Trump sends Cruise missile-carrying nuclear submarine to South Korean port as he warns Kim Jong Un ‘is a problem that needs to be finally solved’
The USS Michigan arrived on Monday ahead of a possible Tuesday nuke trial
Tuesday is the 85th anniversary of the start of the North’s Korean People’s Army
The US, Japan and South Korea are meeting in Tokyo to discuss North Korea
Trump has also invited the entire Senate to the White House on Wednesday
And the UN Security Council on North Korea will also meet on Friday
Japan and China are to meet too; China is an unhappy ally of the hermit state
North Korea has refused to stop its nuclear tests and is threatening more trials
The USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier strike group is also heading to the peninsula
By Reuters and Dailymail.com ReporterDAILY MAIL, 25 April 2017 A nuclear-powered US submarine arrived in a South Korean port on Tuesday in a show of force amid concerns that North Korea may attempt another missile launch or nuclear test on Tuesday.
The port call in Busan by the USS Michigan came as an American aircraft carrier strike group continued steaming towards Korean waters.
And as tensions in the area continued to rise, the top nuclear envoys from South Korea, Japan, and the US met in Tokyo to discuss North Korea’s refusal to give up its nuclear program.
On Monday, US President Donald Trump called for tougher new UN sanctions on Pyongyang, saying the North was a global threat and ‘a problem that we have to finally solve’.
The USS Michigan’s armament comprises four torpedo tubes and 154 BGM-109 Tomahawks. It was modified to remove its nuclear armaments in the mid-2000s.
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yoshide Suga, told a media briefing that China’s nuclear envoy, Wu Dawei, would also hold talks with Japanese Foreign Ministry officials on Tuesday.
A ministry source said Wu was likely to meet his Japanese nuclear counterpart on Wednesday.
Matching the flurry of activity in North Asia, the State Department in Washington said on Monday US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson would chair a special ministerial meeting of the UN Security Council on North Korea on Friday.
Tillerson, along with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and Joint Chiefs chairman General Joseph Dunford, would also hold a rare briefing for the entire US Senate on North Korea on Wednesday, Senate aides said……..
Two Japanese destroyers conducted exercises on Monday with the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier strike group that is headed for waters off the Korean peninsula, sent by Trump as a warning to the North.
The South Korean military is also planning to conduct joint drills with the carrier group.
As those drills continued, the USS Michigan arrived in the South Korean port of Busan on Tuesday, the US Navy said. The nuclear-powered submarine is built to carry and launch ballistic missiles and Tomahawk cruise missiles.
As well as his military show of force, Trump has also sought to pressure China to do more to rein in its nuclear-armed neighbor.
China, North Korea’s sole major ally, has in turn been angered by Pyongyang’s belligerence, as well as its nuclear and missile programs.
STUDY: Impact Of Climate Change On Florida, Goodbye Miami
America’s trillion-dollar coastal property bubble could burst “before the sea consumes a single house.” Here’s why. “Pessimists selling to optimists.” That’s how one former Florida coastal property owner describes the current state of the market in a must-read Bloomberg story.
Right now, science and politics don’t favor the optimists. The disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is speeding up, providing increasing evidence we are headed for the worst-case scenario of sea level rise — three to six feet (or more) by 2100.
The impacts are already visible in South Florida. “Tidal flooding now predictably drenches inland streets, even when the sun is out, thanks to the region’s porous limestone bedrock,” explains Bloomberg. “Saltwater is creeping into the drinking water supply.”
At the same time, President Trump is working to thwart both domestic and international climate action while slashing funding for coastal adaptation and monitoring. E&E News reported earlier this month that the EPA has already “disbanded its climate change adaptation program” and reassigned all the workers.
Faster sea level rise and less adaptation means the day of reckoning is nigh. Dan Kipnis, chair of Miami Beach’s Marine and Waterfront Protection Authority — who has failed to find a buyer for his Miami Beach home for nearly a year — told Bloomberg, “Nobody thinks it’s coming as fast as it is.”
But this is not just South Florida’s problem. The entire country is facing a trillion-dollar bubble in coastal property values. This Hindenburg has been held aloft by U.S. taxpayers in the form of the National Flood Insurance Program.
