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20 Radioactive Dangers We All Face |
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Watchdogging Radiation Cover-ups
...Did you fall for the 'We don't know what caused your cancer ' line?
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What is Idealist.ws? Idealist is a grassroots organization that endeavors to slow and ultimately reverse the tide of global corporate and governmental suppression and cover-up of the environmental and health effects of human-made radiation that now contaminates every place on Earth. Our philosophy at Idealist is that unburying and disseminating this 'inconvenient' public knowledge will be the key to unlocking a nuclear-free world. More here
Read Today's NRC Event Notification Report
March 30, 1955 NEW YORK (U.P.) - An atomic sleuth reported Tuesday that mysterious radioactive fallouts have rained down on New York City this year from sources other than the nuclear explosions in Nevada. The radioactivity was slight enough to be considered harmless to humans but large enough to indicate nuclear activity somewhere in the world, he said. Physicist M. Reiss said he would need much more information before he could tell whether the several unexplained fallouts resulted from harmless leaks in atomic piles, seepage from improperly burned radioactive waste or atomic explosions in Russia or other countries. Reiss keeps his highly sensitive equipment on window sills of his office atop a building at Fifth Ave. and 42nd St. and carries several recording devices in his car. They have recorded fallouts after every known nuclear explosion since 1949, as well as after the still undisclosed atomic activities early this year. |
Top News: FIRES LIFTING CHERNOBYL (CHORNOBYL) FALLOUT FOR ALL THE WORLD TO SUFFER - Last updated Aug. 30, 2010 - Idealist reporting from central Oregon - Update1: Chernobyl wildfire fallout detected in Germany On August 11, the German Federal Office for Radiation Protection (Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz, or BfS), Germany's state radiation protection body, detected an increase in background radiation that they attributed to the radiation-filled smoke from fires burning in Russia's Chernobyl-contaminated areas. On a Bfs webpage (read it in German) dedicated to the topic of the Russian wildfires, they state (in their English-translated version) that "There was one case where traces of radioactive substances were transported to Germany whose concentration was harmless under radiation protection aspects ...It has happened in the past that in case of a fire in contaminated areas in Russia small traces of radioactivity that were harmless under radiation protection aspects (in the area of some micro-becquerel of caesium-137 per cubic metre of air) were measured at the Federal Office for Radiation Protection’s measuring point on the Schauinsland near Freiburg." Elsewhere on that page, the Bfs explains the danger inherent in the 'Chernobyl forests': "In case of fires soil and plant particles and thus also the radioactivity bound to them are released into the atmosphere (resuspension). In the immediate vicinity of Chernobyl also trees still show high caesium exposures. This caesium can also be released in case of fires." Since it is now fact that Russian wildfire fallout made it to Germany, it seems very likely that not-so-safe amounts of radioactive-filled smoke fell in local areas to the fires. It is also likely that contamination in not-so-safe levels fell in other parts of Europe or Asia either in gaps (holes) in radiation monitoring networks or in nations lacking any such networks. It is prudent to note that any exposure to radiation, no matter how small, increases the risk of cancers and mutations. QUOTES:
Over the past two weeks, a Chernobyl Reloaded has been in the making, thanks to wildfires that are breaking out in parts of Russia that received some of the greatest deposition levels from Chernobyl fallout. Long-lived radioactive isotopes, such as Cesium-137 and Strontium-90, which are deposited from fallout events such as nuclear weapons tests and large-scale radiological accidents, tend to reside in the top few inches of the soil and also become lodged in vegetation and dead biomass. Hot burning wildfires - such as a record-breaking, large wildfire in 2007 that lifted legacy fallout radiation north of Milford, Utah - can suspend back into the air up to 100% of this lingering radioactivity where winds can carry these carcinogens. How far can the winds carry this stuff? Thousands of miles. This was confirmed in 2006 when an international team of scientists discovered that forest fires are capable of re-suspending radioactive fallout debris over great distances. They found that nuclear testing fallout found in the soils of Canada was 'still being redistributed far and wide by forest fires' and this fallout was 'subsequently transported across great distances.' The hard-hit fallout areas of Chernobyl are virtually no different in character than lingering nuclear testing fallout in North America's soils. The problem is the concentration of radiation is thousands of times higher. On August 11, 2010, Professor Edmund Lengfelder who is chairman of the German Society for Radiation Protection said in a public radio interview in Germany that 'the chance of radioactive particles entering the atmosphere was "very large" and that these could travel up to thousands of kilometers depending on wind conditions.' Lengfelder commented that "Nobody can be sure about the distance these particles could travel in the wind." ('Russian fires hit Chernobyl-affected areas, threatening recontamination,' Deutsche Welle, 8/11/2010) The health danger? A 1996 scientific study noted that during wildfires in radioactively contaminated areas, 'If the elements were radioactive isotopes, such as I-129, Cs-137 and Cl-36, fires could cause an increased radiological dose to people through inhalation, exposure to ash, or ingestion of plants because of increased uptake of ash leachate.' Regrettably, Russia is hardly forthcoming about the existence and nature of the fires and also the radiological public health problem. Worse, Russia's radiation monitoring network is probably no better at detecting in real-time or near-real time these radiation plumes than those arrayed throughout the United States. As we discuss on our Nevada page, the U.S.'s Environmental Protection Agency's RADNET monitoring network is inadequate for characterizing the ingredients in any reasonable amount of time of smoke-filled radiological plumes crossing over the U.S. regardless of its origin. The prime reason why millions and millions of federal dollars were spent in recent years to (failingly) upgrade RADNET was because of EPA's failure to adequately monitor radiation-filled smoke from wildfires that in 2000 ripped through contaminated areas of Hanford and LANL, two DOE nuclear 'reservations.' The EPA, as with most of the scientific community, knew that smoke from both those events was radioactive and this time the EPA hopes its RADNET 2.0 will do a better job, but it won't. The results of radiological analysis will take days and weeks, not minutes and hours. That is too late for most of us. The EPA cannot be trusted with regards to radiation and public health. A very convincing reason why this is the case is that the agency was complicit in a joint radiation coverup with the DOE when the 1986 Chernobyl fallout began crossing over the continental United States. In a shameful and deceitful act, the DOE began to fully and deliberately vent radioactively contaminated smoke and air from the tunnel of a failed nuclear test in Nevada called 'Mighty Oak' precisely at the moment the air outside was toxic with Chernobyl fallout debris. The EPA then blamed all unusually high radiation readings from their deployed and mobile monitors in the U.S. Southwest on Chernobyl and then packed up their monitors as Chernobyl fallout 'moved on' (dissipated) but that was before the DOE's radioactive tunnel was fully purged. More. Assurances from ANY environmental agency or nuclear nation should be taken with a grain of salt. Oh, add the media to that list too. Untrusty old National Public Radio (NPR) recently ran a piece titled 'Russian Wildfires Threaten With Radioactive Smoke' that quoted a Humboldt State University professor whose preliminary and 'reassuring' results from a modeling exercise found that, regarding the Russian fires, 'in the worst possible fire, people downwind would only be exposed to a very small amount of additional radiation.' NPR itself