PERSONAL STORIES « nuclear-news

The cover-up of workers’ illnesss in radioactively polluted clean-up of Kingston coal ash spill

A Legacy of Contamination, How the Kingston coal ash spill unearthed a nuclear nightmare, Grist By Austyn Gaffney on Dec 15, 2020 This story was published in partnership with the Daily Yonder.

………………………………….The apparent mixing of fossil fuel and nuclear waste streams underscores the long relationship between the Kingston and Oak Ridge facilities………… .

……….In 2017, a former chemist named Dan Nichols stumbled upon a news story that revealed the existence of the additional health problems TVA feared. High levels of uranium had been measured in the urine of a former cleanup worker named Craig Wilkinson. Like Thacker, Wilkinson had worked the night shift. After dredges piped the coal ash back onshore, Wilkinson used heavy equipment to scoop, flip, and dry the wet ash along the Ball Field.

Although Wilkinson worked at the Kingston site for less than a year, he quickly developed health issues, including chronic sinus infections and breathing problems that eventually led to a double-lung transplant. Frustrated by his sudden decline in health, Wilkinson shelled out over $1,000 for a toxicology test because he wanted to know what occupational hazards might be lingering in his body.

After reading Wilkinson’s story, Nichols sat stunned. Though he was not associated with the spill, he’d been unable to shake his obsession with the Kingston disaster. Nichols had worked as a Memphis-based field chemist for a wastewater technology company, and he was used to studying lab reports on industrial water supplies and samples. For years he’d been trying to solve a mystery that no one else seemed to be aware of: why Kingston regulators deleted and then altered a state-sanctioned report showing extremely high levels of radiation at the cleanup site.

Roughly a month after the spill, Nichols read a Duke University press release stating that ash samples collected at Kingston by a team led by Vengosh, the geochemist, showed radium levels well above those typically found in coal ash. Nichols knew that the state environmental regulator, the Tennessee Department for Environment and Conservation, or TDEC, was also testing soil and ash samples at the site. After seeing Vengosh’s high radium readings, he wondered if TDEC’s report would also show high levels of either radium or uranium. (Radium is a decay element of uranium.) Later that spring, Nichols visited TDEC’s website and discovered the test results.

“I opened it up and went to uranium, and it was just off the charts,” Nichols recalled. In a 2020 affidavit, Nichols reported that these levels were “extremely high so as to be alarming.” At least 27 soil and ash samples were collected from at least 20 different sites surrounding Kingston beginning January 6, 2009. The levels ranged from 84 parts per million (ppm) to 2,000 ppm. The average level was over 500 ppm, as much as 50 times the typical uranium content found in coal ash.

The next morning, when Nichols slumped back into his computer chair and refreshed TDEC’s website, he saw that the report had been changed. The high uranium readings had plummeted. Now the average uranium levels in the ash were 2.88 ppm, a tenth of the typical uranium content found in coal ash and illogically, below levels naturally occurring in soil. Luckily, Nichols had downloaded the unaltered report the night before.

A month later, Nichols sent the two lab reports to one of the attorneys representing Tennessee residents affected by the spill in a lawsuit they’d brought against TVA. According to Nichols, the lawyers weren’t interested. Nevertheless, Nichols was determined to find more proof of the unusually high levels of on-site radiation. In between cutting hay and spraying weeds on his family farm, he spent years poring over information online about TVA, coal ash, and uranium before he stumbled across Wilkinson’s story.

Back in 2014, Wilkinson’s urine tested for unusually high levels of both mercury and uranium. The mercury is more easily explained: The most common cause of mercury contamination, according to the EPA, is coal-fired power plant emissions, which account for 44 percent of all man-made mercury pollution. The 2008 spill released 29 times the mercury reported at the Kingston site for the entire decade before it, and TVA documents show high levels of additional legacy mercury were present in the Clinch River and could have migrated into the Emory. Today, Wilkinson has symptoms attributable to methylmercury poisoning including blurry vision, fatigue, a hearing impairment, memory loss, and loss of coordination that caused him to fall out of the machines he operated until retiring on disability in 2015.

But most shocking to Nichols was the high level of uranium in Wilkinson’s body — it was 10 times the U.S. average, and identical to the median levels that one study found in workers exposed to the substance. Prolonged occupational exposure to uranium is strongly linked to chronic kidney disease, which Wilkinson suffers from. Because Wilkinson’s toxicology results were taken four years after he left Kingston, they likely show lower uranium levels than what he and other cleanup workers initially had.

Wilkinson’s results left no doubt in Nichols’ mind that the original uranium readings he’d saved were significant. A reporter for the Knoxville News-Sentinel, Jamie Satterfield, contacted him after the report he saved showed up in court proceedings. Satterfield published a story about the altered uranium readings in May of this year.

In response to her story, TDEC told the News-Sentinel that its updated uranium readings, which plummeted by 98 percent, were due to a change in the sampling method used for the tests. (Satterfield also reported that radium levels had been lowered between the initial TDEC report Nichols downloaded and the updated one; the department attributed this to a “data entry error.”) In an email response to Grist and the Daily Yonder, a TDEC spokesperson elaborated that the sampling lab, which was neither staffed nor supervised by TDEC, “discovered there were interferences in the analysis of soil and ash samples for uranium” and subsequently changed the method of analysis from one EPA-approved protocol to another. The new results were then published without public notice of the alteration.

“Changing lab reports is a very serious thing,” Nichols said. “But I can assure you data entry errors don’t cause a man to test for unusually high levels of uranium. That’s [TDEC’s] big problem.”

Unbeknownst to Nichols, Russell Johnson, the district attorney with jurisdiction over Roane County, where Kingston is located, had informed TDEC’s commissioner in 2017 that he was beginning a criminal probe into the Kingston cleanup. “I am deeply concerned with the apparent intentional conduct of the cleanup contractors and their supervisors, actions that took place in Roane County, conduct that may indeed have caused serious bodily injury or possibly even death to a number of people,” Johnson wrote in a letter to TDEC.

In concert with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Johnson began investigating whether TVA or its contractors “suppressed information” as part of the coverup alleged in the 2013 worker lawsuit against Jacobs. They now have Nichols’ evidence as well. But despite this ongoing investigation, it’s unclear if workers will ever learn for certain whether or not they were exposed to dangerous substances besides the coal ash itself. (Bob Edwards, an assistant district attorney working under Johnson, told Grist and the Daily Yonder that the district attorney’s office could not comment on a pending investigation.)………………….https://grist.org/justice/tva-kingston-coal-ash-spill-nuclear/

December 17, 2020 Posted by Christina Macpherson | employment, health, incidents, investigative journalism, Legal, PERSONAL STORIES, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, Uranium, wastes | Leave a comment

How a US defense secretary came to support the abolition of nuclear weapons

How a US defense secretary came to support the abolition of nuclear weapons, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, By William J. Perry, December 7, 2020 Many people have asked me how a former secretary of defense could support the abolition of nuclear weapons. This paper is a partial answer to that question, in the form of a personal history of how my thinking on nuclear weapons has evolved from Hiroshima to the present time.

