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Documentary tells story of Mars Bluff incident | SCNow
Many Pee Dee residents recall the details of the incident that occurred on March 11, 1958, in Mars Bluff.
Now, with the production of a documentary examining the aftermath of the day a 3-ton unarmed nuclear bomb was accidentally dropped on a family’s farm a few miles outside of Florence, the story is coming full circle.
Part of the ETV series Carolina Stories, “The Incident at Mars Bluff” tells the story of the Gregg family from that fateful day when their house and all their belongings were destroyed, through their struggles to receive fair compensation from the U.S. Air Force.
On Sunday, approximately 30 people attended a free screening of the program at the Florence County library and Matt Burrows, the director and producer of the documentary, was on hand to field questions about the project.
Nuclear scars: Tainted water runs beneath Nevada desert -- latimes.com
Reporting from Yucca Flat, Nev. - A sea of ancient water tainted by the Cold War is creeping deep under the volcanic peaks, dry lake beds and pinyon pine forests covering a vast tract of Nevada.
Over 41 years, the federal government detonated 921 nuclear warheads underground at the Nevada Test Site, 75 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Each explosion deposited a toxic load of radioactivity into the ground and, in some cases, directly into aquifers.
When testing ended in 1992, the Energy Department estimated that more than 300 million curies of radiation had been left behind, making the site one of the most radioactively contaminated places in the nation.
During the era of weapons testing, Nevada embraced its role almost like a patriotic duty. There seemed to be no better use for an empty desert. But today, as Nevada faces a water crisis and
Full text of "Marine bioligist and environmentalist : oral history transcript : pycnogonids, progress, and preserving bays, salmon, and other living things / 1996"
Hedgpeth and McGraw family history; childhood in Oakland and the Sierra foothills; studies in biology at UC Berkeley, University of Texas; comments on Monterey Bay marine biologist Ed Ricketts, Steinbeck character and ecologist; founding the Society for the Prevention of Progress, revising Between Pacific Tides; Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 1950s; director, University of the Pacific's Pacific Marine Station, Dillon Beach, 1957-1965; discusses opposition to Pacific Gas & Electric Company's proposed nuclear power plant at Bodega Bay, CA, 1957-1964; director of Oregon State University's Marine Science Center, 1965-1973; pycnogonid (sea spider) research, lifelong and worldwide; research trips to Antarctica; estuarine studies; research and testifying on San Francisco Bay and Delta environmental issues.
Daily Kos: State of the Nation
Way back when I was in college, someone gave me a book that they thought I should read. "You've been working with plutonium, and you have an interest in nuclear weapons. You really ought to read this book." The book was The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes. He was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for that book, and it is well deserved. It's my belief that anyone who wants to truly understand the American legacy of the first two nuclear bombs, and the consequences of their use, should read that book, as well as Rhodes two subsequent books on nuclear weapons: Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, and Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race.
Since I've been writing quite a bit about current-day nuclear weapons issues, I thought it would be good to step back and take a look at the big picture again. What better way to do that than to talk to Richard Rhodes, nuclear weapons historian and journalist extraordinaire?
Toxic waste trickles toward New Mexico's water sources -- latimes.com
More than 60 years after scientists assembled the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, lethal waste is seeping from mountain burial sites and moving toward aquifers, springs and streams that provide water to 250,000 residents of northern New Mexico.
Isolated on a high plateau, the Los Alamos National Laboratory seemed an ideal place to store a bomb factory's deadly debris. But the heavily fractured mountains haven't contained the waste, some of which has trickled down hundreds of feet to the edge of the Rio Grande, one of the most important water sources in the Southwest.
So far, the level of contamination in the Rio Grande has not been high enough to raise health concerns. But the monitoring of runoff in canyons that drain into the river has found unsafe concentrations of organic compounds such as perchlorate, an ingredient in rocket propellent, and various radioactive byproducts of nuclear fission.
Toxic legacy of the Cold War -- latimes.com
Reporting from Fernald Preserve, Ohio - Amid the family farms and rolling terrain of southern Ohio, one hill stands out for its precise geometry.
The 65-foot-high mound stretching more than half a mile dominates a tract of northern hardwoods, prairie grasses and swampy ponds, known as the Fernald Preserve.
Contrary to appearances, there is nothing natural here. The high ground is filled with radioactive debris, scooped from the soil around a former uranium foundry that produced crucial parts for the nation's nuclear weapons program.
A $4.4-billion cleanup transformed Fernald from a dangerously contaminated factory complex into an environmental showcase. But it is "clean" only by the terms of a legal agreement. Its soils contain many times the natural amounts of radioactivity, and a plume of tainted water extends underground about a mile.
Nobody can ever safely live here, federal scientists say, and the site will have to be closely monitored essentially forever.
The Snake River Alliance, Idaho's anti-nuclear watchdog, turns 30 | Local News | Idaho Statesman
The anti-nuclear Snake River Alliance got its start on a bench at Boise's Julia Davis Park
The Snake River Alliance has brought a lot of good music to Idaho. Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and Carole King gave a benefit concert in 1981 at Boise State. King returned for a benefit at Boise High School in 1984.
