“You people who live near the Nevada Test Site are in a very real sense participants in the Nation’s atomic test program,” boasted a propaganda pamphlet distributed to those living downwind from the American nuclear test site in Nevada in 1955. In the end this statement turned out to be more ominous than it was celebratory. Their primary means of “participation” in the nation’s program was to be silent about being irradiated and having their land contaminated by fallout radiation from clouds that blew overhead after nuclear weapon tests for years. Of course that doesn’t count paying high taxes for the gift of national security.
All across the globe communities have been devastated by radiation in the name of giving the members of those communities “security.” This is especially true of communities that suffered from the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, however, many of the communities that experienced underground testing, such as Pokharan (of which today is the anniversary of the first test there) experienced the venting of radiation from the underground shafts, contaminating areas near to the test sites. This was especially true of the French Bérly nuclear test in Algeria in 1962 in which the tunnel, drilled into a hillside, partially collapsed venting tremendous amounts of radiation that contaminated the surrounding communities.
While communities on every continent besides South America and Antarctica have experienced contamination from nuclear weapon testing, not one person has yet been “protected” by nuclear weapon testing. Arguments are made that vast nuclear arsenals have “deterred” nuclear war, but these arguments rest on assumptions and are as demonstrable as the notion that prayer produces miracles. What is certain is that the communities that have been the sites of nuclear weapon testing have experienced radiological contamination and that this has led to illness, loss of access to land and seas, disruption of traditional diets, traditional lifestyles, and ruptures of culture.
In Australia where aboriginal societies were displaced by British nuclear testing in the 1950-60s, generations of knowledge of the land—where to find water and game—were broken when communities were simply moved off of traditional lands. Survival in areas in which ancestral knowledge did not guide and protect these communities proved extremely difficult. But as (barely) Australians and members of the Commonwealth, their safety was supposedly guaranteed by these tests. In truth there never was a threat to the safety of people living in Australia that was protected by the British testing of nuclear weapons. Rather, it was the testing itself that destroyed communities and left land desolate.
In all nations that have built, tested and maintain nuclear arsenals, those arsenals have taken essential resources away from the maintenance of social welfare. In the United States, arguably the richest country in history during the period of the Cold War, the dominance of public tax monies by the nuclear weapon complex, and the military as a whole, has left the country depleted of social wealth in a few short decades.
During the early Cold War period there were times when 10% of all electricity was being used to build, maintain and deploy nuclear weapons. Did this protect the nation, or did it cost the citizens? I would argue that the pursuit of nuclear weapons by any nation is an attack on the welfare of the citizenry in terms both of the public cost, and in antagonizing the neighbors and enemies of the nation. It is clearly true that possessing nuclear weapons has not kept any nation from becoming embroiled in warfare, and has proved useless once war commences. For those who live close to nuclear weapon testing sites, either domestically or in the colonial reaches of the nuclear power, the tests themselves have been a kind of warfare wagged upon them directly by their own governments.
Like the crown jewels of nobility past, nuclear weapons are a vast commitment of public wealth to the purpose of dazzling observers. Nuclear prima donnas display their expensive, glittering weapons to establish status and dominance. If we are lucky the cost to the citizens who pay for this is only money. But for those who live near to the nuclear testing facilities of the exclusive club of nuclear states, the cost is higher. They pay with their health, their families, their communities, and uncertain futures that accompany contaminated lands and gene pools.
Showing posts with label radiation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label radiation. Show all posts
Monday, May 13, 2013
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
WHITE HOUSE APPROVES RADICAL RADIATION LEVELS, Civilian Cancer Deaths Expected to Skyrocket
Washington, DC — The White House has given final approval for dramatically raising permissible radioactive levels in drinking water and soil following “radiological incidents,” such as nuclear power-plant accidents and dirty bombs. The final version, slated for Federal Register publication as soon as today, is a win for the nuclear industry which seeks what its proponents call a “new normal” for radiation exposure among the U.S population, according Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
Issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, the radiation guides (called Protective Action Guides or PAGs) allow cleanup many times more lax than anything EPA has ever before accepted. These guides govern evacuations, shelter-in-place orders, food restrictions and other actions following a wide range of “radiological emergencies.”
The Obama administration blocked a version of these PAGs from going into effect during its first days in office. The version given approval late last Friday is substantially similar to those proposed under Bush but duck some of the most controversial aspects:
In soil, the PAGs allow long-term public exposure to radiation in amounts as high as 2,000 millirems. This would, in effect, increase a longstanding 1 in 10,000 person cancer rate to a rate of 1 in 23 persons exposed over a 30-year period;
- In water, the PAGs punt on an exact new standard and EPA “continues to seek input on this.” But the thrust of the PAGs is to give on-site authorities much greater “flexibility” in setting aside established limits; and
- Resolves an internal fight inside EPA between nuclear versus public health specialists in favor of the former. The PAGs are the product of Gina McCarthy, the assistant administrator for air and radiation whose nomination to serve as EPA Administrator is taken up this week by the Senate.
- Despite the years-long internal fight, this is the first public official display of these guides. This takes place as Japan grapples with these same issues in the two years following its Fukushima nuclear disaster.
stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, noting that the EPA package lacks a cogent rationale, is largely impenetrable and hinges on a series of euphemistic “weasel words.” “No compelling justification is offered for increasing the cancer deaths of Americans innocently exposed to corporate miscalculations several hundred-fold.”
Reportedly, the PAGs had been approved last fall but their publication was held until after the presidential election. The rationale for timing their release right before McCarthy’s confirmation hearing is unclear.
Since the PAGs guide agency decision-making and do not formally set standards or repeal statutory requirements, such as the Safe Drinking Water Act and Superfund, they will go into full effect following a short public comment period. Nonetheless, the PAGs will likely determine what actions take place on the ground in the days, weeks, months and, in some cases, years following a radiological emergency.
Saturday, April 13, 2013
Inhuman Radiation Experiments
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the
declassification of top secret studies, done over a period of 60 years,
in which the US conducted 2,000 radiation experiments on as many as
20,000 vulnerable US citizens.[i]
Victims included civilians, prison inmates, federal workers, hospital patients, pregnant women, infants, developmentally disabled children and military personnel — most of them powerless, poor, sick, elderly or terminally ill. Eileen Welsome’s 1999 exposé The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War details “the unspeakable scientific trials that reduced thousands of men, women, and even children to nameless specimens.”[ii]
The program employed industry and academic scientists who used their hapless patients or wards to see the immediate and short-term effects of radioactive contamination — with everything from plutonium to radioactive arsenic.[iii] The human subjects were mostly poisoned without their knowledge or consent.
An April 17, 1947 memo by Col. O.G. Haywood of the Army Corps of Engineers explained why the studies were classified. “It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans and might have adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits.”[iv]
In one Vanderbilt U. study, 829 pregnant women were unknowingly fed radioactive iron. In another, 188 children were given radioactive iron-laced lemonade. From 1963 to 1971, 67 inmates in Oregon and 64 prisoners in Washington had their testicles targeted with X-rays to see what doses made them sterile.[v]
At the Fernald State School, mentally retarded boys were fed radioactive iron and calcium but consent forms sent to parents didn’t mention radiation. Elsewhere psychiatric patients and infants were injected with radioactive iodine.[vi]
In a rare public condemnation, Clinton Administration Energy Sec. Hazel O’Leary confessed being aghast at the conduct of the scientists. She told Newsweek in 1994: “I said, ‘Who were these people and why did this happen?’ The only thing I could think of was Nazi Germany.”[vii] None of the victims were provided follow-on medical care.
Scientists knew from the beginning of the 20th century that radiation can cause genetic and cell damage, cell death, radiation sickness and even death. A Presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments was established in 1993 to investigate charges of unethical or criminal action by the experimenters. Its findings were published by Oxford U. Press in 1996 as The Human Radiation Experiments.
The abuse of X-radiation “therapy” was also conducted throughout the ’40s and ’50s. Everything from ringworm to tonsillitis was “treated” with X-radiation because the long-term risks were unknown or considered tolerable.
Children were routinely exposed to alarmingly high doses of radiation from devices like “fluoroscopes” to measure foot size in shoe stores.[viii]
Nasal radium capsules inserted in nostrils, used to attack hearing loss, are now thought to be the cause of cancers, thyroid and dental problems, immune dysfunction and more.[ix]
Experiments Spread Cancer Risks Far and Wide
In large scale experiments as late as 1985, the Energy Department deliberately produced reactor meltdowns which spewed radiation across Idaho and beyond.[x] The Air Force conducted at least eight deliberate meltdowns in the Utah desert, dispersing 14 times the radiation released by the partial meltdown of Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979.[xi]
The military even dumped radiation from planes and spread it across wide areas around and downwind of Oak Ridge, Tenn., Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Dugway, Utah. This “systematic radiation warfare program,” conducted between 1944 and 1961, was kept secret for 40 years.[xii]
“Radiation bombs” thrown from USAF planes intentionally spread radiation “unknown distances” endangering the young and old alike. One such experiment doused Utah with 60 times more radiation than escaped the Three Mile Island accident, according to Sen. John Glen, D-Ohio who released a report on the program 20 years ago.[xiii]
The Pentagon’s 235 above-ground nuclear bomb tests, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are not officially listed as radiation experiments. Yet between 250,000 and 500,000 U.S. military personnel were contaminated during their compulsory participation in the bomb tests and the post-war occupation of Japan. [xiv]
Documents uncovered by the Advisory Committee show that the military knew there were serious radioactive fallout risks from its Nevada Test Site bomb blasts. The generals decided not to use a safer site in Florida, where fallout would have blown out to sea. “The officials determined it was probably not safe, but went ahead anyway,” said Pat Fitzgerald a scientist on the committee staff.[xv]
Dr. Gioacchino Failla, a Columbia University scientist who worked for the AEC, said at the time, “We should take some risk… we are faced with a war in which atomic weapons will undoubtedly be used, and we have to have some information about these things.”[xvi]
With the National Cancer Institute’s 1997 finding that all 160,000 million US citizens (in the country at the time of the bomb tests) were contaminated with fallout, it’s clear we did face war with atomic weapons — our own.
John LaForge works for the nuclear watchdog group Nukewatch in Wisconsin and edits its Quarterly newsletter.
Victims included civilians, prison inmates, federal workers, hospital patients, pregnant women, infants, developmentally disabled children and military personnel — most of them powerless, poor, sick, elderly or terminally ill. Eileen Welsome’s 1999 exposé The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War details “the unspeakable scientific trials that reduced thousands of men, women, and even children to nameless specimens.”[ii]
The program employed industry and academic scientists who used their hapless patients or wards to see the immediate and short-term effects of radioactive contamination — with everything from plutonium to radioactive arsenic.[iii] The human subjects were mostly poisoned without their knowledge or consent.
An April 17, 1947 memo by Col. O.G. Haywood of the Army Corps of Engineers explained why the studies were classified. “It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans and might have adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits.”[iv]
In one Vanderbilt U. study, 829 pregnant women were unknowingly fed radioactive iron. In another, 188 children were given radioactive iron-laced lemonade. From 1963 to 1971, 67 inmates in Oregon and 64 prisoners in Washington had their testicles targeted with X-rays to see what doses made them sterile.[v]
At the Fernald State School, mentally retarded boys were fed radioactive iron and calcium but consent forms sent to parents didn’t mention radiation. Elsewhere psychiatric patients and infants were injected with radioactive iodine.[vi]
In a rare public condemnation, Clinton Administration Energy Sec. Hazel O’Leary confessed being aghast at the conduct of the scientists. She told Newsweek in 1994: “I said, ‘Who were these people and why did this happen?’ The only thing I could think of was Nazi Germany.”[vii] None of the victims were provided follow-on medical care.
