July 17 2017 Terry R ScheidtSeems like Terry is the only responder, is there anyone else, It is July 2017, been writing to Trump to use his EO but he never responds either. Boy is this America?
January 12, 2014 Aloha, It is now 01/2014 (24 years) since RECA was enacted. We are still waiting for justice. Our country denied, deceived, has no integrity or values by denying victims of radiation they caused. The justice system denied and dismissed most litigation cases claiming the Congress had to enact better laws to address radiation.
They claimed radiation does not cause cancer, of course we know better in the PACIFIC, Micronesia, Guam, Johnston Island and many other location. The unfortunate thing is 70 years have passed and many have already died which is our countries hope.
May 13, 2017 It is now May 2017, yes Terry is still alive and still seeking equity, HA. Our delegates never heard such a word, denial is more like it. I will advocate for loyalty till I die. Hard to believe our nation does things I thought only others did.
I was a range rat, many friends on Midway, Eniwetok, Wake, French Frigate Shoals, Christmas, Johnston, Jarvis, Canton damn so many.
Way back in 2010, we made a small post about the the plight of residents of Guam, who were suffering from illnesses resulting from radiation exposure. Research presented to the National Academy of Science and National Research Council described the effects on this community, of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. The Pacific Association for Radiation Survivors, a nonprofit organization, was lobbying U.S. Congress to include Guam in the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act Program, so that they could receive help and compensation for their radiation-induced illnesses.
Well, what happened about this?
Thanks to one reader of this website, we have been kept up to date over the years:
TERRY R SCHEIDT by Terry R Scheidt January 6, 2011 I WAS A 1962 JOHNSTON ISLAND PARTICIPANT. I WAS AT GROUND ZERO AND EXPOSED TO HIGH LEVELS OF RADIATION FOR WHICH I GOT CANCER. I HAVE NOT BEEN COMPENSATED UNDER THE DOE/EEOICPA ACT BECAUSE I DID NOT WORK FOR DOE. I WAS DENIED. I RECEIVED UNEQUAL COMPENSATION FROM DOJ (RECA) BUT AT A MUCH LESSER AMOUNT THAN DOE (EEOICPA). NO MEDICAL AND LESS THAN HALF THAT OF DOE. PLEASE SUPPORT HR 5119/S3224.
April 23, 2011Do our representatives really care? Why have both HR5119/S3224 both died in committee. Our government does not live up to responsibility. They cause us harm than ignore us as if we do not exist. Aloha.
April 26, 2011 I am a 1962 ground zero victim of the Johnston Island PPG. Senators Pangelinan, Udalls and Rep Lujan have done nothing. All legislation died in committee. They turned their backs on us again. Shame.
A small plane based at the Pasco airport will fly over central Hanford to survey for slight increases in temperature. Thermal images will be collected to check for hot spots that could be caused by buried radioactive waste.
The data will be used to augment information collected two years ago with a helicopter equipped with sensors to measure levels of radiation and to help predict what type of radioactive contaminants might be present.
“It gives us a starting point of where to go look,” said Mike Cline, Department of Energy director for the Hanford nuclear reservation soil and groundwater division.
Work then will be done to determine the extent and type of waste that may have been buried in central Hanford from World War II through the Cold War, when Hanford was producing plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program.
Characterization will be done with more intrusive methods, such as boring into the ground, before plans are developed for how to clean up the waste.
To be more exact here with the wording, the researchers have found a “shift in (thyroid cancer) cases to cancer mutations consistent with radiation exposure from those consistent with random causes,” as worded by the press release.
As most people reading this will remember, the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island facility — near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania — definitely released some radiation into the wider environment, but according to the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the levels were low enough that no detectable health effects were associated with it.
The new work — which analyzed tumor samples from people who have been verified through an extensive vetting process to have lived in areas surrounding the nuclear facility at the time of the accident, to have stayed in the area, and to have later developed thyroid cancer there — shows that this apparently hasn’t, in fact, been the case.
The press release provides more:
“In this retrospective cohort study — meaning the patients in the study already had thyroid cancer and were known to have been exposed to the TMI accident — lead researcher Dr David Goldenberg, professor of surgery, and colleagues identified 44 patients who were treated at the Penn State Health Milton S Hershey Medical Center for the most common type of thyroid cancer, papillary thyroid cancer, between 1974 and 2014. The patients were then divided into two groups: at risk and control groups.
