tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62389121762972494412024-03-21T06:08:32.154-07:00Satan's Cauldrons<center>Satan's Cauldrons addresses the nuclear project in its various guises. Nuclear reactors were born of the will to create weapons of immense destructive power three generations ago.
The invisible storm of radioactive atoms now dispersed through land, water and air has grievously poisoned the earth, her creatures and an increasingly ailing humanity.
Yet this insane method of boiling water continues to be championed by those in high places.</center>Vincent Di Stefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09559307846832090756noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6238912176297249441.post-51194711080872072332018-08-06T01:15:00.000-07:002018-08-07T22:41:21.771-07:00Confronting the Unspeakable. Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Beyond<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 1.3pt;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNOf-py9_7NXN6xHMJLvRT4vTmxXPjPGOwWgwTcdBiiFkzLEsixRG6PNo7BaAs_WwKLc5843sv0GtPCbjmHAmtQWrveRgPhmzoUj4KrjV9kHMU0W5brB2x_GmaEnaZ-_GRyNOT93gs2cT4/s1600/Hiroshima.+After+the+Blast.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="640" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNOf-py9_7NXN6xHMJLvRT4vTmxXPjPGOwWgwTcdBiiFkzLEsixRG6PNo7BaAs_WwKLc5843sv0GtPCbjmHAmtQWrveRgPhmzoUj4KrjV9kHMU0W5brB2x_GmaEnaZ-_GRyNOT93gs2cT4/s640/Hiroshima.+After+the+Blast.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hiroshima, mid-morning, August 6th 1945</td></tr>
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August is the time for calling to mind
the atomic slayings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seventy-three years ago, the
Pentagon exacted a savage retribution for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour
in December 1941. It also exercised its prerogative to "test" the effects of newly developed nuclear bombs on two cities and their unfortunate inhabitants.<br />
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The quaintly named <i>Little Boy</i> was an unearthly obscenity that tore history apart and changed life on the earth ever after. It was based on a very simple design. A
relatively small pellet of highly enriched uranium (HEU) was shot into a larger
block of highly enriched uranium. This produced a sufficient mass of heavy radioactive metal
to start an unstoppable chain reaction that tore atoms apart and released an unspeakable fury of destructive energy. The entire city of Hiroshima was instantaneously
transformed into a cindered
atomic wasteland.<br />
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Some 70,000 lives were vaporised in an instant when the bomb detonated 600 metres above the city. <a href="https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1945/hiroshima.htm" target="_blank">It has been estimated</a> that over the next five years, a further 130,000 people died as a result of injuries sustained in the initial blast and the longer term effects of radioactive fallout. </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">But the destruction of Hiroshima together with its inhabitants was not enough.</span> </span></div>
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The torching of Nagasaki followed three days later. The bomb
dropped on Nagasaki was a larger "device" than that gifted to Hiroshima and was of more complex design. It was cynically named <i>Fat Man </i>by its creators. It consisted of a central core of plutonium into which multiple
explosive charges impelled smaller lugs of plutonium to bring it to critical
mass. It “yielded” an explosive force equivalent to 22,000 tons of
trinitrotoluene - TNT. Thus the wonders of human ingenuity, amoral engineering and value-free techno-chemistry. </div>
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The sheer criminality of the gratuitous atomic slaying of Nagasaki has been widely understood. The wise and compassionate Kurt Vonnegut Jr. <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1995-08-07/news/9508070100_1_hiroshima-nuclear-weapons-nuclear-chain-reaction" target="_blank">offered his own thoughts</a> at a public lecture commemorating the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6th 1995:<br />
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<i>"I have said, largely out of respect for my friend William Styron, an ex-Marine officer, who avers that he would be dead if it weren't for the bombing of Hiroshima, that the atrocity did indeed save the lives of many Americans and Japanese.</i><br />
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<i>But a single word which I am about to utter proves to me that our democratically elected government has been and may still be capable of obscene, racist, high-tech, yahooistic even gleeful massacres of defenceless civilian populations. For the few of you who have not guessed that word, a foreign word, I will speak it now: Nagasaki."</i></blockquote>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6Thnrb-OOV4q3aybpn5dOLdjwFZ7RoxWsm9YYK-bX1AOatKp_LTFSMdob4dmvpo5PxvrssVbIITM7uZYOHJBdqAC9JBBI_sdZa105Mp1yGX3VQKXK_wanD3usMhY1-ewJUT8lAxO-CxEi/s1600/The+Ruins+of+Nagasaki+1945.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="323" data-original-width="430" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6Thnrb-OOV4q3aybpn5dOLdjwFZ7RoxWsm9YYK-bX1AOatKp_LTFSMdob4dmvpo5PxvrssVbIITM7uZYOHJBdqAC9JBBI_sdZa105Mp1yGX3VQKXK_wanD3usMhY1-ewJUT8lAxO-CxEi/s1600/The+Ruins+of+Nagasaki+1945.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nagasaki, August 11th 1945</td></tr>
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki were part of an infernal calculus
coldly rationalised to test the effects of these finely wrought mechanical wombs of an
inhuman energy. Hundreds of thousands of lives were extinguished in those two insane lashings. The
lucky ones died immediately. The less fortunate ones dragged their flayed flesh
and seared futures through agonising days and weeks. Tens of thousands walked silently as living ghosts through the ruins of what has been forgotten by so many in these
amnestic times.</div>
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And where are we today? On a positive note, many of the 64,000 nuclear warheads that bristled into the 1980s have been dismantled. During
this eighteenth year of the new millennium, we can all rest easier in the
thought
that <a href="https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohaswhat" target="_blank">a mere 14,500 nuclear infernos</a> sit snugly in rocket cones stored
in
deep silos, on floating platforms, in the hardened steel chambers of
sleek
and silent submarines that cruise the world’s oceans, and
in warehouses throughout the United States, the Russian Federation and the small but privileged "elite" group of nuclear-armed states. </div>
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Leaving aside the nightmarish consequences of a large scale nuclear war between the great powers, if a limited regional conflict between India and Pakistan in which each side "delivered" 50 relatively small Hiroshima-sized bombs against the other were to erupt, the lives of tens and possibly hundreds of millions of people would be destroyed, and the future of the inhabitants of both nations would be shredded. But it would not end there. In addition to producing radioactive fallout on a
global scale, <a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2013EF000205" target="_blank">it has been widely recognised</a> that such an event would both alter longer-term global temperature patterns and destroy much of the earth's protective ozone layer, thereby creating a state of global nuclear famine. In addition, the combination of widespread radioactive fallout and the destruction of the ozone layer would expose the cells of all living creatures to unpredictable genetic damage, thereby darkening even further an already darkened
future. We have yet to fully comprehend the consequences for both humanity and for land-based and marine ecosystems of the meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima.</div>
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<a href="https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/USNuclearModernization" target="_blank">It has recently been confirmed</a> that the United States has slated more than US $1,200 billion for the maintenance and modernisation of its
nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years. This is an inconceivable amount of money. In attempting to understand this in more concrete terms, consider the following:<br />
<br />
A single $100 dollar bill is one tenth of one millimetre in thickness. A well compressed bundle of ten $100 bills, or $1,000 would therefore be one millimetre in thickness. A well compressed bundle of ten thousand $100 bills, or $1 million, would be one metre high. Consequently, $1 billion dollars would consist of a thin column of well-compressed $100 bills one kilometre high.<br />
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In other words, over the next 30 years, and apart from any other military expenditure, the United States intends to spend the equivalent of a length of well-compressed $100 bills extending from the Melbourne CBD to Lismore in northern New South Wales on upgrading its nuclear weapon systems. And this at a time when <a href="http://www.who.int/news-room/detail/15-09-2017-world-hunger-again-on-the-rise-driven-by-conflict-and-climate-change-new-un-report-says" target="_blank">one person in ten</a> on the earth has difficulty finding enough food to get from one day to the next, and so many in the so-called developed countries have difficulty getting by from one week to the next.<br />
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Meanwhile, base-line infrastructure throughout the United States <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/maps-of-american-infrastrucure/?noredirect=on" target="_blank">begins to break down on multiple fronts</a> and the cooling ponds carrying much of the 70,000 tons of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel from US nuclear reactors are full to overflowing with nowhere to go. Hmmm . . . <br />
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Russia and the other nuclear states meanwhile pursue their own far less extravagant, though no less obscene modernisation
programs.<br />
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The lessons of the past have not been learned. The present Commander-in-Chief of the US military machine continues to use demonically-charged rhetoric in his provocations with nations that are deemed not to have toed the line sufficiently. In August 2017, Donald Trump threatened North Korea with "fire and fury like the world has never seen." A year later in July 2018, he issued the following warning to Hassan Rouhani, President of Iran: "Never, ever threaten the United States again or you will suffer consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before. We are no longer a country that will stand for your demented words of violence and death. Be cautious!"<br />
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In the insane display of power and its exercise, there is never a shortage of demented words.</div>
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<b>Confronting the Unspeakable</b><br />
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<a href="http://www.icanw.org/setsuko-thurlow/" target="_blank">Setsuko Thurlow</a> is one of the few remaining living witnesses of the horror unleashed over the city of Hiroshima on the morning of August 6th, 1945. In March 2017, <a href="https://www.soas.ac.uk/cisd/events/21mar2017-a-voice-from-hiroshima---setsuko-thurlow-.html" target="_blank">she offered an extraordinary reminiscence</a> of that day and its consequences for her life - and for our collective futures - at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London.<br />
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Setsuko Thurlow has spent most of her adult life as an advocate and campaigner for the total abolition of nuclear weapons. She was one of the speakers at the inaugural meeting of the <a href="http://www.icanw.org/the-treaty/" target="_blank">International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons</a> (ICAN) in Canada in October 2007, and together with Beatrice Finn, ICAN's Executive Director, accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in December 2017 on ICAN's behalf.<br />
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The embedded audio below offers an edited version of the presentation she gave in London in March 2017. In her talk, Setsuko Thurlow offers an unforgettable account of what happened at ground level in Hiroshima on the morning of August 6th, 1945.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="30" mozallowfullscreen="true" src="https://archive.org/embed/HiroshimaMemorialAugust2018" webkitallowfullscreen="true" width="500"></iframe>
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<i>Confronting the Unspeakable</i> can be streamed using the media player above. A CD quality mp3 file can be downloaded from: <a href="https://archive.org/details/HiroshimaMemorialAugust2018">https://archive.org/details/HiroshimaMemorialAugust2018</a><br />
