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I finished up my class at Weber State University last week, studying Vietnam and Watergate through popular culture. High praise for Justina Bernstein for teaching it. The class was an eye-opener for a lot of reasons, not the least of which the miserable reminder that nothing really changes, including the seemingly inevitable forces that draw our politicians into foreign policy traps. The last assignment was to ponder the Afghanistan "surge" President Obama just announced in light of our studies. What I did was compare Obama's West Point speech with Richard Nixon's 1970 speech announcing the incursion into Cambodia. It was distressing to see Obama and Nixon giving parallel speeches, structured the same way and attempting to achieve the same goals. Both presidents were faced with wars they want to get out of. Both felt the need to up the ante to give the local forces a chance to build up and take on the fight. Both felt they had right on their sides, both claimed allies, both claimed that ultimate victory would be the result. And we all know how Vietnam worked out.

I finished up my class at Weber State University last week, studying Vietnam and Watergate through popular culture. High praise for Justina Bernstein for teaching it. The class was an eye-opener for a lot of reasons, not the least of which the miserable reminder that nothing really changes, including the seemingly inevitable forces that draw our politicians into foreign policy traps. The last assignment was to ponder the Afghanistan "surge" President Obama just announced in light of our studies. What I did was compare Obama's West Point speech with Richard Nixon's 1970 speech announcing the incursion into Cambodia. It was distressing to see Obama and Nixon giving parallel speeches, structured the same way and attempting to achieve the same goals. Both presidents were faced with wars they want to get out of. Both felt the need to up the ante to give the local forces a chance to build up and take on the fight. Both felt they had right on their sides, both claimed allies, both claimed that ultimate victory would be the result. And we all know how Vietnam worked out.

Right up until practically the last minute, only an elite few knew about the building, testing and ultimate plans to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the "gadget" was about to be tested, project manager Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves - who ran the project from its inception - tried to explain it as the explosion of an ammunition dump. As a precaution, Groves alerted the governor of New Mexico that it might be necessary to evacuate the state if something went wrong. "The physicists working on the project jokingly bet that testing the gadget could set fire to the atmosphere," says Cameron Reed, a professor and chairman of the physics department at Alma College in Alma, Mich., and an expert on the Manhattan Project. "They didn't know what to expect."

Right up until practically the last minute, only an elite few knew about the building, testing and ultimate plans to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the "gadget" was about to be tested, project manager Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves - who ran the project from its inception - tried to explain it as the explosion of an ammunition dump. As a precaution, Groves alerted the governor of New Mexico that it might be necessary to evacuate the state if something went wrong. "The physicists working on the project jokingly bet that testing the gadget could set fire to the atmosphere," says Cameron Reed, a professor and chairman of the physics department at Alma College in Alma, Mich., and an expert on the Manhattan Project. "They didn't know what to expect."

If the Department of Energy has its way, highly radioactive waste will soon be coming from all over the world, traveling right through our highways and railways here in the Pacific Northwest, past our schools and shopping centers to end up at Hanford Washington, already one of the worlds most highly polluted sites. There is so much about this plan that is objectionable, misleading, untruthful, not to mention deadly, that I hardly know what to say. For starters, the hearings were scheduled in such a way to discourage vocal opposition from citizens. You aren't supposed to know this is happening. The most important message here is that YOU CAN help stop this. Simply use one of the three methods below to voice your opposition, on a Government website, by snail mail, or by FAX. Tell them what you think even if it is just a simple "I disapprove of GNEP". View the videos below that were taken at the Pasco Washington and Hood River hearings on November 17th and 18th of 2008. These videos are only some of the testimonies that were given and are posted to help inform the many who could not make it. They may also be very useful in formulating your own statement. Please help stop this by submitting your opinion.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair would have favored removing Saddam Hussein from power even with no evidence that the Iraqi leader had weapons of mass destruction, he said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. "I would still have thought it right to remove him," Blair said when asked if he would have backed a war against Iraq knowing that Hussein didn't have nuclear weapons. "Obviously, you would have had to use and deploy different arguments" to justify the war to lawmakers and the public, he told the BBC.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair would have favored removing Saddam Hussein from power even with no evidence that the Iraqi leader had weapons of mass destruction, he said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. "I would still have thought it right to remove him," Blair said when asked if he would have backed a war against Iraq knowing that Hussein didn't have nuclear weapons. "Obviously, you would have had to use and deploy different arguments" to justify the war to lawmakers and the public, he told the BBC.

