Chelyabinsk Meteor Shines Light on What May Be the Most Contaminated Place on Earth
Fukushima and Chernobyl are up there, but back in the day, Chelyabinsk was home to a disaster that was kept secret for decades...
The Most Contaminated Place on Earth: Chelyabinsk-40
Sometimes-Interesting.com
July 15, 2011
We’re quite familiar with the lore of various secret United States nuclear facilities; their storied history and operations being shrouded in secrecy has fascinated us for decades. What we seldom hear about are the secret nuclear laboratories and test facilities of our greatest Cold War opponent – the former U.S.S.R. One particular installation – Chelyabinsk-40 – was the first Soviet plutonium production complex and the site of three separate massive nuclear incidents. Until recently this area was not on maps and the Russian government denied its existence. No visitors were allowed under any circumstances, and all residents worked in the facility (later referred to as Chelyabinsk-65). With the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 90?s, Chelyabinsk-40 was finally publicly acknowledged by the Russian government and granted town status. In 1994, Chelyabinsk-65 was finally given a name: Ozyorsk.
70,000 prisoners from 12 labor camps began construction of the underground city in 1945. The first nuclear reactor, named “Anotchka,” was constructed in 18 months. Additional nearby facilities would be constructed around the area later known as Ozyorsk (or Ozersk), which would house nearly 100,000 people and encompass some 90 square kilometers. This region chosen by the Soviet government was called “the Mayak complex” and was to serve as secret headquarters for nuclear research and development.
Aside from the nuclear scientists, most of the workers in the underground nuclear facility were prisoners who agreed to work and process plutonium in exchange for a lesser sentence. Russian convicts were given the option to work 25 years hard labor in Siberia or 5 years underground in Chelyabinsk-40. It really was a death sentence, however; no workers would live beyond five years with that level of radioactive exposure. Of course at the time, the convicts did not know what they’d be doing at this facility nor were they aware of the ramifications of increased exposure to radioactive material. Ultimately, the entire Mayak complex would be closed to all non-residents for nearly 45 years.
Disasters
During the first six years of operation, the entire Mayak complex dumped all radioactive waste into the Techa River, which happened to be the only source of water for the 24 villages along its banks. By 1951, it became obvious the nuclear run-off was damaging the river and surrounding population, and nuclear waste from Chelyabinsk-40 was found in the Artic Ocean. This prompted a decision to start dumping radioactive waste elsewhere. Lake Karachay (more of a bog than a lake) was chosen, in part because the lake had no outlet. To limit future issues with residents and the radioactivity of the Techa River, authorities strung barbed-wire fences up and down the river banks restricting any human habitation – but they did not disclose the reasons why to the local population.
In 1957 a radioactive waste containment sector failed and exploded. Radiation was immediately spread throughout the region, affecting over 250,000 people. This was long before the Chernobyl incident and it occurred in a secret underground facility; less than half of one percent of the population was evacuated, and public awareness of the incident – or even consequences of nuclear exposure at all – was virtually nil. Experts have said the explosion itself was a force of 70-100 tons of TNT, although the radioactivity released into the atmosphere was “only” one-fourth that of the later Chernobyl disaster.
CONTINUED...
http://sometimes-interesting.com/2011/07/15/the-most-contaminated-place-on-earth-chelyabinsk-40/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Not just the Mutually Assured Destruction kind, but just plain don't take off your mask nuts.
I love cowboy movies. And Tartars.
Soviet weapons plant pollution
published by WISE News Communique on November 2, 1990
US experts who visited parts of the Soviet nuclear weapons complex last year and looked over formerly secret Soviet publications have issued a report describing "astronomically" high radioactive pollution of towns, farm land, rivers, and lakes from the early years of Soviet nuclear weapons production. The report says the findings were backed up by Soviet scientists.
(341.3409) WISE Amsterdam / WISE Stockholm - The report, "Soviet Nuclear Warhead Production" (NWD 90-3), was published in Washington D.C. in August by the Natural Resources Defense Council and was written by NRDC's senior staff scientist Thomas Cochran, who has also written on the US nuclear weapons production system. According to Cochran and his co-author, Robert Norris, as hazardous as some of the US defense production sites are, none are known to have approached the levels of contamination from Soviet bomb production.