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<b>Production Notes</b><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Voice</b> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Setsuko Thurlow: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=19&v=LMx5jLflwtg" target="_blank"><i>A Voice From Hiroshima</i></a> (SOAS, University of London, March 2017)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Music </b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Rodrigo Rodriguez: <a href="https://archive.org/details/RodrigoRodriguezAkiAutumnbyRodrigoRodriguez.mp3" target="_blank"><i>Aki</i></a> (Internet Archive)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Remix/production</b> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Vincent Di Stefano</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVl3mg9yZGzVKqsK4x_LYynyPh4hUDdQL1f1A7cDHQ-ug8gG-0QvZk919QiHA4o3iNyK0-nsjfdRfCVlOvmJs9ne9vmHMIxxrkCP8AM_3oTX-jlL_kCBnPKwmAIGbrrs65Albyj-3JG3cK/s1600/Hiroshima.+Late+August%252C+1945.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1129" data-original-width="1600" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVl3mg9yZGzVKqsK4x_LYynyPh4hUDdQL1f1A7cDHQ-ug8gG-0QvZk919QiHA4o3iNyK0-nsjfdRfCVlOvmJs9ne9vmHMIxxrkCP8AM_3oTX-jlL_kCBnPKwmAIGbrrs65Albyj-3JG3cK/s400/Hiroshima.+Late+August%252C+1945.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hiroshima, late August 1945</td></tr>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">RELATED POSTS</span></b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieJvuIB7sBh11ogjyt6mMZ8m5F0lVCymrPUiAW4hvw6Hf_UB29_Gn3C2S5622ohMb9Un3mln27UV18KKS00SYZ0Vf6I5S9KcKcJZeNKk6j4f7aOsOIa_0JaPf-Q9iO_UDvfjoMKE4aBi7C/s1600/Thomas+Merton+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="367" data-original-width="284" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieJvuIB7sBh11ogjyt6mMZ8m5F0lVCymrPUiAW4hvw6Hf_UB29_Gn3C2S5622ohMb9Un3mln27UV18KKS00SYZ0Vf6I5S9KcKcJZeNKk6j4f7aOsOIa_0JaPf-Q9iO_UDvfjoMKE4aBi7C/s200/Thomas+Merton+2.jpg" width="154" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://thehealingprojectwebcast.blogspot.com/2012/08/thomas-merton-and-original-child-bomb.html" target="_blank">1. Thomas Merton and the Original Child Bomb</a><br />
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<i>Original Child Bomb</i> is one of a small number of pieces written by Thomas Merton which he describes as "anti-poems." It concerns the atomic slaying of Hiroshima. Merton's anti-poems are characterised by the conscious and ironic use of the debased, but now common-place language that masks the horror of genocide.<br />
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This post offers audio of a performance interpretation of the poem together with its full text.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpgZ0zhSdRtuDBkRUbfeoZwCVOjZnOJfUCQsWBReora9NUYMjC3KVq-01VnSP6iDZLnjFMZ-0YtvPIt6OcYtKwAZc9g4tFawu8ntlQXeHx1UPToczt7iGW2ao_cD2XsFyW-gJmz5YbEjHT/s1600/Operation+Crossroads%252C+Bikini%252C+Marshall+Islands.+The+Baker+Explosion+%25281946%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="840" data-original-width="1600" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpgZ0zhSdRtuDBkRUbfeoZwCVOjZnOJfUCQsWBReora9NUYMjC3KVq-01VnSP6iDZLnjFMZ-0YtvPIt6OcYtKwAZc9g4tFawu8ntlQXeHx1UPToczt7iGW2ao_cD2XsFyW-gJmz5YbEjHT/s320/Operation+Crossroads%252C+Bikini%252C+Marshall+Islands.+The+Baker+Explosion+%25281946%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<a href="http://satanscauldrons.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-ruin-of-rongelap-when-protectors.html" target="_blank"> 2. On the Ruin of Rongelap. When Protectors Become Destroyers</a><br />
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At the end of World War II, the Marshall Islands was handed over to the United States as a "Protectorate" by the United Nations. In June 1946, the US Navy "tested" a 23 kiloton bomb above Bikini Atoll. Over the next 12 years, the US detonated a further 66 nuclear and thermonuclear bombs in the Islands.<br />
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<i>On the Ruin of Rongelap</i> offers both an audio presentation and a substantive essay detailing the events surrounding those tests and their consequences on the inhabitants and their children.</div>
Vincent Di Stefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09559307846832090756noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6238912176297249441.post-11480132297531707302017-08-29T02:22:00.002-07:002021-09-16T02:12:46.293-07:00When Protectors Become Destroyers. On the Ruining of Rongelap<div style="text-align: left;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS9LcOOnp1EFmtPzHfMEFIJP1F7aP0oblj8l1-8ESHZcGuYw5s5NBhDQXfbtnuoQy6UyoL_3y_FgJPnJdj1kgdK_DGTSMH3sOvz1SwigSlMvBD249jZbc4Rzq_UtZ_BaWeqtAo8qPNbDcu/s1600/Operation+Crossroads%252C+Bikini%252C+Marshall+Islands.+The+Baker+Explosion+%25281946%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="840" data-original-width="1600" height="336" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS9LcOOnp1EFmtPzHfMEFIJP1F7aP0oblj8l1-8ESHZcGuYw5s5NBhDQXfbtnuoQy6UyoL_3y_FgJPnJdj1kgdK_DGTSMH3sOvz1SwigSlMvBD249jZbc4Rzq_UtZ_BaWeqtAo8qPNbDcu/s640/Operation+Crossroads%252C+Bikini%252C+Marshall+Islands.+The+Baker+Explosion+%25281946%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The "Baker" Explosion, Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, 1946</td></tr>
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</style> The first thermonuclear explosion ever to occur on the earth, <i>Ivy Mike</i>, was detonated by the US Military on Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands on 1st November 1952. The device itself weighed 60 tons and was housed in a six-storey structure containing the massive cooling apparatus needed to produce a temperature of minus 250 degrees Centigrade whereby the deuterium used to fuel the bomb could be liquefied.<br />
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Sixteen months later, the explosion of <i>Castle Bravo</i> on Bikini atoll marked the beginning of a second series of thermonuclear tests staged with the express purpose of creating a much smaller "deliverable" thermonuclear weapon in the megaton range.<br />
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<i>On the Ruin of Rongelap</i> offers an account of the events surrounding those tests, and describes the human and environmental consequences of such immense violations from the perspective of the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands.<br />
<br />
This post offers both an audio presentation and a substantive essay detailing the events leading up to and following on from the nuclear weapon testing program conducted by the US in the Marshall Islands from June 1946 to August 1958. Special attention is given to the effects of <i>Castle Bravo</i>, the first of six thermonuclear tests that were conducted as part of <a href="http://archive.org/details/CastleCommandersReport1954" target="_blank">Operation Castle</a> between 1st March and 22nd April 1954.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="30" mozallowfullscreen="true" src="https://archive.org/embed/PrometheanHubrisAndTheRuiningOfRongelap1" webkitallowfullscreen="true" width="500"></iframe>
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<br />
<i>The Ruining of Rongelap </i>can be streamed using the media player above. A CD quality mp3 audio file is also available for download <a href="https://archive.org/details/PrometheanHubrisAndTheRuiningOfRongelap1" target="_blank">here</a>.<b> </b><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Production Notes</b><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Voices</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">J. Robert Oppenheimer: Archival recording</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Holly Barker: <a href="http://radio4all.net/index.php/program/57861" target="_blank">Interview with Mick McCormick</a>, February 2012 (Radio4All)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Tony de Brum: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvj7MscvSrg" target="_blank">"Atomic Testing in the Marshall Islands"</a> (Youtube)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Steve Osborn: <a href="http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/8893" target="_blank">Interview with Dori Smith</a>, March 2004 (Radio4All)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Martini Gotje: <a href="http://archive.org/details/MartiniGotj" target="_blank">Interview with Shirin Brown</a>, July 2010 (Internet Archive) </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Vincent Di Stefano: Commentary</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Music</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">A. Coe, <a href="https://soundcloud.com/acoe/now-i-am-become-death-original" target="_blank">"Now I am Become Death"</a> (Jamendo)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://archive.org/details/MIXG029" target="_blank">Alexander Sitnikov</a>, "Downfall" (Internet Archive, MixGalaxy Collection)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Steve Kahn and Rob Mounsey, "Mahana" </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Dead Can Dance, "Black Sun"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://archive.org/details/DocLenaSelyanina-SongsOfVastnessmt027" target="_blank">Doc and Lena Selyanina</a>, "Steppe" (Internet Archive, Netlabels Collection)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Dead Can Dance, "As the Bell Rings the Maypole Spins"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Archie Roach, "There is a Garden" </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Poetry</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://steveosborn.blogspot.com.au/" target="_blank">Steve Osborn</a>: "The Day of the Two Sunrises"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Effects</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Ryansnook: <a href="http://www.freesound.org/search/?q=ryansnook+nuclear+explosion" target="_blank">"Nuclear Explosion"</a> (Freesound)</span><br />
<b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Production</span></b><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Vincent Di Stefano </span><br />
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<h3>
<span style="color: #0b5394;"><span lang="EN-GB">WHEN PROTECTORS BECOME DESTROYERS</span></span></h3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm5c5RJWh08wDrR5oWC3RZr-VUOH1ejn7e9HxWO1jwA3MNIHMwAUfeyyyHR84a5SdoVjqZEkEKVnW21aMofc1FtGMUnzMSztGQgwmBtT1A9D3Q0ptEQN3CMHfSUQOjxJSAaM4J7vPt8OhC/s1600/Castle+Bravo+1954.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="724" data-original-width="1280" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm5c5RJWh08wDrR5oWC3RZr-VUOH1ejn7e9HxWO1jwA3MNIHMwAUfeyyyHR84a5SdoVjqZEkEKVnW21aMofc1FtGMUnzMSztGQgwmBtT1A9D3Q0ptEQN3CMHfSUQOjxJSAaM4J7vPt8OhC/s400/Castle+Bravo+1954.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">While the colours of the rising sun were
beginning to play over the skies of a still Pacific morning on the first day of
March 1954, a second sun suddenly and furiously erupted from Namu Island in the
Bikini atoll. It was the fruition of an unflinching determination by the
nuclear physicist Edward Teller to gift the world with a weapon as powerful as
the sun itself, a weapon based on the fusion of hydrogen atoms.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Within one second of that infernal
detonation, an immense fireball 7 kilometres in diameter had formed. In less
than a minute, the fireball had risen to a height of 14 kilometres. Eight
minutes later, the fiery cloud had billowed out to a height of 40 kilometres
and had spread out over a distance of 100 kilometres. Even so, it continued
expanding outwards at a rate of more than six kilometres a minute. Beneath this
unearthly fury, the Bikini atoll had been riven in two by a gaping crater two
kilometres wide and nearly 200 feet deep.</span><span lang="EN-GB"> The clever men who had worked so hard to
create such a weapon were well pleased. The 80,000 inhabitants of the Marshall
Islands, in which the Bikini atoll was situated, were to suffer for generations
to come.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Rongelap atoll lies 170 kilometres to the
east of Bikini. On the morning of March 1st 1954, the sky lit up as it had
never lit up before. The atoll shuddered as from an earthquake and a horrific
roar filled the air. Soon after, white flakes began to fall from the sky
covering everything on the atoll with a layer of ash up to two centimetres
thick. The sky had turned a ghastly grey, and families gathered together
wondering what had happened. The children played with the strange “snow” fallen
from the heavens. Some even tasted it to see what it might be.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Some Americans arrived by
boat the next day. They were wearing full protective clothing and proceeded to take a number
of measurements with their Geiger counters. According to the islanders, they
came and went within 20 minutes and did not speak to any of them during that
time. A number of US navy boats returned a day later - more than 48 hours after
the initial blast - and began to evacuate the islanders.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Even before the Americans arrived, most of
the inhabitants of Rongelap had developed symptoms. Many were vomiting and had
developed diarrhoea. Within a few days, their skin started itching and burning
and began to develop black-pigmented areas that became ulcerated and infected.