When we reached the 75th anniversary of Hiroshima, I was inspired to think back to that fateful day and to my own reaction when I heard the news. Back then, I was relieved that the terrible war would finally end, and I was intensely curious about how this new bomb worked. But I was not thinking about what the long-term consequences of such a bomb might be. That would come later.

A few months after Hiroshima, I turned 18, joined the Army’s Corps of Engineers, and in time became a part of the Army of Occupation of Japan. I saw first-hand the once-great city of Tokyo reduced to rubble by our firebombs. Then I was sent to Okinawa, the scene of the last great battle of World War II, a battle so fierce that only 10 percent of the 100,000 Japanese solders defending the island survived; the rest either were killed in battle or committed suicide. There was hardly a building left standing in the capital city of Naha. The Japanese and Okinawans that I worked with were still numb with the horror and shock of what they had experienced.

What I saw in Tokyo and Okinawa totally removed any view that I had of the glory of war and convinced me that humanity could not continue its practice of engulfing the world in war every generation. The devastation I witnessed in Tokyo had been done with thousands of airplanes and tens of thousands of bombs over a period of years; equivalent devastation could have been inflicted on Tokyo with one plane, one nuclear bomb, in one instant. Similarly, the deaths and destruction in the Battle of Okinawa had taken place over several months and required an American landing force equivalent to what was employed on D-Day in Europe, and the Okinawa fighting cost tens of thousands of American casualties. The Japanese forces in Okinawa could have been defeated with one nuclear bomb, in one instant.

Einstein said that with the advent of the nuclear bomb, everything has changed, save our way of thinking. But what I witnessed in Tokyo and Okinawa began to change my way of thinking. It led me to believe that we would have to completely reconsider the role of war, which had been with us since the beginning of history. As deadly as World War II was even without nuclear bombs, a war where Hiroshima-type bombs were widely used would be a far greater catastrophe. I concluded that the only reasonable goal of our nuclear weapons should be to deter the use of nuclear weapons.

Then in 1952, the US tested a thermonuclear bomb that unleashed a destructive force 1,000 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A few years later the Soviet Union tested one even more powerful. Subsequently both the United States and the Soviet Union began deploying hydrogen bombs in their nuclear arsenals, most of them with a destructive power of 10 to 100 times the Hiroshima bomb. Each of our countries soon had the capability not only to destroy the other, but to actually create an extinction event, comparable to when a large asteroid struck the earth 66 million years ago, leading to the extinction of most animal species then living, including all dinosaurs. That extinction event was caused by a natural phenomenon. Now mankind has the power to cause its own extinction. This led me to conclude that the deterrence policies of the United States and the Soviet Union had to be completely foolproof. But even as I reached this conclusion, I feared that it might not be possible to achieve that result.

October of 1962, my fears were confirmed. At the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was managing an electronics laboratory in California and was called back to Washington to lead a small technical team whose job was to provide President Kennedy with a daily assessment of the operational readiness of the nuclear missiles the Soviet Union had deployed to Cuba. Kennedy’s military advisors were urging him to authorize military action against those missiles. Instead, he wanted to try to resolve the crisis through diplomacy, since he feared that any military action could easily escalate into a nuclear war. Still, he was prepared to take military action before the Soviet missiles became operational, so he was using our input to determine how many more days he had for diplomacy. With the intimate picture I was getting as the crisis unfolded, I believed that every day that I went into our analysis center was going to be my last day on Earth.

Against all odds, Kennedy and Khrushchev were able to reach an agreement before the missiles became operational, but it was a very close call. Kennedy later estimated the chances of the Cuban Missile Crisis ending in a nuclear catastrophe were one in three. But when he said that, he did not know that the Soviets had deployed in Cuba not only the medium-range nuclear missiles that were the cause of the crisis, but short-range nuclear missiles that were already operational. If our troops had invaded Cuba, they would have been decimated on the beachhead with nuclear weapons, and a general nuclear war would surely have followed.

We avoided that tragedy as much by good luck as by good management. But our governments learned the wrong lesson from the Cuban missile crisis. The United States concluded that it “won” because it had more nuclear weapons than the Soviet Union, so we worked to sustain and increase that lead. The Soviets concluded that they “lost” because they did not have enough nuclear weapons, so they began a major nuclear buildup. Both the United States and the Soviet Union apparently thought that more nuclear weapons would put them in a better position to “win” the next crisis. Before the resulting nuclear arms race had run its course, our planet had 70,000 nuclear weapons, and fissile material to build tens of thousands more—enough to obliterate each other and the rest of the planet 10 times over.

Both the United States and the Soviet Union were so focused on building nuclear bombs that neither considered the reality that, although neither Kennedy or Khrushchev wanted a nuclear war, we had almost blundered into one. Neither side focused on the unprecedented level of tragedy that such a war would have caused. But I saw that near-tragedy up close, and I learned a different lesson. I learned that even though our two leaders were doing everything they could to avoid a nuclear war, we came very close to having one—and our deterrence policy would not have stopped it…………..

Obama ran into a buzz saw when he tried to get New START ratified. He finally negotiated an agreement with the opposition in which Senate Republicans gave their approval of New START after Obama agreed to an extensive nuclear modernization program. That price was too high in my judgment; it now has the United States on the path of spending more than $1 trillion over 30 years to modernize weapons whose numbers we should instead be seeking to reduce. At that point, Obama stopped pursuing his “Prague agenda,” and the four statesmen who hade been pursuing nuclear abolition halted their joint efforts, too

I was profoundly disappointed at the failure of Obama’s initiative, but I decided that the problem was too grave for me to simply give up. If we could not abolish nuclear weapons at this time, at least we could take actions to lower their dangers. To encourage those actions I formed the William J. Perry Project to educate the public on nuclear dangers and to advocate to reduce those dangers. ………..

Over many decades in and around both the US and Russian defense establishments, my thinking has evolved, and I have come to strongly believe that it is time to start moving toward the abolition of nuclear weapons, and, until complete abolition can be achieved, to take the smaller but critically important steps spelled out in The Button to lower the risk of blundering into a nuclear war.

In January, Joe Biden will become the 46th president of the United States. He will face many daunting problems: the ongoing pandemic, the battered economy, and a deeply divided nation. All of these will demand his immediate attention, but he must also direct his attention to the entrenched nuclear policies that threaten to end our civilization. As he does so, this paper could be a guide to his thinking.https://thebulletin.org/premium/2020-12/how-a-us-defense-secretary-came-to-support-the-abolition-of-nuclear-weapons/?utm_source=Announcement&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Announcement12072020&utm_content=NuclearRisk_Perry_12072020

December 8, 2020 Posted by Christina Macpherson | PERSONAL STORIES, Reference, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The human impact of ”Trinity” and a thousand other nuuclear bomb tests on American soil

75 Years Later, Victims of Nuclear Bomb Tests on U.S. Soil Still Seek Justice, https://truthout.org/articles/75-years-later-victims-of-nuclear-bomb-tests-on-u-s-soil-still-seek-justice/, BY Satya Vatti, Globetrotter / Independent Media Institute, November 15, 2020 They thought the world was coming to an end,” Genoveva Peralta Purcella explains.

