RADIOACTIVE NIAGARA?

Even Low-Level Radioactivity Is Damaging, Scientists Conclude

Science Daily (Nov. 13, 2012) — Even the very lowest levels of radiation are harmful to life, scientists have concluded in the Cambridge Philosophical Society's journal Biological Reviews. Reporting the results of a wide-ranging analysis of 46 peer-reviewed studies published over the past 40 years, researchers from the University of South Carolina and the University of Paris-Sud found that variation in low-level, natural background radiation was found to have small, but highly statistically significant, negative effects on DNA as well as several measures of health.

The review is a meta-analysis of studies of locations around the globe that have very high natural background radiation as a result of the minerals in the ground there, including Ramsar, Iran, Mombasa, Kenya, Lodeve, France, and Yangjiang, China. These, and a few other geographic locations with natural background radiation that greatly exceeds normal amounts, have long drawn scientists intent on understanding the effects of radiation on life. Individual studies by themselves, however, have often only shown small effects on small populations from which conclusive statistical conclusions were difficult to draw.

"When you're looking at such small effect sizes, the size of the population you need to study is huge," said co-author Timothy Mousseau, a biologist in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Carolina. "Pooling across multiple studies, in multiple areas, and in a rigorous statistical manner provides a tool to really get at these questions about low-level radiation."

Mousseau and co-author Anders Møller of the University of Paris-Sud combed the scientific literature, examining more than 5,000 papers involving natural background radiation that were narrowed to 46 for quantitative comparison. The selected studies all examined both a control group and a more highly irradiated population and quantified the size of the radiation levels for each. Each paper also reported test statistics that allowed direct comparison between the studies.
The organisms studied included plants and animals, but had a large preponderance of human subjects. Each study examined one or more possible effects of radiation, such as DNA damage measured in the lab, prevalence of a disease such as Down's Syndrome, or the sex ratio produced in offspring. For each effect, a statistical algorithm was used to generate a single value, the effect size, which could be compared across all the studies.
The scientists reported significant negative effects in a range of categories, including immunology, physiology, mutation and disease occurrence. The frequency of negative effects was beyond that of random chance.
"There's been a sentiment in the community that because we don't see obvious effects in some of these places, or that what we see tends to be small and localized, that maybe there aren't any negative effects from low levels of radiation," said Mousseau. "But when you do the meta-analysis, you do see significant negative effects."
"It also provides evidence that there is no threshold below which there are no effects of radiation," he added. "A theory that has been batted around a lot over the last couple of decades is the idea that is there a threshold of exposure below which there are no negative consequences. These data provide fairly strong evidence that there is no threshold -- radiation effects are measurable as far down as you can go, given the statistical power you have at hand."
Mousseau hopes their results, which are consistent with the "linear-no-threshold" model for radiation effects, will better inform the debate about exposure risks. "With the levels of contamination that we have seen as a result of nuclear power plants, especially in the past, and even as a result of Chernobyl and Fukushima and related accidents, there's an attempt in the industry to downplay the doses that the populations are getting, because maybe it's only one or two times beyond what is thought to be the natural background level," he said. "But they're assuming the natural background levels are fine."
"And the truth is, if we see effects at these low levels, then we have to be thinking differently about how we develop regulations for exposures, and especially intentional exposures to populations, like the emissions from nuclear power plants, medical procedures, and even some x-ray machines at airports."

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==
lou ricciuti,
http://www.ask.ne.jp/~hankaku/english/niagara_fall.html,
http://www.iicph.org, www.artvoice.com, Union of Concerned Scientists,
** Niagara Falls - Lewiston - Porter, New York, "Los Alamos East,"
* The free world's largest ore-to-metal uranium production center.
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Scroll to reference: "Sites and Contractors - Appendix A,"

