KING 5 News, May 5, 2016 (emphasis added): Record number of Hanford workers sickened by toxic vapors — An unprecedented number of workers at Hanford have been exposed to dangerous chemical vapors since Thursday, April 28. In one week’s time a total of 47 people either sought medical attention… Symptoms reported by workers include a headache, burning nose and throat, nausea, a metallic taste in the mouth, elevated blood pressure, and dizziness… [T]hose familiar with the nuclear site cannot remember so many people falling victim in such a short period… On May 4, two more evacuations were enacted at the site after workers smelled odors and experienced symptoms… “Forty-two employees have been evaluated as a precautionary measure due to reported odors or symptoms at the on-site medical facility since Thursday. Thirty-one employees reported health symptoms while 11 went for cautionary reasons. All have been released to return to work” said Rob Roxburgh of the Dept. of Energy, in a statement sent to KING 5 on Wednesday. Chemical vapor releases at Hanford come from underground nuclear waste storage tanks that vent the gasses without warning.
RT, May 7, 2016: Spike in radiation levels after toxic waste leak at Washington nuclear site — Radiation levels at the Hanford, Washington nuclear waste site have spiked to “elevated risk” after thousands of gallons of toxic waste leaked in April… The recent readings from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) obtained by RT have revealed that a sharp spike in the radiation level had been registered in Richland on the morning of May 5. The readings show the random jump when the toxic fume rates briefly reached around 410 CPM (counts per minute), nearly the highest possible level… As of Friday afternoon, there have been no media reports suggesting that an evacuation or other measures and guidance have been ordered for Richland… The most recent radiation spike comes less than a month after a massive leak was first detected…
RT transcript, May 5, 2016: On Thursday last week at least 19 workers at the Hanford nuclear site were hospitalized after inhaling poisonous fumes, from tasting metal in their mouth to bleeding ulcers and burned lungs.
RT transcript, May 3, 2016: At the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state… more workers sought medical attention after inhaling radioactive fumes. This adds to 19 workers hospitalized last week for the same reason — reinforcing burning concerns about the facility as it’s been reportedly leaking huge amounts of radioactive materials for more than 2 weeks… [Tom Carpenter, Executive Director of Hanford Challenge:] “It’s an environmental disaster, at some point the [Columbia] River becomes so contaminated that you can’t use the river.”… Ecologists say the situation can always get worse. They hate to think what would happen in case of even a minor earthquake in a geologically unstable area that it is. But even in the current state of things with tanks leaking nuclear poison into the environment, Hanford is already way past the ticking time bomb stage.
RT transcript, May 2, 2016: [Tom Carpenter, Executive Director of Hanford Challenge:] “A second double-shelled nuclear waste tank is showing signs of having failed, you find that out because there’s high radiation levels in between the two shells of the tank. There should be no radiation in that space… but instruments they have deployed there show high radiation levels, plutonium, cesium, strontium-90, etc. – well where did that come from? It probably came from the tank, meaning there’s a hole.”… So we’re looking at potentially a catastrophe, a disastrous catastrophe? [Carpenter:] “Every day we’re looking at that at Hanford – I’m totally serious.”
RT transcript, Apr 21, 2016: ‘Washington state nuke plant leaks thousands of gallons of toxic waste‘… Experts say it’s time for every American to be worried.
Britain’s nuclear bomb test veterans suffered severe genetic damage from radiation, writes Chris Busby, and their case for compensation is being heard in the High Court today. Key to their case is evidence of similar damage inflicted on in utero babies exposed to radiation from the Chernobyl disaster, and how the dreadful health impacts of radiation cascade down to future generations.
The world has had 30 years to assess the consequences for life on Earth of the disaster at Chernobyl. This is about the same period during which I have studied the effects of radioactive pollution on the planet.
It was the radioactive rain in the mountains of North Wales, where I lived in 1986, that brought me into this strange Alice in Wonderland area of science, where people and children die, and the global authorities, advised by physicists, deny what would be obvious to a child at school.