Scientists knew from the beginning of the 20th century that radiation can cause genetic and cell damage, cell death, radiation sickness and even death. A Presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments was established in 1993 to investigate charges of unethical or criminal action by the experimenters. Its findings were published by Oxford U. Press in 1996 as The Human Radiation Experiments.
The abuse of X-radiation “therapy” was also conducted throughout the ’40s and ’50s. Everything from ringworm to tonsillitis was “treated” with X-radiation because the long-term risks were unknown or considered tolerable.
Children were routinely exposed to alarmingly high doses of radiation from devices like “fluoroscopes” to measure foot size in shoe stores.[viii]
Nasal radium capsules inserted in nostrils, used to attack hearing loss, are now thought to be the cause of cancers, thyroid and dental problems, immune dysfunction and more.[ix]
Experiments Spread Cancer Risks Far and Wide
In large scale experiments as late as 1985, the Energy Department deliberately produced reactor meltdowns which spewed radiation across Idaho and beyond.[x] The Air Force conducted at least eight deliberate meltdowns in the Utah desert, dispersing 14 times the radiation released by the partial meltdown of Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979.[xi]
The military even dumped radiation from planes and spread it across wide areas around and downwind of Oak Ridge, Tenn., Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Dugway, Utah. This “systematic radiation warfare program,” conducted between 1944 and 1961, was kept secret for 40 years.[xii]
“Radiation bombs” thrown from USAF planes intentionally spread radiation “unknown distances” endangering the young and old alike. One such experiment doused Utah with 60 times more radiation than escaped the Three Mile Island accident, according to Sen. John Glen, D-Ohio who released a report on the program 20 years ago.[xiii]
The Pentagon’s 235 above-ground nuclear bomb tests, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are not officially listed as radiation experiments. Yet between 250,000 and 500,000 U.S. military personnel were contaminated during their compulsory participation in the bomb tests and the post-war occupation of Japan. [xiv]
Documents uncovered by the Advisory Committee show that the military knew there were serious radioactive fallout risks from its Nevada Test Site bomb blasts. The generals decided not to use a safer site in Florida, where fallout would have blown out to sea. “The officials determined it was probably not safe, but went ahead anyway,” said Pat Fitzgerald a scientist on the committee staff.[xv]
Dr. Gioacchino Failla, a Columbia University scientist who worked for the AEC, said at the time, “We should take some risk… we are faced with a war in which atomic weapons will undoubtedly be used, and we have to have some information about these things.”[xvi]
With the National Cancer Institute’s 1997 finding that all 160,000 million US citizens (in the country at the time of the bomb tests) were contaminated with fallout, it’s clear we did face war with atomic weapons — our own.
John LaForge works for the nuclear watchdog group Nukewatch in Wisconsin and edits its Quarterly newsletter.
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Effects of Digital Milennium Copyright Act on Blogs
Greetings
The following "take down" notice and action was taken on an article that I republished in its entirety, but someone claimed that I had plagiarized the article. The article that I posted, with videos, related to Dr Chris Busy and his positions on Radiation and claims that the Military Industrial Complex personnel were libeling him and sites posting information related to that were being given DMCA notices in an effort to silence him.
Definitions have not changed, plagiarism, would be the case IF I had claimed the published work as my own......which I did not.
The notice below from GOOGLE is standard format and should be chilling.
Truth matters not, the content of the article does.......the watchers are everywhere if they are able to fund staff that searches out names, words or topics that could be offensive to the Dominant Society.
Imagine, this tiny, unimportant Blog earning a DMCA take down......crazy world....and just who's money is that doing this funding, hmmmmm?
I just checked out Chilling Effects website, quite an interesting world happening out there.
Thanks
Toni
take down notice below
______________
Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog is alleged to infringe upon the copyrights of others. As a result, we have reset the post(s) to \"draft\" status. (If we did not do so, we would be subject to a claim of copyright infringement, regardless of its merits. The URL(s) of the allegedly infringing post(s) may be found at the end of this message.) This means your post - and any images, links or other content - is not gone. You may edit the post to remove the offending content and republish, at which point the post in question will be visible to your readers again.
A bit of background: the DMCA is a United States copyright law that provides guidelines for online service provider liability in case of copyright infringement. If you believe you have the rights to post the content at issue here, you can file a counter-claim. In order to file a counter-claim, please see http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=lr_counternotice&product=blogger.
The notice that we received, with any personally identifying information removed, will be posted online by a service called Chilling Effects at http://www.chillingeffects.org. We do this in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). You can search for the DMCA notice associated with the removal of your content by going to the Chilling Effects search page at http://www.chillingeffects.org/search.cgi, and entering in the URL of the blog post that was removed.
If it is brought to our attention that you have republished the post without removing the content/link in question, then we will delete your post and count it as a violation on your account. Repeated violations to our Terms of Service may result in further remedial action taken against your Blogger account including deleting your blog and/or terminating your account. DMCA notices concerning content on your blog may also result in action taken against any associated AdSense accounts. If you have legal questions about this notification, you should retain your own legal counsel.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
Affected URLs:
http://natural-health-home-remedies.blogspot.com/2013/02/christopher-busby-libeled-by-military.html
The following "take down" notice and action was taken on an article that I republished in its entirety, but someone claimed that I had plagiarized the article. The article that I posted, with videos, related to Dr Chris Busy and his positions on Radiation and claims that the Military Industrial Complex personnel were libeling him and sites posting information related to that were being given DMCA notices in an effort to silence him.
Definitions have not changed, plagiarism, would be the case IF I had claimed the published work as my own......which I did not.
The notice below from GOOGLE is standard format and should be chilling.
Truth matters not, the content of the article does.......the watchers are everywhere if they are able to fund staff that searches out names, words or topics that could be offensive to the Dominant Society.
Imagine, this tiny, unimportant Blog earning a DMCA take down......crazy world....and just who's money is that doing this funding, hmmmmm?
I just checked out Chilling Effects website, quite an interesting world happening out there.
Thanks
Toni
take down notice below
______________
Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog is alleged to infringe upon the copyrights of others. As a result, we have reset the post(s) to \"draft\" status. (If we did not do so, we would be subject to a claim of copyright infringement, regardless of its merits. The URL(s) of the allegedly infringing post(s) may be found at the end of this message.) This means your post - and any images, links or other content - is not gone. You may edit the post to remove the offending content and republish, at which point the post in question will be visible to your readers again.
A bit of background: the DMCA is a United States copyright law that provides guidelines for online service provider liability in case of copyright infringement. If you believe you have the rights to post the content at issue here, you can file a counter-claim. In order to file a counter-claim, please see http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=lr_counternotice&product=blogger.
The notice that we received, with any personally identifying information removed, will be posted online by a service called Chilling Effects at http://www.chillingeffects.org. We do this in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). You can search for the DMCA notice associated with the removal of your content by going to the Chilling Effects search page at http://www.chillingeffects.org/search.cgi, and entering in the URL of the blog post that was removed.
If it is brought to our attention that you have republished the post without removing the content/link in question, then we will delete your post and count it as a violation on your account. Repeated violations to our Terms of Service may result in further remedial action taken against your Blogger account including deleting your blog and/or terminating your account. DMCA notices concerning content on your blog may also result in action taken against any associated AdSense accounts. If you have legal questions about this notification, you should retain your own legal counsel.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
Affected URLs:
http://natural-health-home-remedies.blogspot.com/2013/02/christopher-busby-libeled-by-military.html
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Visit Sunny Chernobyl
Featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, author and environmentalist Andrew Blackwell heralded the beauty of Chernobyl, a man-made disaster, now a wasteland, where he found a shining desolate place that humans had vacated, and now returned to nature.
Part of a ‘love letter to pollution,’ Blackwell discusses his book Visit Sunny Chernobyl, sounding off in poetic language “Paradoxically, perversely, the accident may actually have been good for this environment.”
“Because it’s [a] quarantined, radioactive zone, everyone has left a long time ago, and very few people spend any time there,” he tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz. “You’ve got to go in spring, obviously, and it’s just full of trees and birds and insects. And it’s sort of become this huge, accidental wilderness preserve.”
In a way, nature has taken over.
“The birds and the bees and the animals and the wolves are not aware, and/or don’t care about radioactive contamination the way we do,” Blackwell says. “There’s nothing like it, and it’s an absolutely unique place, and most of it is just flat-out beautiful.”
Blackwell observes a synergy between nature and the radioactive contamination: “So it’s not just a place that has been contaminated with radiation and radioactive particles. They are sort of in it, which is another thing that makes it so incredibly fascinating … the ecosystem itself has sort of incorporated that pollution.”
Yes, with Fukushima still falling out, we are again witnessing the celebration of harmful and destructive nuclear disasters– now salvaged as an environmentalist’s ironic, symbolic victory-from-disaster. For all hopes of scaling back the scourge of civilization, Nature seems at peace with nuclear dead zones, if this author’s account is any indication.
Like Ann Coulter, Blackwell tries to convince the world that nuclear radiation has actually helped us and the environment. In the immediate aftermath of Fukushima, Coulter claimed that “radiation is good for you,” adding the Orwellian claim that “excess radiation operates as a sort of cancer vaccine.” Other Fox News contributors have boldly stated that Fukushima has caused zero deaths.
Ann Coulter’s “Glowing” Report on Radiation
Nuclear expert Dr. Christopher Busby accused Guardian columnist George Monbiot of being “criminally irresponsible” for downplaying the effects of Japan’s disaster, in part for his article, “Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power,” which cited global warming as a bigger threat than nuclear fallout. The corporate media have similarly tried to convince the mindless public that mercury is good for you! Incredibly, this “news” report claims that mercury based preservatives in vaccines may help not harm neurological behavior.
Silence, cover-ups and lies about the extent of the effects of the radiation have cost untold millions of deaths. The partial meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory nuclear salt reactors in 1959 went undisclosed to the public for decades, with total effects unknown. A recent survey found 48 of 65 nuclear reactors in the U.S. are leaking, with many of them introducing tritium, the radioactive element of hydrogen, to the environment. Our recent investigation into Austin’s nuclear secrets raises further questions about illegal dumping of waste and the lack of disclosure to the public on nuclear issues.
Of course, Blackwell is NOT overtly saying that radiation is good for living humans or that he’d like to see people die (at least, I presume not; it could be in the book). However, his book’s iconic title Visit Sunny Chernobyl is attempting to create an association of doom with beauty; inverting the darkness of disaster with the image-wording of ‘sunny.’ Thus creating at least a few positive connotations with meltdown and annihilation. The author’s only agenda may well be to use a little irony to cut through the saturated market for book sales and media influence.
But his poetry on the landscape of apocalypse speaks the language of nihilistic technocrats, eugenicist legacy causes, environmentalist-bankers, UN controllers and climate change fanatics alike. When Blackwell finds solace in the pristine remains of an act that drove out humans through immense dark power, he resonates with those pursuing the cause of rewilding and depopulating the earth. Bleak but beautiful. Extreme measures for extreme times. The end justifies the means.
Agenda 21 For Dummies NWO depopulation
This author plays into the imagery of what amounts to the ultimate fantasy of your average upper eschelon eco-terrorist from the ranks of international policy bodies, finance, government or private eugenics sector: rewriting the earth via revolutionary causes (think 12 Monkeys) laced with Agenda 21 undertones. Blaming humanity for ruining the planet, all while hoping to someday toast a scorched earth with scant a person around. A sort of Logan’s Run wash over in balance with humanity’s greatest excesses.
