We're Becoming Little Glow Wormz

Here are two disturbing articles about the dangers of nuclear power. As I've stated in this space before, I am categorically opposed to nuclear power. It creates byproducts that are extremely lethal and NO ONE has yet to figure out how to store said byproducts safely. The continued use of all things nuclear poses one of the greatest dangers to life on planet earth.

Uranium bombing in Iraq contaminates Europe
San Francisco Bay View
by Bob Nichols

Nine days after the start of the American president's 2003 "shock and awe" uranium bombing campaign in Baghdad, an invisible radioactive uranium oxide gas cloud swept through Britain's towns and countryside and throughout Europe.

Respected scientists reported on the unrevealed gas cloud after conducting research on specialized high volume air filters in England. Dr. Chris Busby and Saoirse Morgan stunned Europe in a Sunday Times of London article on Feb. 19, 2006. Their scientific paper, released March 1st, 2006, proved the event. With all the vigor of delusional drunkards, British nuclear and military spokesmen predictably denied the reality of an invisible radioactive cloud.

The military claimed that a Chernobyl-like event in the area was probably responsible, but no explosive meltdowns of operating reactor cores have been reported or observed in 2006 anywhere in the world. Evidence of the truth of the gas cloud panicked the military into frantic, irrational, ludicrous denials. The military spin was later refined and the new Chernobyl claim quietly dropped...read the rest of the article.

Radiation Found To Be Harmful in Any Amount
United for Peace of Pierce County
By John LaForge

More news arrives daily of the ever-deadlier damage to the body by exposure to allowable “low doses” of radiation from nuclear reactors and radioactive waste. The findings -- if widely recognized -- could provoke a rewrite of guidelines for “allowable” exposures and bring an end to reactor operations in the U.S: Operating them so their emissions didn’t kill anyone would be too expensive. This is why critical scientists are pushed out of academia and industry and their studies ignored or suppressed.

In 2003, a dissenting group of British scientific experts found that internal exposure to plutonium is 100 to 1,000 times more dangerous than officially estimated (See p. 5). Their finding was cut from the official record and had to be published independently.

The National Research Council reaffirmed last summer their position that all radiation exposure carries the risk of cancer. The Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation VII (BEIR VII) report explicitly refuted the “hormesis” theory -- propounded by professors Todd Allen and Paul Wilson of the Department of Engineering Physics at the University of Wisconsin -- that a little radiation is good for you. “The scientific research base shows that there is no threshold of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficial,” said BEIR committee chair Richard Monson of Harvard.

This November, a study published in Radiation Research by U.S. and Russian scientists blamed excess cancers in the Ural Mountains in central Russia on chronic exposures to low doses of radioactivity leaked from a weapons factory 50 years ago. Science magazine calls the new report -- along with a large scale study revealing an elevated cancer risk in nuclear industry workers around the world -- “the strongest direct evidence yet of chronic, low-dose health effects.”

In 2002, British researchers also published in Science their finding that low level radiation from Soviet bomb test fallout caused genetic mutations in families living nearby, mutations that can be passed to future generations. The rate of mutation was found to be 80 percent higher than in the corresponding generation in the control group.

In 2001 the National Cancer Institute was forced to reveal its finding that atomic bomb testing in Nevada, which spread radioactive fallout across every state in the union, has caused at least 15,000 cancer deaths and up to 212,000 nonfatal thyroidcancers. The 67 bomb tests blown off between 1946 and 1958 were said at the time to be safe.

A two-year government study in 1990 found a marked increase in leukemia deaths among people living near the Prairie Island nuclear power reactor in SE Minnesota. The “significantly high” risk of leukemia death appeared among residents between the ages of 40 and 59, the National Cancer Institute said. Northern States Power, now Excel Energy, which runs the reactors, said, “Power plants have releases that are so low that one would not expect to see any health effects at all.” That was then.

The journal Environmental Epidemiology and Toxicology reported in 2000 that infant mortality rates around five U.S. nuclear reactors dropped almost immediately after the reactors closed. In areas surrounding five reactors shut down between 1987 and 1995 (Genoa, in Wisconsin; Rancho Seco in California; Ft. St. Vrain in Colorado; Trojan in Oregon; and Millstone in Connecticut), infant death rates dropped an average of 18 percent in the first two years. The average drop elsewhere in the U.S. was 6.4 percent...read the rest of the article.

[Note: Article originally published by NukeWatch. You can download of a pdf of the article here.]

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Addendum: Just after finishing this post, I received the following article from TruthOut. Talk about serendipity!

The Bush administration on Wednesday unveiled a blueprint for rebuilding the United States' decrepit nuclear weapons complex, including restoration of a large-scale bomb manufacturing capacity.

The plan calls for the most sweeping realignment and modernization of the nation's massive system of laboratories and factories for nuclear bombs since the end of the Cold War.

Until now, the nation has depended on carefully maintaining aging bombs produced during the Cold War arms race, some several decades old. The administration, however, wants the capability to turn out 125 new nuclear bombs per year by 2022, as the Pentagon retires older bombs that it claims will no longer be reliable or safe.

Under the plan, all of the nation's plutonium would be consolidated into a single facility that could be more effectively and cheaply defended against possible terrorist attacks. The plan would remove the plutonium now kept at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory by 2014, though transfers of the material could start sooner. In recent years, concern has sharply grown that Livermore, surrounded by residential neighborhoods, could not repel a terrorist attack.

But the administration blueprint is facing sharp criticism, both from those who say it does not move fast enough to consolidate plutonium stores and from those who say restarting bomb production will encourage aspiring nuclear powers across the globe to develop weapons...read the rest of the article.