Within a fortnight, most of their hair had fallen out, and blood tests showed
significant abnormalities. This was but the beginning of a tribulation that
continues to sear the lives of three generations of Marshall Islanders. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Further afield, the radioactive plume from
the <i>Castle Bravo</i> atomic test had settled on numerous inhabited islands in the
Marshall Islands archipelago, exposing many thousands of their inhabitants to
varying levels of radioactivity.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0b5394;"><b>Dark Seeds</b></span><br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Hiroshima was the first triumph for a group
of new Prometheans intent on unleashing undreamed of destructive power in the
service of the forces of war. The first atomic explosion in human history,
not-so-cryptically named Trinity, had lit up the morning skies of the New
Mexico desert in July 1945. That awesome event inspired J. Robert Oppenheimer,
the director of the Manhattan Project, to ecstatically sing Vishnu's chant of power
from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” </span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdux1UntynxVHJ08Im0TkiCXWaKPCXsXsMAnZZ_sQccLZiAzG4l28LLo2IdvbOOVvuxsUV2tklWoixQpCwwNczUcnvYQhWAWkMz7OJa4KnrxCY71axfGawhwAWzlX_K4ar7Q_e-60xoQKG/s1600/The+Ruins+of+Hiroshima%252C+August+1945.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="562" data-original-width="700" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdux1UntynxVHJ08Im0TkiCXWaKPCXsXsMAnZZ_sQccLZiAzG4l28LLo2IdvbOOVvuxsUV2tklWoixQpCwwNczUcnvYQhWAWkMz7OJa4KnrxCY71axfGawhwAWzlX_K4ar7Q_e-60xoQKG/s400/The+Ruins+of+Hiroshima%252C+August+1945.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Ruins of Hiroshima, August 1945</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Within a year of the atomic slayings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, the US military had claimed the Marshall Islands as their secret
testing ground for nuclear weapon development. As a result of backroom negotiations, the
United Nations formally handed over the Marshall Islands to the US as a Protectorate in
July 1947. But in June 1946, a full year before the UN handover, the US Navy had already exploded a 23-kiloton atomic bomb above Bikini atoll. Three weeks later, they
detonated a similar device 90 feet below the atoll. The Promethean Games had
begun in earnest.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">At the end of World War II, Stalin made sure that the Soviets would not be left behind in the race for
nuclear supremacy. Armies of engineers and scientists were put to work and
within four years had constructed a replica of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
The Soviet version was detonated in August 1949 and had an explosive power of
22 kilotons - the equivalent of 22,000 tons of TNT. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The Soviet detonation
drove US military planners into a frenzy of renewed activity. They soon enlisted
the support of Hungarian physicist, Edward Teller, who even while working on
the Manhattan Project through the early 1940s, was dreaming of the feasibility of producing a fusion
bomb based on deuterium and tritium, the isotopes of hydrogen. He understood
that theoretically, there was no limit to the explosive power of such a weapon.</span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBK_G5W87z9sFfaTS2YSd4HFYA25oELwYjC_EyZ5id9UMIU4xNjhWAC9-tz57KFGUj1E5oYih5rJI1jGLm4hP0vMnvngIsUGp9Im5MCjOlw8wFDSBbjCD0AVP0DiBr7iM9_xz4f4SlX0-X/s1600/Edward+Teller.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBK_G5W87z9sFfaTS2YSd4HFYA25oELwYjC_EyZ5id9UMIU4xNjhWAC9-tz57KFGUj1E5oYih5rJI1jGLm4hP0vMnvngIsUGp9Im5MCjOlw8wFDSBbjCD0AVP0DiBr7iM9_xz4f4SlX0-X/s200/Edward+Teller.jpg" width="161" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Edward Teller</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-GB">After the Soviet atomic test in 1949,
Teller set to work convincing his colleagues that the time had come to develop
a more powerful weapon based on thermonuclear fusion. Both J. Robert Oppenheimer and
Enrico Fermi had voiced their opposition to the construction of such a bomb.
But the succesfull Soviet test changed everything. After intense
lobbying at the highest levels by Teller and his military supporters, US
president Harry Truman rubber-stamped the project in 1950. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Many of the nuclear physicists who had
worked on the Manhattan Project were contacted. Soon after, a group of
20 scientists calling themselves “The Matterhorn Gang” were furiously working
up mathematical formulae to track the progression of a man-made thermonuclear fusion reaction. The calculations proved so formidable, that IBM programmers
in New York, the entire computation department of the University of
Pennsylvania, and the operators of the large experimental computers owned by
the US government were brought into the project. Most of the available computing
power in the United States at the time was given over to the scientists at Los
Alamos.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Work began soon after on the
construction of an industrial-scale heavy water nuclear reactor at Savannah River in
South Carolina. This facility was to produce the tritium that eventually enabled the
production of a massive arsenal of thermonuclear weapons by the US over the
next forty years. </span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikETr1xASAycAquC54Dcsd9El95VeG7gTbtofgLkXzZDjVf8VpOdVcK-IuhIFOEP1PDqmN_X2fHYGznHKlqnSHGD29NA0BK5wNkiqapcOIRVb_h0vDufaLqC9ozoQhe_7uWZ3iS87Aj9TW/s1600/Ivy+Mike+Structure.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="291" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikETr1xASAycAquC54Dcsd9El95VeG7gTbtofgLkXzZDjVf8VpOdVcK-IuhIFOEP1PDqmN_X2fHYGznHKlqnSHGD29NA0BK5wNkiqapcOIRVb_h0vDufaLqC9ozoQhe_7uWZ3iS87Aj9TW/s400/Ivy+Mike+Structure.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ivy Mike</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-GB">In less than three years, the previously
deserted Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands had become home to a six-storey
structure built especially to house the first hydrogen bomb, innocuously named
<i>Ivy Mike</i>. It housed an immense cooling apparatus to maintain temperatures at
minus 250° Celsius (minus 417° Fahrenheit) in order to liquefy the deuterium
used to fuel the bomb. The whole assembly weighed over 60 tons. This structure
was linked to a two-mile long tunnel filled with helium that enabled
scientists to determine what occurred in those infinitesimally small moments
during which the fusion reaction occurred.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Despite the fact that Teller had driven the
process from the start, he chose not to join the audience of over 10,000 observers - mainly military - gathered around Bikini Atoll to witness the event. Instead, he chose to monitor the explosion on a seismograph in a Californian
laboratory. He reasoned that if the detonation was successful, its shock waves
would be easily detectable on the US West Coast, 8,000 km away. He had reasoned
correctly. Long before word of the event could arrive through the usual
channels, Teller had jubilantly reported the success of the operation to his
colleagues at Los Alamos, and to his political sponsors in Washington. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The blast exploded with a force of 10.4
megatons - the equivalent of 10.4 <i>million</i> tons of TNT. It completely vaporised
the structure in which the bomb was housed leaving a crater more than a mile
wide and forming an immense mushroom cloud 160 kilometers wide and 40 kilometers in
height. The blast destroyed all life on the immediately surrounding islands.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Well-satisfied with this first effort, Teller and his group immediately set to
work on building a new bomb that would be “deliverable” by air to any nominated
target. In the subsequent design, the liquid deuterium used in the first
thermonuclear explosion was replaced by solid lithium deuteride. This could be
detonated in such a way as to split the lithium atoms into heavy isotopes of
hydrogen, thereby providing the necessary fuel for a thermonuclear fusion
process. This new design formed the basis of the weapon that was exploded on
Bikini atoll on March 1st 1954.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><b><span style="color: #0b5394;">Darker Fruits </span></b><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Despite their most careful calculations,
Teller and his group seriously underestimated the explosive power of their
second more portable version. They had predicted a yield of five megatons, but
when their baby burst forth into the world, it thundered out at an astonishing 15
megatons – a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima -
and spewed millions of tons of radioactive debris throughout the region. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Stalin and his scientists had been watching these developments with great interest. On August 12th
1953, nine months after <i>Ivy Mike</i>, the Soviets themselves exploded their first thermonuclear bomb. It came in at 400 kilotons, nearly 30 times more powerful than the bomb
used in Hiroshima. Unlike the first US hydrogen bomb however, the Soviets had
from the outset produced a useable weapon that could easily be dropped from a plane. Two years
later, the Soviets exploded a more respectable 1.6-megaton hydrogen bomb at
Semipalatinsk in northeast Kazakhstan.</span></div>
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</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFOraECM4Ebq3dcuSGtwceqj5Ff5G0VA1Xvrkd6HqBSS5d-XMldd6_h0dpcLuHD6Hd2S3d5IpceEVnaajdzQLga45re5pDbtpCnDhjyITZk_2xR-VOwxB2VEID4C2q8f7vWyBVzPzaf0gu/s1600/Tsar+Bomba.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFOraECM4Ebq3dcuSGtwceqj5Ff5G0VA1Xvrkd6HqBSS5d-XMldd6_h0dpcLuHD6Hd2S3d5IpceEVnaajdzQLga45re5pDbtpCnDhjyITZk_2xR-VOwxB2VEID4C2q8f7vWyBVzPzaf0gu/s320/Tsar+Bomba.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Tsar Bomba</i> Detonation, 1961</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The party became increasingly unruly. In 1961, the Soviets exploded Tsar Bomba, a massive bomb that clocked in
at an astonishing 58 megatons. In real terms, that single bomb carried the explosive power
of 58 million tons of TNT. At the time, Soviet president Nikita Khrushchev
boasted that his scientists and engineers could easily have done better, but
were restrained by the fact that the Soviet Union was not large enough to
absorb a shock that would have shattered windows over 6,000 kilometers away.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Teller had been correct in his conjectures.
