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In the public controversy over storage of depleted uranium at Energy Solutions' site west of Salt Lake City, none of the participants have explained why DU becomes more radioactive over time, nor how fast, nor how hazardous that material is. Uranium is a heavy metal, found in small quantities everywhere -- in the soil, the water, our foods and our bodies. An average human being has about 0.000002 of a pound of uranium in her/his body, two-thirds of which is in the bones, the rest distributed throughout the body. All uranium is radioactive; your body is slightly radioactive because of the uranium it contains. At a world-average concentration, an acre-foot of fresh water contains about a 0.0001 pound of uranium; seawater has about 100 times as much.

In the public controversy over storage of depleted uranium at Energy Solutions' site west of Salt Lake City, none of the participants have explained why DU becomes more radioactive over time, nor how fast, nor how hazardous that material is. Uranium is a heavy metal, found in small quantities everywhere -- in the soil, the water, our foods and our bodies. An average human being has about 0.000002 of a pound of uranium in her/his body, two-thirds of which is in the bones, the rest distributed throughout the body. All uranium is radioactive; your body is slightly radioactive because of the uranium it contains. At a world-average concentration, an acre-foot of fresh water contains about a 0.0001 pound of uranium; seawater has about 100 times as much.

Controlled Ottawa River leak OK, AECL says Nuclear facilities and power plants are contaminating Canadian food and water with radioactive waste that increases risks of cancer and birth defects, says a new report to be released today. The report, Tritium on Tap, produced by the Sierra Club of Canada, warned that radioactive emissions from various nuclear plants across the country have more than doubled over the past decade. The figures were based on statistics compiled by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which measured pollution coming from the plants.

Controlled Ottawa River leak OK, AECL says Nuclear facilities and power plants are contaminating Canadian food and water with radioactive waste that increases risks of cancer and birth defects, says a new report to be released today. The report, Tritium on Tap, produced by the Sierra Club of Canada, warned that radioactive emissions from various nuclear plants across the country have more than doubled over the past decade. The figures were based on statistics compiled by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which measured pollution coming from the plants.

"NEARLY a quarter of a century after the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in the Ukraine exploded and spewed radioactivity across the world, it has finally stopped making Scottish sheep too "hot" to eat. For the first time since the accident, levels of radioactive contamination in sheep on all Scottish farms dropped below safety limits last month, enabling the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to lift restrictions. Controls on the movement and sale of sheep have been in force since after the explosion in 1986. The Chernobyl reactor near Kiev scattered a massive cloud of radioactivity over Europe after it overheated, caught fire and ripped apart because of errors made by control room staff. It was the world's worst nuclear accident, and has been blamed for causing tens of thousands of deaths from cancers. Peat and grass in upland areas of Scotland were polluted with radioactive caesium-137 released by the reactor, blown across Europe and brought to ground by rain."

"Sweet-shop metaphors were being tossed around like ammunition in a food fight Tuesday at a meeting of the state Radiation Control Board. Some likened the blending of low-level radioactive waste to concocting a sugar cookie, others to baking a layer cake. But board members preferred less-creative analogies when considering the serious issue of various types of nuclear- reactor rubbish that EnergySolutions and others want to stir together to be buried forever at the company's disposal site in Utah. The Radiation Control Board a few months ago approved a position paper that said even though blended waste is not significantly more hazardous than the Class A waste allowed in Utah, the state doesn't want any radioactive waste that is blended just to change its classification so that it can be legally buried at the EnergySolutions site."

"Is it akin to a chocolate chip cookie, a pot of Earl Grey tea or a sugar cookie? On the issue of radioactive "waste blending," members of the Utah Radiation Control Board were presented Tuesday with a smorgasbord of food analogies to help them as they grapple with the question of imposing stricter disposal guidelines on the material. EnergySolutions senior vice president Tom Magette told the board that so-called blended waste represents the uniformity of a sugar cookie, not a chocolate chip cookie peppered with higher radioactive waste resins."