On July 16, 1945, the first-ever nuclear bomb was tested in New Mexico, in the Southwestern United States. The detonation was code-named “Trinity.” It is the day that would seal the fate of many Americans living in the surrounding areas for generations to come.

Seventy miles from what became known as ground zero—the Trinity test site—Genoveva’s family lived on a ranch just outside the village of Capitan in New Mexico. Genoveva was born the year after the blast. Now 74 years old, she solemnly recalls how her family remembers the day that would change their lives forever.

Genoveva’s sisters had come to visit their father and pregnant mother at the ranch. At precisely 5:30 a.m., as dawn broke, the sky suddenly went pitch dark. Having no other point of reference, they mistook the abnormally loud roaring and rumbling in the sky for thunder. The entire house began to shake. Fear-stricken, the family huddled together in a corner.

When the sky cleared, her father stepped outside the house and found himself being showered with a white powder. The powder was everywhere and covered everything around them. Nothing escaped it, not the cows the family had raised, or the vegetables in the garden, or the rainwater they stored in the absence of running water. Like other families who went through this experience, Genoveva’s family also dusted off the powder and consumed their vegetables and the stored water.

The blast produced so much energy that it incinerated everything it touched and formed a fireball that rose to more than 12 kilometers into the atmosphere. The fireball created ash that snowed over the communities surrounding the blast site. The people did not know it then, but this ash that covered thousands of square miles was the radioactive fallout from the explosion.

Dread gripped the communities in Tularosa Basin who either witnessed or experienced the phenomenon they could not make sense of. Meanwhile, the immediate reaction of the staff of the Manhattan Project, which created the bomb, was of “surprise, joy, and relief.”

Paul Pino, Genoveva’s cousin, who was born nine years after the Trinity blast, says that his family, which lived 33 miles from the blast site, was one of many who were unaware of what had transpired on that day. In the days and months leading up to the blast, U.S. government officials did not notify anyone who lived in the region about the imminent nuclear bomb test. Nobody in the Tularosa Basin was evacuated to safety.

In the aftermath of the nuclear test, officials began to cement a false narrative into the consciousness of the nation; the region was remote and uninhabited. Tens of thousands of people, in fact, lived in the Tularosa Basin in 1945. For a long time, the people of the basin believed that the blast was an ammunition explosion. “We were lied to by the government,” said Pino.

It takes 24,000 years for half of the radioactive plutonium used in the Trinity bomb to decay. The people of the region have inhaled and ingested radioactive particles for 75 years because of environmental contamination. Those in power refuse to accept responsibility and take any corrective action. To this day, there have been no cleanup efforts.

Radiation exposure has caused high rates of aggressive cancers, thyroid disease, infant mortality, and other health abnormalities in generations of families in the Tularosa Basin region. The scale of the health impact cannot be determined accurately as long-term epidemiological studies have only been undertaken recently. The findings of the latest research studies by the National Cancer Institute were published in September 2020 in the journal Health Physics.

“There were 10 of us; now only one is surviving,” Genoveva says, speaking of herself. She has lost everyone in her family to cancer.

In a country without universal health care, debt from medical expenses has brought economic ruin to the communities near the Trinity site. “All the pain and suffering we have had to endure, and not a speck of help from the government,” Pino says. “Meanwhile, it has spent trillions on thousands of nuclear weapons.”

Genoveva’s story is not an exceptional one. It is the story of tens of thousands of families in the United States.

More than 1,000 nuclear bomb tests have been conducted in the U.S. between 1945 and 1992. A total of 100 above-ground tests were conducted at the Nevada test site from 1951 to 1962. The winds carried radioactive fallout for thousands of kilometers. Hundreds of millions of people living in the U.S. have been exposed to varying levels of radiation over the years, unknown to them.

New Mexico was downwind of the Nevada test site, and the people living there continued to be exposed to radioactivity for decades after the initial exposure during the Trinity nuclear test.

People from the impacted communities founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium in 2005 to fight for justice for the survivors and their descendants. Tina Cordova, one of the group’s cofounders, was shocked to find out that a few of the impacted states neighboring New Mexico were receiving financial compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act since 1990. The communities in New Mexico, however, were left out of the act.

When asked why, Cordova responds with, “It is the billion-dollar question. I think we are being left out because we are mainly Mexican Hispanics, Natives, and Latinos. We are minorities and we are poor.”

Cordova herself is the fourth generation in her family to have cancer. She has joined with others like her to educate and organize the affected communities, to fight to establish the truth. “In their [the government’s] rush to bomb Japan, we were sacrificed in the process. We were enlisted in the service of our country, unknowing, unwilling, and remain uncompensated.”

November 16, 2020 Posted by Christina Macpherson | health, PERSONAL STORIES, Reference, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Hibakusha renew their push for the abolition of nuclear weapons

Atomic bomb survivors’ renewed push for the abolition of nuclear weapons, https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/1370/ Kita Yusuke

NHK World Correspondent, Yoshida Mayu, NHK World Correspondent, 13 Nov 20,

Today is a big, memorable day for us.”

Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor Abe Shizuko was reacting to the October 24 ratification of the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The accord will take effect in January – although none of the world’s nuclear powers are members.

Nevertheless, hibakusha, which is what the atomic bomb survivors are called in Japan, see the treaty as a victory for their cause. “I take pride in the fact that the decision is a result of the united little voices of individual hibakusha,” says 93-year-old Abe.

On August 6th, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb for the first time in human history. Its target was Hiroshima, where 18-year-old Abe was helping to dismantle buildings to prevent the spread of fires caused by air raids during World War Two. Abe was working just 1.5 kilometers away from ground zero. She suffered severe burns on the right side of her body and face, and has been through 18 surgeries.

“The operations were very painful and difficult. There wasn’t enough anesthetic back in those days, so doctors could not give me supplemental relief even if I started feeling pain. I tolerated the pain through a strong hope to restore my body,” Abe recalls.

The bomb left keloid scars on her face and the right side of her body. In photographs from when she was younger, Abe always looks down, or shows only her left side.

A-bomb survivors call the 10-year period following the world’s first atomic bombing “the blank decade.” That is because people who were injured had little to no medical or financial support. At the same time, they were exposed to severe prejudice and discrimination.

Abe says she was once nicknamed “Red Ogre” because of her scars. “My wound did not heal. My body weakened. I was in poverty. Many people stared at me only just to satisfy their curiosity, because they wanted to know what a hibakusha looked like. They did not feel sympathy for me. They bullied me. The suffering that I went through, and the emotional wound, will never go away.”

In 1956, Abe joined other atomic bomb survivors to form a delegation. They traveled to Tokyo to appeal to the then prime minister and government officials to offer relief for victims, and support their call for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Those efforts led to the establishment of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organization.

