror of dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki inspired a universal hope that the awesome force of atomic energy should be harnessed for the benefit of humankind. We needed a friendly face for nuclear technology.
Some top pioneering scientists realized that none of the claims were true and that policy was flawed. These conscionable men were suppressed. Anyone who blew the whistle was persecuted in some foul way. This persecution is detailed in my book.
Before I was Chief Engineer of Melnor Inc., I was Director of Engineering for a company that made a product that could cause death if it had a structural failure. I was pressured to approve a design, which violated the structural code. This compelled me to resign. Later, I met other engineers who were confronted by a similar ethical conflict. When I learned that what happened to us was happening on a grand scale in the nuclear industry, I took a deep interest.
As an engineer, one of the first things that struck me was that claims for nuclear programs were so brazen; they violated the most elementary laws of physics, engineering, common sense, and decency.
Take the Chernyobl accident. The Bergen Record reported that at least a million people needed medical treatment of some sort. Doctors in India believe that during fourteen years after the accident, a million children died from the fallout.However, the American nuclear industry is satisfied with a mere ten-mile evacuation radius.
But, even if this ridiculously microscopic evacuation radius is increased, evacuees will return to an area, which will be poisoned for a long time. Plutonium is deadly for more than 250,000 years. Iodine 129 is deadly for up to 160 million years.The tiniest speck of plutonium can cause a lung cancer.
When I was in engineering school, I was taught that someday, someone would claim a miraculous efficiency for a source of power. All you have to do to find out if they are lying is to apply the Carnot principle, a thermodynamic principle.
You just need to know the temperature of the steam, which enters the turbine, and the temperature of the steam, which leaves the turbine. Subtract two numbers and divide by another, and you calculate an efficiency, which is so ideal that it, cannot be achieved in real life.
The industry claimed a net energy yield of 94%. This miserably failed the Carnot test.
A government official was caught lying under oath. Coal had been burned to enrich nuclear fuel.
Wait a minute! The industry has always boasted that nuclear power eliminates the burning of coal. The way they eliminated burning coal was by burning coal to enrich uranium.
As explained in my book, after deciphering the weasel worded contractions in government reports. and applying elementary analysis, it is remarkably easy to demonstrate that nuclear power has never really delivered anything close to what has been claimed as its energy contribution.
My independent research led to the realization that the net yield is actually less than 4%.
This is much lower than the claimed 94%.
The fraud and deceit of Enron, Tyco, and Worldcom is amateurish compared to business as usual in the nuclear industry.
One of the most elementary laws of physics is the law of conservation of energy. As explained in my book, applying this law to the design of containers for shipping nuclear waste proves that dangerous specifications have been stealthily foisted on us.
Rigged tests have been used to deceive us. Failures in design, poor construction, and negligent inspection have been covered up.
Furthermore, each shipment of radioactive waste is a terrorist’s dream comes true. Containers were never designed to withstand an explosion. Each container is a potential dirty bomb.
Nuclear scientists are surely well aware of the high school physics involved. They have been willing to jeopardize the public safety on behalf of their own selfish boondoggles.
Some radioactive wastes remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years. Some poisons are deadly for more than a hundred million years. Yet, the industry is satisfied with containing these wastes for a mere ten thousand years. If you want to know where we have been keeping these wastes, take a look at the most earthquake prone areas in the nation….bulls eye.
Worst of all, Yucca Mountain, the ultimate burial ground for nuclear wastes is where there have been hundreds of earthquakes within fifty miles, over the last 25 years. Furthermore, Cambridge scientists recently discovered that there is a dormant volcano near Yucca Mountain.
Given the known toxicity of nuclear poisons, poisons must be contained with a reliability that is 99.999% perfect. This means that a lack of containment of .001% is dangerous. Within thirty years, up to 3% of our nuclear wastes have already leaked.
In other words, the industry and government has already been thousands of times less reliable than they have to be to make good on their boasts about health and safety.
Of course they cannot predict and control earthquakes, human error, or other hazards for the hundreds of thousands of years necessary, so these genious’s who put nukes on earthquake faults are so perfect, they keep saying that no one has ever been harmed.
Leaked wastes cannot be retrieved to be re-isolated. They have not solved and never will solve the radioactive waste problem. To say that they are working hard to solve problems, which can’t really ever be solved, is irrelevant.
When I was president of the Paramus Environmental Council a nuclear engineer asked to come to one of our meetings to set us straight about nuclear power. This man told us not to worry about the nearby Indian Point Plant that was built near the active Ramapo earthquake fault.
A bad accident, or act of terrorism at the Indian Point nuclear plant, near New York City could cause more than a trillion dollars damage. It would make the entire metropolitan area unfit to live in for thousands of years. The liability of the operators of this plant, however, is limited by a federal law called the Price Anderson Act.
Victims would be lucky to be reimbursed 3 cents on the dollar. As for your, health, you will be told, “Don’t worry, you weren’t harmed. It is all your imagination.” That’s what the victims of Three Mile Island were told, some of whom could taste the bitter taste of radioactive iodine in their mouths. Big guns in the industry are afraid to operate nuclear plants without the indemnification of the Price Anderson Act. They have threatened to shut down every plant in the country unless this law is kept on the books.
Wait a minute! If there is no risk, as they always say, there is absolutely no justification for the mere existence of this law.
The insistence by the industry that we need this law proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that the big guns in the industry do not believe one word of their deceitful assurances.
Renewable energy and energy efficiency can provide much more energy than we get from nukes, at a fraction of the cost, and without the risks. A landmark study by the Union of Concerned Scientists reported that by fully implementing these neglected resources, we can reduce global warming emissions 70% by the year 2030. In the process of doing this, they can save American consumers trillions of dollars in fuel and electrical costs.
Renewable energy is sufficiently developed for widespread use right now. It can give us a golden age of economic and environmental benefits, and put an army of people to work.
It will benefit both rich and poor alike. This golden age has been stolen from us by politicians who have created unfair market barriers, as is explained in my book. Our energy policy has been both stupid and corrupt.
The largest chapter in my book explains why anyone who says we have no choice but to go nuclear only proves that there are more horses asses than there are horses.
“Asleep” covers much more than nuclear power. It discloses the problems of depleted uranium, food irradiation, nukes in space, and “recycling” nuclear wastes, putting them into all kinds of products. Believe it or not, nuclear waste has already been used as a fertilizer. Horrible deformities of small animals have been found on this so called fertilized ground. These are the ethics which confront us.
“Asleep” explains how nuclear power totally undermines our national security,and how it has proliferated the building of nuclear weapons around the world. The book documents how civil liberties have been trampled along the way. The book documents how nuclear power has sacrificed genuine energy independence on an altar of special interest greed, giving us a legacy of multi-billion dollar boondoggles for poisoned power.
You are cordially invited to read the book for details.
We have seen the machine age. We have seen the atomic age. With your involvement,
let us try to develop a new age, the age of humanity.

Sidney Goodman's new book, Asleep at the Geiger Counter.
It is available from the UNPLUG Salem Campaign for 16.95 plus 2.00 shipping. If we get 6 orders or more, we'll be elegible for a discount from the publisher, and the extra profits will go to support the work of the UNPLUG Salem Campaign.
Note: if you prefer that the profits from your purchase be given to the Jersey Shore Nuclear Watch, just indicate such with your order, and we'll pass them on to JSNW.

To order - please send a check for 18.95 to UNPLUG Salem Campaign, 321 Barr Ave, Linwood NJ, 08221.
Allow about 3 weeks for delivery. We also accept Visa and Mastercard.

Thanks
Norm Cohen
Coordinator, UNPLUG Salem Campaign