Alaskan Nuclear Weapons Freeze

I am very proud of Alaska for doing this:

http://www.ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Alaska_Nuclear_Weapons_Freeze_Measure_%281986%29

Alaska Nuclear Weapons Freeze Measure (1986)

From Ballotpedia

The Nuclear Weapons Freeze Initiative was an initiated state statute that appeared on the statewide primary ballot in Alaska in 1986, where it was approved.
The language on the ballot said:

"The initiative would officially recognize that the prevention of nuclear war is the greatest challenge facing the Earth and that the nuclear arms race dangerously increases the risk of a war that would destroy humanity. The initiative would promote mutual and verifiable nuclear weapons freeze, to be followed by nuclear weapons reduction. The initiative would direct the governor to conduct the state's affairs in conformity with the initiative's goals. "

Alaska Nuclear Weapons Freeze Measure (1986)
Yes or no		Votes	Percentage
Yes		-	58.4%
No		-	41.6%
Total votes		-	100% precincts

I believe the whole country of New Zealand did this as well. I was visiting there when President Bush threatened them with economic sanctions if New Zealand did not allow US nuclear subs to refuel there. They remained firm in their refusal, although they were frightened by the economic threats. That  was impressive.

It seems like a good idea for more countries and states, provinces, etc. to do this. 


I do not know whether the average Alaskan voted for this nuclear weapons freeze, with the nuclear test bombing of  Amchitka Island in mind or not. The understanding of just how bad the consequences are for the Amchitka nuclear bomb tests, have only been revealed gradually.


Amchitka used to be inhabited by Alaskan Natives. Many Aleutian Alaskan Natives were forcibly evacuated from their homes during WWII according to some material I read. There is quite a bit about it. This is not a shining moment for the USA. Here is a link to a site on a book about it:


http://www.nps.gov/aleu/historyculture/unangan-internment.htm


United States citizens were forcibly and even violently evacuated from their homes, and then interned in camps. Their villages were burned in their sight as they were taken away on ships to be imprisoned.


This is not something that I had been aware of before I began research for these posts. I find it distressing.


This evacuation is the reason that Amchitka was not inhabited when nuclear bombs tests were done there. It saddens me to think that those people will never be able to go home again, nor will many generations of their children and children's children.


This is all the more reason why we can not trust politicians and military with nukes. The average people in the street and in their homes and workplaces need to take this option away. We do not need  nuclear weapons and we do not need nuclear power plants. We can not live with them. We can live without them. 


This is not on topic, but it is so good I have to share it for those interested. It is an entire video about the dead zone around Chernobyl, especially the wolves that live there. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/radioactive-wolves/introduction/7108/

Various National Nuclear Waste Repositories

If a country uses any nuclear power for either peacetime or war reasons, that country will have to dispose of nuclear wastes. That means finding a place to put the nuclear wastes. This brings up a NIMBY, or Not In My Back Yard, problem. It is almost inevitable that an area with a smaller population is going to get the nuclear wastes deposited in their back yard.


The UK is currently fighting over this matter because they have kept their nuclear wastes without a permanent home for a very long time. Since the UK was one of the earliest producers of nuclear wastes they must have a lot of it. I can see why the battle over where to put it is rather heated. I can't say even a little nuclear waste is a pleasant prospect to have in my back yard. 


Here is a list of potential sites for the nuclear waste in the UK:

Adjacent to Bradwell nuclear power station in Essex

Ministry of Defence land on Potton Island, 8 km from Southend on Sea. Essex

Under the North Sea, accessed from the port at Redcar, Yorkshire

Under the sea between the Inner Hebrides and Northern Ireland, accessed from the port at Hunterston in North Ayrshire

Killingholme, South Humberside

Ministry of Defence training area, Stanford, Norfolk

Adjacent to Dounreay nuclear plant in Caithness

Two sites near the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria

Altnabreac in Caithness 18 km south of Dounreay

Fuday, small, uninhabited island north of Barra in the Western Isles

Sandray, small, uninhabited island south of Barra in the Western Isles

This list is from the "New Scientist" site.

