Group items tagged

"There are con men who rip people off using the most transparent of ruses. The best one yet was the guy who nailed up a wooden box next to a bank night safe. Then he posted a sign saying "night safe out of order, please use box". A short while later he took the box down, making off with several hundred pounds. You know, it was so simple (and those falling prey to the scam were so unbelievably naive) that the guy almost deserved the money. There are politicians who can promise the sun, moon and stars and, lo and behold, people go out and vote for them. And I'm sick to death of the number of e-mail scams which go the rounds. Every couple of weeks another scam will arrive in the in-box, often forwarded by folks who should know a lot better."

"A picture-board show about a Nagasaki atomic bomb survivor who passed away in April was shown at a school here by a Nagasaki high school student on Wednesday (Thursday, Japan time). Mitsuhiro Hayashida, 18, a "high school peace ambassador" who traveled from Nagasaki to New York where the review conference on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) is taking place, was the presenter of the "kamishibai," a storytelling format in which audience members are shown picture boards while the presenter recites the corresponding narrative or dialogue. The story featured the life of Katsuji Yoshida, a Nagasaki atomic bomb survivor who passed away in April at the age of 78. Yoshida had been a storyteller who traveled and shared his experiences of the bomb."

"All hope abandon ye who enter here": The Unofficial Motto of the Office of Workers' Compensation Programs (OWCP) I must confess that the above quote isn't really engraved over the entrances to all of the OWCP district offices - poetry buffs will realize that I borrowed this quote from Dante Alighieri, the great 14th century Italian poet who penned the "Divine Comedy" - but from my experience I think it would be a suitable warning to injured Federal workers as to how they are likely to be treated by the agency.

"All hope abandon ye who enter here": The Unofficial Motto of the Office of Workers' Compensation Programs (OWCP) I must confess that the above quote isn't really engraved over the entrances to all of the OWCP district offices - poetry buffs will realize that I borrowed this quote from Dante Alighieri, the great 14th century Italian poet who penned the "Divine Comedy" - but from my experience I think it would be a suitable warning to injured Federal workers as to how they are likely to be treated by the agency.

Last December, 141 states supported a General Assembly resolution requesting that the United Nation's agencies - the WHO, IAEA and UNEP - update their positions on the potential threat to human health and the environment posed by the use of uranium weapons. Of these, it seems to be that of the WHO which will prove the most influential. 17 November 2009 - Doug Weir and Gretel Munroe This was the second NAM resolution on uranium weapons in recent years and it garnered more support than its 2007 predecessor. Abstentions were down as Finland, Norway and Iceland voted in favour while France, Israel, the United States and the United Kingdom were left more isolated than ever. Following the vote, the UK justified its position by stating that all the research that has ever needed to be undertaken into the potential health impact of uranium weapons has been completed and that we can now therefore ignore the subject.

Last December, 141 states supported a General Assembly resolution requesting that the United Nation's agencies - the WHO, IAEA and UNEP - update their positions on the potential threat to human health and the environment posed by the use of uranium weapons. Of these, it seems to be that of the WHO which will prove the most influential. 17 November 2009 - Doug Weir and Gretel Munroe This was the second NAM resolution on uranium weapons in recent years and it garnered more support than its 2007 predecessor. Abstentions were down as Finland, Norway and Iceland voted in favour while France, Israel, the United States and the United Kingdom were left more isolated than ever. Following the vote, the UK justified its position by stating that all the research that has ever needed to be undertaken into the potential health impact of uranium weapons has been completed and that we can now therefore ignore the subject.

"The office of Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania attempted to obtain a statement from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission according to documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act. On August 27, 2009, Arlen Specter wrote to Rebecca Schmidt asking that the NRC "issue a formal public statement confirming that he [constituent Zalman Shapiro] was not involved in any activities related to the diversion of uranium to Israel." http://www.IRmep.org/08272009specter_numec.pdf Zalman Shapiro was formerly president of the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation at Apollo, PA. According to a secret GAO report "Nuclear Diversion in the US?" partially declassified on May 6, 2010 NUMEC received over 22 tons of uranium-235, the key material used to fabricate nuclear weapons. Israel's top economic espionage case officer Rafael Eitan, who handled spy Jonathan Pollard in the 1980s, infiltrated NUMEC under false pretenses in 1968. According to Anthony Cordesman, "there is no conceivable reason for Eitan to have gone [to the Apollo plant] but for the nuclear material." CIA Tel Aviv station chief John Hadden called NUMEC "an Israeli operation from the beginning." NUMEC's venture capital came from David Lowenthal, who had close ties to Israeli intelligence and David Ben-Gurion,who spearheaded Israel's nuclear weapons program. "

