Nuclear Power/Radiation

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From a military standpoint who would win WWIII? | Grok

Predicting the outcome of a hypothetical World War III involves considering a myriad of factors including military capabilities, alliances, technological advancements, economic strength, and strategic positioning. Here’s a balanced analysis based on current military strengths and geopolitical dynamics:

U.S. and NATO:

  • Military Power: The United States has the world’s most advanced military technology, with significant investments in cyber warfare, space capabilities, and nuclear forces. NATO allies, particularly countries like the UK, France, and Germany, add to this with their own substantial military forces and advanced technologies.
  • Alliances: NATO provides a collective defense framework, which could potentially involve 31 member countries, offering a broad base of support in terms of troops, logistics, and strategic depth.
  • Technological Edge: The U.S. leads in military technology, including stealth technology, drones, cyber warfare capabilities, and missile defense systems. This could give NATO an initial advantage in precision strikes and defensive operations.
  • Global Influence: The U.S. has numerous military bases around the world, providing strategic flexibility and the ability to project power globally.

Russia, China, and Potential Allies:

  • Military Hardware: Russia has one of the largest nuclear arsenals and has been modernizing its conventional forces, particularly with advanced missile technology. China has been rapidly expanding its military, focusing on both quantity and quality, with significant advancements in hypersonic missile technology and naval capabilities.
  • Economic and Industrial Base: Both Russia and China have substantial industrial capabilities. China’s ability to produce military hardware at scale could be crucial in prolonged conflict.
  • Cyber and Space: China has shown significant capabilities in cyber operations and has been advancing in space technology, which could disrupt communications and satellite operations.
  • Alliances: While less formal than NATO, countries like North Korea, Iran, and potentially others might align with Russia and China for ideological or strategic reasons. However, these alliances are less predictable.

Potential Outcomes:

  • Conventional Warfare: NATO might have an early advantage due to technological superiority and global reach. However, if the conflict drags on, China’s production capabilities could become a significant factor. Russia’s ability to endure prolonged conflict, learned from its experiences, would also play a role.
  • Nuclear Escalation: If nuclear weapons come into play, the scenario becomes unpredictable. The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) could deter nuclear use, but regional conflicts or miscalculations could lead to escalation.
  • Geopolitical Shifts: The involvement of other global powers or neutral nations could shift the balance. For instance, India’s stance could be pivotal due to its military strength and strategic location.
  • Economic Impact: A global conflict would severely impact the global economy, potentially leading to a situation where no clear winner emerges due to the destruction of economic infrastructure.
  • Cyber and Information Warfare: This aspect of modern warfare could be decisive, where neither side might achieve a traditional military victory but could dominate in terms of information control and cyber capabilities, influencing global perception and control of critical infrastructure.

Conclusion:

From a purely military standpoint, without considering the nuclear aspect:

  • If it remains conventional: The U.S. and NATO might have an upper hand early on due to technological advantages and global military presence. However, a prolonged conflict might see China’s industrial might and Russia’s resilience become more influential.
  • With nuclear escalation: All bets are off as the scale of destruction could be so immense that the concept of ‘winning’ becomes meaningless, leading to a scenario where no one truly wins.

The discourse around such scenarios often leans on the idea that in a modern World War, the real losers would be humanity and the planet, with victory being a hollow concept amidst global devastation.

Source: Ask Grok Any Question

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IAEA issues warning about Europe’s largest nuclear plant | RT Russia & Former Soviet Union

The UN is sending more observers to Zaporozhye after the Kakhovka dam disasterIAEA issues warning about Europe’s largest nuclear plant.

It is “critical” for the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant to have continued access to water in order to prevent a reactor meltdown, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director-general Rafael Grossi said on Wednesday.

Europe’s largest atomic power station relies on the Kakhovka reservoir for water to cool its six reactors. However, the water levels have dropped by 2.8 meters since the Kakhovka dam broke early on Tuesday. Once the water level is below 12.7 meters, the ZNPP will no longer be able to pump water from the reservoir, Grossi warned.

“As the full extent of the dam’s damage remains unknown, it is not possible to predict if and when this might happen,” the IAEA director said, but at the current rate of 5-7 centimeters per hour, that could be “within the next two days.”

ZNPP is building up water reserves while it still can, Grossi noted, citing reports from the IAEA experts who are on site. He intends to visit ZNPP next week and bring additional observers to strengthen the agency’s presence at the facility.

“Now more than ever, the IAEA’s reinforced presence at the [ZNPP] is of vital importance to help prevent the danger of a nuclear accident and its potential consequences for the people and the environment at a time of increased military activity in the region,” Grossi said.

The possible loss of the plant’s main source of cooling water further complicates an already extremely difficult and challenging nuclear safety and security situation.

