Dateline: Planet Earth, 24th July, 2013

The map(s) formerly above, dated from April 2011. They've been "disappeared." So, I've invited an image of Dr. Strangelove. Meanwhile, unreported but ongoing, the Fukushima reactors continue in meltdown, with explosions of Plutonium, etc. from the MOX-fuel reactor No. 3. All into the global Jet Stream and rad-cess into the Pacific Ocean. Problem is monstrous; Let's talk solutions.

The UN has been adopting resolutions condemning the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights for decades; however Tel Aviv hasn't changed its policies and is continuing to exercise sovereignty over the disputed territory, including holding municipal elections.

Secretary-General of the UN Antonio Guterres has presented a report to the UN Human Rights Council based on Syrian accusations against Israel's action in the Golan Heights, saying that Israel has been burying "nuclear waste with radioactive content in 20 different areas populated by Syrian citizens" in the occupied territory. Most of the waste has allegedly been dumped in the area near Al-Sheikh Mountain.

According to the report, this puts "the lives and health of Syrians in the occupied Syrian Golan in jeopardy" and violates the 4th Geneva Convention.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon dismissed as “utter nonsense” a United Nations charge that Israel had buried radioactive nuclear waste in the Golan Heights.

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres included that allegation in a report his office prepared for the UN Human Rights Council’s 40th session, which is set to open in Geneva on Monday and run through March 22.

Most people think they have to die to go to hell but that is not true anymore. Today, in the mainstream press, they announced the existence of a hell hole in Japan at the destroyed nuclear power station at Fukushima. We have a hot spot on our planet that has never been imagined before and in the face of it human technology is helpless.

At the levels of radiation now being found a Fukushima, a robot would be able to operate for less than two hours before it was destroyed. And Japan’s National Institute of Radiological Sciences said medical professionals had never even thought about encountering this level of radiation in their work.

Tourists, employees and children on tours were exposed to radiation from uranium sitting in the Grand Canyon's museum collection building for nearly two decades, according to the park's safety manager.

Elston 'Swede' Stephenson, the park's safety, health and wellness manager, warned of possible health consequences to staff and the public from three five-gallon buckets of uranium ore which he claims were stored next to a taxidermy exhibit from 2000 until June 18, 2018, according to AZ Central.

Stephenson revealed the information in a rogue email to staff after bosses failed to issue any information on the exposure for eight months, he claims.

He believes top management are now involved in a cover-up operation, saying he has been cut off from all information about the exposure.

In his email, Stephenson wrote: 'If you were in the Museum Collections Building (2C) between the year 2000 and June 18, 2018, you were 'exposed' to uranium by OSHA's definition.'

In truth, the cataclysm was born of the planned economy and communist bureaucracy itself.

For this was an empire of falsified statistics, of unattainable deadlines easily beaten by corner-cutting, sullen indifference to individual responsibility, terror at conveying bad news to superiors and chains of toadying yes-men clinging to their comfortable party privileges. They made the disaster at Chernobyl almost inevitable.

On Wednesday, operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) sent a remote-controlled probe to the bottom of the plant's No. 2 reactor and lifted five small pieces of radioactive debris two inches.

"We were able to confirm that the fuel debris can be moved," said spokeswoman Yuka Matsubara, adding "We accomplished the objective of this test."

Matsubara says tht TEPCO plans to move more debris by next March.

Police have not yet ascertained how the radioactive substance ended up in a scrap yard, but said they are investigating the case "from all possible angles."

India's Central Crime Station (CCS) has recovered an unspecified quantity of a missing radioactive isotope of Cesium-137 (CS-137) which was reported missing from a facility belonging to the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) in Rajamahendravaram, Andhra Pradesh.

Over 126,000 barrels of radioactive material are stored in the Asse mine in Lower Saxony, a state in northwest Germany bordering the North Sea, a fact that has many locals - as well as the global anti-nuke community - frustrated.

Manfred Kramer, a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, lives close to the Asse salt mine in which the decaying waste is stored and — while acknowledging that politicians are finally beginning to take notice — has long protested against having radioactive waste in the old mine, Tekportal reported.

"It's nice that she's finally coming," Kramer said, referring to Environment Minister Svenja Schulze's upcoming visit to the mine, which was originally used for the extraction of potash salt until 1965. "Soon she'll have been in office for a year. It sure took a while!" he quipped, according to Deutsche Welle.