has a history of playing down radiation dangers - they have to, and if you research who their biggest underwriters are, you'll know why. If indeed wildfires are burning hot enough and 'wildly' enough through Chernobyl fallout-areas such as (most notably) the Bryansk region and the territories of Kaluga, Chelyabinsk, Kurgan, Tula, Orel, Penza, etc... (other Chernobyl-hit areas), then it is a certainty that fallout is now circling the globe. Areas in Belarus, for example, have persistently higher background radiation levels that are two to seven (and more) times higher than normal in non-Chernobyl hit areas. For example, the Belarus government has on record these background gamma radiation figures: "69 microroentgen per hour in Bragin, 57 in Narovl, 23 in Chechersk and Slavgorod, and 25 in Khvoiniki." (MINSK. Aug 12. (Interfax Russia)) Most of this additional gamma radiation coming from the ground is from Chernobyl-originated Cesium-137, which won't decay to safe levels until the years 2300 or 2400. Parts of the United States are also contaminated from radiation from Chernobyl and nuclear accidents and testing fallout. World leaders need to declare now a worldwide radiological crisis. In some areas of Russia citizens are being advised to avoid contact with the smoke, although they are told that the danger lies solely in the smoke, and not the smoke combined with radiation too. This crisis requires immediate action by all capable nations. They must take the following steps to avoid unnecessary damage to the world's public health: deploy mobile monitoring equipment on the ground and in the air, increase the frequency intervals on monitoring apparati, bypass all tiered review protocols and remit all data immediately to the public without revision, track worldwide plume movements and monitor large-scale rain events to predict 'rainouts,' and educate and ready populations and public health agencies in 'wet areas' to take shelter during fallout deposition events and possibly avoid drinking water, milk and agricultural and meat products in the days or weeks following the fallout. Not just the forests that are in danger Press reports indicate the fires have endangered and could still endanger other nuclear areas. For instance, the Bryansk region is home to its own nuclear facilities (other than contaminated 'Chernobyl forests') including nuclear weapons research centers and about twelve reactors, which depend on cool water, which is hard to come by during the worst-ever on record heat-wave! A nuclear production facility in Snezhinsk in the Chelyabinsk region that was partly surrounded by flames was put on red alert on Aug. 11 but the warning was later dropped. Other areas threatened by the fires have included or may include a huge reprocessing plant in the Southern Urals, the Mayak Chemical Combine, whose dumping points that include lakes and rivers 'are running dry and spreading contaminated sediment' (source). The president of a local watchdog group told Bellona news: 'There is a real threat that the situation of 1967, when exposed banks of the contaminated Lake Karachai were spread by whirlwinds carrying radiation that was spread throughout a significant portion of the Chelyabinsk and neighboring regions. This led to the necessary evacuation of several dozen populated areas that were contaminated as a result of windborne radiation.' Other areas include the multitudinous temporary staging areas for tactical nuclear bombs; the forests of the Chernobyl-contaminated Belgorod region; one of Russia's largest chemical weapons storage facilities, the Maradykovo arsenal in the Kirov region, that has stores of sarin and soman gases; the Novovoronezh Nuclear Power Plant; the All-Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics facility in Sarov (Russia's main nuclear research center); and the Urals Radioactive Trace (EURT). EURT, considered one of the most radioactively contaminated areas on Earth, was 'formed' from the debris of a 1957 nuclear waste explosion, also at the above-mentioned facility at Mayak. As the water level drops in the nearby Techa River, which was heavy polluted (and horrificly poisoned downstream communities) by the 1957 explosion, its radioactive silt will be exposed to winds and resuspended; likewise, radioactive dust clouds could emerge if fire spreads along the river's drying fauna. According to one source, fires were burning in contaminated areas in and around Russia as early as July 2010. So, the lofted radiation from Russia's wildfires likely has spread across parts of Eurasia and the globe by now. Testimony from Eco-Defense (Russia) co-chair who was 'taken' on a chaperoned government tour of Bryansk region "As for the radiation measurements, the ones taken by the MChS [Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations] guys were off, compared by the ones rung up on my Inspector (Geiger-Müller detector with great alpha/beta sensitivity), by a factor of about three. Three times as low. Furthermore, as it turned out, they never measured alpha radiation to begin with – they just don’t. ...Most notable in his speech was the claim that it made little sense measuring anything but gamma radiation, because everything else posed no threat whatsoever. The question whether it really was no danger at all to inhale an alpha particle into one’s lungs never generated an intelligible answer. Not that it was needed, not after Chernobyl anyway. When, in a conversation with Bryansk officials, we broached the subject of the risk of radiation carried elsewhere by air currents as a result of wildfires, we were told that the migration of radionuclides was, of course, a possibility. ....If radionuclides had already been spread by winds from the burning forests, then the regions where they most likely ended up were not the areas around Bryansk, but the neighbouring Belarus and Ukraine. Taking into account that in Bryansk Region, MChS only takes gamma radiation measurements at the ground level – and, according to a local official radiation specialist who I spoke with at dinner, it’s not certain that this kind of measurements are supposed to indicate anything at all of value – it is anyone’s guess how much radiation is there or how much has been transferred by winds, and where. Honestly, hard as I might, I couldn’t understand how one could make such peremptory assertions as the MChS had, that background radiation levels in the area were normal, when essentially there was no substantive information to back that up. To have the basis to make such assertions, one will have to take aerosol measurements – check the content of radioactive particles in the air – for which the MChS apparently has no equipment, pure and simple. If they do have it, they chose not to show us. Furthermore, it wouldn’t hurt to check the levels of alpha radiation, too, not just gamma radiation. Airborne concentrations of alpha particles, which could cause irreparable harm to the health of the local population and the fire-fighters, may not necessarily be something gamma radiation measurements would pick up on....Earlier, MChS officials said radiation levels were being monitored on a continuous basis in Bryansk and that Rosgidromet was taking measurements in several locations. As it turned out, to our surprise, this was only true for one location – and precisely for three days, August 13 to 15, when a lab was deployed from this agency for field measurements. That is, exactly when the MChS said no more major fires had been happening in the region. In other words, a curious picture is shaping up: When the fires were burning in Bryansk, and aerosols needed to be measured for radiation levels, no one was doing that. Not to mention that taking measurements in one location only is, to put it mildly, an underachievement...the MChS’s assurances that Bryansk Region is suffering no radiation safety problems because of the fires are, in fact, a fickle smokescreen barely covering a complete lack of hard facts..... In fact, this entire tour of Bryansk forests was a confirmation of all the fundamental risks we and other environmental organisations had warned about before....Komogortseva told us, the total mass of radioactively contaminated deadwood found in Bryansk forests was currently estimated at one million cubic metres (!). All possible measures must be taken to prevent that dry mass from bursting into flames... Of all places in Russia where appropriate radiation safety measures are sorely needed, Bryansk Region, regardless of the fire hazard, is a leading candidate – and, from what we’ve observed, it is yet to see them.."
