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Nuclear Israel points at non-nuclear Iran as danger!

Reality turned upside down: Nuclear Israel points at non-nuclear Iran as danger, By Nathalie Hrizi  Liberation News, 4 May 18     In a not unusual display of utter hypocrisy in a televised appearance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued on April 30 that Iran is a “danger” and is violating the nuclear deal formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Iran has no nuclear weapons.

Immediately following Netanyahu theatrical performance the International Atomic Energy Agency released a statement saying “that the Agency had no credible indications of activities in Iran relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device after 2009.”

Because of the JCPOA, Iran is a highly inspected country. The IAEA has a presence in that country at 18 nuclear sites and nine other locations.  From 2013 to 2017 they increased surveillance activities by 152 percent and inspectors spend 3, 000 days in the field each year.

In fact, Israel is the real nuclear danger.

In 2017, it was estimated that Israel possessed 80 nuclear warheads. It has never signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and has indicated that it has no intention of doing so.

Not only is Israel armed with nuclear weapons and an entire military primarily funded by U.S. tax dollars, but it has consistently attacked its neighbors in the Middle East. Israel maintains a blockade and constant aggression against the Palestinians. It has bombed or invaded Iraq, Jordan  Lebanon and Syria and Egypt without provocation. It consistently threatens Iran today. ……https://www.liberationnews.org/reality-turned-upside-nuclear-israel-points-non-nuclear-iran-danger/

May 5, 2018 Posted by | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israel Dragging the United States Into World War III ?

Retired US Colonel: Israel Is Dragging the United States Into World War III, Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who now teaches at Washington-area universities, didn’t hold back in his critique of where the status quo is leading the United States via its client state, Israel.  Mintpress News, 12 March 2018 by Darius Shahtahmasebi  

Israel is in the process of plunging America into a war with Iran that could destroy what’s left of the Middle East and ignite a third world war, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, warned in Washington approximately a week ago.

Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who now teaches at Washington-area universities, didn’t hold back in his critique of where the status quo is leading the United States via its client state, Israel.

At the annual Israel lobby conference at the National Press Club, sponsored by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, Wilkerson explained that Israel is headed toward “a massive confrontation with the various powers arrayed against it, a confrontation that will suck America in and perhaps terminate the experiment that is Israel and do irreparable damage to the empire that America has become.”

One of the principal antagonists begging for a war with Iran that Wilkerson identified was none other than Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s Russian-born Defense Minister. Wilkerson stated:

ieberman will speak in April in New York City at the annual conference of the Jerusalem Post. The title is, ‘The New War with Iran.’ It is clear that he’s [at] the forefront of promoting this war.

And nowhere does my concern about such a war focus more acutely at the moment than Syria. As [the] president of France Emmanuel Macron described it recently, ‘The current rhetoric of the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israel is pushing the region toward conflict with Iran.’”

Despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s incessant denigrations of Iran, including claiming the greatest danger facing the Jewish state is the Islamic republic — a country he accuses of fanning the flames of anti-Semitism — Wilkerson blew these accusations out of the park using simple logic. He said:

This antisemitism bit, of course, as we’ve heard today, is almost always a weapon of choice for Israeli politicians under stress hurled, in this case, at the country whose Jewish population — by the way, the largest in the Middle East outside of Turkey and Israel — lives in Iran in reasonable peace.”

He continued:

And don’t forget that these words were uttered by the man who, as we’ve heard today, is doing everything he can to expel dark-skinned African refugees largely from Eritrea and Sudan from Israel, where most have come as legitimate refugees.”

……..But why is there a danger that the U.S. will be dragged into this war, and why does Israel need America’s help? As Wilkerson explains:

I believe the answer is fairly clear once you push aside the cobwebs that surround it. The legitimacy of great power is what I call it. And that is precisely what Netanyahu and Lieberman desire.

“It’s also what Riyadh desires, especially with the new boy king Mohammed bin Salman, now an erstwhile ally of Israel.

