The White House wants to leave the INF Treaty. New START could be next. The death of 
these agreements would fuel a new arms race. Foreign policy, BY JON WOLFSTHAL OCTOBER 31, 2018, President Donald Trump’s tough talk about withdrawing the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty has generated plenty of controversy, but not much clarity about what happens next. What’s certain is that the end of the treaty would make the United States and its allies (for whom Trump apparently cares little) less safe and would undermine the global basis for nuclear restraint and nonproliferation.
And it may get worse. America’s potential withdrawal from the INF Treaty—which bans the United States and Russia from having nuclear or conventional ground-based missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km (300 to 3,400 miles)—suggests that the 2010 New START arms reduction treaty with Russia might be next.
The untimely death of these two agreements would add fuel to a new arms race and further undermine stability and predictability between Washington and Moscow.
The last time the United States aand Russia had to navigate a world without bilateral nuclear constraints was before 1972; it was a world we were lucky to survive and one to which no sane person should want to return.
Nuclear weapons and deterrence advocates like to claim that the invention of nuclear weapons is what has kept the peace among major powers since the end of World War II. However, it was the development of predictable, binding, legal agreements and enforced global norms of behavior across security, trade, and global issues—not nuclear arms—that helped the United States to become the most prosperous and secure country in history. The rules not only made the United States safer and richer but also helped usher in an unprecedented era of global prosperity. The preservation of that order is a vital national interest and is under attack by the Trump administration.
That Trump would seek to undermine the rules that have benefited U.S. prosperity and influence is bad enough. That he would try to disrupt the system that prevents nuclear anarchy is inexcusable…………..
After assuming office, Trump largely ignored the issue of the INF Treaty and nuclear stability, even passing on an early offer from Russian President Vladimir Putin to extend the New START agreement, which caps both Russia and the United States at 1,550 strategic offensively deployed nuclear weapons and will expire on Feb. 5, 2021, unless extended by a term of up to five years. Since then, there has been no evidence that Trump or any senior member of his administration has engaged with Russia in any serious way to bring it back into compliance with the INF Treaty. While the Defense Department’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review does briefly mention the agreement, it includes no strategy to restore Russian compliance and instead uses Russia’s violations to justify considering a new generation of sea-launched, nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/31/trump-is-pushing-the-united-states-toward-nuclear-anarchy/
https://www.wjbf.com/news/csra-news/hearing-on-failed-vc-summer-nuclear-project-begins-in-south-carolina/1567635123, By: Shawn Cabbagestalk Nov 01, 2018 SOUTH CAROLINA (WJBF) – A stroke of a pen signed it into law back in 2007. It’s blamed for higher rates you’ve paid on projects not yet completed.
‘Clear evidence’ of mobile phone radiation link to cancers in rats, US health agency concludes
Uncertainty remains about risk to humans who experience much lower radio wave doses, Independent, Alex Matthews-King, Health Correspondent 2 Nov 18, A long-running US study on the effects of radio wave radiation, the sort emitted by mobile phones, has found “clear evidence” of high levels of exposure and heart cancers in male rats.
Some evidence of links to brain and adrenal gland tumours was also found in male rats, but in female rodents and male mice signs of cancer weren’t clear, the National Toxicology Programme (NTP) concluded in its final report on Thursday.
The programme is run by the US Department of Health and Human Services and was tasked with reviewing the toxicity of mobile phone radiation in response to the devices’ near ubiquity in modern life.
Radiation exposure in the trial was well above the levels most humans would experience, but researchers said the findings show the link between radio frequencies and tumours – at least for rats – “is real”.
“In our studies, rats and mice received radio frequency radiation across their whole bodies. By contrast, people are mostly exposed in specific local tissues close to where they hold the phone.
“In addition, the exposure levels and durations in our studies were greater than what people experience.”………..