Possible smoke from Russia entering North America: 'Additional aerosols were seen coming ashore from the west/southwest over southern California but the composition and origin of this aerosol is unknown and it does not appear to be remnant smoke.' [NOAA smoke text product - DESCRIPTIVE TEXT NARRATIVE FOR SMOKE/DUST OBSERVED IN SATELLITE IMAGERY THROUGH 0330Z August 19, 2010 - link] 'Northwest Territories: A narrow ribbon of thin smoke was aligned in a north to south orientation and extended from north central Northwest Territories northward off the Arctic coast and reached to just off the west coast of Banks Island.' [Thursday, August 19, 2010 DESCRIPTIVE TEXT NARRATIVE FOR SMOKE/DUST OBSERVED IN SATELLITE IMAGERY THROUGH 1700Z August 19, 2010 - link] Later: [Thursday, August 19, 2010 DESCRIPTIVE TEXT NARRATIVE FOR SMOKE/DUST OBSERVED IN SATELLITE IMAGERY THROUGH 0215Z August 20, 2010] - link: Pacific Northwest: A few patches of very thin smoke were seen over north central Oregon, northern Idaho and into extreme northwest Montana, drifting to the east. The source of the smoke is not clear but is likely from fires yesterday in northern Oregon and Washington. Links: Greenpeace Russia's Map of fires Track smoke movements using NOAA data - Smoke Text Product Censorship and rumor-policing begins: On August 8, Roslesozashchita (RCFH), the Russian state forestry agency, posted data 'which pin-pointed areas most at threat from radiation redistribution into the atmosphere of fires that have been burning across Russia since July.' The information related information to the public about the fires in areas contaminated by Chernobyl and provided recommendations to local authorities about how to protect and alert residents. The site was closed/shut down by Russia authorities, but then restored later (on Aug. 18) with the August 6th message censored - taken off (the website of Roslesozashchita). Snapshot of webpage; text produced below
************************************************* July 8, 2010 PRESS RELEASE: For immediate release - For further information, contact: NTS, You Can't Have Your Nuke-Readiness and Solar Farm Too The DOE announced today that after
consulting with a wide range of stakeholders, it and the Interior Department
will be building an expansive research facility called the 'Solar Demonstration
Zone' in a southwest portion of the Nevada Test Site. The new research
center, whose ground will be broken in 2011, will be tasked with developing
cutting edge solar power technology and presumably will be home to dozens of
football fields, or more, of solar panels (more below on why that's important). Legally speaking, the land that the
NTS sits on is BLM land that should be cleaned up and returned to the BLM, if it
can. If it can, the land should be ours - the public - to decide its use.