Chernobyl was mentioned as the star that fell to earth in the Book of Revelations. You may laugh, and it may be a coincidence, but the impact of the event has certainly been of biblical proportions.
It is a story about the imposition by reductionist science on humanity of a version of the truth constructed from mathematics, not the only one, but perhaps the most important, since it involves the systematic destruction of the genetic basis of life. It is a story of lies, secrecy, power, assassination and money: the vast amounts of money that would be lost if the truth came out.
Shortly after the murder in 1992 of the German Green Party leader and anti-nuclear activist Petra Kelly, the late Prof Ernest Sternglass (the first of the radiation scientist/ activists) told me that Kelly had just struck a deal with a German TV company to run a series demonstrating the true awfulness of the immediate effects of radiation.
A dreadful global cover up begins
He said: if the truth came out, all the Uranium and the billions of dollars in Uranium shares would turn into sand. So something like a cover-up had to happen, and it did, continuing the process of chicanery and control of information that began with the nuclear weapons tests of the 50s and 60s.
In 1959, as the genetic effects of the atmospheric tests became apparent, the control of the understanding of radiation and health was wrested from the World Health Organization (WHO) and passed to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Photo caption: Explosion cloud from the UK’s Operation Hurricane atomic bomb test on Australia’s Montebello Islands, 3rd October 1952. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).
Since then, no research on the health effects of radiation has been carried out by WHO, which has led to a permanent vigil outside their headquarters in Geneva by the group Independent WHO.
The arguments about the health effects of Chernobyl have mostly centered on cancer. I won’t write much about cancer here. The study of radiation and cancer has many complications, including that the data is often suspect, the time lag between the cancer diagnosis and the original radiation exposure can be 20 years, in which time a lot can happen, introducing ammunition (and opportunity) for those denying causation.
The predictions of the global cancer yield of the Chernobyl contamination has ranged from around a million (as predicted independently by the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR), Rosalie Bertell, John Gofman and me, to about 600,000 (Alexey Yablokov), to less than a few thousand (the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), whose risk model is the current basis for all legal constraints on radioactive releases in Europe.
Cancer: just one manifestation of the genetic damage caused by radiation
Cancer is caused by genetic damage but takes a while to show. More easily studied is the immediate and direct genetic damage, demonstrated in birth rates of congenital diseases, birth defects, fetal abnormalities, data which is easier to locate. The effects of a sudden increase in radioactive contamination are most easily seen in sudden increases in these indicators.
You don’t have to wait 20 years. Out they come after nine months or in aborted fetuses with their heart and central nervous system defects, their lack of hands and feet, their huge hydrocephalic heads, their inside-out organs, their cleft palates, cyclops eyes and the whole range of dreadful and usually fatal conditions. There is no argument, and the affair is in the hands of doctors, not physicists. The physicists of the ICRP base their risk of genetic effects on experiments with mice.
I was in Kiev in 2000 at the WHO conference on Chernobyl. On the podium, conducting the theatricals, were the top men in the IAEA (Abel Gonzalez) and the United National Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), represented by Canadian Norman Gentner. “No effects can be seen” – Abel Gonzalez. “Internal radiation is the same as external” – Norman Gentner. Happily you can watch this farce as it was videotaped by a Swiss team (embed below).
So: cut to the chase, to the fatal assault on the edifice of the current ICRP radiation risk model. In January 2016 Prof Inge Schmitz Feuerhake, Dr Sebastian Pflugbeil and I published a major review paper on the genetic effects of radiation in the prestigious Korean peer-reviewed Journal of Environmental Health and Toxicology.
What the research shows is that in every corner of the ex-Soviet Union and Europe and even further afield where epidemiologists and pediatricians looked, there were large and statistically significant increases in congenital diseases at birth and in babies that were aborted.
The genetic risk that cascades through the generations
The new article recalculates the genetic risk from radiation based upon reports from Germany, Turkey, Greece, Croatia, Egypt, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Hungary, Italy, the UK, Scotland, Wales, indeed everywhere where anyone looked.