Oil-gas wells proposed near Rocky Flats ex-nuclear weapons site, https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/politics/oil-gas-wells-proposed-near-rocky-flats-ex-nuclear-weapons-site, Associated Press, Nov 1, 2018 DENVER (AP) — An oil and gas company is asking for state permits to drill near a former nuclear weapons plant in Colorado, but it’s unclear whether any of the wells would extend under the site.
Republican senators ask Trump to end nuclear energy talks with Saudi Arabia https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/republican-senators-ask-trump-to-end-nuclear-energy-talks-with-saudi-arabia/2018/10/31/71fdbb60-dd20-11e8-b3f0-62607289efee_story.html?utm_term=.eb0c6524a937 By Karoun Demirjian October 31
Five Republican senators sent a letter to President Trump on Wednesday imploring him to end ongoing discussions with Saudi Arabia on nuclear energy cooperation in the wake of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi’s killing at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
The senators also threatened in the letter to file legislation to block any civil nuclear agreements with Saudi Arabia if Trump will not agree to suspend negotiations “for the foreseeable future.”
“We already held serious reservations about negotiations for such an agreement,” Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Todd C. Young (R-Ind.), Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.) wrote in the letter, first reported by NBC.
“The ongoing revelations about the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, as well as certain Saudi actions related to Yemen and Lebanon, have raised further serious concerns about the transparency, accountability, and judgment of current decision-makers in Saudi Arabia.”
Congressional dissatisfaction with the U.S.-Saudi relationship was on a slow ascent before the prominent journalist’s disappearance earlier this month. But his apparent murder — which most lawmakers believe occurred at the behest of Saudi leaders, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — has precipitated unprecedented calls for consequences, from sanctions to an end to arms sales and military support for the Saudi kingdom in its controversial regional engagements, particularly in Yemen’s civil war.
Saudi officials have acknowledged that Khashoggi, a self-exiled critic of the Saudi government, was killed in the consulate, but deny that the action had their authorization.
[Turkish prosecutor says Khashoggi was strangled and dismembered in Saudi Consulate]
The senators’ letter indicates yet another layer of distrust in Saudi leaders: concern that the kingdom may try to adapt nuclear technologies acquired in a civil-use deal for weapon-making purposes.
Saudi Arabia has never agreed to terms that would prohibit it from turning a civil nuclear program dedicated for energy production into a tool to enrich uranium, reprocess plutonium and pursue other weapons-grade uses “that can bring a nation within weeks of producing a nuclear weapon,” they wrote, pointing out that the United Arab Emirates did accept such terms for a similar deal.
The senators suggested that it would be hypocritical and dangerous for the United States to accept anything less than a Saudi pledge to abide by terms of an Emirates-style deal — terms known as the “Gold Standard” — especially when the administration is demanding such behavior from Iran.
“Given your Administration’s ongoing efforts to press the Iranian regime — in the words of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — to ‘stop enrichment and never pursue plutonium reprocessing,’ we have long believed that it is therefore critical and necessary for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to accept and uphold this ‘Gold Standard’ for responsible nuclear behavior,” the senators wrote.
Facing Trump coal and nuclear push, new energy panel chief swears off politics, Washington Examiner, by Josh Siegel, October 31, 2018
New Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Neil Chatterjee vowed Wednesday to protect the independent body from political influence as it considers how to handle the growing number of retirements of coal and nuclear plants.
“We should be separate an
d apart from any political influence on either side,” Chatterjee said. “I intend to do everything in my power.”
“I have made very clear to all of the staff at the agency that the agency’s independence from political influence will continue,” Chatterjee, a sitting GOP commissioner, told reporters at a briefing one week after the White House designated him chairman, replacing Kevin McIntyre, a fellow Republican who is suffering from health issues.
Chatterjee sought to rebut critics who fear, because of his political background representing a coal-friendly state, that he may be more sympathetic to the Trump administration’s interest in saving uneconomic coal and nuclear plants by subsidizing their continued existence……….
FERC in January voted unanimously to reject a proposal from Energy Secretary Rick Perry to provide special payments to struggling coal and nuclear plants in the name of resilience and reliability, saying the grid faces no immediate risk without them.