The Zaporozhye NPP is Europe’s largest atomic power station, with six reactor cores capable of generating a gigawatt of electricity each. Russian troops have controlled it since March last year. The region in which it is located voted to join Russia in September 2022, though Ukraine claims it is illegally occupied.

READ MORE: China worried about potential nuclear catastrophe

Russia has accused Ukraine of destroying the Kakhovka dam and causing widespread flooding in Kherson Region. President Vladimir Putin called it a “barbaric act”amounting to terrorism. Moscow says that Kiev is trying to secure the flank of its forces so it can bring up reserves after a series of failed assaults on the Zaporozhye front.

The IAEA deployed an observer mission at the ZNPP in September 2022. Prior to that, the station and its environs had been repeatedly targeted by Ukrainian artillery, which Kiev admitted at one point. Just before the IAEA mission arrived, Ukrainian commandos also attempted to seize the facility but were driven back. Russia has provided evidence of Ukrainian attacks to the UN, which has stubbornly avoided assigning blame.

In part due to the Ukrainian artillery activity, five of the six reactors at ZNPP have been shut down, with one continuing to operate at a low level to maintain power to the facility. They all require continued cooling to prevent a fuel meltdown and possible radioactive release.

Source: RT

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“We’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history” says Noam Chomsky | The New Statesman

By George Eaton

It was as a ten-year-old that Noam Chomsky first confronted the perils of foreign aggression. “The first article that I wrote for the elementary school newspaper was on the fall of Barcelona [in 1939],” Chomsky recalled when we spoke recently via video call. It charted the advance of the “grim cloud of fascism” across the world. “I haven’t changed my opinion since, it’s just gotten worse,” he sardonically remarked. Due to the climate crisis and the threat of nuclear war, Chomsky told me, “we’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history… We are now facing the prospect of destruction of organised human life on Earth.” 

At the age of 93, as perhaps the world’s most cited living scholar, Chomsky could be forgiven for retreating from the public sphere. But in an era of permanent crisis, he retains the moral fervour of a young radical – more preoccupied with the world’s mortality than his own. He is a walking advertisement for Dylan Thomas’s injunction – “Do not go gentle into that good night” – or for what Chomsky calls “the bicycle theory: if you keep going fast, you don’t fall off”. 

The occasion for our conversation is the publication of Chronicles of Dissent, a collection of interviews between Chomsky and the radical journalist David Barsamian from 1984 to 1996. But the backdrop is the war in Ukraine – a subject about which Chomsky is unsurprisingly voluble. 

“It’s monstrous for Ukraine,” he said. In common with many Jews, Chomsky has a family connection to the region: his father was born in present-day Ukraine and emigrated to the US in 1913 to avoid serving in the tsarist army; his mother was born in Belarus. Chomsky, who is often accused by critics of refusing to condemn any anti-Western government, unhesitatingly denounced Vladimir Putin’s “criminal aggression”. 

But he added: “Why did he do it?” There are two ways of looking at this question. One way, the fashionable way in the West, is to plumb the recesses of Putin’s twisted mind and try to determine what’s happening in his deep psyche.

“The other way would be to look at the facts: for example, that in September 2021 the United States came out with a strong policy statement, calling for enhanced military cooperation with Ukraine, further sending of advanced military weapons, all part of the enhancement programme of Ukraine joining Nato. You can take your choice, we don’t know which is right. What we do know is that Ukraine will be further devastated. And we may move on to terminal nuclear war if we do not pursue the opportunities that exist for a negotiated settlement.”

How does he respond to the argument that Putin’s greatest fear is not encirclement by NATO but the spread of liberal democracy in Ukraine and Russia’s “near abroad”? 

“Putin is as concerned with democracy as we are. If it’s possible to break out of the propaganda bubble for a few minutes, the US has a long record of undermining and destroying democracy. Do I have to run through it? Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, on and on… But we are supposed to now honour and admire Washington’s enormous commitment to sovereignty and democracy. What happened in history doesn’t matter. That’s for other people.” 

“What about NATO expansion? There was an explicit, unambiguous promise by [US secretary of state] James Baker and president George HW Bush to Gorbachev that if he agreed to allow a unified Germany to rejoin NATO, the US would ensure that there would be no move one inch to the east. There’s a good deal of lying going on about this now.” 

Chomsky, who observed in 1990 that “if the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every postwar American president would have been hanged”, spoke witheringly of Joe Biden. 

