Expert predicts doubling of Fukushima cleanup costs; First Nations want radiation testing of fishby CHARLIE SMITH Straight.com, FEB 15, 2014 A CANADIAN-BORN nuclear-energy expert has predicted that the it will cost at least $120 billion to clean up the mess left by the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant. In an interview with ResourceClips, Thomas Drolet said that it will take 12 to 15 years to convert the Fukushima Daiichi site “back to brownfield condition”.
“Of the government and TEPCO cost estimates, the biggest I’ve seen in print is about $60 billion,” Drolet told journalist Greg Klein. “My opinion? Double that.”…..
Meanwhile here in B.C., the North Shore News hasreported that several First Nations leaders—including Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs president Grand Chief Stewart Phillip and Tahlton Central Council president Annita McPhee—want the federal government to conduct systematic tests of radiation levels in fish from the Pacific Ocean.
….Busche has filed complaints with the federal government alleging she has suffered retaliation since filing her original safety complaint in 2011…. AP | Spokane (US)
A whistle-blower who raised safety concerns at the most polluted nuclear weapons production site in the US has been fired from her job at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.
Donna Busche’s complaints are part of a string of whistle-blower and other claims related to the design and safety of an unfinished waste treatment plant at Hanford, created by the federal government in the 1940s as part of the top-secret project to build the atomic bomb. Today, it is the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site, where cleanup costs about USD 2 billion each year.
Busche, 50, said she was called into the office yesterday morning and told she was being fired for cause.
“I turned in my key and turned in my badge and left the building,” Busche told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Richland, where Hanford is located.
Busche worked for URS Corp., which is helping build a USD 12 billion plant to turn Hanford’s most dangerous wastes into glass. Construction of the plant has been halted over safety concerns. Busche has filed complaints with the federal government, alleging she has suffered retaliation since filing her original safety complaint in 2011.
Author and Pediatrician Helen Caldicott takes time out of her busy schedule to join me to discuss the unfolding events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station in Japan. Fukushima was devastated by a massive earthquake on March 11, 2011 which led directly to a massive failure causing hydrogen explosions which blew the roof off of at least two of the reactor buildings. Tepco and the Japanese government have understated the radiation dangers and the dire reality of the situation from day one.
Helen says, at this point there is no “best case scenario” for Fukushima, just worsening degrees of horror because it’s scientifically impossible to clean up what has already occurred. And with thousands of spent fuel rods and thousands more active rods still in the fuel pools of the damaged reactor buildings, the worst case scenario – if another major earthquake hits the area – is an ecological nightmare of biblical proportions for everyone living in the Northern hemisphere.
GREG & MICHEAL GIVEN OVER, 5 MORE YEARS PLOWSHARES 3 , FOR WHAT, attempting to safe your life, your kids life, your kids kids kids kids kids lifes.
AS Y 12 OAK RIDGE, IS BREAKING THE LAW. THE QUEENS COURT CONT. THE TORUTURE AND REPRISSION OF JUSTICE, LONGSHANKS LIVES,
TOKYO, Japan (February 19, 2014) U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy delivers opening remarks at the Japan-U.S. Decommissioning and Remediation Fukushima Recovery Forum.
Green Drinks NYC invites you to a lively evening at its SPARK SPEAKER SERIES with a focus on Japan’s Fukushima Reactor disaster and New York’s Indian Point Nuclear Reactor and how to manifest a green energy future. Riverkeeper Hudson River Program Director Phillip Musegaas will take part in a panel discussion at The Moderns titled “Three Years After Fukushima: Lessons Learned from the Disaster and The Future of Indian Point.”
The nuclear disaster at Fukushima continues to unfold nearly three years after that fateful day, March 11, 2011. The lives and livelihoods of tens of thousands of Japanese have been irreparably harmed with devastating human, economic and environmental consequences. Here in the United States, what lessons have we heeded from this disaster? What are U.S. regulators doing to better protect the hundreds of millions of Americans who live near one of the nation’s 100 operating nuclear reactors, including the Indian Point nuclear plant, 38 miles north of New York City? What are some of the known risks at the Indian Point plant and what is being done to address them?
Riverkeeper has a long history of work on Indian Point safety and environmental issues, including its current active legal challenge to Indian Point’s re-licensing by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Appearing with him is and journalist Susan Q. Stranahan and Edwin Lyman, a nationally recognized nuclear power safety expert from the Union of Concerned Scientists and the author (with Dave Lochbaum and Susan Q. Stranahan) of the Feb, 2014 book, Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster.” Hosting the event is Paul E. McGinniss.