"Some research is suspended at a Columbia University center, but experts fear the case could deter people from participating in crucial brain-imaging studies. The suspension of some research at a prominent Columbia University brain-imaging lab because of sloppy practices could have repercussions beyond that laboratory, potentially affecting brain-imaging studies nationwide and raising questions about the safety of participants, research experts said Saturday. The Kreitchman PET Center in Manhattan, part of Columbia University, halted brain-imaging studies after federal authorities reportedly found safety violations that could endanger patients and invalidate research findings. The center has admitted to poor manufacturing processes of radioactive compounds injected in patients and to sub-par record-keeping. Columbia authorities reported the findings of its own internal investigation in a July 6 letter to the Food and Drug Administration. Lab personnel are alleged to have used chemicals that had failed required purity tests when conducting brain scans of people with mental disorders. The scans, called PET scans, produce images of the brain and various neurological processes. » Don't miss a thing. Get breaking news alerts delivered to your inbox. The chemicals used at the Columbia center were found to have contained impurities at levels well above what is permitted under FDA protocols. The center has halted research using those locally manufactured chemicals; the lab itself remains open, is still conducting other types of research and continues to see patients. Experts disagree on whether the Columbia incident is an anomaly or if such slip-ups are widespread in research labs. But the documented lapses highlight apparent disregard for patient safety that rarely comes to light at major research institutions. No patients were harmed, according to a statement from Columbia University released Saturday. But the practices also include failure to report use of the su

"Tularosa downwinders prepare for vigil, meetings this week There will be a candle for Ruthina Utter Tyler, who died after battling a series of cancers. There will be a candle for Tony Cordova, who endures two types of cancer, and a candle for Demetrio Montoya, a former mayor of Tularosa who died of pancreatic cancer. There will be candles for mothers, sons, a daughter or a father, a grandparent who told their children of their memories of that morning 65 years ago when the brilliant light and roar of the very first detonation of a radioactive bomb at the historic Trinity Test site brought a secret military project to the Tularosa Basin and an unexamined legacy. These and hundreds of others will be honored at a candlelight vigil Friday evening at the Tularosa Little League Park to begin a weekend of educational programs and documentation of as many oral histories as possible of the fateful day. Organizers hope it will bring more light onto the dark secret of suffering and a widespread "cancer culture" among residents of the area. Ruthina Tyler believed her cancers were a result of exposures throughout her life to the contaminated food, water and land after the Trinity Test. Her son Fred Tyler agreed with her and while she was still alive, he publicly questioned the impacts of the historic test on local residents in Tularosa and the surrounding areas."

"This is the third and final installment of a series of stories about the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium and the possible effects the Trinity Site test may have had on residents of the area developing cancer. "I hate the fact that we have been treated as insignificant scientists have been compensated but our community has been ignored," cancer survivor Tina Cordova said. "We have to fight for the recognition that our environment was damaged and, in the process, we were also damaged. It is a shame that they did not come back and tell us our food supply is compromised." Cordova, who grew up in Tularosa, was a medical student for two years before creating her own business in Albuquerque. After much discussion, she and Tularosa resident Fred Tyler formed the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium to collect data and see what they could do to help survivors in the wake of the 1945 Trinity atomic bomb explosion that shook the Tularosa Basin. In July 2005, they worked with several volunteers to collect cancer histories from local residents ending up with well over 100 documents of a cancer culture that had festered quietly among generations of families."

Congressman David Dreier, R-San Dimas, kicked off the 111th Congress today by reintroducing legislation to provide funds for ongoing perchlorate clean-up in San Gabriel Valley groundwater. The measure would increase by $61.2 million federal funds in the San Gabriel Basin Restoration Fund, which is used throughout the region for cleanup of perchlorate, a chemical in rocket fuel and fireworks. Under the bill, the San Gabriel Basin Water Quality Authority would receive $50 million and the Central Basin Municipal Water District would receive $11.2 million. Perchlorate can reduce the production of thyroid hormones, which in fetuses and infants are critical for normal growth and development of the central nervous system, according to the Food and Drug Administration. Therefore, pregnant women and infants are at greatest risk if exposed to perchlorate.

Unlike G I Crawford (Letters, November 27), even the UK government's Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) believes that " if nuclear waste storage is to address the need to protect humans and the environment for hundreds of thousands of years, while long-lived radionuclides decay to safe levels, then stores will have to be actively managed over these long timescales". Further, it argues that "storage places considerable burdens on future generations, in terms of store management, provision of funding levels, capacity to monitor and inspect the waste, repair and refurbish buildings, equipment and waste packages and maintain security" (Defra, June 2008).

