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FW: THREE MEDIA DECEPTIONS IN TWO WEEKS !!


FYI, her's another try to set things straight...

> ----------
> From: 	Franta, Jaroslav
> Sent: 	Tuesday, October 12, 1999 5:38 PM
> To: 	'Editor of The Gazette'
> Subject: 	THREE MEDIA DECEPTIONS IN TWO WEEKS !!
> 
> Montreal Gazette
> 250 St-Antoine Street West
> Montreal, Quebec
> H2Y 3R7
> 
> To the Editor:
> 
> Last Wednsday's Gazette World Briefs headline "Power-plant workers
> irradiated in South Korea" mislead readers in Montreal - as it did in
> other cities around the world, where the news media carried this story.
> Any one of the thousands of people who have taken the basic radiation
> safety course required for workers at CANDU nuclear power-plants such as
> South Korea's Wolsung, can debunk the "serious accident... of highly
> dangerous technology... [which some Gazette readers concluded requires us
> to] kill the CANDU program before it kills us" (R.W. Morel, Gazette
> letters, Oct. 8, 1999).
> Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen, and is a well-known hazard in
> heavy-water systems of CANDU power-plants (its also an indispensable fuel
> for possible future fusion reactors). But it is a hazard that is fairly
> easily guarded against because its not a gamma-ray emitter, and it only
> gives off low-energy, non-penetrating beta rays, as it decays into stable,
> non-radioactive helium. A full-body plastic suit with breathing air supply
> - to prevent surface and internal contamination - is standard gear inside
> the CANDU reactor containment building and any other place at the station
> where maintenance or repair on primary heat transfer system heavy water
> equipment and piping must be performed, and it offers complete protection
> against this hazard whenever some of the contents of this equipment spills
> out, as can be expected in such situations (normally piping and equipment
> are drained as much as possible - into a heavy water holding tank for
> recycling - but there may always be some pockets which can't be drained
> until the equipment is dismantled...). 
> Similar safety measures must be employed by people in much less exotic
> working environments such as septic tanks or sewers - the difference being
> that if your protective gear fails in this situation you will probably die
> on the spot (as has in fact happened on occasion before), whereas in the
> case of the reactor you may exceed your allowable radiation dose for the
> year, possibly reaching the level you would get in a dozen or more
> trans-Atlantic flights (like pilots & flight attendants), or what you
> would get by spending a couple of months on an earth-orbiting
> space-station - not life-threatening at all !
> Different kinds of safety measures must be used by workers doing
> maintenance or repairs on windmills or roof-top solar panels, to avoid
> injury due to falling to the ground (falling or tripping is second only to
> fires as the most common cause of accidental fatalities in Canadian homes,
> killing some 60 Quebeckers each year). This is especially true in the
> winter or on windy days, when such weather-sensitive equipment is most
> likely to fail.
> A spill of a couple of dozen litres of tritiated heavy water from a pump
> inside the containment dome of a CANDU reactor hardly qualifies as a
> "disaster" or even an "accident." Nor were workers "irradiated" any more
> than any of us are irradiated by natural background radiation ( for
> details, see United Nations'  International Atomic Energy Agency web
> posting at
> http://www.iaea.org/worldatom/Press/P_release/1999/koreabrief.shtml ).
> There's almost no chance this latest "disaster" story would have "sold"
> were it not for the Japanese accident the previous week. But media
> coverage of the Tokaimura accident featured another world-wide deception:
> some wiseguy journalist paid by the BBC decided that the criticality
> accident wasn't scary enough and dug up some two-year-old film footage of
> a fire-damaged building at a plant near-by, and proclaimed that the
> accident at the uranium processing plant included "a small nuclear
> explosion" that blew a hole in the roof of the building. The next day
> every television station news broadcast in the world carried this
> fabricated story, some even showing animations of how a tank lid might