A grim “Of Special Importance”[highest classification level] report prepared by the State Atomic Energy Corporation (ROSATOM) circulating in the Kremlin today is warning that the “potentially catastrophic nuclear event” currently unfolding at the United States atomic Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico has prompted the Obama regime to begin pre-staging government forces and equipment in the event a large-scale evacuation is needed.
According to this report, the United States Department of Energy WIPP is the world’s third deep geological repository (after closure of Germany’s Repository for radioactive waste Morsleben and the Schacht Asse II Salt Mine) licensed to permanently dispose of transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years that is left from the research and production of nuclear weapons.
Critical to note, however, this report says, is that the United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC), the private American corporation serving as executive agent for the HEU Purchase Agreement, was “deliberately targeted” for elimination by the Obama regime in early 2009 leading to its 16 December 2013 announcement that it had reached an agreement with a majority of its debt holders to file a prearranged and voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy restructuring in the first quarter of 2014.
As to why the Obama regime wanted to eliminate USEC, Federal Security Service (FSB) intelligence experts contributing to this report say, was for the diverting HEU Purchase Agreement uranium for the purpose of reconstituting it to its highly dangerous U-235 level to conduct experiments at the WIPP on what is called nuclear salt-water rockets (NSWR), which is a proposed type of nuclear thermal rocket designed by Robert Zubrin that would be fueled by water bearing dissolved salts of plutonium or U-235.
Under tight strictures put upon it by US law, this report says, the Obama regime needed Russia’s HEU Purchase Agreement uranium for these NSWR experiments and which is not reportable.
On 5 February, however, this report continues, these NSWR experiments at the WIPP went “horrifically wrong” leading to an explosion and fire at the underground facility, followed by the 14 February “radiological event” that prompted its full evacuation.
Sister Megan Rice vandalized a weapons facility for almost an hour before she was apprehended
Sister Megan Rice, an 84-year-old radical nun who broke into a nuclear weapons facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., in protest against the nation’s nuclear arsenal, was sentenced Tuesday afternoon to 35 months in federal prison.
“Please have no leniency with me,” Rice told the judge. “To remain in prison for the rest of my life would be the greatest gift you could give me.”
The judge said he considered her age and her decades of good works and just could not give her what could amount to a life sentence. He asked that Rice use her “brilliant mind” to lead to change in Washington, D.C., and not use it to break laws in Tennessee.
Her co-defendants, Michael Walli, 65, and Gregory Boertje-Obed, 58, were sentenced to 62 months on charges of interfering with national security and damaging property at the Y-12 National Security Complex in July 2012 — the facility that once provided the enriched uranium for the Hiroshima bomb.
The activists put up banners, splashed blood and beat hammers against the walls of the storage facility in a biblical reference to Isaiah 2:4, “They shall beat swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”
The defense argued the trio acted in accordance with their religious beliefs and did not mean to cause any harm with their action, which follows a series of anti-nuclear protests organized by “Transform Now Plowshares,” a collective of pacifist activists looking to draw attention to the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal.
Sister Megan Rice and two other defendants jailed for entering Oak Ridge plant and daubing it with Biblical messages
…..But the US government argued at the January hearing that they did not accept that they had committed crimes, took no responsibility for them, showed no contrition and then, during the trial, proceeded to argue against the laws they had broken. It has described the three, who have previous convictions related to their protest activities, as “recidivists and habitual offenders”……
An 84-year-old nun was handed a 35-month jail term on Tuesday for breaking into a US nuclear weapons plant and daubing it with biblical references and human blood. Sister Megan Rice was sentenced alongside two co-defendants, Greg Boertje-Obed, 58, and Michael Walli, 64, who both received 62-month terms.
At an earlier hearing in January, a judge ordered the three Catholic anti-nuclear protesters to pay $53,000 for what the government estimated was damage done to the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, regarded as one of the most secure in the world.
All three defendants were convicted of sabotage after the 2012 break-in, on charges that carried a maximum sentence of up to 30 years. The government had asked for the trio to be given prison sentences of between five and nine years.
In a recent interview with the Guardian from prison, Rice said she hoped US district judge Amul Thapar would seize the opportunity to “take his place in history” and sentence them in a way that would reflect their symbolic, non-violent actions – actions she said were intended to highlight the US stockpile of nuclear weapons they believe is immoral and illegal.
Rice and her co-defendants have been in prison, mostly in Ocilla, Georgia, for nine months, a period of time her lawyers had argued was sufficient punishment for the break-in.
On 28 July 2012, the three activists cut through three fences before reaching a $548m storage bunker. They hung banners, strung up crime-scene tape and hammered off a small chunk of the fortress-like storage facility for uranium material, inside the most secure part of complex. They painted messages such as “The fruit of justice is peace” and splashed small bottles of human blood on the bunker wall.
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