McIntyre and Chatterjee both opposed the Perry plan.
FERC, in rejecting Perry’s plan, directed regional transmission operators to submit information on resilience challenges in their markets. The commission is reviewing those responses and could act on its own. President Trump has repeatedly pressed for action to save coal and nuclear plants, but the White House has reportedly stalled over an effort to use emergency executive authority.
Any potential action would likely come through FERC.
Chatterjee said he would follow the “rule of law” on any decision on the matter and take action, or no action if the evidence does not support it, based on facts.
“This won’t be a politically influenced decision,” he said. “My actions will be taken by the record, facts, and the rule of law.”
The new FERC chairman also said he would not veer from the commission’s other priorities…… https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/facing-trump-coal-and-nuclear-push-new-energy-panel-chief-swears-off-politics
WHAT TRUMP AND JOHN BOLTON DON’T UNDERSTAND ABOUT NUCLEAR WAR,  The Intercept, Jon Schwarz, PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S announcement on October 20 that he intends to pull the United States out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was, if nothing else, appropriately timed. On that date exactly 56 years before, President John F. Kennedy abruptly cut short a midterm campaign trip to Illinois because, the White House said, he had a cold. In fact, Kennedy was returning to Washington to address the Cuban missile crisis — the closest humanity has ever come to obliterating itself with a nuclear war.The INF treaty was signed in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. It required both countries to forgo any land-based missiles, nuclear or otherwise, with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.
In concrete terms, the treaty was a huge success. The U.S. destroyed almost 1,000 of its own missiles, and the Soviets destroyed almost 2,000 of theirs. But arms control treaties are never about weapons and numbers alone. They can help enemy nations create virtuous circles, both between them and within themselves. Verification requires constant communication and the establishment of trust; it creates constituencies for peace inside governments and in the general public; this reduces on both sides the power of the paranoid, reactionary wing that exists in every country; this creates space for further progress; and so on. The long negotiation of the INF treaty, and the post-signing environment it helped create, was part of an extraordinary collapse of tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the 1980s. When Reagan took office, the Soviets genuinely believed that the U.S. might engage in a nuclear first strike against them. This, in turn, led to two separate moments in 1983 in which the two countries came terrifyingly close to accidental nuclear war — closer than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis. Instead, the INF treaty was part of an era of good feelings that contributed to one of the most remarkable events of the past 100 years: the largely peaceful implosion of the Soviet Empire. Empires generally do not go quietly, and the dynamics of imperial collapse often contribute to huge conflagrations. Think of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and World War I; or the British Empire and World War II. The Soviet fall was an incredible piece of good fortune for the world; if it had happened in the early 1980s, instead of a few years later, it plausibly would have been catastrophic…….. exiting the treaty will do more than just lead to an arms race in which all three countries throw themselves into building new weapons. It will also create an atmosphere in which any rational modus vivendi between the U.S. and Russia, or the U.S. and China, will be far more difficult. This is the prize for Bolton and his allies, who can imagine only one world order: One in which they give orders, and everyone else submits. Bolton has the standard self-perception of his genre of human: In his memoir, “Surrender Is Not an Option,” he explains that he cares about “hard reality,” in contrast to the “dreamy and academic” fools who support arms control. But in fact, it is Bolton who is living inside of a dream. The hard reality is that our species almost committed suicide on October 27, the most dangerous moment of the Cuban missile crisis, later dubbed Black Saturday by the Kennedy administration. Even with comparative doves in charge of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, we came close to ending human civilization, thanks to mutual incomprehension. And we avoided it, as then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara later said, not by talent or wisdom, but pure luck. Then, we created a false history of what happened, one which allows terrifying fantasists like Bolton to reach, and thrive within, the highest levels of power……… Shortly after midnight, in the early morning of Black Saturday, the U.S. informed NATO that it “may find it necessary within a very short time” to attack Cuba. At noon, a U-2 flight over Cuba was shot down, killing the pilot. On all sides, war — potentially