Fallout

Page Contents:

What Science Learned at Bikini

Fate of the Marshall Islanders

Statement from Lewis L. Strauss, chief of the AEC

Weather modification for fallout control

Explosions at Fukushima Japan, March 2011

Human Experiments

Low-Dose Danger, Radiation Injury

Fallout Effects and fallout map links

Fallout in Milk — fallout in baby teeth

The Story of Three Mile Island

The Battle of Chernobyl

Fallout from weapons –excerpts from the 1960 book Fallout, editor John M. Fowler

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[Magazine headline, 1947] “What Science Learned at Bikini” …”For a year the scientists who went to Bikini [Operation Crossroads] have tabulated their instrument readings and studied the animals which survived the bombs…. Conclusions, Tests Proved Irresistible Spread of Radioactivity [following section written by Stafford L. Warren:]…’Atomic bombs cause damage by a number of massive effects. The first is an instantaneous shower of penetrating radiation [the flash]. The second is a shock wave… the third is the release of great quantities of radioactive fission products… Within an hour after the Baker Day explosion [second test, shallow underwater]..Geiger counters recorded a solid wall of contamination…  Some of us have reflected..what might have happened if Bikini had been a populous harbor with a wind blowing in from the sea. Fission products equivalent to tons of radium would have been spread over the city. Most of its people would have inevitably died… no defense would have been effective. The only defense against atomic bombs still lies outside the scope of science. It is the prevention of atomic war.’ “

http://books.google.com/books?id=V04EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA86&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=1#v=onepage&q&f=true

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On January 29, 1947, a meeting to establish the goals and priorities of a Health Physics program for the government was convened as an extension of the Manhattan Project. Participants were presented with an orientation and outline addressing issues and recommendations :

…”many critical problems of far reaching scope remain to be solved. Information concerning the method of production of..injurious effects in body tissues is almost completely lacking. No methods are available which might stop or delay the development of radiation injuries. No therapeutic measures are at hand to use following accidental injury due to radiation or radioactive materials. Such problems relate to the fundamental nature of living matter…” https://polioforever.wordpress.com/health-physics/

OPERATION CROSSROADS, BIKINI ATOLL

   test Able                            test Baker 

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“..The U.S. nuclear weapon testing task force returned to Bikini for the 1954 Castle series [H-bombs]. The first shot of the Castle series produced such  extensive radioactive fallout that a third Marshallese group, the Rongelapese,  was evacuated from its contaminated home island and relocated for several years. After Castle Bravo the Marshall islanders petitioned the United  Nations to stop the nuclear testing in their territory or, if the testing was  essential, to exercise all precautions to safeguard the inhabitants and their  possessions. The U.S. continued to test at Bikini and Enewetak in 1954, 1956,  and 1958. By October 31, 1958, the U.S. had tested 66 nuclear devices in the  Marshall Islands since 1946.” http://www.hss.energy.gov/HealthSafety/IHS/marshall/marsh/; But it didn’t end there. The Marshallese were again required to surrender for Star Wars ballistics tests, fired on them from California.

Fate of the Marshall Islanders: from “Day of Two Suns” by Jane Dibblin

“At 6:45 on the morning of 1 March 1954, eight years after the testing in the Marshall Islands began, the US detonated a bomb codenamed ‘Bravo’ on the island of Bikini..equivalent to 17 megatons of TNT, 1,300 times the destructive force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima… That morning the wind was blowing in the direction of two inhabited atolls, Rongelap and Utrik, roughly 100 and 300 miles from Bikini. During previous tests Rongelap and Utrik had been evacuated. For some reason never yet divulged, there was no attempt to evacuate them before Bravo.” [p24]

   “Bravo was an unecessarily dirty bomb– it delivered huge quantities of fallout… it detonated low off the ground and the fireball scooped up..Bikini’s coral reef…

   “Official US figures estimated that the people on Rongelap at the time were exposed to 175 rems of radioactivity..[later] changed [in 1982] to 190..not including internal absorption doses from eating, drinking, breathing…The [original] calculations were taken in the air, three feet above the ground about one week after the Bravo detonation… islanders of Utrik atoll were exposed to 14 rem.” [p59] The maximun permissible dose to the thyroid in one week is 0.3 rems (This is not, of course, what the body can tolerate with no harm done, but what governments and the nuclear industry estimate to be acceptable damage.) [p45]

   “Women [on the islands] have had deeply traumatic births..what the Marshallese women..call ‘jellyfish babies’…’One of my babies was born in 1955 and it did not have any bones in its body’…’I saw three different women give birth to strange things…One was like a watery mass’…’Have you ever seen a jellyfish baby born looking like a bunch of grapes…we knew it was a baby..because we could see the brain…’ [pp35-36]

   “[D]octors on the ground didn’t even keep records… When the Rongelapese were taken to Kwajalein their urine samples were analyzed only as a pool sample instead of individually…The Atomic Energy Commission averaged the values of radionuclides found in land, fish, and fruits..thus concealing the expected effect on..an individual…[p54]

   “Senior weather technician [for the US] who was on Rongerik [and also exposed] at the time of the Bravo test says someone must have known for days that the wind was blowing towards Rongelap. [He said]’The wind had been blowing straight at us for days before the test… it was blowing straight at us after it. The wind never shifted.’ [p61]

   “[A] magistrate on Rongelap..tells what happened over the next two days… ‘I was awake and drinking coffee. I thought I saw..the sunrise, but it was in the west. It was truly beautiful..and I was surprised… Then all of the people heard the great sound of the explosion. Some..began to cry with fright.  Several hours later the powder began to fall…which covered our island and stuck to our bodies…The next day..we noticed the water turned to yellow. I warned the people not to drink from..water catchments, and told them to drink only [coconut milk]. The people began to get sick with vomiting, aches all over..and fatigue…’ [p25] It was two days before the Navy arrived to pick up the Rongelap islanders and US personnel– two days in which they breathed, slept and ate the fallout. [p26] ‘After two days..my fingernails came off and my fingers bled. We all had burns..and our hair began to fall out’..[p27] The Utrik people were..taken off the island 72 hours after being exposed. [p28] Early estimates that these areas received 2,000 to 2,300 rads were later changed to 3,000…[The] islanders returned in 1957… And why were [they] sent home when their atoll was still contaminated?…Early estimates that these areas received 2,000 to 2,300 rads were later changed to 3,000…[p32] Brookhaven’s three-year report on Rongelap and Utrik [states] ‘Even though..the radioactive contamination of Rongelap Island is considered perfectly safe for human habitation, the levels of activity are higher than those found in other inhabited locations in the world. The habitation of these people on the island will afford most valuable ecological radiation data on human beings.’ ” [p34]

    “I think that the outlook for the Marshallese is nothing but cancer… I am predicting a very, very bad outlook for those people.” –Dr. John Gofman [p51]

“The Rongelap people provided scientists with new raw data, for while people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had suffered most from the effects of the initial blasts, the Rongelapese suffered the effects of fallout four to six hours after the bomb had been detonated. (The bombs on Japan were airbursts and so created little fallout.)” [p63]