One site the NRDC report looked at was the nuclear weapons complex in Chelyabinsk, a plutonium and tritium product ion complex situated about 900 miles east of Moscow. According to their report, so much radioactive waste from the complex was dumped into the nearby Techa River between 1949 and 1956 (96 million cubic meters of radioactive liquid) that traces of it finally showed up in the Arctic Ocean, 1,000 miles to the north. The area was also in the path of fallout from the recent Kyshtym nuclear waste tank explosion (see WISE News Communique 339.3389). Access to the river has been blocked off by wire fencing. The taking of fish, mushrooms, berries, or hay from the riverside is forbidden.
Chelyabinsk wastes were pumped into Lake Karachay, also near the complex, after the Techa dumping stopped in 1951, until its 100 acre area contained 120 million curies, or 2.5 times the total releases in the 1986 Chernobyl reactor accident. The deposits included the long-lived radionuclides cesium-137 and strontium-90, which entered the groundwater. Wind-whipped dispersion of the lake water spread high levels of contamination on nearby land.
In February, the Soviet publication Priroda ("Nature"
also began carrying information about the extreme radioactive contamination at Lake Karachay. Now being called "the most polluted spot on the planet", the shoreline of the lake delivers a deadly 600 roentgen/hour dose -a dose according to the NRDC "sufficient to kill a person in an hour". (And according to an article in Nucleonics Week, US officials taken to Karachay this summer were not allowed off their bus and were told readings at the lake surface exceeded 700 B/h.) Remote controlled lead-shielded bulldozers similar to those used at Chernobyl are at work on the site.
The NRDC also found in Soviet documents descriptions of a "sanitary alienation zone" in the heavily contaminated area, in which people are forbidden to live or travel. According to one source, this exclusion zone also encompasses the security zone around the military production complex.
A separate report by Alexander Shlyakter, formerly a scientist at the Leningrad Nuclear Physics Institute and now a researcher at Harvard University in the US, has disclosed high plant worker exposure at Chelyabinsk. The Shlyakter study of radiation exposure among Chelyabinsk workers in the 1940s and 1950s, as reported by the New York Times, described doses to large numbers of workers of more than 100 rem. The cancer mortality rate among the 100 rem-plus group was 8.1%, compared to 4.3% for those exposed to fewer than 100 rem.
Sources:
Nucleonics Week (us), 23 Aug. 1990, p.14
Radwaste Report (US), Sept. 1990, p.1
The European, 28-30 Sept. 1990.
Contact: The NRDC report is available from the Natural Resources Defense Council, 1350 New York Avenue NW, Suite 300, Washington DC 20005. USA.
SOURCE: http://www10.antenna.nl/wise/index.html?http://www10.antenna.nl/wise/341/3409.html
PS: Sorry to add to the reading, but the nuke stuff helps explain a lot of how the national security state got to be so. Thank you, DisgustipatedinCA, for caring about the history.
No bigger gun to protect that gold than nuclear weapons.
Which may explain why working with and worrying about The Bomb
must make liberals into fascists faster than Dan Quayle (left) can say "nuclear fission."
Know your BFEE: American Children Used in Radiation Experiments
And the thing has its roots in the antebellum New World...or parts thereof.
Know your BFEE: Eugenics and the NAZIs - The California Connection
Gee. And to think some people who hate Americans ask: 'Why do you hate America?' when others notice that.
Thanks for all your info and the time you take to bring these background nuggets to our attention.
To many, war is progress.
A reply to a post kicks the thread to the top of the forum.
And you can recommend a thread with the "DU Rec" button in the lower left corner of every OP (original post).
Yet, we devote trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars to nuclear stuff.
If this were a true democracy*, that would be crazy.
As it is, there's a reason for it: National Security
(and the more private property you got, the more security you get).
