Citizens Climate Lobby actually promotes nuclear power
At least some Clean Energy laws have been coopted, taken over, or pushed by huge corporations that hide behind the scenes, but pull the strings of political, media and non profits through various mechanisms.
New Study Exposes True Extent, Influence Of Climate Denial Echo Chamber For First Time, Indigenous Press Conference Demanding True Climate Solutions at COP21, New York AG Subpoenas ExxonMobil
http://agreenroad.blogspot.com/2015/12/new-study-exposes-true-extent-influence.html
NASA, PBS, EPA, Alaska Inuits And Dr John Church Explain Ocean Level Rise And Very Fast, Massive Carbon Dioxide, CO2, Methane, And Nitrous Oxide Global Warming Gas Increase
http://agreenroad.blogspot.com/2013/01/nasa-and-dr-john-church-explain-ocean.html
WHAT IS THE FEE AND DIVIDEND CARBON TAX LAW? Continue reading
Indian officials unwilling to answer questions about nuclear emergency guidelines
Officials pass the buck on RTI queries on NDMA guidelines http://m.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/officials-pass-the-buck-on-rti-queries-on-ndma-guidelines/article8079555.ece
G. Sundarrajan of Poovulagin Nanbargal, an environmental forum had sought to know whether the NDMA Guidelines on Nuclear and Radiological Emergencies released in 2009 had been implemented in the district.
He also sought information on the infrastructure such as hospitals identified to treat radiological emergencies as per the guidelines.
The Public Information Officer (PIO) in Tirunelveli Collectorate, in his reply to the applicant, stated that the request was being forwarded to his counterpart in Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant, as the latter was the officer concerned for the details sought for.
The Public Information Officer at Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant of NPCIL on December 29 replied contending it was the District Management Authority, which was the authority concerned and returned the queries to the PIO of Tirunelveli Collectorate.
Mr. Sundarrajan said, “The Supreme Court was, in 2013, informed that all precautionary measures were taken and now they are denying information on the details of the implementation. This is anti-constitutional, anti-people and illegal. They cannot deny or point at each other when asked for information.”
Tirunelveli District Collector M. Karunakaran told The Hindu , “The applicant has not sent the queries to the right person, i.e., the DRDA, which deals with the information and the PIO in Collectorate would not have the information. If information is sought from the right person, it would have been provided.” When contacted by The Hindu , an NPCIL official said, on condition of anonymity, “There has been some misunderstanding among officials in some departments of the district administration on this issue. We complied with the implementation of the guidelines on our part.”
Info sought under RTI Act whether suggestions
on nuclear emergencies were implemented
America’s secret plutonium experiments on humans
Then there is the horrifying reality that these experiments were taking place in the shadow of Nazi Germany; some of the scientists involved in the radiation experiments were the very men whose earlier experimental designs had tormented prisoners of concentration camps. Welsome describes Operation Paperclip, conducted under the auspices of the U.S. government. Paperclip imported Nazi scientists and supported their work, helping to confer, in the words of scientist Joseph G. Hamilton, “a little of the Buchenwald touch” on American medicine.
This valuable work represents an elegy to lost ideals, lost health, and lost trust. One can only hope it will serve as a cautionary tale.
The Plutonium Files: America’s secret medical experiments in the Cold War N Engl J Med 1999; 341:1941-1942 December 16, 1999 Harriet A. Washington
The Plutonium Files: America’s secret medical experiments in the Cold WarBy Eileen Welsome. 580 pp. New York, Dial Press, 1999. $26.95. ISBN: 0-385-31402-7
Amid the embarrassments of Monicamania and of multiple public mea culpas, the past few years have not been exemplary ones for American journalism. This fact makes the triumph of The Plutonium Files all the sweeter, because this superlative book is a reminder of the purpose of investigative journalism.
This richly detailed, subtly nuanced history of government-engineered radiation experiments on unwitting Americans is based on the Pulitzer-prize–winning series Eileen Welsome wrote for the Albuquerque Tribune. Welsome’s tenacious and resourceful detective work has unveiled the saga of a sordid, tragic, yet fascinating chapter in the history of American medical science. The book succeeds on many levels. It is a gripping exposé of governmental exploitation and of medicine’s moral failures in an era in which blind trust defined the normal relationship between physicians and patients.