A 2014 Reuters analysis of this “slow-motion disaster” calculated there’s almost $1.25 trillion in coastal property being covered at below-market rates.
When will the bubble burst? As I’ve written for years, property values will crash when a large fraction of the financial community — mortgage bankers and opinion-makers, along with a smaller but substantial fraction of the public — realize that it is too late for us to stop catastrophic sea level rise.
When sellers outnumber buyers, and banks become reluctant to write 30-year mortgages for doomed property, and insurance rates soar, then the coastal property bubble will slow, peak, and crash.
The devaluation process had begun even before Trump’s election reduced the chances we would act in time to prevent catastrophic climate change. The New York Times reported last fall that “nationally, median home prices in areas at high risk for flooding are still 4.4 percent below what they were 10 years ago, while home prices in low-risk areas are up 29.7 percent over the same period.”
Sean Becketti, the chief economist for mortgage giant Freddie Mac, warneda year ago that values could plunge if sellers start a stampede. “Some residents will cash out early and suffer minimal losses,” he said. “Others will not be so lucky.”
As this week’s Bloomberg piece puts it, “Demand and financing could collapse before the sea consumes a single house.”
So here’s a question for owners of coastal property — and the financial institutions that back them — as they watch team Trump keep his coastal-destroying promises: Who will be the smart money that gets out early — and who will be the other kind of money?
North Korea highlights 1250 US marines in Darwin to claim America is preparing for nuclear war, SMH, Kirsty Needham and James Massola, 25 Apr 17, North Korea’s state newspaper has singled out the United States’ deployment of 1250 marines to Darwin to claim America is preparing for nuclear war.
And as regional tensions escalate and a US carrier strike group approaches the Korean peninsula, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said the secretive regime “must be stopped” as it represented a threat to the region and, potentially, globally.
Pusan National University associate professor Robert Kelly told Fairfax Media North Korea’s missiles might have the range to reach northern Australia, but played down the threat as “the question is guidance, not range”.
Rodong Sinmun, the official paper of the Worker’s Party of North Korea, highlighted the US marines’ arrival in northern Australia on April 18. The marines will be joined by 12 military helicopters including five Cobra helicopters and four Osprey carriers.
“This is the largest scale US military presence in Australia after World War 2,” the newspaper reported on Monday. “America is fanatically, crazily trying to optimise its nuclear war readiness,” it claimed.
The story, on page six of the North Korean newspaper, was headlined: America prepares for nuclear war in different overseas military deployments. Darwin was the only city named…….
Australia-based defence experts believe it is unlikely North Korea has the capacity to strike Australia yet, though they may do within the next three years. The nation’s most recent missile test, earlier this month, failed just seconds after launch…….
The deployment of 1250 marines is the largest to Darwin since the former prime minister Julia Gillard and former president Barack Obama struck a deal back in 2011 to undertake the yearly rotation of troops.
US prepares charges to seek arrest of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange – sources | 20 April 2017 | US authorities have prepared charges to seek the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, US officials familiar with the matter tell CNN. The Justice Department investigation of Assange and WikiLeaks dates to at least 2010, when the site first gained wide attention for posting thousands of files stolen by the former US Army intelligence analyst now known as Chelsea Manning.
Turkey Point nuclear wastewater plan needs further study, groups say, Susan Salisbury, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer, April 25, 2017If Florida Power & Light’s proposed Turkey Point units 6 and 7 nuclear reactors are ever built, will it be safe to inject wastewater used to cool to the reactors into deep wells in the Boulder Zone?
FPL and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission say yes, but groups who oppose the new $20 billion reactors say no. They assert that injecting the wastewater underground could contaminate the Upper Floridan Aquifer above the Boulder Zone and threaten the water supply of 3 million South Floridians.
Mindy Goldstein, an attorney and director of the Turner Environmental Law Clinic at Emory University School of Law, said Tuesday that more studies are needed for the NRC to make an informed decision about the potential impact of possible upward migration of wastewater.
“The NRC and FPL continue to wish away the problem, saying upward migration would not occur,” Goldstein said.