> have been propelled up and through the roof. Of course there was no
> explosion, and no hole in the roof. Some of us in the nuclear business
> were very suspicious about the explosion report even before it became
> clear that there wasn't one - a nuclear fission criticality achieved by
> manually adding aqueous solution of enriched uranium to an open tank will
> never reach sufficient excess reactivity to "explode" - though the
> resulting radiation flash can certainly be lethal. The fact that the
> reaction pulsed off-and-on several times over 17 hours was proof-positive
> that the tank did not belch out even a small part of its contents - an
> explosion would have emptied it and terminated the reaction for good. The
> BBC quietly swept their swindle under the rug - no journalistic heads will
> roll as a result of this massive deception perpetrated on the entire
> world. I was surprised to have received even this lame excuse from the
> BBC:  
>                <<RE: Japanese criticality accident - NO EXPLOSION !!>> 
> 
> Of course Greenpeace wasn't at all happy with this "disaster" that hasn't
> even claimed any lives todate, despite the fact that one of the exposed
> workers received three times what's considered the lethal dose of
> radiation. "The group said it found the radioactive isotope sodium-24 in
> salt collected from private homes near the [Tokaimura] plant and in soil
> collected further afield" (Ottawa Citizen, Oct. 8, 1999).
> The deception here is a very simple one - sodium-24 can be found anywhere
> in the world, since its a "cosmogenic radionuclide" produced by the
> interaction of cosmic rays with salt and other sodium compounds on the
> surface of the earth and in thousands of tonnes of sea water spray lofted
> to high altitudes by hurricanes or typhoons. Much of the activated sodium
> (as well as other NORMs - Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials) stays
> in the atmosphere, until the rain comes and washes it down to the ground.
> Turns out the Greenpeace folks got lucky - it rained for a day after the
> accident and "the rest is history" (for more information on NORMs and
> TENORMs - technologically enhanced NORMs - see the internet web sites,
> http://www.normis.com/nrm101.htm and
> http://www.sph.umich.edu/group/eih/UMSCHPS/natural.htm ).
> Guess what happened next - news media around the world obediently spread
> this latest deception. The moral of the story is simply that you can not
> trust the media on anything having to do with nuclear power or radiation.
> Mr. Morel will no doubt be pleased that his suggestion to kill nuclear
> power is already well underway - I guess congratulations would be in order
> ?
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Jaro Franta
> 
> Disclaimer: the opinions expressed in this communication reflect only
> those of the author and do not represent those of his employer, AECL, or
> anyone else.
> 
> Jaro Franta, eng. 
> AECL Design & Engineering Services
> Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.
> Pickering 'A' Return to Service (PARS) Project
> *(905) 823-9060 x 4585
> Fax: (905) 823-0108
> Sheridan Park - SP2-F4
> 2251 Speakman Drive,
> Mississauga, Ontario, 
> Canada L5K 1B2
> * frantaj@aecl.ca
> Montreal residence tel. : (514) 363-9717
> 
> 
> 


Dear Mr Franta

Thank you very much for your e-mail.

I have investigated  the issues you have raised, and discovered that our
initial reporting of what happened at the Tokaimura nuclear plant was
factually incorrect. 

Both the television report, which we featured in realvideo, and the text of
the early versions of our stories wrongly reported that there had been an
explosion at the plant, which punched a hole in the plant's roof. 

As it turns out, there was a "criticality flash", but neither an explosion
nor a hole in the roof.

 However, this was not a deliberate deception. 

Our early reports were based on video footage that we received from a
reputed news agency. The television feed was flagged as showing pictures
taken in the immediate aftermath of last month's nuclear accident at
Tokaimura. 

We used this material in good faith, and we will take up the issue with the
agency supplying the pictures.

I have now corrected all the relevant stories in our archive, and would like
to apologise that we got it wrong.  

Yours sincerely


Tim Weber
Acting World Editor
BBC News Online - http://news.bbc.co.uk/