"Russian scientist Igor Sutyagin, who was serving 15 years following a wrongful conviction on espionage charges, was Friday delivered together with three other convicted spies to Vienna and exchanged, in what appears to be the biggest US-Russian "spy swap" since the Cold War, for ten Russian individuals who have admitted earlier in New York to have been acting as agents of the Russian Federation. Maria Kaminskaya, 09/07-2010 Information that Sutyagin, an innocent man who was imprisoned at the height of what became known as "spymania" in Russia, will be part of an exchange by which Russia will repatriate ten US-based agents has earlier been confirmed by his lawyer Anna Stavitskaya. His release became joyful news for Bellona, which is all too familiar with the dismal situation with human rights and the workings of the justice system in Russia, though the fact that Sutyagin was forced to sign a confession of guilt in order to walk free was another testimony that little has changed for the better."

There is an easily distinguishable line between those who support and those who oppose the relicensing of Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon. But both those groups would probably agree that 2008 was a memorable year for the facility. On the one hand, the power plant had its longest continuous run -- more than 400 days -- since it was started up in the early 1970s. On the other hand, a series of mishaps caused many in the public who were unaware of the plant's relicensing application to lean toward the camp of those opposing license extension.

Call it Charlie Wolf's War. U.S. Sen. Mark Udall is mobilizing a coalition of senators and congressional members who have constituents like Charlie Wolf: former nuclear weapons workers who lost their health - and in some cases their lives - building the nation's Cold War nuclear arsenal. Wolf, 50, died Wednesday. He fought brain cancer for more than six years - and struggled with a federal bureaucracy nearly that long to prove he deserved the compensation Congress had promised workers who mined radioactive metals, made them into bombs and tested the most powerful weapon on Earth.

Three anti-nuclear protestors who were previously convicted of trespassing at Lake Anna Power Station's visitor center won an appeal in Louisa Circuit Court this morning and were resentenced on new charges. Three anti-nuclear protestors who were previously convicted of trespassing at Lake Anna Power Station's visitor center won an appeal in Louisa Circuit Court this morning and were resentenced on new charges. John "Jack" Maus, who represented all three protesters, appealed a lower court's conviction and sentence on grounds that the charges alleged a violation of county code, when in fact they should have been based on a violation of state law because the plant sits on private property.

Radiation from the atomic bomb blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, likely rearranged chromosomes in some survivors who later developed papillary thyroid cancer as adults, according to Japanese researchers. In the 1 September issue of Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, the scientists report that subjects who lived close to the blast sites, were comparably young at the time, and developed the cancer quickly once they reached adulthood, were likely to have a chromosomal rearrangement known as RET/PTC that is not very frequent in adults who develop the disease.

Ralph Andersen states that I am "determined to scare people with discredited claims" about heath risks of the nuclear reactors at Indian Point (Letters from Readers, May 30). I am a health researcher, and direct a group of health professionals and scientists who are experts in radiation health risk. Mr. Andersen is a physicist who never conducted a single study of cancer risk from radiation. He cites critics of our work who also have never done radiation-cancer studies - and thus, are unqualified to "debunk" our research.

ALBUQUERQUE, May 4 (UPI) -- Research to create the first U.S. atomic bombs has caused cancer among people who grew up near where the research was conducted, a lawsuit alleges. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Albuquerque this month, alleges children who lived Los Alamos, N.M., in the 1940s and '50s were poisoned by contaminated fish and water, and even by radiation brought into their homes on the clothes of their fathers, who worked on the research effort dubbed the Manhattan Project, The New Mexican reported Sunday.

The U.S. Department of Labor has notified all former Mallinckrodt Chemical Company, Destrehan Street Plant workers about a new class of employees added to the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act's (EEOICPA) Special Exposure Cohort (SEC). The EEOICPA provides compensation and medical benefits to employees who became ill as a result of working in the nuclear weapons industry. Survivors of qualified employees may also be entitled to benefits. A worker who is included in a designated SEC class of employees, and who is diagnosed with one of 22 specified cancers, may receive a presumption of causation under the act. To date, more than $80 million in compensation and medical benefits has been paid to eligible Mallinckrodt Chemical Company, Destrehan Street Plant employees and more than $4.6 billion in compensation and medical benefits has been paid to eligible claimants nationwide under the act.