On May 2, at 9:30 a.m. the issue is scheduled to be heard before the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Atomic Safety Licensing Board at Homestead City Hall, 100 Civic Court, Homestead.
The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, the National Parks Conservation Association and Miami-Dade residents Capt. Dan Kipnis and Mark Oncavage intervened in the licensing proceedings. They assert an environmental impact statement issued last year is deficient.
The intervenors say that the chemical concentrations of ethylbenzene, heptachlor, tetrachloroethylene, and toluene in the wastewater injections could adversely impact the water supply should they migrate from the Boulder Zone to the Upper Floridan Aquifer……
On Tuesday, the intervenors referred to a 40-page 2015 study that found water could migrate from the boulder zone into the lower Floridan Aquifer through “tectonic faults” or cracks and through collapsed karst, the limestone layer that was formed millions of years ago from the remains of sea creatures.
The U.S. Geological Survey report by Kevin Cunningham was prepared in cooperation with the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department. It focused on the Floridan Aquifer system near Boulder zone deep wells where the department injects treated wastewater.
FPL already operates two nuclear units at the site about 20 miles south of Miami. In 2009, FPL applied for permission to construct and operate two AP1000 reactors at the site, but the NRC has not yet granted FPL a license.
The case involved the tax treatment of the costs to dispose of spent nuclear fuel — nuclear wastes.
In a 20-page ruling issued last week, West Palm Beach-based U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenberg ruled in favor of the Internal Revenue Service and said the company is not entitled to a tax refund.
NextEra had argued that the fees it pays to the Department of Energy for the disposal of nuclear waste qualify as decommissioning expenses and should be counted as net operating losses. The fees should also be eligible for carry-back to the in-service date of the reactor, the company asserted.
Rosenberg ruled that the disposal of nuclear fuel as waste from a nuclear power plant does not constitute decommissioning.
“Stated another way, for fuel to be decommissioned, it would first have to be commissioned,” Rosenberg wrote.
FPL owns and operates nuclear reactors at its Turkey Point plant south of Miami and at its St. Lucie plant on Hutchinson Island. NextEra owns three nuclear plans through other subsidiaries. They are Seabrook, Seabrook, N.H.; Duane Arnold, Palo, Iowa and Point Beach, Two Rivers, Wis.
Nuclear reactors require nuclear fuel assemblies containing radioactive uranium, and after about four years the assemblies no longer efficiently produce energy. They are then spent fuel and must be removed from the reactor and replaced with a new fuel assembly.
The tax years the company claimed it was owed a refund are 2003-05 and 2008-10. During those years, NextEra paid more than $73 million in nuclear waste fees to the Energy Department, and FPL paid more than $24.5 million, according to the lawsuit filed in April
FPL to build more solar plants, one new gas plant, Palm Beach Post Susan Salisbury April 3, 2017 More solar power plants are on the way, and an older power plant in Dania Beach will be replaced with a newnatural gas-fired facility, Florida Power & Light officials said Monday.
The company also said it has reached a preliminary agreement with JEA to close down the St. Johns River Power Park, a coal-fired power plant in Jacksonville that is jointly joined by the two companies. That plant, which is no longer economical to operate, will not be replaced.
In addition to the approximately 600 megawatts of solar power Juno Beach-based FPL is building at eight sites around the state, the company said it wants to add another 1,500 megawatts beginning in 2019 through 2023. It already operates more than 335 megawatts of solar generating capacity.
Although the sites for the 1,500 megawatts of new solar have not been determined yet, FPL said that an undeveloped parcel it owns in western Miami-Dade County is a possible location for a solar facility.
FPL president and CEO Eric Silagy said, “We’re currently building some of the lowest-cost solar ever seen in America, and our investments in more efficient natural gas technology are delivering enormous savings and environmental benefits for our customers and our state.”
The addition of nearly 2,100 megawatts of new solar will be enough to power more than 420,000 homes. Lower costs are possible because of existing transmission and substation infrastructure and the purchase of solar panels in large quantities…….
What is the Gotham Shield? Nuclear bomb drill in NJ this week, New jersey 101.5 By Dan AlexanderApril 24, 2017 NEW YORK — An emergency response drill that has caught the attention of conspiracy theorists begins in New Jersey on Monday night.