Whether intentional or not, the coined phrase “Visit Sunny Chernobyl” repeats a subtle propaganda meme that joins in concert with a wide campaign working to sell the public on the idea that humanity itself is bad for the planet (see Humanity’s Ultimate Secret below). Therefore, since humans are bad, extermination is necessary, and somehow, even a brilliant control mechanism and balancing act for the earth. Rather than actually recognizing who is repeatedly wrecking things, or addressing why nuclear meltdowns are happening, and stopping them, the population turns its head and creates an internal fiction to train themselves to accept and, finally, love their servitude, even in the depths of austere bleakness of apocalyptic proportions.
Just as Aldous Huxley predicted that the Brave New World would be a future of people who “love their servitude,” there is an attempt going on to persuade the public into “loving their radiation”– by raising the “safe” limits, downplaying effects, by talking little about it, all part of an attempt to create a false memory about all the ‘good’ that nuclear has done for us, now not in spite of, but because of its disasters.
Blackwell’s smug embrace of beauty in all things is signing a willing surrender of mankind’s future, and embracing the post-human world they say is to come. Because a corrupt elite have hijacked the mechanisms of social control, and have given into maniacal urges to implode development, and kill and destroy, many well-meaning people give into a severe Stockholm syndrome and nihilistically cheer on those designing a world without humans.
If we allow ourselves to believe we are trash, we accept a great evil perpetrated upon the planet. Instead, we must create awareness and reset the global course and chart our future to steer away from the rocks of dehumanization, depopulation and death.
Part of a ‘love letter to pollution,’ Blackwell discusses his book Visit Sunny Chernobyl, sounding off in poetic language “Paradoxically, perversely, the accident may actually have been good for this environment.”
“Because it’s [a] quarantined, radioactive zone, everyone has left a long time ago, and very few people spend any time there,” he tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz. “You’ve got to go in spring, obviously, and it’s just full of trees and birds and insects. And it’s sort of become this huge, accidental wilderness preserve.”
In a way, nature has taken over.
“The birds and the bees and the animals and the wolves are not aware, and/or don’t care about radioactive contamination the way we do,” Blackwell says. “There’s nothing like it, and it’s an absolutely unique place, and most of it is just flat-out beautiful.”
Blackwell observes a synergy between nature and the radioactive contamination: “So it’s not just a place that has been contaminated with radiation and radioactive particles. They are sort of in it, which is another thing that makes it so incredibly fascinating … the ecosystem itself has sort of incorporated that pollution.”
Yes, with Fukushima still falling out, we are again witnessing the celebration of harmful and destructive nuclear disasters– now salvaged as an environmentalist’s ironic, symbolic victory-from-disaster. For all hopes of scaling back the scourge of civilization, Nature seems at peace with nuclear dead zones, if this author’s account is any indication.
Like Ann Coulter, Blackwell tries to convince the world that nuclear radiation has actually helped us and the environment. In the immediate aftermath of Fukushima, Coulter claimed that “radiation is good for you,” adding the Orwellian claim that “excess radiation operates as a sort of cancer vaccine.” Other Fox News contributors have boldly stated that Fukushima has caused zero deaths.
Ann Coulter’s “Glowing” Report on Radiation
Nuclear expert Dr. Christopher Busby accused Guardian columnist George Monbiot of being “criminally irresponsible” for downplaying the effects of Japan’s disaster, in part for his article, “Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power,” which cited global warming as a bigger threat than nuclear fallout. The corporate media have similarly tried to convince the mindless public that mercury is good for you! Incredibly, this “news” report claims that mercury based preservatives in vaccines may help not harm neurological behavior.
Silence, cover-ups and lies about the extent of the effects of the radiation have cost untold millions of deaths. The partial meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory nuclear salt reactors in 1959 went undisclosed to the public for decades, with total effects unknown. A recent survey found 48 of 65 nuclear reactors in the U.S. are leaking, with many of them introducing tritium, the radioactive element of hydrogen, to the environment. Our recent investigation into Austin’s nuclear secrets raises further questions about illegal dumping of waste and the lack of disclosure to the public on nuclear issues.
Of course, Blackwell is NOT overtly saying that radiation is good for living humans or that he’d like to see people die (at least, I presume not; it could be in the book). However, his book’s iconic title Visit Sunny Chernobyl is attempting to create an association of doom with beauty; inverting the darkness of disaster with the image-wording of ‘sunny.’ Thus creating at least a few positive connotations with meltdown and annihilation. The author’s only agenda may well be to use a little irony to cut through the saturated market for book sales and media influence.
But his poetry on the landscape of apocalypse speaks the language of nihilistic technocrats, eugenicist legacy causes, environmentalist-bankers, UN controllers and climate change fanatics alike. When Blackwell finds solace in the pristine remains of an act that drove out humans through immense dark power, he resonates with those pursuing the cause of rewilding and depopulating the earth. Bleak but beautiful. Extreme measures for extreme times. The end justifies the means.
Agenda 21 For Dummies NWO depopulation
This author plays into the imagery of what amounts to the ultimate fantasy of your average upper eschelon eco-terrorist from the ranks of international policy bodies, finance, government or private eugenics sector: rewriting the earth via revolutionary causes (think 12 Monkeys) laced with Agenda 21 undertones. Blaming humanity for ruining the planet, all while hoping to someday toast a scorched earth with scant a person around. A sort of Logan’s Run wash over in balance with humanity’s greatest excesses.
Whether intentional or not, the coined phrase “Visit Sunny Chernobyl” repeats a subtle propaganda meme that joins in concert with a wide campaign working to sell the public on the idea that humanity itself is bad for the planet (see Humanity’s Ultimate Secret below). Therefore, since humans are bad, extermination is necessary, and somehow, even a brilliant control mechanism and balancing act for the earth. Rather than actually recognizing who is repeatedly wrecking things, or addressing why nuclear meltdowns are happening, and stopping them, the population turns its head and creates an internal fiction to train themselves to accept and, finally, love their servitude, even in the depths of austere bleakness of apocalyptic proportions.
Just as Aldous Huxley predicted that the Brave New World would be a future of people who “love their servitude,” there is an attempt going on to persuade the public into “loving their radiation”– by raising the “safe” limits, downplaying effects, by talking little about it, all part of an attempt to create a false memory about all the ‘good’ that nuclear has done for us, now not in spite of, but because of its disasters.
Blackwell’s smug embrace of beauty in all things is signing a willing surrender of mankind’s future, and embracing the post-human world they say is to come. Because a corrupt elite have hijacked the mechanisms of social control, and have given into maniacal urges to implode development, and kill and destroy, many well-meaning people give into a severe Stockholm syndrome and nihilistically cheer on those designing a world without humans.
If we allow ourselves to believe we are trash, we accept a great evil perpetrated upon the planet. Instead, we must create awareness and reset the global course and chart our future to steer away from the rocks of dehumanization, depopulation and death.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Radioactive Nighmare Continues For North America
Millions of Southern Californians and tourists seek the region’s famous beaches to cool off in the sea breeze and frolic in the surf. Those iconic breezes, however, may be delivering something hotter than the white sands along the Pacific.
Buckyballs.
According to a recent U.C. Davis study, uranium-filled nanospheres are created from the millions of tons of fresh and salt water used to try to cool down the three molten cores of the stricken reactors. The tiny and tough buckyballs are shaped like British Association Football soccer balls.
Water hitting the incredibly hot and radioactive, primarily uranium-oxide fuel turns it into peroxide. In this goo buckyballs are formed, loaded with uranium and able to move quickly through water without disintegrating.
High radiation readings in Santa Monica and Los Angeles air during a 42-day period from late December to late January strongly suggest that radiation is increasing in the region including along the coast in Ventura County.
The radiation, detected by this reporter and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, separate from each other and using different procedures, does not appear to be natural in origin. The EPA’s radiation station is high atop an undisclosed building in Los Angeles while this reporter’s detection location is near the West L.A. boundary.
Both stations registered over 5.3 times normal, though the methods of sampling and detection differed. The videotaped Santa Monica sampling and testing allowed for the detection of alpha and beta radiation while the sensitive EPA instrument detected beta only, according to the government website.
A windy Alaskan storm front sweeping down the coast the morning of March 31 slammed Southern California with huge breakers, a choppy sea with 30-foot waves and winds gusting to 50 mph. A low-hanging marine layer infused with sea spray made aloft from the chop and carried on the winds blew inland over the Los Angeles Basin for several miles bringing with it the highest radiation this reporter has detected in hot rain since the meltdowns began, over five times normal.
Scientific studies from the United Kingdom and Europe show that sea water infused with radiation of the sort spewing out of Fukushima can travel inland from the coast up to 300 kilometers. These mobile poisons include cesium-137 and plutonium-239, the latter with a half-life of 24,400 years.
Even with government, University of California and this reporter’s tests showing high radiation in the air, water, food and dairy products in this state, the state and federal governments cut off special testing for Fukushima radionuclides more than half a year ago.
Southern California is still getting hit by Fukushima radiation at alarmingly high levels that will inevitably increase as the main bulk of polluted Pacific Ocean water reaches North America over the next two years.
Luckily, the area is south of where the jet stream has brought hot rains from across the Pacific and Fukushima, more than 5,000 miles away, upwind and up-current of the West Coast. Those rains have brought extraordinary amounts of radiation to places like St. Louis, with multiple rain events detected and filmed, showing incredibly hot rains.
Unluckily, North America is directly downwind of Japan, where the government is having 560,000 tons of irradiated rubble incinerated with the ash dumped in Tokyo Bay. The burning began last October and continues through March 2014, enraging American activists for this unwitting double dose.
American media coverage of Fukushima’s continuing woes and of contamination spreading across Japan and threatening Tokyo’s 30 million residents, while not robust has been adequate. Coverage of contamination in America and Southern California has been practically non-existent.
That’s one of the reasons we started Radiation Station Santa Monica four days after the meltdowns began on March 11, 2011, transmitting live radiation readings for the Los Angeles Basin 24/7 ever since.
With nuclear radiation monitoring equipment, this investigation has performed more than 1,500 radiation tests in different media throughout four states and in and in jet airplane cabins where, even accounting for higher radiation at higher altitudes, readings were more than five times normal according to the manufacturer of our Inspector Alert nuclear radiation monitor.
Writer Michael Collins measuring the unfriendly skies in December 2011.
Those readings, along with the EPA’s, combined with the UC Davis study of buckyballs and a European study of sea spray radiation spread, strongly indicate that Southern California is being exposed to significant amounts of radiation. The closer to the coast, like much of populated Ventura County, the more pronounced the radiation in this scenario.
Other reports exist of what likely-Fukushima fallout in the Southland exist.
Researchers from Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University and the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, Stony Brook University, released a study May 28 that showed that all 15 samples of Pacific Bluefin tuna caught off of San Diego in August 2011 showed indisputable signs of radiation contamination emanating from Fukushima.
This suggests that the popular and expensive animal carved up usually for sushi is even more contaminated now nearly a year after it was first harvested and tested as at least 1,000 tons of highly radioactive water used to cool the melted cores and spent fuel ponds are being dumped daily into the ocean, according to recent revelations of the nuclear plants owners, Tokyo Electric Power Company.
The study also suggests that other highly migratory species, like turtles, sharks and marine birds, may also be contaminated with the radiation found in the tuna: cesium-134 and cesium-137.
The U.S. Geological Service (USGS) reported Feb. 21 that Los Angeles had more cesium-137 fallout than any other place in the nation during the opening days of the disaster from March 15 to April 5, 2011.