“In short, the IDF could defend Israel but it could not attack Iran. Not successfully, anyway. And were it to do so, it would be damned internationally and thus isolated even more than it already is today, perhaps devastatingly so.”

Last year, a top Israeli general tasked with writing his country’s defense policy admitted that Israel cannot take on Iran’s military alone if the day should come that the regional powers face off in a direct military confrontation, saying they would need to rely on the U.S. for assistance

According to a Politico report, during the Obama years, Israel drew up a military strike option but never really used it. Deep down, Israel knew its effectiveness lied in its ability to pressure the U.S. government into taking further action of its own lest it be dragged into a catastrophic war with Iran that it may or may not be prepared to fight………https://www.mintpressnews.com/retired-us-colonel-israel-is-dragging-the-united-states-into-world-war-iii/238812/#.WuwHCvbGsdM.twitter

May 5, 2018 Posted by | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Widening fraud scandal over radioactive contamination clean-up

Former Hunters Point shipyard cleanup workers plead guilty to fraud
First criminal convictions in widening toxic cleanup scandal, Curbed San Francisco , By Chris Roberts  

Two former supervisors at Tetra Tech EC, the company at the center of a widening fraud scandal at the former Navy shipyard in San Francisco’s Hunters Point, have pleaded guilty to faking documents and were sentenced to federal prison terms, the Justice Department announced late Thursday.

Stephen Rolfe and Justin Hubbard will both serve terms of eight months in federal prison and pay fines of $2,000 and $10,000, respectively, according to a news release from Alex G. Tse, the acting United States attorney for Northern California.

It’s not clear if other Tetra Tech managers or employees are under investigation, or if other criminal indictments are forthcoming.

But their guilty pleas and subsequent sentences represent the first instance of criminal penalties stemming from malfeasance at the shipyard, a sprawling, decades-long, $1.1 billion toxic cleanup project that, within the last year, has devolved into an environmental fiasco and attracted national attention.

This is vindication for other former cleanup employees—co-workers and subordinates of Rolfe and Hubbard, whose detailed and repeated whistleblower allegations of fraud appear to have led to their convictions.

And if the rest of the whistleblowers’ allegations are correct, more indictments may be coming.

Sworn declarations from multiple former cleanup employees allege that other Tetra Tech managers and supervisors directed them to commit fraud on multiple occasions.

Tetra Tech EC, a subsidiary of Tetra Tech, Inc., a multi-billion-dollar firm with a history of winning government contracts, received a $300 million contract from the U.S. Navy to prepare the former shipyard—an EPA Superfund site rife with industrial and radioactive contamination stemming from its use as a warship repair base and nuclear warfare research lab—for redevelopment……….https://sf.curbed.com/2018/5/4/17318768/arrests-hunters-point-shipyard-cleanup-workers-toxic-crime

May 5, 2018 Posted by | Legal, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

Uranium market looking crook – again!

Uranium Loses Power as U.S. Miners Seek Protection, WSJ By Rhiannon Hoyle, 
 Fears that uranium will be the next commodity swept up in the U.S.’s trade offensive have the market grinding to a halt.

The price of U3O8, a common uranium compound used mainly in nuclear-power generation, has already sunk 12% this year to roughly $21 a pound—near its 12-year low of $18, struck in 2016—according to the Ux Consulting Co…..   (subscribers only) https://www.wsj.com/articles/uranium-loses-power-as-u-s-miners-seek-protection-1525424829