US nuclear tab at $5.8 trillion
South News July 1
Washington: In an enormous drain on resources the United States has spent $5.8 trillion on nuclear weapons according to a new study
A four-year study of newly declassified Pentagon documents, released yesterday by the Brookings Institute, looked at the expenditures of producing and deploying nuclear explosives over the past 5 1/2 decades with current spending on the arsenal at about $35 billion annually, or roughly 15 percent of the total defense budget.
Since the birth of the atomic weapons program in 1940, a total of $5.5 trillion was spent through 1996, the Washington think tank reports. That is 29 percent of all U.S. military spending and almost 11 percent of all government spending through the 52 years.
In the first comprehensive audit of the US nuclear arsenal,it calculated costs for research, development, deployment, command and control, defenses and dismantlement. The U.S. government has never attempted to track these costs, and whether the weapons helped to bring down the Soviet Union, against whom most of the arms were aimed after World War II, remains an open question, Stephen I. Schwartz, chairman of the four-year study, said in the report.
"Given the significant sums expended on nuclear weapons and their central role in the cold war, it is striking that so few have expressed an interest in either the cumulative or the annual costs,'' Schwartz wrote.
SNIP...
Highlights of the report:
• The United States produced 70,000 nuclear warheads between 1945 and 1990, with an arsenal that peaked in the 1960s at 32,000 warheads
• Making the warheads was relatively inexpensive. Firing, storing and handling them was extremely costly. The 70,000 warheads cost $409.4 billion, only about 7 percent of the total. But thousands of aircraft, submarines, ships, missiles, and a large network of factories, bases and personnel cost $3.241 trillion.
• In 1996 dollars, the World War II Manhattan Project cost more than $26 billion.
• The United States has produced 65 warhead types for 116 different weapons systems.
• Thirteen major U.S. facilities - including Washington state's Bangor submarine base - handle and maintain nuclear weapons, and cover an area larger than Delaware, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia combined.
• Some 6,135 strategic ballistic missiles were purchased at a cost of $266 billion, as well as 4,680 strategic bombers since World War II at a cost of $227 billion.
• The 2,975 submarine-launched ballistic missiles alone cost $97 billion, said the report. Since their inception, the United States has designed and deployed 14 kinds of strategic bombers. Some 210 nuclear-powered military vessels have been built or are being built.
• The figures include the estimated $7 billion costs of attempting to develop a nuclear-powered airplane, which never got off the ground.
• At the moment, the U.S. nuclear arsenal - long-range strategic and short-range tactical - is estimated at 10,635 warheads.
• The current stockpile has the equivalent explosive force of about 120,000 Hiroshima bombs.
• The United States is spending an estimated $35 billion a year on nuclear weapons and related programs, the Brookings Institution says in a massive study.
CONTINUED...
http://southmovement.alphalink.com.au/southnews/980701-USnukes.htm
These numbers, IMO, are low. Of course, if we had the free press the Constitution mentions, let alone Congress and Executive, we would know the answer.
Something else that bears repeating: Nuclear power and weapons are most un-democratic. Apart from The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, there's almost no one talking about it in the media.
*And not some managed, national security state in service of the plutocrats and their toadies.
stupid human beings are and how the most immoral and unethical of the species seem to constantly take control of various societies.
I wonder if we will survive since we do not seem to learn! 
As you, I always think we should -- as most human beings are good people. As one profound child put it 70 years ago:
“It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” ― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
Now, the governments are another thing. My 2-cents from last summer which may bear repeating:
Fukushima, Plutonium, CIA, and the BFEE: Deep Doo-Doo Four Ways to Doomsday
The story connects a few dots from the present day back to World War II.
War crime, Yakuza, Secret Government. Why not?
Japan’s Nuclear Industry: The CIA Link.
By Eleanor Warnock
June 1, 2012, 10:18 AM JST.
Wall Street Journal Blog
Tetsuo Arima, a researcher at Waseda University in Tokyo, told JRT he discovered in the U.S. National Archives a trove of declassified CIA files that showed how one man, Matsutaro Shoriki, was instrumental in jumpstarting Japan’s nascent nuclear industry.
