Don't trust nuclear power and depleted uranium. Grow Hemp for biomass hempahol.
From the article:
"two stretches of road in Niagara Falls whose beds are known to contain
dangerous radioactive materials—materials whose only reasonable
provenance can be the Manhattan Project—will be torn up and repaved."
=== Article ===
The Cult of Nuclearists. By
Geoff Kelly & Louis Ricciuti. May 13, 2010.
The Palestine Telegraph. Originally, May
12, 2010, in ArtVoice of
Buffalo, New York. See:
http://artvoice.com/issues/v9n19/cult_of_nuclearists
(photo courtesy Louis Ricciuti)
A new book says nuclear safety
experts have deliberately underplayed the dangers of radioactivity. So
what does that mean for Niagara Falls?
This summer, two stretches of road in Niagara
Falls whose beds are known to contain dangerous radioactive
materials—materials whose only reasonable provenance can be the
Manhattan Project—will be torn up and repaved. Radiation surveys
produced within the last two years for the city by national defense
contractor Science Applications International Corporation reiterate the
findings of radiation surveys produced for the federal government in the
1970s and 1980s: Portions of Lewiston Road and Buffalo Avenue are
emitting unnatural levels of gamma radiation. Some hotspots reach up to
100,000 and 1,000,000 counts per minute, respectively, 50 and 100 times
what SAIC deceptively calls “background” levels of radiation (set at
2,000 and 10,000 counts per minute for the SAIC studies) and thousands
of times what might be called “natural” levels of radiation for this
thoroughly contaminated region (between five and 50 counts per minute).
The prospect of those materials being thrown up into the air as
dust and carried off site as runoff deeply concerns author Paul
Zimmerman. He thinks the prospect ought to concern residents of Niagara
Falls and surrounding communities, too.
Zimmerman’s new book is called A Primer in the Art of Deception:
The Cult of Nuclearists, Uranium Weapons and Fraudulent Science. In
it, Zimmerman describes how the agencies that set safety standards for
exposure to radiological materials have consistently ignored new science
that shows even small doses of so-called “low-level” radiation can have
devastating health consequences, clinging instead to outdated and often
fraudulent guidelines that enable and excuse the nuclear industry.
Zimmerman became interested in the subject of radiation and its
health consequences in the 1980s, when he began lecturing about the
history of radiation accidents during seminars for healthcare
professionals and first responders on managing radiation emergencies. In
studying that history—from fallout at the Nevada bomb test site in the
1950s to the Chernobyl disaster, to studies that showed elevated rates
of childhood leukemia and other illnesses surrounding nuclear facilities
throughout Europe and North America—Zimmerman came across numerous
communities that were exposed to materials that the radiation protection
community declared harmless, and yet manifested catastrophic health
issues down the road. He fears that Niagara Falls is poised to write a
new chapter in that history.
“When you’re tearing up a road in Niagara Falls, you’re creating
an inhalation hazard to the surrounding community,” Zimmerman says.
He is not placated by assurances that extraordinary safety
measures will be taken by the contractor that won the bid to do the
actual roadwork. (The bid went to Man O’ Trees, a West Seneca company
with no previous experience handling radiological waste, and which only
recently received training and licensing to do so for this project.)
After all, he says, the US military wrote protocols for the handling of
depleted uranium munitions that were completely ignored during both gulf
wars. “Who’s going to supervise the work so that they follow
procedures?” Zimmerman says. “Are we really going to do this again?
Twenty years from now are we going to discover there was a higher rate
of cancer and birth defects, the birth defects occurring the year after
the road projects were finished and the cancer appearing 20 years later?
How can we watch this happening again, when there is such a historical
record of illness being created by doses that are being called safe?”
Fraudulent science
A Primer in the Art of Deception—an elaborately researched
book that draws on decades of studies and work in scientific journals—is
something of a follow-up to a book Zimmerman produced in the 1980s
about the history of radiation accidents. He regarded that book as a
failure. “I was never really happy with the result,” he says. “It wasn’t
really complete. I was tearing my hair out, I was ripping up pages,
because I knew I had entered into some sort of dysfunction. The pieces
weren’t fitting together: Radioactivity was being released in all sorts
of different scenarios, in areas where populations were being exposed.