There was a sudden jump in birth defects immediately following the contamination from Chernobyl and in proportion; but only up to the point where the exposure was so great the babies died in the womb or miscarried early in pregnancy. Thus, the relation between exposure level and effect was not a simple one where the birth defects increased with exposure: after a critical level of exposure they leveled off, or indeed fell.
Also since contamination is still there, women are still giving birth to genetically damaged children some 30 years later. These results, published by many doctors, epidemiologists and researchers in many different journals, show that the effects occurred at levels of contamination that provided ‘doses’, that yardstick of radiation exposure invented by the ICRP, that were very low, often below the natural background dose.
It is worse: from research on the nuclear test site veterans’ grandchildren (also reviewed in the study) it is clear that these effects continue down the generations and will only disappear when an offspring dies without issue, and leaves the genome of the human race. And many will or already have done: since what causes genetic malformation in the infant, at a larger dose causes fetal death and infertility.
These facts now form the basis of the case of Britain’s nuclear test veterans, whose case I am representing in the High Court today. The UK government recklessly exposed them to a double blast of intense radiation from the gamma ray burst of nuclear bombs, and to the subsequent fallout, and has since washed their hands of the matter.
The vetermans’ demand is that the sacrifice they and their families made should be recognised, and fair compensation paid. The MOD has resisted their claim by fair means and foul, but finally the evidence is assembled and their case is being heard. Today’s hearing is largely procedural, and the substantive hearings are scheduled to take place for some two weeks of June.
The scientific fraud explained
No one can have failed to have noticed the increase in human infertility that has occurred since the radioactive contamination of the planet began in the 1950s. As ex-US Atomic Energy Commission scientists John Gofman wrote in 1981 “the nuclear industry is waging a war on humanity.”
So how can it be possible that the legislative system has got it so wrong? The answer is also given in the paper. It is that the concept of ‘dose’ which may be convenient for the physicists as it is simple to compute, really does not address the situation where the substances that provide the dose are inside the body, often bound chemically to the DNA, which is the acknowledged target for all these genetic effects.
It shows that the human genome (and of course that of all life) is exquisitely sensitive to radiation damage from such internal exposures, to Strontium-90, Plutonium-239, Uranium and particularly to the nano-particles containing these radioactive elements which were produced when the reactor No 4 blew apart.
The paper shows the studies of the Hiroshima bomb survivors, upon which the current unsafe radiation laws are based were faulty because the true comparison group, those not in the city at the time of the bombing, was abandoned when it began to look like there was a real effect. Was this stupidity? Was it a trick? Does someone have to go to jail?
Last month, Prof. Alexey Yablokov, Dr. Alex Rosen and I wrote to the editor of The Lancet, in a recorded delivery letter posted by the Independent WHO in Geneva, requesting space in that influential journal to draw attention to these truths and overturn the false and dangerous structures created by the physicists.
Let us all hope that some good will finally come of the disaster – that the real legacy of Chernobyl will be the understanding of the true danger to health of radioactive pollution.
And that Britain’s nuclear bomb test veterans, and their families, will finally receive the justice they so richly deserve.
Chris Busby is an expert on the health effects of ionizing radiation. He qualified in Chemical Physics at the Universities of London and Kent, and worked on the molecular physical chemistry of living cells for the Wellcome Foundation. Professor Busby is the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk based in Brussels and has edited many of its publications since its founding in 1998. He has held a number of honorary University positions, including Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Health of the University of Ulster. Busby currently lives in Riga, Latvia. See also: chrisbusbyexposed.org, greenaudit.org and llrc.org.
Latest book: Christopher Busby (2015) ‘What is Life? On the origin and mechanism of living systems’. QTP Publications. Illustrated by Saoirse Morgan. ISBN 978-0-9565132-1-2, 130pp. Order from Amazon UK (£10.00) or QTP publications 10 Bratwell Rd, Coleraine, BT51 4LB.