The following countries are also investigating sites for deep underground disposal of nuclear wastes: 
 Finland, Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium and France. 


The USA already has a nuclear waste disposal site. It is called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) for weapons waste in a salt formation 655 metres under the Chihuahuan Desert near Carlsbad in New Mexico. Another site is being considered. It is Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert. The Carlsbad, New Mexico one is for weapons waste disposal and the Yucca Mountain one is supposed to be for nuclear power plant disposal.


Here is a link to a pdf map of how much spent nuclear fuel is located in each of the states of the USA:


http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/documentlibrary/nuclearwastedisposal/graphicsandcharts/used-nuclear-fuel-storage-map/

This map shows Alaska as having zero tons of spent nuclear fuel. I do not believe this to be true, since three atomic  bombs were tested here. Perhaps it is a semantics thing and they don't think it counts as spent fuel. 


They can use whatever words for it they want. I expect close examination of the vicinity would turn up a cousin to Blinky, the three-eyed fish, from the Simpsons cartoons.


The three nuclear test bombings were conducted on an island named Amchitka. "The island is actually part of a small crustal block being torn apart by oblique subduction — and is therefore one of the least stable tectonic environments in the United States." 


The above quote was from "Nuclear Stewardship: Lessons from a Not-So-Remote Island " by John Eichelberger, Jeff Freymueller, Graham Hill and Matt Patrick .  


The most important part that I took away from the above is that a lake formed by the nuclear bomb test on Amchitka is going to end up in the ocean. 


This is a big risk to international fishing. A lot of international ship traffic goes by there. It is closer than it appears on most maps. When shipping goes through the Northwest Passage at a good clip, it will pass by Amchitka too. 


Radioactive lake water in the ocean will be distinctly bad for the Aleutian Islands residents. It will not be good for Petropavlovsk-Kamchatksky, Russia either. That city is closer to Amchitka, than Anchorage Alaska is.


Greenpeace started up over the nuclear bomb tests at Amchitka. That was before anyone even knew just how bad an idea they were. Tectonic plate theory was not advanced enough to tell us about how geologically unstable Amchitka is. There is no known way to mitigate the danger from the Amchitka nuclear bomb test site.

There have already been three serious nuclear accidents worldwide. Some people do not know them, so I will list them. Chernobyl in Russia, Three Mile Island in the USA, and Fukishima in Japan. 


These three countries have some of the best resources in the world to prevent such disasters. If this is how three of the world's most affluent and technologically advanced countries, Russia, the USA, and Japan, take care of safety in their nuclear power plants, we are all in trouble.


Germany decided to phase out nuclear power in their country after the horrible examples of Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. Perhaps it is time for the rest of the nuclear-power-using countries to do the same.


"An analysis carried out by Nature and Columbia University, New York, shows that two-thirds of the world's 211 power plants have more people living within a 30-kilometre radius than the 172,000 people living within 30 kilometres of the Fukushima Daiichi plant."


That was a quote from the "Nature" site about nuclear power plants and the number of humans near them. Here is a link to that site:  http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110421/full/472400a.html

Nature went on to say, "Some 21 plants have populations larger than 1 million within that radius, and six have populations larger than 3 million." 


It is not as though the radiation from a nuclear power plant disaster all stays in the area where it occurs. Debris from the Japanese nuclear disaster traveled long distances, including the coast of the state of Alaska, where I live, and to California and the rest of the West Coast of the USA and to Canada.


There is not a single nuclear power plant in the state of Alaska, yet we got the dubious benefit of radiation from those in Japan anyway. 


Nuclear power plants affect us all whether we have one near us or not. Nuclear power plants are the business of the entire world.


The operation of a nuclear power plant is nothing compared to the remains of spent fuel and the dismantling of a no-longer useful nuclear power plant. Nuclear waste repository sites offer much more excitement to life for many more people. Just about everyone is involved when you consider the routes traveled to ship the nuclear wastes to those sites. 