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   In 1982, the Marshallese had hoped to settle some of their long disputes with the US Government by signing a Compact that would compensate them for the uninhabitability of their homelands and force legal accountability on the continuing military use of those territories. Kwajalein Senator Imada Kabua spoke for the islanders: “Our people know from first-hand knowledge, better than most, the perils of nuclear weapons… To the extent we assist the development of nuclear weapons delivery systems we are involved in responsibility for their ultimate use.” [p90] “[A] descendent of Rongelap and Bikini has studied the evidence and..come to the conclusion that the contamination was deliberate. He has charged the US with ‘knowingly and consciously allowing the people of Rongelap to be exposed so that the United States could use them as guinea pigs in the development of its medical capabilities’… The US is now [1989] trying to stop lawsuits..from being heard in court. The Compact of Free Association which forms a new relationship between the Marshalls and the US..[stipulates] that the US has paid a lump sum for damages and from now on all responsibility must be shouldered by the Marshall Islands government –not even a sovereign nation at the time of Bravo… 14 of the atolls and islands surveyed received ‘intermediate range fallout from..megaton tests’. Yet the Compact provides for only four of them and there has been no survey of radiation..on the 15 remaining atolls… Like the bombing of the Japanese..66 bombs in the Marshall Islands..was a display of power and control.” [p62]

…In 1982, after much heart-searching..the people of Rongelap came to the conclusion that they would all have to leave their atoll until it was properly cleaned up…[p65]..March 1984, Rongelapese lawyer Johnsay Riklon told a US Congressional Committee that as the US had chosen to ignore..the Marshallese people, it had accepted an offer of help from..Greenpeace, who would provide a ship to move them to a different island… [the US pledged them $3.2 million ‘if the survey proved the move justified’]..So when the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior anchored off the shore..in May 1985..the people [still] had received not one cent from the US towards the cost of their resttlement.[p68] ..the crew had ten days, according to schedule, to move a community of 304 people and about 100 tons of cargo…corrugated iron, plywood and timber..cooking utensils..clothes..fishing gear. The animals would have to be left behind…[p70]
“Moving the people of Rongelap was to be the last act in the Rainbow Warrior’s remarkable history. After leaving the Marshalls..she was sunk by a French secret service limpet mine in Auckland Harbour before she could reach the South Pacific atoll of Moruroa and begin disrupting French nuclear tests there.” [p69] …there is as much thyroid cancer at Utrik as at Rongelap… A remarkable number of people..have cataracts… The Marshall Islands has the highest rate of diabetes in the world…[pp46-47]

   “Marshallese lawyer Johnsay Riklon: ..’So long as the US says its defending peace in the world, Kwajalein will be needed. I don’t see how we’re going to break that. We’ve gone to the U.N….and now we’ve just learned to live with this reality… We’ve exhausted all the available remedies…and I still haven’t seen the light at the end of the tunnel. We now suffer psychological dependency… The US just sits outside the picture and watches us…” [p105]

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Contaminated along with the islanders was the Japanese fishing vessel “Lucky Dragon” crew of 23: “AEC chair Lewis Strauss (who originally proposed nuclear energy “too cheap to  meter” in the post-War Atoms for Peace program) told President Eisenhower’s  press secretary James Hagerty in April 1954 that the Lucky Dragon was not a  fishing boat at all – it was a “Red spy outfit” snooping on the American nuclear  tests…” http://www.countercurrents.org/alcalay270311.htm

   According to his memoirs, the BRAVO test “demonstration of power” was the only Pacific blast that AEC Chairman Strauss excursioned to witness live. Over the next three months, his efforts were absorbed by the surveillance and prosecution of the Oppenheimer security hearings, focused on the scientist’s perveived obstruction in the building of H-bombs.

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“Willard Libby, a famed chemist and new member of the AEC [promoted up from the advisory board, GAC], insisted that “there  is no immediate hazard to the civilian population.”[from fallout]. Privately..Libby told his colleagues on the commission that fallout was just a fact of life  that people would have to learn to live with; chairman Strauss retorted that it  was all right “if you don’t live next door to it”—“or under it” added general  manager Kenneth Nichols.” http://spot.colorado.edu/~chernus/Research/Apocalypse%20Management%20text/Chapter6.htm; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Libby

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Timeline of the Marshall Islands    http://www10.antenna.nl/wise/index.html?http://www10.antenna.nl/wise/454/4498.html

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Feb.2, 1955 – “On this day Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss had given Eisenhower a proposed public announcement regarding the anticipated effects of fallout from thermonuclear explosions. The statement was designed to inform the American public of the “nature and extent of the dangers of nuclear attack and of the protective measures that can be taken by individuals and communities to avoid or minimize those dangers. (Goodpaster, Memorandum for Record, Feb.2, 1955..;  New York Times, Feb.16, 1955..)…Several days later Eisenhower would say that “instinctively he felt what was  going to be said was in error” and that he would prefer “a calm practical  statement” (Ann Whitman memorandum, Feb. 7, 1955..)” http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/presidential-papers/first-term/documents/1282.cfm

New York Times, Feb24, 1955; “This year, for the first time, the public is getting virtually the full publishable story from officials about the Nevada atomic tests…” (stub) http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00C17FB3E58107A93C6AB1789D85F418585F9

—To this day, the public has not gotten the full story, virtual, publishable or not. Strauss was evidently crafting his ‘legacy papers’: “Most Americans had forgotten, the most knowledgeable among them choosing to forget, that it was Khrushchev who had first proposed negotiations on a test ban, in February 1955. This was after the discovery that the fallout from an American test in March 1954 –not the bomb but the radioactive debris carried in the atmosphere– had killed or maimed Japanese fishermen and islanders hundreds of miles from the test site on Bikini Atoll.” [p121, President Kennedy, by Richard Reeves]

Continuous fallout detection became a US military priority after the 1946 test series Operation Crossroads. By 1948, a system of seismic, acoustic, and aerial sampling was a regular feature of activity involving all branches of the services and extensive civilian facilities, especially at university laboratories. The Air Force dispatched relay sorties that operated a bi-weekly ‘circuit’ of the northern hemisphere –this method of sampling detected the Soviet’s first test in August of 1949 with great accuracy. The aerial ‘filters’ which were changed on schedule within geophysical coordinates allowed US scientists to determine the type, chemistry, and location of the Soviet test. High altitude “weather” balloons were also part of the fallout-detection program, which only expanded it’s range and sophistication after the ’49 experience.