“Patients in the at-risk group were those who developed cancer between 1984 and 1996, consistent with known latency periods of radiation-induced thyroid cancer, and who lived in at-risk geographical areas — based on reported weather patterns — at the time of the accident.”
“This definition was designed to allow us to identify relatively acute effects of radiation exposure from the accident,” explained Goldenberg.
The press release continues: “Patients who developed cancer outside of the expected latency period were placed in the control group. Researchers searched through all thyroid cancer tumor samples in the hospital’s possession from the study period for patients who lived in at-risk regions Dauphin, York, eastern Cumberland, Lancaster and western Lebanon counties. They used genealogical software to verify that the patient was in an at-risk area during the accident, remained until cancer developed and was treated at the Medical Center. The tumor samples of those patients who were positively linked to the TMI accident area were then processed through the Penn State Institute for Personalized Medicine to determine genetic makeup of the cancer.
“While most thyroid cancers are sporadic, meaning they happen without clear reasons, exposure to radiation has been shown to change the molecular makeup of the cancer, according to the researchers. The researchers observed an increase in the genetic mutation caused by exposure to low-dose radiation in the at-risk group and a decrease in the incidence of sporadic thyroid cancer, identified by a specific genetic mutation known as BRAF. The BRAF mutation is typically not present in the radiation-induced types of thyroid cancer.
“The study indicates that these observations are consistent with other radiation-exposed populations. In the control group, 83% of patients had the BRAF mutation. The BRAF mutation was found in only 53% of patients in the at-risk group. In the at-risk group, there was also a rise in other molecular markers seen in radiation induced thyroid cancer, the researchers added.”
So, this is yet another example of the way that nuclear energy is probably not the safest (or most economical) way to go about providing people with electricity.
Goldenberg continued: “While no single marker can determine whether an individual tumor is radiation-induced, these data support the possibility that radiation released from TMI altered the molecular profile of thyroid cancers in the population surrounding the plant.”
The researchers are now planning to expand the work to include patients from other regional hospitals, to try and determine if the correlation is true on the larger scale as well.
The new research is detailed in a paper published as a supplement to the latest issue of the journal Laryngoscope.
The highest incidence of cancer, looking across 60 years, was among those who were children when they were exposed. This is not news. The surprise is that in this group, females suffered twice as much cancer across their lives than did males.
The difference between male and female, with males more resistant to radiation harm, is measurable in all the age-of-exposure cohorts, even into old age
For every two men exposed in adulthood who died of cancer, three women died of cancer
Females Exposed to Nuclear Radiation Are Far Likelier Than Males to Suffer Harm http://www.passblue.com/2017/07/05/females-exposed-to-nuclear-radiation-are-far-likelier-than-males-to-suffer-harm/, by Mary Olson • July 5, 2017 • The new nuclear weapons ban treaty, to be most likely adopted by the United Nations General Assembly this week, arises from hope for our future. The negotiations for the treaty have elevated new information about the damage from ionizing radiation to the world stage. That is exactly where it needs to be heard.
More cancers are derived from radiation than national regulators now report. They may not be aware that both age-at-exposure and one’s sex determine how much harm we suffer from radiation.
Women exposed to ionizing radiation during childhood suffer from cancer at a rate 10 times higher than predicted by traditional models used by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The models assume that “Reference Man” represents us all. Invented to simplify calculations, Reference Man is 25 to 30 years old, weighs 154 pounds, is 5 feet 6 inches tall, “Caucasian and has a Western European or North American” lifestyle.
There has never been a pause as more than 2,000 atomic tests since 1945 have been spreading radioactivity worldwide and hundreds of nuclear factories have proliferated. No one asked if Reference Man is an appropriate stand-in for all of humanity and radiation harm.
It turns out that adult males are hurt by radiation, but they are significantly more resistant than their mothers, sisters, wives or daughters. Use of Reference Man masks gendered impacts and therefore systematically underreports radiation harm.
My first paper on radiation, published in 2011, “Atomic Radiation Is More Harmful to Women,” answers a simple question from a woman who raised her hand at one of my public lectures in North Carolina a year earlier, asking, “Does radiation exposure harm me more than a man?” She did not mean in pregnancy; she meant her own body.