I have not found an actual map of these routes yet. Oddly enough, the sites I have tried to access so far are no longer there. An article about them did mention that one out of seven people in the USA would live along proposed shipping routes for nuclear wastes. 


If you live in the USA you can find out about some of this by using a site called, "local". Just type in your town and nuclear wastes or nuclear waste shipping routes. Here is a link to the local site:
http://www.local.com

My Personal Experience With Nuclear Power "Accidents"

I grew up in an area that started off free of nuclear power plants. That changed when I was in High School. They decided to build a nuclear power plant on the beach less than ten miles from where I lived. This is the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant.


Lots of people came from all over the United States and even from other countries to protest building this nuclear power plant. They most often held signs grimly, near the security gates of the building site. One time there was a very large protest and a lot of people were arrested. The local courts were completely overwhelmed with the numbers of protesters. They had to get outside help to avoid breaking US law by keeping the protesters too long without charges. It discourages me to think that would not happen, since the passage of laws that make a mockery of the US Constitution, and allow arrests without charges and indefinite imprisonment. I digress, however.


None of this stopped the power plant from being built and put into operation. I learned much more than I wanted to about nuclear power plants, and that one in particular, because it was so close to where I lived.


One of the worst things that I learned about nuclear power plants is that they can be built by real idiots. The thing that impressed this on me the most was mistakes that were made by builders and the lies they told about them.


The first one was that there was no danger of any earthquakes in the area of the power plant. It was made public that the builders knew that an earthquake fault had been found that was very close to the power plant. The builders had been assuring the local public that there were no nearby faults during a time when they knew that the opposite was true.


The next thing that came out, was that someone had designed the containment domes to be mirror images of each other. The designer had decided that it would be a good idea to save money by designing one containment dome and letting the builders flip the blueprint to mirror image the other containment dome and build it from the same blueprint.


You are right if you guessed that the builders neglected to flip the blueprint and built the second dome wrong. The second dome did not pass inspection for safety because the metal reinforcement inside it was in the wrong areas to hold up for containing a reaction.


They decided that it would cost too much money to tear the second containment dome down and start over. Instead, they simply added metal reinforcements in places they should have been in the first place. This was in addition to the metal reinforcements that were in the wrong places. The builders informed the public that we actually had a bonus as a result of the initial mistake. Our second containment building was extra secure because it was stronger because of the extra mental reinforcements inside it.


My view, which was popular, was that it really worried me that such chuckle heads, who could not even manage to build the nuclear power plant, were planning to fire it up and operate it. 


It was not reassuring to think that we might need both of those containment buildings because of the earthquake fault nearby, either.


This post is getting too long, so I will continue on the subject.

What Do You Think You Would Do?

My post two days ago, about dealing with people in a disaster is the least pleasant part of preparedness for me. I particularly hate writing about it. 


It is not possible to prepare enough for everyone around you who does not choose to prepare for disasters. Most people will not prepare themselves for a disaster. That means when you are in a disaster, you will be surrounded with other people who are not prepared for it. If they know that you are prepared, they will want you to give them the stuff that you have prepared, or they will want to take it from you.


I dislike conflict more than a lot of people. Disasters are distressing for anyone to deal with. Dealing with the distress of conflict over resources due to having preparedness supplies versus people who are not prepared is even more distressing.


People in the world on the whole, are not dealing with even more important issues than disaster preparedness. There are limited resources in the world and more people want these resources than can get them. For this reason, people sometimes fight, and countries do the same and have wars.


Wars were bad in the past, but since humans invented nuclear weapons, the consequences of war are much worse. 


I recently did a series of posts about preparedness for surviving a nuclear war. 


I would like to present a hypothetical situation to my readers:


Suppose you could probably remove all, or most, easily fissionable materials, from the planet. This would make a nuclear war very difficult to do. It would also make other things, that are more helpful, very difficult to do. Examples of this are nuclear power plants and medical therapy for cancer treatment.


