The Economic Collapse Blog
All over America, restlessness and frustration are growing. It has now been almost three years since the great financial crash of 2008, and yet the U.S. economy is still a complete and total mess. In fact, there are all sorts of signs that things are about to get even worse, and the American people are just about fed up. Virtually every major poll, survey and measure of consumer confidence shows that the American people are becoming more pessimistic about the economy. Millions of hard working Americans that worked their fingers to the bone for their employers and that did everything "right" are sitting at home on their couches tonight staring blankly at the television. Many of them still have a hard time believing that they were laid off and that there is nobody out there that wants to give them a good job. There are millions of other Americans that won't get much sleep tonight because they will spend much of the night rolling around in bed wondering how they are possibly going to be able to pay the mortgage. We have never faced such an extended economic downturn in modern U.S. history, and a lot of people are starting to freak out about the condition of the economy. As Gerald Celente likes to say: "When people lose everything and have nothing left to lose - they lose it."
Every single month, the number of good jobs continues to go down. Wall Street actually rewards companies that have a good "outsourcing strategy". As I have written about previously, a growing percentage of the jobs that are being "created" these days are very low paying jobs. But you can't support a family, pay a mortgage or even afford decent health insurance on what you would make stocking shelves at Target or passing out buckets of chicken for KFC.
The American people keep waiting for "hope" and "change" to show up, but all they get instead are more helpings of "despair" and "frustration".
Sadly, most Americans still cling to the hope that if the "next election" will just turn out the right way that things will be okay. But the truth is that things seem to stay on pretty much the same course no matter who we put into office.
For many years the status quo seemed to be okay for most people, but now we are starting to reap the results of the economic seeds that we have sown.
Now our economic decline is starting to accelerate and people are starting to panic. Most Americans may not know why all of this is happening, but what many of them do know is that something in their gut is telling them that things have gone terribly, terribly wrong somehow.
The following are 10 signs that the American people are starting to freak out about the condition of the economy....
#1 Things have already gotten so bad that Americans will literally trample one another just to get on a waiting list for rental assistance vouchers. Just check out the following excerpt from a local news report about a recent incident in Texas....
At least eight people were hurt Thursday morning while scrambling to line up for a limited number of Dallas County rental vouchers — after waiting for hours in their cars.
People lined up Thursday morning to apply for Dallas County Section 8 housing vouchers. Dallas County sheriff's spokesman Kim Leach estimated the crowd at about 5,000.
Video of this incident is posted below. One of the people that was trampled was a pregnant woman....
#2 Almost every measurement of consumer confidence is going down. For example, the Conference Board’s consumer confidence index fell from 61.7 in May to 58.5 in June.
#3 The Reuters/University of Michigan consumer sentiment index has fallen to 63.8 after being at 71.5 in June. It is now the lowest that it has been since the last recession "ended".
#4 The Rasmussen Consumer Index is down 9 points from a month ago.
#5 A recent poll taken by Rasmussen found that 68 percent of Americans believe that we are actually in a recession right now.
#6 According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans that lack confidence in U.S. banks is now at an all-time high of 36%.
#7 In many areas of the United States this summer, just about anything that is not bolted down is being stolen by people that are desperate for money.
#8 According to one recent poll, 39 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. economy has now entered a "permanent decline".
#9 Another recent survey found that 48 percent of Americans believe that it is likely that another great Depression will begin within the next 12 months.
#10 According to a brand new Reuters/Ipsos poll, 63 percent of Americans believe that the nation is on the wrong track. That figure is three percent higher than it was last month.
One of the only things preventing chaos from breaking out in the streets of our cities from coast to coast is government handouts.
Today, almost 20 percent of all personal income in the United States comes from benefits provided by the federal government.
You don't believe this? Just check out what the New York Times recently had to say....
Close to $2 of every $10 that went into Americans’ wallets last year were payments like jobless benefits, food stamps, Social Security and disability, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics.
There are tens of millions of Americans that are living "on the edge", but at least the massive government handout programs are enabling most of them to survive.
So what happens when the checks from the government stop coming?
Look, I am not advocating that the "welfare society" that we have become is a good thing. Today, Americans receive more in direct government benefits than they pay in taxes. That is not even close to sustainable.
What I am pointing out is that tens of millions of Americans that are deeply suffering are currently being pacified by these government handouts. Once the handouts are cut significantly or taken away completely it is going to unleash a lot of anger and frustration.
Of course what the American people really need are good jobs that will give them dignity and allow them to provide for their families, but millions of those keep getting shipped out of the country.
So the only thing that millions of Americans still have to hang on to are their government benefits. Once that changes a whole lot of people are going to throw a fit.
In fact, we are already seeing some really bizarre behavior across the United States. In many areas of the country we are literally watching society crumble right in front of our very eyes.
If you doubt this, just check out these two articles....
1) "Americans Gone Wild"
2) 18 Signs The Collapse Of Society Is Accelerating
But not all Americans will resort to lawless behavior. In fact, there are a lot of really good, hard working people out there that this economy has left behind.
There are some people that have put in decades of hard work only to see their dreams shrivel up over the past few years.
Some of the stories people send me are absolutely heartbreaking. I have looked at each and every comment that has been left on The Economic Collapse over the past couple of years. Needless to say, it has taken a huge investment of my time to go through more than 20,000 comments. But in the process I have gotten a very good idea of what people are going through across the nation.
So how badly are people hurting? Well, a reader identified as "Anna44" recently shared with us what some of her family members have been going through in this economy....
My B-I-L was a dealership owner/manager who worked long hours over 38 years and had to close his doors when Saturn was dissolved. When his dealership went under, 72 others lost their job. That’s 72 families who took a hit. He lost his home, everything. A few of his former employees lost their homes as well eventually. They were not lazy or WORTHLESS. It took him a year and a half to finally find something, but now he lives in a hotel unable to qualify for a house or apartment. This is an educated man who competed nationwide for top dog and got it more then once. His biggest fault? He’s almost 60, young enough to need the work, but too old to be hired.
As for my husband- 26 years AF officer, handling millions & billions on International & National levels has just entered his 7th month of unemployment. Two tours abroad- lazy he is NOT. He doesn’t qualify for unemployment, nor is he counted because he gets a retirement check. He wants and needs to work- yet there is little out there. If he doesn’t find something soon, we too will lose the home we sunk every cent into after 20 years of saving for it!
All across America tonight there are similar stories. People have done everything "right" all of their lives and they are frustrated that now they have been pushed to the edge of poverty by this economy.
Unfortunately, it looks like things may soon get even worse. Economist David Rosenberg recently told CNBC the following....
"We're just one small shock away from the economy going back into recession."
That is not what the American people want to hear.
What they want to hear is that things are about to get better.
What they want to hear is that things are going to get back to normal soon.