If it can't be cleaned up, then it should sit there, off limits, and be dubbed a
national sacrifice zone. Off limits. Aug 19, 2010 - Gamma spike in Las Vegas
July 1, 2010 - NPR lies about fallout in their story on 'Starfish Prime' (updates made to HANE page) July 1, 2010 - Colorado appeals court restores right of residents to request hearings on drilling applications in thorny Rulison district- see end of 'Low-tritium strategy backfires' section here June 25, 2010 - The six U.S. Senators, who in April 2010 introduced S. 3224, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) Amendments of 2010, today sent a letter to the Judiciary Committee requesting a hearing on the introduced bill. Read their press release and letter here. Please visit our RECA page. Also contact your senators to thank them for requesting this hearing. June 7, 2010 - Soviets used nukes to put out runaway gas wells.... but on one occasion created hell on Earth Don't believe a damn word from any nuclear power about their professed triumphs with peacetime nuclear explosions, including the former Soviet Union, which - via its surviving nuclear 'scientists' - claims to have had successes using nukes to extinguish natural gas calamities. It was - and still is - in the respective federal interests of Russia and the U.S. to withhold any information (especially radiation and accident data) about their atomic testing programs that could be damaging to their reputations and their treasuries. So, we don't know the whole picture - we are only given pieces of the puzzle. It is foolhardy to believe anything the United States or the former Soviet Union has said about their nuclear test programs - it is probably safer to assume the worst rather than the best. When it comes to information on atomic testing in the former Soviet Union, much of this information must to be taken with a grain of salt. Data about Soviet 'peacetime' tests is meager and often contradictory. We do know - or maybe not! - that one of the Soviet peacetime nuke attempts to extinguish natural gas calamities came with a mushroom cloud. According to a recent article in Oil and Gas Eurasia titled "Remembering a Nuclear Explosion to Close a Gas Well in the USSR", an accident occurred when a new gas well was being drilled in Ukraine's Krasnograd district in July 1971 but the gas shot through to the surface, fanning a fire of flames tens of meters high. The gas-fire was resistant to conventional extinguishing techniques and so the decision was made to use a nuke, which was placed in a shaft drilled about two kilometers beneath the surface. According to the article 'About 400 people lived just 400-500 meters from the well in Pershotravneve village...but they knew nothing of the planned nuclear blast.' The nuke test, dubbed 'Fakel,' took place on July 10, 1972, and the article states that 'A huge, dirty radioactive mushroom cloud arose over a kilometer high and then quietly floated off towards Sanzhar (Poltava Region, Ukraine). Eye-witnesses recall that as the shadow passed everyone felt as if the world was ending. And then there was a deathly silence.' It turns out the nuke test's shockwave and rock debris from a volcanic eruption of gas (a kilometer high!) turned the village partly into a ruin. 'It took a year to rebuild, and still the villagers did not know what exactly had happened. People living in other villages nearby said no-one ever warned them of the danger of radiation or told them not to eat their fruits or vegetables or drink their cows' milk. But they learned later - apparently someone in the village was tuning in to the Voice of America.' During the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. government conducted several 'peacetime' atomic experiments in a smattering of U.S. states under the banner of the "Plowshare Program" that offered the promise of harnessing the power of the atomic bomb to overcome some of America's greatest engineering problems. The A-bomb, according to the 'bomb-men,' could be used to excavate harbors, build a new Panama Canal, blast highway passes through mountains, and even tap into untouchable oil and gas formations. It was in the gas fields of western Colorado that the flame of the Plowshare Project burned its brightest until her citizens helped put it out for good. Atomic bombs several times the power of the one that destroyed Hiroshima were used in the underground explosion experiments dubbed 'Rulison' (1969) and 'Rio Blanco' (1973) that were intended to 'liberate' natural gas trapped in tight rock formations. The Rulison project was a success, according to the feds, however local city councils ruled that the gas was too radioactive to use. The feds, rashly, burned (flared) the contaminated gas into the atmosphere, releasing nuclear contaminants into Colorado's food and water supplies. The test dubbed 'Rio Blanco,' which comprised three 33-kiloton nuclear bombs, failed to create the desired effect and resulted in significant surface contamination at the site. Although Coloradans were lucky that these explosions didn't cause earthquakes, or horribly vent, or contaminate the Colorado River system, they were fed up - so much so that they voted in the mid-1970s to amend their state constitution to stipulate that the voters will have the final say, should the federal government wish to explode nuclear bombs in Colorado for the 'public good.' No nuclear bomb has ever done any good for humanity, nor will it ever. Should a nuclear bomb miraculously succeed in stopping BP's gusher, it will come with great unknown and unanticipated costs (i.e., seismic-wave induced liquifaction of unstable, unconsolidated sediments on the Gulf floor that could trigger landslides and wreck nearby underwater structures such as pipes and other well heads and other BOPs!), and ultimately be a Giant Leap Backwards For Humankind. Sadly, the only way for 'the people' to quickly take control of the situation in the Gulf that is being made worse by absent leadership, corporate greediness, media kowtowing to a corporation that's too big to !*#$ with, and psychopathic problem-solving means (dispersants, potentially 'nukes') is through the federal courts. One group has already served BP with a notice of intent to sue over the dispersant's impact on wildlife: more here. But what is needed is injunctive relief to stop application/dumping of hazardous chemicals into the oceans. And then another injunction to stop the imminent deployment of a nuke. June 4, 2010 - A CNN iReporter from Northern Utah is questioning the startling incidence of thyroid anomalies in her family and blames her kin's health problems on radioactive fallout she suspects lurks in her family's water well. She came to this conclusion after ruling out other radiation exposure routes she was convinced couldn't possibly relate to her. Why? The iReporter is confident that since her family's home was not in the current RECA boundaries ('one county too far North for "downwinder syndrome"') and that she and her sisters "are too young for direct exposure to the radioactive fallout," that she is not a 'downwinder' in the classical sense. Although many of Utah's water sources are contaminated from weapons testing fallout, the iReporter ignored a more likely culprit for the thyroid diseases that plagues her family and thousands like hers: direct nuclear test fallout exposure, such as breathing iodine-131 in air and drinking iodine 131-contaminated milk. Fallout from nuclear weapons testing - including thyroid-damaging radioiodines - was deposited throughout the Northern Hemisphere and especially in Northern Utah at dangerous levels even through the mid-1990s! Aboveground testing at the Nevada Test Site ended in late 1962, but notoriously bad 'ventings' in 1970, 1986 and a slew of other years released millions of Curies of radioactivity across the nation. Up until about 15 years ago, Iodine-131 regularly contaminated our nation's food chain (and that of the entire globe) as underground nuclear tests by the U.S., the former Soviet Union, China, France, etc...vented and spewed their poisons across our agricultural landscape. Read more in The Black and White World of RECA. May 23, 2010 - The Legacy of U.S. Nuclear Testing in the Marshall Islands by Robert Alvarez.