The amount of Cs-137 detected in precipitation at a monitoring station 20 miles east of downtown was 13 times the limit for the toxin in drinking water according to a report obtained by the VCReporter.
USGS released another astonishing study Feb. 22, from measurements taken at its Bennington National Atmospheric Deposition Program in Vermont, confirming a grim cesium-137 scenario for Southern California.
“Deposition actually decreased as the air mass traveled east to west,” Greg Wetherbee, a chemist with USGS, told the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper before imparting an additional bombshell.
“In the United States, cesium-134 and cesium-137 wet dispersion values were higher than for Chernobyl fallout, in part due to the U.S. being further downwind,” Wetherbee told the paper. “With Chernobyl, there was more opportunity for plume dispersion.”
This double whammy of cesium-137, with a half-life of 30 years isn’t even in a uranium-60 buckyball. But they are in the unfathomable spread of goo throughout the Pacific on the second strongest current in the world headed right for us.
The three meltdowns have spewed trillions of becquerels of highly radioactive iodine-131, cesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-239 into the atmosphere and Pacific since March 11, 2011. The initial explosions and fires sent untold amounts of radiation high into the atmosphere.
A Feb. 28 report by the Meteorological Research Institute, just released at a scientific symposium in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan, says that 40,000 trillion becquerels, double the amount previously thought, have escaped Unit 1 reactor alone.
This has resulted in fallout around the globe and especially impacting the Pacific and parts of America and Canada, two countries downwind of Japan on the jet stream. British Columbia, the Pacific Northwest, Midwest and Ontario have been hit especially hard by rain, sleet and snow, in some cases with dizzying amounts of high radiation.
A March 6 study Department of Biological Sciences study conducted at California State University, Long Beach, found that kelp along the coast of California was heavily impacted by radioactive Iodine-131 a month after the meltdowns began. The virulent and deadly isotope was detected at 250 times levels the researchers said were normal in the kelp before the disaster.
Radioactive fallout in St. Louis, Mo., rainfall, which has been monitored at Potrblog.com since the crisis began, has been repeatedly so hot that levels have been reached that make it unsafe for children and pregnant women. An Oct.17, 2011, St. Louis rainstorm was measured on video at 2.76 millirems per hour or more than 270 times background.
The U.S. EPA considers anything 3 times background to be significantly above background. The California Highway Patrol deems any material more than three times background as a potential hazardous materials situation. The St. Louis rain was 90 times CHP’s hazmat trigger.
The main wave of water-borne radiation from the meltdowns, including highly mobile uranium-60 buckyballs, is surging across the Pacific along the Kuroshio Current, second only to the Gulf Stream for power on the planet.
Millions of tons of seawater and fresh water have been used to cool the melted cores and spent fuel rods, generating millions of tons of irradiated water. The Kuroshio Current is transporting a significant amount of this escaping radiation from Fukushima Daiichi across the Pacific toward the West Coast.
The 70-mile-wide current joins the North Pacific Current, moving eastward until it splits and flows southward along the California Current, which flows along the coast to Ventura County and beyond.The American government has done nothing to monitor the Pacific Ocean for over half a year, even though a Texas-sized sea of Japanese earthquake debris is already washing up on outlying Alaskan islands and is suspected to have already hit the West Coast, including California.
“In terms of the radiation, EPA is in charge of the radiation network for airborne radiation; it’s called RadNet,” EPA Region 9 Administrator Jared Blumenfeld told the VCReporter on Feb. 9 during a news conference about new ship sewage regulations. “And we have a very significant and comprehensive array of RadNet monitors along the, actually along the coast, but on land. We don’t have jurisdiction for looking at marine radiation. Perhaps NOAA would be able to answer that question but we don’t have data or monitor it,” he said.
NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, suspended testing the Pacific for Fukushima radiation last summer after concluding that there wasn’t any radiation to be detected.
“As far as questions about radiation, we are working with radiation experts within the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy,” NOAA media liaison Keeley Belva wrote in a Feb. 10 e-mail. “Here are some contacts information for those agencies at the headquarters level.”
In other words, no federal agency, department or administration is doing anything to sample and analyze water from the Pacific. Fish aren’t being tested for contamination, either.
“NOAA is not currently doing further research on seafood,” Belva said adding “NOAA is doing a study related to radiation that is focused on radiation plume modeling.”
The lack of testing disappoints Dan Hirsch, U.C. Santa Cruz nuclear policy lecturer and president of Committee to Bridge the Gap which exposed the Rocketdyne partial meltdowns above the western San Fernando Valley in 1979 and continues to lead the fight to clean up Rocketdyne today.
“EPA did some special monitoring for a few weeks after the accident began, then shut down the special monitoring” Hirsch told the VCReporter. “What monitoring was done was very troubled. Half of the stationary air monitors were broken at the time of the accident. Deployable monitors were ordered not deployed.”
Even when the government testing did work, increasingly high levels of radiation seem to have been ignored.
The VCReporter has learned that the California Department of Public Health halted monitoring of Fukushima fallout when its Radiologic Health Branch issued its last report on Oct. 10, 2011.
That report shows an alarming rise in cesium-137 in CalPoly San Luis Obispo dairy farm milk beginning June 14, 2011, when it tested 2.95 picocuries per liter (pCi/l) and steadily rising in four subsequent tests until it was 5.91 pCi/l. The hot milk was at twice the allowable amount of this radionuclide in drinking water, according to the EPA’s 3.0 pCi/l limit.
Then the testing stopped, for no other reason than the government concluded that nothing from Fukushima had sufficiently contaminated anything to be of concern. Even detections of radioactive sulphur-35 in San Diego and plutonium-239 in Riverside did nothing to pique the interest of regulators.
“The lesson to be learned is that both the U.S. and Japan suffer from very lax regulation, a too-cozy relationship between nuclear regulators and the industry they are to regulate,” Hirsch said. “This can lead to dangerous outcomesThis was not unanticipated. Yet the need for immediate information was undeniable.
Live-streaming radiation readings from Santa Monica began four days after the meltdowns. Since then, this reporter has conducted more than 1,500 tests in four states and miles above the Earth, where jet radiation registered more than five times normal, even accounting for altitude.
Special tests revealed elevated radiation in Bryce Canyon and Grand Canyon rain. Southwest Michigan rain samples were hot.
Santa Monica and Los Angeles rain and mist were also high. Readings taken in Agoura, Oxnard and Ventura mostly mirrored these measurements. The Radiation Station Ventura California provides near-daily radiation readings that include local food measurements.
Japanese sake, beer, vegetable juice, seaweed, pastries and tea all registered significant ionization above background. Powdered milk, turkey hot dogs, and jet travel breathing masks were all part of the specific media tested, many of which were recorded in these videotaped radiation detections.
HEPA filters may also be effective in capturing buckyballs, which are geodesic dome-shaped structures that are spherical with multiple flat sides. Strong evidence suggests that these hardy radioactive Uranium-60 nanoparticles have crossed the Pacific quickly, with their concentrations rising.
That evidence includes our and the EPA’s high beta readings in Los Angeles. Our radiation station is a little more than a mile from the Pacific shoreline. Downtown Los Angeles is more than 13 miles away from the sea.
The Jan. 27, 2012, U.C. Davis report “Uranyl peroxide enhanced nuclear fuel corrosion in seawater,” is the first account to analyze what is happening to the gargantuan amount of seawater, as well as fresh water, that has been hosing down the melted reactor cores and flushing into the Pacific.
Alexandra Navrotsky, Ph.D., director of nanomaterials research at U.C. Davis (center) with colleagues.
The study spells out a horrific scenario in which compromised irradiated fuel turned huge amounts of ocean water into a series of uranium-related peroxide compounds containing as many as 60 “uranyl ions” in hardy nanoscale cage clusters that can “potentially transport uranium over long distances” and persist for “at least 294 days without detectable change.”
How hot these nano-cage clusters of cancer-causing radiation are depends on what kind and ratio of uranium isotopes make up the 60 in each one.
“A given isotope has the same radioactivity (half-life) regardless of what chemical state it is in,” Alexandra Navrotsky, Ph.D., director of nanomaterials research at U.C. Davis, told the VCReporter. “So the radioactivity for a constant number of U atoms depends on the proportion of different isotopes in the sample.”
There is a strong possibility that these uranium peroxide buckyballs are already sloshing around in the waters off Southern California as this reporter and the EPA’s radiation readings appear to indicate. But if it was the source of our high detections what was the mechanism that was transporting radiation inland.
Sea spray, perhaps. Radioactive sea spray has been shown to blow hundreds of kilometers inland in tests conducted in the United Kingdom by British and European researchers. As any one who has ever smelled the salty ocean air miles from the ocean might expect, salt in sea spray can travel a significant distance. The same holds true for radioactive particles floating in the sea, even if in addition to U60 buckyballs.
In the 2008 report “Sea to land transfer of radionuclides in Cumbria and North Wales,” the greatest average concentration of cesium-137 and plutonium-239 in soil at a depth of 0 to 15 centimeters was found 10 kilometers from the coast. The highest average amounts found at 15 to 30 centimeters deep were 5 kilometers away from the sea illustrating the unpredictability of radiation fallout.
A 62-page UK study released in December 2011 found that sea spray and marine aerosols created from bubbles forming and popping when the sea is choppy or waves break have increased concentrations of radioactive “actinides.”
Actinides are chemically alike radioactive metallic elements and include uranium and plutonium. One actinide infused the spray with an 812 times greater concentration of americium-241 than normal amounts of Am-241 in ambient seawater.
The report cited information that sea-spray-blown cesium 137 was found 200 kilometers from the discharge source in the New Hebrides islands in northern Scotland.
Another UK study found that the Irish Sea has a micro layer on top of it, perhaps only thousandths of a millimeter in thickness, that can become imbued with fine particulate material and its absorbed radiation.
These concentrations of plutonium and americium are four to five times their concentrations in ambient seawater. Plutonium concentrates by 26,000 times in floating algal blooms at sea, says the report.
These radionuclides and buckyballs make up the goo inexorably crossing the Pacific, which may just have begun to impact our shores. Yet not a nickel of state or federal money is spent monitoring it. We are on our own in this Fukushima nightmare.
Buckyballs.
According to a recent U.C. Davis study, uranium-filled nanospheres are created from the millions of tons of fresh and salt water used to try to cool down the three molten cores of the stricken reactors. The tiny and tough buckyballs are shaped like British Association Football soccer balls.
Water hitting the incredibly hot and radioactive, primarily uranium-oxide fuel turns it into peroxide. In this goo buckyballs are formed, loaded with uranium and able to move quickly through water without disintegrating.
High radiation readings in Santa Monica and Los Angeles air during a 42-day period from late December to late January strongly suggest that radiation is increasing in the region including along the coast in Ventura County.
The radiation, detected by this reporter and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, separate from each other and using different procedures, does not appear to be natural in origin. The EPA’s radiation station is high atop an undisclosed building in Los Angeles while this reporter’s detection location is near the West L.A. boundary.
Both stations registered over 5.3 times normal, though the methods of sampling and detection differed. The videotaped Santa Monica sampling and testing allowed for the detection of alpha and beta radiation while the sensitive EPA instrument detected beta only, according to the government website.
A windy Alaskan storm front sweeping down the coast the morning of March 31 slammed Southern California with huge breakers, a choppy sea with 30-foot waves and winds gusting to 50 mph. A low-hanging marine layer infused with sea spray made aloft from the chop and carried on the winds blew inland over the Los Angeles Basin for several miles bringing with it the highest radiation this reporter has detected in hot rain since the meltdowns began, over five times normal.