Mr. Shoriki was many things: a Class A war criminal, the head of the Yomiuri Shimbun (Japan’s biggest-selling and most influential newspaper) and the founder of both the country’s first commercial broadcaster and the Tokyo Giants baseball team. Less well known, according to Mr. Arima, was that the media mogul worked with the CIA to promote nuclear power.
SNIP...
Mr. Shoriki, backed by the CIA, used his influence to publish articles in the Yomiuri that extolled the virtues of nuclear power, according to the documents found by Mr. Arima. Keen on remilitarizing Japan, Mr. Shoriki endorsed nuclear power in hopes its development would one day arm the country with the ability to make its own nuclear weapons, according to Mr. Arima. Mr. Shoriki’s behind-the-scenes push created a chain reaction in other media that eventually changed public opinion.
SNIP…
Mr. Shoriki, backed by the CIA, used his influence to publish articles in the Yomiuri that extolled the virtues of nuclear power, according to the documents found by Mr. Arima. Keen on remilitarizing Japan, Mr. Shoriki endorsed nuclear power in hopes its development would one day arm the country with the ability to make its own nuclear weapons, according to Mr. Arima. Mr. Shoriki’s behind-the-scenes push created a chain reaction in other media that eventually changed public opinion.
CONTINUED...
http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2012/06/01/japans-nuclear-industry-the-cia-link/
After President Carter was out of office, it was pretty much full-steam ahead for the Japanese bomb during the Pruneface Ronnie-Poppy Bush years. Hence, Fukushima Daiichi Number 3 and other select Japanese reactors were set up to process plutonium uranium fuels.
United States Circumvented Laws To Help Japan Accumulate Tons of Plutonium
By Joseph Trento
on April 9th, 2012
National Security News Service
The United States deliberately allowed Japan access to the United States’ most secret nuclear weapons facilities while it transferred tens of billions of dollars worth of American tax paid research that has allowed Japan to amass 70 tons of weapons grade plutonium since the 1980s, a National Security News Service investigation reveals. These activities repeatedly violated U.S. laws regarding controls of sensitive nuclear materials that could be diverted to weapons programs in Japan. The NSNS investigation found that the United States has known about a secret nuclear weapons program in Japan since the 1960s, according to CIA reports.
The diversion of U.S. classified technology began during the Reagan administration after it allowed a $10 billion reactor sale to China. Japan protested that sensitive technology was being sold to a potential nuclear adversary. The Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations permitted sensitive technology and nuclear materials to be transferred to Japan despite laws and treaties preventing such transfers. Highly sensitive technology on plutonium separation from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site and Hanford nuclear weapons complex, as well as tens of billions of dollars worth of breeder reactor research was turned over to Japan with almost no safeguards against proliferation. Japanese scientist and technicians were given access to both Hanford and Savannah River as part of the transfer process.
SNIP...
A year ago a natural disaster combined with a man-made tragedy decimated Northern Japan and came close to making Tokyo, a city of 30 million people, uninhabitable. Nuclear tragedies plague Japan’s modern history. It is the only nation in the world attacked with nuclear weapons. In March 2011, after a tsunami swept on shore, hydrogen explosions and the subsequent meltdowns of three reactors at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant spewed radiation across the region. Like the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan will face the aftermath for generations. A twelve-mile area around the site is considered uninhabitable. It is a national sacrifice zone.
How Japan ended up in this nuclear nightmare is a subject the National Security News Service has been investigating since 1991. We learned that Japan had a dual use nuclear program. The public program was to develop and provide unlimited energy for the country. But there was also a secret component, an undeclared nuclear weapons program that would allow Japan to amass enough nuclear material and technology to become a major nuclear power on short notice.
CONTINUED...
http://www.dcbureau.org/201204097128/national-security-news-service/united-states-circumvented-laws-to-help-japan-accumulate-tons-of-plutonium.html
Those of who have seen The World at War series on the tee vee are familiar with the black and white footage and great narrative chronicling the main events and figures of World War II. One of those episodes was entitled "The Bomb" and featured an interview with John J. McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War to President Roosevelt and President Truman.