As the Cold War progressed, the hibakusha became disheartened. Even though they were speaking out about the need to eliminate nuclear weapons, the world was not listening. Nuclear experiments were being carried out repeatedly, and the arms race took off.

“It was really a difficult time for our campaign,” Abe remembers. “We felt as if we were yelling out while trying to survive in rough waves on a dark night.”

Abe carried a grudge against the US, but started to feel a change of heart almost 20 years after the bombing. In 1964, she went to the US and Europe for what was known as the Peace Pilgrimage. It was an opportunity for A-bomb survivors to speak about their personal experiences in front of audiences. Abe stayed at a private home with local hosts in the US, and she was deeply touched by their tender-heartedness.

“They listened attentively to my stories and said to me, ‘It must have been very hard for you. You’ve been through a lot. We’re so sorry for you,'” Abe recalls. “I realized we should never let anyone fall victim to nuclear weapons, regardless of what nationality you are. Americans or anybody.”

The voices of the hibakusha spread to all corners of the world, slowly but steadily.

These days, the average age of hibakusha is more than 83 years old, and there are fewer chances to hear their direct accounts. Some of them, like Taniguchi Sumiteru, played a direct role in the recent ratification of the UN treaty that bans nuclear weapons.

Taniguchi died three years ago, but he put the wheels in motion with a campaign that collected signatures to demand an international convention to ban nuclear weapons. He worked on that until the last moment of his life.

Taniguchi was 16 when he was exposed to the second atomic bomb that the US dropped on Japan. He was working as a postman in Nagasaki. A picture that shows the red burned flesh on his back shocked the world.

He delivered an impassioned speech at the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference at the UN’s New York headquarters: “Please don’t turn your eyes away from me. Please look at me again. I have survived miraculously, but for me, to ‘live’ was to ‘endure the agony’. Bearing the cursed scars of the atomic bomb all over our bodies, we the hibakusha continue to live in pain.”

“For humans to live as humans, not even one nuclear weapon should be allowed to exist on earth. I cannot die in peace until I witness the last nuclear warhead eliminated from this world,” said Taniguchi.

Hibakusha and their supporters gathered at Nagasaki Peace Park shortly after last month’s treaty ratification to share their joy. Among them was Okuma Yuka, a member of an activist group that calls itself “Hiroshima and Nagasaki Peace Messengers”.

Okuma took part in the signature-collecting campaign for the abolition of nuclear weapons after being deeply shocked by the image of a young Taniguchi in the aftermath of the atomic bombing. Her great-grandmother was a hibakusha but didn’t talk much about her experience. The photograph of Taniguchi brought it home to Okuma that suffering had occurred in her own family.

“I believe the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is definitely an important step forward,” Okuma says. “I expect that this will become a good opportunity for us to move toward a world that is completely free of nuclear weapons.”

November 14, 2020 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, PERSONAL STORIES, Reference, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The nuclear launch authorizer’s guide to staying calm at election times

The nuclear launch authorizer’s guide to staying calm on election night, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists By Matt Field | November 3, 2020 Their thumbs are calloused from refreshing Nate Silver’s twitter feed too many times. Their nerves are frayed from too much time spent figuring out what’s going on in places like Lackawanna County. (I know you know where it is.) Americans are heading into this Election Day full of anxiety and stress. For many, the stakes of today’s contest between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden couldn’t be higher. Anxiety-inducing information will be arriving in social media feeds, on TV screens, and on news websites at a furious pace later today. But it’s important for people to take a moment to breathe, a second to ease their worried minds. Perhaps they might consider a few tips from the annals of nuclear weapons history, insights from times when people, through relatively calm rationality, were able to avert the worst in the highest of high stress situations.

The man who saved the world. In 1983 Soviet Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov was the duty officer working the overnight shift at the Soviet Union’s nuclear early warning base. His job was to monitor the Soviet early warning system and alert his higher ups to US nuclear attacks. In the wee hours of Sept. 26, an attack appeared to be happening.

“The sirens sounded very loudly, and I just sat there for a few seconds staring at the screen with the word ‘launch’ displayed in bold red letters,” Petrov told the BBC in 2013. Petrov watched as his systems warned him of another four launches—for a total of five incoming Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles. Only minutes remained before they would reach their targets. “The computers changed their alerts from launch to missile strike.”

But Petrov decided not to trust the computer. He reported a false alarm to his superiors, forestalling a possible Soviet retaliatory strike. “But I myself was not sure until the very last moment,” he said.

Making an educated guess, Petrov decided that the alerts were wrong.

In a real war, the United States would launch a massive attack on Soviet defenses, Petrov had been told. “When people start a war, they don’t start it with only five missiles,” he told The Washington Post. Petrov, who died in 2017, is often credited with preventing a nuclear war.

The Cuban Missile Crisis and bad advice. For a little over a month in the fall of 1962, the world stood on edge as the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a standoff over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba–just 90 miles from the United States. Coming a little more than a year after the ill-conceived Bay of Pigs invasion, in which US-trained Cubans made a miserably failed attempt to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro, the Cuban Missile Crisis happened at a time of sky-high tensions between the Cold War enemies. When US spy plane photos showed Soviet missile installations in Cuba, President John F. Kennedy had to do something. He’d taken a tough line on Cuba and the Soviet Union as a presidential candidate, after all.

Kennedy’s advisors, including his brother Robert Kennedy, had a lot of suggestions.

The advisors developed proposals, including a strike on the Soviet missile facilities or a full-on invasion of the island involving tens of thousands of troops. Luckily for the world, Kennedy didn’t invade, which could have ignited a nuclear war. He didn’t go with his brother’s idea to stage a false-flag attack on a US base to justify an invasion, either.

According to a review of his book in The New Yorker, historian Martin J. Sherwin believes Adlai Stevenson, the US representative to the United Nations and a two-time presidential candidate, successfully urged Kennedy to negotiate. The Soviets pulled their missiles off the island, and the United States agreed not to try and invade Cuba again and pulled its own missiles from Turkey……….

Tip: The web will be flooded with election-related disinformation today. There could be false claims about voting irregularities such as ballots being thrown away, or of people voting twice. Trump himself has been making false claims about a rigged election or voter fraud for much of the election cycle. When you see something that causes you to break out in cold sweats, check another source.

The presidential elections are a high stakes event. It’s understandable to be nervous. But remember that first reports can be and often are incorrect. Through it all, try to maintain the calm of a Stanislav Petrov and the wisdom of Adlai Stevenson. You may not save the world from Armageddon, but just maybe, you’ll preserve your own sanity. https://thebulletin.org/2020/11/the-nuclear-launch-authorizers-guide-to-staying-calm-on-election-night/

November 4, 2020 Posted by Christina Macpherson | PERSONAL STORIES, Reference, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The human cost in illness and death, caused by working with nuclear weapons

Friday will honor Americans sickened by working with nuclear weapons Daily Sentinel, By JAMES BURKY James.Burky@gjsentinel.com, Oct 29, 2020 “…………Developing the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal came at a cost that the government denied for decades.The materials used in the Manhattan Project led to chronic illness and often death in the workers. Breathing in dust from beryllium, a toxic metal, for example, was one of the many hazards weapons workers were exposed to.