There was in fact no limit to the explosive power that could be released in
thermonuclear detonations. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Writing from Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky a
year after the <i>Tsar Bomba</i> explosion, Cistercian monk Thomas Merton reflected: </span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB">“Up to now (August 1962) there have been
106 nuclear tests since testing began again (almost a year). Thirty-one of
these by the USSR, seventy-four by the USA, and one by Britain, in the USA
(Nevada). The USA has made twenty-nine atmospheric tests, twenty-six in the
South Pacific and three in Nevada. The USA has also made forty-four underground
tests and one in the stratosphere. Total of all nuclear tests since the
beginning: USA 229, USSR 86, UK 22, France 5.</span></i></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB">Grand total: 342 tests, of which 282 were
in the atmosphere.</span></i></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB">Nice going, boys!” </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">(Conjectures of a Guilty
Bystander, 1966, p. 229)</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Unfortunately, it was not such nice going for the
people of the world, and more particularly, for the people of the Marshall
Islands who had in the 12 years between 1946 and 1958, weathered the fallout of
67 atmospheric tests conducted by the US military.</span><span lang="EN-GB"> Within a decade of the <i>Castle Bravo</i> test,
90% of the children who were under 12 years of age on Rongelap Island at the time of the test had developed thyroid tumours. Marshall Islanders continue to have
one of the world’s highest rates of thyroid abnormalities. </span>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Many of the women from the island of Rongelap suffered
stillbirths and miscarriages in the years after <i>Castle Bravo</i>. Beverley Keever,
author of “News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb” <a href="https://www.wagingpeace.org/suffering-secrecy-exile-bravo-50-years-later/" target="_blank">describes the experiences of Ainri</a>, a young 18 year old woman who was pregnant with her first
child at the time of the 1954 test: </span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB">“After the blast, Ainri gave birth to a
son, Robert. His thyroid glands were so damaged that he became dwarfed. The
glands were later removed, consigning him to a lifelong regimnen of medication.
Ainri got pregnant again and gave birth, she said, to “a bunch of grapes that
had to be pulled out of me.” Twice more Ainri got pregnant, she said, and gave
birth to children who appeared to be normal but died several days later.
Another son, Alex, survived, but again with damaged thyroid glands. Ainri
herself has thyroid problems: two new growths recently (2004) appeared there.”</span></i></div>
</blockquote>
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<span lang="EN-GB">There is a more sinister dimension to the
experience of the Marshall Islanders that has only recently come to light. In November 1953, four months <i>before</i> the <i>Castle Bravo</i> explosion, a research document was circulated. <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266938236_For_the_good_of_mankind_The_legacy_of_nuclear_testing_in_Micronesia" target="_blank">It was entitled</a> "Project 4.1. Study of Response of Human Beings Exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma Radiation Due to Fallout from High Yield Weapons." <a href="http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issues/testing/Marshall%20Islamds%201954.pdf" target="_blank">The final version</a>, re-titled "Operation Castle - Final Report Project 4.1. Study of Response of Human Beings Accidentally Exposed to Significant Fallout Radiation" was released a year later, in October 1954. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">What had been observed after Hiroshima and
Nagasaki was but a prelude. More data was needed and the Marshall Islands,
being at a suitable remove from the US mainland, provided an opportunity for further “information” to be gathered. Those who oversaw the “management” of
the Marshallese affected by the atomic tests must have had some awareness of the consequences of both their actions and their inactions.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="color: #0b5394;"><b>Delay and Prevarication </b></span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">It took a full three days after the <i>Castle Bravo</i> explosion for the irradiated inhabitants of Rongelap to be evacuated. They, their children, and their grand-children have been monitored
on and off ever since. In 1957, they were returned to the island by US
authorities. During their three-year absence, the US continued to carry out
both atomic and thermonuclear weapon tests in the Marshall Islands. A further
11 thermonuclear tests had been conducted on Bikini atoll, while an additional
eight atomic and three thermonuclear tests had been carried out on Eniwetok atoll.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">No attempt was ever made to clear Rongelap
Island of the immense amounts of fallout to which it had been exposed. The people of Rongelap
were simply reassured that it was safe for them to return to their ancestral
lands. They were, however, advised to avoid the more northern islands in their
fishing expeditions. It was also suggested to them that they should eat mainly
imported canned food. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">In 1956, the year <i>before</i> their repatriation
to Rongelap, Merril Eisenbud, a prominent member of the Atomic Energy Commission,
<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266938236_For_the_good_of_mankind_The_legacy_of_nuclear_testing_in_Micronesia" target="_blank">had this to say</a> about the “data” being gathered for Project 4.1: </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="EN-GB">“They had been living on that Island [Utrick Atoll - further downwind from Rongelap]: now that Island is safe to live on but is by far the most contaminated place in the world and it will be very interesting to go back and get good environmental data, how many per square mile; what isotopes are involved and a sample of food changes in many humans through their urines, so as to get a measure of the human uptake when people live in a contaminated environment.<br /><br />Now, data of this type has never been
available. While it is true that these people do not live the way westerners
do, civilized people, it is nonetheless true that they are more like us than
the mice.”</span></i></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">After the irradiated inhabitants had been returned to
Rongelap, Dr Robert Conard, head of the Atomic Energy Commission medical
surveillance team <a href="https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/705/nuclear-bravos-56th-birthday-and-its-radioactive-legacy" target="_blank">wrote in his 1957 annual report</a>: </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="EN-GB">“The habitation of these people on Rongelap
Island affords the opportunity for a most valuable ecological radiation study
on human beings. . . . <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The various
radionuclides present on the island can be traced from the soil through the
food chain and into the human being.”</span></i></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">During the 1970s, the inhabitants of
Rongelap became increasingly distrustful of reassurances by US government
representatives about the safety of their land. A number of children had been
born with birth defects and others had been diagnosed with leukaemia and
thyroid tumours. They began to seek independent advice.But it was difficult to get any information.<br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">In 1983, the people of Rongelap were finally provided with copies of a translation of a US Department of Energy
document prepared in 1978. The document stated conclusively that many parts of
the island they had lived on since 1957 had a contamination rating of Level 3,
the same as that deemed for both Bikini and Eniwetok atolls where all human
habitation was forbidden.</span><span lang="EN-GB"> Their worst fears were realised. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">They
immediately approached the US authorities and asked to be evacuated from the
island. Their request was summarily refused and they were again reassured by
the US Department of Energy that Rongelap was “safe” and that there was no
cause for concern. </span>
</div><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSN9zaixpOOtLI_SB-3K6pZ_5EJIaX9SpMcvMeRE4kdSqQy-6hlRycMLncqy-SMTavh7lYoXIOTXBsRpqOufdXxlOTe9k5_L3WQrZRI_DyuqPP3oaFxLMljRRaDS9qyQAeiFpUQ5_alYZD/s1600/Sinking+of+the+Rainbow+Warrior.JPG" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSN9zaixpOOtLI_SB-3K6pZ_5EJIaX9SpMcvMeRE4kdSqQy-6hlRycMLncqy-SMTavh7lYoXIOTXBsRpqOufdXxlOTe9k5_L3WQrZRI_DyuqPP3oaFxLMljRRaDS9qyQAeiFpUQ5_alYZD/s400/Sinking+of+the+Rainbow+Warrior.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. Auckland 1985</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Understandably, <span lang="EN-GB">they were desperately concerned about
their own and their children’s futures. Again, they sought outside help. The
Greenpeace yacht Rainbow Warrior travelled to Rongelap in May 1985 in order to
relocate all of the inhabitants to Mejato Island, 180 kilometres away. This was
to be the last action of the <i>Rainbow Warrior. </i></span></div><i>
</i><div class="MsoNormal"><i>
</i><br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Two months later, the Greenpeace yacht was resting at the bottom of Auckland Harbour after having been torn apart by two bombs
planted by agents of the French government. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="color: #0b5394;"><b>Cold Comfort </b></span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">By 1988, the US government was forced to
publically acknowledge the extent of the contamination of Rongelap declaring parts of the
island group “forbidden territory” and in the words of Beverley Keever, “recommending
that the remaining part would be safe only if inhabitants ate imported food <i>for
the next 30 to 50 years</i>” (italics in original). During the 28 years from 1957
and 1985, the inhabitants of Rongelap had been continuously and knowingly
exposed to dangerous levels of Caesium 137, Strontium 90 and a hellish
cauldron of long-lived radioactive isotopes that had settled everywhere. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">In the time since their relocation by the
<i>Rainbow Warrior</i>, some reparations have been made through the US Nuclear Claims Tribunal.