I was shocked. That was 2010; in decades of work on radioactive waste policy, I had never heard of gender as a factor in radiation harm. I could not even attempt an answer. When the literature yielded nothing, my mentor, Rosalie Bertell, suggested I look at the numbers myself. Bertell was a mathematician and a recipient of a Right Livelihood Award, which is called an alternative to the Nobel prizes. Bertell devoted her life to communities hurt by radiation, including the ones she pointed me to in order to examine the data.
Only one large data set includes all ages and both genders exposed together to a single flash of gamma and neutron radiation: the survivors of the US nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. They survived in shelters or other shielding amid the first horrific years. Sixty years of data on cancer incidences and fatality among the survivors — called the Hibakusha — was published by the US National Academy of Science in 2006.
I regret that this data even exists — it was my government that used the first nuclear bombs on cities full of people, and I certainly wish they had not. I nonetheless use the numbers. They hold a message for humanity: gender matters in the atomic age. That does not make it right.
The highest incidence of cancer, looking across 60 years, was among those who were children when they were exposed. This is not news. The surprise is that in this group, females suffered twice as much cancer across their lives than did males.
The difference between male and female, with males more resistant to radiation harm, is measurable in all the age-of-exposure cohorts, even into old age — the difference between genders is smaller when adults are exposed rather than when they are children.
For every two men exposed in adulthood who died of cancer, three women died of cancer. A 50 percent difference in the rate of cancer death from radiation exposure in adulthood is not insignificant to most female readers! Indeed, this finding is changing my own behavior in fieldwork.
The question, Why is gender a factor?, is waiting for researchers to tackle. A team lead by David Richardson in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 2016 showed that the A-bomb cancer data mirrors the outcomes of many smaller radiation exposures over time, adding up to the same exposure level as the Japanese survivors.
We are all getting these smaller radiation exposures.
The 10-females-to-1-male ratio cited here is the comparison of cancer outcomes from the youngest female survivors versus the 25- to 30-year-old males: the group that underpins Reference Man. This dramatic order-of-magnitude difference in biological research is like a siren blaring: pay attention!
It is time to retire Reference Man. Any level that is set for public exposure to radiation should be based on little girls. When we protect them, everyone is better protected. Unless we protect girls, our collective future is at stake.
The radiation and gender “siren” has not been heard widely, but it has been heard. In 2014, I was honored to present my findings at the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Consequences of Nuclear Weapons and exhilarated to read the draft treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, where one basis for the need for the new treaty is the disproportionate harm to women and girls from ionizing radiation.
The treaty falls within the jurisdiction of humanitarian law, which includes the most human activity of all: making babies, from which flow future generations. For these countless people to come, I celebrate that the news on radiation has been heard at the UN as it takes the next vital step of voting on a new nuclear-ban treaty.
Climate change’s brutal toll on Africa, newsroom, 9 Jul 17 United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund The vast majority of child migrants uprooted by violence, poverty and climate change remain in Africa, write UNICEF’s Lachlan Forsyth and Patrick Rose
The vast majority of child migrants uprooted by violence, poverty and climate change remain in Africa, according to a new report by child rights organisation UNICEF.
It is a bitter irony that the countries that have done the least to cause climate change are going to suffer the most. Countries that have minuscule carbon footprints are going to be the first to suffer the consequences of flooding, drought and displacement.
In West and Central Africa, the impact of climate change will be especially severe, with the region set to experience a 3 to 4 degree rise in temperature this century – more than one and a half times higher than anywhere else on the planet.
For the millions of people living in this vast region, longer droughts and intense storms will make farming and herding more difficult, and people will be forced to seek a better life.
Already, children account for more than half of the 12 million West and Central African people on the move each year. Contrary to many opinions, 75 percent of them remain in sub-Saharan Africa, with fewer than one in five heading to Europe.
This current wave of migrants is just the start of a swelling humanitarian crisis. Migration involving children and young people is likely to increase due to rapid population growth and urbanisation, climate change, inequitable economic development, and persistent conflict.