The U.S. government deflected these accusations until 2000 when it acknowledged that working with chemicals such as beryllium and uranium, produced chemicals that caused illness and death. Not long after the government’s acknowledgment, , the Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act was passed in a bipartisan effort.

That long delay is why the groups such as Cold War Patriots continue to honor those who suffered and continue to do so, the release said.

Colorado War Patriots highlighted one Coloradan who worked at the Rocky Flats Plant, a nuclear power plant in Jefferson County near Arvada.

“I worked at Rocky Flats in Colorado for almost 30 years and was exposed to plutonium,” the person — identified as Jamie G. — said in the news release. The release claims the individual had part of a lung removed and must constantly be on oxygen. “In the early years the procedures and safety features weren’t very stringent. Now I have lung cancer and just recently found out it has come back and spread to my adrenal glands and kidneys.” https://www.gjsentinel.com/news/western_colorado/friday-will-honor-americans-sickened-by-working-with-nuclear-weapons/article_df11905a-194b-11eb-a9db-0bc7727305fd.html

October 31, 2020 Posted by Christina Macpherson | employment, health, PERSONAL STORIES, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Lithuania strongly opposed to Belarus developing nuclear power close to their border

Lithuania upset over soon-to-open Belarus nuke plant The Baltic nation of Lithuania has sent a protest note to Belarus over a planned nuclear power plant close to their shared border that is to start operating in November https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/clarification-lithuania-belarus-nuclear-story-73925624

By The Associated Press, 31 October 2020 VILNIUS, Lithuania — The Baltic nation of Lithuania sent a protest note Tuesday to Belarus over a planned nuclear power plant close to their border that is scheduled to start operating in early November.

The Astravyets nuclear power plant, 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, is to start production between Nov. 1-10, Belarusian operator Belenergo told Lithuania’s power transmission system operator Litgrid on Monday.

“We are categorically against such a hasty launch,” said Asta Skaisgiryte, an adviser to the Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda. She confirmed the note had been sent.

Nauseda said during a news conference in Helsinki almost a year ago that the construction of Astravyets had been plagued by accidents, stolen materials and the mistreatment of workers. The plant is being financed and constructed by Russia nuclear giant Rosatom, which rejected the president’s allegations and said its design conformed to the highest international standards.

The power plant’s construction was delayed when the reactor’s hull slipped to the ground in July 2016 after workers failed to strap it properly during installation. Rosatom insisted at the time that the reactor wasn’t damaged, but it agreed to replace the unit at the demand of Belarusian authorities.

Belarus suffered severe damage from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which spewed radioactive fallout from a plant in then-Soviet Ukraine across large areas. The painful legacy that fueled opposition to the nuclear plant project in Belarus.

In recent weeks, Lithuanian residents living near the Belarus border have been supplied with free iodine pills and evacuation drills have been held. The pills, which can help reduce radiation build-up in the thyroid, are in case of a radiation leak at Astravets.

Lithuania closed its sole nuclear power plant in 2009 and has forbidden the purchase of energy from Belarus.

The two former Soviet republics are already at odds after the Aug. 9 presidential election in Belarus that opposition members and Lithuanian officials say was rigged. The southernmost Baltic country has given refuge to Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the main opposition challenger in the election that handed Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko a sixth term after 26 years of authoritarian rule.

October 30, 2020 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Belarus, PERSONAL STORIES, politics international | Leave a comment

Donald Trump’s erratic behaviour revives the debate on the President’s unchecked nuclear authority

Trump’s Virus Treatment Revives Questions About Unchecked Nuclear Authority
Even before the president was given mood-altering drugs, there was a movement to end the commander in chief’s sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. NYT, 12 Oct 20, By David E. Sanger and William J. Broad,

President Trump’s long rants and seemingly erratic behavior last week — which some doctors believe might have been fueled by his use of dexamethasone, a steroid, to treat Covid-19 — renewed a long-simmering debate among national security experts about whether it is time to retire one of the early inventions of the Cold War: the unchecked authority of the president to launch nuclear weapons.

Mr. Trump has publicly threatened the use of those weapons only once in his presidency, during his first collision with North Korea in 2017. But it was his decision not to invoke the 25th Amendment and turn control over to Vice President Mike Pence last week that has prompted concern inside and outside the government.

Among those who have long argued for the need to rethink presidents’ “sole authority” powers are former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, considered the dean of American nuclear strategists, who has cited the fragility of a nuclear-weapons control chain and the fear that it can be subject to errors of judgment or failure to ask the right questions under the pressure of a warning of an incoming attack.

Mr. Trump’s critics have long questioned whether his unpredictable statements and contradictions pose a nuclear danger. But the concerns raised last week were somewhat different: whether a president taking mood-altering drugs could determine whether a nuclear alert was a false alarm.

That question is a new one. The military’s Strategic Command often conducts drills that simulate actual but inconclusive evidence that the United States may be under nuclear attack. Such simulations drive home the reality that even a president asking all the right questions could make a mistake. But they rarely simulate what would happen if the president’s judgment was impaired.

“A nuclear crisis can happen at any time,” Tom Z. Collina, the policy director at the Ploughshares Fund, a private group that seeks to defuse nuclear threats, noted last week in an opinion piece. “If such a crisis takes place when a president’s thinking is compromised for any reason,” he added, “the results could be catastrophic.”

Traditionally, presidents have temporarily conveyed authority — including nuclear launch authority — to the vice president when they anticipated being under anesthesia. Ronald Reagan took that step in 1985, and George W. Bush did so in 2002 and 2007. There was no indication that Mr. Trump was unconscious, but there was reason to be concerned that the cocktail of drugs he was given could impair his judgment to make the most critical decisions entrusted to a president.

Last week in telephone interviews with Fox News and Fox Business Network, Mr. Trump said he was no longer taking experimental medications but was still on dexamethasone, which doctors say can produce euphoria, bursts of energy and even a sense of invulnerability. On Friday, he told Fox News he was off the drug, which he appears to have taken for less than a week.

But during that week, his prolific Twitter activity and rambling interviews led many to question whether the drugs had accentuated his erratic tendencies. His doctors’ refusal to describe with any specificity his condition or treatment only played up the concern.

“The history of obfuscating the medical condition of presidents is as old as the Republic,” said Vipin Narang, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied the nuclear command-and-control chain. “The issue here is that the dex” — shorthand for dexamethasone — “can make you paranoid and delusional.”

“We don’t know how much he was given,” Mr. Narang said. “And if he gives an order in the middle of the night, and no one is there to stop him, we are dependent on his military aide not to transmit the order or the duty officer at the national military command center to stop it.”………….