Between April 1945, scant months before the bombing of Hiroshima, and July 1947, the scientists of the Manhattan Project followed the construction of the atomic bomb with a chilling second act: medical experimentation on hundreds of unsuspecting Americans. Continue reading
Secret radiation experiments carried out on people
Some of the classified government experiments included:
* Exposing more than 100 Alaskan villagers to radioactive iodine during the 1960s.
* Feeding 49 retarded and institutionalised teenagers radioactive iron and calcium in their cereal during the years 1946-1954.
* Exposing about 800 pregnant women in the late 1940s to radioactive iron to determine the effect on the fetus.
* Injecting 7 newborns (six were Black) with radioactive iodine.
* Exposing the testicles of more than 100 prisoners to cancer-causing doses of radiation. This experimentation continued into the early 1970s.
* Exposing almost 200 cancer patients to high levels of radiation from cesium and cobalt. The AEC finally stopped this experiment in 1974.
* Administering radioactive material to psychiatric patients in San Francisco and to prisoners in San Quentin.
* Administering massive doses of full body radiation to cancer patients hospitalised at the General Hospital in Cincinnati, Baylor College in Houston, Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York City, and the US Naval Hospital in Bethesda, during the 1950s and 1960s. The experiment provided data to the military concerning how a nuclear attack might affect its troops.
* Exposing 29 patients, some with rheumatoid arthritis, to total body irradiation (100-300 rad dose) to obtain data for the military. This was conducted at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco.
—In preparing America for nuclear attack during the Cold War years following World War II, thousands of US citizens became the innocent victims of over 4,000 secret and classified radiation experiments conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and other government agencies, such as the Department of Defense, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the Public Health Service (now the CDC), the National Institutes of Health, the Veterans Administration (VA), the CIA, and NASA.
Millions of people were exposed to radioactive fallout from the continental testing of more than 200 atmospheric and underground nuclear weapons, and from the hundreds of secret releases of radiation into the environment. Over 200,000 “atomic vets” who worked closely with nuclear detonations at the Nevada test site during the 1950s and 1960s were especially vulnerable to radiation fallout.
Also affected were the thousands of so-called “downwinders”, who lived in nearby small towns in Nevada, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. These downwinders (along with the animal populations) suffered the worst cumulative radioactive effects of fallout, along with a contaminated environment teeming with radioactive food and farm products. The plight of these poor country people exposed to government-induced radiation sickness has been recorded in Carole Gallagher’s remarkable photo-essay American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War (The Free Press, 1993).
In reviewing declassified AEC records (now the Department of Energy) from the 1950s, Gallagher was shocked to discover one document that described the people downwind of the Nevada Test Site as “a low use segment of the population.” Her shock at such callous bigotry caused her to eventually move West to research, investigate and document those who lived closest to the Test Site, as well as workers at the site, and soldiers repeatedly exposed to nuclear bombs during the military tests.
Disinformation and Nuclear Fallout
In the nuclear arms race, government doctors and scientists brainwashed the public into believing low dose radiation was not harmful. Some officials even tried to convince people that “a little radiation is good for you.” Totally ignored was the knowledge that the radiation from nuclear fallout could lead to an increased risk of cancer, heart disease, neurological disorders, immune system disease, reproductive abnormalities, sterility, birth defects, and genetic mutations which could be passed on from generation to generation. The full extent of this radiation damage to the American public during the Cold War years will never be known. Continue reading
Are governments still allowing secret medical radiation experiments?
For over twenty years the law allowed the US Department of Defense (DoD) to use Americans as “guinea pigs.” This law (the US code annotated Title 50, Chapter 32, Section 1520, dated 30 July, 1977) remained on the books until it was repealed under public pressure in 1998. The new and revised bill prohibits the DoD from conducting tests and experiments on humans, but allows “exceptions.”
Unethical and dangerous experimentation undoubtedly continues in secret up to the present time, ostensibly under the guise of “national security.”
The Human Radiation Experiments By ALAN R. CANTWELL Jr., M.D.October 8, 2001 By davidjones “……. Does Secret Medical Experimentation Continue? To this day there are no adequate safeguards to protect people from secret government experimentation. ……. What is clear from studying the Committee’s Final Report is that the medical and scientific professions collaborated with the government and the military to abuse and harm US citizens. In the process, the nuclear establishment literally got away with murder. And there is simply no end to the secrets that still emerge from the Cold War years that began 58 years ago with the Manhattan Project.