Poverty is a powerful driver of migration in West and Central Africa. Countries with high levels of poverty are more likely to be a source of migration as people look to improve their lot in life. In interviews conducted by UNICEF, migrants describe the feeling of ‘having nothing to lose,’ aware that by migrating they are taking a risk, but it is a gamble that might pay off.
Helene is one of them. She is 14 years old, holding a sign saying “I am a child, and not a commodity.”……..
With drought and temperatures intensifying in West and Central Africa, tensions in accessing scarce resources for cattle are also increasing hostilities in many rural areas, pushing greater numbers of people towards cities. But with more than 100 million people living in coastal cities less than one metre above sea level, even conservative estimates of a sea-level rise could result in the forced displacement of millions of climate refugees as people seek safety for their families and children.
For organisations like UNICEF, the challenges are enormous and complex. Aid money can only fix so much, when monumental societal changes are required also. Until the root causes of poverty are addressed, and solutions provided in the form of economic opportunities, access to health care and access to quality education, people are likely to continue to take dangerous risks migrating for better opportunities.
Unless the long-term planning of governments and civil society is equipped to anticipate these climate shocks and subsequent migration, the unmitigated impact of these forces will create detrimental outcomes for children across the region.
Mr Oldham said for years, anti-independence leaders had stayed away from the commemorations for the victims of the French nuclear weapons tests.
To mark the 51st anniversary of the first test, the president Edouard Fritch sent a minister and in a letter advised Mr Oldham that France was broadening its compensation offer.
Mr Oldham said for years there were undertakings from the French state which were barely followed up.
He also said the gravity of the aftermath of the tests was sinking in and politicians from all camps have used the nuclear issue in their recent campaigns.
“We have been here for so long and we know politicians so well that all I’m awaiting from them is some concrete action,” he said. Roland Oldham said he would like to have dates for when previously rejected claims would be reconsidered as well as recognition of the lasting health problems now emerging among the veterans’ children.
Guardian 29th June 2017, The government must reverse its opposition to new building regulations that
ensure homes, hospitals and schools do not overheat as the number of deadly
heatwaves rises, according to its official climate change advisers. The
Committee on Climate Change (CCC) recommended the new regulations in 2015
but ministers rejected the advice, citing a commitment to “reduce net
regulation on homebuilders”.
Without action, the number of people dying as
a result of heat is expected to more than triple to 7,000 a year by 2040,
the CCC warns in its annual report on the UK’s pr ogress on tackling global
warming. Earlier in June, Britain experienced its longest period with
temperatures above 30C since 1976. Heatwaves are known killers in the UK
and the number of hot days is rising. On the hottest day of the year in
2016 there were almost 400 extra deaths, while a heatwave in 2006 led to
680 people dying and another in 2003 contributed to the deaths of about
2,000 people. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/29/failure-to-update-building-regulations-could-triple-heatwave-deaths-by-2040
It’s essentially the same as a bill passed earlier this year by the House. But the initial bill failed to be scheduled for a vote to pass out of the Senate Commerce, Labor and Sports Committee before an early April deadline.
Since then, three Democratic state senators from the west side of the state have introduced a new Senate bill that was scheduled to be discussed on Wednesday in an executive session of the same Senate committee. But the executive session was canceled after a hearing on another bill ran long.
Now the committee is unlikely to meet again this session as the Legislature works to pass a budget by Friday, making chances slim that the bill will advance this year. But the introduction of the new bill signals continued interest by lawmakers in the issue.
Sen. Karen Keiser, D-Kent, introduced the new Hanford worker bill, SB 5940, out of concern for worker safety after the partial collapse of Hanford tunnel storing highly radioactive waste was discovered in May, according to her staff. Sen. Steve Conway, D-Tacoma, and Sen. Guy Palumbo, D-Maltby, also are sponsors.
The breach in the tunnel resulted in an emergency order for more than 3,000 workers to shelter in place, some for hours, before it was determined that no airborne radioactive material had been released. No one was injured.
But concern remains because of aging infrastructure at Hanford, some dating to the 1940s, while the Department of Energy is expected to continue cleanup of radioactive and hazardous chemical contamination at the nuclear reservation for decades to come. Hanford produced plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons programs from World War II through the Cold War.
Proving a worker compensation claim can be impossible for workers, when even DOE may not know precisely what workers are exposed to at Hanford, said workers and former workers who testified at hearings on HB 1723.
The state Department of Labor and Industries requires proof that an exposure to chemical vapors or other hazardous chemical or radioactive materials at Hanford caused a worker’s illness.
But the original bill that passed the House, HB 1723, and the new Senate bill, SB 5940, would require the state agency to presume that a wide range of illnesses were caused by working at Hanford. A worker would have to be assigned to just one eight-hour shift anywhere at Hanford to be covered.
DOE, which is self-insured and hires a contractor to administer worker claims, could rebut the presumption that disease was caused by Hanford exposure with evidence about a worker’s health, including smoking, weight, lifestyle, hereditary factors or exposure from other activities.
Covered diseases would include a wide range of cancers, respiratory disease, any heart problems experienced within 24 hours of an exposure, and neurological disease. The coverage would continue for a worker’s lifetime.
The Washington Self-Insurers Association opposed the bill, pointing out that one eight-hour shift on a site half the size of Rhode Island would entitle a worker to a presumption of coverage for life.
Repeated radiation warnings go unheeded at sensitive Idaho nuclear plant Center fr Public Integrity 29 June 17
“…….Key findings
The chairman of a safety committee at Idaho National Laboratory wrote a memo in 2009 warning that damaged plutonium plates could endanger workers. He said in a legal deposition that he shared it with 19 people at the lab, including high-ranking managers.
The managers ignored most of his recommendations, he said. An accident occurred in which 16 workers inhaled plutonium dust particles. Two minutes beforehand, a supervisor who had been warned about the risks relayed an order for it to proceed.
Three workers sued, claiming their inhalations brought injury and illness. Though BEA, the contractor running the lab, disagreed about the severity of the exposures, it settled the suits confidentially and then petitioned the federal government to pay its legal fees and settlement costs.
Word of this incident reached local newspapers, but there were other radiation exposures at the lab — both before and after this incident — that did not attract public notice. Despite work stoppages and re-training of workers, unsafe conditions persisted, according to government reports.
The year of the plutonium-exposure accident, BEA received 92 percent of all the profit its contract made available — $17.1 million. In 2012 the Energy Department withheld $500,000 in profits from BEA for radiation events, but later gave all of the money back to the company. In March 2014, the Department of Energy extended BEA’s contract to operate Idaho National Laboratory for five more years without holding a competition……..https://apps.publicintegrity.org/nuclear-negligence/repeated-warnings/
Nuclear Weapons Site Alarms Shut Off, Scientists Inhale Uranium, Most scientists were not told of risks for months after 2014 incident; investigation shows more mishaps at Nevada and New Mexico nuclear sites, Scientific American By Patrick Malone, Peter Cary, R. Jeffrey Smith, The Center for Public Integrity on June 27, 2017
At the nation’s top nuclear weapons labs and plants, safety mishaps have imperiled life and limb, and hindered national security operations. This Scientific American story is part of a one-year investigation by reporters at the Center for Public Integrity that reveals many problems and little accountability. In addition to the Nevada accidents, a near-fission calamity in 2011 at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico led to an exodus of nuclear safety engineers and a four-year shutdown of operations crucial to the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Yet penalties for these incidents were relatively light, and many of the firms that run these facilities were awarded tens of millions of dollars in profits—or even new contracts—after major safety lapses occurred.
Not a clue.
The government scientists didn’t know they were breathing in radioactive uranium at the time it was happening. In fact, most didn’t learn about their exposure for months, long after they returned home from the nuclear weapons research center where they had inhaled it.
The entire event was characterized by sloppiness, according to a quiet federal investigation, with multiple warnings issued and ignored in advance, and new episodes of contamination allowed to occur afterward. All of this transpired without public notice by the center.
Here’s how it happened: In April and May 2014, an elite group of 97 nuclear researchers from as far away as the U.K. gathered in a remote corner of Nye County, Nev., at the historic site where the U.S. had exploded hundreds of its nuclear weapons. With nuclear bomb testing ended, the scientists were using a device they called Godiva at the National Criticality Experiments Research Center to test nuclear pulses on a smaller and supposedly safe scale.
But as the technicians prepared for their experiments that spring—under significant pressure to clear a major backlog of work and to operate the machine at what a report called Godiva’s “upper energy range”—they committed several grievous errors, according to government reports.
The machine had been moved to Nevada nine years earlier from Los Alamos, N.M. But a shroud, descriptively called Top Hat, which should have covered the machine and prevented the escape of any loose radioactive particles, was not reinstalled when it was reassembled in 2012.
Also, because Godiva’s bursts tended to set off multiple radiation alarms in the center, the experimenters decided to switch the alarm system off. But because the alarms were connected to the ventilation and air filter system for the room, those were shut off as well. The only ventilation remaining was a small exhaust fan that vented into an adjacent anteroom where researchers gathered before and after experiments.
On June 16, 2014, a month after the experiments were completed, technicians doing routine tests made an alarming discovery—radioactive particles were in the anteroom. They then checked the room holding Godiva, and found radiation 20 times more intense there. The Nevada site’s managers, who work for a group of private, profit-making contractors—like most U.S. nuclear weapons personnel—ordered the rooms decontaminated. But they didn’t immediately check exposures among the scientists and researchers who had gathered for the tests, many of whom had already gone back to their own labs.
None had any clue about the mishap until two months after the experiments, on July 17, when one of them—a researcher from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapons lab in California—got the results from his routine radiation monitoring. His urine tested positive for exposure to enriched uranium particles.
National Security Technologies,, LLC (NSTec), the lead contractor that runs the Nevada site, subsequently collected urine specimens from its own workers who’d been in the room with Godiva during the experiments. It discovered three of its technicians also had inhaled highly-enriched uranium.
News of trouble spread–but only among the scientists and their bosses, who were accustomed to a shroud of official secrecy covering their work. No public announcement was made. According to an initial U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) investigative report dated April 28, 2015, calls eventually went out to test the 97 people present for the Godiva experiments. But for reasons that remain unclear the testing went very slowly, and not until 2016 did the DoE state that 31 were discovered to have inhaled uranium.
In a letter last summer to the Los Alamos and Nevada lab directors, National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Frank Klotz suggested that the employees’ radiation doses were not large—at the high end, they were roughly equivalent to 13 chest x-rays. But once inhaled, uranium particles can keep emitting radiation for years, and so they pose an added cancer risk. Klotz’s letter deemed the exposures “safety-significant and preventable.” It could have been even worse, of course, given the absence of any timely warning.
LAB OPERATIONS RIDDLED WITH ERRORS
The four key national facilities involved in the underlying experimentation—Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore, the Nevada Test Site and Sandia National Laboratory—are among the U.S.’s premier scientific labs. They collectively employ more than 26,000 people engaged in cutting-edge and often dangerous work, governed by myriad nuclear safety regulations, with two major contract enforcement mechanisms meant to inflict financial pain when needed on the private corporations that operate them.
And yet in this case, and in others like it, not only were the labs’ procedures and responses riddled with errors, but even after attention was called to these incidents, other safety mishaps occurred. And the financial penalties imposed by the government didn’t seem to have a major impact on the labs’ conduct.
A review by The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) of more than 60 safety mishaps at 10 nuclear weapons–related federal sites that were flagged in special, internal reports to Washington, along with dozens of interviews of officials and experts, revealed a protective system that is weak, if not truly dysfunctional: Fines are frequently reduced or waived while contractors are awarded large profits. Auditors say labs and production plants are overseen by an inadequately staffed NNSA and DoE, which as a result largely rely on the contractors to police themselves.
The CPI probe, partly based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveals a system in which extra profit is awarded under a rating profile that persistently places higher priority on the nuclear weapons labs’ national security “mission” than on worker protections, putting production far ahead of safety. Experts say it is a practice in keeping with a culture of urgent, no-holds-barred work that took root in the nuclear weapons complex during World War II. These production pressures flow down to the highly secured rooms where workers labor with special clearances, routinely handling highly toxic and explosive materials……..
Trump Administration Delays Protections for Construction and Shipyard Workers, Weakens Beryllium Rule, UCS, KATHLEEN REST, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR | JUNE 26, 2017, More bad news for workers coming from the Trump administration. Last Friday (June 23), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced its proposal to “modify” (read “weaken”) protections for workers exposed to beryllium in construction and shipyards.
Beryllium is a very dangerous material. It’s a carcinogen and the cause of chronic beryllium disease, a devastating illness. There’s no real rescue from this slow, incurable, and often fatal lung disease.
While it leaves in place the permissible exposure limit (PEL) for beryllium (0.2ug/m3), OSHA now proposes to eliminate the “ancillary provisions” of the rule that would extend certain protections to construction and shipyard workers. Protections like exposure monitoring, a written exposure control plan, personal protective equipment, and medical surveillance. These “ancillary provisions” are actually basic public health protections for workers dealing with a really hazardous material….. http://blog.ucsusa.org/kathleen-rest/trump-administration-delays-protections-for-construction-and-shipyard-workers-weakens-beryllium-rule
Fury as nuclear power plant holds sexy bikini contest to pick new female intern, A NUCLEAR power station has sparked anger after holding a raunchy bikini contest to choose its new female intern. Express UK , By TOM PARFITT, Jun 27, 2017 The Temelin Power Station, in the Czech Republic, launched the competition to recruit young women based solely on their bikini bodies.
Officials selected 10 female candidates and then organised a bizarre photoshoot in one of the station’s cooling towers.
The sexy shots were then posted online, with fans asked to vote for the hottest to get the internship job.
But bosses were forced to apologise and scrap the unique recruitment process after a social media backlash.
Human rights lawyer Petra Havlikova said: “The competition is absolutely outside the bounds of ethics.
“In 2017, I find it incredible that someone could gain a professional advantage for their good looks.”…..
INSIDE THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY: PARANOIA AND STIFLED WORKBased on interviews with 47 current and former EPA employees, a new report paints a picture of a deeply divided and stymied agency. Pacific Standard, FRANCIE DIEP, JUN 20, 2017 A new report paints the Environmental Protection Agency under Scott Pruitt’s leadership in a particularly bad light.
Among the allegations from the report, which relies on anonymous sources: that Pruitt, despite his role as EPA head, has almost never met with environmental groups, and is, in fact, hamstringing his own agency’s law enforcement and regional offices; that Pruitt has banned employees from taking pen and paper into meetings out of fear of information being leaked; and that Pruitt’s office suppressed plans for an agency Earth Daypicnic because it seemed too combative.
“Beneath the veneer of Pruitt’s public statements and appearances, I think there’s a lot of dysfunction,” says Christopher Sellers, a history professor at Stony Brook University who interviewed 32 current and former EPA employees for the report, which was released publicly today by the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, an activist group of university professors. EDGI organized shortly after President Donald Trump’s election in a response to what founders saw as anti-science sentiment in the administration.
The new EDGI report indicates there’s widespread demoralization and dissent within the EPA. That’s not surprising. Trump has long called for policies that are sure to be unpopular at the agency. While running for office, he vowed to shutter the agency. Since then, he has blamed environmental regulation for killing jobs; worked to repeal EPArules; and, in his proposed budget, called for a 31 percent cut to the agency’s funding, which would likely eliminate thousands of jobs. Pruitt, meanwhile, has denied the reality of climate change, then later said he thought the Earth is warming, but wasn’t sure how much human activity had to do with it. What the new report offers are fresh details about Pruitt’s internal decisions and how they may already be affecting the agency’s work.
For the report, Sellers worked with seven other academics to interview 10 current and 37 former employees of the EPA between December of 2016 and May of this year. They recruited their sources through EPA alumni groups and by asking people they were already in contact with to refer them to others. They did not reveal their sources’ identities to Pacific Standard. Requests for comment from the EPA were not returned.
EDGI’s work paints a picture of an imbalanced agency that favors certain industries and constituents over others and is stymied by distrust between its head and his staff. Indeed, some doubt whether Pruitt wants the EPA to work at all. “I think the plan is to get rid of EPA,” one employee told the EDGI interviewers. “I think this is just phase one.”
ONLY SOME STAKEHOLDERS
Pruitt hasn’t been around for his staff, interviewees told EDGI. Few of the interviewees had seen him in the Washington, D.C., office. Instead, the sources said Pruitt seems to travel frequently and to pay attention to a select group of stakeholders: He’s gone to meet the governors of Western states, farmers, and coal miners, for example. He decorated headquarters with posters showing him shaking hands with miners. In late March, Trump visited the EPA headquarters to sign an executive order rewriting the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan and starting the process of lifting a moratorium on coal leasing on federal land. He did so with Pruitt at his side and several coal miners surrounding him. “You know what it says, right?” Trump told the miners. “You’re going back to work.”…..https://psmag.com/environment/paranoia-and-stifled-work-at-epa
Why do nuclear bombs leave little longtime radiation, while nuclear reactor meltdowns could last for centuries? Well, for starters, there is the amount of fuel involved.