What do you think you would do?

Emotional And Mental Recovery After Disaster

I have met a a lot of people who have lived through natural disasters, primarily earthquakes. Every one of them experienced anxiety connected with the disaster long afterwards.


It seems to me as if those people have not completely recovered from the disasters they were in. 


The furthest back in time of the disasters that these people experienced was the Alaskan earthquake of 1964. The level of recovery of these people varies a lot, but I believe they all told me something without saying it out loud. "People need some kind of emotional and mental healing from disasters."


I have obliquely covered the subject with posts that included comfort items to include in, "go bags", or "bug out bags", to take along for disaster evacuation. 


Emotional and mental recovery after a disaster is very important and deserves its own post. Even if you do not have a scratch on you and your home even survives intact from a disaster, you are likely to have suffered some injuries that are not obvious. Those must be dealt with for you to have a good recovery from a disaster.


It will be easier for you if you have some sort of plan made to help you recover emotionally and mentally after a disaster. You may or may not need a professional counselor. It may be enough for you and your family to talk to someone like a pastor of your church. 


Charitable organization or NGOs (Non Governmental Organizations), train their workers, both volunteer and paid, to be sensitive to the emotional suffering of the people they are helping. Some of these organizations provide free counselors to help out more. You may want to think about where and how you might find counseling help for yourself and your family after a disaster. 


Here is a list of effects that often happen to people after a disaster:

Normal physical stress responses to traumatic events

The symptoms of traumatic stress are not just emotional—they’re also physical. It’s important to know what the physical symptoms of stress look like, so they don’t scare you. They will go away if you don’t fight them:


Trembling or shaking
Pounding heart
Rapid breathing
Lump in throat; feeling choked up
Racing thoughts
Stomach tightening or churning
Feeling dizzy or faint
Cold sweats


The above is from this site and I think it would be a good idea to take a look at it so you can learn more than I have room for here:
http://helpguide.org/mental/disaster_recovery_trauma_stress_coping.htm


Post Traumatic Stress is normal. People get it after being in battle and they get it after an accident or a disaster. You do not have to suffer from the effects of PTSD for the rest of your life. It is possible to recover. I think this recovery from PTSD is much easier if you make it part of your disaster preparedness.


If you have recently or even not recently been in a disaster and realize that you are still experiencing PTSD, please seek help. You do not have to continue suffering.

How Are You Going To Deal With Other People In A Disaster?

One of the least pleasant aspects of disaster preparedness, for me, is about how to deal with other people during a disaster. The first thing you notice when you begin thinking about this subject is food and water. 


Most of your relatives, friends, and neighbors will not be prepared for a disaster. When a disaster hits your area the people who are not prepared will soon be thirsty and hungry. 


Did you tell them, or let them find out that you were preparing for a disaster? If they know you were prepared and have food and water ready to use, they will probably ask you for some of it. 


How much food and water did you prepare? Is there going to be enough to share with everyone who wants what you have? If you share, will you be hungry and thirsty too?


What happens if you decide not to share with others? What if you say, "No," and they don't want to accept that answer. What if they decide to take what you have anyway? 


What are you prepared to do to keep what you have prepared? Is your door strong enough to keep someone out if they decide they want to break it down to get food and water?


What happens if someone wants to break your windows to get in and take your food and water? Will you be willing to fight to keep your food and water? Are you a better fighter than the people who want to take your food and water? 


What happens if you are away from home and someone decides to take your food and water from your family? Will your family be able to fight them off?


Are you willing to use weapons and let your family use weapons to keep your food and water? If you are willing to use weapons, what kind of weapons would they be? Can you afford those weapons and do you already know how to use them? Do you need to take lessons or practice so that you can use the weapons effectively? Does your family need to take lessons on the weapons?


Everyone has to make their own choices on these matters. It is something you will have to think about and decide for yourself.