In January 2000, the government presented the results of a statistical study showing that atomic workers employed in the nuclear weapons industry during the Cold War were more likely to suffer a higher rate of cancer, due to their exposure to cancer-causing radiation and chemicals.
From the 1940s up to the present time, government lawyers and scientists have repeatedly rejected the claims of workers who became sick as result of nuclear radiation and exposure to deadly uranium, plutonium, and fluorine. As many as 600,000 workers in 14 nuclear weapons plants are now affected by the government’s final admission of wrongdoing in exposing these people to cancer and other chronic illnesses.
According to a Los Angeles Times report, “workers told of spending years trying to get compensation payments from the state, of having to hire attorneys to get disability pay, of going to clinics that forced them to sign away rights to a portion of any future disability payment before they could be treated.”
Kay Sutherland, a worker at the Hanford plutonium plant in central Washington State, told a hearing that “the people in this area have been forced into poverty because they’ve had to retire in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, too young to get a retirement, and too young to get Social Security. They fall through the cracks and they die.” Sutherland has lost four of her five family members to disease, and has an enlarged liver and multiple tumours. She considers herself “a Holocaust survivor for the American Cold War.”
How can we stop these nuclear and biological horrors, which have condemned thousands of innocent people to disease and death? Why must decades of government-sanctioned medical abuse be kept secret and covered-up by scientists and physicians who claim to be concerned about the health of the public?
One way to prevent abuse might be to bring the physician-scientist perpetrators of these experiments to justice in a court of law. However, unless the public is aroused, this is unlikely to happen.
Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Geoffrey Sea notes: “A startling fact about the experiments is that, despite the documentation of hundreds of cases of unethical conduct resulting in lasting damage to thousands of people, not a single physician or nurse, scientist or technician, policy maker or administrator has yet come forward to admit wrongdoing.”
For over twenty years the law allowed the US Department of Defense (DoD) to use Americans as “guinea pigs.” This law (the US code annotated Title 50, Chapter 32, Section 1520, dated 30 July, 1977) remained on the books until it was repealed under public pressure in 1998. The new and revised bill prohibits the DoD from conducting tests and experiments on humans, but allows “exceptions.” One of the exceptions is that a test or experiment can be carried out for “any peaceful purpose that is related to a medical, therapeutic, pharmaceutical, agricultural, industrial, or research activity.” Thus, the 1998 law has obvious loopholes which allow secret testing to continue. For details on the restrictions (and exceptions) for human testing for chemical and biological agents, consult the Gulf War Vets website at http//www.gulfwarvets.com/1520a.htm.
Unethical and dangerous experimentation undoubtedly continues in secret up to the present time, ostensibly under the guise of “national security.” Thus, it would seem prudent for patients to think twice before signing-up for government-sponsored medical studies, particularly at leading medical institutions. Enlightened patients might also view doctors (and scientists) with a healthy dose of skepticism, and a touch of paranoia. As weird as all this sounds, it could save your life! http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/the-human-radiation-experiments
Documents reveal sloppy unsafe radiation management at San Onofre Nuclear Station
“My general impression from what I have seen in that report is San Onofre was very very sloppy, very very careless in handling radioactive material,” he told NBC 7 Investigates. “You basically had hundreds of pieces of contaminated equipment.”
The radiation levels around the concrete cubicle were so elevated “the inspector did not perform a survey inside,” according to the document
Documents Detail How Nuclear Material Was Handled at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, 7 San Diego
Expert tells NBC 7 Investigates handling of nuclear material was “sloppy”
By JW August and Lynn Walsh Documents newly obtained by NBC 7 Investigates during secret talks about the condition of the land where the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) sits detail how nuclear material was handled at the plant since the 1980s.
The documents were released to individuals involved with the secret negotiations about the current condition and future handling of the 25-acre property. According to a source familiar with the negotiations, the secret meetings have been going on for about 20 months and involve all the players with a stake in the prime coastal property.