“Gotham Shield” is the name given to a multi-agency, real-time drill that starts Monday night and runs all week, involving a number of law enforcement and rescue agencies from New Jersey and the Northeast, according to NJ.com.
The “notional” drill will be based on the explosion of a nuclear device in West New York. A response center will be set up at MetLife Stadium on Tuesday, according to the report, in which rescue teams and equipment will be set up to respond to respond to casualties, but will not involve actual “actors” playing victims.
FEMA spokeswoman Lauren Lefebvre told NJ.com on Sunday the purpose of the exercise is “to expand the ability at local and national levels to coordinate in effect a large-scale response and recovery to an event like this.”
Over the last week, hundreds of public servants across the government of Canada, including military and emergency response officials, have been participating in a series of exercises under that common scenario.
Exercise STAUNCH MAPLE 17 is a command post exercise representing the Canadian Forces’ support to this scenario.
It started on April 20 and will run until April 28. The exercise, based in Ottawa and Nova Scotia, trains “consequence management capabilities with a focus on staff processes and leadership,” according to the Department of National Defence.
STAUNCH MAPLE 17 is part of a series of bi-national, government exercises aimed at enhancing interagency protocols and communication in case of a significant threat to Canada.
STAUNCH MAPLE 17 brings together hundreds of public servants from several departments and agencies, including:
· Public Safety· Health Canada
· Transport Canada
· Government Operations Centre
· Royal Canadian Mounted Police
· Natural Resources Canada
· Public Health Agency of Canada
· Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission
· Industry Science and Economic Development Canada
· Defence Research and Development Canada· Canadian Border Services Agency
· Nova Scotia Emergency Management Office
· Halifax Regional Municipality
· Halifax Harbour Bridges
· Halifax Port Authority
· Halifax Regional Police
Some participants in the exercise are involved in a concurrent exercise, PROMINENT HUNT 17-01. That exercises U.S. assistance to the Canadian government to support the investigation of the simulated nuclear threat. Participants from the U.S. and Canada will collect simulated evidentiary samples of debris at various locations in Nova Scotia.
Royal Canadian Air Force CH-146 Griffon helicopters, an RCMP ASTAR-350 helicopter, and American UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters will be conducting low-level aerial survey flights for that scenario.
Man guilty of bomb threats against nuclear plant in Florida | 19 April 2017 | A north Florida man has pleaded guilty to sending bomb threats to a nuclear power plant, a school and other government and private facilities. Acting U.S. Attorney W. Stephen Muldrow said in a news release that 25-year-old David Wayne Willmott Jr. pleaded guilty on Tuesday in federal court to three counts of making threats to use an explosive device. Federal prosecutors say Willmott emailed bomb threats in 2014 and 2015 to the nuclear plant as well as two courthouses, two airports and a sheriff’s office.
“The reason that I care so much is that I basically grew up on the beach. It’s like another mother, sort of, to me,” Levi said.
His local beach faces the Atlantic Ocean and the flat coastal terrain is one of the areas in the United States most vulnerable to a rise in sea level.
Levi and his family believe they are already seeing the effects of climate change in the local sand dunes, which are nesting territory for sea turtles.
“It makes me really sad seeing how much dune we’ve lost,” Levi said.
“When I went out on the beach after the hurricane, I was just crying because there was so much dune lost.” The young people suing Mr Trump began their legal action under former president Barack Obama, and last November they had a win with a judge dismissing a move from the administration to throw out their court action.
“Exercising my ‘reasoned judgement’ I have no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society,” Federal Judge Ann Aiken wrote.
Last month the Trump administration announced plans to appeal, but Levi is not backing down.
“I was just totally shocked that he doesn’t believe climate change is real,” Levi said.
“It was a little bit scary. It was just a little bit disturbing he didn’t believe that climate change was real.”
The case has seen Levi and his fellow young climate activists face some rather adult language on social media, but his mother Leanne Draheim said she was not worried.
“Some people are saying like, ‘Why are you letting your kid get involved? What does he know? He doesn’t know enough to get involved’,” Ms Draheim said.