“It’s certainly right to have moral outrage about Putin’s actions in Ukraine,” he said of Biden’s recent declaration that the Russian president “cannot remain in power”. “But it would be even more progress to have moral outrage about other horrible atrocities… In Afghanistan, literally millions of people are facing imminent starvation. Why? There’s food in the markets. But people who have little money have to watch their children starve because they can’t go to the market to buy food. Why? Because the United States, with the backing of Britain, has kept Afghanistan’s funds in New York banks and will not release them.” 

Chomsky’s contempt for the hypocrisies and contradictions of US foreign policy will be familiar to anyone who has read one of his many books and pamphlets (his first political work, American Power and the New Mandarins, published in 1969, foretold the US’s defeat in Vietnam). But he is now perhaps most animated when discussing Donald Trump’s possible return and the climate crisis. 

“I’m old enough to remember the early 1930s. And memories come to mind,” he said in a haunting recollection. “I can remember listening to Hitler’s speeches on the radio. I didn’t understand the words, I was six years old. But I understood the mood. And it was frightening and terrifying. And when you watch one of Trump’s rallies that can’t fail to come to mind. That’s what we’re facing.”

Though he self-identifies as an anarcho-syndicalist or a libertarian socialist, Chomsky revealed to me that he had voted for Republicans in the past (“like them or not, they were an authentic party”). But now he said, they were a truly dangerous insurgency. 

“Because of Trump’s fanaticism, the worshipful base of the Republican Party barely regards climate change as a serious problem. That’s a death warrant to the species.” 

Faced with such existential threats, it is perhaps unsurprising that Chomsky remains a dissident intellectual – in the manner of one of his heroes, Bertrand Russell (who lived to 97 and similarly straddled politics and philosophy). But he also still spends hours a day answering emails from admirers and critics, and teaches linguistics at the University of Arizona, the state where he lives with his second wife, Valeria Wasserman, a Brazilian translator. 

Chomsky is also still engaged by British politics. “Brexit was a very serious error, it means that Britain will be compelled to drift even further into subordination to the US,” he told me. “I think it’s a disaster. What does it mean for the Conservative Party? I imagine they can lie their way out of it, they’re doing a good job of lying about a lot of things and getting away with it.”

Of Keir Starmer, he scornfully remarked: “He’s returning the Labour Party to a party that’s reliably obedient to power, that will be Thatcher-lite in the style of Tony Blair and that won’t ruffle the feathers of either the US or anyone who’s important in Britain.” 

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci advised radicals to maintain “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”. What, I asked Chomsky at the close of our conversation, gives him hope? 

“A lot of young people; Extinction Rebellion in England, young people dedicated to trying to put an end to the catastrophe. Civil disobedience – it’s not a joke, I’ve been involved with it for much of my life. I’m too old for it now [Chomsky was first arrested in 1967 for protesting against the Vietnam War and shared a cell with Norman Mailer]… It’s not pleasant to be thrown in jail and beaten, but they’re willing to undertake it.”

“There are plenty of young people who are appalled by the behaviour of the older generation, rightly, and are dedicated to trying to stop this madness before it consumes us all. Well, that’s the hope for the future.”

Source: The New Statesman

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Japan expected to dump over 1 MILLION TONS of radioactive Fukushima water into Pacific, fishermen fear ‘catastrophic impact’ | RT.com

The Japanese government is planning to release more than one million tons of contaminated radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean, angering fishermen, local media have reported.

Japan has debated what to do with the rapidly increasing store of radioactive wastewater for years, and now the decision to release it into the ocean could be confirmed by the end of the month.

Currently, Japan houses the water in more than 1,000 tanks, but with 170 additional tons of the radioactive by-product being produced every day, storage space is quickly running out.

It is estimated that all tanks will have reached maximum capacity by the summer of 2022 and Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said on Friday that the decision was one they could “not keep delaying,” Kyodo News reported.

The water is used to cool the Fukushima nuclear reactor core, which went into meltdown after the catastrophic 2011 earthquake and tsunami that struck the plant. 

The government previously considered building more tanks to house the additional water, or attempting to evaporate the water into the atmosphere, but an advisory panel recommended releasing it into the ocean as the most efficient solution. However, the release process is not expected to begin until 2022 and is likely to take 30 years to complete.

The prospect of an ocean release has reignited concerns among local fishermen who fear it could destroy their industry.

“We are terrified that if even one fish is found to have exceeded the [radiation] safety standards after the treated water is released, people’s trust in us will plummet,” Kyodo News quoted a local fisherman as saying. 

Hiroshi Kishi, who heads a confederation of Japanese fishing cooperatives told officials last week that the release could have a “catastrophic impact” on the industry. 

Fishing was completely halted following the 2011 disaster, and despite a recent recovery, fishermen in the region continue to face international trade restrictions. South Korea, which still bans all fish imports from the region, has described the proposal as a “grave threat.” 