Here's part of what Mr. McCloy said about the Atomic Bomb – the use of which he counseled only as a last resort, after warning Japan to surrender (around 7:30 mark of Part 2):
“Besides that, we’ve got a new force, a new type of energy that will revolutionize warfare, destructive beyond any contemplation. I’d said, I’d mention the bomb. Mentioning the bomb, even at that late date, in that select group, was like, it was like they were all shocked. Because it was such a closely guarded secret. It was comparable to mentioning Skull and Bones at Yale – which you’re not supposed to do.”
After the war, McCloy was the United States High Commissioner to Germany, administering the U.S. zone of occupation, making him one of the front-line leaders of the Cold War. In that capacity, one of the questionable things he did was to forgive several NAZI industrialists and war criminals.
The great cartoonist Herb Block, HERBLOCK, depicted McCloy holding open a prison door for a NAZI, while in the background Stalin took a photo (if anyone has a copy or link to the cartoon, I’d be much obliged). About 15 years later, Mr. McCloy served the nation as a member of the Warren Commission.
While he wasn’t a member of Skull and Bones, McCloy certainly worked closely with a bunch of them, including Averell Harriman and Prescott Bush. As a Wall Street and Washington insider, "Mr. Establishment" he was called, Mr. McCloy used the offices of government to centralize power and wealth. That is most un-democratic.
Mother Jones goes into detail:
The Nuclear Weapons Industry's Money Bombs
How millions in campaign cash and revolving-door lobbying have kept America's atomic arsenal off the chopping block.
— By R. Jeffrey Smith, Center for Public Integrity
Mother Jones
Wed Jun. 6, 2012 3:00 AM PDT
Employees of private companies that produce the main pieces of the US nuclear arsenal have invested more than $18 million in the election campaigns of lawmakers that oversee related federal spending, and the companies also employ more than 95 former members of Congress or Capitol Hill staff to lobby for government funding, according to a new report.
The Center for International Policy, a nonprofit group that supports the "demilitarization" of US foreign policy, released the report on Wednesday to highlight what it described as the heavy influence of campaign donations and pork-barrel politics on a part of the defense budget not usually associated with large profits or contractor power: nuclear arms.
As Congress deliberated this spring on nuclear weapons-related projects, including funding for the development of more modern submarines and bombers, the top 14 contractors gave nearly $3 million to the 2012 reelection campaigns of lawmakers whose support they needed for these and other projects, the report disclosed.
Half of that sum went to members of the four key committees or subcommittees that must approve all spending for nuclear arms—the House and Senate Armed Services Committees and the Energy and Water or Defense appropriations subcommittees, according to data the Center compiled from the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics. The rest went to lawmakers who are active on nuclear weapons issues because they have related factories or laboratories in their states or districts.
Members of the House Armed Services Committee this year have sought to erect legislative roadblocks to further reductions in nuclear arms, and also demanded more spending for related facilities than the Obama administration sought, including $100 million in unrequested funds for a new plant that will make plutonium cores for nuclear warheads, and $374 million for a new ballistic missile-firing submarine. The House has approved those requests, but the Senate has not held a similar vote on the 2013 defense bill.
CONTINUED...
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/06/nuclear-bombs-congress-elections-campaign-donations
It isn't ironic or coincidental. It is the Establishment, the in-group, the Elite, the One-Percent that’s pretty much gotten the lion’s share of the wealth created over the last 50 years. The same group that’s pretty much had their fingers on the atomic button ever since the Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as profited from the development of nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and the almost continuous state of war since then. For lack of a better term, I call them the BFEE, or War Party.
...and one of these diseases is man." -- Nietzsche
,[1] known also as Perimeter,[2] is a Cold-War-era nuclear-control system used by the Soviet Union. General speculation from insiders alleges that the system remains in use in post-Soviet Russia. An example of fail-deadly deterrence, it can automatically trigger the launch of the Russian Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) if a nuclear strike is detected by seismic, light, radioactivity and overpressure sensors. By most accounts, it is normally switched off and is supposed to be activated during dangerous crises only. However, it is said to remain fully functional and able to serve its purpose whenever needed.[3]
And to think the BFEE thinks nuclear war is winnable.