Weapons-grade plutonium from South Carolina was secretly shipped to a nuclear security site in Nevada months ago despite Nevadans' protests, the Department of Energy revealed on Wednesday.

The Justice Department notified a federal judge in Reno that the government trucked in the radioactive material to store at a site 70 miles north of Las Vegas before Nevada asked a court to block the move in November.

Five-year prison terms were sought Wednesday for three former executives of Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. for their alleged failure to prevent the Fukushima nuclear disaster triggered by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
At the Tokyo District Court, court-appointed lawyers acting as prosecutors said if the three had collected information properly and prepared necessary safety measures it would have been possible to predict the massive tsunami and prevent the disaster.

Tsunehisa Katsumata, 78, chairman of the company at the time of the disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, and Ichiro Takekuro, 72, and Sakae Muto, 68, both former vice presidents, have pleaded not guilty, arguing the tsunami was unforeseeable and the disaster would have occurred even if they had implemented preventive measures.

A final hearing for the defense will be held next March.

Donald Trump is the Ugly American incarnate. More so than even Dick Cheney or George Bush the Younger. His boorish manners and in-your-face self-promotion puts to shame the servile European, Japanese and other spittle-lickers who have profited from their associations with Washington at the expense of their compatriots. These would-be friends of Washington have nowhere to hide from the disgrace Trump metes out to them before their own peoples. All of this is good and necessary medicine to set the world on its way towards a multipolar future. Far more than we “American dissidents” have been able to muster.

Therefore, I can only say “godspeed” to Donald Trump in the New Year 2019. May he willy-nilly continue to do God’s work.

In my Nov. 16 column, I reported on potential radiation risks posed by California’s Woolsey wildfire having burned over parts or all of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory—south of Simi Valley, Calif., 30 miles outside Los Angeles—site of at least four partial or total nuclear reactor meltdowns.

The field laboratory operated 10 experimental reactors and conducted rocket engine tests. In his 2014 book Atomic Accidents, researcher James Mahaffey writes, “The cores in four experimental reactors on site … melted.” Reactor core melts always result in the release of large amounts of radioactive gases and particles. Clean up of the deeply contaminated site has not been conducted in spite of a 2010 agreement.

Last night, the Woolsey fire burned the contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), a former nuclear and rocket engine testing site. Footage from local television showed flames surrounding rocket test stands, and the fire’s progress through to Oak Park indicates that much of the toxic site burned.

A statement released by the California Dept. of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) said that its staff,

“do not believe the fire has caused any releases of hazardous materials that would pose a risk to people exposed to the smoke.”

The statement failed to assuage community concerns given DTSC’s longtime pattern of misinformation about SSFL’s contamination and its repeated broken promises to clean it up.

While families, firefighters and first responders inhale potentially radioactive and toxic chemicals in this awful smoke, the DTSC says it has no evidence that the smoke is unusually dangerous. This is an agency that has repeatedly lied to us, minimized risk from the Santa Susana Field Lab and broken every promise ever made regarding the clean up. Why would we trust them when the lab is on fire – especially now that we know the fire actually began at Santa Susana?

The Japanese government is allowing residents to relocate back to nuclear radiation-stricken areas near its Fukushima nuclear plant despite calls from the United Nations to bring down radiation levels first before exposing women and children to the environment.

Following the powerful tsunami that left 18,000 Japanese citizens dead or missing in March 2011, the island nation also had to contend with the partial meltdown of several light-water nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, once among the 15 largest nuclear plants in the world.

Baskut Tuncak, United Nations special rapporteur on hazardous substances and waste, said Thursday that people felt they were "being forced to return to areas that are unsafe, including those with radiation levels above what the government previously considered safe," AFP reported.

The only promise that is new about the promised peace plan is the way it will be forced on the Palestinians: no one has promised that the plan itself will be new. With Saudi Arabia and Egypt—the outside—brought onside with the promise of continued military aid despite their crimes against humanity and violations of international law and the Palestinians weakened by being silenced, economically crushed and stripped of any friends to help them, the United States and Israel are now free to attempt to impose a peace plan on the Palestinians.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is being tight-lipped about an “unusual event” which occurred at the Brunswick Nuclear Plant last Saturday which forced a “hot shutdown” of both the plant’s Generation IV-type reactors 1 and 2.
The NRC classified the emergency as an “unusual event” but provided little to no details on the situation.