Scientific studies from the United Kingdom and Europe show that sea water infused with radiation of the sort spewing out of Fukushima can travel inland from the coast up to 300 kilometers. These mobile poisons include cesium-137 and plutonium-239, the latter with a half-life of 24,400 years.
Even with government, University of California and this reporter’s tests showing high radiation in the air, water, food and dairy products in this state, the state and federal governments cut off special testing for Fukushima radionuclides more than half a year ago.
Southern California is still getting hit by Fukushima radiation at alarmingly high levels that will inevitably increase as the main bulk of polluted Pacific Ocean water reaches North America over the next two years.
Luckily, the area is south of where the jet stream has brought hot rains from across the Pacific and Fukushima, more than 5,000 miles away, upwind and up-current of the West Coast. Those rains have brought extraordinary amounts of radiation to places like St. Louis, with multiple rain events detected and filmed, showing incredibly hot rains.
Unluckily, North America is directly downwind of Japan, where the government is having 560,000 tons of irradiated rubble incinerated with the ash dumped in Tokyo Bay. The burning began last October and continues through March 2014, enraging American activists for this unwitting double dose.
American media coverage of Fukushima’s continuing woes and of contamination spreading across Japan and threatening Tokyo’s 30 million residents, while not robust has been adequate. Coverage of contamination in America and Southern California has been practically non-existent.
That’s one of the reasons we started Radiation Station Santa Monica four days after the meltdowns began on March 11, 2011, transmitting live radiation readings for the Los Angeles Basin 24/7 ever since.
With nuclear radiation monitoring equipment, this investigation has performed more than 1,500 radiation tests in different media throughout four states and in and in jet airplane cabins where, even accounting for higher radiation at higher altitudes, readings were more than five times normal according to the manufacturer of our Inspector Alert nuclear radiation monitor.
Writer Michael Collins measuring the unfriendly skies in December 2011.
Those readings, along with the EPA’s, combined with the UC Davis study of buckyballs and a European study of sea spray radiation spread, strongly indicate that Southern California is being exposed to significant amounts of radiation. The closer to the coast, like much of populated Ventura County, the more pronounced the radiation in this scenario.
Other reports exist of what likely-Fukushima fallout in the Southland exist.
Researchers from Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University and the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, Stony Brook University, released a study May 28 that showed that all 15 samples of Pacific Bluefin tuna caught off of San Diego in August 2011 showed indisputable signs of radiation contamination emanating from Fukushima.
This suggests that the popular and expensive animal carved up usually for sushi is even more contaminated now nearly a year after it was first harvested and tested as at least 1,000 tons of highly radioactive water used to cool the melted cores and spent fuel ponds are being dumped daily into the ocean, according to recent revelations of the nuclear plants owners, Tokyo Electric Power Company.
The study also suggests that other highly migratory species, like turtles, sharks and marine birds, may also be contaminated with the radiation found in the tuna: cesium-134 and cesium-137.
The U.S. Geological Service (USGS) reported Feb. 21 that Los Angeles had more cesium-137 fallout than any other place in the nation during the opening days of the disaster from March 15 to April 5, 2011.
The amount of Cs-137 detected in precipitation at a monitoring station 20 miles east of downtown was 13 times the limit for the toxin in drinking water according to a report obtained by the VCReporter.
USGS released another astonishing study Feb. 22, from measurements taken at its Bennington National Atmospheric Deposition Program in Vermont, confirming a grim cesium-137 scenario for Southern California.
“Deposition actually decreased as the air mass traveled east to west,” Greg Wetherbee, a chemist with USGS, told the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper before imparting an additional bombshell.
“In the United States, cesium-134 and cesium-137 wet dispersion values were higher than for Chernobyl fallout, in part due to the U.S. being further downwind,” Wetherbee told the paper. “With Chernobyl, there was more opportunity for plume dispersion.”
This double whammy of cesium-137, with a half-life of 30 years isn’t even in a uranium-60 buckyball. But they are in the unfathomable spread of goo throughout the Pacific on the second strongest current in the world headed right for us.
The three meltdowns have spewed trillions of becquerels of highly radioactive iodine-131, cesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-239 into the atmosphere and Pacific since March 11, 2011. The initial explosions and fires sent untold amounts of radiation high into the atmosphere.
A Feb. 28 report by the Meteorological Research Institute, just released at a scientific symposium in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan, says that 40,000 trillion becquerels, double the amount previously thought, have escaped Unit 1 reactor alone.
This has resulted in fallout around the globe and especially impacting the Pacific and parts of America and Canada, two countries downwind of Japan on the jet stream. British Columbia, the Pacific Northwest, Midwest and Ontario have been hit especially hard by rain, sleet and snow, in some cases with dizzying amounts of high radiation.
A March 6 study Department of Biological Sciences study conducted at California State University, Long Beach, found that kelp along the coast of California was heavily impacted by radioactive Iodine-131 a month after the meltdowns began. The virulent and deadly isotope was detected at 250 times levels the researchers said were normal in the kelp before the disaster.
Radioactive fallout in St. Louis, Mo., rainfall, which has been monitored at Potrblog.com since the crisis began, has been repeatedly so hot that levels have been reached that make it unsafe for children and pregnant women. An Oct.17, 2011, St. Louis rainstorm was measured on video at 2.76 millirems per hour or more than 270 times background.
The U.S. EPA considers anything 3 times background to be significantly above background. The California Highway Patrol deems any material more than three times background as a potential hazardous materials situation. The St. Louis rain was 90 times CHP’s hazmat trigger.
The main wave of water-borne radiation from the meltdowns, including highly mobile uranium-60 buckyballs, is surging across the Pacific along the Kuroshio Current, second only to the Gulf Stream for power on the planet.
Millions of tons of seawater and fresh water have been used to cool the melted cores and spent fuel rods, generating millions of tons of irradiated water. The Kuroshio Current is transporting a significant amount of this escaping radiation from Fukushima Daiichi across the Pacific toward the West Coast.
The 70-mile-wide current joins the North Pacific Current, moving eastward until it splits and flows southward along the California Current, which flows along the coast to Ventura County and beyond.The American government has done nothing to monitor the Pacific Ocean for over half a year, even though a Texas-sized sea of Japanese earthquake debris is already washing up on outlying Alaskan islands and is suspected to have already hit the West Coast, including California.
“In terms of the radiation, EPA is in charge of the radiation network for airborne radiation; it’s called RadNet,” EPA Region 9 Administrator Jared Blumenfeld told the VCReporter on Feb. 9 during a news conference about new ship sewage regulations. “And we have a very significant and comprehensive array of RadNet monitors along the, actually along the coast, but on land. We don’t have jurisdiction for looking at marine radiation. Perhaps NOAA would be able to answer that question but we don’t have data or monitor it,” he said.
NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, suspended testing the Pacific for Fukushima radiation last summer after concluding that there wasn’t any radiation to be detected.
“As far as questions about radiation, we are working with radiation experts within the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy,” NOAA media liaison Keeley Belva wrote in a Feb. 10 e-mail. “Here are some contacts information for those agencies at the headquarters level.”
In other words, no federal agency, department or administration is doing anything to sample and analyze water from the Pacific. Fish aren’t being tested for contamination, either.
“NOAA is not currently doing further research on seafood,” Belva said adding “NOAA is doing a study related to radiation that is focused on radiation plume modeling.”
The lack of testing disappoints Dan Hirsch, U.C. Santa Cruz nuclear policy lecturer and president of Committee to Bridge the Gap which exposed the Rocketdyne partial meltdowns above the western San Fernando Valley in 1979 and continues to lead the fight to clean up Rocketdyne today.
“EPA did some special monitoring for a few weeks after the accident began, then shut down the special monitoring” Hirsch told the VCReporter. “What monitoring was done was very troubled. Half of the stationary air monitors were broken at the time of the accident. Deployable monitors were ordered not deployed.”
Even when the government testing did work, increasingly high levels of radiation seem to have been ignored.
The VCReporter has learned that the California Department of Public Health halted monitoring of Fukushima fallout when its Radiologic Health Branch issued its last report on Oct. 10, 2011.
That report shows an alarming rise in cesium-137 in CalPoly San Luis Obispo dairy farm milk beginning June 14, 2011, when it tested 2.95 picocuries per liter (pCi/l) and steadily rising in four subsequent tests until it was 5.91 pCi/l. The hot milk was at twice the allowable amount of this radionuclide in drinking water, according to the EPA’s 3.0 pCi/l limit.
Then the testing stopped, for no other reason than the government concluded that nothing from Fukushima had sufficiently contaminated anything to be of concern. Even detections of radioactive sulphur-35 in San Diego and plutonium-239 in Riverside did nothing to pique the interest of regulators.
“The lesson to be learned is that both the U.S. and Japan suffer from very lax regulation, a too-cozy relationship between nuclear regulators and the industry they are to regulate,” Hirsch said. “This can lead to dangerous outcomesThis was not unanticipated. Yet the need for immediate information was undeniable.
Live-streaming radiation readings from Santa Monica began four days after the meltdowns. Since then, this reporter has conducted more than 1,500 tests in four states and miles above the Earth, where jet radiation registered more than five times normal, even accounting for altitude.
Special tests revealed elevated radiation in Bryce Canyon and Grand Canyon rain. Southwest Michigan rain samples were hot.
Santa Monica and Los Angeles rain and mist were also high. Readings taken in Agoura, Oxnard and Ventura mostly mirrored these measurements. The Radiation Station Ventura California provides near-daily radiation readings that include local food measurements.
Japanese sake, beer, vegetable juice, seaweed, pastries and tea all registered significant ionization above background. Powdered milk, turkey hot dogs, and jet travel breathing masks were all part of the specific media tested, many of which were recorded in these videotaped radiation detections.
HEPA filters may also be effective in capturing buckyballs, which are geodesic dome-shaped structures that are spherical with multiple flat sides. Strong evidence suggests that these hardy radioactive Uranium-60 nanoparticles have crossed the Pacific quickly, with their concentrations rising.
That evidence includes our and the EPA’s high beta readings in Los Angeles. Our radiation station is a little more than a mile from the Pacific shoreline. Downtown Los Angeles is more than 13 miles away from the sea.
The Jan. 27, 2012, U.C. Davis report “Uranyl peroxide enhanced nuclear fuel corrosion in seawater,” is the first account to analyze what is happening to the gargantuan amount of seawater, as well as fresh water, that has been hosing down the melted reactor cores and flushing into the Pacific.
Alexandra Navrotsky, Ph.D., director of nanomaterials research at U.C. Davis (center) with colleagues.
The study spells out a horrific scenario in which compromised irradiated fuel turned huge amounts of ocean water into a series of uranium-related peroxide compounds containing as many as 60 “uranyl ions” in hardy nanoscale cage clusters that can “potentially transport uranium over long distances” and persist for “at least 294 days without detectable change.”
How hot these nano-cage clusters of cancer-causing radiation are depends on what kind and ratio of uranium isotopes make up the 60 in each one.
“A given isotope has the same radioactivity (half-life) regardless of what chemical state it is in,” Alexandra Navrotsky, Ph.D., director of nanomaterials research at U.C. Davis, told the VCReporter. “So the radioactivity for a constant number of U atoms depends on the proportion of different isotopes in the sample.”
There is a strong possibility that these uranium peroxide buckyballs are already sloshing around in the waters off Southern California as this reporter and the EPA’s radiation readings appear to indicate. But if it was the source of our high detections what was the mechanism that was transporting radiation inland.