In 1947, Dr. Irving Langmuir initiated the first large-scale weather modification experiments, which were partly incorporated into the US Air Force as Project Cirrus. In 1950, Langmuir also tested burning silver-iodide from the ground in Socorro, New Mexico. Edward Teller wrote in his Memoirs, “In 1947, Langmuir was mostly interested in talking about cloud seeding; he talked so much about the amount of damage done by a storm his seeding had caused that I began to wonder whether he saw the technique as competition to the atomic bomb.” [p253, Memoirs, Edward Teller]  Conveniently, Irving Langmuir’s brother Dean, a ‘Morgan’ and Lazard Freres banker, was in the Bureau of Aircraft Production. Project Cirrus is generally referred to as a failure that ended in 1952, however, the limited records of operation continue until 1957 when peak fallout was achieved (Operation Plumbob) and then disappear. Langmuir also passed away. Weather modification during the ’50s seems likely to have been used for fallout control. 1954 and ’55 in the US were record-setting flood years –1955 was also the first year of domestic H-bomb tests and polio vaccine. http://www.smokershistory.com/lazard.htm#Dean_Langmuir; here’s a retelling of Langmuir’s experiments http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/Climate-Control.html?c=y&page=1

 Irving Langmuir  

Irving Langmuir (1881-1957), graduate of Columbia University’s School of Mines as an engineer of Metallurgy and then earning a PhD in Chemistry, worked for General Electric from 1909 to 1950. He studied chemical bonding, atomic structure and ionized gases, coining the word ‘plasma’. In 1932 Langmuir won a Nobel Prize. His nephew, Alexander Langmuir, became a famed epidemiologist, advancing from Deputy Commissioner of Health of Westchester County, New York, to founding the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the CDC in 1951. http://www.gifnet.org/articles/Langmuir%20&%20Atomic%20Hydrogen.pdf

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September 5, 1961 — “In view of the continued testing by the Soviet Government, I have today ordered the resumption of nuclear tests, in the laboratory and underground, with no fallout,” President Kennedy announced.. six days after the first [moratorium-breaching] Soviet test… There was no scientific or military reason for the United States to test until early 1962 or even into 1963… But there were political reasons now. In the six days, the Soviets exploded two more hydrogen bombs..into the atmosphere above Siberia. Some of Kennedy’s men..tried to talk Kennedy out of matching the Soviet testing. The United States, they argued briefly, could score a propaganda victory around the world by not testing now. But he was under much greater pressure to resume testing from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from Congress, from the Atomic Energy Commission –and from the American people… Personally, Kennedy did not want to resume testing. In meetings with scientists, he asked fewer questions about megatonnage than about radioactive fallout, ‘Where would we be if testing had continued at the 1958 rate?’ he asked Dr. Charles Dunham, director of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Division of Biology and Medicine. ‘Civilized man would have been in trouble,’ Dunham said. ‘How does the radioactive fallout get to the earth?’ [JFK] asked his science adviser, Jerome Wiesner. ‘The clouds are washed out by rain,’ answered Wiesner. Kennedy looked out through the French doors into the garden. It was a rainy day and he asked: ‘You mean it’s in the rain out there?’  ‘Yes’, Wiesner said. He stood, awkwardly, waiting. Kennedy did not speak for a long time.” [pp 226-227, President Kennedy, by Richard Reeves]

Baird Whaley/ Donner Lab, (division of Berkeley Radiation Lab) 1994 oral history given for the DoE ‘Openess Project’:

“Dr. Charles L. Dunham..is a name that would figure prominently in Donner history… [Dunham was] head of..the Division of Biology and Medicine of the AEC [between 1963 and 1967]. He was our funding source. There was, and this I remember very clearly –it was 1963, and there was concern about fallout..and the biological impact of fallout: ‘What was happening to us?’ The AEC didn’t have as much of a research program as was desirable. And so, Dunham asked Jack Gofman to go to Livermore and set up a program there to study fallout. Remember, Livermore is a weapons laboratory. And this may have been more than to just study fallout.” http://www.hss.doe.gov/healthsafety/ohre/roadmap/histories/0479/0479toc.html [Donner Lab was endowed by the Donner family, largesse acquired originally from the Donnor Steel Company in ‘Donora’ Pennsylvania –a town named for this family– which was also the scene of the worst fluoride air poisoning in American industrial history; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Donner]

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>>>polioforever: all underground nuclear tests released radiation into the atmosphere although those facts have been scrubbed from the public-access records. Remnants, however, exist in old news clippings and memoirs, such as this http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20615F93B5C1A7493C4AB178AD95F458785F9

  Jerome Wiesner, 13th president of M.I.T

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Radiation and air-borne chemical pollution of all types including X-rays, from all sources, is considered fallout. A newer technology of  Terahertz (THz, trillion hertz) microwaves in the far-infrared range (magnetic, as opposed to electro-magnetic) , used in radioastronomy,  is the next radiation hazard to people now being applied in airport body scans:  http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24331/; bodily-cellular injury from electromagnetism is here: https://polioforever.wordpress.com/electromagnetism/

The authors of “Deadly Deceit: Low Level Radiation, High Level Coverup” estimate the era of atmospheric testing was equivalent in fallout to the detonation of 40,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs. http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1990/06/review.html

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This is fallout…..

March 11, 2011 — “TOKYO – Japan declared states of emergency for five nuclear reactors at two power plants after the units lost cooling ability in the aftermath of Friday’s powerful earthquake. Thousands of residents were evacuated as workers struggled to get the reactors under control to prevent meltdowns… A single reactor in northeastern Japan had been the focus of much of the concern in the initial hours after the 8.9 magnitude quake, but the government declared new states of emergency at four other reactors in the area Saturday morning… Authorities said radiation levels had jumped 1,000 times normal inside Unit 1 and were measured at eight times normal outside the plant…” http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/as_japan_quake_power_plant .  Compare what happened at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl –in both cases, meltdowns were denied. The Chernobyl explosion was unavoidably obvious, however, Three Mile Island’s reactor status was unknown for many years while regular ventings released pressure and dispersed a wide pattern of radioactive fallout. Scroll down the page to read about TMI.  Updated information about the Fukushima fallout is here http://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/the-fallout-is-coming/

     

Southern California:   In 1959, the purportedly worst nuclear accident in US history, a partial meltdown, took place at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), just outside Los Angeles; “In July, 1959, the site suffered a partial nuclear meltdown that has been named “the worst in U.S. history”, releasing an undisclosed amount of radiation, but thought to be much more than the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979… The reactors located on the grounds of SSFL were considered experimental, and therefore had no containment structures… In October 2006, the Santa Susana Field Laboratory Advisory Panel.. concluded that the SRE meltdown caused the release of more than 458 times the amount of radiation released by the Three Mile Island accident.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory

Here is a magazine article from July 1959 on the state of public fallout disclosure:   “..among scientists at the [Congressional] hearings..everyone..was willing to agree that it was coming down much faster than had been expected..” [p.19 on doc] http://www.unz.org/Pub/Reporter-1959jul09-00017

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Western Pennsylvania:  “NUMEC Used Apollo, Parks as Guinea Pigs” [headline, Aug.28,2002]– “If you lived near the former NUMEC nuclear fuel plants in Apollo and Parks in the 1960s, you were part of studies to determine how much nuclear fallout was safe for humans. You just didn’t know it. And neither may have the workers inside the plants, who were studied to see just how much radiation the human body could absorb… But what were the results of the tests?… The extent of the tests will most likely stay unknown… ‘Private contractor sites like NUMEC fell off the map’ said [Dan] Guttman… results of the ongoing [lifetime] study are not available” http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/valleynewsdispatch/s_88353.html [cited on page www.polioforever.wordpress.com/dr-marys-monkey/ ]

>>>polioforever: the NUMEC plant operations are implicated in the JFK assassination conspiracy as a source of bomb-grade weapons fuel smuggled to Israel (see the Dr. Mary’s Monkey link above)

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http://www.youtube.com/v/UvABEvadacU&rel=0&border=1&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1

CHEMTRAILS – the field of Health Physics developed for the Atomic Energy program taught the authorities everything they needed to know about fallout and ‘uptake’, exhaustively studied ad nauseum. It is not possible that ignorance of biological damage caused by chemtrails is valid http://www.californiaskywatch.com/. Nanoparticulates, metals and synthetic ingredients in the atmosphere and food chain describe the components of semi-conductors, ‘soft machines’ and engineered lifeforms.