Those players include the U.S. Navy, which owns the property; the U.S. Marines, whose base surrounds the property; and Southern California Edison (SCE) and San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E), both of which hold the lease to the property. Continue reading
PG&E Corporation deliberately delaying decision on future of Diablo Nuclear Station
As long as PG&E keeps its options open, the state’s progress toward a sustainably carbon-free energy grid remains in suspended animation
PG&E plays coy on the future of Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, LA Times, Michael HiltzikContact Reporter, 1 Jan 16 The Economy Hub “……..More than just the future of Diablo Canyon lies in limbo. The plant’s generating capacity of 2,160 megawatts affects the development of the state’s renewable electric resources. Although PG&E has asserted that the plant’s continued operation would save its customers as much as $16 billion during the additional 20 years, the cost of bringing Diablo Canyon into compliance with environmental and seismic mandates may in fact not be worth the effort. Continue reading
China keen to market nuclear expertise, but in the UK scrutiny is increasing
Nuclear energy: Beijing’s power play, Ft.com Christopher Adams and Lucy Hornby, December 29, 2015 China is intent on exporting its nuclear expertise but in the UK scrutiny is increasing. “………. The French-designed plant, which after five years of construction is about to undergo testing, will serve as the prototype for a huge power station planned by the UK in south-west England. It is set to cost £18bn according to the latest estimates by French energy group EDF, which is leading the project.
Hinkley Point, in Somerset, is home to a working nuclear plant and twin disused Magnox reactors. Now David Cameron, UK prime minister, wants the site to host the first of a new generation of reactors that he envisages will replace Britain’s ageing nuclear fleet by 2030.
Under a commercial pact struck during October’s state visit to London by Chinese president Xi Jinping, CGN will take a one-third stake in Hinkley. Its state-owned rival, China National Nuclear Corporation, may also participate. A decade from now, assuming all goes to plan, Taishan’s distinctive egg-shaped reactor domes, double-hulled walls and monster turbines will dominate the shoreline of the Severn estuary. Hinkley Point C will supply 7 per cent of the UK’s electricity……….
CGN can ill-afford errors at Taishan, one of three unfinished projects using a third-generation technology called the European pressurised reactor. Designed by Areva of France, these reactors are being touted as a revolution in nuclear power. But they have had a troubled start on projects at Flamanville in France and Olkiluoto in Finland.
Taishan, too, has suffered delays, albeit not as bad as those in Europe. As a result, CGN is treading carefully. The Chinese plant’s targeted completion date, originally late 2013, has already been put back once, in part because of safety rules after Fukushima. Now it will probably come online in 2017 — though CGN will not say exactly when. Says Mr Zheng: “We must perform a lot of tests, and since it’s now a first of a kind, we need to do more tests than we planned. Those tests should have been done already in Finland or France, but we must do them now.”
The construction problems highlight the complexity of the EPR projects. There are questions over whether there really is demand for these larger reactors, given their cost and size. Mr Guo, though, is bullish. Standing under an 80-tonne door that will one day seal off the reactor hall, he lists the EPR’s credentials…….
He Zuoxiu, a retired physicist who helped develop China’s nuclear programme in the 1960s, questions whether nuclear power will ever truly be safe, even with safeguards to prevent disasters such as Fukushima. He cites a statistic: the US, Russia and Japan each had more than 50 reactors when they suffered accidents. In other words, the more a country has, the greater the chance of something going wrong……..
UK concerns
There are worries, too, that Britain’s tilt towards China — and chancellor George Osborne’s embrace of its investment — will open the door to security risks. The UK shift has caused consternation in the US, which accuses China’s state-owned industry of benefiting from military-linked corporate espionage.
Patrick Cronin, an Asia expert at the Center for a New American Security, says Britain should take care to balance its economic needs against those of national security, particularly on critical infrastructure such as nuclear plants. “Let’s say that 10 years from now there is a major conflict with China. This would give China, effectively, a veto over UK participation, for example, over the Taiwan issue in the next decade,” says Mr Cronin.
“Just understanding the most vulnerable parts of reactors in Britain is a vulnerability. A Chinese state-owned enterprise may show that information to people who have ill intentions to the UK, especially if there’s a crisis.”
Concerns have also been raised in Whitehall over the prospect of China being able to build digital loopholes into hardware it supplies, allowing Beijing to exploit vulnerabilities at nuclear plants. CNNC’s background as China’s nuclear weapons developer before it built the country’s civilian reactors has added to those fears……… http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/789e5070-974a-11e5-9228-87e603d47bdc.html#axzz3vvmo6esp
US spying reveals Israeli bids to block Iran nuclear deal
US spying reveals Israeli bids to block Iran nuclear deal, France 24 2015-12-30 The U.S. National Security Agency’s foreign eavesdropping included phone conversations between top Israeli officials and U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
White House officials believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s campaign against the nuclear deal with Iran, according to the unnamed officials, the Journal said.