** "Electro Metallurgical Company (Niagara Falls, New York), a subsidiary of Union Carbide, was the MED's largest ore-to-metal uranium production plant. From 1942 to 1953, the plant processed uranium tetrafluoride (green salt, UF4) into uranium metal. The plant was also called the Union Carbide and Chemical Electro-Metallurgical Division Works." http://www.hss.energy.gov/healthsafety/ohre/new/findingaids/epidemiologic/orise/app.html,
United States Department of Energy - Office of Health, Safety and Security,
Office of Human Radiation Experiments, Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education.
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** In Western New York state more than a dozen commercial production and experimental Manhattan Engineering District (MED) -- Manhattan Project, Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), US-ERDA - Energy Research and Development Agency, USDOE - Department Of Energy, and GoCo [government owned, contractor operated] related manufactories, foundries and laboratories.
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Local-to-Soil Burials include: Element 94 - Pu from Human Radiation Experiments (HREX) and related lab equipment, one-third to one-half of the world's mined supply of radium 226 and related uranium residues and processing wastes including Sengier's Congolese -- Afrimet K-65 (60-65% uranium), Apollo Lunar Project moon fuel & mass- perchlorate production, burn-offs and burials, Tom Brokaw's "disposed-of" office, irradiated heavy-equipment Case 450 front-loader buried whole, 38' diameter metallic Hortonsphere (suspected early experimental reactor use), along with burials of graphite, zirconium and other reactive, solid, sintered, powdered metallic, chemical and radiological materials.

From Obstruction to Gridlock

Of course the next post will be "From Gridlock to admitting we live in a rigidly class divided society." But prior to that,let's look into the future. Present "gridlock" is occurring in that nothing is happening politically; no one is thinking; the talking heads are still talking about Romney's funeral, the catch-22 the Republican party(or should I say 'rich class mouthpiece') finds itself caught in, or, even Thanksgiving, or Black Friday. Now the Repub's have found another target, Susan Rice.The Repub's will latch onto anything, even secession from the union movements, to detract from the political matters at hand.  It doesn't seem to matter that a look backward at such obstructionist tactics, if not strategy, show them for what they are.  In fact 'gridlock' is a strategy for the Repub's.  Such resistance and non-cooperation as politics is dangerous yet revealing of the impotence, the effete and enervated character of "republicanism" today.  So while backroom meetings haggle of the so-called 'fiscal cliff'--another scare tactic to allow the parties to get away with doing nothing of ultimate political value or significance--democracy continues to degrade, and de-politicization of the masses becomes more subtle and deepens. So looking into our political future is the same as looking into our past.  Given that facts don't matter in politics these days, an irrationalist nihilism tightens its grip and normality becomes a zombification of the normal in which most agree with Jack Nicholson when he said, "this is as good as it gets."  So money continues to 'matter' more than ever and what really matters doesn't seem to be real. 

OBSTRUCTIONISM BEGINS WITH BENGHAZI

Investigating the Benghazi incident is one thing. Making it a matter of cynical hyperbole for the media machine and red meat for the unrequited right wing is another matter. The Republican lynch mob rhetoric makes anyone aware of the last four years of Republican obstructionism suspicious that we are in for more of the same--more subtle and less blatantly bold but still obstructionist in spirit. The state of the nation-state may actually move them to at least appear as if they are doing something. At least a bone will be thrown to the people. Yet it won't be sufficient to deal with the continuing crisis of an impotent Liberalism hog tied by a capitalism run out of ideas. The only support they have from "the people" to continue such anti-democratic if not unconstitutional behavior is from the likes of the fringe of the fringe Conservative Majority Fund. In other words the Republicans are out on a limb without any net. Furthermore, if Elizabeth Warren manages to push through filibuster reform, the bland Old Party will have one less tool to prevent the system from having some semblance of usefulness in reducing the misery of the 20 million or so out of work and possibly soon out of hope. Stopping progress is easy for the 1%. They can wait indefinitely for the masses to flip flop and return them to power once again. Possibly,, however, the new young Republicans will force the hand of their party's establishment. But what they can imagine themselves to be beyond a front for the rich is yet to be seen. Their talk regarding acknowledging and responding to the "the new demographics" of the country hardly makes space for the re-visioning of conservatism. This would amount to old policies and attitudes with only new strategies and tactics to presumably maneuver the masses into acceptance of an apparent alternative once Obama's efforts prove to be relatively futile and, in effect, more of the same managerial liberalism and obsolete empire building and global policing.