The field of Health Physics, created in 1947 www.polioforever.wordpress.com/health-physics/  determined a need for “large population surveys” to study radiological hazard effects.

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Low-Dose DANGER

In 1972, Canadian nuclear researcher Abram Petkau published the results of his work studying the effects of ‘low dose’ radiation. The ‘Petkau’ effect describes a non-linear relationship, what’s called a “paradoxical dose response”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petkau_effect Petkau observed that small doses over longer time, such as fallout, were much more damaging and that substances like fluoride (and other halogen compounds) have similar non-linear effects. [Dr. Albert Schatz on fluoride: http://www.fluoridation.com/schatz.htm] www.polioforever.wordpress.com/fluoride/

In 1979, Dr. John Gofman, former Manhattan Project scientist from Berkeley,CA and expert on the biological effects of radiation stated, “I feel that at least several hundred scientists trained in the biomedical aspect of atomic energy –myself included– are candidates for Nuremberg-type trials for crimes against humanity for our gross negligence and irresponsibility. Now that we know the hazard of low-dose radiation, the crime is not experimentation– it’s murder.” www.ratical.org

        Three Mile Island, 1979 “partial” meltdown; five days later, the worst known anthrax contamination in history occurred in Sverdlovsk, USSR as the fallout cloud reached the Soviets. The event is regarded as an intentional biowarfare release. Significantly the “last cases of wild polio in the United States” occured after TMI in a community of mid-west Amish. Scroll down for more reading to The Story of Three Mile Island. Significantly, the Soviet anthrax event was studied by Salk Institute personnel.

       Chernobyl, 1986

The April 1986 Chernobyl accident provided ‘cover’ for the US to secretly vent the radiation from the “Mighty Oak” underground test at NTS.

>>>Coincidence? In mid-April of 1986 the U.S. led an attack on Libya. Approximately 12 days later the reactor at Chernobyl exploded and news about Libya disappeared.  In March of 2011, the accident at Fukushima Daiichi was followed approx. 12 days later by a U.S. led attack on Libya, and the news about Fukushima disappeared.

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“Radiation definitely ages the population so that it dies off from all causes at earlier ages than it otherwise would…[p85]  …life-shortening now appears to be the major deleterious effect of fallout..” –Walter R. Guild [p91 Fallout, published 1960, editor J.M. Fowler]

Radiation Effects Literature

March, 1957 “The Nuclear Radiation Handbook”, report by Nuclear Development Corporation of America, White Plains, NY [military document in the National Security Archive]

1957 “The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and It’s Effects on Man”, 2 volumes, presented to Congress May/June

“Medical Consequences of Nuclear Warfare”, Part 1, Vol 2 in the Textbook of Military Medicine series http://www.afrri.usuhs.mil/outreach/pdf/tmm/chapter7/chapter7.pdf

Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues

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“Radiation linked to Oxidative Injury — Radiation can be divided into two primary categories: ionizing and non-ionizing. The latter includes microwaves, which are relatively low energy and evoke effects primarily through heating. Ionizing radiation, on the other hand, has sufficient energy to displace electrons from atoms or molecules, producing ions. Ultraviolet light, X-rays, and gamma rays, as were released from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster in Japan recently, are examples of ionizing radiation… Atoms or molecules with unpaired electrons are referred to as ‘radicals’, often termed ‘free radicals’. The unpaired electrons generally cause radicals to be highly chemically reactive. In biological systems, this means that ionizing radiation can directly damage all types of molecules (e.g., DNA, proteins, lipids) or the effect may be secondary to the generation of free radicals, which react with nearby molecules [bystander effect]… Ionizing radiation..involves the removal of an electron from water, producing the highly reactive hydroxyl radical. This can be followed, to a lesser extent, by further electron ejection to give H₂O₂… In concert with SOD [superoxide dismutase], catalase, and other enzymes, antioxidants react with ROS [reactive oxygen species] to take them out of play. One of the most important natural antioxidants is glutathione, a tripeptide composed of glycine, cysteine, and glutamine.

…The effects of ionizing radiation can be divided into direct and indirect. Each has distinct ramifications. Radiation can directly disrupt DNA, introducing isolated nucleotide damage, double-strand breaks, or clustered DNA damage… ROS, produced by ionizing radiation, also damage DNA… The most vulnerable site for oxidative damage on DNA is on guanosine and, specifically on carbon-8 (Figure 2). Note that this site is not normally involved in bonding between guanosine and cytosine. As a result, it can be attacked in both single- and double-stranded DNA. The abstraction of a proton from carbon 8 leads to the production of 8-OH-dG. Tautomerization with nitrogen-7 produces 8-oxo-2-deoxyguanosine (8-oxo-dG), in reference to the carbonyl group at C8; the term 8-oxo-dG is used interchangeably with 8-OH-dG.

…Like DNA, RNA can be damaged by reactive oxygen and reactive nitrogen species. A common product of RNA oxidative damage is 8-hydroxy guanosine (8-OH-Guo). Similarly, individual nucleotides can be oxidized: GTP can become 8-OH GTP.

…The direct effects of ionizing radiation on lipids are less significant, compared to those on DNA: a damaged lipid molecule is easily replaced, whereas damaged DNA must be repaired. The indirect damage of lipids by radiation-induced ROS, however, can be devastating. In membranes, nature has created the ideal setting for a remarkable chain reaction…”

http://www.caymanchem.com/app/template/Article.vm/article/2165

“8-Oxo-2′-deoxyguanosine (8-oxo-dG) is an oxidized derivative of deoxyguanosine . 8-oxo-dG is one of the major products of DNA oxidation.^[1] Concentrations of 8-oxo-dG within a cell are a measurement of oxidative stress.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-Oxo-2%27-deoxyguanosine

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“Linear energy transfer (LET) is a measure of the energy transferred to material as an ionizing particle travels through it. Typically, this measure is used to quantify the effects of ionizing radiation on biological specimens or electronic devices.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_energy_transfer

“The aim of this study was to investigate the role of the indirect effect of radiation for the repair fidelity of non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ), homologous recombination repair (HRR) and base excision repair (BER) when DNA damage of different complexity was induced by gamma radiation, alpha particles or from base damages (8-oxo-dG) induced by potassium bromate (KBrO₃)….results revealed that the indirect effect of low-LET radiation significantly reduced the repair fidelity of both NHEJ and HRR pathways…  The response to bromate observed for the two DSB repair deficient cell lines strongly support earlier studies that bromate induces complex DNA damages.” http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0027510711003228

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An example of bromine’s usefulness to the military complex is given in the 1947 book “Treason’s Peace” by Howard Ambruster:

“Bromine, together with chloral, is used in making nitric gases which are of such great importance in trench warfare. Without bromine these nitric gases are of slight effect; in connection with bromine, they are of terrible effect.”   http://www.archive.org/stream/treasonspeaceger00ambrrich/treasonspeaceger00ambrrich_djvu.txt