These attacks that ‘accidentally’ corrupt data could impact control systems of nuclear power plants, just as a hacker intentionally altered controls to chemicals for a municipal water system, and it could be done remotely.
From Fierce Big Data
May 4, 2016 | By Pam Baker
Data breaches that result in stolen data are not the only threats organizations have to worry about now. Ransomware attacks are spreading across industries too. The latest on that front are attacks on electric and water utilities ranging from Israel to Michigan.
“The nature of a ransomware attack, where attackers encrypt the victim’s data until they pay, is not a direct threat to critical infrastructure systems. Ransomware attacks are based on the ability of the attacker to halt-and-release the victim’s data, which is less likely in physical systems,” said Itsik Mantin, director of security research at Imperva. “The main risk ransomware presents for critical infrastructure systems is an accidental one. Ransomware tends to corrupt all the data it finds, both locally on the infected machine and everywhere else on the network, regardless of whether the data is a picture of the user from his last vacation or a configuration file used by a critical system.”
Ransomware found its opening through a phishing attack on Israel Electric Authority back in January. While the media freaked as if the attack took out that nation’s power grid, that’s not what happened. Although given other forms of attacks on utilities, it might one day. But no, this was a case of ransomware which Yuval Steinitz, the Israeli Minister of National Infrastructure, Energy and Water said was “one of the largest cyber attacks that we have experienced.”
Now comes word that the State of Michigan, Lansing’s Board of Water & Light was similarly attacked. It began as a phishing attack on April 25th and led to the authority keeping systems, including phone servers, locked down until Monday.
“Despite the controls on the perimeter and on endpoints, security officers should assume that the attacker will make it in, one way or another, either by compromising a user’s endpoint or when the attacker is the user himself,” said Mantin.
“Like most of the threats on the enterprise, ransomware attacks focus on the business critical data and can be effectively mitigated by having security controls protecting the places where the data is stored: databases, files or cloud applications, and over the applications through which it is accessed.”
So, what does ransomware mean in terms of ultimate threats to utilities?
“The nature of a ransomware attack, where attackers encrypt the victim’s data until they pay, is not a direct threat to critical infrastructure systems,” said Mantin.
“Ransomware attacks are based on the ability of the attacker to halt-and-release the victim’s data, which is less likely in physical systems. The main risk ransomware presents for critical infrastructure systems is an accidental one. Ransomware tends to corrupt all the data it finds, both locally on the infected machine and everywhere else on the network, regardless of whether the data is a picture of the user from his last vacation or a configuration file used by a critical system.”
While ransomware attacks on utilities seem to be picking up steam and are hurting the organizations they hit, let’s not forget that other threats loom large too. One example, the recent Iranian hacktivist group that seized the control system for a dam in New York, “an intrusion that one official said may be ‘just the tip of the iceberg,’” according to an NBC News report.
One point all these breaches bring home is that organizations must make serious moves in protecting data now, before something worse happens. Data is the alpha and omega of our existence now.
For more:
– read the article
– see BML’s Facebook page
– see the NBC News report
Thank you. Thank you for welcoming me to this hallowed ground, given meaning like the fields of Gettysburg by those who died here, far more than any speech can pretend to add.
Those deaths, here and in Nagasaki, those hundreds of thousands of lives taken in a pair of fiery nuclear infernos, were the entire point. After 70 years of lying about this, let me be clear, the purpose of dropping the bombs was dropping the bombs. The more deaths the better. The bigger the explosion, the bigger the destruction, the bigger the news story, the bolder the opening of the Cold War the better.
Harry Truman spoke in the U.S. Senate on June 23, 1941: “If we see that Germany is winning,” he said, “we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.” This is how the U.S. president who destroyed Hiroshima thought about the value of European life. Perhaps I needn’t remind you of the value Americans placed on Japanese lives during the war.
