An Interview With Julian Assange, the Nation, Chris Hedges, 8 May 13 “…..Assange spoke repeatedly about Manning, with evident concern. He sees in the young Army private a reflection of his own situation, as well as the draconian consequences of refusing to cooperate with the security and surveillance state.
Manning’s twelve-week military trial is scheduled to begin in June. The prosecution is calling 141 witnesses, including an anonymous Navy SEAL who was part of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Assange called the Navy SEAL the “star diva” of the state’s “twelve-week Broadway musical.” Manning is as bereft of establishment support as Assange.
“The old media attempted to remove his alleged heroic qualities,” Assange said of Manning. “An act of heroism requires that you make a conscious act. It is not an unreasoned expression ofmadness or sexual frustration. It requires making a choice—a choice that others can follow. If you do something solely because you are a mad homosexual there is no choice. No one can choose to be a mad homosexual. So they stripped him, or attempted to strip him, of all his refinements.”
“His alleged actions are a rare event,” Assange went on. “And why does a rare event happen? What do we know about him? What do we know about Bradley Manning? We know that he won three science fairs. We know the guy is bright. We know that he was interested in politics early on. We know he’s very articulate and outspoken. We know he didn’t like lies.… We know he was skilled at his job of being an intelligence analyst. If the media was looking for an explanation they could point to this combination of his abilities and motivations. They could point to his talents and virtues. They should not point to him being gay, or from a broken home, except perhaps in passing. Ten percent of the US military is gay. Well over 50 percent are from broken homes. Take those two factors together. That gets you down to, say, 5 percent—5 percent on the outside. There are 5 million people with active security clearances, so now you’re down to 250,000 people. You still have to get from 250,000 to one. You can only explain Bradley Manning by his virtues. Virtues others can learn from.” ……”http://www.thenation.com/article/174227/interview-julian-assange#
Delhi still not radiation readyDarpan Singh,Hindustan Times New Delhi, May 08, 2013 Three years after a man was killed in India’s first case of radiation exposure at the Mayapuri scrap market in West Delhi, there is still a big question mark on the preparedness to prevent such disasters.
The National Green Tribunal (NGT) will on Wednesday hear a petition, which has claimed the mechanism to detect radiation is withering away. There is no screening of scrap before it finds its way to the market. The National Disaster Management Authority is still in the process of procuring devices, to be given to the police, to detect radiation.
Behind the scenes at Kudankulam… THE HINDU, VASUDEVAN MUKUNTH, 7 May 13 “…. the people of Kudankulam and its surrounding fishing villages protest against the plant and call for its shutdown. Why? Despite accidents being unpredictable by definition, they do occur because the enterprise is immensely complex for anyone to keep track of all its components at the same time.
While the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) could be addressing this issue well, etc., the complexity increases the opportunities for accidents to occur rather than directly precipitating them. Despite a decent track record for maintenance, the one for compensation in India is dismal, and so the people’s fears are bound to persist.
In order to explain how a nuclear power plant works, I’ve divided it up into short chapters, each explaining the role of an important component. … Continue reading →
Mr. Bass said that the Japanese government was “insolvent” and described recent accounting moves that included issuing a new form of debt called Japanese compensation bonds as “adding a Ponzi scheme to a Ponzi scheme”
He said that believing it was possible to understand these risks with concepts such as “value at risk”, a popular analytical framework used by banks [And insurance – Arclight2011] to assess trading risk, was “naive”.
Japan will be consumed by a debt crisis surpassing the U.S. subprime crash, a leading U.S.-based hedge fund manager has warned, telling investors that “the beginning of the end has begun” for Japan’s finances.
Over-indebted governments, and especially the precarious state of Japan’s finances, set the tone for the high-profile Ira Sohn investment conference in New York on Wednesday.
Kyle Bass of Hayman Capital, a $1.8 billion Texas-based hedge fund and a noted Japan bear, said signs of the crisis had started to emerge, as banks and dealers become less willing to take the other side of negative bets from funds such as his.
…..The last one was plutonium241, which had radiation dose about 50 times as much as the total of the other three(PU238, PU239 & PU240)…..
….The underground tanks were meant to store low level of radioactive water after being filtered through ALPS. But they have been using them to store high level of radioactive water (including β (beta) emitting nuclide, Strontium and α (alpha)emitting nuclide, Plutonium)…..
Thursday, 18 April 2013
A MBS radio interview with Prof. Koide: the repeated leaking problems at Fukushima Crippled Plant. Additional report: Plutonium should be in the leakage! 汚染水問題に関する小出先生のコメント、報道するラジオより。 追加報告：プルトニウムも汚染水に混じっているはず！
The most recent report on the leakage problem said that about 22 liters of radioactive water had leaked from gaps between the pipes used to transfer it from underground water storage tank into an another tank, and that the level of radioactivity in the water was 290,000Bq/m3.
This is so high that the leakage is unsafe to approach. Prof. Koide commented that according to Japanese law, the safety level of radioactive water that can be discharged into the environment is 0.05Bq/m3, or 0./03Bq/m3 if it contains strontium, so it is easy to imagine how high 290,000Bq/m3 actually is!