Sadly, that is just not going to be the case.
The economy is going to get worse and worse, and the frustration and the anger of the American people is just going to continue to grow.
View Article With Links HERE
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Future of America: Harder Than Anything You’ve Experienced In Your Lifetime
SHTFplan.com
Mac Slavo
In February 0f 2009, while on the Glenn Beck show, trend forecaster Gerald Celente was asked to comment on global events and extraordinary times in which we live. His response should have been a wake up call.
[It will be] Like nothing we’ve ever seen in our lifetime or I would say anyone’s life time.
Since then we’ve seen not billions, but trillions upon trillions of dollars committed to bank bailouts, toxic asset purchases, stock market liquidity infusion, so-called job creation programs, tax breaks and mortgage modifications. The Obama administration has taken every opportunity to tout these programs as evidence of success.
On the one hand, we’re told that the recovery, albeit slower than expected, is in full swing. We were also told in late 2008 that this was a recession. Any discussion about the possibility of another Great Depression was taken off the table by government, media and mainstream economists. The idea that America could enter another depression was simply not possible, and anyone who spoke of such thing was a fear mongering pessimist.
Yet, it seems that we were on the very brink of complete melt-down in 2008. So close, in fact, that administration officials now claim the President’s policies are responsible for avoiding the very scenario that was completely denied as a possibility three years ago:
The American economy was falling off the cliff in the fall of ’08 and the first months of this administration. And he put in place the most creative, the most forceful set of economy measure we have ever done as a country. And because of that, we’ve preented a second Great Depression and the economy has now been growing for more than a year and a half.
-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Meet the Press, July 10, 2011
At the same time Mr. Geithner explains to us how saddling us with trillions more in debt and expanding government intervention into every aspect of our lives has avoided depression, he warns that things are going to remain tough for the average American. His words are eerily reminiscent of Gerald Celente’s 2009 forecast:
I think it’s going to take a long time still. This is a very tough economy. And I think for a lot of people it’s going to be – it’s going to feel very hard, harder than anything they’ve experienced in their lifetime now, for some time to come.
The consensus among the experts who didn’t see the 2008 recession until six months after it was official and then told us the economy would be back to normal by 2011 are the same people who are telling us that a Great Depression has been avoided.
As in 2008, the Great Depression debate is off the table.
For those paying attention, however, it should be clear that the next Great Depression was signaled by the 2008 economic and equities market crash, and the last three years of policy initiatives have done nothing to fix the fundamental problems that caused the crisis in the first place.
An argument could be made that things are actually much worse now – on a number of fronts including the economy, jobs, real estate, deficit spending, national debt, and cost of living – than they were three years ago.
If you’ve haven’t guessed, it is very likely that the reason Americans are going to experience times tougher than anything they have experienced in their lifetimes is because our nation is fully engrossed in the next Great Depression. There is no better example of this than then our 21st century version of soup lines:
It’s real. It’s happening right now. Prepare yourself financially, mentally, spiritually, and physically – because it’s only going to get worse.
View Article With Links HERE
Mac Slavo
In February 0f 2009, while on the Glenn Beck show, trend forecaster Gerald Celente was asked to comment on global events and extraordinary times in which we live. His response should have been a wake up call.
[It will be] Like nothing we’ve ever seen in our lifetime or I would say anyone’s life time.
Since then we’ve seen not billions, but trillions upon trillions of dollars committed to bank bailouts, toxic asset purchases, stock market liquidity infusion, so-called job creation programs, tax breaks and mortgage modifications. The Obama administration has taken every opportunity to tout these programs as evidence of success.
On the one hand, we’re told that the recovery, albeit slower than expected, is in full swing. We were also told in late 2008 that this was a recession. Any discussion about the possibility of another Great Depression was taken off the table by government, media and mainstream economists. The idea that America could enter another depression was simply not possible, and anyone who spoke of such thing was a fear mongering pessimist.
Yet, it seems that we were on the very brink of complete melt-down in 2008. So close, in fact, that administration officials now claim the President’s policies are responsible for avoiding the very scenario that was completely denied as a possibility three years ago:
The American economy was falling off the cliff in the fall of ’08 and the first months of this administration. And he put in place the most creative, the most forceful set of economy measure we have ever done as a country. And because of that, we’ve preented a second Great Depression and the economy has now been growing for more than a year and a half.
-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Meet the Press, July 10, 2011
At the same time Mr. Geithner explains to us how saddling us with trillions more in debt and expanding government intervention into every aspect of our lives has avoided depression, he warns that things are going to remain tough for the average American. His words are eerily reminiscent of Gerald Celente’s 2009 forecast:
I think it’s going to take a long time still. This is a very tough economy. And I think for a lot of people it’s going to be – it’s going to feel very hard, harder than anything they’ve experienced in their lifetime now, for some time to come.
The consensus among the experts who didn’t see the 2008 recession until six months after it was official and then told us the economy would be back to normal by 2011 are the same people who are telling us that a Great Depression has been avoided.
As in 2008, the Great Depression debate is off the table.
For those paying attention, however, it should be clear that the next Great Depression was signaled by the 2008 economic and equities market crash, and the last three years of policy initiatives have done nothing to fix the fundamental problems that caused the crisis in the first place.
An argument could be made that things are actually much worse now – on a number of fronts including the economy, jobs, real estate, deficit spending, national debt, and cost of living – than they were three years ago.
If you’ve haven’t guessed, it is very likely that the reason Americans are going to experience times tougher than anything they have experienced in their lifetimes is because our nation is fully engrossed in the next Great Depression. There is no better example of this than then our 21st century version of soup lines:
It’s real. It’s happening right now. Prepare yourself financially, mentally, spiritually, and physically – because it’s only going to get worse.
View Article With Links HERE
Friday, July 8, 2011
VIPR Searches and the American Citizen: ‘Dominate. Intimidate. Control.’
By John W. Whitehead
Rutherford Institute
“They’re trying to scare the pants off the American people that we need these things... Fear is a commodity and they’re selling it. The more they can sell it, the more we buy into it. When American people are afraid, they will accept anything.”--Kate Hanni, passengers’ rights advocate
“Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government…Among deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual and putting terror in every heart.”-- Justice Robert Jackson, chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials
The transition to a police state will not come about with a dramatic coup d’etat, with battering rams and marauding militia. As we have experienced first-hand in recent years, it will creep in softly, one violation at a time, until suddenly you find yourself being subjected to random patdowns and security sweeps during your morning commute to work or quick trip to the shopping mall.