“But really he knows that he cares about the environment, he cares about being outside, and we’ve talked about how that’s not going to happen in the future for his kids if things keep going the way things are going.”
Climate change spending slashed
President Trump has not yet said whether he will stick by his pledge to “cancel” the Paris Climate Accord, but he has moved swiftly to curtail government spending on climate.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) stands to lose almost a third of its funding under Mr Trump’s draft budget, and climate programs in other agencies will not be funded.
“Regarding the question as to climate change, I think the president was fairly straightforward: ‘We’re not spending money on that anymore,'” Mr Trump’s budget director Mick Mulvaney said.
But besides demanding North Korea give up its only trump card — no pun intended — some are pushing the administration to go even further: to consider launching a preemptive strike on Pyongyang.
What happens next is one of the worst military and human tragedies in history: Kim orders a nuclear strike on Seoul. While the missile lands four miles outside of the city thanks to a targeting error, millions of people are instantly killed with millions more poisoned by radioactive fallout. In a sheer panic, the millions of people who survive the attack rush south, creating a massive humanitarian crisis of the worst magnitude.
From here, things get even worse……the price of such a victory could be millions of people dead and large sections of Korea rendered uninhabitable for decades, if not longer.
No one wants to talk to the dictator of a nation with over 200,000 people or more in prison camps — but an attack that could lead to a conflict where millions could die in a nuclear war is far worse. The stakes are too great to at least not consider it.
First, it seems the Trump administration is ready to take the toughest of lines when it comes to dealing with the Hermit Kingdom. In an interview with The Washington Post‘s Josh Rogin, Vice President Pence declared that North Korea must give up its nuclear and missile programs in exchange for nothing, not even talks.
As the piece points out, it is tough to tell at this point if this was just rhetoric, maybe a trial balloon of sorts, or a new Trump administration policy. The vice president, however, seemed clear: “I think the path of negotiations with North Korea has been a colossal failure now for more than 25 years.”
But besides demanding North Korea give up its only trump card — no pun intended — some are pushing the administration to go even further: to consider launching a preemptive strike on Pyongyang.
In an interview on the Today show, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) explained that if China would not stop North Korea from building a missile that can hit the U.S. homeland, Washington should use diplomacy, sanctions, and possibly “a military strike to stop their program.”
On the surface, both comments in isolation might not draw oodles of attention. But taken together with the facts that Washington will not negotiate with North Korea and that the Hermit Kingdom already has, according to most estimates, 10-20 nuclear weapons, the comments are nothing short of apocalyptic.
In order to appreciate the ramifications of such a policy, let’s game out what such ideas would look like in practice. Let us assume in the near future that Washington decides to push China hard into somehow “solving” the North Korea issue. Beijing, for its part, does cut back some food and fuel aid and does, to its credit, end all direct and indirect aid to Pyongyang’s various military programs. North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs continue to advance, but instead of racing towards a missile that can nuke America, the program is slowed dramatically.
The Trump administration is not satisfied. It threatens China, declaring that it must do more. But Beijing does not want to precipitate the possible downfall of the Kim dynasty. They fear Washington’s wrath, but they’re much more worried about millions of hungry North Koreans trying to seek refuge in China as well as potentially loose nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Combined with Beijing’s other great concern — that Seoul would eventually unite the Korean peninsula under its control and continue its military alliance with the U.S. — China decides to take its chances with America.
Washington is now faced with a dilemma. They have made substantial progress on curtailing the speed in which Pyongyang can pair a nuclear warhead with a long-range missile — but the threat does remain. So the Trump administration leaks to the press that it is considering military action, and begins to move its best military assets into the region — and this time it’s for real. President Trump orders B-2 bombers at the ready, with the ability to evade radar and drop large, bunker-buster bombs on North Korean nuclear facilities.