A U.S. Army poll in 1943 found that roughly half of all GIs believed it would be necessary to kill every Japanese person on earth. William Halsey, who commanded the United States’ naval forces in the South Pacific during World War II, thought of his mission as “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs,” and had vowed that when the war was over, the Japanese language would be spoken only in hell.
On August 6, 1945, President Truman lied on the radio that a nuclear bomb had been dropped on an army base, rather than on a city. And he justified it, not as speeding the end of the war, but as revenge against Japanese offenses. “Mr. Truman was jubilant,” wrote Dorothy Day on the spot, and so he was.
People back home, let me be clear, still believe false justifications for the bombings. But here I am with you in this sacred place thousands of miles away, with these words flowing so well on this teleprompter, and I’m going to make a full confession. There has for many years no longer been any serious dispute. Weeks before the first bomb was dropped, on July 13, 1945, Japan sent a telegram to the Soviet Union expressing its desire to surrender and end the war. The United States had broken Japan’s codes and read the telegram. Truman referred in his diary to “the telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.” President Truman had been informed through Swiss and Portuguese channels of Japanese peace overtures as early as three months before Hiroshima. Japan objected only to surrendering unconditionally and giving up its emperor, but the United States insisted on those terms until after the bombs fell, at which point it allowed Japan to keep its emperor.
Presidential advisor James Byrnes had told Truman that dropping the bombs would allow the United States to “dictate the terms of ending the war.” Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal wrote in his diary that Byrnes was “most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in.” Truman wrote in his diary that the Soviets were preparing to march against Japan and “Fini Japs when that comes about.” Truman ordered the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th and another type of bomb, a plutonium bomb, which the military also wanted to test and demonstrate, on Nagasaki on August 9th. Also on August 9th, the Soviets attacked the Japanese. During the next two weeks, the Soviets killed 84,000 Japanese while losing 12,000 of their own soldiers, and the United States continued bombing Japan with non-nuclear weapons. Then the Japanese surrendered.
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that,”… certainly prior to 31 December, 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November, 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” One dissenter who had expressed this same view to the Secretary of War prior to the bombings was General Dwight Eisenhower. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William D. Leahy agreed: “The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender,” he said.
Apart from the question of how rudely Truman was maneuvered into the bombing decision by his subordinates, he justified the barbarous weapon’s use in purely barbarous terms, saying: “Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, and against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international law of warfare.”
He didn’t pretend to any humanitarian purpose, the way we are obliged to do these days. He told it like it was. War need not bow before any humanitarian calculation. War is the ultimate power. During my presidency, I have bombed seven countries and empowered war making in all kinds of new ways. But I have always put up a pretense of exercising some sort of restraint. I have even talked about abolishing nukes. Meanwhile I’m investing in building newer, better nukes that we now think of as more useable.
Now, I know that this policy is creating a new nuclear arms race, and that eight other nuclear nations are following suit. I know the chance of ending all life through a nuclear accident, never mind a nuclear action, has multiplied several fold. But I am going to keep pushing the U.S. war machine forward in every possible way, and the consequences be damned. And I’m not going to apologize for the mass murder committed on this site by my predecessor, because I have already told you what I know. The fact that I know the real situation and must necessarily know what ought to be done, even though I never do it, has always been good enough to satisfy my supporters back home, and it damn well ought to be good enough to satisfy you people too.
On April 28, Japan’s Ministry of the Environment (MOE) officially decided on a new rule regarding so-called “specified waste” from the March 2011 accident at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plants, to the effect that when the concentration of radioactive cesium in such waste falls below 8,000Bq/kg, the waste will no longer be deemed specified and may be disposed of in the same manner as ordinary waste.
By Ms. Tamayo Marukawa
The actual lifting of a specified waste designation, however, will be determined in talks between the national government and the local municipality concerned. Costs for disposal of the waste after the lifting will be borne by the national government, as is the case with specified waste.
MOE revised its ministerial ordinance under the Act on Special Measures Concerning the Handling of Pollution by Radioactive Materials, and those revisions took effect the same day. At a press conference, MOE Minister Tamayo Marukawa said, “The national government will deal with the matter, after lifting the designation, together with local municipalities.”