Perhaps you have yet to experience the particular thrill, and I use that word loosely, of being manhandled by government agents, having your personal possessions pawed through, and your activities and associations scrutinized. If so, not to worry. It’s only a matter of time before more and more Americans will experience such a military task force knocking at their door. Only, chances are that it won’t be a knock, and they might not even be at home when government agents decide to “investigate” them. Indeed, as increasing numbers of Americans are discovering, these so-called “soft target” security inspections are taking place whenever and wherever the government deems appropriate, at random times and places, and without needing the justification of a particular threat. Worse, not only is this happening with the blessing of the Obama administration but at its urging.
What I’m describing--something that was once limited to authoritarian regimes--is only possible thanks to an unofficial rewriting of the Fourth Amendment by the courts that essentially does away with any distinctions over what is “reasonable” when it comes to searches and seizures by government agents. The rationale, of course, is that anything is “reasonable” in the war on terrorism. What the powers-that-be understand--and Americans remain oblivious to--is the fact that by constantly pushing the envelope and testing the limits of what Americans will tolerate, the government is thus able to ratchet up the level of intrusiveness that Americans consider reasonable.
Read Entire Article HERE
Rutherford Institute
“They’re trying to scare the pants off the American people that we need these things... Fear is a commodity and they’re selling it. The more they can sell it, the more we buy into it. When American people are afraid, they will accept anything.”--Kate Hanni, passengers’ rights advocate
“Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government…Among deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual and putting terror in every heart.”-- Justice Robert Jackson, chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials
The transition to a police state will not come about with a dramatic coup d’etat, with battering rams and marauding militia. As we have experienced first-hand in recent years, it will creep in softly, one violation at a time, until suddenly you find yourself being subjected to random patdowns and security sweeps during your morning commute to work or quick trip to the shopping mall.
Perhaps you have yet to experience the particular thrill, and I use that word loosely, of being manhandled by government agents, having your personal possessions pawed through, and your activities and associations scrutinized. If so, not to worry. It’s only a matter of time before more and more Americans will experience such a military task force knocking at their door. Only, chances are that it won’t be a knock, and they might not even be at home when government agents decide to “investigate” them. Indeed, as increasing numbers of Americans are discovering, these so-called “soft target” security inspections are taking place whenever and wherever the government deems appropriate, at random times and places, and without needing the justification of a particular threat. Worse, not only is this happening with the blessing of the Obama administration but at its urging.
What I’m describing--something that was once limited to authoritarian regimes--is only possible thanks to an unofficial rewriting of the Fourth Amendment by the courts that essentially does away with any distinctions over what is “reasonable” when it comes to searches and seizures by government agents. The rationale, of course, is that anything is “reasonable” in the war on terrorism. What the powers-that-be understand--and Americans remain oblivious to--is the fact that by constantly pushing the envelope and testing the limits of what Americans will tolerate, the government is thus able to ratchet up the level of intrusiveness that Americans consider reasonable.
Read Entire Article HERE
Friday, July 1, 2011
Lindsey Williams & Alex Jones: Earth Shattering Events to Come
Alex welcomes back to the show pastor Lindsey Williams. Since Lindsey appeared on the show earlier this year, his prediction about a war in the Middle East expanding into World War 3 are coming true as the U.S. prepares a ground invasion of Libya.
New San Francisco bridge built in China to be shipped to US
The Telegraph
Malcolm Moore
First, China made cut-price clothes and knick-knacks. Then it learned how to make mobile phones and iPads. Now it is making a 2,050ft-long bridge spanning the San Francisco bay.
Next month, four enormous steel skeletons, the last of the 12 segments of the bridge, will be shipped 6,500 miles from Shanghai to San Francisco before being assembled on site.
The bridge, which will connect San Francisco to Oakland on the other side of the bay, is a sign of how China has moved on from building roads and ports in Africa and the developing world and is now aggressively bidding for, and winning, major construction and engineering projects in the United States and Europe.
After building forests of skyscrapers in Beijing and Shanghai, showpiece buildings like the Bird's Nest stadium and the Guangzhou Opera House, and a high-speed rail network that is the envy of the world, Chinese construction companies are flush with cash and confidence. This week, Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, lobbied David Cameron to give the contract for the UK's new high speed rail link to a Chinese company.
According to Engineering News Record, five of the world's top 10 contractors, in terms of revenue, are now Chinese, with likes of China State Construction Engineering Group (CSCEC) overtaking established American giants like Bechtel.
CSCEC has already built seven schools in the US, apartment blocks in Washington DC and New York and is in the middle of building a 4,000-room casino in Atlantic City. In New York, it has won contracts to renovate the subway system, build a new metro platform near Yankee stadium, and refurbish the Alexander Hamilton Bridge over the Harlem river.
In Europe, meanwhile, China has signed deals with Serbia for a bridge over the river Danube and a connecting road to Belgrade. A £215 million deal will see Chinese firms refurbishing and upgrading a Serbian coal-fired power plant, while China is building a new mobile phone network in Hungary and wants to sell Bulgaria a nuclear power plant, built from a French design.
"The European construction market is huge and the Chinese are very interested in it," said Werner Buelen at the European Federation of Building and Woodworkers, an umbrella organisation for Europe's construction trade unions. "At the moment, they seem to be running a pilot programme to decide whether to access the market directly by bidding on contracts or whether to buy European construction companies and then use those to access the market," he added.
"They have a very clever mechanism, with several advantages. The first is financing, which they have better access to because Chinese companies are mostly state-owned. It is getting more and more difficult for European contractors to access financing, and you need to have a lot of finance in the construction industry," he said.
"Then they have managed to transfer Chinese workers, who are cheaper.
They can also use construction machinery they have built in China.
Finally, because they can generate still profit despite their low bids, they use that money to hire famous architects and demonstrate they can deliver a project above the normal standard".
However, earlier this month, China was fired from its first major prestige project in Europe, the new A2 motorway in Poland for the Euro 2012 football championships. After bidding 44 per cent lower than the Polish government had budgeted for the road, a Chinese state-owned building company found it was unable to pay its workers to finish the job.
"It is difficult for Chinese companies," said Wang Shouqing, a professor at the International Engineering research department at the elite Tsinghua university. "They are not familiar with Western culture, law or standards. What happened in Poland was a very bad example for other Chinese companies. It could take another decade or even 20 years to put our footprint on Europe and the US." The embarrassment in Poland led China's State Council to publish a notice on Monday warning the heads of China's state-owned companies that they would be "punished" if their companies negligently lost money on overseas projects.
Norman Haste OBE, an engineer whose projects include the second Severn crossing and the design of Heathrow’s Terminal 5, said he had encountered Chinese firms bidding aggressively in the Middle East and that he had a “high regard for what they have done in recent years".
He said: “Their capabilities are second to none, and they are able to finance projects. There is a big demand for new investment in Eastern Europe and similarly in the United States and they will do well there.” But he added that the history of protectionism in the French, German and UK markets might be harder to break.
