Oklahoma and Cherokee discuss nuclear waste disposal

SALLISAW, Okla. (AP) — The state of Oklahoma and the Cherokee Nation are working together in court to stop the permanent disposal of radioactive waste near the Arkansas and Illinois rivers.

The pair obtained a temporary restraining order against the owner of a long-out-of-business uranium plant on Thursday, the Tulsa World (http://bit.ly/2kQfMgP ) reported.

Statements from the Cherokee Nation said the Sequoyah Fuels facility, which converted yellowcake uranium into fuel for nuclear reactors, left tons of “uranium-contaminated sludge” in many “basins, lagoons and ditches at the site” when it closed in 1993.

Cherokee officials said the company agreed in 2004 to spend about $3.5 million to remove the waste and dispose of it off-site. But Sequoyah Fuels recently told the tribe that it couldn’t find a suitable site to dispose of the waste. The company said it intended to put the waste into a permanent disposal cell on-site.

The restraining order will temporarily keep the company from disposing of the waste at the site. Court records said tribal and state officials want their own experts to review options for off-site disposal.

“The safety of the environment, our citizens and all people in and around Gore is our highest priority,” said Sara Hill, the Cherokee Nation’s secretary of natural resources.

According to reports, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission ordered the plant to close after an accidental release of toxic gas caused about 34 people to seek medical treatment in 1992.

Sequoyah Fuels and the company’s law firm didn’t respond to the newspaper’s request for comment.

http://www.alvareviewcourier.com/story/2017/02/10/regional/oklahoma-and-cherokee-discuss-nuclear-waste-disposal/8721.html

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Information from: Tulsa World, http://www.tulsaworld.com

1.This Month

How the viewing public was ‘protected’ from seeing what the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombing did to people

Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the cutting room floor https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-on-the-cutting-room-floor/ By Thomas Gaulkin, August 5, 2019 Seventy-four years after nuclear weapons were first and last used in war, it can be challenging to conceive of the devastation they cause. But even in the immediate months after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, news accounts offered a view of ingenuity and destruction that often elided the human cost.

The newsreels below [on original] were mainly screened to audiences in 1946 and 1947 and detail the destructive force of the explosions almost entirely through excited accounts of the structural damage to the cities. There’s occasional mention of the lost city populations and the scientific knowledge to be gained from studying their casualties, but hardly any description of what people actually suffered, let alone personal accounts. It’s instructive to look at and listen to these reports today, and contemplate what is missing.

The 12-minute reel below was produced by the US War Department in 1946. “Tale of Two Cities” makes selective use of film that was confiscated from a Japanese filmmaker, Akira Iwasaki—though you wouldn’t know that from the narration, which boasts that “army cameramen have found and filmed pictorial evidence that tells in twisted steel and stone the effect of death-dealing atomic power.” (Some twenty years later, historian Eric Barnouw obtained more of Iwasaki’s footage and produced a remarkably different narrative that documented the horrible physical impact of the attacks on Hiroshima’s citizens.)

Contrasted with the triumphant tone of the news/propaganda made for 1940s audiences, silence changes everything. Made public only decades later, the two films below —one beginning with footage of wounded victims, the other, a full-color glimpse of survivors picking up the pieces of the ruined city—report what those above do not, without a single word.

Nagasaki And Hiroshima (1945)

Harrowing Accounts from Hiroshima Survivors

Hiroshima Bomb to Today | Tour around the Atomic Hypocenter

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