Over 1,800 Marshall Islanders received some financial compensation from the US
government for the leukaemia, cancers of the oesophagus, stomach, small
intestine, pancreas and bone, and severe growth retardation due to thyroid
damage that they have suffered. But Keever notes: “46% of affected islanders
died before they were fully paid for their injuries.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Clean-up operations on Rongelap began in
1999, 45 years after the <i>Castle Bravo</i> test. Huge quantities of potassium were shipped to the island and
added to the soil in order to decrease the uptake of radioactive caesium by
plants. Despite the horrendous damage that has been done to their lands,
the people of Rongelap are looking forward to soon returning to the islands
that they have inhabited for over 4,000 years.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="color: #0b5394;"><b>Lengthening Shadows </b></span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">The story of Rongelap is not an isolated
event in the sordid history of nuclear adventurism. Between 1945 and 1998, the
US has conducted a total of 1,054 nuclear tests, over 330 of which were
atmospheric. The Soviets have detonated over 700 nuclear weapons during the
same period. Between 1966 and 1996, the French have carried out nearly 200
nuclear detonations - both atmospheric and underground - in Moruroa and
Fangataufa atolls in Polynesia. China has conducted 45 tests, as has the UK,
while India, Pakistan and North Korea have between them exploded 14 nuclear
devices. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">The world has been irremediably altered by
the nuclear tests conducted during the latter half of the twentieth century, a
time in which we have also come to see the creation of a massively expensive
medical system to treat a world-wide epidemic of childhood cancers and
so-called “diseases of civilisation.”</span><span lang="EN-GB"> What we are witnessing at present is and expression of
the dehumanised dimension of scientific and technical endeavour. This
is not a peculiar feature of twentieth century civilisation, but was early evident in
the calls of Francis Bacon in the sixteenth century to extract “nature’s
secrets” by whatever means we could muster. This attitude toward the natural world was
furthered by Rene Descartes in his declaration that life was in essence
a clockwork mechanism subject to the demands and manipulations
of the <i>res cogitans</i>, the sphere of human thought and will. </span>
</div><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">The free expression of the seemingly
limitless power of human rationality has come at the cost of distancing the
human heart and human feeling from the determinations and practices of so-called value-free science. The present over-reach has brought in
its train its own inherent breakdown. Our failure
to reflect on the consequences of our projection of power in
the material world is itself a reflection of our alienation from the sustaining forces that have
enabled such projections to begin with. We are both in the world and of the
world and as the air, earth, fire and water within which we live, move and have
our being become progressively more deranged and more toxic, so too ourselves. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Within the sweep of history, the fate of
the people of Rongelap is but another small stain in the wash of blood and
grief that reaches far beyond the vast charnel grounds of time and empire.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">The gift of human intelligence has yet to
be informed by the greater gift of human wisdom. The great power of
human will has yet to be infused by the greater power of divine
love.</span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-GB">Vincent Di Stefano D.O., M.H.Sc.</span><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b><span lang="EN-GB">Further Sources</span></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">1. Beverley Keever’s important paper
<a href="https://www.wagingpeace.org/suffering-secrecy-exile-bravo-50-years-later/" target="_blank">“Suffering, Secrecy, Exile. Bravo 50 years later”</a> published by Nuclear Age
Peace Foundation describes many of the hidden dimensions of the plight of the
Marshallese since the Castle Bravo detonation.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">2. Glenn Alcalay’s brief overview “<a href="https://www.commondreams.org/views/2010/03/12/atomic-atolls" target="_blank">Atomic Atolls</a>” published March 12, 2010 by CommonDreams.org offers the perspective of an
American anthropologist who served as a Peace Corps volunteer on in the
Marshall Islands during the 1970s. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">3. For the more masochistically inclined,
there is fascinating insight to be gained regarding the mindset of the
scientists involved in the creation of both the atomic and thermonuclear
weapons at Los Alamos in <a href="http://www.webofstories.com/play/13356" target="_blank">a series of video remembrances</a> by Edward Teller
recorded in June 1996. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<h4>
<span style="font-size: small;"><b><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">This essay can be accessed in PDF form <a href="https://ia601603.us.archive.org/15/items/PrometheanHubrisAndTheRuiningOfRongelap1/OnTheRuinOfRongelap.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>.</span> </b></span></h4>
</div>
Vincent Di Stefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09559307846832090756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6238912176297249441.post-69616246985067665802016-12-27T01:57:00.001-08:002021-01-26T19:47:37.918-08:00The Nuclear Wasteland<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH_XHdWYmWQ9KohnEQ9JuBCxcHLwRpkcjtMyUHDBEZWv1OW5rK3HKJP_guyu2JyzFH6w2U7xS-IWG-31VW9CZynynht8mElunso7VwB5COGX5dwmjGJ5N2F9afqMp9vh6BLYrWMRIxv_2k/s1600/After+the+Holocaust.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH_XHdWYmWQ9KohnEQ9JuBCxcHLwRpkcjtMyUHDBEZWv1OW5rK3HKJP_guyu2JyzFH6w2U7xS-IWG-31VW9CZynynht8mElunso7VwB5COGX5dwmjGJ5N2F9afqMp9vh6BLYrWMRIxv_2k/s640/After+the+Holocaust.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b><span lang="EN-GB">"Why</span><span lang="EN-GB"> pay we such a price, and one we give</span></b></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>
</b></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i><b><span lang="EN-GB">So clamoringly, for each racked empty day</span></b></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>
</b></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i><b><span lang="EN-GB">That leads one more last human hope away,</span></b></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>
</b></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i><b><span lang="EN-GB">As quiet fiends would lead past our crazed
eyes</span></b></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i><b><span lang="EN-GB">Our children to an unseen sacrifice?" </span></b></i><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i><b><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></b></i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/EdwinArlingtonRobinson.TheManAgainstTheSky" target="_blank">Edwin Arlington Robinson</a>, 1916 </span></div>
<br />
If a person persists in acting in ways that are damaging to their health, a point will be reached beyond which their capacities will inevitably decline, if not collapse. In a similar way, if we continue to collectively live in ways that are fundamentally damaging to the earth and her creatures, thresholds will be crossed beyond which unpredictable and inevitably damaging consequences will result. This is effectively the story of industrial/technological civilisation as it has unfolded over the past century.<br />
<br />
Runaway climate change is but the latest manifestation of a process that has been steadily eroding the delicately balanced equilibrium of our planet. The contemporary litany is evident to all who have sought to remain informed. Near-universal deforestation, widespread denaturation of agricultural lands, poisoning of inland lakes and waterways through industrial and mining activities, accelerating depletion of the ocean's fisheries and loss of coral reefs, and urban over-reach throughout the world all reflect aspects of a deepening systemic deterioration in the health of the earth's ecosystems. These processes have been inexorably gaining momentum since the time of the industrial and petrochemical revolutions during the nineteenth century.<br />
<br />
Among the more disturbing influences to be unleashed over the past century have been the energies within the atomic nucleus. Immediately after the fateful and devastating eruption of nuclear fire over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the major powers of the world sought to possess and to control the newly discovered energies within the atom. An early driver of this process was the desire for military supremacy. This desire was masked by the promotion of nuclear power as a source of energy for an increasingly energy-hungry world. The inherent dangers of nuclearisation were systematically downplayed by technocratic elites and by those attracted to the power and control made available by the nuclear demon.<br />
<br />
The ruinous consequences of seventy years of nuclearisation are now patently manifest. The <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/29/hanford-not-fukushima-is-the-big-radiological-threat-to-the-west-coast/" target="_blank">Hanford facility</a> in the U.S., <a href="http://www.nuclear-risks.org/en/hibakusha-worldwide/windscalesellafield.html" target="_blank">Sellafield</a> in the U.K. and the <a href="http://basementgeographer.com/lake-karachay-mayak-and-chelyabinsk-40-a-look-at-the-most-contaminated-place-on-earth/" target="_blank">Mayak Industrial Complex</a> in the former Soviet Union have all served as "sacrifice zones" where plutonium pits were manufactured for deployment in nuclear warheads during the Cold War era. They are now vast nuclear wastelands with unthinkable quantities of radioactive wastes stored in <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hanford-nuclear-cleanup-problems/" target="_blank">ageing containers</a> and leaking landfill sites. Less visibly, countless abandoned uranium mines throughout the world <a href="http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/elist/eListRead/abandoned_uranium_mines_plague_navajo_nation/" target="_blank">continue to release radioactivity</a> into the air, soil, local waterways and groundwater. And most recently, the meltdowns at both Chernobyl and Fukushima have irrevocably poisoned vast tracts of land and the waters of the northern Pacific ocean, insidiously undermining the genetic future of plant, animal and human communities.<br />
<br />
Despite the voicing of concerns regarding the "grave potential hazards" of nuclear power plants by over 2,000 members of the <a href="http://libgallery.cshl.edu/items/show/88392" target="_blank"><i>Union of Concerned Scientists</i></a> over 40 years ago, neither the nuclear industry nor its supporters have offered a sober reflection on precisely what has been released into the world by the nuclear project. Rather, the present temper enthuses over "new builds" and spins tales of an energised nuclear renaissance driven by <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/is-nuclear-power-ever-coming-back/373315/" target="_blank">the promise of smaller, safer, smarter nuclear power plants</a> to replace the fleet of ageing reactors around the world that have reached their use-by date. In the meantime, the earth heaves under 400,000 tones of spent nuclear fuel produced by these monsters with an additional 12,000 tons added to the tally with each passing year. These deadly fruits of a reckless civilisation will remain dangerous to all life over geological time scales. <br />
<br />
The problem of nuclear waste has yet to be dealt with. There have been numerous plans made, numerous barrel-loads of dangerous waste dumped into rivers, water-ways and oceans, numerous false starts that went nowhere, and numerous failed projects. As cooling ponds around the world near their capacity, spent nuclear fuel rods have become <a href="http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/environmental-health-policy-institute/responses/the-growing-problem-of-spent-nuclear-fuel.html" target="_blank">the singular intractable problem</a> for those who operate nuclear power plants. They generate high temperatures that must be controlled for decades. And they hold a mix of highly radioactive fission products that must be kept isolated from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years.<br />
<br />
<b>Early Stirrings</b> <br />
<br />
Although the Manhattan Project was bankrolled by the U.S. government, its conceptual and intellectual foundations were firmly rooted in the work of European physicists. Much of the early research investigating the feasibility of producing an atomic weapon was undertaken by what became known as <a href="http://atomicarchive.com/Docs/pdfs/00416632.pdf" target="_blank">the Maud Committee</a> in the U.K. in 1940 and 1941. English physicists joined the Manhattan Project in 1943 and proved to be instrumental in the design and construction of the first atom bombs. After <i>Little Boy</i> and <i>Fat Man</i> had done their appalling work on the