This fall, the British government released transcripts of Cold War era tapes it planned to broadcast if the nation came under attack. "There is nothing to be gained by trying to get away," the pages read. "This country has been attacked by nuclear weapons." Survivors are urged to save toilet water for drinking, to hoard enough food to last for several weeks, and to avoid leaving fallout rooms "for a moment longer than necessary." It's inexplicable that we find ourselves climbing back atop the nuclear knife 60 years after the atomic bomb changed the world in an instant.

The use of nuclear weapons will grow increasingly likely by 2025, US intelligence warned Thursday in a report on global trends that forecasts a tense, unstable world shadowed by war. "The world of the near future will be subject to an increased likelihood of conflict over scarce resources, including food and water, and will be haunted by the persistence of rogue states and terrorist groups with greater access to nuclear weapons," said the report.

If a nuclear power plant was emitting dangerous poison gasses into your neighbor's air, water, and soil (food supply) do they have the right to know? Once upon a time, ohh till I was about 46 or so, I thought that nuclear power plants had a magical way of keeping all of their radiation within an enclosed structure. Never for a moment did I ever imagine these structures leaked, nor, even worse, that radioactive releases - toxic, chemical poison gasses - were expelled out into the air (on purpose!) on a regular basis.

Award-winning Frozen Seed screens Nov. 6 Imagine a frozen wasteland where food is scarce and winter is permanent. A nuclear war has forced survivors to seek refuge underground. A buried seed cache lays somewhere in the ruins of modern society and scientists are racing against a totalitarian regime, trying to find it. It's a compelling tale told in just under 10 minutes by producers Tim Bissell and Craig Watkins.

Some people have been kicking up an awful lot of fuss about the EPA's decision to not regulate the amount of perchlorate found in drinking water. If you don't track hazardous waste in the environment as obsessively as we do, perchlorate is an explosive used in rocket propellant and fireworks that has been detected in the water supplies of 35 states. It's also shown up in leafy vegetables irrigated with Colorado River water, and in milk from California cows, indicating that perchlorate can disperse and concentrate itself in everything from the environment, to the food we eat, to our own bodies. No studies have yet been released on the chemical's effect on aquatic life, but we do know it's hazardous to humans. Perchlorate, according to the FDA, disrupts thyroid hormone function. Fetuses and infants are particularly at risk because thyroid hormones are crucial to normal central nervous system growth and development.

On 28 August at 23:31 the European Commission received an ECURIE alert notification from Belgium concerning a radiological incident in the Institut National de Radio-éléments (IRE) in Fleurus, Belgium. There had been a release of gaseous Iodine-131 from this facility. The incident had been classified Level 3 on the international INES scale (comprising 7 steps) on 26 August.

This letter is in response to a quote by Dr. Sonja Johnson's in the article titled "Public voices displeasure at uranium meeting" in the June 5 Times & Transcript. She is quoted as saying "80 percent of an individual's exposure to uranium is through sources such as the Earth's core, water and food."

Entergy's ads about Vermont Yankee being clean, safe and reliable are psychologically abusive to the good people of Vermont and an insult to our intelligence. Are we supposed to ignore that uranium comes from somewhere? Uranium mining has devastated the traditional food sources and health of the Serpent River First Nation in Ontario. The workplace safety insurance board pays $30,000 to the families of uranium miners who die from workplace-related cancer. We are paying for our "cheap" energy with bodies.

This has been energy crisis week at Tomdispatch (with a brief pit stop at America's mega-bases in Iraq, built with control of the oil heartlands of the planet in mind). First, Michael Klare asked why the Pentagon's garrisoning of the global gas station had anything to do with American security. Then John Feffer wondered whether, when it came to that lethal combo of soaring energy prices, soaring food prices, and extreme weather, we were all now North Koreans. Today, Chip Ward takes up the energy crisis in America's increasingly arid western backyard.

This has been energy crisis week at Tomdispatch (with a brief pit stop at America's mega-bases in Iraq, built with control of the oil heartlands of the planet in mind). First, Michael Klare asked why the Pentagon's garrisoning of the global gas station had anything to do with American security. Then John Feffer wondered whether, when it came to that lethal combo of soaring energy prices, soaring food prices, and extreme weather, we were all now North Koreans. Today, Chip Ward takes up the energy crisis in America's increasingly arid western backyard.