May 5, 2018 Posted by | business and costs, Uranium, USA | Leave a comment

‘Global Consequences’ of Lethal Radiation Leak at Destroyed Japan Nuclear Plant

mai 4 2018.jpg
May 4, 2018
Lethal levels of radiation have been observed inside Japan’s damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant. And they are arguably way higher than you suspect.
According to Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), radiation levels of eight Sieverts per hour (Sv/h) have been discovered within the Fukushima nuclear power plant, which was destroyed after a massive earthquake and a tsunami in March 2011.
Tepco, the company that operated the plant and is now tasked with decommissioning it, reported the discovery after making observations in a reactor containment vessel last month.
Eight Sv/h of radiation, if absorbed at once, mean certain death, even with quick treatment. One Sv/h is likely to cause sickness and 5.5 Sv/h will result in a high chance of developing cancer.
While 8 Sv/h is deadly, outside of Fukushima’s Reactor Number 2 foundations of a much higher level of 42 Sv/h was detected.
A strange occurrence, and experts are still arguing what caused the discrepancy. One possible explanation is that cooling water washed radioactive material off debris, taking it somewhere else.
But here’s a truly terrifying catch: according to the report, Tepco highly doubts the new readings, because, as was discovered later, a cover was not removed from the robot-mounted measurement device at the time of the inspection, NHK World reports.
Exactly one year ago, Sputnik reported that Tepco engineers discovered absolutely insane levels of radiation of about 530 Sv/h within the reactor. Such levels of radiation would kill a human within seconds. By comparison, the Chernobyl reactor reads 34 Sv/h radiation level, enough to kill a human after 20 minutes of exposure.
The levels of radiation within Fukushima reactor number 2 were so high that Tepco’s toughest robot, designed to withstand 1000 Sv/h of radiation, had to be pulled out, as it started glitching due to high radiation levels. Nuclear experts called the radiation levels “unimaginable” at the time.
On November 2017, the New York Times and other news outlets reported a much smaller figure of 70 Sv/h of radiation, more or less on par with a 74 Sv/h reading gathered before an anomalous 530 Sv/h spike.
While that radiation dosimeter cover negligence prevents precise calculations, the actual picture inside Unit 2 is thought to be much worse.
Japanese state broadcaster NHK World quoted experts saying that if the cleaning of the stricken power plant is not properly addressed, it will result in major leak of radioactivity with “global” consequences.
Richard Black, director of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, says that while the readings are not reliable, they still “demonstrate that, seven years after the disaster, cleaning up the Fukushima site remains a massive challenge — and one that we’re going to be reading about for decades, never mind years.”
Mycle Schneider, independent energy consultant and lead author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, criticized Tepco, saying the power company has “no clue” what it is doing.
“I find it symptomatic of the past seven years, in that they don’t know what they’re doing, Tepco, these energy companies, haven’t a clue what they’re doing, so to me it’s been going wrong from the beginning. It’s a disaster of unseen proportions.”
In observing the poor maintenance of plant radiation leaks, Schneider also pointed out that the company stores nuclear waste at the site in an inappropriate way.
“This is an area of the planet that gets hit by tornadoes and all kinds of heavy weather patterns, which is a problem. When you have waste stored above ground in inappropriate ways, it can get washed out and you can get contamination all over the place.”

