"Three Mile Island and Nuclear Hopes and Fears"

The New York Times Retro Report has published a 13 minute video about the Three Mile Island disaster. Unfortunately, it repeats the myth that "no one died at TMI." Beyond Nuclear debunked that falsehood in its recent Thunderbird newsletter, Three Mile Island: The Truth, on the disaster's 35th anniversary. Beyond Nuclear also created a website devoted to TMI Truth.

The Retro Report also handed the microphone to Pandora's propagandist Michael Shollenberger of the Breakthrough Institute. Beyond Nuclear has also debunked the propaganda of Pandora's Promise.

It also presented the supposed potential of thorium power, another false promise Beyond Nuclear and its allies have challenged.

No discussion of "Retro" and nuclear power is complete without a link to NIRS's "Nuke Retro: Salesman from the '70s," created by cartoonist Mark Fiore during the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney push for a "nuclear renaissance" a decade ago.

"Chernobyl: Capping a Catastrophe"

The New York Times has published an extended article, returning to the scene of the "Huge Dirty Bomb" that exploded 28 years ago this week, resulting in 1,000 square miles of radioactively contaminated "Dead Zone" in Ukraine and Belarus. Radioactive fallout "hot spots" extend hundreds, and even thousands, of miles away, into western Russia, Scandinavia, southern Germany, the British Isles, and elsewhere.

The coverage features a video of a former resident returning to Pripyat, formerly home to 45,000, but now a radioactive ghost town since the mass evacuation of late April, 1986.

The article also features large format photos of Chernobyl and its current workforce, focusing on the construction of "The Arch" (see photo, above). The largest movable engineered structure in history, costing $1.5 billion, and counting, this cover is meant to contain the 95% of Chernobyl's exploded and melted core that still resides somewhere within the hastily-built, and now crumbling, concrete and steel "Sarcophagus" of 1986. The Arch must be built some distance from Unit 4, and concrete radiation shielding walls have had to be built, to protect workers from hazardous gamma rays.

The Times reports that the workforce erecting the Arch -- including many Western Europeans -- was forced to evacuate temporarily several weeks ago, in response to the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

As Adi Roche, founder of the Irish Chernobyl Children's Project, wrote in her 1996 book Children of Chernobyl: The Human Cost of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster, "the next Chernobyl will be Chernobyl," if the Sarcophagus collapses, sending a large, radioactive dust cloud onto the winds, to fallout on the land and surface waters, and exposing the destroyed reactor core directly to the elements.

The Arch is designed to last only a century, while the radioactive poisons within will remain hazardous for a million years or longer.

"Who's Minding the Nukes?"

The insignia of the U.S. nuclear missileers Stahl interviewed in this reportCBS 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl reports on the status of U.S. nuclear-tipped missiles at silos located across five states on the Great Plains. This includes antiquated communications and computer equipment, as well as hardware problems. The report comes in the aftermath of a major shake up in the U.S. military's nuclear missile command and corps, based on a competency test cheating scandal, as well as illegal drug use, and even a drunken binge by the top U.S. nuclear missile commander while on official duty in Moscow, Russia.

The report features an interview with the author of the book Command and Control, Eric Schlosser. He has been named an Alliance for Nuclear Accountability DC Days award winner this year.

Unfortunately, the 60 Minutes report does not question the wisdom of U.S. reliance on "deterrence," based on "Mutually Assured Destruction" (MAD). This is all the more ironic, because 60 Minutes' own report touched on a number of incidents where U.S. nuclear weapons nearly caused disasters on U.S. soil. One involved a nuclear missile rocket fuel explosion caused by a dropped socket wrench, necessitating the evacuation of an Arkansas town. Another involved the accidental drop, and near detonation, of a hydrogen bomb in North Carolina, a few days after John F. Kennedy's presidential inauguration. A more recent incident, in 2007, involved the unauthorized -- and unguarded -- transfer of six nuclear warheads, by plane, from North Dakota to Louisiana. This led to the firing of the U.S. Air Force's top two officials.

60 Minutes also did not question the wisdom of U.S. plans to "modernize" its nuclear weapons arsenal, to the tune of $355 billion over the next ten years. The Republic of the Marshall Islands has filed lawsuits against the United States of America in federal district court in San Francisco -- as well as against the other countries in the world with nuclear weapons arsenals, at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, in the Netherlands -- for their failure to negotiate, in good faith, the abolition of their nuclear weapons arsenals, as called for by the four decade old Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) has reported that the "exchange" of "only" 100 Nagasaki-sized nuclear weapons between India and Pakistan could cause a "mini" Nuclear Winter, and crop failures worldwide, resulting in the deaths of a billion people, or more, due to starvation.

As President John F. Kennedy famously said: "Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us."

The irony of the U.S. nuclear missileers' insignia (above left), captured for a fleeting moment in the 60 Minutes report, is conveyed by this quote from Noam Chomsky's book Pirates and Emperors: "A captured pirate was brought before Alexander the Great. 'How dare you molest the sea?' asked Alexander. 'How dare you molest the whole world?' the pirate replied, and continued: 'Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor.'"

"Forced to Flee Radiation, Fearful Japanese Villagers Are Reluctant to Return"

As reported by Martin Fackler of the New York Times, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and the Japanese national government under Prime Minister Abe's pro-nuclear Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) administration are pressuring nuclear evacuees from around Fukushima Daiichi to move back to their radioactively contaminated homes.

The pressure comes in the form of an end to meager yet essential compenstation payments worth $1,000 per month or less, as well the closing of barracks-like emergency shelters where families have had to live for over three years now. TEPCO, forced to pay such meager compensation by the Japanese government, often offers at most half the value of a family's unrecoverable home, or even as little at $3,000.

Such terms have left penniless nuclear evacuees with little choice but to return to their radioactively contaminated homes, like it or not.

“This is inhumane and irresponsible,” said Teruhisa Maruyama, a lawyer who leads the Support Group for Victims of the Nuclear Accident, a Tokyo-based legal organization that helps residents seek increased compensation.

“The national government knows that full compensation could add up to big money, enough to raise public doubts about the wisdom of using nuclear power in Japan.”

“They want to say that everything is back to normal so they can keep their nuclear plants,” said Mr. Satoshi Mizuochi, 57, a nuclear evacuee. “Failing to compensate us for our losses is a way of pressuring us to go back.”

"U.S. welcomes Japan's pro-nuclear policy in joint statement"

Kyodo News reports:

"The United States on Friday welcomed Japan's recently decided new energy policy that supports the use of nuclear power despite the devastating accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011.

In a joint statement released after Japanese and U.S. leaders held a meeting in Tokyo a day earlier, the United States said it "welcomed Japan's new Strategic Energy Plan, which includes global, peaceful and safe use of nuclear energy and acceleration of the introduction of renewable energy."

The remarks are in contrast to the concerns the United States is said to have expressed when the previous government led by the Democratic Party of Japan, now the main opposition party, decided in 2012 on an energy strategy that seeks to phase out nuclear power."

This pro-nuclear U.S.-Japanese policy statement comes on the eve of the 28-year mark of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, and 37 months after the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe began. Although Prime Minister In a bid to secure the 2020 Summer Games for Tokyo, Abe assured the International Olympic Committee last year that the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe was "under control." But his flippant words were contradicted just five days ago by a knowledgable insider, as reported by Reuters in an article entitled "Fukushima No. 1 boss admits plant doesn't have complete control over water problems."