“Chemical mutagens –A byproduct of research on chemical warfare agents during WWII [is] the realization of the possibility of mutagenic activity of chemicals. The nitrogen and sulfur “mustards” (p-chloro-alkylamines and sulfides) have been studied especially extensively and found to be potent mutagens for all organisms studied. In general their effects are similar to those of X-rays and UV….There is a wealth of further literature on this subject and it is likely to remain an active field….substances as diverse as formaldehyde, acriflavine, urethane, caffeine, hydrogen peroxide, and manganous ion are credibly reported as active in one or another system….and in general, the results of ,i.e., X-ray treatment would not be readily distinguishable from that of formaldehyde.” http://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/mutation/

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>>ATTENTION readers, Feb. 18, 2010 –Fallout “cloud track” maps, (above and elsewhere on this site) are DISAPPEARING from the INTERNET! and may no longer be accessible by links with the ‘wayback machine’.  Scanned copies will eventually be entered here if maps disappear. [stand-by]

Maps, dose estimates, documents, websites and resources:

Depleted Uranium : http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_uranium04.htm

Radon gas: http://www.radonseal.com/radon-facts.htm

Rad Waste : see this must watch documentary ”Waste: The Nuclear Nightmare”  http://123nonstop.com/watch_online_movie_video/Waste:_The_Nuclear_Nightmare

Yucca Mountain Project http://www.yuccamountain.org/; nuclear waste is a complex subject involving the complete fuel cycle of power production from mining to end storage, radioactive products manufacture, fertilizer, medical waste, reclamation, and illegal dumping, recycling and neglect. The lawful disposal of rad waste can be reviewed here:http://www.radwaste.org/disposal.htm

WIPP, Waste Isolation Pilot Project, Carlsbad New Mexico (since 1999) http://www.wipp.energy.gov/

[March 2011] “Utah has long been the destination for all but a small percentage of the radioactive waste that’s disposed of in the nation’s three commercial landfills. But that could change soon..” http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/home/50983582-76/waste-texas-disposal-radioactive.html.csp

“The largest program at ORNL [Oak Ridge Nat’l Lab] focusing on partitioning and transmutation is investigating methods for accelerator transmutation of wastes (ATW). Conceived by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, ATW uses a linear accelerator system to produce neutrons for transmutation of excess weapons plutonium and other radioactive DOE wastes…” http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-2/text/radside1.html; this is a plan to restore and recycle waste into fuel and other materials.

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“Native communities, primarily in the western US, have been chronically exposed to low doses of radiation.. from the many nuclear activities on indigenous lands such as uranium mining and milling, uranium conversion and enrichment, and testing of nuclear weapons. More than one half of all US uranium deposits lie under reservation land. [The] long-term use of the Nevada Test Site (NTS), which is located on traditional Shoshone land, the Western Shoshone nation has become known as the most bombed nation on earth. The 928 American and 19 British nuclear explosions in Newe Sogobia have been classified by the Western Shoshone National Council (WSNC) as bombs rather than “tests.” …But no treaty, agreement, vote or sale exists that give the US permission to explode nuclear bombs on or under the Western Shoshone Nation.”  http://www.russellmeansfreedom.com/2010/native-americans-bear-the-nuclear-burden/

Human Experimentation:

RAD Journal http://www.radjournal.com/articles/History/April/April.htm

<<>>DoE ‘Openess’ Roadmap Project http://www.hhs.energy.gov/healthsafety/ohre/roadmap/achre/intro_3.htm, “We reveal the perhaps surprising finding that officials and experts in the highest reaches of the AEC and DoD discussed requirements for human experiments in the first years of the Cold War”.

Robley Evans, of CalTech and MIT, did Radium ingestion studies and extensive follow-up in the case of the Radium Dial Painters (late 1920s). During the Manhattan Project, Evans was in charge of radioactive material transport which included secret brown-box shipments to Dr. Stafford Warren at the Univ. of Rochester, NY, that were sprayed on the campus grounds at night by Drs. Warren and Harold Hodge (see Fluoride).

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/radiation/dir/mstreet/commeet/meet9/brief9/tab_i/br9i2.txt (from the National Security Archive)..”secret medical research reports;  (2) indicate that reports on human experiments, including the plutonium injections, were initially declassified but reclassified for fear of public and legal
consequences of disclosure;  (3) show that continued secrecy was a policy judgment by the highest AEC medical authorities (the Division
of Biology and Medicine and its Advisory Committee)”…

http://www.cjr.org/archives.asp?url=/94/2/radiation.asp

http://proliberty.com/observer/19990504.htm

National Security Archives (word search only) http://gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/. Documents can be searched for with phrases.

Maps : Northeast US from Pennsylvania to Maine http://twosixtypress.com/gallery-35.htm (sourced from the U.S. Atlas of Nuclear Fallout, below)

The Nevada Proving Grounds opened with the first detonations in January of 1951, Operation Ranger. On May 11, 1951   Science magazine published an article by W.W. Meinke on the radioactive snow observed in Ann Arbor, Michigan  —  http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/refs/113/2941/545?ck=nck

Maps 1951 Operation Buster–Jangle http://web.archive.org/web/20080620044321/http://www.aracnet.com/~pdxavets/bustdoc.htm; the Provo Utah vaccine trials with gamma globulin were run in concert with Buster-Jangle

Maps 1952 Operation Tumbler –Snapper http://web.archive.org/web/20071109092800/www.aracnet.com/~pdxavets/tumdoc.htm

Maps 1955 Operation Teapot http://web.archive.org/web/20071108081926/http://www.aracnet.com/~pdxavets/teadoc.htm

Map 1957 Operation Plumbob: composite for iodine 131 deposition http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Pbscd.gif; fallout cloud tracking maps http://www.aracnet.com/~histgaz/atomi/fallout.htm

http://www.downwinders.org/

http://www.ratical.org/ , statements, oral histories

Dr. Rosalie Bertell http://www.ccnr.org/bertell_book.html

Dr. John W. Gofman http://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/JWGcv.html

Ernest Sternglass “Secret Fallout” http://www.ratical.org/radiation/inetSeries/index.html#ES

US Radiation Sites http://www.prop1.org/prop1/radiated/states.htm

Nevada Test Site: http://www.philipfradkin.com/fallout__an_american_nuclear_tragedy_44506.htm

http://mason.gmu.edu/~kcherrix/repercussions2.html

researcher Richard L. Miller composed the 5-volume set http://web.archive.org/web/20051103165641/www.kued.org/avoidingarmageddon/miller-story.html

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The ACERER, Advisory Committee for Energy-Related Epidemiological Research, advises the US Dept of Health and Human Services on radiation research http://www.cdc.gov/NCEH/radiation/fallout/feasibilitystudy/Appendix_I-3_Workshop_Summary.pdf

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http://www.netti.fi/~makako/mind/radiatio.htm          ……….events leading to the 1994 disclosure of secret radiation experiments on US citizens……..

“The Clinton administration’s first halting step toward taking responsibility for past government misdeeds occurred on Pearl Harbor Day 1993, when DoE Secretary Hazel O’Leary confirmed that the AEC, her agency’s predecessor, had sponsored experiments in which hundreds of Americans were exposed to radioactive material, often without their consent. …………….Top DoE aide Dan Reicher pulled O’Leary out of a meeting last November just before the story broke to warn her that People were injected with plutonium back in the 1940s, and there’s a newspaper in New Mexico that’s about to lay out the whole thing.  O’Leary provided information about experiments at major universities, including MIT, the University of Chicago, California, and Vanderbilt. Experimenters exposed about 2,000 Americans to varying degrees of radiation. These numbers may grow as more information about experiments is released.