May 5, 2018 Posted by | Fukushima 2018 | , , | Leave a comment

Foreign Trainees Used in the Cleanup of Fukushima Nuke Plant

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Foreign workers who have been employed at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant are pictured in Fukushima Prefecture.
Despite ban, foreign trainees working at crippled Fukushima nuclear plant
May 1, 2018
FUKUSHIMA — At least four foreign technical intern trainees are working at the construction site on the premises of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant despite the policy of its operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), that bans the employment of such trainees there, the Mainichi has learned.
TEPCO has acknowledged to the Mainichi that the foreigners are indeed at work at the plant in Fukushima Prefecture. The plant has been shut down due to the core meltdown accidents at some of its nuclear reactors after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated northeastern Japan.
A TEPCO official said that the practice of letting the trainees work does not match the intentions of the Technical Intern Training System. “We will demand our contractors to thoroughly check the residency status (of their foreign workers). We will do our own checks too,” the official said.
The Mainichi investigation has found that the four Vietnamese and other trainees are in their 20s or 30s and two of them just arrived in Japan last year and thus speak little Japanese. Two more foreign construction workers operate inside the grounds of the Fukushima plant.
The six workers, employed by a Tokyo-based subcontractor of a major construction company, are involved in laying the foundations of a new facility designed to burn rubble or trees with potential radioactive contamination. The work began in November last year.
According to TEPCO, the area the six workers are assigned to is outside the radiation controlled area where protection from radiation is necessary. Although they are inside the premises of the nuclear power plant, they did not receive training on how to protect themselves from radiation, and there is no need to control their radiation exposure, the company said.
The six workers are made to wear dosimeters but told the Mainichi that they were not aware of the amount of radiation they have received.
The Technical Intern Training System is designed to transfer technology to developing countries, but Vietnam does not have nuclear power plants where workers could be exposed to radiation. The Vietnamese government ended a plan to construct a nuclear power plant in 2016 due to a shortage of funds and out of consideration of public opposition following the nuclear disaster at the TEPCO plant in 2011.
TEPCO officials told a news conference in February 2017 that the company wanted to protect the working environment with its own control measures as the training system was designed for the trainees to acquire knowledge and experience in Japan and pass that on to people at home.
A TEPCO official told the Mainichi that the company does not accept technical intern trainees to work at locations even outside the radiation controlled areas, adding that the company intends to strengthen the contractual management of its contractors.
The president of the construction company that hires the six foreigners said that he was told by the main contractor to refrain from using foreign workers as much as possible. “But our industry cannot carry on without foreigners any longer,” he said.
According to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, some 55,000 foreigners were reported to have worked in the construction sector in 2017, more than four times the number recorded five years earlier. Out of the 2017 total, some 37,000 were technical intern trainees.
(Japanese original by Shunsuke Sekiya, Chiba Bureau)
 
 
Foreign workers vital for Japanese contractor in cleanup at Fukushima nuke plant
May 1, 2018
FUKUSHIMA — Foreign technical intern trainees have been employed in what is said to be a 40-year-long decommissioning operation underway at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) in the wake of devastating core meltdowns in 2011. While they are not supposed to be there under TEPCO policy, they are still considered indispensable by their employer, commissioned by TEPCO.
The homelands of the interns include Vietnam, a country that abandoned plans to import a nuclear reactor from Japan two years ago. As trainees, they are supposed to “transfer” their experiences in Japan to their compatriots back home. But in the case of Vietnam, there is no chance of using such know-how in the non-nuclear country. What is going through the minds of the trainees as they engage in this work?
“Hosha-kei, hosha-kei, hosha-kei,” one foreign worker repeated when the Mainichi Shimbun asked six workers from Vietnam and elsewhere about their job at the plant in February. It was not clear whether he meant radiation, radioactivity or a dosimeter.
“The job is easy and many Japanese workers are with us. I think (safety) is OK,” said another foreign worker who had the best command of the Japanese language in the group. The location they started working last fall is outside the radiation controlled areas and everyone there is in ordinary workers’ outfits.
The president of the Tokyo-based company that employs the six has nothing but praise for them. “People say they are so good at their work. I depend on them very much.” The six workers make up two-thirds of the company’s workforce, which also includes three Japanese nationals.
When the company was founded some 30 years ago it employed over 20 Japanese workers in their 20s, but now foreigners are vital for its operations. Says the president: “Japanese youngsters quit easily but foreigners stick with us because they borrow heavily to come to Japan and cannot go home at least for three years,” a requirement for technical intern trainees.
The six each borrowed between 1.2 million and 1.5 million yen to pay for their trip to Japan and other expenses. Four of them are paying back the debt as they work. They all share a one-story, three-room wooden apartment near the plant that includes a small dining room and a kitchen.
When one male foreign worker who barely spoke Japanese was asked why he came to Japan, he replied in Japanese, “Okane” (money).
The workers have not told their families they are working at the nuclear plant. “My family would worry and tell me to come home,” one man said in broken Japanese.
(Japanese original by Shunsuke Sekiya, Chiba Bureau)
 