JFK was offered a chance to strike the USSR before they could strike us back, and he not only refused, he ordered the Joint Chiefs and CIA Director Dulles to STFU about it in perpetuity. It was not until around the time Robert McNamara was working on his important memoir published in the mid-90s that the one surviving copy of the meeting minutes was found.
Oh. The optimum time to strike the Soviets was "late 1963." I kid you not.
Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?
Recently declassified information shows that the military presented President Kennedy with a plan for a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in the early 1960s.
James K. Galbraith and Heather A. Purcell
The American Prospect | September 21, 1994
During the early 1960s the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) introduced the world to the possibility of instant total war. Thirty years later, no nation has yet fired any nuclear missile at a real target. Orthodox history holds that a succession of defensive nuclear doctrines and strategies -- from "massive retaliation" to "mutual assured destruction" -- worked, almost seamlessly, to deter Soviet aggression against the United States and to prevent the use of nuclear weapons.
The possibility of U.S. aggression in nuclear conflict is seldom considered. And why should it be? Virtually nothing in the public record suggests that high U.S. authorities ever contemplated a first strike against the Soviet Union, except in response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, or that they doubted the deterrent power of Soviet nuclear forces. The main documented exception was the Air Force Chief of Staff in the early 1960s, Curtis LeMay, a seemingly idiosyncratic case.
But beginning in 1957 the U.S. military did prepare plans for a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S.S.R., based on our growing lead in land-based missiles. And top military and intelligence leaders presented an assessment of those plans to President John F. Kennedy in July of 1961. At that time, some high Air Force and CIA leaders apparently believed that a window of outright ballistic missile superiority, perhaps sufficient for a successful first strike, would be open in late 1963.
The document reproduced opposite is published here for the first time. It describes a meeting of the National Security Council on July 20, 1961. At that meeting, the document shows, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the CIA, and others presented plans for a surprise attack. They answered some questions from Kennedy about timing and effects, and promised further information. The meeting recessed under a presidential injunction of secrecy that has not been broken until now.
CONTINUED...
http://prospect.org/article/did-us-military-plan-nuclear-first-strike-1963
For some, no doubt classified, reason this is not found in the history books, history programs, official history or general discourse of anything public. If it were, more people than Smedley Butler would connect the dots and realize what a scam these gangsters in the MIC are running on America.
Inside the Zone
BY ALEXANDER ZAITCHIK
10.17.2007 | ENVIRONMENT
CHELYABINSK — It was just after four o'clock in the afternoon on September 29, 1957, when the cooling system failed at the Mayak nuclear complex inside the closed military town of Chelyabinsk-65. Two hundred and fifty cubic meters of volatile liquid uranium waste overheated, then combusted. The fireball shot a kilometer into the sky, where the toxic clouds caught wind and drifted northeast, slicing at roughly 45 degrees between the two nearest cities, Chelyabinsk in the south and Yekaterinburg in the north. It was a less lucky wind for the more than 200 villages and settlements under the fallout's fated path. According to state maps of what is officially known as the "East Ural Radioactive Trace Zone," this path stretched 50 km wide and 300 km long.
The blast in Chelyabinsk-65, since renamed Ozersk, was one of the twentieth-century's best-kept secrets. Its full scope known only to a handful of Soviet officials for more than three decades, it was the first major accident of the atomic age. Until Chernobyl melted down, it was also the largest.
A quarter of a million people were irradiated in the days following the September 1957 explosion. Most of them were soon resettled outside the inner trace zone at the state's expense. But not all of them. Fifteen years after the truth about Mayak spilled out, many of those left behind now believe that while the '57 blast was an accident, their subsequent suffering was part of large-scale human radiation experiment. The question hangs over the East Urals Trace Zone like a mist: Why were some villages evacuated, and others not?
For those left behind, exposure continues through radioactive isotopes in the soil and water with decay rates measured in millennia, and through fresh leakage of radioactive material from Ozersk. For their children and grandchildren, the legacy of 1957 was passed on in the womb.