The initial meltdown in 2011 forced the evacuation of 150,000 people from within 20km of the plant as well as from outside areas that experienced high levels of fallout. The clean-up process is expected to take many more years to complete.

Source: RT

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Planet of the Humans: A Film by Jeff Gibbs & Michael Moore | YouTube

Editor’s Note: At first I was not interested in watching yet another Michael Moore film, but after getting half-way through the film I realized the importance of the message. Renewable and green energy such as solar and wind, as beautiful a notion that is, still requires a massive industrial infrastructure to manufacture and deploy. That infrastructure is still dependent upon fossil fuels such as coal, natural gas and nuclear. So the lofty idea of a Green New Deal somehow independent of the existing fossil fuels/industrial infrastructure may very well be a pipe dream. For a counterpoint opinion do read “A Bomb in the Center of the Climate Change Movement”.

By Jeff Gibbs

Michael Moore presents Planet of the Humans, a documentary that dares to say what no one else will this Earth Day — that we are losing the battle to stop climate change on planet earth because we are following leaders who have taken us down the wrong road — selling out the green movement to wealthy interests and corporate America. This film is the wake-up call to the reality we are afraid to face: that in the midst of a human-caused extinction event, the environmental movement’s answer is to push for techno-fixes and band-aids. It’s too little, too late.

Source: YouTube

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FBI’s 37 secret pages of memos about Russia, Clintons and Uranium One | The Hill

By John Soloman

Eight years after its informant uncovered criminal wrongdoing inside Russia’s nuclear industry, the FBI has identified 37 pages of documents that might reveal what agents told the Obama administration, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others about the controversial Uranium One deal.

There’s just one problem: The FBI claims it must keep the memos secret from the public.

Their excuses for the veil of nondisclosure range from protecting national security and law enforcement techniques to guarding the privacy of individual Americans and the ability of agencies to communicate with each other.

Sound familiar?

It’s a lot like the initial reasons the bureau was reluctant to turn over documents in the Russia collusion investigation, such as former FBI agent Peter Strzok’s “stop Trump” texts or the revelation that Clinton and the Democrats funded the Steele dossier.

The FBI’s declaration and list of withheld documents — entitled simply “Uranium One Transaction” — were posted recently inside its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) online vault.

The bureau actually released a handful of documents, but it wasn’t a big stretch of either freedom or information. It actually just released already public letters from members of Congress demanding answers in the Uranium One case.

I was the reporter who first disclosed last fall that a globetrotting American businessman, William Douglas Campbell, managed to burrow his way inside Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear giant, Rosatom, in 2009 posing as a consultant while working as an FBI informant.

Campbell gathered extensive evidence for his FBI counterintelligence handlers by early 2010 that Rosatom’s main executive in the United States, Vadim Mikerin, orchestrated a racketeering plot involving kickbacks, bribes and extortion that corrupted the main uranium trucking company in the United States. That is a serious national security compromise by any measure.

The evidence was compiled as Secretary Clinton courted Russia for better relations, as her husband former President Clinton collected a $500,000 speech payday in Moscow, and as the Obama administration approved the sale of a U.S. mining company, Uranium One, to Rosatom.

The sale — made famous years later by author Peter Schweizer and an epic New York Times exposé in 2015 — turned over a large swath of America’s untapped uranium deposits to Russia.

Mikerin was charged and convicted, along with some American officials, but not until many years later. Ironically, the case was brought by none other than current Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — a magnet for controversy, it turns out.

But the years-long delay in prosecution mean that no one in the public, or in Congress, was aware that the FBI knew through Campbell about the Russian bribery plot as early as 2009 — well before the Obama-led Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) approved Uranium One in fall 2010.

Since the emergence of Campbell’s undercover work, there has been one unanswered question of national importance.

Did the FBI notify then-President Obama, Hillary Clinton and other leaders on the CFIUS board about Rosatom’s dark deeds before the Uranium One sale was approved, or did the bureau drop the ball and fail to alert policymakers?

Neither outcome is particularly comforting. Either the United States, eyes wide open, approved giving uranium assets to a corrupt Russia, or the FBI failed to give the evidence of criminality to the policymakers before such a momentous decision.

Campbell tells me his FBI handlers assured him they had briefed Obama and then-FBI Director Robert Mueller, now the Russia special prosecutor, on Rosatom’s criminal activities as part of the president’s daily briefing and that agents suggested to him that “politics” was the reason the sale was allowed to go through.

After I broke the Campbell story, a predictable pattern occurred. President Trump and the Republicans took note. On the flip side, Democrats attacked the credibility of the informer — despite evidence the FBI had given him a hefty $50,000 award of thanks after the case was finished.