people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the British government lost no time in
securing similar prizes. The production of weapons-grade plutonium was deemed absolutely necessary if Britain was to retain a prominent place in the emerging Promethean
circus. <br />
<br />
A small prototype nuclear reactor was designed, constructed and successfully fired up by British scientists and engineers at <a href="http://www.onr.org.uk/sites/harwell.htm" target="_blank">Harwell</a> in August 1947. A month later, the British government had acquired the Sellafield Royal Ordnance Factory in Cumbria, changed its name to Windscale, and started building two large nuclear reactors and a reprocessing facility for plutonium extraction. Both reactors were fully operational by 1951. Their sole purpose was to produce plutonium for the creation of atomic bombs. The first plutonium was separated from spent fuel in July 1952. Within three months, the U.K. had detonated its first nuclear bomb. It shook the Montebello Islands off Western Australia to their foundations.<br />
<br />
A year later, the U.K. government commissioned the construction of two massive 4-reactor complexes of British design for the production of both plutonium for the military and electricity for the national grid. The first reactor complex, Calder Hall, was to be situated adjacent to the Windscale facility on the Calder River. The second group of reactors was to be sited at Chapelcross in Scotland. Australian physicist and historian of science <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Falk" target="_blank">Jim Falk</a> has referred to Calder Hall in the following terms: "In 1956 the first 'commercial' nuclear reactor began operation in the U.K. It was a plutonium producer for the nuclear weapons program, to which had been added a small generator." <br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTUKkUKikjzebkurDjpw1BCg0grjP2Baf3UpNFWydq2_1J8Js3fhUTH3su6IWYMXxrFxYQ_FfsDvB-TSqJGdvcK0_fEdvzKC7maGeGRnMEMSdrOzIuhGJoboxgDtXUQM8PG6HU_wX4wM4n/s1600/Windscale+and+Calder+Hall%252C+1957.jpeg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTUKkUKikjzebkurDjpw1BCg0grjP2Baf3UpNFWydq2_1J8Js3fhUTH3su6IWYMXxrFxYQ_FfsDvB-TSqJGdvcK0_fEdvzKC7maGeGRnMEMSdrOzIuhGJoboxgDtXUQM8PG6HU_wX4wM4n/s320/Windscale+and+Calder+Hall%252C+1957.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Windscale/Calder Hall, 1957</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The first of the Calder Hall reactors was triumphantly launched by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on October 17th 1956. It was the first industrial-scale nuclear reactor to be built anywhere in the world. The dual purpose Calder Hall reactors ushered in what would become a fleet of 26 Magnox nuclear reactors constructed in the U.K. between 1956 and 1971. The Magnox reactors were so-named because the cladding for the fuel rods was made of magnesium-aluminium alloy. A peculiarity of this design was that spent fuel rods were prone to early deterioration and therefore <a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-t-z/appendices/nuclear-development-in-the-united-kingdom.aspx" target="_blank">could only be stored for a limited time</a>. They were designed for rapid reprocessing in order to extract plutonium.<br />
<br />
The reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel took place at Windscale just across the river. These activities have gifted the U.K. with a nightmarish stockpile of nuclear waste - including <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-21505271" target="_blank">over 100 tonnes of plutonium</a> - that nobody knows what to do with.<br />
<br />
<b>The Growing Burden</b><br />
<br />
By the mid-1970s, it had become apparent to those within the U.K. nuclear establishment that it was faced with a major problem. A number of the 26 Magnox reactors were by that time approaching their use-by date and a second generation of more powerful Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGRs) were about to be fired up. Immense amounts of radioactive waste from Windscale <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzbvTvlErE0" target="_blank">had already been dumped</a> into the Irish Sea, the English Channel, and into deep channels in the North Atlantic ocean. By 1982, nuclear activities in the U.K. had contributed 80% of the load of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste" target="_blank">140,000 tons of nuclear waste sitting on the North Atlantic ocean floor</a> in flimsy metal drums. The high level wastes from nuclear reactors and the reprocessing of spent fuel were not, however, to be so easily disposed of.<br />
<br />
Spent fuel rods from Magnox reactors were reprocessed at Windscale in order to recover plutonium and uranium for recycling. This involved dissolving the fuel rods in nitric acid and subsequently separating out the various fission products using a range of solvents. The reprocessing of spent fuel created vast quantities of <a href="http://www.nuclearpolicy.info/docs/briefings/a99.pdf" target="_blank">high-level fission products in liquid form</a>. Much of this liquid waste was stored in stainless steel tanks but from the 1960s, various methods of fusing the waste into glass blocks were tested in order to convert the liquid into a more stable form that could later be stored in geological repositories that were yet to be built.<br />
<br />
In 1976, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) started to search out possible sites in the U.K. for the burial of wastes from British reactors. The Scottish highlands <a href="http://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/radwaste/history-of-nuclear-waste-disposal-proposals-in-britain/" target="_blank">were early identified</a> as relatively stable geological areas where high level nuclear waste could be stored underground. From an initial list of 127 possible sites, 8 were selected for test drilling and further investigation. The process did not, however, get very far once word began to circulate and public opposition gathered momentum. Other sites were nominated in Somerset, Leicestershire, North Wales and Caithness in Scotland soon after, but they too suffered a similar fate. Local protests were so strong that these did not even get past the stage of test drilling.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX6W-aervwczhzD7zEpnmBUymOJ6l4hlpqFWQBYqa9k3spUj5kiFy7-0b8vfx7arzGeC1ktH-n_3oO-TUgkr-S-frOlqweG9RriZYLxZ5LiBgr-xXVflFAlRQ3UOHSGWzk7Cfxo4hVtltQ/s1600/Greenpeace+and+ocean+dumping+of+nuclear+waste.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX6W-aervwczhzD7zEpnmBUymOJ6l4hlpqFWQBYqa9k3spUj5kiFy7-0b8vfx7arzGeC1ktH-n_3oO-TUgkr-S-frOlqweG9RriZYLxZ5LiBgr-xXVflFAlRQ3UOHSGWzk7Cfxo4hVtltQ/s320/Greenpeace+and+ocean+dumping+of+nuclear+waste.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Greenpeace action, North Atlantic, June 1982</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Realising the extent of public opposition, the government changed direction and in 1981, refocussed its attention on the growing reserves of low and intermediate level wastes hoping that their disposal would attract less opposition. Again, they were mistaken. Up until that time, such wastes were often secretly dumped into the sea in metal drums. Once this became known, Greenpeace and other activist groups sprung into action. They ignited widespread outrage by alerting the public to the routine practise of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNV0cmKO8sM" target="_blank">ocean dumping</a> of nuclear wastes. The British government could no longer rely on such reckless ways and began to look for other methods of disposal. Its attempts to create sites for the underground burial of low level wastes over the following 15 years proved fruitless, again because of vocal opposition from local communities.<br />
<br />
By the late 1990s, Sellafield, the former Windscale site, had become the de facto storage site for much of the U.K.s nuclear wastes. In addition, vast tonnages of steadily-accumulating spent fuel languished in cooling ponds situated alongside the nuclear reactors of Great Britain. <br />
<br />
<b>Mountains of Waste</b><br />
<br />
The situation was similarly fraught on the other side of the Atlantic. As early as the mid-1950s, scientists and engineers in the U.S. had understood that the promotion of civil nuclear reactors for electricity production as part of the grievously misnamed <a href="http://ifpafletcherconference.com/pdf/eisenhower_speech.pdf" target="_blank">"Atoms for Peace"</a> program would compound the already thorny issue of nuclear waste management. Despite their call for <a href="https://www.nap.edu/read/18527/chapter/1" target="_blank">the creation of suitable geological repositories</a> in anticipation of the flood of high level wastes that would issue from a civil nuclear energy program, very little was actually done.<br />
<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYPp7C5rm5ACnAKi4Wo2azy3EBDVYoBbhf7SpqboMdodYVTs9henTU_avQD1epk-34rAhygA465FDnhpnWVSH2wv9Q_3kgXUyYVgL7kIZftfMzdSrgWjo3-sx-V86HXRGH7s6A618nRm4R/s1600/Spent+nuclear+fuel+in+storage+pool.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYPp7C5rm5ACnAKi4Wo2azy3EBDVYoBbhf7SpqboMdodYVTs9henTU_avQD1epk-34rAhygA465FDnhpnWVSH2wv9Q_3kgXUyYVgL7kIZftfMzdSrgWjo3-sx-V86HXRGH7s6A618nRm4R/s320/Spent+nuclear+fuel+in+storage+pool.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Spent fuel storage pond (USA)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
It took another 40 years before work commenced on the construction of a deep geological repository at <a href="http://www.yuccamountain.org/time.htm" target="_blank">Yucca Mountain</a> in Nevada in 1994. Fifteen years and fifteen billion dollars later, the Obama Administration declared the project unworkable due to unresolved safety issues. The Yucca Mountain project was formally abandoned in 2009 without taking in a single gram of nuclear waste. Soon after, nuclear power facilities in 38 states commenced legal proceedings against the US government claiming <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/nuclear-waste-fiasco-100450" target="_blank">tens of billions of dollars in damages</a> for failing to deliver. In the meantime, over 2,000 tonnes of incandescent spent fuel rods continue to be added to the already overloaded cooling ponds of nuclear reactors throughout the U.S. with each passing year<br />
<br />
The situation in Canada which was also involved in the nuclear project from its inception in the 1940s is equally chaotic. As in the U.K., steps were taken by the Canadian government to create geological repositories for the long-term storage of its growing stores of nuclear waste during the late 1970s. And as in the U.K., the plans came to naught due to widespread popular opposition.<br />
<br />
Nearly four decades later, and after <a href="http://mvramana.yolasite.com/resources/Canada-NuclearWasteManagement-EnergyPolicy-October2013.pdf" target="_blank">numerous studies and investigations</a> by the Canadian government and the nuclear industry, <a href="https://knownuclearwaste.wordpress.com/2016/02/22/world-awaiting-canada-decision-on-nuclear-waste-february-2016/" target="_blank">the situation remains precarious and uncertain</a>. Work has yet to actually begin on the construction of a deep geological repository for Canada's nuclear wastes, but the government is confident that a suitable site will be located and that a storage facility will be built and made ready to receive its deadly accumulations by 2035.<br />
<br />
It can therefore come as no surprise that the entrepreneurial possibilities for creating a lucrative international repository for spent nuclear fuel began to attract the attention of some big players once the enormity of the problem was realised.<br />
<br />
<b>
The Nuclear Cowboys</b><br />
<br />
The Australian political scene was unexpectedly shaken in the late 1990s when it was revealed that a small but highly organised and well-connected group had been secretly developing a finely orchestrated plan to import 75,000 tons of spent fuel together with an unspecified quantity of high and intermediate level nuclear wastes into the central Australian desert. <a href="http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/31/033/31033869.pdf" target="_blank">The project</a> was conceived by Pangea Resources International (PRI) and it detailed the mobilisation, conditioning and packaging of nuclear wastes in their nations of origin, the creation of a fleet of special-purpose ships for the transoceanic transport of these wastes to a yet-to-be-built sea terminal, the construction of a dedicated rail transport system from the port to an isolated repository in Western Australia where the wastes would be temporarily stored above ground, and the construction of a deep geological repository 500-1,000 metres below the surface where the stored wastes would eventually be deposited.<br />
<br />