RADIOACTIVE NIAGARA

RE-PRINTED FROM ARTVOICE: On Tuesday afternoon, lawyers for Man O’ Trees, the company that three years ago won the ill-fated contract to reconstruct a deeply contaminated stretch of Lewiston Road in Niagara Falls, filed a lawsuit against the City of Niagara Falls; its mayor, Paul Dyster; the Niagara Falls City Council as a body and its individual members; the city’s engineers and lawyers; and a host of its consultants. The 105-page complaint alleges a multitude of sins, ranging from conspiracy to fraud to breach of contract. The lawsuit’s allegations, in a nutshell: • The above-named defendants were eager both to repair a road that had been deteriorating for decades and to address the radioactive contamination that studies indicated lay beneath the pavement. • Because it would be difficult for the cash-strapped city to win federal or state funds for an expensive environmental remediation project, officials set their eyes instead of plentiful federal stimulus dollars available for road work. • City officials therefore underplayed the environmental remediation aspect of the job, characterizing it as a road reconstruction project. • Thus, the specifications of the job conveyed to bidders were designed to make the bidders think they were engaging a road project. • For example, contractors were told they “may encounter up to 500 cubic yards of radioactive material” and advised to budget $500,000 for its removal and disposal; in fact, by the time Man O’ Trees had completed 30 percent of the job, the contractor had removed nearly 3,000 cubic yards of radioactive material at a cost of $4 million. • The bid documents also failed to indicate that the winning contractor would need to have a Radioactive Material Handling License from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation; only after Man O’ Trees had won the bid was the company told that it would need to acquire that license, which delayed the beginning of work on the project for six months. • The defendants misrepresented the variety of and danger posed by the radioactive contaminants, referring to it sweepingly as low-level “radioactive slag”; in fact, Man O’ Trees encountered thorium and uranium isotopes consistent with the region’s industrial history, especially its engagement in early efforts to produce materials for atomic weapons and reactors. • The city’s consultants set a removal threshold for radioactive waste at 9,000 counts per minute, more than twice the “ambient radiation levels in the area.” Even that material was taken to a way-station and “further investigated” by the city’s consulting engineers, from the firm Wendel Duchscherer, to determine whether the waste should be shipped to a disposal facility or returned to the ground. In one case, the lawsuit alleges, Man O’ Trees was instructed to return waste that measured 80,000 counts per minute to the ground, rather than dispose of it. • The lawsuit also alleges that Man O’ Trees was ordered by the city and its consultants to ignore areas where radiation levels measured “in excess of 180,000 [counts per minute] and in one report almost 300,000 [counts per minute].” • The city and its consultants refused requests by Man O’ Trees to establish a written protocol for handling radioactive waste as it was encountered. • A city engineer, Tom Radomski, who lived on Lewiston Road at the time the project started, allegedly ordered his property remediated. then moved his family to Lewiston, and was subsequently fired for failure to meet the city’s residency requirement for some employees. We’ll post the entire lawsuit and its supporting exhibits, along with further analysis, on AV Daily at Artvoice.com. On June 22, the City of Niagara Falls filed a complaint against Man O’ Trees for breach of contract, essentially accusing the company of abandoning the job. That accusation is not without merit: When it became clear that the city was not going to pay Man O’ Trees $2.9 million the company’s owner, David “Bear” Pfeiffer, felt it was owed for removing radioactive waste, and when negotiations to resolve the endless disputes the project engendered came to naught, and when the city and its consultants began to limit his employees’ access to the work site, Pfeiffer told us that he ordered his men off the job. But the equipment and materials remained, because, according to Niagara Falls attorney John Bartolomei, who is representing Man O’ Trees, Pfeiffer hoped eventually to reach a deal that would allow the work to continue. Instead the city sued and prepared new bid materials, hoping to hire a new contractor to finish the job. In those bid documents, Bartolomei says, the city maintains that the contractor may encounter as much as 150 cubic yards of radioactive waste—another lowball figure, according to Bartolomei, which proves the point of the lawsuit: The city does not want this project to be characterized as a cleanup, no matter how much radioactive waste material it uncovers, because it can only fund a road project. The new bid documents also do not require the new contractor to obtain a license to handle radioactive material. In the new bid documents, the city informed bidders that the materials and equipment Man O’ Trees left on site would be available for their use. On Friday and Saturday, Pfeiffer and his employees responded by returning to the site to remove their possessions, including heavy equipment, precipitating a showdown with police and city officials. Police impounded a front-loader, under orders from city officials, who argued that it was in the city’s right-of-way and lacked a license plate. The lawsuit claims that Man O’ Trees is owed $14 million for work performed, and asks for hundreds of millions more in punitive damages, arguing that the city and its consultants have waged a public war on the company, denigrating the quality of its work in the media. “They’re trying to destroy my company because I’m speaking out about what’s going on up there,” Pfeiffer told Artvoice earlier this summer, in one of several long conversations in which he described how the project went south, and how he became concerned, as both a matter of ethics and liability, for the health of his workers and people living nearby the project, whose own properties were contaminated with radioactive waste. “But I won’t let them ruin me,” he said, “and I won’t be quiet.” Reader Comments