Dousing it or injecting it with water is the only way of continuing to cool the molten fuel, and this requires 400tons of water every day. Prof. Koide also observed that the leaks will carry on for as long as Tepco keeps using water to cool the molten fuel, possibly for at least 40 more years, or as long as it takes to decommission the plant.
He also commented that although Tepco keeps making new tanks to combat the problem, this solution would not work for ever, and urged the company again to bring a tanker to store the water.
On top of the reported leakage problems, Prof. Koide reckons that there must have been many cracks in many different places in the trenches and pits and also in the concrete basements of the reactor and turbine buildings, which must have been damaged by the M9 earthquake in March 2011.
He has kept on advising right from the beginning that Tepco should have arranged to bring a tanker to store the contaminated water and should have built a huge underground dam to stop it leaking into the environment. However Tepco has never followed his advice, citing cost as one of the reasons.
But one not so small thing remained unchanged, post-Fukushima: the tightly capped insurance system. Of course, raising the amount of insurance required to operate nuclear plants would be expensive. The nuclear industry, which provides 20 percent of all of the country’s electrical power, is not eager to incur additional expenses like higher insurance premiums for more coverage. Oh, but the nuclear power industry doesn’t actually pay premiums on most of the insurance coverage that supposedly is available…
Going without insurance is described as “going naked” in insurance industry lingo. Going without insurance for the worst hazards in the nuclear power industry is business as usual.
One need not look back very far to see the problem. In March 2011, the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, triggered by an earthquake followed by a tsunami that overwhelmed all of Japan’s safeguards, melted down three reactors, displaced 160,000 people and caused an estimated $250 billion in damages and other still-unfolding economic consequences.
Today, in the United States, we have 104 operating nuclear plants producing electricity. The owners, operators, and government regulators who oversee them say an event like Fukushima will not happen here. And even if it did, they insist, there is enough liability insurance in place to cover the damages. The actual amount of that insurance coverage: just $12.6 billion.
You don’t need an advanced degree in calculus or risk analysis to see that something doesn’t add up, and to start feeling a bit…naked. But when it comes to nuclear insurance, naked is the fashion designed for the American public.
A catastrophic accident in the US could cost way more than $12.6 billion. A worst-case scenario study in 1997 by the Brookhaven National Laboratory estimated that a major accident could cost $566 billion in damages and cause 143,000 possible deaths. Another such study, by Sandia National Laboratories in 1982, calculated the possible costs at $314 billion. Adjusted for inflation, that would put both estimates close to the trillion dollar range today. So $12.6 billion wouldn’t cover much.
An Interview With Julian Assange, the Nation, Chris Hedges, 8 May 13″…….The press of a nation at war, in every conflict I covered, is an enthusiastic part of the machine, cheerleaders for slaughter and tireless mythmakers for war and the military. The few renegades within the press who refuse to wave the flag and slavishly lionize the troops, who will not endow them with a host of virtues including heroism, patriotism and courage, find themselves pariahs in newsrooms and viciously attacked—like Assange and Manning—by the state.
As a reporter at The New York Times, I was among those expected to prod sources inside the organs of power to provide information, including top-secret information. The Pentagon Papers, released to the Times in 1971, and the Times’s Pulitzer-winning 2005 exposure of the warrantless wiretapping of US citizens by the National Security Council used “top secret” documents—a classification more restricted than the lower-level “secret” designation of the documents released by WikiLeaks. But as the traditional press atrophies with dizzying speed—effectively emasculated by Barack Obama’s use of the Espionage Act half a dozen times since 2009 to target whistleblowers like Thomas Drake—it is left to the renegades, people like Assange and Manning, to break down walls and inform the public.
The cables that WikiLeaks released, as disturbing as they were, invariably put a pro-unit or pro-US spin on events. The reality in war is usually much worse. Those counted as dead enemy combatants are often civilians. Military units write their own after-action reports and therefore attempt to justify or hide their behavior. Despite the heated rhetoric of the state, no one has provided evidence that anything released by WikiLeaks cost lives. Then–Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in a 2010 letter to Senator Carl Levin conceded this point. He wrote Levin: “The initial assessment in no way discounts the risk to national security. However, the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by the disclosure.”
The New York Times, The Guardian, El País, Le Mondeand Der Spiegel giddily printed redacted copies of some of the WikiLeaks files and then promptly threw Assange and Manning to the sharks. It was not only morally repugnant, but also stunningly shortsighted. Do these news organizations believe that if the state shuts down organizations such as WikiLeaks and imprisons Manning and Assange, traditional news outlets will be left alone? Can’t they connect the dots between the prosecutions of government whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act, warrantless wiretapping, monitoring of communications and the persecution of Manning and Assange? Don’t they worry that when the state finishes with Manning, Assange and WikiLeaks, these atrophied news outlets will be next? Haven’t they realized that this is a war by a global corporate elite not against an organization or an individual but against the freedom of the press and democracy?……..http://www.thenation.com/article/174227/interview-julian-assange#
Asked about volunteers who braved the radiation danger to rescue animals in the evacuation zone, such as Yoshida, Okura said, “Honestly, we were grateful.”