nuclear war — seemed likely, if not inevitable. But that night, Kennedy made the most important presidential decision in history: He accepted an offer from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to remove the U.S. missiles in Italy and Turkey in return for the removal of the Soviet missiles in Cuba. But the U.S. part of the bargain was kept secret from Americans. The administration maintained that Kennedy had forced the Soviets to give in, giving them nothing. That was, of course, more than frightening enough. But here’s the rest of the story. ON OCTOBER 27, A U.S. Navy ship participating in the blockade dropped depth charges on a Soviet submarine. It was only discovered years later that not only was the submarine armed with nuclear torpedoes, but also was out of radio contact with the Soviet government and believed that the war had begun. The captain wanted to use the torpedoes, which almost certainly would have led to the U.S using nuclear weapons in response. However, according to Soviet protocol, the torpedoes could only be launched with the approval of all three officers aboard. One of them refused. ……… what we can be sure of is that if people like Trump and Bolton had been in charge in 1962, then today there would be no discussion of the INF treaty — because there would be no treaty and no one to discuss it. It’s also certain that on our current trajectory, the day will come when the world will face a similar crisis. That time we won’t get the same roll of the dice. The hard reality of the Cuban missile crisis is that, as Blight and Lang put it, “either we put an end to nuclear weapons, or they will put an end to us.” https://theintercept.com/2018/10/27/trump-inf-treaty-cuban-missile-crisis-nuclear-war/ |
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| Energy Secretary Says White House Still Backs Nevada Nuke Dump, Financial Express, By: Bloomberg October 27, 2018
Energy Secretary Rick Perry said the White House still supports construction of a planned repository for nuclear waste in Nevada, despite President Donald Trump’s suggestion over the weekend that he was reconsidering. When asked if the Trump administration still supports Yucca Mountain, Perry swiftly said “Yes.” “I’m making this presumption by looking at a budgeting process and there was money in the president’s budget to manage Yucca,” Perry said, after giving remarks at the department’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. Trump requested $120 million in his budget proposal for the geologic repository 90 miles north of Las Vegas. ……….Trump told a Nevada television station he was reconsidering his support after campaigning last weekend with Senator Dean Heller, an embattled Republican senator who opposes the project and is in a tight re-election battle. “I think you should do things where people want them to happen, so I would be very inclined to be against it,” Trump said in Oct. 20 interview with KRNV-News 4. “We will be looking at it very seriously over the next few weeks, and I agree with the people of Nevada.”…….. https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/energy-secretary-says-white-house-still-backs-nevada-nuke-dump/1363704/
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Coal And Nuclear Subsidy Still Alive Despite Stall, Wyoming Public Media By COOPER MCKIM • OCT 26, 2018, Coal-fired power plants are closing down in unprecedented numbers, many of which are Wyoming coal customers. In June, President Trump took a step to change that. Taylor Kuykendall, a coal reporter with S&P Global Market Intelligence, gives context to the coal and nuclear plant subsidy introduced last June.
TK: The basic idea is that the Department of Energy would like to intervene into the energy markets and basically either order grid operators to buy electricity from struggling coal nuclear plants or they would provide some sort of an incentive to do so. And currently, a lot of those units are retiring because it’s cheaper to get energy from elsewhere. And so, what the DOE is doing here is making a national defense or a national security argument that basically gives wide deference to the administration that would allow them to come in and intervene in those markets and put their thumb on the scale in support of coal and nuclear plants that otherwise might not dispatch. …….
I think one of the things to keep in mind is that even all of the even before the opposition is stacked against the proposal any sort of legal battles is going to be a very protracted process. …..there’s a lot of kind of a top-down political drive to move this thing forward……..
this is probably going to be a very costly proposal and anything that we’ve seen so far doesn’t really detail who’s going to pay for it or how they’re going to pay for it. ……. someone’s got to pay for it and that’s going to be pretty politically damaging…….http://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/coal-and-nuclear-subsidy-still-alive-despite-stall#stream/0
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The 1987 accord prohibits the United States and Russia from possessing, producing, or deploying ground-launched cruise and ballistic missiles with a range of between 500 and 5,000 kilometers.