NSA eavesdropping revealed to the White House how Netanyahu and his advisers had leaked details of the U.S.-Iran negotiations, which they learned through Israeli spying
operations, the newspaper reported.
The NSA reports allowed Obama administration officials to peer inside Israeli efforts to turn Congress against the deal, according to the Journal.
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, was described as coaching unnamed Jewish-American groups on lines of argument to use with U.S. lawmakers, and Israeli officials were reported pressing lawmakers to oppose the deal, the newspaper said.
Asked for comment on the Journal report, a White House National Security Council spokesman said: “We do not conduct any foreign intelligence surveillance activities unless there is a specific and validated national security purpose. This applies to ordinary citizens and world leaders alike.”……. http://www.france24.com/en/20151230-usa-nsa-israel-netanyahu-iran-nuclear
Investigation into the California Public Utilities Commission’s San Onofre response
Criminal probe focuses on San Onofre response Warrant examines utilities commission, Edison meetings and UCLA grant funds San Diego Tribune, By Jeff McDonald and Ricky Young Dec. 29, 2015 A state criminal investigation into the California Public Utilities Commission centers around former President Michael Peevey’s persistent intervention into the process to assign costs for the failure of the San Onofre nuclear plant, newly released court documents show.
A sworn affidavit by an investigator for Attorney General Kamala Harris, unsealed last month, lays out the developing criminal case in detail for the first time.
The 18-page document says improper meetings were held, which might bring misdemeanor charges, but that a conspiracy to commit those misdemeanors could be considered a felony……..
The court document details Peevey’s efforts to win funding for UCLA and researcher Stephanie Pincetl, starting with an undisclosed March 2013 meeting in Warsaw, Poland, with an Edison executive. The affidavit argues that there was probable cause to believe that the executive, Stephen Pickett, conspired to engage in prohibited backchannel communications……..
According to the document, the investigator interviewed Edison International President Ted Craver about Peevey’s efforts to secure Edison grants for UCLA.
Diaz said he “interviewed Ted Craver, who confirmed that Peevey ‘went at him hard,’ telling him that they (SCE) did not get the importance of combatting climate change and this was an opportunity to do something, and if they were smart, they would figure out how to ‘wrap this in a cloak’ and it would be good for public relations.”
The document goes on to describe how Edison never agreed to pay for the research, but it was built in as a requirement in the utilities commission approval process for the San Onofre settlement……..
There is probable cause to believe that Michael Peevey, former President of the California Public Utilities Commission, utilized his position to influence SCE’s commitment of millions of dollars to UCLA to fund a research program,” the affidavit states………
No charges have been filed as a result of the investigation, which is proceeding separately from a federal review of commission practices……. http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2015/dec/29/diaz-affidavit-cpuc-probe/
Oak Ridge, USA, dependent on nuclear industry, kept secret about its polluting work
Nuclear workers: Projects’ results were worth illnesses, deaths Amarillo.com December 28, 2015 Tribune News Service ….”……it’s a sensitive subject in Oak Ridge, with the community so dependent on the still-running Y-12 plant.
And over the years, there have been plenty of secrets to keep.
The women who worked at the plant were told to keep their mouths shut, and those who talked about their jobs were quickly let go.
Huddleston, the calutron girl who said she felt the burden of helping kill Japanese citizens, said she didn’t even tell her son what she was doing at Y-12 until five years ago.
“I was told so long — I just never did talk about it,” she said………..http://amarillo.com/news/latest-news/2015-12-28/nuclear-workers-projects-results-were-worth-illnesses-deaths#.VoMfhne5dh0.twitter
Sloppy health data collection in the history of America’s nuclear workers
Nuclear workers: Projects’ results were worth illnesses, deaths Amarillo.com December 28, 2015 Tribune News Service “…………The death toll for American workers has never been disclosed. The U.S. Department of Labor, which administers the compensation program, makes routine reports on how much it spends and how many people it serves, but never on the number who have died.
At first, department officials told TNS they do not even bother to collect information on the cause of injury or deaths for deceased workers. But later they said they do, on a limited basis, to comply with federal law.
The investigation also found vast differences in the way the federal program is run. As an example, workers at the nuclear facility at Hanford are nearly twice as likely to win money from the government as workers at their sister plant at Savannah River.