Specified waste is generated primarily in five prefectures—Miyagi, Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma and Chiba—and has been temporarily stored at such places as waste treatment facilities, sewage plants and on farmers’ private property. Radioactive concentrations have fallen naturally in the five years since the nuclear accident, and there are increasing volumes of waste with concentrations lower than the criteria. There had, however, been no clear rule on lifting the designation, and municipalities had asked the government to issue such a rule as swiftly as possible.
Under the new rule, either the MOE or the municipality will check the level of radioactive cesium concentration, and lifting the specified waste designation will be determined in talks between the two parties. After the lifting, municipalities will be able to dispose of the waste as ordinary waste.
In the case of specified waste stored in Miyagi Prefecture, re-measuring by the MOE showed that the radioactive concentrations in 2,300 tons of it—two-thirds of the total—were lower than the criteria.
France’s ailing nuclear giant, Areva, faced a major scandal on Tuesday after the country’s nuclear watchdog confirmed there have been “irregularities” in 400 parts produced in its reactors since 1965, and that “around 50 are currently in service in France’s nuclear power plant fleet”.
The fault in the vessel destined to house the plant’s nuclear fuel and confine its radioactivity was detected last year.
“These irregularities consist in incoherencies, modifications or omissions in manufacturing dossiers,” ASN said in a statement.
The revelation came hours after Areva’s director general admitted that 400 documents assessing whether parts of nuclear plants met required standards may have been “falsified”.
The doubts over documents supposed to rubber-stamp the quality of parts destined for new-generation nuclear power reactors will be a cause for serious concern for the British government as it is poised to finalise a controversial, multi-billion pound contract to build reactors at Hinkley Point designed by Areva.
Areva launched an audit late 2015 into anomalies at the Le Creusot Forge site, which specialises in highly complex moulded parts for new-generation nuclear reactors.
According to Les Echos, an operator conducted tests on metal parts then wrote down his findings on a host of parameters.
“When a value was obtained at the upper end of the required norm, the written reports of certain manufacturing reports were allegedly modified,” it wrote.
This was the case for around 400 parts, it wrote.
ASN said it has asked Areva to transmit as soon as possible the list of parts concerned and its analysis of the consequences on the safety of installations”.
The explosive revelations came just hours after Emmanuel Macron, the French economy minister, visited the site.
During the visit, Mr Macron reiterated the French government’s support for the Hinkley Point project, which unions at EDF have argued is too expensive for the cash-strapped French electricity utility due to manage it.
“Hinkley Point is an essential project for this factory and I have come to restate the government’s commitment to the project without which there would be hundreds of job losses at the Le Creusot site,” he told unions.
“I believe in the need to undertake big export projects for the French nuclear industry and in particular Hinkley Point,” he went on.
“It will enable us to continue to strengthen our skills, to make us even stronger and to conquer new markets.”
£18 billionEDF estimate of construction cost 3.2 GWCapacity of plant 5.8 millionNumber of homes it could power 5,600People to be employed on site at peak construction 25,000Total number of jobs that could be created £92.50Price to be paid (in 2012 money) for each MWh unit of electricity – more than double the current market price of power 35 yearsDuration of subsidy contract agreed by ministers 2025Earliest expected date for first power to be generated
“Jobs” is the banner waved by the French government to promote their nuclear maladventures.
If France would quit bombing Syria and Libya and other countries and quit subsidizing NATO, there would be plenty of money in the federal budget for creating a strong living economy.
The American people have been distracted to keep them from hearing about the 3 nuclear disasters occurring on the East Coast.
The debate over which bathroom transgender people can use has been taking over the Internet and our social conversations for weeks now, and it’s getting a bit ridiculous. Transgender people have always used the bathroom that they feel comfortable with, whether it’s the bathroom that belongs to the sex they were born with or not, and there have been no problems.