Browne and Raitt returned in 1996 for a Stop the Shipments benefit concert. Hailey resident Steve Miller performed for the group's 25th anniversary in 2004.
When Raitt and Taj Mahal performed this summer at the Idaho Botanical Garden, the Snake River Alliance was invited to set up an information table.
Rocky Barker
None of its founders can remember the actual date of the Snake River Alliance's first meeting in 1979.
It was in the spring, soon after the Three Mile Island Reactor in Pennsylvania partially melted down, raising fears nationwide about nuclear power. A report by U.S. Geological Survey scientist Jack Barraclough had just been made public showing iodine 129 in concentrations more than 25 times the allowable standards for drinking water near a well at the Idaho National Laboratory in eastern Idaho.
asahi.com: Atomic power safety questions still unanswered - English
Ten years after a nuclear accident killed two plant workers and shattered the "safety myth" surrounding atomic power generation, Japan still has much work to do in improving responses to cases of radiation exposure.
Experts and officials say the number of doctors and facilities that can provide emergency care is still insufficient, while more has to be done to prevent and respond to radiation emergencies.
The incident, at the JCO Co. nuclear fuel processing plant in Tokai, Ibaraki Prefecture, on Sept. 30, 1999, was the nation's first "criticality accident," a term used to describe the unintentional triggering of a nuclear chain reaction in fissile material.
Details shed light on end of nuclear monopoly - JSOnline
Even before its first Alamogordo test, the atomic bomb was the highest-stakes game around. It still is. At the July 1945 Potsdam Conference, President Harry Truman followed a careful plan to tell Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
In "Red Cloud at Dawn," Princeton University history professor Michael D. Gordin quotes Truman's interpreter, Charles "Chip" Bohlen, who watched out of earshot: "Truman said he would stroll over to Stalin and nonchalantly inform him. He instructed me not to accompany him . . . because he did not want to indicate there was anything particularly momentous" about it. "So it was . . . the Russian interpreter who translated.
The shared sins of Soviet and U.S. nuclear testing | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Gerald Sperling's new film, Silent Bombs: All for the Motherland, recounts the effects of decades of nuclear testing on Kazakh villagers near the Soviet nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk. The film is at once very particular to Kazakhstan, the exotic ambience of which is evoked with a sad lyricism, and, in a disturbing way, generic to the nuclear age. It evokes something that is simultaneously strange and familiar.
The Soviets tested around 500 nuclear weapons in northeastern Kazakhstan between 1949 and 1989. Until 1963 the tests were all aboveground. Some of these tests left behind massive craters that have become atomic lakes. Even when testing moved underground, tests often vented, according to the filmmakers.
The world's worst radiation hotspot - The Independent
At the start of the Cold War, Stalin chose one of the furthest outposts of his empire to test the Soviet Union's first nuclear bombs. Sixty years on, their cancerous legacy is still being felt. Jerome Taylor reports from Kurchatov
Nemytov Oleg, a radiologist at the National Nuclear Centre checks is Geiger meter at the epicentre of the first nuclear test conducted by the Soviets on 29 August 1949.
Walking through the flat and endless Kazakh steppe, Nemytov Oleg suddenly stops, fumbles in his desert camouflage trousers and pulls out a Geiger counter. The device bleeps into life. He peers pensively at the reading. When we got out of the car it read 3. Now, within a couple of hundred yards, it has jumped to 10. He unwraps breathing masks and two pairs of disposable shoe coverings. "If we want to go any further we will have to wear these," he says.
Further along the dusty road he checks his device once more. "You see, the meter is now reading 21," he says. "If we were in a city far away from here it would read about 0.1. The radiation increases very quickly."
'Exposed' tells the downwinder story | The Spectrum
The Salt Lake City-based journalist was working on a manuscript for a nonfiction book about the nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site and the downwinders who attribute various health problems to those tests.
During the research she told an actress about her own personal battle against thyroid cancer. It is one of the diseases eligible for compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990 for people who lived in certain geographic areas during the Cold War-era above ground testing.
Dickson's sister, Ann, also passed away from complications of lupus. Some downwinders and doctors believe there may be a connection between the testing and autoimmune diseases like lupus but there is no proof.
40 years later, dust still hasn't settled from Project Rulison nuclear blast
The ground rippled when a nuclear blast shattered the earth beneath Doghead Mountain south of Rulison 40 years ago, witnesses remember.
“It was an ocean wave that came across the valley, and you could see it coming at you clear as a bell,” said Cristy Koeneke, who was a college freshman watching the detonation of Project Rulison from an observation tent set up several miles away, across the Colorado River.
The Project Rulison experiment was conducted Sept. 10, 1969. The federal government and private companies were trying to free natural gas from underground sandstone formations. The experiment continues to cause reverberations today because of the nuclear contamination it left behind.