Members of Congress are wondering who -- if anyone -- would control EnergySolutions' Utah disposal site should a federal judge rule the company isn't subject to a regional oversight authority. U.S. House energy and environment subcommittee members, all Democrats, wrote to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Tuesday to air their concerns and to ask for the federal agency's assessment of what it will mean if, as the company insists, the Northwest Compact lacks control over EnergySolutions. "Uncertainty about who is in charge of regulating foreign waste could turn into chaos depending on the outcome in this case," said U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson, a Utah lawmaker who is co-sponsoring legislation to ban the type of foreign-waste imports EnergySolutions has requested. The letter to NRC comes nearly two weeks after U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart heard oral arguments from the Salt Lake City nuclear-waste company on one side and the state of Utah, the Northwest Compact and the Rocky Mountain Compact on the other. The pending ruling is expected to say whether the site must answer to the compact, of which Utah has been a member for more than two decades.

As a fairly new resident of San Antonio, but a well seasoned reactor engineer and energy analyst, I would like to present my comments concerning investing in additional nuclear power by San Antonio residents. For 17 years, I worked in a nuclear power plant for a utility that owned two nuclear power stations and attempted to build a third. In the 1980s my company invested billions of dollars toward building two new nuclear plants with a lot of analysis showing the need for the plants. The plant was never finished due to multiple issues, primarily the inability to resolve intervener issues and changing regulations. Who won and who lost in this attempt? The companies building the plants received their pay. The companies who supplied the materials were paid. The utility company engineers, executives, lawyers, etc. were paid. The people of the community lost. They had to pay for the plant and never received any electricity from it. I contend that investing in a nuclear power plant is one of the most risky investments available. A simple review of the history of the last attempts to build a nuclear plant here in the U.S will show plants that never achieved operations, plants that were required to shut down early, and extreme over-budget and delayed projects. Even a simpler project of the Yucca Mountain waste repository was not able to be completed even after spending billions of dollars.

Dozens of workers diagnosed with cancer after their employment at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory may have more leverage in claiming federal compensation to help with their health care. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health first granted a special designation earlier this month for those assigned to the field lab's 270-acre Area IV, where much of the nuclear work was conducted. The designation applies to those who were exposed to radiation for at least 250 days, between Jan. 1, 1955 and Dec, 31, 1958. On Wednesday, the federal agency broadened the designation to include those who worked at the field lab in 1959, the year of a partial nuclear meltdown at the site. The federal action is the result of a efforts by Bonnie Klea of West Hills, who worked as a secretary for Rocketdyne in the 1960s. A survivor of bladder cancer, she compiled letters, press releases, news articles and documentaries about radioactive and chemical contamination at the site. She delivered the petition in 2007, after learning that the Department of Labor had denied most of the claims for compensation filed by cancer-stricken workers under the 2000 Energy Employees Occupational Illness Program Act. Of the 993 claims filed by Thursday with the Department of Labor, 249 had been denied, 164 had been approved and the rest are pending.

In 1946, just after the first anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima, "The New Yorker" magazine's Aug. 31 issue published the complete text of John Hersey's portrait of the atom bomb and its effects on the Japanese city. At the end of the war, in 1945, Hersey was in Japan writing about the reconstruction of the devastated country when he happened across an account written by a Jesuit priest who had survived the Hiroshima destruction. It was he who introduced the reporter to other survivors. From these, Hersey chose six individuals: two doctors, a minister, a widowed seamstress, a young woman who worked in a factory, and the priest himself. These became the principal characters in an account that melded nonfiction reportage with the stylistic devices of the novel, all expressed through the plainest of styles.

During the Vietnam War, the hell that was soldiers' daily lives sometimes was complicated by their exposure to plastic explosives and their neurotoxic effects. Back home, munitions workers faced similar nightmares. Though not wandering the jungle in search of Viet Cong, workers on the front lines at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant knew that at any moment they could be injured or die in an explosion. And those who were lucky or smart enough to survive could have ended up like Mary Ludlow. Ludlow, a Wisconsin resident, worked two stints at the plant in the late-1960s, totaling about six months. Ludlow left the plant a second time, and for good, when her then-husband decided to pursue a graduate degree at Iowa State University in Ames.

During the Vietnam War, the hell that was soldiers' daily lives sometimes was complicated by their exposure to plastic explosives and their neurotoxic effects. Back home, munitions workers faced similar nightmares. Though not wandering the jungle in search of Viet Cong, workers on the front lines at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant knew that at any moment they could be injured or die in an explosion. And those who were lucky or smart enough to survive could have ended up like Mary Ludlow. Ludlow, a Wisconsin resident, worked two stints at the plant in the late-1960s, totaling about six months. Ludlow left the plant a second time, and for good, when her then-husband decided to pursue a graduate degree at Iowa State University in Ames.