PRI was well connected and well cashed-up from the outset. Anticipating a
possible solution to its own problems, British Nuclear Fuels Limited
(BNFL), wholly owned by the U.K. government, bankrolled Pangea <a href="https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/515/australia-pangea-international-repository-plan" target="_blank">to the tune of 35 million dollars</a> by purchasing an 80% share in the company. The remaining holdings of 20% were shared by NAGRA, <a href="http://www.laka.org/info/publicaties/afval/2-discussions-00/ingang-discussions.html" target="_blank">a consortium owned by the operators of Switzerland's five nuclear reactors at the time</a>,
and EHL, a company wholly owned by Golder Associates, a Canadian waste-management corporation. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
This ambitious project came unstuck in December 1998 when the British chapter of Friends of the Earth contacted its sister organisation in Australia and passed on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjBSAlu0hjM" target="_blank">a leaked promotional video</a> produced in the U.K. by Pangea. It soon became evident that there was little appetite for the project among Australian politicians, among the general public, and especially among the indigenous groups for whom central Australia was a homeland and not an empty wasteland into which the world's nuclear wastes could be dumped.<br />
<br />
By <a href="http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;db=CHAMBER;id=chamber%2Fjournals%2F1999-08-24%2F0005;query=Id%3A%22chamber%2Fjournals%2F1999-08-24%2F0000%22" target="_blank">August 1999</a>, the Australian Senate had overwhelmingly rejected Pangea's plan. <a href="http://www.parliament.wa.gov.au/hansard/hans35.nsf/16ab30a0303e54f448256bf7002049e8/ebe01ccceb0b9d7e482567ec001dca6e?OpenDocument" target="_blank">The following month</a>, the West Australian government passed a bipartisan motion expressing its complete opposition to the construction of a deep geological repository for nuclear wastes anywhere in Western Australia. <br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmlweboiJ-mCIB5LSN-zR45JTEzsjl3P0SaBRvdicORDBwV4Rcf166GzGkUXN3I-Vndz8xS8aIGjFIJSmE-pOZECUHIs3Iw7fP3vE7rlhtm0qCtDeilH4oATESpnvHFneiKV6z9_1XYOsN/s1600/Nuclear+Wastes%252C+Sellafield%252C+UK.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmlweboiJ-mCIB5LSN-zR45JTEzsjl3P0SaBRvdicORDBwV4Rcf166GzGkUXN3I-Vndz8xS8aIGjFIJSmE-pOZECUHIs3Iw7fP3vE7rlhtm0qCtDeilH4oATESpnvHFneiKV6z9_1XYOsN/s320/Nuclear+Wastes%252C+Sellafield%252C+UK.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nuclear Wastes, Sellafield U.K.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The driving force behind Pangea was David Pentz, a London-born geotechnical engineer who in 1966 began his career with Rio Tinto, one of the world's largest mining corporations. He joined the Canadian mining-engineering and waste management company Golder Associates in 1970, <a href="http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/seattletimes/obituary.aspx?pid=168484223" target="_blank">eventually rising to the position of President and Chairman</a>. During the 1980s, Pentz participated in <a href="http://pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML0402/ML040290400.pdf" target="_blank">high level discussions</a> in the U.S. regarding the geological isolation and disposal of nuclear wastes. And during the 1990s as a director of Golder Associates U.K., Pentz was privy to the fact that the British government had reached a virtual impasse in the matter of disposing of its own burgeoning stores of spent fuel and high-level nuclear wastes. He clearly understood the magnitude of what was becoming a major global problem.<br />
<br />
After several years of discussion and planning, David Pentz joined forces with James Voss, his long-time colleague and brother-in-arms at Golder Associates. Together, they established Pangea Resources International in 1997. <a href="http://www.wmsym.org/archives/1999/01/1-3.pdf" target="_blank">Its stated goal</a> was to promote and eventually create an international geological repository for the disposal of a large part of the world's radioactive wastes.<br />
<br />
Pentz offered the following account at a nuclear waste management conference in the U.S. in March 1999:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Over the period of 1992-1995 . . . . my colleagues and I began to define the objectives for forming an international disposal corporation. This has as its centrepiece a geological repository located in very simple geology and topography with a robust arid climate whose safety could be predicted with relative ease. . . .</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>This enabled us to identify extensive adjacent sedimentary basins extending from central Western Australia into northern Southern Australia that we believe are among the world's best regions for deep disposal of long-lived radionuclides.</i></blockquote>
Not everybody shared Pentz and Voss's enthusiasm or certitude that wastes stored in the Australian desert would be perennially safe and immured from endangering future generations. Among the first to offer <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20120410062832/http://eps.mq.edu.au/media/veevers1.htm" target="_blank">a deeply informed critique</a> of the Pangea project was Professor John Veevers from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Macquarie University and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. After pointedly noting the strong financial involvement of the British Government in the project, Veevers went on to refute Pentz's claims that the safety of the proposed Australian repository <i>"could be predicted with relative ease</i>." In addition, he expressed deep concern at the inherent dangers involved in transporting such large quantities of high level nuclear waste half-way around the world. Citing a <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252489010_Episodic_nature_of_earthquake_activity_in_stable_continental_regions_revealed_by_paleoseismicity_studies_of_Australian_and_North_American_Quaternary_faults" target="_blank">1997 geological study</a>, John Veevers questioned the easy assumption of seismic stability implicit in the Pangea project. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>. . . although they may be currently aseismic, faults in stable continental regions [as the Great Victoria Desert] that are favourably oriented for movement in the current stress field could produce damaging earthquakes, often in unexpected places.</i></blockquote>
Veevers also pointed out that the notion of perceiving the Australian desert as an unchangeable "<i>robust arid climate</i>" was both foolish and presumptuous and suggested that a number of dry
lakes in the Great Victoria Desert of central Australia may have been
full to overflowing with water as recently as 6,000 years ago. <br />
<br />
John Veevers' concerns regarding seismic stability <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/science/expert/realexpert/nuclearpower/08.htm" target="_blank">were later echoed</a> by Professor Mike Sandiford from the School of Earth Sciences at Melbourne University, a fellow member of the Australian Academy of Sciences:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Australia is not the most stable of continental regions, although the levels of earthquake risk are low by global standards. To the extent that past earthquake activity provides a guide to the future tectonic activity, Australia would not appear to provide the most tectonically stable environment for long-term waste facilities. </i></blockquote>
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</div>
In the meantime, we have collectively come to understand that the reality of climate change, of melting polar ice caps, and of the high probability that water tables throughout the world will rise in the future all add further dimensions of uncertainty to a picture that demands absolute environmental and geological stability for the hundreds of thousands of years that long-lived radionuclides need to be kept isolated from all ecosystems due to their extreme danger to all of life.<br />
<br />
Even after it had become obvious that both political and popular
opposition to Pangea's plans were near-insuperable, David Pentz confidently
murmured in a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykRb0Iibckk" target="_blank"><i>Four Corners</i> documentary</a> produced by the Australian Broadcasting
Commission at the time, "<i>Ideas of this size don't go away.</i>" Pangea Resources Australia came and went in four years, having been set
up in January 1998 and then formally dissolved in January 2002. But the seeds had been firmly planted. <br />
<br />
It was to take another 15 years before Pentz's prediction came to fruition,
but in its reincarnated form, the project was to be driven by the South
Australian government and a small cohort of nuclear cowboys. <br />
<br />
<b>Pangea Redux: The South Australia Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission</b><br />
<br />
Regardless of whether one's nation is a member of the British Commonwealth or not, the notion of a <i>Royal Commission</i> evokes the expectation of a process that is inherently ethical, that seeks above all else to uncover the truthful dimensions of whatever subject-area is under investigation, and that is objective, fundamentally unbiased, and deeply informed. The South Australian public, together with many who have closely followed the progression of the recent South Australia Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission (SANFCRC), have come to realise that even as hallowed an institution as a Royal Commission remains vulnerable to manipulation by special interest groups operating from within.<br />
<br />
In March 2015, South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill announced the establishment of a state-based Royal Commission to independently and comprehensively investigate the possibilities for greater participation of South Australia in a number of aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle. Prominent among those possibilities was the establishment of an international facility for the storage and disposal of high-level nuclear waste as a commercial venture.<br />
<br />
A former Governor of South Australia, Rear Admiral Kevin Scarce, was appointed as its head. Four months before the Commission was constituted, Kevin Scarce had <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiR6T7YjBDA&t=1879s" target="_blank">acknowledged publicly</a> that he was "not just an advocate for the nuclear industry." Yet soon after being appointed, <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2015/s4201053.htm" target="_blank">he contradicted himself</a> by stating: "I have not been an advocate and never have been an advocate of the nuclear industry." Soon after, a five-member Expert Advisory Committee was established. Three of those members were known proponents of the nuclear industry, with only one member, Professor Ian Lowe, former head of the School of Science at Griffith University, holding an explicitly anti-nuclear position. <br />
<br />
Predictably, when <a href="http://yoursay.sa.gov.au/system/NFCRC_Final_Report_Web.pdf" target="_blank">the Royal Commission Report</a> was released 12 months later, its primary recommendation was that South Australia be actively promoted as the ideal destination for over one third of the world's accumulated stores of high-level nuclear waste in the form of spent fuel rods, and that an additional 400,000 cubic metres of intermediate-level nuclear wastes be imported as part of an ambitious 120-year-long business plan that would relieve the South Australian government of its financial woes ever after.<br />
<br />
Ever-mindful of the sorry fate of Pangea's attempt in the 1990s, an elaborate "public education" campaign was immediately launched in order to soft-sell the plan. In additional, a <a href="http://nuclear.yoursay.sa.gov.au/citizens-juries/citizens-jury-one" target="_blank">"Citizens Jury"</a> was commissioned in the hope that some public consensus in favour of the project could be manufactured by suitably-delivered "information sessions".<br />
<br />
The Citizens Jury process was as transparently biased and manipulated as the Royal Commission itself. Mercifully, this was not lost on the participants who voted overwhelmingly that the plan to create a vast nuclear burial-ground in South Australia <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-06/sa-citizens-jury-vote-against-storing-nuclear-waste/7999262" target="_blank">not go ahead</a>. Predictably, Premier Jay Weatherill spat the dummy and in the face of the failure of the Citizens Jury ruse, declared that what was now needed was <a href="http://www.barossaherald.com.au/story/4292076/premier-calls-for-nuclear-referendum/" target="_blank">a nuclear referendum</a> to give the people another opportunity to make the "right" decision.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, the whole crooked underbelly of the project <a href="http://reneweconomy.com.au/bias-sa-nuclear-royal-commission-finally-exposed-57819/" target="_blank">was exposed</a> when it was discovered that the economic edifice provided by <a href="http://nuclearrc.sa.gov.au/app/uploads/2016/02/NFCRC-Summary-Radioactive-waste-storage-and-disposal-facilities-in-South-Australia.pdf" target="_blank">Jacobs MCM</a> on which the entire project depended was not only fundamentally flawed, <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-03/radioactive-waste-dump-would-boost-sa-economy-commission-hears/7991170" target="_blank">but had been quietly driven behind the scenes</a> by the old Pangea crew. The details are all on the record and are a further testimony - if one is needed - of the demonic tenacity of the supporters of the nuclear industry to ensure that their unspeakably violent and inhumanly toxic method of boiling water in nuclear reactors to generate electricity is here to stay, and to hell with the possibilities held in renewable sources of energy and the safety of future generations.<br />