Additionally, the NRC reports that weather conditions from Tropical Storm Florence are currently preventing workers from accessing the plant.

The two reactor Brunswick nuclear plant on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina may be critically threatened by flooding from hurricane Florence. The nuclear plant has a sea wall designed to withstand 22 feet of flooding according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The National Weather Service in Wilmington NC reported on Thursday that the Cape Fear River is expected to crest at up to 22 feet on Tuesday Sept. 17 swollen by hurricane Florence storm surge and downpours.

The seawall was constructed following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan after a tsunami overtopped the sea wall and damaged plant electric power and controls leading to catastrophic meltdowns and release of radiation.

The advisory also warns military activities linked to the bloody conflict in Syria have been ramped across Iran's airspace.

Tensions between Tehran and Washington are running high following Donald Trump’s controversial decision to pull out of the landmark Iran nuclear deal re-introduce economic sanctions last month.

Flight Service Bureau, which provides safety information on airspace to airlines, said "without seeming alarmist", the deteriorating relationship between the US and Iran must be taken into account when planning flights in Iran's airspace.

Radioactive particles from the Fukushima disaster have been detected in – of all places – California wines.

Inspired by tests conducted in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, researchers at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, or CNRS, decided to test a series of California wines dating between 2009 and 2012. They looked for traces of radioactive particles, specifically cesium-137, a man-made isotope.

Smithsonian.com reported on the team’s findings:

Their findings, newly published in the pre-print online journal Arxiv, suggest that currents and atmospheric patterns carried radioactive particles across the Pacific, where they settled on grapevines growing in California’s wine regions. The team writes that bottles produced following the nuclear meltdown contain increased levels of cesium-137, with the cabernet revealing double the amount of pre-Fukushima radiation.

As the White House convenes a policy meeting on Iran Thursday involving senior Pentagon officials and cabinet advisers under national security adviser John Bolton, and after a week of intense saber-rattling by President Donald Trump and his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani, a new bombshell report by Australia's ABC says the White House is drawing up plans to strike Iran's alleged nuclear facilities as early as next month.

Senior figures in the Australia's Turnbull government have told the ABC they believe the US is prepared to bomb Iran's nuclear capability. The bombing could be as early as next month. —ABC report

The Pennsylvania Department of Health is stepping up efforts to protect people who live near nuclear power plants.

The health department will distribute free potassium iodide tablets on Aug. 9 to those who live, work or attend school within a 10-mile radius of one of the state's five nuclear power plants.

More than 60 studies have shown increases of childhood leukemia around nuclear facilities worldwide. Despite this finding, there has never been independent analysis in the US examining connections between childhood cancer and nuclear facilities. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) had tasked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to conduct such a study, but then withdrew funding, claiming publicly that it would be too expensive.

Radioactive levels are increasing in wine from California's Napa Valley, thanks to the radioactive cloud that drifted from the Fukushima disaster in 2011.
Researchers from the University of Bordeaux Centre d'Études Nucléaires de Bordeaux-Gradignan (CNRS) in France tested California wine from before and after the Fukushima disaster and found there was double the amount of cesium-137 in its Cabernet Sauvignon after the 2011 tsunami caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors to leak.

The radioactive cloud released by the plant drifted all the way to California’s Napa Valley. There, trace amounts of cesium-137 made its way into the vineyard grapes.

The levels varied depending on the wine, researchers found, with Cabernet Sauvignon reds having a higher amount and rosé having the least.

We wish we could say this is from The Onion but it's a now viral story that's but the latest representation of extreme government incompetence in handling deadly radioactive materials. Two Department of Energy security officials tasked with transporting deadly substances left plutonium in the back of their Ford Expedition, where it was promptly stolen from a Marriott parking lot in San Antonio.

And over a year later and after what appears to be a ham-handed investigation that was prematurely shut down perhaps for fear of public embarrassment, authorities still have no clue as to the whereabouts of what the government admits are "bomb-usable materials".

A concrete dome holding the radioactive waste of 43 nuclear explosions is leaking into the ocean, veterans have warned.