View Original Article HERE
Malcolm Moore
First, China made cut-price clothes and knick-knacks. Then it learned how to make mobile phones and iPads. Now it is making a 2,050ft-long bridge spanning the San Francisco bay.
Next month, four enormous steel skeletons, the last of the 12 segments of the bridge, will be shipped 6,500 miles from Shanghai to San Francisco before being assembled on site.
The bridge, which will connect San Francisco to Oakland on the other side of the bay, is a sign of how China has moved on from building roads and ports in Africa and the developing world and is now aggressively bidding for, and winning, major construction and engineering projects in the United States and Europe.
After building forests of skyscrapers in Beijing and Shanghai, showpiece buildings like the Bird's Nest stadium and the Guangzhou Opera House, and a high-speed rail network that is the envy of the world, Chinese construction companies are flush with cash and confidence. This week, Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, lobbied David Cameron to give the contract for the UK's new high speed rail link to a Chinese company.
According to Engineering News Record, five of the world's top 10 contractors, in terms of revenue, are now Chinese, with likes of China State Construction Engineering Group (CSCEC) overtaking established American giants like Bechtel.
CSCEC has already built seven schools in the US, apartment blocks in Washington DC and New York and is in the middle of building a 4,000-room casino in Atlantic City. In New York, it has won contracts to renovate the subway system, build a new metro platform near Yankee stadium, and refurbish the Alexander Hamilton Bridge over the Harlem river.
In Europe, meanwhile, China has signed deals with Serbia for a bridge over the river Danube and a connecting road to Belgrade. A £215 million deal will see Chinese firms refurbishing and upgrading a Serbian coal-fired power plant, while China is building a new mobile phone network in Hungary and wants to sell Bulgaria a nuclear power plant, built from a French design.
"The European construction market is huge and the Chinese are very interested in it," said Werner Buelen at the European Federation of Building and Woodworkers, an umbrella organisation for Europe's construction trade unions. "At the moment, they seem to be running a pilot programme to decide whether to access the market directly by bidding on contracts or whether to buy European construction companies and then use those to access the market," he added.
"They have a very clever mechanism, with several advantages. The first is financing, which they have better access to because Chinese companies are mostly state-owned. It is getting more and more difficult for European contractors to access financing, and you need to have a lot of finance in the construction industry," he said.
"Then they have managed to transfer Chinese workers, who are cheaper.
They can also use construction machinery they have built in China.
Finally, because they can generate still profit despite their low bids, they use that money to hire famous architects and demonstrate they can deliver a project above the normal standard".
However, earlier this month, China was fired from its first major prestige project in Europe, the new A2 motorway in Poland for the Euro 2012 football championships. After bidding 44 per cent lower than the Polish government had budgeted for the road, a Chinese state-owned building company found it was unable to pay its workers to finish the job.
"It is difficult for Chinese companies," said Wang Shouqing, a professor at the International Engineering research department at the elite Tsinghua university. "They are not familiar with Western culture, law or standards. What happened in Poland was a very bad example for other Chinese companies. It could take another decade or even 20 years to put our footprint on Europe and the US." The embarrassment in Poland led China's State Council to publish a notice on Monday warning the heads of China's state-owned companies that they would be "punished" if their companies negligently lost money on overseas projects.
Norman Haste OBE, an engineer whose projects include the second Severn crossing and the design of Heathrow’s Terminal 5, said he had encountered Chinese firms bidding aggressively in the Middle East and that he had a “high regard for what they have done in recent years".
He said: “Their capabilities are second to none, and they are able to finance projects. There is a big demand for new investment in Eastern Europe and similarly in the United States and they will do well there.” But he added that the history of protectionism in the French, German and UK markets might be harder to break.
View Original Article HERE
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Nuclear Doom
Dr. Mark Sircus
Hot Particles – Slow Death – Cancer
Here in the above video we are looking at nuclear hell on earth, a night film of the radioactive steam that continues to rise from Fukushima 24 hours a day. Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear power industry executive, is one of the experts who has been saying from day one that the nuclear crisis in Japan was much worse than they were telling us.
He was absolutely correct. Finally, three months later we are getting some numbers on what the real dangers are. And finally we can begin to understand the enormous cover-up of the nuclear doom that is reaching lungs all over the west coast of America, Canada, Alaska, Hawaii and at least half of Japan! For infants it’s a terrible valley of death we have created for them. As we shall see for years all of them have been born with already polluted bloodstreams and now the very young ones are dying in greater numbers on the west coast of the United States since Fukushima blew up.
After the first week, officials had enough information to call for evacuation of a wide area in Japan and also Hawaii, Alaska and the entire west coast of North America. They really should have evacuated all of northern Japan and also the west coast but that was almost as impossible as evacuating the entire planet or the entire northern hemisphere.
Evacuation of planet earth might be the best way for humanity to avoid the terrible nuclear, heavy metal and chemical toxicity we are now facing all at the same time. Avoiding exposure is always the best plan but there is no way to avoid breathing in air contaminated with tiny hot particles. Inhalation issues are much more frightening than ingestion issues because you can pick and choose what you eat and drink but you can’t buy bottled air.
Nuclear Toxicity Syndrome is about how to survive in nuclear and chemical hell. But one cannot do what is necessary to survive hell if a person doesn’t know they are living in one. It just keeps getting worse by the day and now we have Fort Calhoun nuclear plant outside Omaha, Nebraska on emergency alert as first fire and now flooding threatens to overwhelm yet another nuclear facility. With Mother Nature now angry (in a most bitter sense) we are really in more serious trouble than any of us would be comfortable imagining. We knew nuke power plants were bad news but who would think they would build them on fault lines or in flood zones?
On CNN Arnie was asked, “So should people on the west coast be worried? Gundersen side-stepped just a bit saying, “Well, the average person breathes in about 10 cubic meters a day, and the filters out there for April show that they were breathing in, per day, about five particles. Now these are charged, which is why we call them ‘fuel fleas’ since they latch onto lung tissue. We’re at a point now where you just can’t run from the particles that are still in the air. We call them ‘fuel fleas’ also because they’re incredibly small, smaller than the thickness of your hair.”
That’s Mr. Gundersen’s way of saying, yes, there are definite risks tied to these “hot particles.” But that really does not answer the question. I am afraid I will have to be brutally honest and be the bearer of really terrible news. The information coming out about hot particle concentrations near Fukushima, Tokyo, and now Seattle tell us that not only should all those populations be worrying but their governments should have been issuing evacuation orders months ago.
They did not of course except in a too-tight circle around Fukushima, which is getting 40 times more than in Tokyo or Seattle. Because of the jet stream in April, after the large explosions that destroyed three reactor buildings, it was as dangerous in Seattle and much of the west coast of North America as in Tokyo.
It only takes one of these
particles to trigger a cancer.