During the Vietnam War, the hell that was soldiers' daily lives sometimes was complicated by their exposure to plastic explosives and their neurotoxic effects. Back home, munitions workers faced similar nightmares. Though not wandering the jungle in search of Viet Cong, workers on the front lines at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant knew that at any moment they could be injured or die in an explosion. And those who were lucky or smart enough to survive could have ended up like Mary Ludlow. Ludlow, a Wisconsin resident, worked two stints at the plant in the late-1960s, totaling about six months. Ludlow left the plant a second time, and for good, when her then-husband decided to pursue a graduate degree at Iowa State University in Ames.

No matter what we're led to believe, the world's worst polluter is not your cousin who refuses to recycle or that co-worker who drives a gas guzzler or the guy down the block who simply will not try CFL bulbs. "The U.S. Department of Defense is the largest polluter in the world, producing more hazardous waste than the five largest U.S. chemical companies combined," explains Lucinda Marshall, founder of the Feminist Peace Network. Pesticides, defoliants like Agent Orange, solvents, petroleum, lead, mercury, and depleted uranium are among the many deadly substances used by the military. What does this mean for us? To start with, it can help illustrate how to best foment a green revolution. As Derrick Jensen reminds us: "Even if every single person in the United States were to change all their light-bulbs to fluorescent, cut the amount they drive in half, recycle half of their household waste, inflate their tire pressure to increase gas mileage, use low flow shower heads and wash clothes in lower temperature water, adjusts their thermostats two degrees up or down depending on the season, and plant a tree, it would result in a one time, 21% reduction in carbon emissions."

There's still nowhere to put that toxic waste Nuclear electricity is affordable and emission free People opposed to nuclear energy applications point to the high initial price tag of enormous nuclear generating facilities that can … read more provide enough reliable electricity for several million people; they often overlook the resulting low cost per unit of power when spread over that large market. There are 104 nuclear plants operating in the US today. Many of us who are old enough to remember the controversies surrounding their construction can remember how many times we were told that nuclear power plants are frighteningly expensive and that they always cost more than predicted. We even remember that electrical power prices often increased immediately after the plants went into operation due to the effect of adding those big, expensive plants into the utility rate base. What many people who consider "news" media to be their only information sources rarely understand, however, is that the 104 plants currently operating provide the US with 20% of its electric power at an average production cost of about 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour. They also do not understand that after a few decades of operation and revenue production, the initial mortgages on those plants are largely paid off. The best information of all, which is not really "news" and does not get regularly published on the front page, is that the plants still have at least 20 years of life remaining during which they can produce emission free, low cost power. The companies that own the plants and their stock holders understand the economics pretty well; that is why 18 applications for 25 new plants have been turned into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission already with more in the pipeline. All of the used fuel - what some people call waste - is being carefully stored in a tiny corner of the existing sites, just waiting to be recycled into new fuel. It still contains 95% of its initial potential energy, but

There's still nowhere to put that toxic waste Nuclear electricity is affordable and emission free People opposed to nuclear energy applications point to the high initial price tag of enormous nuclear generating facilities that can … read more provide enough reliable electricity for several million people; they often overlook the resulting low cost per unit of power when spread over that large market. There are 104 nuclear plants operating in the US today. Many of us who are old enough to remember the controversies surrounding their construction can remember how many times we were told that nuclear power plants are frighteningly expensive and that they always cost more than predicted. We even remember that electrical power prices often increased immediately after the plants went into operation due to the effect of adding those big, expensive plants into the utility rate base. What many people who consider "news" media to be their only information sources rarely understand, however, is that the 104 plants currently operating provide the US with 20% of its electric power at an average production cost of about 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour. They also do not understand that after a few decades of operation and revenue production, the initial mortgages on those plants are largely paid off. The best information of all, which is not really "news" and does not get regularly published on the front page, is that the plants still have at least 20 years of life remaining during which they can produce emission free, low cost power. The companies that own the plants and their stock holders understand the economics pretty well; that is why 18 applications for 25 new plants have been turned into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission already with more in the pipeline. All of the used fuel - what some people call waste - is being carefully stored in a tiny corner of the existing sites, just waiting to be recycled into new fuel. It still contains 95% of its initial potential energy, but