Read Idealist's (more detailed) analysis on Rongelap's imminent doomsday-ic resettlement issue here May 22, 2010 - 'Obama's Oil Gusher Science Team Has "One Good Idea" ', OpEd News, by Andrew Kishner Using a nuke on the gulf oil gusher would violate a number of international treaties, obviously. However, all the treaties are 'breakable,' and the soonest 'they' could nuke the gusher -without gaining special permission by the UNSC - would be 3 months from now. These treaties include:
May 6, 2010 - Radiation vibe - A series of supposed spikes in local radioactivity pits activists against scientists and federal officials - By Jason Whited @ Las Vegas CityLife More about the March gamma spiking in Las Vegas here. April 30, 2010 - 'The Downwinders,' a full-length indy feature film by Lance Brittan (now in post-production), which we critically discuss on Idealist here, now has a trailer, a DVD cover (wow, I didn't know there's grass LIKE THAT in Dixie) and a Facebook page. April 29, 2010 - Senators now have compassion, for downwinders, now what? @ OpedNews April 29, 2010 - Robert Celestial of the Pacific Association of Radiation Survivors told Radio New Zealand Int'l that the RECA timeframes are misleading:
April 25, 2010 - The Black and White World of RECA @ OpedNews April 20, 2010 - Bipartisan bill introduced to expand RECA to help victims of nuclear weapons and uranium development Matheson, unlike Hatch, supports downwinder bill (Deseret News) April 2010- Stop the mixed low-level nuclear waste facility from being built at the NTS on over 700 acres of land that the DOE sneakily took from perpetual-public-ownership to become DOE-titled land. Trucks, with their gamma and neutron ray emitting cargo, will be traveling through small towns all over the American West and converge on Yucca Flat. These trucks will be hauling not only low-level rad waste, like plutonium-contaminated booties, but also low-level rad waste with hazardous materials, like aspestos-contaminated plutonium-contaminated booties. MLLW (mixed low level waste) means radioactive and hazardous materials on your roads . SAY NO! More here. The DOE held a public meeting in Pahrump, NV, to take comments on their idea for the mixed low-level radioactive waste dump on Monday, April 26, 2010. April 7, 2010 - Las Vegas radiation levels spike AGAIN and IT GETS CENSORED - In mid-March 2010, gamma radiation values recorded by a Community Environmental Monitoring Program (CEMP) station outside the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada, yielded strange-looking patterns on software-generated graphs and on March 18, at 10 A.M. local time, average gamma levels - which rarely ever fluctuate in Vegas from the background level of 10 microRem/hour - shot up to 84 microRem/hour, which is over 8 times background levels, for at least one 10 minute period. More on that episode here. But on April 7th, average gamma values again shot up, this time to 10 times background levels for one ten-minute period at around 3pm. What was it? The CEMP station - located outside the Atomic Testing Museum - has a brand new gamma detector (PIC), which was installed on March 22, 2010, and the Desert Research Institute (DRI), which maintains these CEMP stations, certainly wouldn't be stupid enough to not put the plugs all the way in this time (mid-March episode: here). So what was it??? Unfortunately, the DOE, which is responsible for CEMP, doesn't care or else they would look into the reason why these spikes keep happening in Las Vegas! (How about a secondary radiation monitor to verify the data? Or the results of past and future air filter analyses? Gamma, alpha and beta spectrometry??) So, here's the spike: and.... Then, not more than a week later,
in the 2nd week of April, the DRI
ERASED the ABOVE SPIKE WITH NO EXPLANATION!!! THIS IS NOT A MONITORING NETWORK, FRIENDS. THE CEMP NETWORK CANNOT DETECT IN REAL TIME, OR NEAR REAL TIME, OR IN ANY DECENT AMOUNT OF TIME, ALPHAS OR BETAS (LIKE TRITIUM GAS, TRITIUM WATER VAPOR, STRONTIUM-90, AMERICIUM-241, PLUTONIUMS, URANIUMS, ETC...) . SO, WE BASICALLY WON'T FIND OUT IF A DIRTY BOMB OR A NUCLEAR RADIATION ACCIDENT OCCURRED IN NEVADA, OR UTAH, OR ARIZONA, OR IDAHO FOR PROBABLY TWO-WHOLE-WEEKS. AND BY THEN THEY MIGHT JUST NOT TELL US WHAT THEY FOUND. THE EPA RADNET, A NATIONWIDE 'RADIATION MONITORING' NETWORK, HAS JUST ONE STATION IN LAS VEGAS AND RENO THAT CAN DETECT ONLY REAL TIME BETA. EPA ALSO SUBJECTS ITS DATA TO 'TIERED DATA REVIEW'. HOW WILL EPA'S SPOTTY COVERAGE HELP NEVADANS AND UTAHNS FIGURE OUT WHAT'S GOING ON IN AN EMERGENCY? THE SLEW OF EPA MONITORING STATIONS IN THE U.S. HAVE HUGE RADIATION DETECTION CAPABILITY GAPS AND ARE RUN 100% BY VOLUNTEERS - HOW WILL THOSE PROTECT US? IF BY SOME CHANCE THERE WAS A GAMMA EMITTING COMPONENT IN PLUMES ENCROACHING ON LAS VEGAS THAT WAS STRONG ENOUGH TO CAUSE GAMMA SPIKES ON THE CEMP MONITORS, GOOD LUCK TO YOU BECAUSE 1. EITHER THE STATIONS WILL BE 'DOWN' BECAUSE PLUGS WEREN'T PROPERLY INSERTED OR 2. THE DRI/DOE WILL WITHIN A WEEK OR SO ERASE THE GAMMA SPIKES WITHOUT EXPLANATION. THEY WON'T EVEN GIVE YOU THE BENEFIT OF TELLING YOU WHAT THEY'RE BLAMING IT ON. THEY'LL JUST ERASE THE DATA. THEY'LL ERASE ANY AND ALL SPIKES LIKE THEY ALWAYS HAVE DONE. THEY WILL NOT SHOW THE ORIGINAL DATASET. THEN THEY WILL HOPE YOU DIDN'T SAVE THE SPIKING GRAPHS TO YOUR HARDDRIVE BEFORE THEY GOT TO THE DATA. THEY WILL ERASE THE DATA AND HOPE NO ONE TAKES NOTICE AND CARES TO ASK. AND, IF YOU ARE PARANOID ENOUGH TO WORRY ABOUT HUMANMADE RADIATION IN OUR ENVIRONMENT (WHAT KIND OF PERSON ARE YOU? REALLY? ) AND YOU DO ASK WHAT'S GOING ON, THEY WILL BLAME SOMETHING ELSE. RADON, COSMOGENIC RADIONUCLIDES, A BROKEN WHATCHAMACALLIT (WINK WINK) ON THE MONITORING STATION AND RENDER A 'CHARACTERIZATION' ANALYSIS THAT TAKES THREE LONG WEEKS AND ONLY LOOKS AT GAMMA ENERGIES AND NOT ALPHA OR BETA (LIKE THEY DID WITH MILFORD FLAT FIRE). WHY, WHY, WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO PUT YOUR SECURITY IN A BROKEN FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE AGAINST A RADIOACTIVE DUST STORM FROM CHINA OR FROM NEVADA, OR ESCAPING KRYPTON-85 GAS FROM NTS SHAFTS, A ROLLED OVER SEMI CARRYING NUCLEAR WASTE TO NTS, A LOS ANGELES REACTOR GONE WILD, A DIRTY BOMB, ETC... GO AHEAD. CLOSE THE BROWSER. THINK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE. DELUDE YOURSELF INTO BELIEVING SOMEONE IS TAKING CARE OF THE PROBLEM. AND THEN WONDER WHY 30-YEAR OLDS IN UTAH ARE GETTING LUPUS AND CANCER... read more on our Gamma Hall of Fame page
April 5, 2010 - Two dozen arrested at NTS. NDE's 62-mile, annual pilgrimage to the Nevada Test Site began on March 29 with an orientation in Las Vegas and preparation for a six-day walk starting on March 30. Learn more via above link. APRIL 2010 - RECA expansion bill for Guam - A public hearing by the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law on H.R. 1630, introduced by Congresswoman Madeleine Bordallo, was planned in Congress for April 15, 2010. (See list of members of this committee.) According to a recent article by Marianas Variety, 'Those expected to attend and provide testimony are former District Court Judge John Unpingco, Gov. Felix Camacho, Dr. Chris Perez, Speaker Judy Won Pat, and Sen. Ben Pangelinan.' However,
on April 5th, it was announced that the hearing was postponed until
further notice. More here.