A new report from independent scientists in Japan found a much greater release of “hot particles” from the Fukushima power plant than originally estimated. These include radioactive isotopes of cesium, strontium, uranium, plutonium, cobalt-60 and many others. The average person in Tokyo is thought to have inhaled 10 “hot particles” per day throughout the month of April 2011. The inhabitants of Fukushima were estimated to have inhaled 30-40 times more than that—or up to 400 hot particles per day every day that month. In Seattle, WA in the Northwestern U.S., it is estimated that the average person absorbed five “hot particles” per day during the month of April 2011, or 10 “hot particles” per day if they are athletes who are working out. These invisible atomic particles become lodged in your lungs, intestines, bone or muscle.
Professor Christopher Busby, scientific secretary of the European Committee on radiation risks, says that fuel rods at Fukushima got blown sky high, that concentrations of uranium and plutonium particles had been detected in air filters in Hawaii and the Marianas Islands by the end of April. So people knew about this but they were not talking.
Gundersen says, “Well, the radiation initially comes out as a big cloud of gases, and that’s what you can measure with a Geiger counter. But now what we’re finding are these things called ‘hot particles,’ and in the industry it’s interesting because in Seattle it didn’t go down much. It was about five particles a day, because most of the time, as we talked about in April, the wind was blowing toward the west coast.”
A hot particle is defined as an alpha-emitting particle
that contains sufficient activity to deliver at least
1000 rem/yr to the surrounding lung tissue.
Severe damage and disruption of tissue in the lungs are associated with exposure to these types of nuclear particles. The most relevant lung experiment is Bair’s Pu 23902 inhalation study with beagles. Twenty of the 21 dogs that survived more than 1600 days post exposure had lung cancer.
The government recommends that the maximum
permissible lung particle burden for members
of the public be 0.2 hot particles, and the average
lung burden for members of the public be 0.07
hot particles, a factor of 3 less than the maximum.
Let’s say that the official numbers were five “hot particles” per day (10 if one is physically active outdoors) for everyone on the west coast for the month of April. Now let us be very conservative and say that this has dropped from the initially high post-explosion levels at Fukushima down now to one a day. At one a day that would still be 30 of these death particles a month. So perhaps the average person has already absorbed in these three months approximately 200 radioactive particles into their lungs and other tissues. When you think that if even one of these 200 is plutonium, we have to think in terms of millions of eventual cancer deaths!
All of these hot particles will burn the local tissues. They will compromise health in a myriad of ways. But doctors will stand by not having a clue what to tell their patients to do except receive more radiation diagnostic scans and more radiation treatments for cancer patients. The allopathic paradigm will not survive Fukushima because it is utterly ignorant about the approaches that stand a chance of helping us get through this.
Gundersen says, “That’s why we were warning you to wash your lettuce and things like that. Now what that means is that these hot particles can lodge in your lung or in your digestive tract or in your bone and, over time, cause a cancer. But they’re way too small to be picked up on a large radiation detector.” This is one of the reasons many people felt something wrong in the first weeks after the radiation started pouring out of Japan. Sensitive people will register such an invasion of hostile chemical and radioactive toxicity even though radiation detectors will not.
Gundersen understandably would have a hard time telling people how bad it really is. He is not a doctor but he knows full well what only one particle of plutonium will do to surrounding lung tissues. How does anyone tell 200 million people to get out of Dodge or tell them it’s already too late since health-damaging contamination has already taken place?
Evacuation is the only way to avoid continued exposure but hardly anyone perceives it this way. I received a letter from someone in southern California today asking if it was okay to go to Hawaii for a vacation. My real answer to her was you should abandon not only your travel plans but also your home in L.A. and move to the southern hemisphere.
“Geiger counters simply cannot measure whether or not someone has ingested a hot particle but we know they’re here because the air filters have measured these radioactive particles and they’ve been found in the topsoil, in water supplies and in the milk produced on both coasts of the U.S. This suggests that the same would be true of the meat of any livestock raised outdoors—and of the vegetables grown outdoors,” says Gundersen.
Hot Particle
Photo by Del Tredici,Burdens of Proofby Tim Connor,
Energy Research Foundation (1997)
A photograph of a monkey’s lung is shown, with a major depression at its center where a “hot particle” is embedded in the tissue. This is a photo of a “hot particle”, in this case a one-micron particle of plutonium, and it shows the alpha tracks emitted from that particle in one year. This particle has bombarded the surrounding tissue with radiation and damaged it quite dramatically—just one particle. Gundersen says the body will fight off an irritant such as this and it will usually win but sometimes a hot particle will cause cancer. They will all put wear and tear on infected people’s immune systems.
You really do not want even one of these hot
little pieces of sun burning in your tissues.
Plutonium in Lung Tissue: The dark, star-like image in the above photograph (magnified 500 times) shows tracks from alpha particles radiating from a speck of plutonium lodged in the lung tissue of an ape. Alpha radiation from plutonium and other alpha-emitting radionuclides can be blocked by skin or even a piece of paper but it is the most biologically destructive form of ionizing radiation when the alpha-emitting substance is deposited in the soft tissue of internal organs like the lung. The alpha tracks shown above were captured over a two-day period.
These hot particles result in an
intense but highly localized irradiation.
The damaged number three reactor was in its first fuel cycle using MOX nuclear fuel with plutonium. If this MOX reactor goes into full meltdown spewing plutonium dust across Japan and everywhere else, it is lights out via cancer for anyone who breathes the stuff. The half-life of various plutonium isotopes ranges from minutes to 80 million years. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years meaning it takes that long to lose half of its radioactive potency—nothing compared to depleted uranium, which counts its time in billions of years. Uranium-235 has a half-life of 700 million years. And caesium, which tends to go airborne easily, has a half-life of 30 years.
The fuel rods at all six reactors at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi complex contain plutonium. Only six percent of the fuel rods at the plant’s unit 3 were a mixture of plutonium-239 and uranium-235 when first put into operation. The fuel in other reactors is only uranium, but plutonium is created during the fission process. This means the fuel in all of the stricken reactors and spent fuel pools contain plutonium. Plutonium is super nasty stuff, especially damaging to lungs and kidneys. Inhaling or ingesting only one radioactive particle of plutonium can cause cancer.
Valley of Death
In Nuclear Toxicity Syndrome you will read about the dangers we are all facing, especially for those billions who live in the northern hemisphere. If you have not noticed, things are getting real dangerous out there and the media is going to make sure you are blindsided by events they will not inform you of until it is too late.
This is a tough book and it’s going to face you with some very frightening information. Though the main thrust is nuclear radiation, we also will look at mercury as an invisible chemical cloud that has contaminated everything. Lead too is still a problem but they don’t inject lead into babies or plant it in people’s mouths like they do with mercury, a heavy metal more toxic than lead.