Sea spray, perhaps. Radioactive sea spray has been shown to blow hundreds of kilometers inland in tests conducted in the United Kingdom by British and European researchers. As any one who has ever smelled the salty ocean air miles from the ocean might expect, salt in sea spray can travel a significant distance. The same holds true for radioactive particles floating in the sea, even if in addition to U60 buckyballs.
In the 2008 report “Sea to land transfer of radionuclides in Cumbria and North Wales,” the greatest average concentration of cesium-137 and plutonium-239 in soil at a depth of 0 to 15 centimeters was found 10 kilometers from the coast. The highest average amounts found at 15 to 30 centimeters deep were 5 kilometers away from the sea illustrating the unpredictability of radiation fallout.
A 62-page UK study released in December 2011 found that sea spray and marine aerosols created from bubbles forming and popping when the sea is choppy or waves break have increased concentrations of radioactive “actinides.”
Actinides are chemically alike radioactive metallic elements and include uranium and plutonium. One actinide infused the spray with an 812 times greater concentration of americium-241 than normal amounts of Am-241 in ambient seawater.
The report cited information that sea-spray-blown cesium 137 was found 200 kilometers from the discharge source in the New Hebrides islands in northern Scotland.
Another UK study found that the Irish Sea has a micro layer on top of it, perhaps only thousandths of a millimeter in thickness, that can become imbued with fine particulate material and its absorbed radiation.
These concentrations of plutonium and americium are four to five times their concentrations in ambient seawater. Plutonium concentrates by 26,000 times in floating algal blooms at sea, says the report.
These radionuclides and buckyballs make up the goo inexorably crossing the Pacific, which may just have begun to impact our shores. Yet not a nickel of state or federal money is spent monitoring it. We are on our own in this Fukushima nightmare.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Saturday, April 7, 2012
How Smart Is It To Use Wireless Or Submit To The Smart Grid?
A global "Smart Grid" program is being implemented which is blasting homes and businesses with more electromagnetic radiation than human beings have ever been subject to in human history. It is utterly preposterous to assume this will not lead to major human epidemics.
We must now face the very serious problem that the institutions, government, corporations and foundations, that are supposed to be serving our interests are deliberately violating, exploiting, endangering and assaulting us.
This video exposes electromagnetic radiation (EMR) as a major danger and violation to all current and future generations.
NOTE: Asbestos is NOT banned and found in common household & construction products.....
We must now face the very serious problem that the institutions, government, corporations and foundations, that are supposed to be serving our interests are deliberately violating, exploiting, endangering and assaulting us.
This video exposes electromagnetic radiation (EMR) as a major danger and violation to all current and future generations.
NOTE: Asbestos is NOT banned and found in common household & construction products.....
Friday, April 6, 2012
Evacuation Of Tokyo? Or Did You Think All Was A-OK With Radiation?
While it has for the most part disappeared from mainstream view, the Fukushima nuclear disaster is anything but over. In fact, the situation in Japan has gone from bad to worse.
Bottom line: There is no way to contain the radiation.
Even more alarming is that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and other agencies have warned that the nuclear storage pools (the containment units that are being used to cool the nuclear fuel) have been damaged and may collapse under their own weight.
Such an event would cause widespread nuclear fallout throughout the region and force the government to evacuate the nearly 10 million residents of Tokyo and surrounding areas, a scenario which government emergency planners are now taking into serious consideration.
Leading Japanese newspaper The Mainichi Daily News reports:
One of the biggest issues that we face is the possibility that the spent nuclear fuel pool of the No. 4 reactor at the stricken Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant will collapse. This is something that experts from both within and outside Japan have pointed out since the massive quake struck. TEPCO, meanwhile, says that the situation is under control. However, not only independent experts, but also sources within the government say that it’s a grave concern.
The storage pool in the No. 4 reactor building has a total of 1,535 fuel rods, or 460 tons of nuclear fuel, in it. The 7-story building itself has suffered great damage, with the storage pool barely intact on the building’s third and fourth floors. The roof has been blown away. If the storage pool breaks and runs dry, the nuclear fuel inside will overheat and explode, causing a massive amount of radioactive substances to spread over a wide area. Both the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and French nuclear energy company Areva have warned about this risk.
A report released in February by the Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident stated that the storage pool of the plant’s No. 4 reactor has clearly been shown to be “the weakest link” in the parallel, chain-reaction crises of the nuclear disaster. The worse-case scenario drawn up by the government includes not only the collapse of the No. 4 reactor pool, but the disintegration of spent fuel rods from all the plant’s other reactors. If this were to happen, residents in the Tokyo metropolitan area would be forced to evacuate.
Former Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Sumio Mabuchi, who was appointed to the post of then Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s advisor on the nuclear disaster immediately after its outbreak, proposed the injection of concrete from below the No. 4 reactor to the bottom of the storage pool, Chernobyl-style. An inspection of the pool floor, however, led TEPCO to conclude that the pool was strong enough without additional concrete. The plans were scrapped, and antiseismic reinforcements were made to the reactor building instead.
There was a chance early on that a storage pool collapse could be prevented, but according to the report Tokyo Electric Power Co. refused to take the necessary steps as a cost-cutting measure.
Now, as radiation fallout envelops the entire northern hemisphere, there is a distinct possibility that the crisis will move into an even more critical and dangerous phase.
When news of the disaster first emerged we warned, contrary to mainstream experts, that it could be much worse than the Chernobyl accident of the 1980's, that no containment would be possible for at least a few years, and radiation levels across North America would sky rocket. A year on, we are seeing adverse impacts on ocean water throughout the Pacific, and ground levels of radioactive contaminants are well beyond safety thresholds for potable water, food, and soil.
With the Japanese economy already on the brink of meltdown and the rest of the world drowning in debt, an escalation in the severity of the disaster in Japan could be the last nail in the coffin for world financial markets and economic growth.
Even worse, if storage pools in the No. 4 reactor collapse and disintegrate as the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has warned could happen, we will see a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented scale as millions of refugees will have no choice but to flee Tokyo. They’ll have no possessions, no money, no food, no water, no shelter, and a very fragile safety net.
This is what SHTF looks like. The government lies. The corporate cover ups. Downplaying of the severity of the crisis. And then… panic.
Bottom line: There is no way to contain the radiation.
Even more alarming is that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and other agencies have warned that the nuclear storage pools (the containment units that are being used to cool the nuclear fuel) have been damaged and may collapse under their own weight.
Such an event would cause widespread nuclear fallout throughout the region and force the government to evacuate the nearly 10 million residents of Tokyo and surrounding areas, a scenario which government emergency planners are now taking into serious consideration.
Leading Japanese newspaper The Mainichi Daily News reports:
One of the biggest issues that we face is the possibility that the spent nuclear fuel pool of the No. 4 reactor at the stricken Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant will collapse. This is something that experts from both within and outside Japan have pointed out since the massive quake struck. TEPCO, meanwhile, says that the situation is under control. However, not only independent experts, but also sources within the government say that it’s a grave concern.
The storage pool in the No. 4 reactor building has a total of 1,535 fuel rods, or 460 tons of nuclear fuel, in it. The 7-story building itself has suffered great damage, with the storage pool barely intact on the building’s third and fourth floors. The roof has been blown away. If the storage pool breaks and runs dry, the nuclear fuel inside will overheat and explode, causing a massive amount of radioactive substances to spread over a wide area. Both the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and French nuclear energy company Areva have warned about this risk.
A report released in February by the Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident stated that the storage pool of the plant’s No. 4 reactor has clearly been shown to be “the weakest link” in the parallel, chain-reaction crises of the nuclear disaster. The worse-case scenario drawn up by the government includes not only the collapse of the No. 4 reactor pool, but the disintegration of spent fuel rods from all the plant’s other reactors. If this were to happen, residents in the Tokyo metropolitan area would be forced to evacuate.
Former Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Sumio Mabuchi, who was appointed to the post of then Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s advisor on the nuclear disaster immediately after its outbreak, proposed the injection of concrete from below the No. 4 reactor to the bottom of the storage pool, Chernobyl-style. An inspection of the pool floor, however, led TEPCO to conclude that the pool was strong enough without additional concrete. The plans were scrapped, and antiseismic reinforcements were made to the reactor building instead.
There was a chance early on that a storage pool collapse could be prevented, but according to the report Tokyo Electric Power Co. refused to take the necessary steps as a cost-cutting measure.
Now, as radiation fallout envelops the entire northern hemisphere, there is a distinct possibility that the crisis will move into an even more critical and dangerous phase.
When news of the disaster first emerged we warned, contrary to mainstream experts, that it could be much worse than the Chernobyl accident of the 1980's, that no containment would be possible for at least a few years, and radiation levels across North America would sky rocket. A year on, we are seeing adverse impacts on ocean water throughout the Pacific, and ground levels of radioactive contaminants are well beyond safety thresholds for potable water, food, and soil.
With the Japanese economy already on the brink of meltdown and the rest of the world drowning in debt, an escalation in the severity of the disaster in Japan could be the last nail in the coffin for world financial markets and economic growth.
Even worse, if storage pools in the No. 4 reactor collapse and disintegrate as the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has warned could happen, we will see a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented scale as millions of refugees will have no choice but to flee Tokyo. They’ll have no possessions, no money, no food, no water, no shelter, and a very fragile safety net.
This is what SHTF looks like. The government lies. The corporate cover ups. Downplaying of the severity of the crisis. And then… panic.
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Dr Helen Caldicott Reveals Radiation Levels Hundreds Of Thousands Times Higher Than Normal
Few people know that the Pacific Northwest got whacked hard by fallout from the Fukushima disaster with radiation rates hundreds of thousands of times higher than normal background radiation.
The damage from this is not something that the corporate media or the government is talking about. It mysteriously disappeared from the radar almost immediately. Dr. Caldicott referred to this as a process of “cover-up and psychic numbing.” Looks like it may be working. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission just approved two new nuclear power plants this week (4/2/12) in South Carolina in addition to the two approved earlier this year in Georgia.
Dr. Caldicott talks about the dangers and hidden costs of nuclear power then tells the awful truth in minute detail about the actual scale of the Fukushima disaster and compares it to the nuclear disasters of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Recent studies estimated that a million people have died so far from Chernobyl. Dr. Helen Caldicott is a physician, Nobel Peace Prize winner, noted author, anti-nuclear power advocate and has founded numerous national and international groups which oppose nuclear power & weapons, including Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Not Worried About Radiation?
Food is safe to eat, right?
We feel sorry for folks in Fukushima, but we're "far" enough away, right?
Hey not everybody will get cancer will they?
Radiation is scary, just thinking about it!
(日本語) 追加公演も続々決定！ユーリー・バンダジェフスキー来日全国講演決定!!
2012-01-23
(日本語) 東京都大田区(世田谷区、目黒区隣接地域) 雪と雨の検査の結果が出ましたので報告します。
2012.1.28
(日本語) 土壌 江戸川区東小岩のストロンチウム検査の結果が出ました
2011.12.21
(日本語) がれきは受け入れない！会見【中継のお知らせ】
2011.11.26
(日本語) 矢ヶ崎克馬先生より、横浜市のストロンチウムについての見解をいただきました
2011.10.15
(日本語) メールの受信設定について
2011.10.01
(日本語) 【募集を締め切りました】放射能防御プロジェクトによる全国土壌調査：追加募集!!
2011.08.16
(日本語) 朝日ニュースター ニュースの深層で放送
2011.08.08
(日本語) 首都圏150ヶ所 放射能土壌調査会見
We feel sorry for folks in Fukushima, but we're "far" enough away, right?
Hey not everybody will get cancer will they?