In the heat of this debate, Americans are not only divided on the issue but collectively distracted from bigger, more important issues, such as the fact that there are three nuclear disasters occurring throughout the nation that have been getting no media attention.
One major disaster that will soon come to head all started with a fire at the Bridgeton Landfill in Missouri that has been burning for five years. Despite this extremely long length of time, authorities say that this fire is nowhere close to being contained. What’s more is that St. Louis County officials have reported that they have an emergency plan in place because the fire is closing in on nuclear waste dump.
It’s been an entire year since the county first became concerned that the fire would reach the West Lake Landfill, which is home to piles of leftover nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Although the EPA has had control over the site since 1990, no significant effort has been made to clear the harmful waste.
The EPA announced last December that it planned on building a wall to prevent the fire from ever reaching the hazardous materials, but the project was supposed to take a year to complete and residents are furious at this slow-moving “effort” to stop a natural disaster. The project has not yet begun and was just barely finalized last week.
Additionally, there are two nuclear reactors in the U.S. that have reportedly been leaking for months.
One of the nuclear power plants in Turkey Point, which is in Florida, was found to have been leaking polluted water into Miami-Dade County’s Biscayne Bay. The pollution is affecting the bay’s surface waters and will likely have a damaging effect on the already-fragile ecosystem.
This pollution is also said to be affecting the drinking water, as huge saltwater plumes coming from the power plants have invaded the groundwater.
Laura Reynolds, an environmental consultant that is working towards filing a lawsuit against the Turkey Point power plants said,
“We now know exactly where the pollution is coming from, and we have a tracer that shows it’s in the national park. We are worried about the marine life there and the future of Biscayne Bay.”
Meanwhile, another nuclear reactor in New York has been leaking ever since Americans greeted the new year, when workers accidentally spilled contaminated water that contained the radioactive hydrogen isotope tritium. The spill caused a massive spike in radiation in the groundwater wells, and one well even saw an increase in radioactivity of about 65,000%.
This is extremely concerning, but when you consider that this is the ninth reported spill in the last year, four of which were so severe that the plant had to be closed, it becomes clear that something needs to change. The residents living close to these leaks and fires are alarmed to say the least, but utility companies and government agencies (whose hands are in the pockets of the utility companies) have continued to downplay the damaging effects of exposure to radiation.
Some Americans have suspected that the passing of North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” which prohibits transgender people from using the bathroom associated with the gender they identify with, has been a ploy to distract Americans from real issues and they may be right. While there are other important matters occurring daily throughout the world, these three nuclear disasters are being underreported on in an effort to keep the public from turning their attention to these dangerous problems.
From the Santa Cruz Sentinel and Monterey Herald,
May 4, 2015
NOTE: The Herald article is not on the home page and is difficult to find unless you have the link. It has been changed a lot from the print edition and it is missing these paragraphs about cause of death and investigation –
Milbury said it’s not clear what caused the whale’s death.
“There is nothing external on the whale, like entanglement or ship strike marks, that indicate the cause of death,” Milbury said.
Karen Grimmer, NOAA’s resource protection coordinator in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, said two NOAA officials took tissue samples from the whale to help determine its cause of death.
The Sentinel is missing this paragraph published in the Herald.
Karen Grimmer, NOAA’s resource protection coordinator in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, said two NOAA officials took tissue samples from the whale to help determine its cause of death.
The article notes that a dead grey whale calf was found in April. Killer whales are in the bay. However, if they killed this calf, why wasn’t it eaten?
More photos online
—————————————–
By Stephen Baxter
A kayaker investigates the carcass of a humpback whale caught in the kelp off of West Cliff in Santa Cruz Tuesday morning. (Shmuel Thaler — Santa Cruz Sentinel)
SANTA CRUZ >> A dead 40-foot humpback whale caught the attention of residents and authorities off West Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz late Monday and early Tuesday.
Leaders from Long Marine Lab launched a kayak on Tuesday to get a closer look at the whale, which was about a quarter mile off Woodrow Avenue and Columbia Street in a kelp bed.