“Just a week ago, a couple of days before they announced their intention to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Americans via their embassy in Moscow sent the Russian Foreign Ministry an extensive list of questions which are a concern to them,” Lavrov said in an interview aired on Russian television.
“It is better to come to terms with Russia on an equal basis and it is not necessary to be friends,” the Russian minister also said. “We are not forcing a friendship.”………
START Under Threat?
In the wake of U.S. threats to withdraw from the INF Treaty, Lavrov said that the “fate of the New START Treaty is unclear.”
The New START Treaty limits strategic nuclear weapons. It was signed in 2010 and is due to expire in 2021, although the two sides could agree to extend it for another five years.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that Washington’s withdrawal from the INF Treaty could lead to a new “arms race.”
Meanwhile, European members of NATO have urged Washington to try to bring Russia back into compliance with the nuclear arms control agreement rather than quitting it, diplomats say.
Speaking on October 28, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said the United States was in consultation with its European allies on the INF Treaty.
When asked whether he could rule out placing intermediate-range missiles on the ground if Washington left the INF Treaty, Mattis told reporters travelling with him to Prague, “I never rule things out like that, I also don’t rule it in.” ………https://www.rferl.org/a/lavrov-says-moscow-preparing-answers-to-u-s-inf-concerns/29568360.html
Utah says no to EnergySolutions accepting depleted uranium from military, but will it change course in the future? Salt Lake Tribune, By Brian Maffly 26 Oct 18 Radioactive munitions won’t be buried in Utah’s West Desert anytime soon after a decision issued Thursday by state regulators, who rejected EnergySolutions’ emergency request to accept several thousand tons of armor-piercing projectile points made of heavier-than-lead depleted uranium.
Pilgrim to move nuclear waste to higher ground, http://www.patriotledger.com/news/20181026/pilgrim-to-move-nuclear-waste-to-higher-ground By Joe DiFazio
The Patriot Ledger PLYMOUTH — Officials at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station said they want to move nuclear waste at the site to higher ground over the next few years with an eye toward sea level rise.
Patrick O’Brien, spokesman for Entergy, the plant’s owner, said that the new proposed site will be located in what is now a parking lot 75 feet above sea level and 350 feet away from Rocky Hill Road. The site is 700 feet away from the closest point on the shoreline, O’Brien said.
Pilgrim is slated to be shut down by June 1. Entergy announced in August it plans to sell the station to Holtec International who will decommission the plant. O’Brien said the plan to move the waste was made in conjunction with Holtec.
O’Brien said that the proposed site was chosen as the best of three under consideration and that it was evaluated for nine regulatory and technical requirements. O’Brien saidEntergy will apply for the required permits and plans to begin construction on the new site before Pilgrim shuts down.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Neil Sheehan said that the move doesn’t need approval from his agency, but it would monitor construction of the new site and movement of the spent nuclear fuel. The NRC will need to approve Pilgrim’s sale to Holtec.
Half Life Chad Walde believed in his work at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Then he got a rare brain cancer, and the government denied that it had any responsibility , Pro Publica, by Rebecca Moss, The Santa Fe New Mexican, 26 Oct 18,“………A Gap Between Records and Recollection
CHAD WAS CLEARED TO RETURN TO HIS JOB at the lab in late January 2015, four months after his diagnosis. He’d undergone radiation and two chemotherapy treatments, and Los Alamos’ occupational medicine staff said he was fit to continue working with classified material, his medical records show. At risk for seizures, he couldn’t drive or climb stairs or ladders. Chad carpooled and had Angela drive him to the laboratory several times a week. His supervisor offered him a desk job, a step down from his managerial role — but one that kept his health insurance running. He accepted. The only real alternative was termination.