The department goes to great lengths to protect its data, taking several months to release it and comply with a request under the Freedom of Information Act. Then the department refused to release the names of companies that have provided medical care for sick workers under the program, formally called the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act. The department cited privacy concerns, but TNS is appealing that decision.
An examination of the data reveals the program that began accepting applications in 2001 has far surpassed anything envisioned by its founders.
The explosive growth of the program surprised even its chief architect.
Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico who served as energy secretary under President Bill Clinton, said sloppy record-keeping at the nuclear sites made it difficult to predict the ultimate size of the program.
“See, you don’t know when you enter a program like this what the result is going to be, except you need to be guided by: Is it the right thing to do?” he said in September.
Richardson said the federal government had shown “a lack of conscience” in its decades-long refusal to help workers who had legitimate claims until Congress finally reversed course.
He said getting the program passed became easier after the Washington Post in 1999 first reported that thousands of unsuspecting workers had been exposed to plutonium and other highly radioactive metals for 23 years at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in western Kentucky.
Richardson, who apologized at the time for the government’s denial of any plutonium exposures, said the program’s dramatic growth is a good sign, adding that no one’s getting rich, with individual payments capped at $400,000.
James Melius — the chairman of the federal Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, a presidential panel that examines compensation claims — said it’s hardly a surprise that the program has grown so rapidly.
“The DOE complex is huge,” he said, with “literally hundreds of thousands of workers who are potentially eligible who worked at various times within the complex.”……..
Congress passed the program in 2000 after the Department of Energy submitted studies covering 600,000 people that showed workers at 14 sites had increased risks of dying from cancer and nonmalignant diseases……….http://amarillo.com/news/latest-news/2015-12-28/nuclear-workers-projects-results-were-worth-illnesses-deaths#.VoMfhne5dh0.twitter
Inspection records were faked at USA nuclear power station
Nuclear plant contractors faked 10 months of inspection records By Mark Schleifstein, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune December 27 2015 Contractors at Entergy‘s Waterford 3 nuclear power plant on the west bank of St. Charles Parish failed to conduct required hourly fire inspections and falsified records for 10 months to show the inspections occurred, according to the results of a 15-month-long investigation announced Wednesday (Dec. 23) by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In a Dec. 14 letter notifying Entergy of its findings, the commission’s regulatory staff also said an Entergy Operations Inc. supervisor “deliberately failed to identify and take corrective actions upon being provided with information of suspected wrongdoing by contract fire watch individuals.”
Further, the agency found that a manager for the contracting firm providing the fire inspection workers “deliberately provided incomplete and inaccurate information to an access authorization reviewing official regarding the trustworthiness and reliability of a contract fire watch individual.” Entergy identified the company that provided the fire watch workers as GCA Contractors.
The NRC has given Entergy the opportunity of requesting a “pre-decisional enforcement conference.” Or the company may request “alternative dispute resolution,” before the commission decides on enforcement penalties.
The hourly fire watch tours are required to assure that no fires break out in parts of the huge nuclear power plant building where sensitive equipment is located, including wiring and piping involved in operating the nuclear reactor during accidents or emergencies. The inspections were skipped, and the records falsified, between July 2013 and April 2014. …….. http://www.nola.com/environment/index.ssf/2015/12/contractors_skipped_fire_inspe.html
Nuclear Orwellian Doublespeak
New Protection Action Guidelines Will Leave You Chilled to the Bone, Nuclear World, Marti LeRoux 26 Dec 15, In Dr. Bertell’s 1986 speech, she candidly describes the two tactics that she used to report radiological incidents and the release of radionuclides into the environment.
“It’s become even worse of late because in order to impress the public with how insignificant the exposures are, there seem to be two tactics. One tactic is to make the numbers small. So if you’ve been in the business of reporting radiation exposure or accidents for awhile, you’ll remember that it used to be in terms of maybe eighty millirem at Three Mile Island, or a hundred millirem as background radiation, or 5,000 millirem permitted to workers per year. It’s now changed so that instead of eighty millirem it would be eight-tenths of a millisievert. Eight-tenths is a littler number. Instead of workers getting 5,000 millirems per year they now get fifty millisieverts. So they changed the unit to make it a hundred times bigger which makes the numbers a hundred times smaller. So that’s one tactic.