The Enewetak Atoll was used by the US government to test 30 megatons of weapons – equivalent to 2,000 Hiroshima blasts – between 1948 and 1958.

More than 8,000 people, including US troops, would later work to clean up these Pacific islands, shifting 110,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris into a blast crater.

This 30-foot-deep crater on Runit Island would then be entombed in a concrete dome, 350 feet across and 16 inches thick.

But now, with the dome weathered by decades of exposure, it's feared that rising seas and storms could see radiation leaking into the ocean.

A new, shocking report by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy (EPP), Harvard University, and the University of California San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy discovered that the US nuclear power industry could be on the verge of a collapse — a reality that many have yet to realize.

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), “US nuclear power: The vanishing low-carbon wedge” examined 99 nuclear power reactors in 30 states, operated by 30 different power companies. As of 2017, there are two new reactors under construction, but 34 reactors have been permanently shut down as many plants reach the end of their lifespan.

People who live near the Tihange nuclear power plant in Belgium’s Wallonia region have serious concerns about the safety of the station which has experienced several shutdowns in recent years.

The station’s operator, Engie-Electrabe, found “instability” in the reinforced concrete ceiling of the reactor’s armored bunker during a planned check that started on March 30, the newspaper Soir reported on Thursday.

According to the newspaper, company specialists also determined that the “anomalies” in the reinforced concrete had been there since the time the bunker was built.

TEPCO is conducting an independent geological survey to confirm the absence of active faults in Aomori Prefecture, where it wants to resume the construction of a Fukushima-type nuclear plant, frozen following the 2011 disaster.
“It’s necessary to form a consortium for building a nuclear plant that is excellent in safety, technology and economy,” TEPCO President Tomoaki Kobayakawa said in Tokyo, announcing the decision to conduct a survey of the Aomori Prefecture nuclear site.

READ MORE: Fukushima operator turned down tsunami simulation plan 9yrs before disaster

The Higashidori Nuclear Power Plant hosts two adjoining sites administered by Tohoku Electric Power Company and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). While Tohoku Unit 1 began commercial operations in December 2005, TEPCO never got a chance to finish their unit, the construction of which began only in January 2011. All activity at the site has ceased since the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown.

In the early stages of research, before Dimona existed, there were accidents that exposed scientists to lethal levels of radiation. Some of them died and their names are known (though not well). Less known is that Dimona had a series of accidents - the most serious in 1966 - that exposed hundreds of its workers to similarly lethal doses.

Avner Cohen, the world’s leading scholar of the Israeli nuclear programme, told me that in the first 20-25 years the processes used to protect workers were primitive and sloppy. Mistakes were common, often not intentionally, but because relatively little was known about the proper handling of radioactive materials. In some cases, documentation was fabricated.

Beneath the elegant curves of the roof on the Seirinji Buddhist temple in Japan's Fukushima region hangs an unlikely adornment: a Geiger counter collecting real-time radiation readings.

The machine is sending data to Safecast, an NGO born after the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster that says it has now built the world's largest radiation dataset, thanks to the efforts of citizen scientists like Seirinji's priest Sadamaru Okano.

Like many Japanese, Okano lost faith in the government after the nuclear meltdown seven years ago.

"The government didn't tell us the truth, they didn't tell us the true measures," he told AFP, seated inside the 150-year-old temple.

A major wildfire is sweeping through the Chernobyl nuclear disaster area. The authorities have deployed dozens of fire trucks as firefighting aircraft bombard the radioactive exclusion zone with massive amounts of water.

The fire inside the Chernobyl 'dead zone,' which is now part of Ukraine, started on Tuesday morning, when dry grass was ignited, local emergency services said in a statement. The wildfire subsequently reached a forest, where up to 10 hectares (24 acres) are now in flames.

Some 29 vehicles and 126 personnel have been dispatched at the scene, with several planes and helicopters dropping water from the sky on the area engulfed by wildfire.

The zone saw another large blaze last year, which scorched 25 hectares (60 acres) of land.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company is running out of container space to store water contaminated by tritium outside the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, and it's also running out of room for building more tanks, according to Yomiuri Shimbum, a Japanese newspaper, which is creating an intractable problem for the utility, which has been tasked with supervising the cleanup of Fukushima.