MYOPIC ECONOMICS: Policy for the Rich, Politics as Usual for the People

POSTED AT AlterNet January 22, 2012
The Economic Idiocy of Economists
By Mark Weisbrot, Comment Is Free


The American Economic Association's annual meetings are a scary sight, with thousands of economists all gathered in the same place – a veritable weapon of mass destruction. Chicago was the lucky city for 2012 this past weekend, and I had just finished participating in an interesting panel on "the economics of regime change", when I stumbled over to see what the big budget experts had to say about "the political economy of the US debt and deficits".

The session was introduced by UC Berkeley economist Alan Auerbach, who put up a graph of the United States' rising debt-to-GDP ratio, and warned of dire consequences if Congress didn't do something about it. Yawn.

But the panelists got off to a good start, with Alan Blinder of Princeton, former vice-chairman of the US Federal Reserve, describing the public discussion of the US national debt as generally ranging from "ludicrous to horrific". True, that. He asked and answered four questions.

First, is there any urgency (to reduce the deficit or debt)? No. The government can borrow short term at negative real interest rates, and long-term at about zero. The world is paying us to hold their money. That is anything but a debt crisis. The Fed is out of bullets, he said – referring to the fact that the US Federal Reserve had lowered short-term rates to zero and had used quantitative easing to help keep long-term rates low. So we need more fiscal stimulus, preferably spending that focuses on actually creating jobs. Amen.

Second, should we focus on the next decade? No, he said, and noted that the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO's) budget deficit projections over the next decade are about 3.6% of GDP, which is not much to get agitated about. Also true.

Third, is government spending the problem? No, he said, it's healthcare costs, and mainly the rising price of healthcare (that is, not the ageing of the population). Most important truth yet! (More on this below.)

Fourth, is the public really up in arms about the deficit? No, actually, theycare more about the economy and jobs. As they should.

Blinder concluded that since this is an election year, we can forget about having any fact-based discussion of these issues in 2012. Happy New Year, he said, and the audience laughed. Well, that was refreshing, I thought – an economist telling the unvarnished truth to hundreds of his people at the annual meetings.

But a rapid descent into hell was imminent. Former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin was next, talking about the need to "repair" social security and Medicare. The United States has all the characteristics of countries that run into trouble, he said. Then he warned that the US is going to end up like Greece. This is one of the dumbest things that anyone with an economics degree can say.

Hello, Mr Holtz-Eakin! Have you ever heard of the US dollar, the world's key reserve currency?

The United States is not going to end up like Greece, any sooner than it will end up like Haiti or Burkina Faso. A country that can pay its foreign public debt in its own currency and runs its own central bank does not end up like Greece.