"This is an intergenerational catastrophe," says Vladimir Chouprov, a nuclear specialist with Greenpeace Russia, which helped organize a demonstration commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Mayak blast last week in Chleyabinsk. "We are seeing the second and third generations living amid radioactive contamination, both accidental and systemic."
CONTINUED...
http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.php?id=523
I feel numb. o.O
And nauseous. 
cause of death on death certificates.
snip >
Current nuclear doctrine states workers should not be exposed to more than 2 Roentgen Equivalent Man (REM) per year. We know during the first year at Chelyabinsk-40 workers were exposed to 93.6 REM, over 45 times the recommended maximum exposure. By 1951, workers were exposed to 113.3 REM each year with some of the extreme cases seeing workers exposed to 400 REM.
snip >
Chelyabinsk-40 Today
Today radioactivity in the ground water around Lake Karachay has migrated several kilometers and it is said anyone standing on the lake shore would receive a lethal dose of about 600 REM in an hour. Since 1978 Soviet authorities have been working on the cleanup, filling the lake with hollow concrete blocks, rock, and soil to help reduce the dispersion of radioactivity. Today, cleanup efforts have the lake nearly filled; only a small reservoir remains.
Thanks so much for this, Octafish. An absolutely great thread, so much info. I still have more links to read, but holy crap.
How did I miss this?! The current ongoing nightmare there is no surprise, unfortunately. I'm afraid TEPCO is in the midst of creating an even worse catastrophe, the way they are spreading radiation across Japan, not that it wasn't already, but...
I am steadily coming to believe the "not with a bang, but with a whimper" scenario for the extinction of most of the species on this planet.
The small mention about the dandelions was creepy. Anecdotal, I realize, but in 2011, when the dandelions started for the year, my grandson brought me one with, iirc, six stems and one head. We noticed many, many strange dandelions that year. One stem, eight heads - stems that grew to between two and three feet long, some thick and others thin.
I wish now that I had taken photos, not sure why I didn't. Denial maybe?
Thanks for your wonderful contributions to my ongoing education in this roller coaster called Life!
PS - And it pisses me off to no end when those jerks start their crap with you, though you handle them so succinctly. And still they persist that they have all truth. What is that quote? Fools are so certain of themselves and wise ones carry the doubts. Damn senility!
Have a good week!
First: Thank you for the kind words, mnemosyne. We've been many years in the good fight together. It's easy to spot those who aren't. They always find the time to defend the indefensible.
One under the radar player for the side of power just came to my attention:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022397983
Something important everyone should know about plutonium:
DOE-STD-1128-98
Guide of Good Practices for Occupational Radiological Protection in Plutonium Facilities
EXCERPT...
4.2.3 Characteristics of Plutonium Contamination
There are few characteristics of plutonium contamination that are unique. Plutonium
contamination may be in many physical and chemical forms. (See Section 2.0 for the many potential sources of plutonium contamination from combustion products of a plutonium fire to radiolytic products from long-term storage.) The one characteristic that many believe is unique to plutonium is its ability to migrate with no apparent motive force. Whether from alpha recoil or some other mechanism, plutonium contamination, if not contained or removed, will spread relatively rapidly throughout an area.
SOURCE (PDF file format): http://www.hss.doe.gov/nuclearsafety/techstds/docs/standard/DOE-STD-1128-2008.pdf
Some science news that seems to have been missed, with Kim in Rio, the fiscal cliff, and all the fireballs and all.
absolutely sickened realizing how ignorant the masses are being kept regarding the situation in Japan and nuclear 'safety' in general. Leaks everywhere in this country, ignored for years. Nuke plants built on fault lines! It is insane.
It affects the entire world and though there probably isn't much that can be done about it at this point, we are still entitled to know the truth.
Thanks again for working to educate the masses, Octafish.
And though I am getting extremely tired of smashing my head into that brick wall over and over, i will never, ever, shut my mouth about what is right and truth. Mom always said my mouth would get me in trouble, and it has a few times, but nothing causes me to see red more than being told to "be careful what I say".
I am proud to be in the fight with you. 
outside today! 
I will always believe people are entitled to the truth, good or bad. The propaganda I have seen increasingly used in this country over the last forty years is astounding.