Radiation is scary, just thinking about it!
(日本語) 追加公演も続々決定！ユーリー・バンダジェフスキー来日全国講演決定!!
2012-01-23
(日本語) 東京都大田区(世田谷区、目黒区隣接地域) 雪と雨の検査の結果が出ましたので報告します。
2012.1.28
(日本語) 土壌 江戸川区東小岩のストロンチウム検査の結果が出ました
2011.12.21
(日本語) がれきは受け入れない！会見【中継のお知らせ】
2011.11.26
(日本語) 矢ヶ崎克馬先生より、横浜市のストロンチウムについての見解をいただきました
2011.10.15
(日本語) メールの受信設定について
2011.10.01
(日本語) 【募集を締め切りました】放射能防御プロジェクトによる全国土壌調査：追加募集!!
2011.08.16
(日本語) 朝日ニュースター ニュースの深層で放送
2011.08.08
(日本語) 首都圏150ヶ所 放射能土壌調査会見
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Hot Michigan Rain
Home for the holidays takes on a whole new glow when flying for the first time through Fukushima fallout to our family in Michigan.
Packing gets peculiar and precise. Inspector Alert nuclear radiation monitor – check. N-95 approved valved respirators to wear during flight – check. Apple pectin – check. Miniature lab to collect samples in a part of the country hammered by high fallout in rain, sleet and snow since March 11, 2012 – check. One pissed off newlywed wife having to endure this nightmare in a country of oblivious people now being forced to wear an N95-rated respirator on the plane because of her enviroreporter husband – check.
This was first time Denise Anne and I had flown since the triple meltdowns – now melt-throughs – had begun spewing astronomical amounts of radioactive goo into the air and ocean and across lands from Japan to Europe. For months, the readings of high radiation have rolled in from across the country where places like St. Louis have been irradiated by rainfall repeatedly over 170 times normal background radiation.
Other areas reporting in to Radiation Station Central, the monitoring assemblage created March 15 to show folks 24/7 radiation readings in the Los Angeles Basin, have sampled and tested rain and snow finding it dozens of times over background. Courtesy of the jet stream pipeline from Fukushima to North America, places like Toronto, Utah, Arizona, North Carolina, Virginia and the Pacific Northwest have all seen high levels of ionizing precipitation.
Anything three times background and above is considered “significantly” above normal according to the California Envirnomental Protection Agency. Triple background is also the tipping point for the California Highway Patrol, according to an official Nevada radiation report obtained by EnviroReporter.com. Anything above thrice background becomes a hazardous materials case for the CHP.
It was with no small amount of trepidation that we traveled to Michigan to be with our family. The thought that the cyrstalline white fluffy snows that make Michigan so charming during the holidays could be infused with cesium-137 and strontium-90 was horrifying.
What we found over our ten-day holiday confirmed that the Midwest was indeed getting pelted by high radiation but in ways we had not anticipated. Places that we thought would be impacted by fallout turned out to be rad-free while others were even hotter than we thought. Even with knowledge and experise, much gained through conducting over 1,500 radiation tests of rain, fog, food and drink since Radiation Station started March 15, we were still emotionally affected by testing hyper-hot rain falling on the family homestead.
Hot rain and snow were an acceptable risk. Flying through fallout was another matter entirely which we found to be much hotter than even what the manufacturers of our radiation monitor have measured pre-Fukushima.
Not surprisingly, no one aboard the aircraft we boarded at LAX December 23 was wearing a mask to interdict hot particles in fallout from the triple meltdown and burning of 550,000 tons of radioactive debris in Tokyo incinerators. No one even in first class had any protection on not only from the airborne radiation that is circling the northern half of the globe, but from the volatile organic compounds and low-level fumes airing the jet cabin as well as the recirculating viruses from hundreds of passengers some of whom were coughing and sneezing.
We decided to grin and breathe it to get to our Midwest homeland but not by holding our breath. Though worried that we would alarm crew and passengers by donning 3M 8511 particulate respirators N95, wearing the masks was a must since it would afford us the only prevention possible against the trillions of becquerels of ionizing radiation spewing into the atmosphere for over nine months. Our concerns were unfounded, however, as no one thought twice about the masks which we removed when eating our meals and going to the restroom.
While the respirators aren’t 100% effective against inhaling fallout – and can offer no protection against gamma radiation man made or otherwise – they certainly reduce the amount of non-filtered air intake to nearly zero. Radiation bioaccumulation can be greatly reduced by wearing N95-rated masks regardless, making their use essential when flying through Fukushima fallout now mostly confined to the Northern Hemisphere. Even though we were and are a tiny percentage of the 800 million passengers who take to the skies annually worldwide who wear respirators, we were glad we had even before we landed and tested the masks for any hot particles they may have prevented us from breathing.
As the airliner crossed over the Colorado River into Arizona, we were completing our first ten-minute average using one of our Inspector Alert nuclear radiation monitors which can detect alpha, beta, gamma and x-ray radiation. The Inspector is made by Tennessee-based SE International, Inc. (which advertises on EnviroReporter.com through Google AdSense which controls who advertises on the website in some of the ads). Since 1979, this company has expanded in size and distribution as the worldwide demand for radiation detectors has mushroomed.
The captain came on the loudspeaker and announced that we were at 28,000 feet heading up to 38,000 feet. SE International’s “Radiation Basics” page says “When you fly in an air plane at 30,000 feet your rate meter is getting 200 CPM [Counts Per Minute] for anywhere between 2 to 5 hours.”
Our reading was 1,035 CPM which was over five times higher. Two hours later we took another ten-minute average approaching the Missouri River north of St. Charles, Missouri – 1,238 CPM or over 36 times the background in the jet at the terminal. Descending into Chicago the count was 586.2 CPM or 17.40 times previous background in the jet.
Once in our southwest Michigan lodgings, Denise Anne and I tested the two masks we had worn after taking a new background. One respirator was 44% above normal and the other 69% higher than background.
The masks weren’t the only thing that was hot. Global warming was the likely culprit behind the unusually snow-free winter southwestern Michigan was having. No one could remember a time when there wasn’t snow on Christmas. We made good use of the mild weather and hiked the wilds of Michigan along the Kalamazoo River. Later that night, I tested a sample of the river and it came in 267% above background.
That high-sounding number may not totally be the result of any fallout from the Fukushima meltdowns. In July 2010, an oil pipeline busted open letting 3.8 million liters of petroleum to gush into the river. Alberta-based Enbridge Inc. is spending $700 million to clean up the goo having already sucked, scooped and captured 3.5 million liters.
The EPA says that petroleum waste products do contain small amounts of naturally-occurring radioactive materials like uranium, radium and thorium that could account for some of the radioactivity we detected. That seems unlikely though because of this wasn’t waste but instead heavy crude oil that had been spilled.
Snow finally came December 27 and we watched it blanket the family compound. The storm had originated out of the Gulf of Mexico and the radiation readings reflected it: backgrounds and sampling throughout the day and night showed no rise in radiation above background. While that fact is important in and of itself vis-a-vis radioactive fallout from Fukushima not being in a storm that didn’t come in on the jet stream, it was important for another. There was no presence of so-called “radon progeny” or the decay products of radon captured in precipitation that sometimes affect radiation readings.
The absence of radon progeny in this storm, and in a subsequent Michigan storm, suggested that the area we were in at that time was not impacted at all by these radioactive by-products. This point is important because meltdown deniers who routinely dismiss any fallout detection as radon daughter products, can’t explain away the fact that this snow had no additional radiation at all, let alone radiation.
Packing gets peculiar and precise. Inspector Alert nuclear radiation monitor – check. N-95 approved valved respirators to wear during flight – check. Apple pectin – check. Miniature lab to collect samples in a part of the country hammered by high fallout in rain, sleet and snow since March 11, 2012 – check. One pissed off newlywed wife having to endure this nightmare in a country of oblivious people now being forced to wear an N95-rated respirator on the plane because of her enviroreporter husband – check.
This was first time Denise Anne and I had flown since the triple meltdowns – now melt-throughs – had begun spewing astronomical amounts of radioactive goo into the air and ocean and across lands from Japan to Europe. For months, the readings of high radiation have rolled in from across the country where places like St. Louis have been irradiated by rainfall repeatedly over 170 times normal background radiation.
Other areas reporting in to Radiation Station Central, the monitoring assemblage created March 15 to show folks 24/7 radiation readings in the Los Angeles Basin, have sampled and tested rain and snow finding it dozens of times over background. Courtesy of the jet stream pipeline from Fukushima to North America, places like Toronto, Utah, Arizona, North Carolina, Virginia and the Pacific Northwest have all seen high levels of ionizing precipitation.
Anything three times background and above is considered “significantly” above normal according to the California Envirnomental Protection Agency. Triple background is also the tipping point for the California Highway Patrol, according to an official Nevada radiation report obtained by EnviroReporter.com. Anything above thrice background becomes a hazardous materials case for the CHP.
It was with no small amount of trepidation that we traveled to Michigan to be with our family. The thought that the cyrstalline white fluffy snows that make Michigan so charming during the holidays could be infused with cesium-137 and strontium-90 was horrifying.
What we found over our ten-day holiday confirmed that the Midwest was indeed getting pelted by high radiation but in ways we had not anticipated. Places that we thought would be impacted by fallout turned out to be rad-free while others were even hotter than we thought. Even with knowledge and experise, much gained through conducting over 1,500 radiation tests of rain, fog, food and drink since Radiation Station started March 15, we were still emotionally affected by testing hyper-hot rain falling on the family homestead.
Hot rain and snow were an acceptable risk. Flying through fallout was another matter entirely which we found to be much hotter than even what the manufacturers of our radiation monitor have measured pre-Fukushima.
Not surprisingly, no one aboard the aircraft we boarded at LAX December 23 was wearing a mask to interdict hot particles in fallout from the triple meltdown and burning of 550,000 tons of radioactive debris in Tokyo incinerators. No one even in first class had any protection on not only from the airborne radiation that is circling the northern half of the globe, but from the volatile organic compounds and low-level fumes airing the jet cabin as well as the recirculating viruses from hundreds of passengers some of whom were coughing and sneezing.
We decided to grin and breathe it to get to our Midwest homeland but not by holding our breath. Though worried that we would alarm crew and passengers by donning 3M 8511 particulate respirators N95, wearing the masks was a must since it would afford us the only prevention possible against the trillions of becquerels of ionizing radiation spewing into the atmosphere for over nine months. Our concerns were unfounded, however, as no one thought twice about the masks which we removed when eating our meals and going to the restroom.
While the respirators aren’t 100% effective against inhaling fallout – and can offer no protection against gamma radiation man made or otherwise – they certainly reduce the amount of non-filtered air intake to nearly zero. Radiation bioaccumulation can be greatly reduced by wearing N95-rated masks regardless, making their use essential when flying through Fukushima fallout now mostly confined to the Northern Hemisphere. Even though we were and are a tiny percentage of the 800 million passengers who take to the skies annually worldwide who wear respirators, we were glad we had even before we landed and tested the masks for any hot particles they may have prevented us from breathing.
As the airliner crossed over the Colorado River into Arizona, we were completing our first ten-minute average using one of our Inspector Alert nuclear radiation monitors which can detect alpha, beta, gamma and x-ray radiation. The Inspector is made by Tennessee-based SE International, Inc. (which advertises on EnviroReporter.com through Google AdSense which controls who advertises on the website in some of the ads). Since 1979, this company has expanded in size and distribution as the worldwide demand for radiation detectors has mushroomed.