And the Jeff Sessions-Rod Rosenstein Justice Department, likely feeling the heat of President Trump’s watchful eye, announced that a prosecutor from Utah was named to look into the matter.

Campbell was interviewed by the FBI, but that was 10 months ago. Since then, nothing has been made public to address the overriding public interest issue.

Perhaps the FBI’s unexpected “release” — and I use that word loosely, since they gave up no public information of importance — in the FOIA vault was a warning flare designed to remind America there might be evidence worth looking at.

One former U.S. official, who had access to the evidence shared with CFIUS during the Uranium One deal, said this to me: “There is definitely material that would be illuminating to the issues that have been raised. Somebody should fight to make it public.”

That somebody could be President Trump, who could add these 37 pages of now-secret documents to his declassification order he is considering in the Russia case.

Or, those Republicans leading the charge on exposing failures in the Russia probe could use their bully pulpits to pressure for the release.

From what we now know, either the CFIUS process was corrupted or broken, or the FBI dropped the ball.

Either outcome is a matter of national interest.

Source: The Hill

Author: John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He is The Hill’s executive vice president for video.

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28 Signs That the West Coast Is Being Absolutely Fried with Nuclear Radiation from Fukushima| Global Research & The Truth

Global Research Note: 7 years after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, we bring to the attention of our readers this piece originally published in October 2013. This situation is far more serious that what is described in this article.

The map below comes from the Nuclear Emergency Tracking Center.  It shows that radiation levels at radiation monitoring stations all over the country are elevated.  As you will notice, this is particularly true along the west coast of the United States.  Every single day, 300 tons of radioactive water from Fukushima enters the Pacific Ocean.  That means that the total amouont of radioactive material released from Fukushima is constantly increasing, and it is steadily building up in our food chain. 

Ultimately, all of this nuclear radiation will outlive all of us by a very wide margin.  They are saying that it could take up to 40 years to clean up the Fukushima disaster, and meanwhile countless innocent people will develop cancer and other health problems as a result of exposure to high levels of nuclear radiation.  We are talking about a nuclear disaster that is absolutely unprecedented, and it is constantly getting worse.  The following are 28 signs that the west coast of North America is being absolutely fried with nuclear radiation from Fukushima…

By Michael Snyder

1. Polar bears, seals and walruses along the Alaska coastline are suffering from fur loss and open sores…

Wildlife experts are studying whether fur loss and open sores detected in nine polar bears in recent weeks is widespread and related to similar incidents among seals and walruses.

The bears were among 33 spotted near Barrow, Alaska, during routine survey work along the Arctic coastline. Tests showed they had “alopecia, or loss of fur, and other skin lesions,” the U.S. Geological Survey said in a statement.

2. There is an epidemic of sea lion deaths along the California coastline…

At island rookeries off the Southern California coast, 45 percent of the pups born in June have died, said Sharon Melin, a wildlife biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service based in Seattle. Normally, less than one-third of the pups would die.   It’s gotten so bad in the past two weeks that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared an “unusual mortality event.”

3. Along the Pacific coast of Canada and the Alaska coastline, the population of sockeye salmon is at a historic low.  Many are blaming Fukushima.

4. Something is causing fish all along the west coast of Canada to bleed from their gills, bellies and eyeballs.

5. A vast field of radioactive debris from Fukushima that is approximately the size of California has crossed the Pacific Ocean and is starting to collide with the west coast.

6. It is being projected that the radioactivity of coastal waters off the U.S. west coast could double over the next five to six years.

7. Experts have found very high levels of cesium-137 in plankton living in the waters of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and the west coast.

8. One test in California found that 15 out of 15 bluefin tuna were contaminated with radiation from Fukushima.

9. Back in 2012, the Vancouver Sun reported that cesium-137 was being found in a very high percentage of the fish that Japan was selling to Canada…

• 73 percent of mackerel tested

• 91 percent of the halibut

• 92 percent of the sardines

• 93 percent of the tuna and eel

• 94 percent of the cod and anchovies

• 100 percent of the carp, seaweed, shark and monkfish

10. Canadian authorities are finding extremely high levels of nuclear radiation in certain fish samples…

Some fish samples tested to date have had very high levels of radiation: one sea bass sample collected in July, for example, had 1,000 becquerels per kilogram of cesium.

11. Some experts believe that we could see very high levels of cancer along the west coast just from people eating contaminated fish…

“Look at what’s going on now: They’re dumping huge amounts of radioactivity into the ocean — no one expected that in 2011,” Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear policy lecturer at the University of California-Santa Cruz, told Global Security Newswire. “We could have large numbers of cancer from ingestion of fish.”

12. BBC News recently reported that radiation levels around Fukushima are “18 times higher” than previously believed.

13. An EU-funded study concluded that Fukushima released up to 210 quadrillion becquerels of cesium-137 into the atmosphere.