Roark says the lab’s goal is to treat all employees with debilitating conditions with “utmost respect” and says when employees are unable to perform the functions of their jobs, Los Alamos “makes reasonable efforts to accommodate them,” which can result in job reassignment.
Separately, to process his claim for cancer benefits, the Department of Labor also told Chad it would need all of his medical and radiation exposure records from the lab. The Department of Labor sends these to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, another federal agency that uses a probability equation to determine if a worker had a high enough dose of radiation to cause cancer. If the computer found a 50 percent or higher correlation, Chad would get benefits.
When the records arrived from Los Alamos, containing a single CD and a brief letter, it was the first time Chad realized that his own experience differed from what the lab had noted in its records.
The lab had found “no records” of Chad having been exposed to anything or other environmental occupational hazards, the letter said. And his dosimetry report, a spreadsheet that showed his total dose of radiation annually, was scant.
The lab had not tracked Chad’s radiation exposure in 1999, his first year on the job, the report indicated, or in 2000, when the Cerro Grande fire burned. External monitoring began in 2001 but showed a clean zero for 11 out of the next 14 years. (Only in 2008, 2013 and 2014 were there any hits on the report.)
The report said his total dose was 0.254 rems over his career, well below safety limits and slightly less than an average person gets from background radiation from the sun and environment in a single year. A rem is a unit used to measure the absorbed dose of radiation, with 1 rem equivalent to a CT scan, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Chad marveled at the document. It didn’t track with his memory — or hold any record of the time he’d been called in for going over his limit and accused of taking his badge to the airport, or when he was sent home wearing disposable clothes.
“They aren’t on here,” Chad said when he looked at the document.
It also seemed impossible there were so many years that were completely blank.
Asked about the discrepancy between Walde’s memory and the reports, Los Alamos spokesman Roark said, in general, that the lab “maintains a comprehensive archive of worker radiation dosimetry data” and that it “provides any and all records in response to requests as quickly as possible.”
When NIOSH reviewed the records, it had a simple way to fill in the gaps. For the two years when Chad was not monitored, NIOSH assumed the maximum dose he could have been exposed to was the maximum background radiation at the lab (which was 0.4 rem), adding in the possibility of a couple missed readings.
NIOSH said Chad’s records showed he had been exposed to “various sources of radiation during his employment,” but the maximum dose he could have received at the lab, based on its calculations and assumptions, was a 3.744 rem dose to the brain. The agency modeled his probability for cancer based on how this amount of radiation would affect and mutate cells of the thyroid. It does not have a model for how external radiation might impact brain tissue.
On a phone call with a NIOSH claims representative in September 2015, Chad asked why the agency used general air monitoring data to fill in his missed readings. Chad, who made a recording of the call, said this would fail to account for the radiation present at the more dangerous nuclear areas he had been assigned to.
He told the representative how his badge often took hits. Like he’d told his father-in-law, and his friends, Chad said his boss kept asking him why his readings were “above the reporting levels.”
I “wonder if we are not missing something,” Chad said on the recording. “I also worry about the Los Alamos reporting,” relaying instances in which the lab certified an area free of radiation only to discover contamination later while he was working on a maintenance job. Chad began to talk about something he witnessed at the liquid radioactive waste plant but trailed off, saying, “I don’t know if I am allowed to say any of this stuff — never mind.”
Chad Walde’s radiation shells hang in the garage of his family’s home. The shells help keep the head still while a patient receives radiotherapy. (Adria Malcolm, special to ProPublica)
Stu Hinnefeld, director of the divis Stu Hinnefeld, director of the division of compensation analysis and support for NIOSH, said in an interview that those exposed to radiation have a “relatively low” likelihood of developing brain cancer compared with lung and thyroid cancers. He said the institute’s risk models, as a result, require a worker to have a much higher documented exposure to radiation than many of the other cancers in order to get compensation.
The Department of Labor concluded there was just a 2.67 percent chance his cancer was related to his radiation exposure history. His claim was denied on Jan. 14, 2016.