…”When O’Leary confirmed the human experiments, she also revealed two other important activities. First, she admitted her agency had secretly conducted 204 underground nuclear tests in Nevada from 1963-1990. These clandestine blasts were in addition to the 800-plus nuclear tests publicly announced during that period. DoE’s secrecy may have deceived only Congress and the U.S. public. In 1990, the Soviet Union’s minister for atomic energy produced an estimate of U.S. detonations that was very close to the actual number including the secret ones.”

“O’Leary’s other significant disclosure concerned DoE’s massive stock of weapons-grade plutonium: 33.5 metric tons of stockpiled plutonium and another 55.5 metric tons deployed in nuclear warheads and for similar uses. *6 This admission calls into question DoE’s past claims that national security required the continued operation of unsafe plutonium processing plants to produce unnecessary stockpiles of plutonium……..O’Leary’s disclosures about the human experiments have produced a torrent of publicity. Much less attention has been paid to her admissions about secret nuclear tests and plutonium stocks, which have much greater long-term implications for nuclear weapons policy.”

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE

“O’Leary’s promises of full disclosure by DoE aside,  one well-placed source within the agency suggested that the Pentagon, NASA and the CIA were just going through the motions.  For example, the CIA announced in January 1994 that after searching its files it could locate only one reference to human experimentation with radiation. Former CIA official Scott Breckenridge charged that in 1973, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the chemical division of the CIA’s Technical Services Division, may have destroyed many secret files, including those on human radiation experiments………The history of partial revelation and near complete inaction is long. In 1975, the Rockefeller Commission first revealed that the CIA may have conducted radiation experiments,  but the records if not destroyed have yet to be uncovered. William Colby, CIA director from 1973 to 1975, recently said, I recall the various drug tests, which were scandalous, but nothing about radiation.  So far, the institutional memories of the implicated agencies appear to be as conveniently spotty as Colby’s.”

SECRET EXPERIMENTS

“While officials have dallied, dedicated reporters, angry victims, and a handful of government whistleblowers have exposed a pattern of secrecy and deception. A brief sampling of some of the macabre, secret human experiments uncovered by Welsome and others is chilling”……..

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http://www.post-gazette.com/headlines/19991024pluton3.asp

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FALLOUT in Milk: milk was considered the best local/regional indicator of fallout levels as it was generally produced and consumed in the same region while plant foods (feed, grain, fruits & vegs) were widely shipped.

“Strontium 90 is considered to be the most hazardous of the bone-seeking fission products, because of its long half-life and because it resembles calcium so closely. When strontium 90 falls to earth, it becomes mixed with calcium and follows calcium through its ecological chain in nature. The strontium 90 that settles on vegetation may remain as a surface contaminant or may be absorbed through the leaves… [In soil it] can be taken up..through the root system and fed to all parts of the plant. From plants that form a part of the human diet we then obtain strontium 90 directly. This pathway also brings strontium 90 into the diet of grazing animals..[which] then becomes incorporated into the bone, meat and milk of these animals and thus into the human diet.

   Careful studies of the movements of strontium 90 in the calcium cycle of nature reveal that, at many points in this cycle, organisms are able to distinguish between strontium and calcium… In most cases, fortunately, the tendency is to concentrate the calcium and reject the strontium. This process of differential absorption has been termed “discrimination”…Then, as one follows calcium from soil to plant to farm animal and finally to man, the progressive decrease in the amount of strontium 90..in the human skeleton is perhaps tenfold lower than that in the plants and soil… More frequently..the ratio of strontium to calcium is much greater in the plant than in the soil in which it grew. Apparently..the plant may absorb fallout directly into its leaves… the leafy portions (which make up the major source of plant food for grazing farm animals) seem to have higher concentrations than the grain and fruit portions.

   …The major discrimination, or strontium ‘filtering’, comes in the animals that eat the plants. Their digestive and metabolic processes tend to select calcium and reject strontium, with the result that the original strontium-calcium ratio in their feed is reduced to about one fourth in their meat and eggs and to perhaps one tenth in their milk. This has important implications for the human diet. Milk, for instance, has a smaller concentration of strontium than vegetables do. Thus milk is our safest and best source of calcium… On the other hand, in parts of the world where milk is not readily available, most of the calcium in the diet comes from plant sources. In Japan, for example, where the major components of the diet are rice and fish, about 70 percent of the dietary calcium is furnished by plant foods. The result is a two-to-threefold increase in the amount of strontium 90 contamination…  After eating radioactively contaminated food, the human body itself tends to reject strontium through its own filtering system… In a child, who is rapidly laying down bone mineral, the amount of strontium 90 per gram of calcium in newly formed bone is about one half that in his food… In the adult..[one] filters out three fourths of the strontium..[and] this type of incorporation is a slow process… In a child the situation is quite different. He is rapidly building a skeleton… Current data show that the strontium 90 concentrations in the skeletons of small children are four to seven times greater than..in their parents. Once the child has become an adult, because of the slow rate of exchange at that stage, it will be extremely slow and difficult to remoce this radioactive material– even if a proceedure for doing this is discovered…  Other things being equal [such as air, water, and soil contamination], the higher the percentage of calcium contributed by plant sources, the higher the concentration of strontium 90 in the bones; the more calcium contributed by milk, the lower the strontium level thanks to the cow’s ‘filtration system’. ” [pp44-47, p57, Fallout, ed.John M. Fowler] ..”The strontium 90 level in milk..tends to follow the rising accumulation in the soil, not the rate of bomb testing [or atmospheric distribution].” [p66]

   ..”Let us now consider the second most important element in fallout —cesium 137. Like strontium 90, it is a fission product which tends to accumulate in the body and presents a long-range hazard… First, we must note some important differences. Cesium 137 does not concentrate in bone or any other single tissue but is distributed throughout the body… cesium fallout is less important than strontium as far as causing cancer is concerned… On the other hand, its general distribution through the body and its penetrating radiation (gamma rays are emitted in its decay series) make it dangerous to the genes. In other words, the hazard of cesium 137 is mainly to mankind’s heredity. Cesium resembles potassium chemically and travels with potassium in the body, just as strontium goes into the the body as a fellow-traveler with..calcium. In contrast to..strontium..however, the body seems to prefer cesium to potassium, and so the level of cesium in the body is roughly twice that in the diet… [T]he penetrating gamma radiation of cesium 137 passes through the tissues and can be detected outside the body… Moreover, cesium, like strontium, comes into our bodies mainly in milk: in the United States diet 60 percent of the cesium is contibuted by milk and 25 percent by meat…” [pp63-65]  …”laboratory evidence indicates that even a slight increase in radiation increases the amount of genetic damage.” [p66]

   ..”This brings us to carbon 14… We estimated that the bomb tests [up to 1958] have added 1,300 pounds of carbon 14 to the 1,900 pounds already in the atmosphere from cosmic-ray bombardment… over a period of thousands of years the genetic damage from even this small increase in radiation will take a large toll in the absolute number of persons harmed.” [p67]

*

Salk Institute research Fellow, Herman Moritz Kalckar, is credited with measuring fallout in children’s teeth:

…”In 1958 Kalckar accepted a professorship in the Department of Biology of Johns Hopkins University. This year also marked the publication of his highly original proposal that the contamination of foodstuffs from the fallout following atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons could be measured by the analysis of the content of strontium-90 in the milk-teeth of young children. As he pointed out, measurement of radiation from deciduous incisor teeth would reveal the levels of isotope ingested about seven years previous to shedding of the teeth, when the calcified structure of the teeth had been deposited. By this proposal Kalckar hoped to focus attention in a dramatic way on the pollution of the environment by tests of nuclear weapons. The idea attracted considerable attention, and extensive collections of milk-teeth were in fact made, particularly by a group of researchers at Washington University in St. Louis. It was learned that milk-teeth from children born in 1956 contained about ten times more strontium-90 than teeth from children born in 1950. Fortunately, after the ban on atmospheric testing the levels fell once again to lower levels [polioforever— but they did not stay low! The “ban” was initiated with a moratorium and resumed as underground testing, in every case, breaching to the atmosphere].” http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/biomems/hkalckar.html

Noted from this reference is Kalckar’s intimacy with atomic physics: younger brother Fritz Kalckar (died 1938) was a protege of Niels Bohr. Herman received his MD from the University of Copenhagen in 1933 and came to the U.S. as a Rockefeller grantee in 1939 to study biochemistry at Caltech. Kalckar took up permanent U.S. residency in 1952 was appointed to the Salk Institute in April of 1960.

*

http://www.ieer.org/op-eds/radio/2radmilk.html

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/29/5/845

Utah Division of Radiation Control http://www.radiationcontrol.utah.gov/fallout.htm

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The Story of Three Mile Island

It took over 15 years for the authorities and engineers to assess the damage to the TMI reactor (1979-1994), and there is where the story closes. Over 20 tons of molten material pooled at the bottom of the containment vessel, which was unknown until 1987. More than one year after the accident, in June of 1980, radioactive krypton gas had to be vented from the reactor building. The threat of explosion loomed over the clean-up project and it must be supposed that regular ventings occurred, although as this sanitized telling of ‘history’ indicates, most of the “vast amount of documentation of the accident, the crisis, and the clean-up” disappeared. ( http://americanhistory.si.edu/tmi/tmi08.htm ). General Public Utilities, the reactor’s operating company, went out of business. In 1994, revelations about secret weapons tests and human experimentation that broke in the newspapers trumped the TMI clean-up, a process that was really just beginning. The ‘accident’ timeline begins here http://americanhistory.si.edu/tmi/tmi03.htm .

                  

No account has been made of the ‘venting’ that began in the summer of 1980, or sooner. In 1982, when attempts were again made to enter the reactor building, the concern over a possible explosion is palpably described. An admission of venting by the TMI museum pertains to two events only  but the local people who experienced it and followed the news in their hometown papers had something to tell, and it’s a story cut short to fit the framework of time. In 1983, the avian influenza in Pennsylvania and beyond was reaching such a crisis that a series of Congressional hearings ensued, and for how long is not known:

1984/01/26
Daily Digest – Thursday, January 26, 1984; pages D12 – D16 (Bound vol.)Committee Meetings

AVIAN INFLUENZA

Committee on Appropriations: Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development,
and Related Agencies concluded oversight hearings to review the status of the
avian influenza problem that is impacting the poultry industry in several
Eastern states, after receiving testimony from Senators Heinz and Warner; C.
W. McMillan, Assistant Secretary for Marketing and Inspection, James H.
Johnson, Deputy Under Secretary for Small Community and Rural Development,
Charles W. Beard, Director, Southeastern Poultry Research Laboratory, and Bert
W. Hawkins, Administrator, John K. Atwell, Deputy Administrator for Veterinary
Services, E. C. Sharman, Assistant Deputy Administrator for Veterinary
Services, Animal Health Programs, and Sam Ladd, Director, Budget and
Accounting Division, all of the Animal Plant and Health Inspection Services,
all of the Department of Agriculture; Andrew Hansen and Donald Horn, both of
the Task Force on Avian Influenza, Penrose Hollawell, Pennsylvania Department
of Agriculture, and Jim Aurand, Pennsylvania Grange, all of Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania; Charles Warfel, Pennsylvania Farmers Association, Camp Hill; and
Albert E. Pope, United Egg Producers, Decatur, Georgia.

http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/congbibs/senate/098dgst2.html

By April 1984, five years after the accident,  a video topography model of the reactor was confirming damage to the upper 40% of the core. Nothing was yet known about the lower 60%. “It would require another three years for a fairly complete picture to emerge of the condition of the lower core… some twenty tons of molten material had spilled into the bottom of the reactor vessel.” Two years later in July of 1986, core-boring equipment began punching holes through the debris mass, and sometime in early1990 samples were finally extracted for analysis which took until 1994 to complete; fifteen years to determine the extent of the meltdown.

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Three Mile Island: The People’s Testament , Aileen M. Smith  March 27, 1989 http://www.tmia.com/node/118

“In the summer of 1979, three months after the Three Mile Island accident, a party of five concerned Japanese traveled to Central Pennsylvania to study the incident and its aftermath first hand. It was a personal trip for the two lawyers, a student, a radiation research scientist, and Mitsuru Katagiri, university professor and my husband-to-be. When Mitsuru returned home to Kyoto, he confessed that before he left Japan he thought he had basically understood the accident — a barely averted meltdown catastrophe that quite fortunately had probably released only an insignificant amount of radiation. But as they toured the area, he was surprised by the number of people who reported anomalous occurrences during and after the time of the accident; strange tastes and smells; burning, tingling or reddening of the skin; and changes in the local vegetation, animals and atmosphere. This prompted yet another trip that year.”….

Interviewees said on the day of the accident, and for the next couple of days, a powdery ash fell and collected on everything. From the first day, Wednesday March 28, a strong and nauseating metallic taste began affecting them. People and animals stumbled and fell. They felt numbness in their legs and tingling or burning, sometimes a peppery rash. Veterinarian Robert Weber reported in his recollection made in 1982, “Immediately after the accident at TMI, we had many sheep and goats that couldn’t get up. Also, we had troubles with sheep just being found dead. Goats just being found dead…through that summer of 1979.” Weber said there were high numbers of stillbirths and an inability of the pregnant animals to deliver. Local farmers often went through him and filed reports with the Agriculture bureau, only to learn later from officials that no such reports existed. By 1982, he said “Cancer is our big deal now…We are finding the cancers in the uterus, the mammary systems, the lymphatics…I see this curve”.

Betty Fawber said of her animals, “After the accident happened…we’d go up and there’d be chickens that were dead. Just one at a time. Unexplained. We had maybe about six like that…The chickens started dying like that, I’d say, maybe 6 months after the accident…I had two rabbits and one had a litter of 7 bunnies, but they were all born dead. They looked perfect but they were dead.” Betty was sensitive to the ‘venting’, as were others, developing a burning rash on her skin and in her throat and sinuses. She said,” The first year..there were about 47 times when this burning happened….45 times..we accounted [in the newspaper] that they did vent….Last year [1982] sometime..we saw or heard that they were deliberately venting each day”…

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The Battle of Chernobyl

http://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/the-battle-of-chernobyl

The US DoE used the ‘cover’ of the Chernobyl accident fallout to vent underground contamination at the NTS ‘Mighty Oak’ blast http://idealist.ws/mightyoak.php

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SOURCES of Fallout

Forest and Brush fires are a major source of  “re-pollution” fallout, noted by the EPA accounting for only two such incidents: http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/rert/radiationincidents.html, and this ‘leak’ at Brookhaven :

Tritium Leak at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York –tritium is an isotope of hydrogen and a neutron emitter which can cause the elements it comes in contact with to absorb neutrons and become radioactive.