Editor’s note: This is the eighth part of a new series that has run in the past under the title of The Prometheus Trap. This series deals with how pets and livestock fared in the evacuation zone around the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. The series will appear on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
After the government on April 22, 2011, banned entry into a 20-kilometer radius from the disaster-stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, declaring it to be an evacuation zone, many people still began to enter the area illegally to rescue pets left behind.
One of them was Mieko Yoshida, a 63-year-old cram school teacher who lived in Odaka Ward in the city of Minami-soma.
Yoshida was living with 12 cats when the nuclear disaster broke out at the plant in March 2011. Despite her desperate search, she couldn’t find four of the cats that went missing amid the pandemonium created by the disaster. For Yoshida, who lives alone, they were all precious members of her family.
Yoshida started a one-woman campaign for the rescue and protection of pets left behind in the no-go zone.
When she stood in front of the city office, carrying a placard reading, “Give me back my family,” many pet owners approached her, saying, “The same here.”
Yoshida compiled a list of some 80 houses in the off-limits zone where pets had been left behind. She secretly went to these houses to feed and rescue the animals.
After the verdict the defendants were taken into custody and a hearing was scheduled for Thursday morning to determine the merits of detention. Sentencing will be held at a later date. Together, the two felonies carry a maximum 30 years in prison.
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — An 83-year-old Catholic nun and two of her fellow peace activists were found guilty Wednesday of intending to injure the national defense for intruding last July onto the Y-12 National Security Complex, a nuclear weapons production facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
After hearing two days of testimony and arguments, and then deliberating for nearly 2½ hours, the jury also found the defendants guilty of damaging more than $1,000 of government property at the Y-12 site, where they cut through four chain-link fences and spray-painted biblical messages on a building that warehouses an estimated 400 tons of highly enriched uranium, the radioactive material used to fuel a nuclear bomb.
During the trial about 100 spectators filled two courtrooms to support Sister Megan Rice and 64-year-old Vietnam veteran Michael Walli, both of whom live in the District, and Greg Boertje-Obed, 57, a house painter who lives in Duluth, Minn.
As the jury of nine men and three women left the courtroom, supporters sang softly: “Love, love, love, love. People, we are made for love.”
In the pre-dawn hours of July 28, 2012, the three defendants hiked over a wooded ridge and were able to enter the site unimpeded because of a series of deficient security measures, including inoperable security cameras and an alarm system inundated by routine false alarms. The intrusion triggered a two-week shutdown of operations at Y-12 — a Department of Energy site that is overseen by the National Nuclear Security Administration and operated and managed by private contractors — and prompted four congressional hearings on nuclear security and a shake up in the U.S. nuclear security enterprise.
After the verdict the defendants were taken into custody and a hearing was scheduled for Thursday morning to determine the merits of detention. Sentencing will be held at a later date. Together, the two felonies carry a maximum 30 years in prison.
For more on the defendants, the intrusion and the fallout, visit wapo.st/prophets.
Indigenous and international protesters have begun a 250 km-long walk to campaign against uranium mining in Western Australia.
A month-long anti-uranium walk has begun in the gold fields of Western Australia.
Traditional owners and international protesters are walking 250 kilometres from Yellirrie to Leonora campaigning against uranium mining in the resource-rich state.
But their march comes less than a month after the federal government approved a proposed uranium mine about 100 kilometres away.
Walking for country is to reconnect people with land and culture. The Walkatjurra Walkabout is a pilgrimage across Wangkatja country in the spirit of our ancestors so together, we as present custodians, can protect our land and our culture for future generations.
My people have resisted destructive mining on our land and our sacred sites for generations. For over forty years we have fought to stop uranium mining at Yeelirrie, we stopped the removal of sacred stones from Weebo and for the last twenty years we have stopped destruction of 200 sites at Yakabindie.
We are not opposed to responsible development, but cannot stand wanton destruction of our land, our culture, and our environment.
We invite all people, from all places, to come together to walk with us, to send a clear message that we want the environment here, and our sacred places left alone.
Kado Muir, Traditional Owner, Yeelirrie
Join us for a one month walk from Yeelirrie to Leonora from May 4thth – 28th May. This walk will be lead by the Walkatjurra Rangers, in partnership with Footprints for Peace, Western Australian Nuclear Free Alliance (WANFA), the Anti Nuclear Alliance of Western Australia (ANAWA) and the Conservation Council of Western Australia (CCWA).
While this walk is a valuable personal experience, it is also a Non-violent Direct Action that plays an important role in the broader environmental and Aboriginal sovereignty movements. It is a partnership to share knowledge, culture and environmental awareness in a campaign supporting the sovereign rights of Aboriginal people to protect their lands and support a nuclear free future.
One need not look back very far to see the problem. In March 2011, 
nuclear-news 