Chad’s dates of employment made him more likely to be rejected than if he had worked at the lab in a prior era. Overall, the Department of Labor has approved nearly 60 percent of claims filed by Los Alamos workers for cancer and beryllium disease. But for workers who started working at the lab after 1996, that figure falls to 45 percent, according to data requested under the Freedom of Information Act.
A spokesperson for the Department of Labor said, “While gaps in past records have existed at some sites, workers in the modern era have more extensive monitoring records. There are no unexplained gaps or readings in this employee’s radiation dose records.”
Still, Chad wanted to appeal. Over the next year, he would undergo another surgery and start experiencing frequent seizures, at one point spending two days in a coma in Texas, where the family had traveled for the twins’ volleyball tournament, when the spasms refused to subside. The family held “Gray Be Gone” fundraisers, referring to the color of the tumor tissue, to raise money to send Chad to MD Anderson for treatment. He also started clinical trials with a doctor in New Mexico.
During that time, Chad learned that he was not the only person at Los Alamos who thought missing records had led the Department of Labor to deny a claim.
For more than a decade, workers at Los Alamos have been telling federal officials that similar data and records problems have prevented them from getting compensation. In June 2005, at a NIOSH forum for the lab’s technical workers’ union, one worker said the lab “had lied and falsified documents right and left … the monitors were turned off, people weren’t qualified to be doing the monitoring, the equipment was never calibrated,” according to meeting minutes.
Another man, an X-ray technician, said his personal radiation badge always showed up with zero contamination.
Falsified radiation data or medical records have been documented at other labs, including in 2003 at Savannah River Site in South Carolina and Hanford Site in Washington state. Radiation records also were falsified at an Ohio nuclear facility in 2013. The Department of Energy fined lab managers in South Carolina and Ohio more than $200,000 each for “willful falsification.”
Los Alamos has not been fined for willful falsification of health records, but it has been cited within the past year for serious safety violations and for failing to check laboratory rooms for toxic chemicals before allowing workers to enter. Internal incident reports from the early 2000s, obtained by NIOSH, described how records had been removed from radiation log books, “deliberate tampering” with nasal swipe samples (used to test if a worker inhaled radioactive particles) and problems with workers not wearing their radiation badges.
Soon after Chad’s diagnosis, another electrician on his crew, Cesario Lopez, told Chad he’d recently had part of his kidney taken out after being diagnosed with cancer. Both Lopez’s mother and uncle, who worked at the lab before him, had been diagnosed with cancer, too. Lopez applied for and was denied compensation by the Department of Labor but has appealed.
Then Chad learned about his friend Gilbert Mondragon. Mondragon started working as an electrician on the fire protection crew in August 1999, three months before Chad. Mondragon was just 19 and from the beginning saw Chad as a mentor. Chad, he said, taught him how to have a good attitude at work and find value in it. That became harder after Mondragon was diagnosed with kidney cancer in the spring of 2014 at the age of 34.
Like Chad, Mondragon’s radiation report showed 14 straight years of zeroes, and only two years, 2006 and 2007, in which his badge took any hits, totaling 67 millirems of radiation over 16 years.
“It’s not like people think it is,” Mondragon said about lab safety. He, like Chad, recalled several times he’d been decontaminated and given new work clothes or boots.
Mondragon believes some of the zeroes are also the result of being told, by his supervisors, to take his badge off when he was doing work in contaminated places. “Now I know better,” he said, “but it’s too late.”
Roark, the lab spokesman, denies workers were ever told to remove their badges, saying its “Radiation Protection Program would never allow, endorse or recommend removing dosimeters to avoid contamination.”
Ken Silver, who sits on a Department of Labor advisory board and is a professor of environmental health at East Tennessee State University, testified before Congressin 2007 that instructing workers to remove their radiation badges was a common practice for “cleanup crews” at Los Alamos in the past. Silver said this practice was based on the belief that if a badge was contaminated, workers would go on to spread radiation throughout the laboratory, which he called a “flimsy assumption.”