“In 1997, a major, ongoing tritium leak was discovered at Brookhaven National Laboratory, a Department of Energy 2,265-acre scientific research center located in Suffolk County, NY. The leak probably originated from the 68,000-gallon spent fuel pool within a reactor building. It had been leaking for an estimated 10–12 years. Following the initial discovery of the tritium contamination, other plumes including a cobalt-60 plume and an additional tritium plume were located.

Beginning in January, 1997, staff from EPA’s Region 2 office worked with the Department of Energy. In February, DOE committed to conduct a major cleanup effort and to meet the environmental and health standards of EPA’s Safe Drinking Water Act”

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Fallout from Weapons

*

Excerpts from the book Fallout, published in 1960:

…”The complications of the fusion [hydrogen] bomb arise from the fact that it takes a vast amount of energy to start the fusion reaction. To make deuterium nuclei fuse..they must be heated to about 100 million degrees Fahrenheit. Such energy can be provided by the explosion of a fission bomb, which can therefore serve as a trigger for a fusion bomb. But then comes the problem of how to pack enough hydrogen fuel into the bomb and how to hold it together long enough to allow it to fuse.

   “In the first attempt..the hydrogen was condensed to its liquid form. This meant that it had to be reduced to a very low-temperature –not far from absolute zero– and so our first hydrogen ‘bomb’ was a gigantic refrigerator, weighing some 65 tons. Its fuel was tritium (the hydrogen isotope with one proton and two neutrons), which fuses more readily than deuterium. This was the device detonated on the island of Elugelab in the Marshalls on November 1, 1952. It yielded the equivalent of about three million tons of TNT –150 times the Hiroshima bomb– and obliterated the little island…  Having proved that a fission-fusion device would work, the AEC scientists attacked the problem of reducing it to something portable enough to be used as a bomb. Several scientists..suggested that the need for liquefying the hydrogen might be avoided by combining it with the light metal litium in solid form; e.g. in the compound lithium deuteride, composed of one atom of lithium and one of deuterium… The way in which the neutrons were put to use to make the superbomb came to light as part of the tragic story of the Lucky Dragon. The unfortunate fisherman on the Japanese fishing vessel were showered with debris from our first superbomb, exploded at Bikini on the morning of March 1, 1954…  A fusion bomb should be comparatively ‘clean’ –that is, relatively low in fission products– yet the fallout from this bomb proved to be exceptionally ‘dirty’! …What had made the bomb so dirty?

  “The answer was discovered by K. Kimura, one of the Japanese scientists who analyzed the fallout on the Lucky Dragon’s deck. In this debris from the bomb he found a substantial amount of a rare isotope of uranium –uranium 237. It happened that Dr. Kimura himself was the original discoverer of this isotope; he had created it in the laboratory 14 years before [c.1940] and knew exactly how it was produced. It is a product of the bombardment of the common uranium isotope 238 by neutrons. When uranium 238 captures a neutron of considerable energy, it becomes unstable, emits two neutrons and thus decays into uranium 237. But there is also another possibility: capture of a very high-energy neutron..can cause the U-238 nucleus to fission like U-235. So the finding of uranium 237 in the debris from the Bikini bomb solved the mystery of its dirty fallout and gave an unmistakable clue to its construction. The bomb must have had a thick blanket of uranium 238 surrounding its fission-fusion core; fast neutrons from the fusion reactions fissioned the U-238 blanket and thus multiplied the force of the bomb –and also the output of fission products. In short the weapon builders had found a way to use the neutrons that would otherwise have gone to waste: they had made a fission-fusion-fission bomb in which common uranium 238 was added to the fuel. The March 1, 1954 bomb probably consisted of a 220-pound core of uranium 235, about the same weight of lithium deuteride and several thousand pounds of uranium 238. The total energy of the bomb was equivalent to 15 to 20 million tons (megatons) of TNT; of this about two megatons came from fusion, the rest from fission. One can immediately see a great gain in economy over the ‘primitive’ Hiroshima bomb. To produce a 20 megaton explosion with only the original fuel, uranium 235, would require 11,000 pounds..of this rare isotope, separated so laboriously from U-238, and cost about a hundred million dollars. Using U-238 as fuel, however, we can get our 20 megatons at the bargain-basement price of a quarter of a million dollars. (The same size of explosion with TNT would cost ten billion dollars!) Thus the attractiveness of the fission-fusion-fission bomb to military leaders is obvious, especially if we add to the economic advantage the further advantage that construction and delivery of the bomb are simplified because one can pack in any anount of U-238 without worrying about critical mass.” [or the need to keep subcritical assemblies of fuel separated inside the bomb until the time of detonation]  [pp15-18]

*

“But our main concern here is the radioactivity. As we have seen, this lies pricipally in the fission products from the splitting of uranium or plutonium. The millions upon millions of nuclei fissioned give birth to a multitude of particles of many varieties of radioactivity; in all, some 200 different radioactive isotopes emerge from a fission explosion. Some are intensely active but short-lived; some will go on spewing radiation for hundreds or thousands of years.

   “We must briefly examine the nature of these radiations. First, there are high-speed beta particles, or electrons, which are emitted by most fission products. These particles cannot penetrate far into matter and therefore produce little [comparative] damage..when they attack the body from outside. But if a beta-emitter gets inside the body, it can cause serious injury to the sensitive tissues there. Strontium 90, the most feared of the fission products, is a beta-emitter and enters the body via milk and other foods. Secondly, there are the alpha particles, another product of the decay of radioactive isotopes, including radium. Carrying twice the charge of electrons and 4,000 times more massive, they are stopped by matter even more quickly, but like the beta particles they become a serious menace inside the body. Thirdly, and nuclear explosion and its debris release gamma rays. This radiation is similar to X-rays but is more energetic. Its high penetrating power makes it dangerous from outside the body as well as within. Among the fallout products are many gamma-emitters, and of these cesium 137 is particularly feared as a long-term hazard.

   “The intensity of radiation from a nuclear explosion is so vast as to numb the mind. From a one megaton bomb, the gamma radiation an hour after the explosion is equivalent to the radioactivity of 300,000 tons of radium! …The radioactive debris from a bomb burst is swept skyward and sets forth on various journeys which will depend on the size of the particles, the vagaries of the weather, and so on. Some of the deadly dust will fall to the ground in the vicinity of the explosion within ten hours. Some will ride the winds for several weeks. And some will rise to the stratosphere and fall out months or years later on the other side of the world.” [pp20-21]

   “We also have some information on what happens when nuclear bombs are detonated in outer space above the earth’s atmosphere, thanks to the famous high-altitude ‘Argus’ tests of 1958. In such an explosion we must expect about half of the high-speed fission particles to be propelled away from the earth and the other half toward the earth, so that the latter will eventually fall to the ground. The most interesting fact discovered in the Argus project was that the beta particles from the fission products are trapped in the earth’s magnetic field and form a band of electrons 300 or 400 miles above the earth’s surface.” [p22]

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