The captain came on the loudspeaker and announced that we were at 28,000 feet heading up to 38,000 feet. SE International’s “Radiation Basics” page says “When you fly in an air plane at 30,000 feet your rate meter is getting 200 CPM [Counts Per Minute] for anywhere between 2 to 5 hours.”
Our reading was 1,035 CPM which was over five times higher. Two hours later we took another ten-minute average approaching the Missouri River north of St. Charles, Missouri – 1,238 CPM or over 36 times the background in the jet at the terminal. Descending into Chicago the count was 586.2 CPM or 17.40 times previous background in the jet.
Once in our southwest Michigan lodgings, Denise Anne and I tested the two masks we had worn after taking a new background. One respirator was 44% above normal and the other 69% higher than background.
The masks weren’t the only thing that was hot. Global warming was the likely culprit behind the unusually snow-free winter southwestern Michigan was having. No one could remember a time when there wasn’t snow on Christmas. We made good use of the mild weather and hiked the wilds of Michigan along the Kalamazoo River. Later that night, I tested a sample of the river and it came in 267% above background.
That high-sounding number may not totally be the result of any fallout from the Fukushima meltdowns. In July 2010, an oil pipeline busted open letting 3.8 million liters of petroleum to gush into the river. Alberta-based Enbridge Inc. is spending $700 million to clean up the goo having already sucked, scooped and captured 3.5 million liters.
The EPA says that petroleum waste products do contain small amounts of naturally-occurring radioactive materials like uranium, radium and thorium that could account for some of the radioactivity we detected. That seems unlikely though because of this wasn’t waste but instead heavy crude oil that had been spilled.
Snow finally came December 27 and we watched it blanket the family compound. The storm had originated out of the Gulf of Mexico and the radiation readings reflected it: backgrounds and sampling throughout the day and night showed no rise in radiation above background. While that fact is important in and of itself vis-a-vis radioactive fallout from Fukushima not being in a storm that didn’t come in on the jet stream, it was important for another. There was no presence of so-called “radon progeny” or the decay products of radon captured in precipitation that sometimes affect radiation readings.
The absence of radon progeny in this storm, and in a subsequent Michigan storm, suggested that the area we were in at that time was not impacted at all by these radioactive by-products. This point is important because meltdown deniers who routinely dismiss any fallout detection as radon daughter products, can’t explain away the fact that this snow had no additional radiation at all, let alone radiation.
Friday, December 9, 2011
Fukushima Hot Radioactive Particles Very High
New Video of Scientist Kaltofen Presenting to American Public Health Association from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.
A professional video of Marco Kaltofen's presentation to the American Public Health Association was recently made available to Fairewinds. Kaltofen states that hot particles are contaminating portions of northern Japan. He also states that auto air filters from Fukushima, that he tested in his Massachusetts laboratory, are so radioactive that they have to be disposed of in a buried radioactive waste disposal site in the US. Additionally, he expresses concerns for the mechanics who work on cars in Fukushima Prefecture.
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Radioactive Substance Coming From Ground
"It's invisible substances," said Sumiko Goto, a manager of a hotel filled with engineers, officials and construction workers who've been there for months cleaning up the wreckage that inundated everything within a kilometer of the shoreline. "It's in the air, in the river, on the walls," she said. "People are very anxious about the situation. Radioactive substances come from the ground, from the river bottom."
Uncertain reports daily fuel the fears. One day people hear of a leak through which radioactive water is pouring into the sea, poisoning the fish that are a staple of everyone's diet. Next, there are stories of emissions of radioactive xenon gas and then a reading of radioactive cesium in powdered milk - enough for the Meiji Company to recall 400,000 cans of it this week "so people can feel their infants are safe".
All the while officials talk of an imminent "cold shutdown" of the reactors, the stage at which at last the water for cooling the nuclear fuel rods is no longer boiling - and therefore not capable of reheating the fuel.
It's all very confusing, so much so that only 40,000 of the 70,000 people who once inhabited this city have returned. About 13,000 of them lived in a ward within the 20-kilometer zone, meaning they can't stay in their old homes and need permission to go back and retrieve their belongings.
Uncertain reports daily fuel the fears. One day people hear of a leak through which radioactive water is pouring into the sea, poisoning the fish that are a staple of everyone's diet. Next, there are stories of emissions of radioactive xenon gas and then a reading of radioactive cesium in powdered milk - enough for the Meiji Company to recall 400,000 cans of it this week "so people can feel their infants are safe".
All the while officials talk of an imminent "cold shutdown" of the reactors, the stage at which at last the water for cooling the nuclear fuel rods is no longer boiling - and therefore not capable of reheating the fuel.
It's all very confusing, so much so that only 40,000 of the 70,000 people who once inhabited this city have returned. About 13,000 of them lived in a ward within the 20-kilometer zone, meaning they can't stay in their old homes and need permission to go back and retrieve their belongings.
Living With Fukushima Radiation
While walking through the highly contaminated outskirts of Fukushima City last week, I suddenly realized that this capital of the prefecture is as far from the Fukushima nuclear disaster site as my hometown is from Borssele where the only Dutch nuclear power plant in the Netherlands is located —about 60 km. While people in the 20 km exclusion zone around the Fukushima disaster site have been evacuated, the residents of this densely populated city have already waited nine months for decontamination of their houses, gardens and parks without getting any official government support for relocation, not even for children and pregnant women.
We spent four days in Fukushima City doing a radiation survey in the neighbourhoods of Watari and Onami. People there have been left to cope alone in a highly contaminated environment by both the local and national governments. Our radiation experts found hot spots of up to 37 microSieverts per hour in a garden only a few meters away from a house and an accumulation of radioactivity in drainage systems, puddles and ditches. Overall, the radiation levels in these neighbourhoods are so high that people receive an exposure to radiation just from external sources that is ten times the annual allowed dose. How high their internal exposure is from eating contaminated food and inhaling or ingesting radioactive particles remains unknown, since no government program is keeping track of this.
Parks are the most contaminated areas in Fukushima City. Some are marked with signs: “Due to radioactive contamination, don’t spend more than one hour per day in this park.” Even on sunny days last week, the parks where empty. Mothers are smart enough to not let their children play on the playgrounds in these parks, not even for an hour. Even inside their houses, they have to worry about radiation. We measured the rooms of an elderly lady’s house who is expecting her grandchildren for Christmas. She wanted to know what the safest place was for her grandchildren to sleep.
We spent four days in Fukushima City doing a radiation survey in the neighbourhoods of Watari and Onami. People there have been left to cope alone in a highly contaminated environment by both the local and national governments. Our radiation experts found hot spots of up to 37 microSieverts per hour in a garden only a few meters away from a house and an accumulation of radioactivity in drainage systems, puddles and ditches. Overall, the radiation levels in these neighbourhoods are so high that people receive an exposure to radiation just from external sources that is ten times the annual allowed dose. How high their internal exposure is from eating contaminated food and inhaling or ingesting radioactive particles remains unknown, since no government program is keeping track of this.
Parks are the most contaminated areas in Fukushima City. Some are marked with signs: “Due to radioactive contamination, don’t spend more than one hour per day in this park.” Even on sunny days last week, the parks where empty. Mothers are smart enough to not let their children play on the playgrounds in these parks, not even for an hour. Even inside their houses, they have to worry about radiation. We measured the rooms of an elderly lady’s house who is expecting her grandchildren for Christmas. She wanted to know what the safest place was for her grandchildren to sleep.
#Fukushima Workers Says It's Out Of Control
続き7:冷温停止しました、水素爆発しません、放射性物質拡散は大幅に減少しました。って言っても実際の落ちた燃料温度を計ってないし、水素濃度も安定しないし、外部の放射性物質拡散は減少したと言っても毎時0.6億ベクレル出てるし、海には未だに汚染が流れてるし…。
Even though they “declare” the cold shut down, no risk of hydrogen explosion, massive decrease of radiation, nobody can actually measure the temperature of dropped nuclear fuel, and hydrogen level is not stable. Radiation is still emit by 60 million Bq/h, sea contamination is ongoing..
続き8:全てにおいて完全にコントロールされてない状況なんだ。 国は原発収束に向けて全力を尽くすって言ってたけど、これが全力なのかなぁ…？東電は1兆円の支援要請したけど、国も金を出すなら東電任せにしないで口も建設的な意見や案も出せばいいのに。
The situation is totally out of control. Government has been stating they were going to make the best to settle it down, but it doesn’t seem to be their “best”. Tepco requested 1 trillion yen of financial support from government. Now that government is a sponsor of Tepco, they should take more lead of them.
続き9:今のままじゃ本当にメーカーや協力企業は撤退に追い込まれる。未だに工事代金はほとんど支払いしてないし、それどころかそれ以前の工事代金も支払いされてないんだから。今、大地震や大津波が来たら完全にアウトだよ。だから今のうちに早くしなきゃならない事が沢山あるんだ。
Tepco still hasn’t paid their sub-contract companies or makers for the past / current construction cost. Most of the stakeholders will have to withdraw soon. If major earthquake or tsunami hit the plants, it will be the real catastrophe. That is why we need to be in hurry.
続き10:あの防潮堤じゃもたないし循環ホースなんか千切れてどっか行っちゃうし建屋だって崩壊しないっていえないし。いくら電源確保出来ても肝心の物がなくなったら意味ない。もっと全力で考えないと周りの地域除染より根源をなんとかしなきゃ除染も無意味な徒労になると思うんだ。
The coastal levee is not endurable enough, the pipes of water purifying system will be cluttered everywhere. The buildings may fall apart. Even if they keep the emergency power, it will be nothing if they lose the buildings.
Because the core problem has not been solved, decontamination will be a total waste of energy. We need to think more about how to solve the problems.
Even though they “declare” the cold shut down, no risk of hydrogen explosion, massive decrease of radiation, nobody can actually measure the temperature of dropped nuclear fuel, and hydrogen level is not stable. Radiation is still emit by 60 million Bq/h, sea contamination is ongoing..
続き8:全てにおいて完全にコントロールされてない状況なんだ。 国は原発収束に向けて全力を尽くすって言ってたけど、これが全力なのかなぁ…？東電は1兆円の支援要請したけど、国も金を出すなら東電任せにしないで口も建設的な意見や案も出せばいいのに。
The situation is totally out of control. Government has been stating they were going to make the best to settle it down, but it doesn’t seem to be their “best”. Tepco requested 1 trillion yen of financial support from government. Now that government is a sponsor of Tepco, they should take more lead of them.
続き9:今のままじゃ本当にメーカーや協力企業は撤退に追い込まれる。未だに工事代金はほとんど支払いしてないし、それどころかそれ以前の工事代金も支払いされてないんだから。今、大地震や大津波が来たら完全にアウトだよ。だから今のうちに早くしなきゃならない事が沢山あるんだ。
Tepco still hasn’t paid their sub-contract companies or makers for the past / current construction cost. Most of the stakeholders will have to withdraw soon. If major earthquake or tsunami hit the plants, it will be the real catastrophe. That is why we need to be in hurry.
続き10:あの防潮堤じゃもたないし循環ホースなんか千切れてどっか行っちゃうし建屋だって崩壊しないっていえないし。いくら電源確保出来ても肝心の物がなくなったら意味ない。もっと全力で考えないと周りの地域除染より根源をなんとかしなきゃ除染も無意味な徒労になると思うんだ。
The coastal levee is not endurable enough, the pipes of water purifying system will be cluttered everywhere. The buildings may fall apart. Even if they keep the emergency power, it will be nothing if they lose the buildings.
Because the core problem has not been solved, decontamination will be a total waste of energy. We need to think more about how to solve the problems.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)