People would go out and do studies and find there were increased rates
of illness in those populations, and then government would come along
and say, ‘No, there’s something wrong with that study. Let’s reevaluate
this.’ In every single instance, no matter what evidence was provided
that people were getting sick, it was washed away.”
In the late 1990s, Zimmerman found what he’d been missing—“the
joker in the pack,” he calls it—in the work of British scientist and
activist Chris Busby, whose studies of ionizing radiation led him to
investigate the health effects of depleted uranium deployed in Kosovo
and Iraq. Busby taught him that the agencies that set the safety
standards for exposure to radiological materials were engaged in
fraudulent science.
An example that he provides in the book: Imagine you are walking
through Fallujah, which was bombarded with depleted uranium armaments,
on a windy day. (Or, for that matter, imagine you are driving down
Buffalo Avenue this summer with the car windows open, as concrete saws,
jackhammers, and backhoes send plumes of dust into the air.) You breathe
in a particle of uranium, which lodges in your lung. As each atom
decays, the uranium emits alpha particles that pack millions of electron
volts—that’s what makes a Geiger counter click—more than enough to
damage or break a strand of DNA or RNA. These alpha particles can only
travel about six cell diameters, so a tremendous amount of potentially
destructive energy is concentrated in a very small area of the lung.
But the radiation protection agencies consider the energy emitted
by that particle as a dose to the entire lung—when and if
internal does are considered at all. That is to say, they average out
that tremendous burst of energy over a much larger mass of tissue, thus
diluting its apparent impact—at least on paper. “They’re creating a
mathematical fiction by saying that that’s a lung dose,” Zimmerman says.
“But it’s not a lung dose; it’s a dose to individual cells. Cancer is
known to start from the aberration in an individual cell. It has nothing
to do with a lung dose. You have to look at the individual cell and the
cellular response.”
In a similar vein, the radiation protection agencies deploy
adjectives like “background” and “normal” deceptively. To say that 2,000
or 10,000 counts per minute is a “normal” level of radiation on the
roadways of Niagara Falls is absurd. It’s like measuring the temperature
in a burning house in Wales Center and declaring 800 degrees Fahrenheit
the ambient temperature for Erie County. To determine whether
radioactive materials in the air, water, or ground presents a human
health threat, Zimmerman says, a scientist should consider what
constitutes natural exposure.
Another example of fraud: The Veterans Administration argues that
the primary hazard presented by uranium, also a heavy metal, is its
chemical toxicity. They consider its radioactivity separately, and deem
it to be too low-level to pose a cancer threat. Therefore, if a veteran
does not manifest kidney damage as a result of uranium’s chemical
toxicity, then the VA argues that the veteran has not been injured by
exposure to uranium. In fact, current science shows that the radiation
produced by internalized uranium works synergistically with its chemical
toxicity, to devastating effect. That the VA and other health agencies
should consider the chemical and radiological effects of uranium on the
human body separately is a fraud.
“A tremendous amount of research into the effects of uranium has
been instigated since the first gulf war,” Zimmerman says. “People are
starting to study uranium exposure in a way that it never was studied
before—which is funny, because uranium is the parent of all these other
radioactive materials that have seeped into the environment. Evidence is
emerging in the journals that uranium is cytotoxic, it’s toxic to
cells; it’s genotoxic, it adversely affects DNA; it is mutagenic, it
causes mutations in DNA; and it also has been shown to produce birth
defects. Plus it’s a neurological hazard.”
The cult of nuclearists
In writing his book, Zimmerman found himself referring often to they
and them as he described the government-funded agencies and
scientists who justify the continuing discharge of radioactive materials
into the environment. He coined the term “Cult of Nuclearists” to take
the place of the vague pronouns. In fact, Zimmerman argues that it’s not
important to identify and attack a specific culprit.
“What I’m presenting in the book is not some crazy conspiracy
theory, because the proof in what I’m saying is in the science itself,”
Zimmerman says. “The fraudulent science will testify that there’s
mischief somewhere, so you don’t have to find out who’s the guy doing
this. The current knowledge base is not being used to evaluate the
hazards of nuclear pollution. Why is the science being held back?”