The “sole authority” tradition is unusual among the world’s nine nuclear powers; even Russia requires two out of three designated officials to sign off on a nuclear launch. While the Constitution says that only Congress can declare war, the speed of bombers and missiles made clear during the Cold War that there would be no time to convene Congress or mount a defense. As a result, Congress began delegating to the president all powers to use nuclear weapons during Harry S. Truman’s administration. He is the only president who has ordered a nuclear strike……..

“The last finger I would want on the nuclear button,” said Hans M. Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington, “is that of a president on drugs.”……… https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/us/politics/trump-nuclear-weapons-coronavirus.html

October 13, 2020 Posted by Christina Macpherson | PERSONAL STORIES, psychology - mental health, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

After 4 decades of Plowshares Actions, It’s Nuclear Warfare that Should Be on Trial — Not Activists

Most of the Kings Bay Plowshares still await sentencing. Mom was sentenced to time served by video conference in June — a surreal and dislocating experience that is now more and more common in our criminal justice system. Her co-defendants opted to postpone sentencing in hopes that it could be in person, but it is unclear if that will happen.

After 4 decades of Plowshares Actions, It’s Nuclear Warfare that Should Be on Trial — Not Activists, Forty years ago, the Plowshares Eight sparked a movement of nuclear disarmers that continues to take responsibility for weapons of mass destruction.

Common Dreams, by Frida Berrigan 26 Sep 20, “Nuclear warfare is not on trial here, you are!” said Judge Samuel Salus, in exasperation.

Before him were eight activists, including two priests and a nun. As Judge Salus tried to preside over the government’s prosecution of them for their trespass onto — and destruction of — private property, the eight were trying to put nuclear warfare, nuclear weapons, nuclear policy and U.S. exceptionalism on trial.

That was 40 years ago this week — ancient history by some measures. And no one reading this will be surprised to find that the eight were found guilty and the human family is still threatened by almost 15,000 nuclear warheads. So, four decades later, why isn’t nuclear warfare on trial?

They are the crime responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians 75 years ago. They have littered the landscape with radioactive waste. They have cost the United States more than $5 trillion from the public coffers. They are the apocalyptic nightmare on hair-trigger alert that haunt our children’s dreams.

On September 9, 1980, my father, Philip Berrigan, along with his brother Daniel, John Schuchardt, Dean Hammer, Elmer Maas, Molly Rush, Sister Anne Montgomery, and Father Carl Kabat, gained entry into the General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Once inside the complex, they poured blood over two nuclear weapons’ nose cones, and used household hammers to dent the metal. They came to be known as The Plowshares Eight. Continue reading →

September 28, 2020 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Legal, opposition to nuclear, PERSONAL STORIES, Reference, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Indigenous woman’s long trek to protest nuclear waste dump, and encourage others.

Concerns about nuclear waste near Ignace, Ont., prompts one woman to hit the pavement , Darlene Necan says not enough Indigenous people raising their concerns over nuclear repository

Jeff Walters · CBC News ·Sep 16, 2020 One woman’s concern over a proposed nuclear waste repository near Ignace, Ont., means she will walk hundreds of kilometres to raise awareness about the project.

For the past decade, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) has engaged the Township of Ignace, and eight nearby First Nations to determine if the area is interested in hosting the repository.

Darlene Necan, a member of the Ojibways of Saugeen First Nation in Savant Lake, about 150 kilometres north of Ignace, said she has concerns over what the project could do to the water in the area.

“The amount of people here are very terrified and scared. Nobody will stand up to nothing,” she said.

Necan has so far walked from Ignace to Savant Lake, and plans to continue on to Sioux Lookout, before looping back to Ignace.

“We did meet up with the tourist camp owners along the way,” she said, referring to camp operators on Highway 599.

“They are in support because they said how are we going to invite the Americans or people from other countries to come fish in our nuke waters now. They say stuff like that.”

Necan said many members of her community have not been engaged in any discussion of nuclear waste – but she said that falls at the hands of Chief and Council, not the NWMO.

We’re still at a loss about this nuclear thing, so a lot of people cannot say that we’re in the wrong for standing up to it. We’re at a loss, because the leadership past, have never consulted, we never even consented to it.”…………..https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/ignace-ontario-nuclear-walk-1.5725341

September 17, 2020 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, indigenous issues, PERSONAL STORIES, wastes | Leave a comment

Compelling new documentary ‘I am Greta Thunberg’

Greta Thunberg warns of fallouts from climate change in powerful documentary trailer that gives goosebumps https://www.hindustantimes.com/more-lifestyle/greta-thunberg-warns-of-fallouts-from-climate-change-in-powerful-documentary-trailer-that-gives-goosebumps/story-9XsekuG5cWWEZMOamfWM9N.html

Sweden’s teen climate change activist, Greta Thunberg’s documentary trailer grabs over 1.3 million views, makes hair stand on the ends with climate emergency warnings ahead of cinematic release worldwide starting October 16

Sep 13, 2020, Zarafshan Shiraz, Hindustan Times, Delhi An unprecedented global climate emergency is no secret but many choose to ignore it amid the COVID-19 pandemic and Sweden’s teen activist Greta Thunberg will be shining a light on the same in her upcoming documentary ‘I am Greta Thunberg’. Featuring how the 17-year-old from Stockholm became a global figurehead for climate action, the documentary is set for a cinematic release worldwide starting October 16 but its recent trailer was enough to give viewers goosebumps.

Taking to her Instagram handle, Greta shared the powerful trailer that warned of fallouts from climate change and grabbed over 1.3 million views while still going strong. The compelling, never-before-seen footage in the intimate documentary, from Swedish director Nathan Grossman, follows Greta from her one-person school strike for climate action outside the Swedish Parliament to her extraordinary wind-powered voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to speak at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City.

Grossman also tracks Greta as a shy student with Asperger’s Syndrome, her rise to prominence, meeting some of the most powerful politicians in the world and her galvanizing global impact as she sparks school strikes around the world. The trailer is sure to leave one not only emotional but also fired-up with hair standing on the end.

It premiered at the Venice Film Festival and debunks some of the criticisms on her by showing her writing her own speeches and other facts that establish her to be the sole driving force in the campaign and not her parents or other environmental interests. Grossman also documents the real the pressures that accumulated on her as the campaign grew.

September 14, 2020 Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, climate change, PERSONAL STORIES | Leave a comment

Arizona’s cancer toll from nuclear testing: the fight for recognition and compensation

Arizona’s ‘downwinders,’ exposed to Cold War nuclear testing, fight for compensation, “It’s a travesty, and the government should not be alloweto get away with it,” one Mohave County, Arizona, resident said. NBC News, Sept. 13, 2020, By Anita Hassan, KINGMAN, Ariz. — Danielle Stephens ran her fingers down a long list of her relatives’ names and sighed.

All of them had been diagnosed with cancer. Most of them had died, many before they were 55.

Like Stephens, 81, they had all spent their lives in Kingman, Arizona, where during the Cold War they often watched the early morning sky lit up by orange flashes from atomic bombs detonated at a government testing site in the Nevada desert less than 150 miles north of the city.

“Back then, no one thought the tests were dangerous,” said Stephens, who ran a cattle ranch with her husband.