But North Korea is not to be deterred. It declares to the world that if the Trump administration decides to attack, Pyongyang will unload its full arsenal on South Korea and Japan. And considering North Korea’s large military — thousands of artillery pieces, rocket launchers, 4,300 tanks, 1.1 million men under arms, 200,00 special forces, and a dangerous offensive cyber warfare capability — it is a threat that can’t exactly be taken lightly
But Trump presses ahead. After moving three aircraft carrier battlegroups into the region and sending additional bombers and fighters to South Korea, Japan, and Guam, the administration warns North Korea that “it must decide whether it wants peace or war” and that “the Kim regime clearly can see that now we truly have all options on the table.” Trump then goes on Twitter, declaring, “I hope Kim makes the right choice!”
Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s third dynastic dictator, decides not to budge. He knows that if he gives up his nukes he has no leverage with America. And even worse, North Korea’s political elites will see him as weak — and regime change could occur from within. He makes the only choice he can, and hopes Trump is bluffing.
Unfortunately for Kim, and Asia, war is now inevitable.
Trump orders a massive assault on North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs. The goal is simple: Destroy not only Pyongyang’s ability to create nuclear weapons and advanced missiles, but the current stockpiles they have. Washington launches what can only be described as a “shock and awe” campaign on steroids: over 1,000 cruise missiles in the first few hours alone, B-2 bombers flying around the clock from bases in Missouri with stealth F-22 Raptors leading the way.
The assault itself, according to every metric conceivable, is a success. North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs are set back a decade or more with most of Kim’s nuclear weapons and missile launchers destroyed. Republicans and Democrats alike applaud President Trump’s bold actions — acting when leaders of the past decided to do nothing.
There is however a catch to what seems like a resounding military success: The Kim regime’s nuclear deterrent was not completely destroyed. One weapon, buried deep underground, survived the attack. And since North Korea’s chemical and biological weapons were largely hidden underground as well, Kim has a terrible choice to make: Use the weapons he has now, or lose them in a potential second wave of strikes. He decides to use his full arsenal before it’s too late.
What happens next is one of the worst military and human tragedies in history: Kim orders a nuclear strike on Seoul. While the missile lands four miles outside of the city thanks to a targeting error, millions of people are instantly killed with millions more poisoned by radioactive fallout. In a sheer panic, the millions of people who survive the attack rush south, creating a massive humanitarian crisis of the worst magnitude.
From here, things get even worse. Kim launches dozens of chemical and biological weapons at South Korea and Japan. Sarin, VX ,and other toxins are lobbed at Tokyo, Pusan, and other large cities. Millions of people try to flee the impacted areas just as in Seoul — creating a panic not seen since World War II.
In just a few hours, hell is unleashed on the Korean peninsula. And while the United States and its allies would eventually win any war against North Korea, it is clear from the above — far from what could be the most extreme of examples of a Second Korean War — what damage the Kim regime could do in a military confrontation. Indeed, the price of such a victory could be millions of people dead and large sections of Korea rendered uninhabitable for decades, if not longer.
Yet, there is another path forward. It seems due time for President Trump to remember his own words from the campaign when it comes to talking to North Korea — and maybe even to Kim Jong Un directly: “I would speak to him. I would have no problem speaking to him.”
No one wants to talk to the dictator of a nation with over 200,000 people or more in prison camps — but an attack that could lead to a conflict where millions could die in a nuclear war is far worse. The stakes are too great to at least not consider it.
Area G, perhaps more than any other place at Los Alamos National Laboratory, represents the challenges that the U.S. Department of Energy faces in cleaning up the hundreds of waste sites at the lab while work continues to produce new or modernized nuclear weapons.
A report released this spring by the Energy Department’s Environmental Management Los Alamos Field Office says that out of 2,100 contaminated sites, including Area G, only about half of the cleanup at the lab has been completed after decades of work and billions of dollars spent.
If all goes as planned, it will take Los Alamos almost a century to clean up the remnants of the nation’s first generation of nuclear weapons. All the while, tiny, new nuclear bombs are being made.
Visitors cross the final checkpoint on foot. There is just a metal gate, with stop signs and notifications that crossing this threshold means entering a nuclear facility.
The 63-acre Material Disposal Area G at Los Alamos National Laboratory holds radioactive and other hazardous waste generated by nuclear weapons production during the Manhattan Project of World War II and the Cold War that followed.