The other tactic is to give everything in percent so that you’re told `well, there’s a little bit of iodine 131 in your milk, but it’s O.K., it’s only a small percentage of the permissible level.’ Now you’re not really told where that permissible level came from, or who said you could have radioactive material in your milk and it was O.K. But to even express it as a small percentage of a permissible level is very deceptive because those permissible levels are extraordinarily high.”
Since this speech was given, there have been many more radiation disasters in the US and abroad, most notably, Fukushima. Recently, the White House dramatically raised “permissible” levels of radiation in our drinking water and soil. This was done without any input or discussion from you or me. By raising permissible levels the administration seeks to create a “new normal” for our radiation exposure.
It’s a huge win for the nuclear industry because it allows them to legally say that everything is within “permissible levels.” However, the permissible levels “allowed” by the White House is equivalent to Orwellian doublespeak.
Doublespeak deliberately cloaks words in order to distort, disguise or reverse the true meaning of words. It’s a very insidious form of manipulation and a subtle form of brainwashing that is unrelentingly used on the American public in many different ways, but especially so by mass media. Doublespeak is employed in order to make nuclear’s version of the “truth” sound palatable. It’s intentionally designed to create ambiguity and confusion.
What politicians and nuclear lobbyists have determined to be “permissible” is in fact unacceptable, but has the US mainstream media bothered to report it? Of course not.
It turns out that major mainstream media outlets in the US are owned by the very same corporations that own nuclear power plants. Talk about conflict of interest!
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has established new radiation guidelines called Protective Action Guides or PAGs. Tragically, these newly established PAGs are extremely negligent and that’s putting it mildly. PAGs have provisions that cover evacuation, shelter, food restrictions and a host of other actions that governmental agencies are permitted to use following a wide range of “radiological emergencies.”
New Protective Guidelines Only Protect the Nuclear Industry
Orwellian doublespeak abounds when dealing with the nuclear agenda. Take the name Protective Action Guidelines (PAG) for example, these new PAGS have very little to do with actually protecting us. They have more to do with protecting the established nuclear industry. Additionally, very little action is involved, if any. I believe it is safe to say that next to no action is involved when it comes to cleaning up nuclear contamination.
Cancer rates, infertility and genetic mutations will be the order of the day, as very little action will be required for governmental agencies to step in and clean up nuclear contamination because these “protective” guidelines are so lax as to be almost useless. I would even go so far as to say they are laughable, but that would not be showing respect to the generations that will suffer as a direct result of the White House’s refusal to take their responsibility seriously.
Is it any wonder that we hear nary a word spoken against nuclear in the US mainstream media? That’s no coincidence because GE, the company that brought you Fukushima also owns, NBC, CNBS, USA Network, A&E, The History Channel, Bravo, SYFY, Lifetime, and The Biography Channel (just to name a few). ……….http://www.nuclearworld.net/pag/
“Culture of quiet” about India’s Top-Secret Nuclear City to Produce Thermonuclear Weapons
The nuclear city would, in short, be ringed by a security perimeter of thousands of military and paramilitary guards.
in choosing to remain publicly silent, the United States was taking a risk, evidently to try and reap financial and strategic rewards.
India Is Building a Top-Secret Nuclear City to Produce Thermonuclear Weapons, Experts Say The weapons could upgrade India as a nuclear power — and deeply unsettle Pakistan and China. Foreign Policy.com BY ADRIAN LEVY DECEMBER 16, 2015 “………A culture of quiet
Like the villagers in Challakere, some key members of the Indian Parliament say they know little about the project.
One veteran lawmaker, who has twice been a cabinet minister, and who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the topic, said his colleagues are rarely briefed about nuclear weapons-related issues. “Frankly, we in Parliament discover little,” he said, “and what we do find out is normally from Western newspapers.” And in an interview with Indian reporters in 2003, Jayanthi Natarajan, a former lawmaker who later served as minister for environment and forests, said that she and other members of Parliament had “tried time and again to raise [nuclear-related] issues … and have achieved precious little.” Continue reading
1 This Month
23 April – WEBINAR – Why new nuclear reactors are the wrong tools for decarbonization Thursday, April 23 • 1 AM – 2 AM AEST
World Nuclear Power. Reactors 1951-2026, 75 Years of Nuclear Power.
Interactive Map– https://dv.worldnuclearreport.org/
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
of the week–London Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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