14. Atmospheric radiation from Fukushima reached the west coast of the United States within a few days back in 2011.

15. At this point, 300 tons of contaminated water is pouring into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima every single day.

16. A senior researcher of marine chemistry at the Japan Meteorological Agency’s Meteorological Research Institute says that “30 billion becquerels of radioactive cesium and 30 billion becquerels of radioactive strontium” are being released into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima every single day.

17. According to Tepco, a total of somewhere between 20 trillion and 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium have gotten into the Pacific Ocean since the Fukushima disaster first began.

18. According to a professor at Tokyo University, 3 gigabecquerels of cesium-137 are flowing into the port at Fukushima Daiichi every single day.

19. It has been estimated that up to 100 times as much nuclear radiation has been released into the ocean from Fukushima than was released during the entire Chernobyl disaster.

20. One recent study concluded that a very large plume of cesium-137 from the Fukushima disaster will start flowing into U.S. coastal waters early next year…

Ocean simulations showed that the plume of radioactive cesium-137 released by the Fukushima disaster in 2011 could begin flowing into U.S. coastal waters starting in early 2014 and peak in 2016.

21. It is being projected that significant levels of cesium-137 will reach every corner of the Pacific Ocean by the year 2020.

22. It is being projected that the entire Pacific Ocean will soon “have cesium levels 5 to 10 times higher” than what we witnessed during the era of heavy atomic bomb testing in the Pacific many decades ago.

23. The immense amounts of nuclear radiation getting into the water in the Pacific Ocean has caused environmental activist Joe Martino to issue the following warning…

“Your days of eating Pacific Ocean fish are over.”

24. The Iodine-131, Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 that are constantly coming from Fukushima are going to affect the health of those living the the northern hemisphere for a very, very long time.  Just consider what Harvey Wasserman had to say about this…

Iodine-131, for example, can be ingested into the thyroid, where it emits beta particles (electrons) that damage tissue. A plague of damaged thyroids has already been reported among as many as 40 percent of the children in the Fukushima area. That percentage can only go higher. In developing youngsters, it can stunt both physical and mental growth. Among adults it causes a very wide range of ancillary ailments, including cancer.

Cesium-137 from Fukushima has been found in fish caught as far away as California. It spreads throughout the body, but tends to accumulate in the muscles.

Strontium-90’s half-life is around 29 years. It mimics calcium and goes to our bones.

25. According to a recent Planet Infowars report, the California coastline is being transformed into “a dead zone”…

The California coastline is becoming like a dead zone.

If you haven’t been to a California beach lately, you probably don’t know that the rocks are unnaturally CLEAN – there’s hardly any kelp, barnacles, sea urchins, etc. anymore and the tide pools are similarly eerily devoid of crabs, snails and other scurrying signs of life… and especially as compared to 10 – 15 years ago when one was wise to wear tennis shoes on a trip to the beach in order to avoid cutting one’s feet on all the STUFF of life – broken shells, bones, glass, driftwood, etc.

There are also days when I am hard-pressed to find even a half dozen seagulls and/or terns on the county beach.

You can still find a few gulls trolling the picnic areas and some of the restaurants (with outdoor seating areas) for food, of course, but, when I think back to 10 – 15 years ago, the skies and ALL the beaches were literally filled with seagulls and the haunting sound of their cries both day and night…

NOW it’s unnaturally quiet.

26. A study conducted last year came to the conclusion that radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster could negatively affect human life along the west coast of North America from Mexico to Alaska “for decades”.

27. According to the Wall Street Journal, it is being projected that the cleanup of Fukushima could take up to 40 years to complete.

28. Yale Professor Charles Perrow is warning that if the cleanup of Fukushima is not handled with 100% precision that humanity could be threatened “for thousands of years“…

“Conditions in the unit 4 pool, 100 feet from the ground, are perilous, and if any two of the rods touch it could cause a nuclear reaction that would be uncontrollable. The radiation emitted from all these rods, if they are not continually cool and kept separate, would require the evacuation of surrounding areas including Tokyo. Because of the radiation at the site the 6,375 rods in the common storage pool could not be continuously cooled; they would fission and all of humanity will be threatened, for thousands of years.”

Are you starting to understand why so many people are so deeply concerned about what is going on at Fukushima?

About the author: Michael T. Snyder is a former Washington D.C. attorney who now publishes The Truth. His new thriller entitled “The Beginning Of The End” is now available on Amazon.com.