Federal regulators want to know if the time is right to think about allowing a Utah company to import radioactive waste from Italy. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officially opened up its comment line last week to "potential parties" in EnergySolutions Inc.'s controversial import application. The door opened for the Salt Lake City nuclear waste company to dispose of low-level waste from 39 states and foreign nations following a May 15 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Ted Stewart. The ruling basically said a regional radioactive waste organization has no authority to limit the waste the company buries at its Tooele County landfill as Northwest Interstate Compact on Low-level Radioactive Waste and the Rocky Mountain Compact had tried to do.

"New delhi Soumya is just 13, but she knows all about bone marrow transplants, radioactive sources and what exposure to radiation can do to the human body. She has first-hand experience, for her father Ajay Jain had been kept in isolation at the Army Research and Referral Hospital, undergoing treatment for exposure to a radiation source. Jain finally returned home on Thursday, more than a month after he was admitted to Max Hospital in Pitampura, on April 10, with a burn injury on the right side of his posterior. It took him another five days to realise that the piece of metal he had kept in his wallet for months had caused the injury. It turned out to be a piece of radioactive Cobalt-60. "

Families Against Radiation Exposure recently released soil test results showing that a popular Port Hope beach playground is contaminated with uranium ('Port Hope park safe: Mayor', May 1). The volunteer environmental organization handed out brochures to fishermen and residents at noon at the East Beach park at Mill and Madison Streets. FARE provided the results to Mayor Linda Thompson, but she has not made them public. FARE believes the public, which uses the beach area, has a right to know it is contaminated by uranium more than four times higher than guidelines issued by the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME). What is disturbing is the testing was done by SENES Consultants for Cameco Corporation and sent in a report to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) in June, 2008, but nobody told the municipality or the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Office (LLRWMO).

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.

Both democracy and science are based on the free exchange of ideas. A strong democracy depends on well-informed citizens who have access to comprehensive and reliable information about their government's activities. Similarly, science thrives when scientists are free to interact with each other, opening their ideas to wide-ranging scrutiny. Because our country's decision makers need access to the best scientific information available, federal agencies must allow their scientists to participate in the scientific community and speak freely about their research to the media and the public. Yet too often an agency's desire to "control the message" has led to the suppression of information and the censorship of the government's own experts.

THE public has the right to know full details of a secret shipment of nuclear waste due to be trucked through Sydney streets in the next four months, the Greens say. Five years' worth of spent nuclear fuel rods from the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor will be transported to the US by the middle of the year, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation says. But the organisation refuses to reveal the date or route of the operation, except that it will take place in the "Sydney/ Illawarra region". "The shipment will be conducted under strict international and national security and safety standards," a spokeman said.

Sitting in on Mayor Julián Castro's town hall meeting Monday evening felt like watching some old movie in which you know all the lines by heart. It probably served some purpose on the front end - forcing CPS Energy officials to realize that their proposal for a $5.2 billion investment in two nuclear plants falls well short of a sure thing - but it didn't seem to shift opinions around much. Still, with all the talk about how the Big Decision will affect our grandchildren, it was easy to wonder which question will appear most prescient decades from now. Perhaps it will be the handwritten, photocopied 'No Nuclear Energy!' sheet passed out at the front door, on which a man named Ray Davidson Hillman guaranteed that if all North American nuclear plants are not shut down soon, the planet won't support life in one or two hundred years. If he's right, of course, no one will be around to realize how smart he was.