 
TEPCO: Foreign trainees worked at Fukushima nuclear plant
May 2, 2018
Six people in the government’s foreign technical trainee program worked at the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant until the end of April despite Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s ban on such dispatches.
A TEPCO official on May 1 said the company had failed to sufficiently check the situation concerning workers at the nuclear plant.
The utility in February 2017 said it would not have foreign trainees work at the plant, which has continued to leak radiation since being struck by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.
The six workers were employed by a subcontractor of Tokyo-based Hazama Ando Corp.
They started working at the plant between October and December last year and were involved in construction of an incinerator on the premises to destroy contaminated protective clothing and other materials.
They were not required to wear protective gear against radiation because they worked outside the radiation-controlled area.
“We will ask prime contractors once more to check the status of workers (under their supervision),” the TEPCO official said.
The company said it also intends to check whether other foreign trainees have ended up working at the plant.
The purpose of the foreign trainee program is to pass down skills and expertise that interns can use to help their home countries. However, a number of cases have shown that companies are exploiting the program to obtain cheap labor, sometimes for dangerous tasks.
In March, it was revealed that a Vietnamese trainee was involved in decontamination work in Fukushima Prefecture but had not been told of the potential hazards.
A Justice Ministry official said decontamination work is an inappropriate job for foreign trainees.

May 5, 2018 Posted by | Fukushima 2018 | , , | Leave a comment

Fukushima: Radioactive Soil Might Be Used to Build New Roads—and Residents Are Not Happy

May 1, 2018
Residents of Fukushima, Japan, are rallying against plans to build new roads that use soil exposed to radiation during core meltdowns at the local nuclear plant in 2011.
The Environment Ministry plans to begin trials using the soil next month, with the city of Nihonmatsu as the testing ground, The Japan Times reported.
The project would bury large black bags full of the soil under a 656-foot stretch of the planned road. More than 17,650 cubic feet of soil would be buried at a depth of around 1.6 feet. The bags would then be covered with clean soil to block harmful radiation. Those bags, in turn, would be paved over with asphalt.
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Ripped bags containing radioactive soil near Japan’s tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on February 11, 2016. 
 
This represents but a small portion of the roughly 775 million cubic feet of irradiated soil in the prefecture. The 2011 meltdowns, caused by an earthquake and a resulting tsunami, sent radioactive debris spewing over the local area. The material eventually contaminated hundreds of square miles of Fukushima.
The Japanese government has encouraged residents to return to their former homes, but many still believe it is unsafe. Authorities even began withdrawing housing assistance payments to those who left the area after the meltdown, effectively forcing them to return.
Authorities eventually plan to hold all tainted material in temporary storage before transporting it to final disposal spots outside the state, but that could take as long as 30 years. According to a 2016 NPR report, there are around 9 million bags of contaminated soil awaiting disposal.
Because of the huge amount of soil to be disposed of, authorities want to use some of it productively. The Environment Ministry said it would use soil emitting a maximum radiation of 8,000 becquerels per kilogram. The average for soil used in road construction is around 1,000 becquerels per kg. If the trials are successful, the ministry plans to replicate the plans nationwide.
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Workers move bags containing radiated soil, leaves and debris from a temporary storage site in Tomioka on February 23, 2015. 
But to the residents whose lives were upended by the 2011 disaster, any amount of excess radiation is too much. A briefing given by the Environment Ministry on Thursday was interrupted by locals opposed to the project, according to The Japan Times.
“Ensuring safety is different from having the public feeling at ease,” farmer Bunsaku Takamiya, 62, said. His farm is close to one of the planned roads, and he fears that the proximity of his crops to the soil will stop people from buying his produce. “Don’t scatter contaminated soil on roads,” shouted another resident during the meeting. 
A ministry-linked official told the newspaper that, given the residents’ anger, “it’s difficult to proceed as is.”

May 5, 2018 Posted by | Fukushima 2018 | , | Leave a comment

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