In fact, even Japan is not going to end up like Greece, and Japan has a gross public debt of about 220% of its GDP, more than twice the size of ours and vastly larger – again, relative to its economy – than that of Greece. And the yen is nowhere near the dollar in its importance as an international reserve currency. But the Japanese government is still borrowing at just 1% interest rates for its ten-year bonds.

At this point, it was clear that this panel, other than Blinder, was living in a dystopian fantasy world. Next up was Rudy Penner of the Urban Institute, another former CBO director. His perspective was not much different from that of Auerbach or Holtz-Eakin. He complained about the polarisation of the political process, which prevents the two major parties from reaching an agreement. It's not partisanship, he said: House speaker Tip O'Neill and President Ronald Reagan knew how to be partisan, but they were able to reach agreement on the 1983 social security package and the 1986 tax reforms. And yada yada.

He might have added that we have had 25 years of lying about social security since then, and even Reagan didn't dare try to privatise social security. And, of course, social security can currently pay all promised benefits for the next 24 years without any changes.

These arguments about polarisation really pose the key issue: from the viewpoint of the 99%, it's not polarisation, but weakness in defending our interests that is the problem. President Obama compromised much more than he should have last year, offering cuts to social security and Medicare, in exchange for a long-term budget deal. The 99% are just lucky that the Republicans were too extremist to make this kind of a "grand bargain" with Obama.

The last panelist was Alice Rivlin of the Brookings Institution, another former CBO budget director and Fed vice-chair, as well as a member of the president's (2010) National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. She agreed with Blinder that we need more stimulus. But we can only get this if we agree to long-run spending cuts – including social security, of course. Yuck. This is a political strategy that is sure to end in disaster, given the prevailing state of misinformation and disinformation.

During the discussion, Blinder – who identified himself as a Democrat – expressed his frustration in not being able to convince fellow Democrats to cut social security. Double yuck. The average social security check is about $1,177 a month, and a majority of senior citizens are getting most of their meager income from social security. Why these people insist on creating more poverty among the elderly, especially when the program is solvent for decades to come, is beyond me.

I got to ask the first question for the panel. I called attention to Blinder's presentation of the long-term budget problem as almost completely a problem of the rising price of healthcare. I pointed out that you could take any country with a life expectancy greater than ours – including the other high-income countries – and put their per capita healthcare costs into our budget, and the long-term budget deficit would turn into a surplus.

My question was simple: are Americans so inherently different from other nationalities that we can't have similar healthcare costs? And if not, then why are we talking about long-term budget problems – instead of how to fix our healthcare system?

None of the panelists offered a serious answer to this question. Auerbach, the moderator, said that other countries have rising healthcare costs, too. And some of the others said or implied that healthcare costs were rising at an unsustainable pace worldwide.

But this is nonsense. The United States pays about twice as much per person for healthcare as other high-income countries – and still leaves 50 million people uninsured. This is a result of a dysfunctional healthcare system that has had healthcare prices rising much faster than those of other high-income countries for decades.

What the budget hawks are basically telling us is that we must assume that insurance and pharmaceutical companies will have a veto over the provisions of healthcare reform for decades to come. And that, therefore, we must find other ways to make up for these excessive costs, including cutting social security and other government spending, and pushing us into higher rates of poverty and inequality than we already have.

And even worse in the short run, all this crap about the deficit and the debt will be used to block the necessary stimulus measures – "stimulus" has already become a dirty word that Democratic politicians are afraid to utter. This means high unemployment and a lot of unnecessary misery in the world's richest country for the foreseeable future.

A dismal performance for the dismal science, on some of the most important issues of the day. Of course, there are other economists, including Nobel Prize winners such as Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz and Robert Solow (full disclosure: the latter two are members of CEPR's advisory board), who would offer more sensible views. But this panel was, sadly, representative of economists with the most influence on public policy.

With a brain trust like this, a lost decade for America looks likely – unless the citizenry can steer a different course.

Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He is co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and has written numerous research papers on economic policy. He is also president of Just Foreign Policy.
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