Radiation // Current

Beach radiation checks to continue

The Ministry of Defence estates department began investigations into the source of... more

TravG73
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12 days ago
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Are Violent Video Games Preparing Kids For The Apocalypse?

You can never be too prepared! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTbYUd1jUc4

remanns
added this
14 days ago
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Nuclear Hypocrisy: The USA Alone Has The Right to Radiate Middle East And America

How absurd is it that we have the government on the one hand pulling back from using a hollowed out mountain in Nevada to store nuclear waste because of a fear (legitimate I grant) that hundreds or thousands of years hence, some earthquake or other catastrophe could cause the stored waste to leak into the water table, while on the other hand we have this same government deliberately taking some of the most dangerous waste–the actual uranium from the used fuel rods–and putting it into bombs, shells and bullets to be splattered and burned all across the landscape?

And I should note that it’s not just remote places like Iraq and Kuwait and Afghanistan that are being covered in super toxic and radioactive uranium dust–and I’m not just talking about the stuff that gets picked up in the wind and carried around the globe, or the stuff that gets inhaled by our troops and carried home internally, bad enough as that is.

The truth is that depleted uranium weapons are being exploded and burned right here in the USA in training operations. The center of Hawaii’s Big Island, for example, which is a military zone, is heavily contaminated by DU ammunition fired by tanks there. The same is true of Vieques Island, long a favored target for the Navy, which for years has fired DU shells from its ships at the populated island, and also launched DU-tipped missiles and dropped DU-loaded “bunker-buster” bombs at it.

While I don’t have direct knowledge, I’d say it’s a safe bet that there are a number of sites on the Mainland US where DU munitions have also been widely used–maybe White Sands Proving Ground the Marine training area near Joshua Tree National Monument in Southern California, or other such training and testing areas.

The simple truth is that our own government, besides committing an ongoing atrocity in the Middle East, is also poisoning our own country with uranium oxide.

Our Nobel Peace Prize president should take note. President John F. Kennedy reportedly moved to halt open air testing of nuclear weapons after looking at the rain falling outside the window of the Oval Office and asking a science advisor whether it was delivering nuclear fallout to his front lawn (he was told that it was). Maybe President Obama should consider that the rain today is delivering uranium dust to his wife’s and daughters’ garden in the back yard of the White House. At least he should take a look at pictures of the horribly deformed babies being born to mothers in Iraq (and of the lucky babies that are stillborn), thanks to the radioactive warfare that the US military has been employing against both that country and Afghanistan–his “necessary” war.

There is another irony here too. The US is expressing concern about Iran enriching uranium, and possibly creating a nuclear bomb, which in the unlikely event that it were ever used, might spread some radioactivity around parts of the Middle east, yet it is the US which already has spread 2000 or more tons of uranium dust all over Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 18 years–far more than any small Iranian bomb could release.How absurd is it that we have the government on the one hand pulling back from using a... more

WakeUpPeople
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1 month ago
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Cold War Remnant: Cancer for Baby Boomers

Even with a half-century's hindsight, the U.S. government's willingness to risk the health of the nation's children seems somewhere between unfathomable and unconscionable.

Between 1951 and 1962, the Atomic Energy Commission detonated more than 100 nuclear bombs in the atmosphere over its Nevada Test Site, just 65 miles from Las Vegas. The radioactive fallout menaced not only the ranchers and the miners unlucky enough to live in that remote area of southern Nevada, but -- as a new study unveiled Tuesday demonstrated -- untold millions of unsuspecting Americans as well.

The winds carried Strontium-90, Iodine-129 and other lethal particles across a broad swath of the country. Infants who were bottle-fed, which was then considered the modern approach, were particularly vulnerable to the Strontium-90 that ended up in cows' milk.

In 1961, as John Kennedy was poised to resume atmospheric testing after a two-year moratorium, he met with White House science adviser Jerome Wiesner in the Oval Office one rainy day. The president wondered how fallout reached the earth. Wiesner explained that it was washed out of the clouds by rain. "You mean," Kennedy asked, "it's in the rain out there?" As Wiesner tells it, the president then "looked out the window, looked very sad and didn't say a word for several minutes." Nonetheless JFK, fearful that the Soviet Union might score a nuclear breakthrough, authorized a new round of above-ground testing before negotiating the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963.

With Nov. 9, 2009 marking the 20th anniversary of the breaching of the Berlin Wall, Cold War retrospectives are again in season. But the grim legacy of nuclear testing is apt to be lost amid the memories of Josef Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, the Berlin airlift, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Ronald Reagan's famed exhortation at the Brandenburg Gate. The mushroom clouds over the Nevada desert seem so long ago, so devoid of any real-world consequences.

But a study released Tuesday documents the enhanced cancer risk that Baby Boomers face because of these long-ago atmospheric tests. Epidemiologist Joseph Mangano analyzed the lingering radiation in infant teeth (donated long ago by the parents of baby boys born in the St. Louis area between 1959 and 1961) and compared the results to contemporary cancer data from the subjects. "What we found out was shocking," Mangano said. "Persons who had died of cancer had more than double the Strontium-90 in their (baby) teeth than did healthy persons." The original variance in Strontium-90 levels among individuals, he explained, was caused by seemingly small factors such as how much milk expectant mothers drank, diet and the source of the municipal water supply.

more at link...Even with a half-century's hindsight, the U.S. government's willingness to risk the... more