Would you believe they are just now finally stopping the use of a drug (another heavy metal actually) that farmers have given to chickens for decades. Arsenic is being pulled off the market after federal scientists found a potentially carcinogenic form of arsenic in the livers of animals treated with the substance.
In the past two and a half years thousands of workers, villagers and children in at least nine of mainland China’s 31 province-level regions have been found to be suffering from toxic levels of lead exposure, mostly caused by pollution from battery factories and metal smelters.
In many areas of the world people are already at death’s door from chemical and heavy metal pollution. Pollution has reached a zenith and has gone even higher with huge forest fires that have released huge amounts of radioactive and chemically contaminated soil into the atmosphere. Then we added mega oil disasters and now nuclear hell on earth. Is there any nice way to refer to this disaster? Look at that video again above that is a vision of what human darkness can conjure up.
We might as well have shot ourselves in the head. There is nothing for us humans to be proud of if we honestly sweep our minds across reality as it is presenting itself to us this year. For infants it’s a terrible valley of death we have created for them. As we shall see for years all of them have been born with already polluted bloodstreams and now the very young ones are dying in greater numbers since Fukushima blew up.
View Article With Links HERE
Hot Particles – Slow Death – Cancer
Here in the above video we are looking at nuclear hell on earth, a night film of the radioactive steam that continues to rise from Fukushima 24 hours a day. Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear power industry executive, is one of the experts who has been saying from day one that the nuclear crisis in Japan was much worse than they were telling us.
He was absolutely correct. Finally, three months later we are getting some numbers on what the real dangers are. And finally we can begin to understand the enormous cover-up of the nuclear doom that is reaching lungs all over the west coast of America, Canada, Alaska, Hawaii and at least half of Japan! For infants it’s a terrible valley of death we have created for them. As we shall see for years all of them have been born with already polluted bloodstreams and now the very young ones are dying in greater numbers on the west coast of the United States since Fukushima blew up.
After the first week, officials had enough information to call for evacuation of a wide area in Japan and also Hawaii, Alaska and the entire west coast of North America. They really should have evacuated all of northern Japan and also the west coast but that was almost as impossible as evacuating the entire planet or the entire northern hemisphere.
Evacuation of planet earth might be the best way for humanity to avoid the terrible nuclear, heavy metal and chemical toxicity we are now facing all at the same time. Avoiding exposure is always the best plan but there is no way to avoid breathing in air contaminated with tiny hot particles. Inhalation issues are much more frightening than ingestion issues because you can pick and choose what you eat and drink but you can’t buy bottled air.
Nuclear Toxicity Syndrome is about how to survive in nuclear and chemical hell. But one cannot do what is necessary to survive hell if a person doesn’t know they are living in one. It just keeps getting worse by the day and now we have Fort Calhoun nuclear plant outside Omaha, Nebraska on emergency alert as first fire and now flooding threatens to overwhelm yet another nuclear facility. With Mother Nature now angry (in a most bitter sense) we are really in more serious trouble than any of us would be comfortable imagining. We knew nuke power plants were bad news but who would think they would build them on fault lines or in flood zones?
On CNN Arnie was asked, “So should people on the west coast be worried? Gundersen side-stepped just a bit saying, “Well, the average person breathes in about 10 cubic meters a day, and the filters out there for April show that they were breathing in, per day, about five particles. Now these are charged, which is why we call them ‘fuel fleas’ since they latch onto lung tissue. We’re at a point now where you just can’t run from the particles that are still in the air. We call them ‘fuel fleas’ also because they’re incredibly small, smaller than the thickness of your hair.”
That’s Mr. Gundersen’s way of saying, yes, there are definite risks tied to these “hot particles.” But that really does not answer the question. I am afraid I will have to be brutally honest and be the bearer of really terrible news. The information coming out about hot particle concentrations near Fukushima, Tokyo, and now Seattle tell us that not only should all those populations be worrying but their governments should have been issuing evacuation orders months ago.
CNN's John King interviews Arnie Gundersen about the Hot Particles discovered in Japan and the US. from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.
They did not of course except in a too-tight circle around Fukushima, which is getting 40 times more than in Tokyo or Seattle. Because of the jet stream in April, after the large explosions that destroyed three reactor buildings, it was as dangerous in Seattle and much of the west coast of North America as in Tokyo.
It only takes one of these
particles to trigger a cancer.
A new report from independent scientists in Japan found a much greater release of “hot particles” from the Fukushima power plant than originally estimated. These include radioactive isotopes of cesium, strontium, uranium, plutonium, cobalt-60 and many others. The average person in Tokyo is thought to have inhaled 10 “hot particles” per day throughout the month of April 2011. The inhabitants of Fukushima were estimated to have inhaled 30-40 times more than that—or up to 400 hot particles per day every day that month. In Seattle, WA in the Northwestern U.S., it is estimated that the average person absorbed five “hot particles” per day during the month of April 2011, or 10 “hot particles” per day if they are athletes who are working out. These invisible atomic particles become lodged in your lungs, intestines, bone or muscle.
Professor Christopher Busby, scientific secretary of the European Committee on radiation risks, says that fuel rods at Fukushima got blown sky high, that concentrations of uranium and plutonium particles had been detected in air filters in Hawaii and the Marianas Islands by the end of April. So people knew about this but they were not talking.
Gundersen says, “Well, the radiation initially comes out as a big cloud of gases, and that’s what you can measure with a Geiger counter. But now what we’re finding are these things called ‘hot particles,’ and in the industry it’s interesting because in Seattle it didn’t go down much. It was about five particles a day, because most of the time, as we talked about in April, the wind was blowing toward the west coast.”
A hot particle is defined as an alpha-emitting particle
that contains sufficient activity to deliver at least
1000 rem/yr to the surrounding lung tissue.
Severe damage and disruption of tissue in the lungs are associated with exposure to these types of nuclear particles. The most relevant lung experiment is Bair’s Pu 23902 inhalation study with beagles. Twenty of the 21 dogs that survived more than 1600 days post exposure had lung cancer.
The government recommends that the maximum
permissible lung particle burden for members
of the public be 0.2 hot particles, and the average
lung burden for members of the public be 0.07
hot particles, a factor of 3 less than the maximum.
Let’s say that the official numbers were five “hot particles” per day (10 if one is physically active outdoors) for everyone on the west coast for the month of April. Now let us be very conservative and say that this has dropped from the initially high post-explosion levels at Fukushima down now to one a day. At one a day that would still be 30 of these death particles a month. So perhaps the average person has already absorbed in these three months approximately 200 radioactive particles into their lungs and other tissues. When you think that if even one of these 200 is plutonium, we have to think in terms of millions of eventual cancer deaths!