One day, when they hold the hearing, here's the location: map.
March 6, 2010 - SELF-EXILED MARSHALL ISLANDERS FEAR RETURN TO RADIOACTIVE ATOLL - The U.S. government recently made an ultimatum to former residents of Rongelap Island of the Rongelap Atoll: move back home by 2011 or we'll refuse to fund support for your exiled community. continued February
14, 2010 - In 1970, the fallout clouds from the leaked 'Baneberry'
underground nuclear explosion in Nevada deposited radioactive snow over skiers
in northern Utah. In 2010, a similar thing could happen to skiers at the
resorts at Vail , Copper Mountain, Keystone, Steamboat, Powderhorn, Winter Park,
and Breckenridge. Upwind of these resorts in the Western
Colorado gas fields, exploration
companies are drilling closer and closer into subterranean areas where they may
find deposits of natural gas but may also tap into bottled-up radioactive gases
from historic nuclear tests. These radioactive gases could easily
escape and loft hundreds of miles east and meet resistance on the slopes as
skiers fill their lungs with the cold, radioactive mountain air. Read
more
February
13, 2010 - January
27, 2010 (DOWNWINDER
DAY) - Over the
past several years, U.S. 'downwinder' groups representing fallout victims of
Nevada nuclear testing have pushed for their own 'box' on the calendar. If we
have Memorial Day to honor fallen military personnel, one could argue, then the
'downwinders' should have a day of their own. The day
chosen for 'Downwinder Day' is January 27 for the simple reason that it is the
anniversary date of the first atomic explosion in Nevada (January 27, 1951).
More
January
24, 2010 - Gas developers now want to drill in ALL nuclear
test sites in Colorado here.
January
18, 2010 - "4,000
or 500,000 CHERNOBYL CASUALITIES" @ 'No Incinerator For Croydon' blog
January
12, 2010 - NPR's Morning Edition intended to air a piece on
Tuesday (January 12, 2010) titled 'Mohave Downwinders Fight County's Exclusion From
Compensation.' Snippets of the article appeared on the internet but
there was no audio link or full article. We wrote the NPR-affiliate station
that supposedly authored the piece (KNAU) and they only pointed us to a story
they did in early November. (On Jan. 12, there
was a free workshop from the Radiation
Exposure Screening & Education Program in Flagstaff, AZ, scheduled for 5-7:30pm;
more here.)
Then
on Saturday, January 17, 2010, NPR actually aired the piece, retitling it "'Downwinders' Make One Last
Push For Money" - link is here
- but it re-aired the same piece from EARLY
NOVEMBER (HERE). FYI
- We are all downwinders. Not just in the West. See the maps on this
page and learn about 'global
fallout' and RECA.
January
7, 2010 - Aided with stimulus money, the
DOE is demolishing a key facility at the Nevada Test Site used to test nuclear
rockets during the Cold War (more about them here).
Is the demolishment creating a radioactive-dust problem? Keep tabs on the
'situation' on our gamma page. click
pic to expand In
Australia, major nuclear test sites were blocked by a 100-mile radius security
zone. Why don't we do the same, to protect the public from lofting
plutonium dust from the Nevada Test Site? More
January
5, 2010 - If the (airport) scanner doesn't get you, the lightning just might, or the
fallout here
January
1, 2010 - New Youtube video
December
15, 2009 - A bittersweet NPR
story of one woman's use of humor to cope with the impacts of surgeries
from multiple cancers may be inspiring to listeners, but could Linda Hill be a 'downwinder,'
or a victim of radiation poisoning from nuclear testing fallout by the U.S.
during the 'Cold War'? More
December
4, 2009 - The U.S. is conducting one hundred
"backdoor" subcritical nuclear tests yearly with plutonium isotopes at
a new X-ray imaging facility. The DOE
snuck past any criticism of the global community by claiming they weren't
going to use weapons-use plutonium for high explosive hydro-tests, but the DOE
is actually using a 'weaker' type of plutonium that can still be used in nuclear
weapons and using more of it than in past subcritical tests. Read
more
November
27, 2009 - True or false question: do nuclear power plants leak
radiation?
True,
but don't take our word for it. Hear it from the utterly-wise cartoon celebrity
'Donkey
Cow.' Nuclear Power: Bad to
the Bone
November
11, 2009 - Idealist mourns the passing of Eleanore Fanire-Lindquist,
co-founder of Mohave Downwinders. Eleanore tirelessly crusaded for the rights of
downwinders in her community of Mohave County, Arizona, which noticeably
suffered from the hand of radioactive fallout that crossed over from Nevada
during nuclear tests of the 1950s and 1960s. Eleanore strove to put Mohave
County back on the map of "RECA," a compensation scheme set up by the
federal government for radiation victims, known as 'downwinders.' Eleanore
fought to bring dignity to those affected and endeavored to raise awareness
globally of the impacts of nuclear testing too often hidden from world
view. Idealist is dedicated to the memory of Eleanore and radiation
victims everywhere. Obituary;
piece
by KNAU (Arizona NPR);
RECA page
October
29, 2009 - Decades ago we banned the stuff. After Katrina
drained our stashes of building materials, we let it in through our borders.
What is it? It's radioactive-rich drywall. The EPA
did a really really comprehensive study consisting of seven overseas samples
and, alas, found no problem. Sure! So, then why are people
complaining of health problems from 'Chinese Drywall'? Are these health
complaints similar to symptoms of 9/11 survivors? What's the
connection? What is up with the radioactivity in imported AND
domestic drywall? Read more
October 20, 2009
- Nuclear fallout in the U.S.? Children got sick from radiation? Fallout
built up in their
teeth!? Study
finds we nuked ourselves pretty bad.
About
the project; St. Louis fallout
chart (see upper right quadrant); Read
the study. more. even more.
October
6, 2006 - U.S. nuclear experiments raises ire globally. Map of the global conversation about the U.S.'s subcritical experiment
program; See
our subcritical page
October
4, 2009 - The first nation to drop nuclear bombs on the U.S. was....itself:
'Yucca
Flat: The Most Bombed Place on Earth' September
25, 2009 - Britain nuked Australia. Then cleaned some of it up.
Then
Australia has the worst dust storm in 70 years, and you
got radioactive dust storm worries mate! September
22, 2009 - Will
the DOE become the largest landholder in Nevada? A
new 'mixed' low-level radioactive dump is
planned for the Nevada Test Site, which is also where Yucca was planned.
This time the DOE wants its nuke dump and the title to the land too!
More
September
21, 2009 - It is a fact that what happens at the Nevada Test Site
doesn't
stay at the Nevada Test Site, the most radioactive piece of Earth in North
America. Plutonium leaves the Nevada Test Site on regular cross-country
flights called air currents. As long as the NTS isn't cleaned up, we must be remain concerned.
Learn about the 2009-2011 process for the Site-Wide Environmental Impact
Statement for the Nevada Test Site. More here.
September
20, 2009 -U.S. to conduct
subcrits this fall
August
21, 2009 - Saul Landau, co-producer of the 1980 documentary 'Paul Jacobs and
the Nuclear Gang,' airs his own views on nuclear power in the op-ed piece 'The
nuclear gang rides again,' which was published in progreso weekly on August
19, 2009.
August
9, 2009 - Nagasaki Day 2009-
Where
did all the radiation from the Japan bomb attacks go? In
Hiroshima? Not really. In Nagasaki? Not really. Read more.
July
24, 2009 - New EIS announced - The DOE's National Nuclear Security
Administration (NNSA) today made an official announcement in the form of a Notice
of Intent in the Federal Register that it will complete an EIS for the NTS and
off-site areas (only) in Nevada. The
notice of intent (NOI) can be found at this link.
Read more about the new Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).
July
20, 2009 - NASA's Stupidity Remembered - On
July 20, 1969, NASA astronauts landed and walked on the moon.
What also landed on the moon that historic day was over 60 grams of
Plutonium 238, THE most toxic substance. Used simply for the
purpose of creating heat, NASA still relies on plutonium in exploratory
spacecraft even though a significant breakthrough was made in the
1990s on an alternative (high
performance silicon solar-cells) AND some of ours and some of Russia's
spacecraft burnt up in Earth's atmosphere exposing billions of Earthlings to the
most lethal substance known to man. Are we plain old stupid? Is
space exploration worth the price of all of our heads? Do you know there
are nuclear reactors in space, in Earth, orbit right now? Does anyone give
a crap that a nuclear reactor can land on their home at anytime? More our nuclear-power in space page.
June 25, 2009 -
Senators move to add states to RECA
At the
insistence of the downwinder groups in Idaho and throughout the Intermountain
West, all of the senators from Idaho and Montana today, on June 25, 2009,
reintroduced legislation in the U.S. Senate to add their respective states to
the RECA program. Senator
Mike Crapo from Idaho introduced and read the bill the first and second times by
unanimous consent, and referred it to the Senate Judiciary Committee. This
is the third time the bill has been introduced over the past several
years. The astute above senators, as with just about any person
familiar with government studies on Nevada testing
fallout, know that every state in the U.S., and most current and former
territories, was hit by fallout and should be included in RECA. Read
the senators' joint press
release and let your
very own senators know that you want this bill passed!
More on our RECA
page
House
members Jim Matheson, Mike Simpson, and Walt Minnick sent a letter on
2/18/2009 to the House Judiciary Committee asking for RECA
expansion hearings. Read
their letter.
Contact your elected
leaders to insist they support hearings on RECA.
June 2009 - What if North Korea
did a 'Baneberry'?
What
would happen if a North Korean underground nuclear bomb test
behaved (leaked) exactly like 'Baneberry,' which was the name given to a 1970
U.S.
10-kiloton 'underground nuclear' explosion whose containment failed? When
Baneberry blew through the surface of the Nevada Test Site, over 6% of the
test's radiation leaked, entrained in a 7,000 foot high mushroom cloud.