The list of her family members with cancer grew to 32 in July, when she was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. It is the radiation exposure from those nuclear tests that Stephens believes caused her cancer and that of her family members and scores of others who lived in lower Mohave County in the 1950s and ’60s. Her relatives had breast, colon, thyroid and kidney cancer, all of which have been linked to radioactive fallout.

“I just think it’s a travesty, and the government should not be allowed to get away with it,” Stephens said.

The federal government enacted a compensation program for “downwinders,” those who lived near the Nevada Test Site and suffered cancers linked to radiation from the nuclear blasts. However, unlike residents in other parts of Arizona, Nevada and Utah, the residents of Kingman and lower Mohave County have never been compensated by the federal government.

Lower Mohave County residents don’t know why the federal government left them out of the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, known as RECA. Neither do lawmakers who’ve fought for years to broaden the program. With RECA scheduled to end in 2022, they say, it’s urgent to include residents like Stephens and her neighbors and relatives.

We want to make sure that all of the families impacted are appropriately recognized and compensated,” said Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Ariz., who along with Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., introduced legislation this year that would expand RECA to include all of Mohave County, as well as Clark County, Nevada, most of which was also left out of the compensation program.

“They suffered so that we could advance American defense systems at the time that we were testing nuclear missiles, and now we owe it to them to do our part to make sure that they are recognized, acknowledged and compensated,” Stanton said.

Stephens spent more than a decade as the president of the Mohave County Downwinders, sending letters to legislators and collecting personal stories. She hopes she and other downwinders can see those changes in their lifetimes.

“We fought so long for so many years,” she said. “I want it resolved.”

The dangers and fallout of atomic testing were unknown to the public when testing began at the Nevada Test Site, now known as the Nevada National Security Site. One hundred of the nuclear tests at the site from 1951 to 1962 were above ground.

Stephens said getting a glimpse of the flashes or enormous mushroom clouds was a form of entertainment. Detonation times and dates were advertised in newspapers. Children were given short recesses on testing days to stand in the schoolyard and to watch the explosions turn the sky orange. In Las Vegas, only 65 miles from the testing site, businesses billed the tests as tourist attractions to view from hotel windows.

Stephens recalls that as a teenager in 1953, she, her father, her uncle and her brother rode on horseback into the Aquarius Mountains to get a better view of one of the nuclear explosions. As they watched the plume shoot into the sky, they could feel the wind blow the smoke and dust toward them. They hurried to get off the mountain, trying to escape the fallout. But by the time they returned home, their clothes were coated with oily pink stains, Stephens said.

“So about everyone up there got cancer,” she said. Her father died of colon and kidney cancer. Her brother, who is still alive, was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Colon cancer, which Stephens is also diagnosed with, is covered under RECA.

RECA, created in 1990 and administered by the Justice Department, entitles people to one-time payments of up to $50,000 if they developed certain cancers and lived for at least two years in certain counties of Nevada, Arizona and Utah from 1951 to 1962. It also offers compensation to on-site participants and uranium workers. The program has approved more than 23,000 downwinder claims, paying more than $1.1 billion.

But only a small part of Mohave County that lies just north of the Grand Canyon was covered. In 2000, amendments expanded the boundaries, adding five more Arizona counties, but still lower Mohave County was left out.

“It’s closer to the Nevada Test Site than any other county in Arizona,” said Laura Taylor, a lawyer who focuses on RECA claims. She pointed to a 1997 study by the National Cancer Institute that found twice the amount of radiation exposure in lower Mohave County compared to other Arizona counties, such as Gila and Yavapai, which are much farther east of the Nevada Test Site but are now covered by RECA. “It really just doesn’t make any sense.”

According to a report by Arizona health officials, Mohave County had one of the highest average cancer rates in the state from 1999 to 2001.

Taylor believes that lower Mohave County may have been left out because, at the time of RECA’s creation, the county’s closest member of Congress was based in Phoenix. Gosar, who’s spent five years trying to amend RECA to include Mohave County, said he believes that it’s been difficult to gain traction because other lawmakers may view the issue as affecting a small group of people or because the federal government doesn’t want to issue more payments.

“The government also never likes to admit it made a mistake,” he said.

In February, Stanton and Gosar introduced their latest bill to include all of Mohave and Clark counties in RECA. However, COVID-19 has limited congressional hearings, and it hasn’t moved out of the Judiciary Committee.

In July, Stanton and Gosar tried instead to introduce the expansion as an amendment to the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, but it failed. They say they will try to include the language in coronavirus stimulus bills this fall.

If that doesn’t work, they plan to introduce a new bill during the next congressional session in January.

Eddie Pattillo, a retired construction manager, said acknowledgment by the government that lower Mohave County had been affected by nuclear fallout would mean more to him than monetary compensation………. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/arizona-s-downwinders-exposed-cold-war-nuclear-testing-fight-compensation-n1239802eside

September 14, 2020 Posted by Christina Macpherson | health, legal, PERSONAL STORIES, Reference, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Bob Halstead has done a great job defending Nevada from nuclear waste dumping at Yucca Mountain

Nevada grateful for Halstead’s many years fighting nuclear waste, Las Vegas Sun , Monday, Sept. 7, 2020 On this Labor Day, t

he Sun salutes a recently retired Nevada leader whose three decades of tireless public service unquestionably made a difference in our state.

Bob Halstead, who stepped down last month as the executive director for the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, will be long remembered for his staunch defense of the state against the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project. It’s scary to think where Nevada might be today if not for Halstead and his guard-dogging against the federal government’s attempts to shove the nation’s high-level nuclear waste down our throats.

Halstead was the state’s foremost expert on the project, a walking encyclopedia of its many flaws. His credibility, geniality and commitment allowed him to work with Republican and Democratic governors, Nevada congressional delegates, state legislators and local officials alike.

That helped forge a unified front on the project that continues to this day. Outside of a few misguided officials, it’s difficult to find a Nevada leader who wants anything to do with Yucca Mountain.

Halstead also spearheaded the state’s response to the feds’ 2018 secret shipments of weapons-grade plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site, among other efforts.

Along the way, he became a nemesis of the Department of Energy, beating them back with legal and scientific challenges and poking their arguments full of holes………….

It’s certainly been an impressive fight, and a long one. It dates to 1987, when Congress passed the so-called “Screw Nevada” bill that designated our state as the national waste repository site — without our consent.

Since then, the project has been killed and resurrected repeatedly, most recently when the Trump administration pushed for funding to restart the licensing process. When President Donald Trump finally capitulated, it was a high point for Halstead after a career of bedeviling pro-Yucca presidents, bureaucrats and Congress members who were intent on shipping waste out of their own districts and dumping it on Nevada.

But as Halstead has noted, the fight isn’t over. It won’t be until there’s legislation that permanently shuts down the site.

With Halstead’s departure, that means the current and next generations of Nevada leaders will have to take up the cause just as fervently as he did.