Little Boy (the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) contained 64 kilograms of highly enriched (weapons grade) uranium. Of this, less than a kilogram actually underwent nuclear fission, producing fission products including short-lived but dangerous isotopes, and also producing the neutron radiation “flash” that induced secondary radioactivity in some materials that absorbed those neutrons.
In contrast, an RBMK reactor like the one that blew up in Chernobyl contains 100–150 fuel assemblies, each with over 100 kg of partially enriched uranium. So right there, the amount of fuel in the reactor is several hundred times more than the amount of fission fuel in a nuclear bomb. And whereas a nuclear bomb uses its fuel rather inefficiently (the explosive fission process takes place in milliseconds), a reactor does a more thorough job consuming its fuel over the course of several months before a fuel assembly is replaced.
Furthermore, the fission byproducts remain in the fuel assembly. Depending on the reactor design, these may, in fact, include materials a lot worse than the uranium fuel, such as weapons grade plutonium. Then there are also all the irradiated parts of the reactor that have been continuously exposed to radiation, resulting in secondary radioactivity and more nasty byproducts.
When a nuclear bomb explodes, it is dispersed over a large area. In case of a reactor accident, some of the fuel is dispersed, but a lot of it remains in place, at the reactor site. So this represents a concentration of radioactive materials that just does not occur in case of a bomb. And because all of it sits on the ground, there is the chance of leakage, e.g., into the water table, contaminating the water supply of a large region.
A nuclear reactor site may also contain other sources of radiation. For instance, one of the biggest concerns after the Fukushima accident was due to spent fuel pools located near the meltdown sites.
Having said all that, let us not forget that the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone became possibly the biggest accidental wildlife sanctuary in Europe, if not the world. That is because while radioactive contamination takes its toll, it’s nothing compared to what humans do. Remove most of the humans and even if you add a substantial amount of radiation, Nature thrives.
Heatwaves to soar above the hot air of climate politics, Future generations will fear, rather than fend for, the global environment.Nature , 20 June 2017 “……… on planet Earth the heat is rising. Britain was hit by a heatwave at the weekend that forecasters say could last for weeks, and temperatures in California are predicted to reach record levels in a few days’ time. The world is cooking and we should anticipate more of the same.
From extreme rainfall to rising sea levels, global warming is expected to wreak havoc on human lives. Sometimes, the most straightforward impact — the warming itself — is overlooked. Yet heat kills. The body, after all, has evolved to work in a fairly narrow temperature range. Our sweat-based cooling mechanism is crude; beyond a certain combination of high temperature and humidity, it fails. To be outside and exposed to such an environment for any length of time soon becomes a death sentence.
And that environment is spreading. A death zone is creeping over the surface of Earth, gaining a little more ground each year. As an analysis published this week in Nature Climate Change shows, since 1980, these temporary hells on Earth have opened up hundreds of times to take life (C. Mora et al.Nature Clim. Changehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3322; 2017). At present, roughly one-third of the world’s population lives for about three weeks a year under such conditions. If greenhouse-gas emissions continue to rise unchecked, that figure could climb, exposing almost three-quarters of the population by the end of the century.
The analysis also reveals that even aggressive reductions in emissions will lead the number of deadly heatwaves to soar in the coming decades. Cities including London, New York, Tokyo and Sydney have all seen citizens die from the effects of excessive heat. By 2100, people in the tropics could be living in these death zones for entire summers. It’s true that warmer winters will save lives further north. And those living in urban environments may find ways to adapt to the new norm of extreme heat. But, if the researchers are correct, the politics of Pruitt and those who try to hold him to account will seem quaint and anachronistic to our grandchildren. For they will live in a world in which most will see the environment less as something to protect, and more as something to protect themselves and their families from.http://www.nature.com/news/heatwaves-to-soar-above-the-hot-air-of-climate-politics-1.22164