After NUCLEAR
WORKERS FLED [the] TESTING SITE, and RADIOACTIVE DUST ESCAPED,
Baneberry's plumes of radioactivity traveled across
the globe, coming down with air currents or the rain in the U.S., Canada, and
probably parts of Europe. In the U.S. states
worst hit by fallout from Baneberry - and, to repeat, Baneberry was an
UNDERGROUND nuclear test that horribly leaked - infant mortality also rose
sharply during the first three months after the test. If
North Korea did a 'Baneberry,' the radiation would
fall-out extensively over extremely heavily populated areas of China, and parts of
Japan and Russia's Maritime Province. See our Youtube video
and read our article How
to Squash the Baneberry of the East a la Dorothy Gale. The
long-range radioactive fallout will be NO different than the fallout from a
deliberate nuclear attack. Leaked fallout from a peacetime
nuclear test is NO different than fallout from a wartime nuclear
test! Our
calculations indicate that a North Korean 5-kiloton underground blast - if all gases leaked -
will produce, and introduce into the environment, about 1,500 Curies of
radioactive Cesium and Strontium. The 5 grams of
Strontium-90 produced by the test, if distributed evenly in the bodies of all
peoples, would kill the
world's population of 1950 or about one-third of today's world
population. Read more about
the unspoken dangers of global radioactive poisoning by North Korea's 2009
underground nuclear test and future testing. Other recent news:
What
happens when nuclear testing fallout lands on the ground? Cows eat it,
humans drink the milk, and then a good percentage of us get cancer, lupus,
neurological disorders, genetic defects, etc... What happens when nuclear
testing fallout lands on the ocean? It impacts the
weather and creates more hell. Read Rosalie Bertell's
explanation for increased cyclone activity in the Pacific following
French nuclear testing! In
late June 2009, mainstream media outlets took bits and pieces of a
quote about N. Korea *threatening* (sorry but that wasn't one of the
words in the quote!) to 'wipe out' (yes, those were) the U.S. (no,
that wasn't).Idealist will give you the quote, for full context: KCNA
website, June 24, 2009: 'If the US imperialists
start another war, ignorant of the ignominious defeat they had
sustained in the past Korean war, the army and people of Korea will
determinedly answer "sanctions" with retaliation and
"confrontation" with all-out confrontation, the
counter-measure based on the songun [military-first] idea, wipe out
the aggressors on the globe once and for all and achieve the cause of
national reunification without fail.’
New
York, you really do
have a problem. The DOE conducted a terror drill on your
highways that included: 'A mock device
specially designed...to emit safe levels of neutrons[???]....safe
amounts of radioactive material [????].... in five unmarked test cars...'
This is the same federal bureacracy
that cannot
account for nuclear materials at 15 locations....The materials written off included 20,580 grams of enriched
uranium, 45 grams of plutonium, 5,001 kilograms of normal uranium and
189,139 kilograms of depleted uranium.
|
Complete Writings, Compilations and Analyses Australia's worst dust storm in 70 years just got worse 'Believe it or not' Radiation Events in History Cesium and the alarm bells that never rang Charting the Isotopes of Fallout Comments to the NNSA on their Divine Strake Environmental Assessment Divine
Misgivings, December 16, 2006 Divine Strake: A Warning of Things to Come Divine Strake: Size Matters, Jan. 20, 2007 DOE saying it's protecting us is a hard pill to swallow, October 4, 2008 Downwinders concerned about Milford Flat Fire radiation DTRA's Divine Strake Public Meetings Concluded, December 20, 2006 Early quotes on nuclear energy from Barack Obama Fallout, Swine Flu, And A Pandemic Of Awareness article and epilogue Foiling A 'Lottery Of Death', July 11, 2008 GI Joe vs Albert Schweitzer, October 17, 2006 Global
fallout Government studies - impacts of nuclear testing on health and life Guest
Blog: Divine Strake and the Rebirth of Democracy, High-Altitude Nuke Experiments How to Squash the Baneberry of the East a la Dorothy Gale LANL - Los Alamos National Laboratory Las Vegas Radiation Monitors Going Haywire, March 22, 2010 Letter to Utah Radiation Control Board, May 29, 2008 Living in a Nuclear World: Half-lives Millstone's nuke's radioactive 'banner year' NCI testimony of Dr. F. Owen Hoffman Navigating the rocky shallows of radiation monitoring...don't rely on this lighthouse Newton's First Law of Motion, Amendment One – poem Night at the Museum 3: Atomic Testing Museum Nukes Itself North Korea's nuclear ambitions provoked by U.S. nuclear experiments, October 5, 2006 Nuclear power, Bad to the Bone Nuclear Waste Transport Incidents to and from the Nevada Test Site for fiscal years 2001-2008 Our problems with the Salt Lake Tribune article Peace Clock and the fallout from Japan A-Bomb attacks Phosphogypsum and imported drywall Please God Can My Son Survive Acute Myaloid Leukaemia?, August 15, 2008 Poemovie - A nuclear war has come and gone. RECA - Radiation Exposure Compensation Act Project Rulison Second activist in two months sued by Alternate Energy Holdings, August 25, 2008 Sermon
for the downtrodden activist, October 14, 2008 Senators now have compassion, for downwinders, now what?, April 19, 2010 Set of Axioms for the Closure of the Nevada Test Site 'Show me the defamation!' - AEHI's stock Stairway
to Divine Strake, November 5, 2006 Statement on Divine Strake Cancellation Subcritical nuclear experiments That radiation monitoring station in Milford, Utah, is acting up again, June 20, 2008 The Black and White World of RECA, April 25, 2010 'The Downwinders' Movie The Forgotten Guinea Pigs: A Report on Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation Sustained As a Result of the Nuclear Weapons Testing Program Conducted by the United States Government The Iran-Divine Strake Connection, June 26, 2008 The Plutonium Plume That Fell On Utah, May 28, 2008 The Remedy for an Unjust World, December 5, 2008 The Un-killable Nevada Bomb Test, December 13, 2008 That radiation monitoring station in Milford, Utah, is acting up again Today's Forecast: Sunny with a Chance of Nuclear Reactor, March 1, 2009 Top 10 Reasons Why Divine Strake Shouldn't Take Place, February 19, 2007 Why would The Public Ever Believe Me?, October 10, 2008 WSMR - White Sands Missile Range Your Own Island of Humanity, October 29, 2006 |
Idealist's public document archives: 1. 
2.
'The
greatest irony of our atmospheric nuclear testing program is that
the only
victims of U.S. nuclear arms since World War II have been our own people.'
- Forgotten
Guinea Pigs Report, 1980
In 1986, the U.S. Dept. of Energy used the cover of the Chernobyl fallout cloud over the United States to release huge amounts of radiation into the air from a failed underground Nevada nuclear test. It was called Mighty Oak.
learn more on our global fallout page
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