We simply can’t let down our guard on this monstrosity, which would result in more than 110,000 metric tons of highly radioactive waste being shipped into the backyard of Las Vegas and stored there. Transporting the material is dangerous, especially for Las Vegas, given that one of the main routes takes shipments directly through the heart of the city. Think about the effects of an accident or a terrorist attack on a shipment going through the middle of Las Vegas.

As for storage, seismic activity in the region makes Yucca Mountain a terrible place to put this waste. A leak could contaminate groundwater for thousands of years — and keep in mind that we’re talking about enough material to cover a football field about seven yards deep.

There’s nothing close to scientific proof that the waste could be safely stored in the repository for the tens of thousands of years it will remain radioactive.

Halstead knew this, and for 30 years he refused to yield on it……..https://lasvegassun.com/news/2020/sep/07/nevada-grateful-for-halsteads-many-years-fighting/

September 8, 2020 Posted by Christina Macpherson | opposition to nuclear, PERSONAL STORIES, politics, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Arctic tragedy: the loss of Russian sailors in nuclear submarine accidents

Russia’s ‘slow-motion Chernobyl’ at sea, FUTURE PLANET | OCEANS By Alec Luhn, 2nd September 2020 By tradition, Russians

always bring an odd number of flowers to a living person and an even number to a grave or memorial. But every other day, 83-year-old Raisa Lappa places three roses or gladiolas by the plaque to her son Sergei in their hometown Rubtsovsk, as if he hadn’t gone down with his submarine during an ill-fated towing operation in the Arctic Ocean in 2003.“I have episodes where I’m not normal, I go crazy, and it seems that he’s alive, so I bring an odd number,” she says. “They should raise the boat, so we mothers could put our sons’ remains in the ground, and I could maybe have a little more peace.”

After 17 years of unfulfilled promises, she may finally get her wish, though not out of any concern for the bones of Captain Sergei Lappa and six of his crew. With a draft decree published in March, President Vladimir Putin set in motion an initiative to lift two Soviet nuclear submarines and four reactor compartments from the silty bottom, reducing the amount of radioactive material in the Arctic Ocean by 90%. First on the list is Lappa’s K-159. ……………..

‘Cursed August’

Sergei Lappa was born in 1962 in Rubtsovsk, a small city in the Altai Mountains near the border with Kazakhstan. Though it was thousands of miles to the nearest ocean, he cultivated an interest in seafaring at a local model shipbuilding club, and after school he was accepted into the higher naval engineering academy in Sevastopol, Crimea. Tall, athletic and a good student, he was assigned to the navy’s most prestigious service: the Northern Submarine Fleet.

Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, however, the military went into a decline that was revealed to the world when the top-of-the-line attack submarine Kursk sank with 118 crew on board in August 2000. By this time, Lappa was in charge of the K-159, which had been rusting since 1989 at a pier in the isolated navy town of Gremikha, nicknamed the “island of flying dogs” for its strong winds. On the morning of 29 August 2003, the long-delayed order came to tow the decrepit K-159, which had been attached to four 11-tonne pontoons with cables to keep it afloat during the operation, to a base near Murmansk for dismantling, despite a forecast of windy weather.

With the reactors off, Lappa and his skeleton crew of nine engineers operated the boat by flashlight. As the submarine was towed near Kildin Island at half past midnight, the cables to the bow pontoons broke in heavy seas, and a half-hour later water was discovered trickling into the eighth compartment. But as headquarters struggled with the decision to launch an expensive rescue helicopter, the crew kept trying to keep the submarine afloat. At 02:45am Mikhail Gurov sent one last radio transmission: “We’re flooding, do something!” By the time rescue boats from the tug arrived, the K-159 was on the bottom near Kildin Island. Of the three sailors who made it out, the only survivor was senior lieutenant Maxim Tsibulsky, whose leather jacket had filled with air and kept him afloat.

Yet another nuclear submarine had sunk during the “cursed” month of August, Russian newspapers wrote, but the incident caused little furore compared to the Kursk. The navy promised relatives it would raise the K-159 the next year, then repeatedly delayed the project.

Even after 17 years of scavenging and corrosion, at least the bones of the crew likely remain in the submarine, according to Lynne Bell, a forensic anthropologist at Simon Fraser University. But the families have long since lost hope of recovering them.

“For all the relatives it would bring some relief if their fathers and husbands were buried, not just lying on the bottom in a steel hulk,” Gurov’s son Dmitry says. “It’s just that no one believes this will happen.”

The situation has now changed, however, as Russia’s interest revives in the Arctic and its crumbling Soviet ports and military towns. Since 2013, seven Arctic military bases and two tanker terminals have been built as part of the Northern Sea Route, a shorter route to China that Putin has promised will see 80 million tonnes of traffic by 2025. The K-159 is lying underneath the eastern end of the route………….https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200901-the-radioactive-risk-of-sunken-nuclear-soviet-submarines

September 3, 2020 Posted by Christina Macpherson | ARCTIC, incidents, oceans, PERSONAL STORIES, Reference | Leave a comment

Plowshares’ Clare Grady, longtime Catholic Worker and peace activist, may face 21 years in gaol

Plowshares activist facing 21 years in jail finds ’cause for rejoicing’, Natiional Catholic Reporter, Aug 29, 2020, by Eric Martin
Clare Grady is a longtime Catholic Worker and peace activist who now faces the possibility of more than 21 years in jail for her participation in the Kings Bay Plowshares action. Despite that, Grady said in a recent interview that she sees “cause for rejoicing” in the current political moment.On April 3, 2018, Grady and six other Catholics entered Kings Bay Naval Base in Georgia to symbolically and nonviolently disarm nuclear Trident submarines, which Grady says are used as “a cocked gun to enforce systems of white supremacy, global capitalism and global domination.”

The seven hammered on a shrine for nuclear missiles, painted biblical messages, and carried an indictment against the federal government for crimes against peace.

All seven were found guilty on felony charges. Liz McAlister received time served and the remaining six expect their sentencing dates on Oct. 15 and 16 might be delayed…….

NCR: Why have you pushed to link this movement that focuses on nuclear weapons with white supremacy?

Grady: It was my intention that when we got together to plan the Kings Bay Plowshares action, we would include Dr. [Martin Luther] King’s triplets [connecting racism, militarism and materialism]. And I just made a personal commitment that I wasn’t going to do that action unless I could do a little more justice to those triplets. And thankfully, the community was willing to embrace that……………

After the trial, you went on the court steps and said, “We are only as sick as our secrets. This disarming process is revealing the weapons that are ours.” And you pointed to your heart. It seemed like you were talking about collective possession of weapons but also something more personal.

Yes, all those dimensions for me. It’s the full spectrum. It’s the secret of the weapons, the secret of the systems that those weapons enforce that we don’t even know the half of what is hidden around the violence of those systems. And then, when we take up these Plowshares sacramental prophetic actions, we do it in community….,…….. https://www.ncronline.org/news/justice/plowshares-activist-facing-21-years-jail-finds-cause-rejoicing

September 1, 2020 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Legal, PERSONAL STORIES, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

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nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope