nuclear-news

40 Years After America’s Biggest Nuclear Blast, the Damage Continues Echoes of Amchitka counterpunch 10 May 09 By JEFFREY ST. CLAIRAmchitka Island sits at the midway point on the great arc of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, less than 900 miles across the Bering Sea from the coast of Russia…………………………ecological wonders were swept aside in the early ’60s when the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) went on the lookout for a new place to blow up H-bombs. Thirty years ago, Amchitka was the site of three large underground nuclear tests, including the most powerful nuclear explosion ever detonated by the United States.

The aftershocks of those blasts are still being felt. Despite claims by the AEC and the Pentagon that the test sites would safely contain the radiation released by the blasts for thousands of years, independent research by Greenpeace and newly released documents from the Department of Energy (DOE) show that the Amchitka tests began to leak almost immediately. Highly radioactive elements and gasses, such as tritium, americium-241 and plutonium, poured out of the collapsed test shafts, leached into the groundwater and worked their way into ponds, creeks and the Bering Sea.

At the same time, thousands of Amchitka laborers and Aleuts living on nearby islands were put in harm’s way. Dozens have died of radiation-linked cancers. The response of the federal government to these disturbing findings has been almost as troublesome as the circumstances surrounding the tests themselves: a consistent pattern of indifference, denial and cover-up continues even today.

AUSTRALIA: Climate Change – Further Threat to AboriginalsBy Neena BhandariSYDNEY, May 8 (IPS) – Climate change will further marginalise Australia’s Aboriginal communities, forcing them out of their traditional lands, destroying their culture and significantly affecting their access to water resources, indigenous rights advocates warn.”As coastal and island communities confront rising sea levels, and inland areas become hotter and drier, indigenous people are at risk of further economic marginalisation, as well as potential dislocation from and exploitation of their traditional lands, waters and natural resources,” said Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma.Indigenous people have been living in close affinity with nature for thousands of years, preserving the environment and protecting the biodiversity. “Dispossession and a loss of access to traditional lands, waters, and natural resources may be described as cultural genocide; a loss of ancestral, spiritual, totemic and language connections to lands and associated areas,” said the Human Rights Commission’s 2008 Social Justice and Native Title reports launched this week.

Man had ‘enough uranium for bomb’ The Age Steve Butcher  May 9, 2009 A VICTORIAN man who was arrested and charged last month with serious drug offences held enough uranium at a storage facility to make a “dirty bomb”…………………The court heard that an explosives expert found that the uranium could be used in the “construction” of a dirty bomb and that other chemicals for drug manufacture could in combination make an “incendiary device”.