The gas Project Rulison produced was less than anticipated and too radioactive to use. But hydraulic fracturing subsequently has unlocked the enormous gas reserves in the Rulison area and elsewhere in the Piceance Basin
The Energy Daily: Ten-Year Probe Offers First View Of Los Alamos Releases
After 10 years of sifting through thousands of pages of classified records and overcoming secrecy obstacles at the nuclear weapons lab, independent investigators have provided the first rough estimates of radioactive and toxic releases from Los Alamos National Laboratory dating back to its earliest operations and the potential health impact of the nation’s first atomic bomb blast on ranchers and other nearby residents in New Mexico.
Investigators for the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment (LAHDRA) project released a draft final report in late June that—while far from definitive in its conclusions—said there was persuasive evidence from spotty, decades-old emissions monitoring data that radioactive releases during Los Alamos’ early years were so significant that they could dwarf the cumulative releases from all of the Energy Department’s other early nuclear weapons production sites.
In particular, the researchers said that although the lab did not monitor emissions from many of its earliest plutonium processing facilities, fragmentary records—especially “industrial hygiene,” or worker safety, reports from 1955 and 1956—suggest plutonium releases in the late 1940s and early 1950s were much higher than has been acknowledged by the government to date.
Al Jazeera - Kazakhstan's nuclear curse
Kazakhstan's nuclear curse
Sixty years have passed since the former Soviet Union detonated its first experimental nuclear bomb in eastern Kazakhstan.
Al Jazeera's Robin Forestier Walker visits the highly contaminated test site, Polygon, and the surrounding area where effects of the experiments can still be seen.
Cancer rates in the area are 1.5 times higher than in the rest of the country, and the region has high levels of early mortality from a range of common diseases.
Doctors say more research is urgently needed to understand how the 40 years of nuclear tests could harm the children of tomorrow.
The report features an interview with Rebecca Johnson, the director of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy, who has conducted research in Kazakhstan's Semei region.
Saul Landau: The Nuclear Gang Rides Again
A group of scientists, military officials and government bureaucrats signed an informal pact with the devil. The contract became public in August 1945, when U.S. bombers nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Since then, no other nation has used a nuclear weapon, but thousands of radiation-emitting tests have occurred and nuclear energy plants mushroomed, with promises of cheap, safe and clean power. Over the decades, however, “the nuclear industry” has faced repeated cost over-runs, and serious “accidents.” Thousands died at the Chernobyl power plant (Ukraine) and a near catastrophe occurred at the Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania) facility. Air Force planes dropped H bombs in the ocean off the Spanish coast and innumerable leaks, fires and “mishaps” occurred routinely at military and civilian nuclear installations.
Taking Stock After America’s Worst Nuclear Accident | Miller-McCune Online Magazine
Human error helped worsen a nuclear meltdown just outside Los Angeles, and now human inertia has stymied the radioactive cleanup for half a century.
"During an inspection of fuel elements on July 26 at the Sodium Reactor Experiment, operated for the Atomic Energy Commission at Santa Susana, California by Atomics International, a division of North American Aviation, Inc., a parted fuel element was observed.
The pure horror of Hiroshima | The Japan Times Online
In 1946, just after the first anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima, "The New Yorker" magazine's Aug. 31 issue published the complete text of John Hersey's portrait of the atom bomb and its effects on the Japanese city.
At the end of the war, in 1945, Hersey was in Japan writing about the reconstruction of the devastated country when he happened across an account written by a Jesuit priest who had survived the Hiroshima destruction. It was he who introduced the reporter to other survivors.
From these, Hersey chose six individuals: two doctors, a minister, a widowed seamstress, a young woman who worked in a factory, and the priest himself. These became the principal characters in an account that melded nonfiction reportage with the stylistic devices of the novel, all expressed through the plainest of styles.
Japan, Kazakhstan share fate as nuclear victims | The Japan Times Online
A three-part exhibit titled "Against Nuclear Arms" opened Monday at the United Nations as testament to the victims of the atomic bombings in Japan and 40 years of nuclear tests carried out in Kazakhstan.
The exhibit is being presented by the Japan and Kazakhstan missions as part of ongoing efforts for nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation. It will be on display until Sept. 30.
SF Rich peoples houses on pacific
It may have been the rails of the Pacific Street cable car which spurred the opening of Pacific Heights west of Van Ness in late 1800’s, or simply the on going westward expansion to accommodate San Francisco’s continuing growth after the Gold Rush. Since then, our neighborhood has been distinguished by a colorful and often famous cast of characters. We have also seen an intriguing architectural evolution as the elegance of corner Victorian mansions and homes yielded to the tasteful apartments and coops of the early 1900’s and finally the high rise residences of today.
This note comments on a few of those colorful and famous characters as well as portrays them and the homes, in which they lived and played. It is meant to accompany the images of http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/rpjhand@pacbell.net/slideshow?.dir=/c53d&.src=ph. These images are mostly grouped by families and provide a view of old homes, people, new homes and panoramas over past century in area bounded by Pacific, Gough, Laguna and Sacramento. Related image groupings of Lafayette Park are at http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/rpjhand@pacbell.net/slideshow?.dir=/3db6&.src=ph and of Broadway Pacific are at http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/rpjhand@pacbell.net/slideshow?.dir=/1798&.src=ph. Similar material for Van Ness - Franklin and other neighborhoods may be assembled later.
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