Source: The Truth & Global Research

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Plans To Release Entire Fukushima Waste Into Ocean Confirmed By Tepco | Social Consciousness

Editor’s Note: The dumping of highly radioactive material in the Pacific Ocean from Japan’s Fukushima has been occurring for years with no plans to stop dumping or bio-remediate this massive problem for all life in our oceans. This is yet another by-product of civilization which has been ignored by government, scientists and climate-change activists.  

Tepco has confirmed it plans to release the radioactive material from the Fukushima plant into the ocean saying that the “decision has already been made”. The decision has an upset local fisherman who says the decision will kill their industry as a result of a massive loss of sea life.

Under the controversial plan, which could be a massive environmental disaster, the radioactive material tritium, which is being used to cool reactors whose cooling systems were damaged in 2011 tsunami, will now be released into the ocean.

rt.com reports: “I’m very sorry that Tepco has been prolonging making a decision,” the new chairman of Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO) Takashi Kawamura told reporters on Thursday, reported Reuters. “We could have decided much earlier, and that is Tepco’s responsibility.”

The plan still requires the approval of the Japanese government before TEPCO can proceed. Some 770,000 tons (metric) of tritium-containing water is currently stored in 580 tanks at the plant, reported the Japan Times. Toxic water at the plant is currently being treated through a processing system that can remove 62 different types of radioactive material, except tritium.

The local fishermen cooperative has hit out at the plan, saying it had not been discussed with local residents. “Releasing (tritium) into the sea will create a new wave of unfounded rumors, making our efforts all for naught,” Kanji Tachiya, head of a local fishermen cooperative, told the Japan Times.

Situated 10 meters above sea-level, three of the nuclear power plant’s six reactors’ cooling systems were crippled by flooding caused by the tsunami, making the disaster the worst since the Chernobyl catastrophe in the USSR in 1986.

The plan still requires the approval of the Japanese government before TEPCO can proceed. Related: Fukushima Radiation: The Entire Pacific Ocean Has Been Contaminated, And It’s Going To Get Worse Fukushima Radiation: Your Days of Eating Pacific Ocean Fish Are Over, Or Worse Officials Warn: Fukushima Has Now Contaminated 1/3 Of The World’s Oceans

Source: Social Consciousness

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Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change | Boston Globe

By Jordan Michael Smith

DoubleGovernment The voters who put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.

But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons.

Why did the face in the Oval Office change but the policies remain the same? Critics tend to focus on Obama himself, a leader who perhaps has shifted with politics to take a harder line. But Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon has a more pessimistic answer: Obama couldn’t have changed policies much even if he tried.

Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.

RELATED: Coverage of the 2014 midterm elections

Glennon cites the example of Obama and his team being shocked and angry to discover upon taking office that the military gave them only two options for the war in Afghanistan: The United States could add more troops, or the United States could add a lot more troops. Hemmed in, Obama added 30,000 more troops.

Glennon’s critique sounds like an outsider’s take, even a radical one. In fact, he is the quintessential insider: He was legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a consultant to various congressional committees, as well as to the State Department. “National Security and Double Government” comes favorably blurbed by former members of the Defense Department, State Department, White House, and even the CIA. And he’s not a conspiracy theorist: Rather, he sees the problem as one of “smart, hard-working, public-spirited people acting in good faith who are responding to systemic incentives”—without any meaningful oversight to rein them in.

How exactly has double government taken hold? And what can be done about it? Glennon spoke with Ideas from his office at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. This interview has been condensed and edited.

IDEAS: Where does the term “double government” come from?

GLENNON:It comes from Walter Bagehot’s famous theory, unveiled in the 1860s. Bagehot was the scholar who presided over the birth of the Economist magazine—they still have a column named after him. Bagehot tried to explain in his book “The English Constitution” how the British government worked. He suggested that there are two sets of institutions. There are the “dignified institutions,” the monarchy and the House of Lords, which people erroneously believed ran the government. But he suggested that there was in reality a second set of institutions, which he referred to as the “efficient institutions,” that actually set governmental policy. And those were the House of Commons, the prime minister, and the British cabinet.

IDEAS: What evidence exists for saying America has a double government?

GLENNON:I was curious why a president such as Barack Obama would embrace the very same national security and counterterrorism policies that he campaigned eloquently against. Why would that president continue those same policies in case after case after case? I initially wrote it based on my own experience and personal knowledge and conversations with dozens of individuals in the military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies of our government, as well as, of course, officeholders on Capitol Hill and in the courts. And the documented evidence in the book is substantial—there are 800 footnotes in the book.

IDEAS: Why would policy makers hand over the national-security keys to unelected officials?

GLENNON: It hasn’t been a conscious decision….Members of Congress are generalists and need to defer to experts within the national security realm, as elsewhere. They are particularly concerned about being caught out on a limb having made a wrong judgment about national security and tend, therefore, to defer to experts, who tend to exaggerate threats. The courts similarly tend to defer to the expertise of the network that defines national security policy.