All of these hot particles will burn the local tissues. They will compromise health in a myriad of ways. But doctors will stand by not having a clue what to tell their patients to do except receive more radiation diagnostic scans and more radiation treatments for cancer patients. The allopathic paradigm will not survive Fukushima because it is utterly ignorant about the approaches that stand a chance of helping us get through this.
Gundersen says, “That’s why we were warning you to wash your lettuce and things like that. Now what that means is that these hot particles can lodge in your lung or in your digestive tract or in your bone and, over time, cause a cancer. But they’re way too small to be picked up on a large radiation detector.” This is one of the reasons many people felt something wrong in the first weeks after the radiation started pouring out of Japan. Sensitive people will register such an invasion of hostile chemical and radioactive toxicity even though radiation detectors will not.
Gundersen understandably would have a hard time telling people how bad it really is. He is not a doctor but he knows full well what only one particle of plutonium will do to surrounding lung tissues. How does anyone tell 200 million people to get out of Dodge or tell them it’s already too late since health-damaging contamination has already taken place?
Evacuation is the only way to avoid continued exposure but hardly anyone perceives it this way. I received a letter from someone in southern California today asking if it was okay to go to Hawaii for a vacation. My real answer to her was you should abandon not only your travel plans but also your home in L.A. and move to the southern hemisphere.
“Geiger counters simply cannot measure whether or not someone has ingested a hot particle but we know they’re here because the air filters have measured these radioactive particles and they’ve been found in the topsoil, in water supplies and in the milk produced on both coasts of the U.S. This suggests that the same would be true of the meat of any livestock raised outdoors—and of the vegetables grown outdoors,” says Gundersen.
Hot Particle
Photo by Del Tredici,Burdens of Proofby Tim Connor,
Energy Research Foundation (1997)
A photograph of a monkey’s lung is shown, with a major depression at its center where a “hot particle” is embedded in the tissue. This is a photo of a “hot particle”, in this case a one-micron particle of plutonium, and it shows the alpha tracks emitted from that particle in one year. This particle has bombarded the surrounding tissue with radiation and damaged it quite dramatically—just one particle. Gundersen says the body will fight off an irritant such as this and it will usually win but sometimes a hot particle will cause cancer. They will all put wear and tear on infected people’s immune systems.
You really do not want even one of these hot
little pieces of sun burning in your tissues.
Plutonium in Lung Tissue: The dark, star-like image in the above photograph (magnified 500 times) shows tracks from alpha particles radiating from a speck of plutonium lodged in the lung tissue of an ape. Alpha radiation from plutonium and other alpha-emitting radionuclides can be blocked by skin or even a piece of paper but it is the most biologically destructive form of ionizing radiation when the alpha-emitting substance is deposited in the soft tissue of internal organs like the lung. The alpha tracks shown above were captured over a two-day period.
These hot particles result in an
intense but highly localized irradiation.
The damaged number three reactor was in its first fuel cycle using MOX nuclear fuel with plutonium. If this MOX reactor goes into full meltdown spewing plutonium dust across Japan and everywhere else, it is lights out via cancer for anyone who breathes the stuff. The half-life of various plutonium isotopes ranges from minutes to 80 million years. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years meaning it takes that long to lose half of its radioactive potency—nothing compared to depleted uranium, which counts its time in billions of years. Uranium-235 has a half-life of 700 million years. And caesium, which tends to go airborne easily, has a half-life of 30 years.
The fuel rods at all six reactors at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi complex contain plutonium. Only six percent of the fuel rods at the plant’s unit 3 were a mixture of plutonium-239 and uranium-235 when first put into operation. The fuel in other reactors is only uranium, but plutonium is created during the fission process. This means the fuel in all of the stricken reactors and spent fuel pools contain plutonium. Plutonium is super nasty stuff, especially damaging to lungs and kidneys. Inhaling or ingesting only one radioactive particle of plutonium can cause cancer.
Valley of Death
In Nuclear Toxicity Syndrome you will read about the dangers we are all facing, especially for those billions who live in the northern hemisphere. If you have not noticed, things are getting real dangerous out there and the media is going to make sure you are blindsided by events they will not inform you of until it is too late.
This is a tough book and it’s going to face you with some very frightening information. Though the main thrust is nuclear radiation, we also will look at mercury as an invisible chemical cloud that has contaminated everything. Lead too is still a problem but they don’t inject lead into babies or plant it in people’s mouths like they do with mercury, a heavy metal more toxic than lead.
Would you believe they are just now finally stopping the use of a drug (another heavy metal actually) that farmers have given to chickens for decades. Arsenic is being pulled off the market after federal scientists found a potentially carcinogenic form of arsenic in the livers of animals treated with the substance.
In the past two and a half years thousands of workers, villagers and children in at least nine of mainland China’s 31 province-level regions have been found to be suffering from toxic levels of lead exposure, mostly caused by pollution from battery factories and metal smelters.
In many areas of the world people are already at death’s door from chemical and heavy metal pollution. Pollution has reached a zenith and has gone even higher with huge forest fires that have released huge amounts of radioactive and chemically contaminated soil into the atmosphere. Then we added mega oil disasters and now nuclear hell on earth. Is there any nice way to refer to this disaster? Look at that video again above that is a vision of what human darkness can conjure up.
We might as well have shot ourselves in the head. There is nothing for us humans to be proud of if we honestly sweep our minds across reality as it is presenting itself to us this year. For infants it’s a terrible valley of death we have created for them. As we shall see for years all of them have been born with already polluted bloodstreams and now the very young ones are dying in greater numbers since Fukushima blew up.
View Article With Links HERE
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
What The Fukushima Is Going On In Omaha?
Local Talk News
Marvin Wolf
In the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japanese officials assured everyone that everything was alright; everything was under control, that the problem was limited and controllable. It took a few days for that lie to fall apart.
This time, it may be our turn. Something bad is happening in Nebraska. A state of emergency was declared for two counties where two nuclear plants are located - one at the Fort Calhoun nuclear facility and one at the Cooper Nuclear Station near Brownsville. Due to flooding from the Missouri River, some kind of emergency event is happening or about to happen there. The government is telling us not to worry, that there are just some precautionary measures going on to prevent a disaster from happening because of the flooding.
Makeshift barriers have been erected at the Fort Calhoun plant because the current river level is two feet above the ground level of the plant. At the Cooper facility, another three inches of water and the facility will be closed. There were two tornadoes in the area a few days ago with winds of 85 mph.
Without the barriers, the plants would be, as we call it, under water, which is part of what caused the problem at Fukushima. Water plus radioactivity creates radioactive water, or radioactive steam, which radiation can turn into hydrogen and oxygen which have a habit of, as we call it, exploding.