"(1) Depleted uranium (DU) gets hotter (more radioactive) with time, and lasts effectively for eternity (you can't put this in your garden ever). See graph at right, from the WISE Uranium Project. (2) EnergySolutions site is engineered to protect the public from this waste for 500 years. DU's hazard will outlast the EnergySolutions site, but there is a loophole in the regulations that allows EnergySolutions to dump it in Utah. (3) EnergySolutions is under contract to dump DU in Utah! Over 14,000 drums totaling more than 10,000 metric tons was originally scheduled to begin shipping in October 2009. Unfortunately, the Department of Energy (DOE) has initiated shipments to Utah. "

Transport of nuclear waste could put area residents at risk Asheville? Nuclear waste? Why worry that Asheville City Council declined to pass a measure that would have sent federal planners the message "Don't come through here" with these deadly wastes? Taken in a larger context, this nonaction by City Council may be vitally important. Folks have a right to know about some very local nuclear history and the potential for future impacts on Asheville residents' safety and welfare. Does the name Sandy Mush mean anything to you? About 25 years ago, a federal agency was studying Sandy Mush-a rural area in Leicester, about 20 miles from City Hall-as a potential site for a permanent high-level nuclear waste dump. Were you part of the citizen action that helped block it?

There is a reason Miami-Dade County in Southern Florida is the first place where America's utility industry is moving forward with new nuclear capacity in three decades. In Miami, Florida Power & Light found public officials malleable as silly putty, willing to allow a local agreement with a wink to substitute for solid facts that the public had the right to know: where the cooling water will come from at a time of chronic drought, where the water--more than 50 million gallons per day-- will go when it is evaporated, and what will its effects be on public health and the environment

"Uniontown Industrial Excess Landfill Superfund site for sale (AKRON, Ohio) - Why is the Uniontown Industrial Excess Landfill Superfund site for sale, when there has never been a cleanup of the hundreds of thousands of tons of toxins, only the continued flushing into our groundwater? Residents aren't getting straight answers. They are only being told that a buyer would receive liability protections through a "covenant not to sue." Would this mean the new owner couldn't be sued if people got sick, or just that they couldn't be held liable for cleanup costs? Are the Lake Township trustees still considering buying the dump? Don't the taxpayers have the right to know if in fact this is still being planned before the public could be saddled with this toxic nightmare? Or, as seen elsewhere around the country, is a deep-pockets brownfields developer going to take over the IEL?"

""The stark truth is that one single failure of nuclear deterrence could end human history." These words, from a recent essay by Dr. Helen Caldicott, are, you might say, my devotional text for the day. I sit with them reluctantly, of course. They trouble the soul more than anything else I can imagine. But it occurs to me that, six and a half decades into the nuclear era, our premature "peace" with these weapons -- our cultural forgetting, our denial -- betokens a psychic helplessness that is enormously dark and dangerous in its own right. At some level we know that our shadow is growing. We watch it happen as spectators. Does any force seem more impervious to the collective will than that which drives the nuclear weapons industry? Will it take, as Caldicott asks, a horrific accident, an insane act of aggression, to shatter the conspiracy? And by then, will it be too late?"

"After months of failed negotiations, members of the local unions that represent bus drivers, maintenance personnel, dispatchers, and the United Steel Workers, held an informational picket to let the community know about issues they have with Battelle Energy Alliance, the company who operates the INL. This coming Monday, the contract between the company and the unions will end at midnight. Negotiations have been taking place since April, but so far, no resolution has been met. A lack of communication, loss of seniority rights, and problems with labor relations are all reasons the group says they're picketing today. The main issue for the bus drivers is one proposal from Battelle would force them to take a four and a half hour mid-day, unpaid break. "

Criminals have the right to know what evidence is used against them, but sick nuclear weapons workers do not. If a sick worker fights all the way through the federal program meant to compensate those made ill building atomic bombs, the government gets the last word - in the form of a secret report.

America gets one-fifth of its power from nuclear power plants. Nuclear is far and away the cheapest and most reliable alternative to carbon-emitting coal. Yet we all know that nuclear energy carries one great big negative: the problem of nuclear waste, the radioactive residue from enriched uranium. Now, suppose there were a solution to this problem? A solution that reduced the amount and the toxicity of nuclear waste by 80 percent or more? That would be useful, right? Well guess what-it's doable. Better yet-it's done.

Public unable to get information to assess safety, viability, critics say NASHVILLE - The electric industry's effort to fast-track a new design for nuclear reactors has triggered complaints about transparency and questions about the suitability of a TVA site in Alabama. Advertisement Just over a year ago, the Tennessee Valley Authority, backed by a consortium of other electric utilities, applied for a license to build along the Tennessee River the first of a new generation of nuclear reactors.