The Japanese government has been desperately trying to accelerate the cleanup ahead of the upcoming 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo - and it's a miracle it hasn't run into this issue sooner. TEPCO is still struggling with how to dispose of the tritium-tainted water. Options discussed have included dumping it into the ocean, but that proposal has angered local fishing communities.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company is running out of container space to store water contaminated by tritium outside the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, and it's also running out of room for building more tanks, according to Yomiuri Shimbum , a Japanese newspaper, which is creating an intractable problem for the utility, which has been tasked with supervising the cleanup of Fukushima.

The Japanese government has been desperately trying to accelerate the cleanup ahead of the upcoming 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo - and it's a miracle it hasn't run into this issue sooner. TEPCO is still struggling with how to dispose of the tritium-tainted water. Options discussed have included dumping it into the ocean, but that proposal has angered local fishing communities.

A reactor at EDF Energy’s (EDF.PA) Hunterston B nuclear power plant in Scotland will remain offline for additional safety checks after cracks were found in its core, Britain’s Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) said.

Ageing reactors generate just over 20 percent of Britain’s power but almost half of this capacity, including Hunterston, is due to go offline by 2025, prompting the government to plan new plants.

The Republic of Serbia appears to be making moves that would ultimately open the door to holding NATO responsible for the significant spike in cancer illnesses and deaths which followed NATO’s bombing of Serbia with depleted uranium shells.

President of the Serbian Parliament Maja Gojkovic drafted a resolution in parliament that would establish a commission charged with investigating the impact of the NATO bombing in 1999 on the health of citizens and the environment, with particular emphasis on the effects caused by the use of depleted uranium shells.

Previously, the Italian parliament, recognized that NATO’s use of these nuclear waste tainted weapons were the primary cause of illness and death for Italian NATO soldiers in the occupied southern Serbian region of Kosovo. Serbian officials are in an active conversation with the Italians, whose findings may better inform any Serbian investigation.

A small amount of radioactive, weapons-grade plutonium has gone missing from a university in Idaho.

Idaho State University was using the radioactive chemical element, which was about the size of a 10p piece, for research.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the university could not account for about a 30th of an ounce (one gram) of the material, which is used in nuclear reactors and to make nuclear bombs.

One of the nuclear reactors at the Hunterston B nuclear power plant in Scotland could remain offline until the end of the year, after fresh cracks expanding at a higher rate were discovered in the graphite blocks forming its core.

Reactor 3 at the aging Hunterston B nuclear power station on the West coast of Scotland was initially taken offline on March 9 for a routine inspection, during which the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) found new “keyway root cracks” in the reactor core. On Wednesday, operator EDF Energy announced that the reactor could remain offline for months until the problem is fixed.

“The inspections confirmed the expected presence of new keyway root cracks in the reactor core and also identified these happening at a slightly higher rate than modeled,” EDF Energy said. “While Hunterston B Reactor 3 could return to operation from the current outage, it will remain offline” until the company addresses safety concerns.

The radiation dispersed into the environment by the three reactor meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi in Japan has exceeded that of the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, so we may stop calling it the “second worst” nuclear power disaster in history. Total atmospheric releases from Fukushima are estimated to be between 5.6 and 8.1 times that of Chernobyl, according to the 2013 World Nuclear Industry Status Report. Professor Komei Hosokawa, who wrote the report’s Fukushima section, told London’s Channel 4 News then, “Almost every day new things happen, and there is no sign that they will control the situation in the next few months or years.”

Tokyo Electric Power Co. has estimated that about 900 peta-becquerels have spewed from Fukushima, and the updated 2016 TORCH Report estimates that Chernobyl dispersed 110 peta-becquerels. [1] (A Becquerel is one atomic disintegration per second. The “peta-becquerel” is a quadrillion, or a thousand trillion Becquerels.)

The country’s Environment Ministry wants to use the radiation-tainted material to rebuild a number of roads in the region that was devastated by a tsunami in 2011.

But the proposal has sparked fury among residents over fears they could be poisoned by the soil.

A briefing about the plans on Thursday saw angry scenes erupt, with locals in the city of Nihonmatsu yelling about how the roads will be “contaminated”.

Authorities have been desperately trying to convince people that it will be safe, saying the soil will be buried under clean earth that will “block” any harmful radiation.