The government is telling us not to panic. All is under control, just like in Japan. But here are a few troubling inconsistencies. One, the Red Cross shelter next to the Fort Calhoun plant has been closed. They claim it was due to “decreased need.” During a flood? Now there is a no-fly zone around the plant. Then there is the disturbing news that the spent fuel rod pool was so full that they store the surplus fuel rods in a dry storage area outside the safety of the pool. How long will that area stay dry and what happens if it gets wet? One reporter claims the dry storage bunker is now half-submerged. One of the intake structures is prone to flooding that could affect the water pumps. Non-functional water pumps? Does that sound familiar?
Keep in mind that some flooding was deliberately caused by the Army releasing water from reservoirs to protect them from failing. This has flooded levees. The Army has in the past dynamited levees to direct the water elsewhere - like where poor people live and work - to protect the areas where rich people live and work.
The Russians are concerned. They are reporting that on June 7, there was a nuclear accident at the plant due to the flooding and that the Obama administration has ordered a news blackout. They think there’s a Level Four emergency that is being concealed.
Fort Calhoun is probably not a lot like Fukushima - for one thing, the reactor itself is shut down, so the danger is mostly with spent fuel rods, rather than a meltdown of the reactor itself. Not that fuel rods can’t melt down too - they can. But if something happened, we should be told, right?
Some independent sources reported a fire in an electrical switch room at the plant on Tuesday that shut down the cooling pumps. The accident was corrected in about 90 minutes and there was no large increase in temperature at the pool. So no big deal, right?
Well, the weather report for Nebraska says rain Wednesday (when I wrote this) and a lot more on the weekend. Levees are being breached, dams are overflowing, there’s still a tornado threat, some residents are being evacuated, and the river is still rising. So maybe it is a big deal.
An Associated Press investigation concluded that radioactive tritium has escaped from about three-quarters of our commercial nuclear power plants. The weak spot in most nuclear plants are pipes, and pipes have a habit of leaking or bursting. They believe that when most plants fail to meet standards, the government just lowers the standards or chooses to not enforce them. Isn’t that a comforting thought?
We have a nuclear plant close to us at Indian Point, New York, which was erected near two earthquake fault lines. Whoops.
In Japan, the internet gave us more reliable news than the mainstream media, and a lot sooner too. The Hawaii News Daily was reporting on this accident since June 14, but regular media seem slow or unwilling to investigate. For example, early CNN reporting mentioned a flooding risk to their stadium but never mentioned the nuclear power plant. So, is this a National Enquirer style false panic story, or a real conspiracy theory full scale news event? I guess we’ll find out by next week. You can’t hide something like this forever. Japan tried, and failed. Until then, carry an umbrella, and maybe a Geiger counter.
View Original Article HERE
Related:
Fukushima in Nebraska? Raging Flood Waters Threaten Nuclear Catastrophe
Los Alamos nuclear lab: New Mexico fire forces closure
Why are Nuclear Power Plants throughout the U.S. having problems, besides the ones being flooded out?
Marvin Wolf
In the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japanese officials assured everyone that everything was alright; everything was under control, that the problem was limited and controllable. It took a few days for that lie to fall apart.
This time, it may be our turn. Something bad is happening in Nebraska. A state of emergency was declared for two counties where two nuclear plants are located - one at the Fort Calhoun nuclear facility and one at the Cooper Nuclear Station near Brownsville. Due to flooding from the Missouri River, some kind of emergency event is happening or about to happen there. The government is telling us not to worry, that there are just some precautionary measures going on to prevent a disaster from happening because of the flooding.
Makeshift barriers have been erected at the Fort Calhoun plant because the current river level is two feet above the ground level of the plant. At the Cooper facility, another three inches of water and the facility will be closed. There were two tornadoes in the area a few days ago with winds of 85 mph.
Without the barriers, the plants would be, as we call it, under water, which is part of what caused the problem at Fukushima. Water plus radioactivity creates radioactive water, or radioactive steam, which radiation can turn into hydrogen and oxygen which have a habit of, as we call it, exploding.
The government is telling us not to panic. All is under control, just like in Japan. But here are a few troubling inconsistencies. One, the Red Cross shelter next to the Fort Calhoun plant has been closed. They claim it was due to “decreased need.” During a flood? Now there is a no-fly zone around the plant. Then there is the disturbing news that the spent fuel rod pool was so full that they store the surplus fuel rods in a dry storage area outside the safety of the pool. How long will that area stay dry and what happens if it gets wet? One reporter claims the dry storage bunker is now half-submerged. One of the intake structures is prone to flooding that could affect the water pumps. Non-functional water pumps? Does that sound familiar?
Keep in mind that some flooding was deliberately caused by the Army releasing water from reservoirs to protect them from failing. This has flooded levees. The Army has in the past dynamited levees to direct the water elsewhere - like where poor people live and work - to protect the areas where rich people live and work.
The Russians are concerned. They are reporting that on June 7, there was a nuclear accident at the plant due to the flooding and that the Obama administration has ordered a news blackout. They think there’s a Level Four emergency that is being concealed.
Fort Calhoun is probably not a lot like Fukushima - for one thing, the reactor itself is shut down, so the danger is mostly with spent fuel rods, rather than a meltdown of the reactor itself. Not that fuel rods can’t melt down too - they can. But if something happened, we should be told, right?
Some independent sources reported a fire in an electrical switch room at the plant on Tuesday that shut down the cooling pumps. The accident was corrected in about 90 minutes and there was no large increase in temperature at the pool. So no big deal, right?
Well, the weather report for Nebraska says rain Wednesday (when I wrote this) and a lot more on the weekend. Levees are being breached, dams are overflowing, there’s still a tornado threat, some residents are being evacuated, and the river is still rising. So maybe it is a big deal.
An Associated Press investigation concluded that radioactive tritium has escaped from about three-quarters of our commercial nuclear power plants. The weak spot in most nuclear plants are pipes, and pipes have a habit of leaking or bursting. They believe that when most plants fail to meet standards, the government just lowers the standards or chooses to not enforce them. Isn’t that a comforting thought?
We have a nuclear plant close to us at Indian Point, New York, which was erected near two earthquake fault lines. Whoops.
In Japan, the internet gave us more reliable news than the mainstream media, and a lot sooner too. The Hawaii News Daily was reporting on this accident since June 14, but regular media seem slow or unwilling to investigate. For example, early CNN reporting mentioned a flooding risk to their stadium but never mentioned the nuclear power plant. So, is this a National Enquirer style false panic story, or a real conspiracy theory full scale news event? I guess we’ll find out by next week. You can’t hide something like this forever. Japan tried, and failed. Until then, carry an umbrella, and maybe a Geiger counter.
View Original Article HERE
Related:
Fukushima in Nebraska? Raging Flood Waters Threaten Nuclear Catastrophe
Los Alamos nuclear lab: New Mexico fire forces closure
Why are Nuclear Power Plants throughout the U.S. having problems, besides the ones being flooded out?
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