Just three feet below the dusty ground, there are nearly 40 pits and 200 shafts, containing somewhere between several hundred thousand and 11 million cubic feet of waste. Large, white structures, like joyless wedding tents, dot the mesa’s surface, holding drums of waste that are intended to be shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad and disposed of forever.
Many of these drums are especially volatile. They belong to a waste stream that was improperly packaged, causing one drum to explode at WIPP in 2014, leaking radiation and shutting down the facility for nearly three years at a $2 billion cleanup cost.
Area G, perhaps more than any other place at Los Alamos National Laboratory, represents the challenges that the U.S. Department of Energy faces in cleaning up the hundreds of waste sites at the lab while work continues to produce new or modernized nuclear weapons.
The lab recently gave reporters a rare tour of Area G and other sites contaminated by waste generated before 1999, the year the Energy Department opened WIPP. It is the nation’s only permanent disposal site for transuranic waste, which includes soil, tools, gloves and other materials that have come in contact with highly radioactive elements like plutonium, which is used in weapons production. Before WIPP opened, Area G was where the lab disposed of its transuranic waste.
A report released this spring by the Energy Department’s Environmental Management Los Alamos Field Office says that out of 2,100 contaminated sites, including Area G, only about half of the cleanup at the lab has been completed after decades of work and billions of dollars spent.
The report says the initial investigation into the extent of contamination at those sites is 90 percent done, and 93 percent of the above-ground transuranic waste — 4,000 drums — has been removed from the lab since 2011.
But much of the buried waste at Area G is likely to stay there forever.
The lab could dig everything up, but “the federal government and the state don’t require it,” said a senior lab official who took the tour with reporters. Officials on the tour prohibited reporters from quoting them by name.
A volatile collection
The circumstances that led to one of the costliest nuclear accidents in U.S. history began at Area G. A drum of waste improperly packaged with organic — rather than inorganic — kitty litter at Area G in 2013 and shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant overheated and burst underground in February 2014.
At Area G, there are 89 more drums similar to the one that burst. They are kept within the largest tent on the mesa, called the PermaCon.
Inside, the light takes on a yellowish-gray hue and the air is at least 15 degrees cooler than the April day outside. At the center of the space, behind a rope and a sign that reads “combustible restricted area,” the waste drums have been placed inside a refrigerated metal structure, like enormous eggs in an incubator.
They contain some of the most volatile waste at the site, a mix of nitric acids, kerosene, heavy metals, plutonium-239, uranium-238 and nitrate salt.
Sixty of the drums, like the one that burst at WIPP, contain the organic kitty litter. The rest of the 89 drums have the same waste but haven’t yet been mixed with an absorbent.
Before entering the tent, visitors must protect their eyes with plastic glasses and make sure their hands are devoid of wounds. Radiation is more easily absorbed into the body if it can slip through a cut. Visitors are told to avoid touching surfaces and their mouths, and to leave outside anything they don’t want to be surveyed for radioactive contamination.
Area G workers are told to make a habit of wearing gloves at all times, even at home, officials said. “Fight the way you train,” is how one person explained it.
Workers at the PermaCon wore purple gloves and were dressed head to boots in a yellow, plastic material that forms a protective hood and thick goggles.
A sign on a door leading to where the drums are kept informs workers that they will be exposed to 0.1 rem of radiation per hour. The average American receives 0.6 rem per year, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The drums are kept at 57 degrees Fahrenheit and monitored daily to ensure the pressure and heat do not change. If a drum starts to heat, officials can open large vents added to the drums and reduce pressure, but releasing some radiation, too, within the PermaCon.
From Area G it takes just two minutes to walk onto San Ildefonso Pueblo land; The community of White Rock is one mile from the site.
As reporters and officials exited, workers traced radiation detection monitors slowly across palms and the soles of shoes.
A repackaging process
By May, a 3-mile stretch of the road between Area G and a waste repackaging facility will be closed off daily as drums are transported uphill to the Waste Characterization, Reduction and Repackaging Facility, which looks like a series of oversized garages.
As reporters entered the facility, one worker whispered, “Hold your breath.”
Over roughly two months, lab workers will repackage the waste in two-hour shifts using a glove box — a large, sealed container. Inserting their hands into gloves attached to the box, the workers will open the drums.