Los Alamos officials did not testify at the hearing. But the lab says its rate of injuries has dropped significantly since 2006 and is well below the industry average. The laboratory says it does not track the cause of death for its employees.
Hinnefeld said NIOSH has looked into allegations that workers were told to remove their badges and, “We hear that on occasion.” But he said, in the past, officials have concluded that this wouldn’t affect how the agency reconstructs a worker’s radiation exposure because a single missed reading is unlikely to hold much weight in the overall career of a worker.
Diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma, which his physician has linked to chemical exposure, Mondragon resigned from the lab this winter. The doctors’ visits have consumed his life. His cancer claim, like Chad’s, also was rejected by the Department of Labor, but he was told he would likely be accepted if he were to develop another cancer.
For the last six months, he has relied on the help of an oxygen tank to breathe, trailing a long, green plastic tube wherever he goes…..more https://features.propublica.org/los-alamos/chad-walde-nuclear-facility-radiation-cancer/
Energy Department ready to approve nuclear waste 
dumping https://www.salon.com/2018/10/26/energy-department-ready-to-approve-nuclear-waste-dumping_partner/The Texas facility is operated by a major donor to Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s political campaigns SARAH OKESON OCTOBER 26, 2018
Our Energy secretary could ship treated nuclear waste from our nation’s most polluted nuclear weapons production site to a Texas nuclear dump near an aquifer suppling water from northern Texas to South Dakota. The dump was opened by one of Secretary Rick Perry’s largest campaign donors.
The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, signed by former President Ronald Reagan, was written to prevent potential disasters and mandates that the Department of Energy must send high-level waste to a network of underground tunnels and rooms where it can safely decay over millions of years.
Republicans and Trump’s new assistant secretary for environmental management, Anne Marie White,who did consulting work for the company that operates the dump, want to rewrite federal regulationsto say that some high-level nuclear waste isn’t really high-level nuclear waste so it can be stored elsewhere.
“It certainly raises questions about potential conflicts of interest,” said Tom Carpenter, the executive director of Hanford Challenge, a Seattle watchdog group.
Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, who died in 2013 at age 82, owned Waste Control Specialists. Simmons and his wife, Annette, gave Perry’s campaigns more than $1.3 million.
Waste Control Specialists got state licenses in Texas in 2008 and 2009 to dispose of radioactive waste in a dump in Andrews County on the Texas-New Mexico border, adjacent to the giant URENCO USA nuclear enrichment facility at Eunice, N.M. Perry, then Texas governor, appointed the three commissioners of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality who approved the licenses.
The dump is over or near the Ogallala Aquifer, depending on whether you believe the water table boundaries of the company or others. The dump is also in an earthquake hazard zone.
Waste Control Specialists wants to take radioactive waste from the Hanford nuclear weapons complex in southeast Washington state, one of the most contaminated places on earth. About 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste produced during World War II and the Cold War is stored in 177 underground tanks.
Hanford was created during the Manhattan Project in World War II and made the plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.
Waste Control Specialists says it could save the federal government up to $16.5 million. The dump would take waste after cesium is removed and It is encased in grout. In December, 3 gallons of waste, or about 0.0000053% of the waste in the underground tanks, was encapsulated in grout as a test.
Republicans have previously reclassified nuclear waste as less dangerous. In 2004, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) attached a rider to the defense authorization bill so the Department of Energy didn’t have to remove radioactive sludge from underground storage tanks in South Carolina and Idaho.
By: KTVU StaffOCT 25 2018 , SAN FRANCISCO (KTVU) – The United States government has joined the lawsuits against the company hired to clean up radiation at the old Hunters Point Shipyard in San Francisco.
The Department of Justice claims Tetra Tech defrauded the government with its radiation testing of soil and buildings.
The lawsuit against Tetra Tech and others claim radioactive soil left on the property has led to chronic health problems. …….http://www.ktvu.com/news/us-government-joins-hunters-point-shipyard-radiation-lawsuit
of the week– Nuclear Reactor Information Task Force
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
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