The presidency itself is not a top-down institution, as many people in the public believe, headed by a president who gives orders and causes the bureaucracy to click its heels and salute. National security policy actually bubbles up from within the bureaucracy. Many of the more controversial policies, from the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors to the NSA surveillance program, originated within the bureaucracy. John Kerry was not exaggerating when he said that some of those programs are “on autopilot.”

RELATED: Answers sought on CIA role in ‘78 JFK probe

IDEAS: Isn’t this just another way of saying that big bureaucracies are difficult to change?

GLENNON: It’s much more serious than that. These particular bureaucracies don’t set truck widths or determine railroad freight rates. They make nerve-center security decisions that in a democracy can be irreversible, that can close down the marketplace of ideas, and can result in some very dire consequences.

IDEAS: Couldn’t Obama’s national-security decisions just result from the difference in vantage point between being a campaigner and being the commander-in-chief, responsible for 320 million lives?

GLENNON: There is an element of what you described. There is not only one explanation or one cause for the amazing continuity of American national security policy. But obviously there is something else going on when policy after policy after policy all continue virtually the same way that they were in the George W. Bush administration.

IDEAS: This isn’t how we’re taught to think of the American political system.

GLENNON: I think the American people are deluded, as Bagehot explained about the British population, that the institutions that provide the public face actually set American national security policy. They believe that when they vote for a president or member of Congress or succeed in bringing a case before the courts, that policy is going to change. Now, there are many counter-examples in which these branches do affect policy, as Bagehot predicted there would be. But the larger picture is still true—policy by and large in the national security realm is made by the concealed institutions.

IDEAS: Do we have any hope of fixing the problem?

GLENNON: The ultimate problem is the pervasive political ignorance on the part of the American people. And indifference to the threat that is emerging from these concealed institutions. That is where the energy for reform has to come from: the American people. Not from government. Government is very much the problem here. The people have to take the bull by the horns. And that’s a very difficult thing to do, because the ignorance is in many ways rational. There is very little profit to be had in learning about, and being active about, problems that you can’t affect, policies that you can’t change.

Source: Boston Globe

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Radiation Protection | What Is Radiation

radiationprotection144Radiation protection is surprisingly easy. The primary concern for most people is not shielding from direct exposure as a nuclear power plant worker might experience. Instead, radiation protection from internal exposure is what matters to most people.

Simple Radiation Protection Steps:

Radiation Protection From Internal Exposure

Ever since the first atomic test, radionuclides have been accumulating in the environment but radiation protection has been only a passing concern.

Some radionuclides, such as Iodine-131 with a half life of 8 days, pose only a short-term threat. Although it is a good idea to keep one’s Iodine levels up as part of a healthy nutrition regimen, overdosing on Potassium Iodide in reaction to news reports is not recommended. The most vulnerable are infants and developing fetuses, since radioactive Iodine-131 bio-concentrates by a factor of 1,000 in their growing tissues. Three months later, the opportunity for radiation protection will have passed.

Most radionuclides have longer half-lives and constitute a greater threat over time. In particular as regards radiation protection:

  • Cesium-137 has a half-life of  about 30 years and chemically mimics Potassium in the body. This means that quantities as a result of atmospheric atomic testing are still present in the environment at somewhere between 10-25 percent of their original strength. Quantities created from the Chernobyl catastrophe are still present at about 50% of their original levels. This Cesium-137 can find its way into our bodies through consumption of fruits, vegetables and meats.
  • Strontium-90 has a half-life of about 28 years and chemically mimics Calcium in the body and thus shows up in the bones and teeth. This means that it is still present in the environment in quantities similar to Cesium-137.
  • Uranium-235 has a half-life of about 704 million years and chemically mimics Iron in the body. This means quantities released into the environment through atmospheric nuclear testing or nuclear accidents have not diminished substantially in their radioactivity over time.
  • Plutonium-239 has a half-life of about 24,000 years and chemically mimics Iron in the body. This means quantities released into the environment through atmospheric nuclear testing or nuclear accidents have not diminished substantially in their radioactivity over time.

Radiation protection for the above contaminants is accomplished through mineralization and chelation. Although these radionuclides have been accumulating in the environment since the first atomic test, it is difficult to establish direct cause-and-effect links between exposure and subsequent cancers for two reasons:

  1. There is a latency period of from 5 to 20 years between exposure and the appearance of associated cancers.
  2. Many consequences may be classified as “Stochastic Effects” meaning that chance plays a role. This means that statistically, cancers will show up as percentages within an exposed population, but it is difficult to predict individual outcomes.

Source: What Is Radiation?