The waste will be combined with water and zeolite — a fine, gray mineral mined in Western states, including New Mexico, and sold as absorbent cat litter — and stirred in an industrial kitchen mixer within the glove box. Once the waste is mixed, it will be funneled into new “daughter” drums and returned to Area G for later shipment to WIPP, officials said.
An official said zeolite was chosen as an absorbent in part because it eliminates any confusion about the type of kitty litter that can be used.
Tacked to the glove box is a printed sheet of paper with numbered instructions for how to mix the waste. It’s pinned just above the radiation detection panel that workers must press their hands against the moment they are removed from the glove box.
Fire remains a threat
Area G is situated on a mesa between two canyons, and wildfire is a threat to the drums waiting for repackaging and shipment to WIPP.
In 2000, the Cerro Grande Fire burned through both canyons simultaneously, creating extremely high temperatures on the mesa. If this happened again, an official said, the lab would cover the drums with fire blankets but could not move them. They could only hope that the flames subside before the drums overheat and begin a reaction like the one that closed WIPP.
The Los Conchas Fire in 2011 burned within four miles of Area G.
The administrations of Govs. Bill Richardson and Susana Martinez have sought to expedite the removal of vulnerable canisters from lab property. But deadlines for the lab to do so, first by 2010 and then by June 2014, went unmet, in part because waste shipments to WIPP stalled following the radiation leak caused by the Los Alamos drum.
Waste disposal at Area G is expected to stop next year when the last open pit is filled. The lab’s newly constructed Transuranic Waste Facility, an outdoor storage site, will temporarily hold newly generated waste before shipment off-site. The lab also is seeking approval from the New Mexico Environment Department for temporary storage at the plutonium processing facility where pits, the triggers for nuclear weapons, are produced. Pits are similar to small atomic bombs.
But the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, an independent agency, and others have raised concerns about storing radioactive waste at these locations. New waste sites, even those intended to be temporary, increases the potential for dangerous waste to remain on lab property long term.
On the drive to Area G on a winding road within the national laboratory complex, in a lab “taxi” van playing 1980s rock, many buildings appeared more like prison structures than research facilities, with thick, glass windows — or no windows at all — and tall, barbed-wire fences.
One official remarked on the great irony of the work: The first atomic bomb took only 27 months to create, but like the myth of Pandora’s box, it unfurled a seemingly endless stream of deadly waste.
Last September, the Energy Department said the remaining scope of legacy waste cleanup is estimated to cost $3.8 billion, and it will take 24 more years to finish shipping the rest of the waste to permanent storage and decontaminating the land.
If all goes as planned, it will take Los Alamos almost a century to clean up the remnants of the nation’s first generation of nuclear weapons. All the while, tiny, new nuclear bombs are being made.
Kaitlin Martinez, a spokeswoman for the Environmental Management Los Alamos Field Office, said the “biggest priorities right now are the safety of the workers and the public as we execute our mission.”
Last month, the Heartland Institute sent a climate denial booklet to 25,000 teachers around the US. In Episode 8 of the Evidence Squared podcast, we look at the why and how of this book. What is the chief motivation for the book’s misinformation and what are the techniques they employ to cast doubt on climate science?
In an interview on CBS News’ “Face The Nation,” Kelly said a successful strike at a U.S. plane would kill “hundreds and hundreds of people in one fell swoop.” “The … thing that keeps me literally awake at night is the threat against aviation,” he said. “We know that would be the Super Bowl for the terrorists to knock down an air plane in flight, particularly if it was full of Americans.
“There are a number of plots that we’re watching very, very closely— very sophisticated, very threatening, and the number-one thing in my mind is to protect the American people,” he added, calling the “aviation threat… something that is very real.”
On the issue of North Korea’s threat to the nation, Kelly said “as long as they’re on the other side of the world without a missile and a nuclear weapon to deliver against the United States, they’re not much threat right now— except in the world of cyber. They’re pretty aggressive when they want to be in cyber,.”
“The instant they get a missile that can reach the United States, and they have a weaponized atomic device, nuclear device on it, we’re at grave risk as a nation,” he warned.