Zimmerman believes that most of those in the radiation protection
community exercise integrity. The bad science on which they base their
work is taught to them in textbooks and reiterated by powerful
institutions. The “mischief,” he says, occurs at the top of the
information chain, and it justifies and excuses terrible crimes against
the environment and it habitants, as delineated in this passage from the
book:
In the 16 countries where uranium is mined, millions of tons of
radioactive mill tailings remain uncovered, allowing radionuclides to be
swept into the air or washed into waterways. British Nuclear Fuel’s
Sellafield reprocessing facility dumps radioactive waste directly into
the Irish Sea. Cogema’s reprocessing facility at La Hague in France
dumps one million liters of liquid radioactive waste, the equivalent of
50 waste barrels, into the ocean every day…Russia has scuttled
decommissioned naval vessels, sending loaded nuclear reactors to the
ocean floor. Between 1949 and 1956, the nuclear weapons complex at
Chelyabinsk in the former Soviet Union dumped 96 million cubic meters of
radioactive liquid into the Techa River…The facility also pumped 120
million curies of radioactivity into Lake Karachay. Standing on the
shoreline, a person would receive a lethal dose of 600 roentgens in one
hour…Water levels at the lake have been steadily dropping for years and
parts have dried out completely. Winds have lofted radioactivity into
the air, spreading contamination around the planet. At the Hanford
Reservation in Washington state, one third of the 177 tanks holding 54
million gallons of high-level waste are leaking. Nearby underground
aquifers contain an estimated 270 billion gallons of contaminated
water…Also at Hanford, 40 billions gallons of contaminated water was
dumped directly into the soil and storage ponds are leaking. As a
result, radioactive waste is migrating into the Columbia River. At the
former West Valley reprocessing facility 50 miles south of Buffalo, New
York, radioactive and chemical wastes continually leach into Cattaraugus
Creek. For 18 miles, the creek flows along the Cattaraugus Reservation
of the Seneca Nations of Indians before emptying into Lake
Erie…Cesium-137 and strontium-90 contaminate soil and groundwater in and
around the 3,345 acre site. The Department of Energy is attempting to
change its regulations to declassify high-level radioactive waste into
“waste incidental to reprocessing.” Under this new classification,
environmental contamination would be allowed to remain in the ground…DOE
favors covering up contaminated areas with concrete and walking
away…This despite the fact that a 1996 study by DOE calculated that
within 500 years radionuclides from West Valley would begin migrating
into the Great Lakes Watershed….
And then there’s Niagara Falls, which was during the Manhattan
Project and the years immediately following World War Two the free
world’s leading source of uranium and other radioactive metals for
weapons and reactors. Niagara was also, therefore, the leading source of
the massive quantities of waste material created in order to produce
those metals. Much of that waste is consolidated at the Niagara Falls
Storage Site in Lewiston, where it sits in a containment facility that
has outlived its projected lifespan. Some of it was used in roadbeds and
other construction fill. Some of it was dumped directly into waterways
or injected into shallow wells. Some was buried cavalierly in factory
yards and farm fields. For decades, the agencies charged with protecting
communities exposed to radioactive materials insisted that the legacy
waste produced in and around Niagara Falls did not pose a significant
health risk. Zimmerman’s book argues convincingly that they’ve got it
wrong. He says that Niagara Falls residents ought to be asking a lot of
questions about this summer’s road repaving projects: Who will oversee
the work to make sure safety protocols are followed? Where and how will
waste material dug up from those 100,000- and
1,000,000-counts-per-minute hotspots be transported and dumped? Who will
monitor air and water quality during and after the project? And, once
this project is complete, what will be done to study the health effects
on a community that has been exposed for decades to radiological hazards
via numerous pathways?
Zimmerman points to a city not too far away as an example of what
Niagara County residents might demand. Inhabitants of Port Hope,
Ontario, a sister city to Niagara Falls which has long hosted uranium
refinement facilities, grew fed up with being told that their
community’s health issues had nothing to do with uranium contamination.
So the residents paid for tests, conducted by the Uranium Medical
Research Centre based in Toronto, that proved their exposure was real
and dangerous. And they used the results to shame the Canadian
government into undertaking a cleanup. That cleanup comes late and may
be inadequate, but it’s a step in the right direction.
“Port Hope is analogous to Niagara Falls,” Zimmerman says. “What
worked there might work here.”
===== end of ArtVoice article =====
----------
Cheers,
eco
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