Jim Milbury, a spokesman for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Tuesday afternoon that a decision had not yet been made whether to move the animal further offshore or to another location. Dead whales often attract sharks, and some residents expressed concern that sharks could endanger surfers at nearby Steamer Lane.
Don Kinnamon, senior deputy harbormaster of the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor, said authorities typically don’t intervene with dead whales off beaches.
“Any time there’s a dead marine mammal, they let it take it’s natural course. The regular chain of predators will feed off it,” Kinnamon said Tuesday. “We’re not doing anything with it at this stage.”
Milbury said it’s not clear what caused the whale’s death.
“There is nothing external on the whale, like entanglement or ship strike marks, that indicate the cause of death,” Milbury said.
Karen Grimmer, NOAA’s resource protection coordinator in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, said two NOAA officials took tissue samples from the whale to help determine its cause of death.
The Coast Guard first received reports of the whale on Monday. It appeared to be drifting slowly toward Its Beach and Lighthouse Point.
The dead cetacean is at least the second whale to wash up on Santa Cruz County shores this year.
A dead gray whale calf beached itself at Hidden Beach in April. Its carcass then drifted to the Cement Ship off Seacliff State Beach, said photographer and boat captain Giancarlo Thomae.
“White sharks are feeding on it,” Thomae said April 24. “Although it’s extremely rare for sharks to attack live whales, it’s very common for them to feed on the carcass.”
A dead 30-foot gray whale also washed up at Lower Trestles, a surfing beach south of San Clemente, last week. It was chopped up and taken to a landfill, according to the Los Angeles Times. Thousands of gray whales are migrating north this time of year, authorities said.
Le Pr. Aoyama de l’Institut de Radioactivité Environnementale de l’Université de Fukushima déclare que la radioactivité déversée par la centrale de Fukushima dans le Pacifique en a fait le tour pour revenir au large du Japon.
Il a procédé à des analyses de l’eau de mer en 71 points entre novembre 2015 et février 2016. Ces analyses sont partiellement terminées et montrent que la radioactivité s’est répandue au large du Sud-Ouest du Japon. Ils ont relevé 2 Bq/m³ de Cs-137 dans l’eau de mer au Sud-ouest de Kyushu. Ils ont même eu 1,83 Bq/m³ au large de la côte Ouest du Japon.
0,38 Bq/m³ de Cs-134 ont aussi été isolés prouvant qu’il s’agit bien de la catastrophe de Fukushima.
On pense que les Cs-134/137 déversés ont voyagé vers l’Est dans le Pacifique Nord. Ils ont ensuite, pendant 2 à 3 ans, été transportés vers le Sud puis l’Ouest pour revenir au Japon.
Il déclare possible que la radioactivité se mette à augmenter à partir de maintenant.
Prof. Aoyama from Institute of Environmental Radioactivity of Fukushima University reported that the radioactive material discharged from Fukushima plant circulated in the Pacific to come back to Japan offshore.
He implemented seawater analysis at 71 points from 11. 2015 to 2. 2016. The analysis is partially completed to show radioactive material has spread to the South West offshore of Japan. 2 Bq/m3 of Cs-137 was detected in seawater from South West offshore of Kyushu. 1.83 Bq/m3 was detected even offshore of the west coast of Japan.
0.38 Bq/m3 of Cs-134 was also measured to prove this is from Fukushima accident.
It is assumed that the discharged Cs-134/137 travelled to the east in the Northern Pacific. It was carried to the South and West to come back to Japan by taking 2 ~ 3 years.
He comments it is possible that the density of radioactive material increases from now.
been evaluated as a precautionary measure due to reported odors or symptoms at the on-site medical facility since Thursday. Thirty-one employees reported health symptoms while 11 went for cautionary reasons. All have been released to return to work” said Rob Roxburgh of the Dept. of Energy, in a statement sent to KING 5 on Wednesday. Chemical vapor releases at Hanford come from underground nuclear waste storage tanks that vent the gasses without warning.
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