<br />
The whole industry is implicate. There are no good guys or bad guys among them. The self-interest of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZR_Fvp3RrQ" target="_blank">its collusion with the World Health Organisation</a> in the matter of suppressing public knowledge of the true consequences of such catastrophic events as Chernobyl and Fukushima <a href="http://www.ippnw.org/pdf/chernobyl-health-effects-2011-english.pdf" target="_blank">have been extensively documented</a>. And yet, the lies continue to circulate and the whitewashed proclamations of the IAEA and other nuclear agencies are given sacrosanct immunity.<br />
<br />
The soporific ennui that appears to have overwhelmed many within the Western world has been quintessentially evidenced in the election of an ignorant, arrogant and dangerous bigot to the position of Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful economic and military machine that has ever taken form on the earth. Yet gentler currents continue to circulate and gather, often invisibly, awaiting their own day. This is evident in the small but great triumph of native American peoples in the matter of the <a href="http://www.countercurrents.org/2016/12/09/americas-final-solution-for-the-sioux-it-was-a-close-call/" target="_blank">South Dakota pipeline</a>, and in the rejection by the people of South Australia of attempts by nuclear technocrats to put the hellish wastes of a spent civilisation out of sight and out of mind in the Australian desert so as to allow an ill-fated nuclear "renaissance" to proceed unhindered.<br />
<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhucAI5ItLUFNp92eOHeWzN2OReslSyoDLNKCEt1VMrBQUT6I4rdf1V_4YRPcuozP7qahb-K_9Yk68spQu9Kb0WniMVLX-RhpCCr9kvFDQN3Cs05ePO3_L5rV0WNytDB3Pi8Rx-sKDwF7sm/s1600/Don%2527t+Nuclear+Waste+Australia.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhucAI5ItLUFNp92eOHeWzN2OReslSyoDLNKCEt1VMrBQUT6I4rdf1V_4YRPcuozP7qahb-K_9Yk68spQu9Kb0WniMVLX-RhpCCr9kvFDQN3Cs05ePO3_L5rV0WNytDB3Pi8Rx-sKDwF7sm/s320/Don%2527t+Nuclear+Waste+Australia.gif" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Vincent Di Stefano M.H.Sc., D.O., N.D.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Inverloch, December 2016</span></b><br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: small;"><i>A pdf copy of this essay can be downloaded</i> <a href="https://archive.org/details/AsTheSunSetsOnTheNuclearWasteland" target="_blank">here</a></span></b><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>RELATED POSTS</b></span><br />
<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Spent nuclear fuel rods in storage pond</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
1. <a href="http://satanscauldrons.blogspot.com.au/2016/07/poison-in-heart-nuclear-wasting-of.html" target="_blank">Poison in the Heart. The Nuclear Wasting of South Australia</a><br />
<br />
This earlier <i>Satan's Cauldrons</i> post offers a brief review of the development of the nuclear project from the early years of the 20th century to its fearsome culmination in the atomic lashings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. It further examines the post-war activities of the nuclear industry that have created immense quantities of nuclear waste that are stored around the world and reflects on the recommendation of the South Australia Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission that much of this waste be shipped to Australia for storage and eventual underground burial.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge38X1wxE81l_zaSGji9Q_wi9rDEvTf0TazfPqyw2UNLUmBig-zr0I80vGMLIX5N39DeLrVv3mAkgRTGNE5mxOBH3wRUFRbbLPR1Q0GkufedlmVoa-6h0t-woGRTRf9yKhYSCtlKl5XZ6i/s1600/Nuclear+Silo.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge38X1wxE81l_zaSGji9Q_wi9rDEvTf0TazfPqyw2UNLUmBig-zr0I80vGMLIX5N39DeLrVv3mAkgRTGNE5mxOBH3wRUFRbbLPR1Q0GkufedlmVoa-6h0t-woGRTRf9yKhYSCtlKl5XZ6i/s320/Nuclear+Silo.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Titan missile in silo, Arizona</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://thehealingprojectweblog.blogspot.com.au/2011/11/glowing-cores.html" target="_blank">2. Glowing Cores</a><br />
<br />
This <i>Integral Reflections</i> post offers a short poetic expression of the hidden dimensions of nuclearisation and considers the altered reality that has been gifted to present and future generations by nuclear activities. Vincent Di Stefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09559307846832090756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6238912176297249441.post-86355660753289007702016-07-21T23:23:00.001-07:002021-01-26T19:47:21.802-08:00Poison in the Heart. The Nuclear Wasting of South Australia<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeHeFZxqYWz2Dl3Xx8qzNxmrKo-eqHnxlymx5BMXobi8OAntlYhUe6AtpyY-gH1nfT3Utsmbw1vwF3EV3olC-KkWnYEXdLOksNjrV65EivW2MBYgqTkXGvZdr2XqFbNrysJd47lox03g7p/s1600/Cherenkov+radiation+in+spent+fuel+rods.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeHeFZxqYWz2Dl3Xx8qzNxmrKo-eqHnxlymx5BMXobi8OAntlYhUe6AtpyY-gH1nfT3Utsmbw1vwF3EV3olC-KkWnYEXdLOksNjrV65EivW2MBYgqTkXGvZdr2XqFbNrysJd47lox03g7p/s1600/Cherenkov+radiation+in+spent+fuel+rods.jpg" /></a></div>
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<i><b>"Nuclear weapons and nuclear power are both leading instances of the irrationalities </b></i></div>
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<i><b>that result from a social world that has been constructed to concentrate power </b></i></div>
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<i><b>in the hands of tiny minorities, and to make it possible for them </b></i></div>
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<i><b>to maintain and defend their power."</b></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"> <a href="http://reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Publications/modernization/assuring-destruction-forever.pdf" target="_blank">Andrew Lichterman</a>, 2012</span></div>
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<b><i>". . . because a few, by fate's economy, shall seem to move the world</i></b></div>
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<b><i>the way it goes."</i></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"> <a href="http://thehealingprojectwebcast.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/edwin-arlington-robinson-man-against-sky.html" target="_blank">Edward Arlington Robinson</a>, 1916</span> </div>
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Our planet is deeply burdened. It presently harbours 390,000 tons of high level nuclear waste produced by nuclear reactors and weapons programs over the past 70 years. Spent nuclear fuel is one of the most dangerous materials on earth. Most of it is stored underwater in numerous cooling ponds throughout the world. High level nuclear waste is dangerous to all life for unthinkable periods of time. Plutonium, which is produced in every nuclear fuel rod, has a toxic lifespan of 240,000 years. With each passing year, a further 10,000 tons of spent fuel is added to the world's accumulated stores of deadly waste. In addition to the spent fuel from nuclear reactors, vast amounts of lower-level radioactive waste lie
scattered in mining sites, tailings dams, undersea dumps and soil-borne
contamination on every continent.<br />
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We have no idea what to do with the stuff. The Americans sank over $13 billion into the construction of a massive underground repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. It was closed down in 2010 without taking in a single gram of nuclear waste. The Soviets didn't bother with such elaborate schemes and <a href="http://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/radioactive-waste-and-spent-nuclear-fuel/2012-08-russia-announces-enormous-finds-of-radioactive-waste-and-nuclear-reactors-in-arctic-seas" target="_blank">until recently</a>, simply dumped much of their waste - including obsolete submarines complete with nuclear reactors - into the Kara Sea and elsewhere in the Arctic Circle where they slowly corrode, leaching their lethal contents into the cold waters of the Arctic Ocean.<br />
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In the meantime, a small cadre of aspirational Promethean technocrats in South Australia have somehow decided that Australia holds the solution to the global problem of nuclear waste. The recently released <a href="http://yoursay.sa.gov.au/system/NFCRC_Final_Report_Web.pdf" target="_blank">Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission Report</a> recommends that the South Australian government accepts over one third of the world's high level waste for above-ground storage and eventual burial in yet-to-be-built underground repositories in the South Australian desert. <a href="https://nuclearnewsaustralia.wordpress.com/2016/07/06/south-australias-nuclear-citizens-jury-manufacturing-consent/" target="_blank">The report proposes</a> that South Australia imports 138,000 tons of high level radioactive waste in the form of spent fuel rods as well as an additional 390,000 cubic metres of intermediate level waste for storage and eventual disposal.<br />
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This has all been spruiked as a fail-safe commercial venture that will relieve the South Australian Government of its financial problems ever after and create a rosy economic future for generations that have yet to be born. Such madness blithely ignores the fact that the genetic and biological futures of those generations may thereafter be a different story. <br />
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<h4>
Awakening the Nuclear Beast </h4>
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The cadaverous face of nuclear energy was revealed right from the start. Marie Curie, who discovered the radioactive elements radium and polonium, was fascinated with the peculiar luminosity emitted by the salts of uranium and radium. Her decades-long work with these elements was, however, invisibly accompanied by a slow and silent destruction of the blood-forming cells in her bone-marrow. This eventually led to her death from aplastic anaemia in 1934. Curie's notebooks written over a century ago are stored in lead-lined boxes. Present-day researchers who wish to examine them are required to wear protective clothing.<br />
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The US military was among the first to realise the possibilities of glow-in-the-dark radium salts. Towards the end of World War I, it commissioned the painting of watch-dials and other instruments with radium. The idea became more widely popular and the United States Radium Factory was set up in New York in 1917. Over the following decade, 70 young women were employed to paint watch-dials with radium salts using fine camel hair brushes. They were instructed by their supervisors to keep the brush tips sharp by rolling them between their lips or on their tongues. Their inevitable fate is recounted in Eleanor Swanson's powerful but harrowing poem <i><a href="https://rhapsodyinbooks.wordpress.com/2011/04/24/national-poetry-month-eleanor-swanson-and-the-radium-girls/" target="_blank">The Radium Girls</a>.</i> <br />
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Ernest Rutherford's work with uranium during the early years of the twentieth century led him to develop the first coherent model of the structure of the atom. Danish physicist Neils Bohr worked in his laboratory for a short time in 1912. Soon after, Bohr had refined Rutherford's theory and formulated the idea that electrons moved in fixed orbits around a central nucleus and that, by absorbing or emitting energy, they could instantaneously change their orbits. His theory formed the core around which a more complete understanding of quantum mechanics could develop over the next decade.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_DuBMYa9onhd16Jwf3fBeDaMG6ktY3BMPExvOAp-fuH_FO5Di48qIcBEnS_Lb4BjnrnzeND5uexohvXtr6YiExDbrOSXk-elM_0kgHWi6GxVQbr3nT0n8bL1l_fFvY5Mnud8WVAZgpJLk/s1600/Hahn+and+Strassmann.+Nuclear+Fission+Experimental+Apparatus%252C+1938.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_DuBMYa9onhd16Jwf3fBeDaMG6ktY3BMPExvOAp-fuH_FO5Di48qIcBEnS_Lb4BjnrnzeND5uexohvXtr6YiExDbrOSXk-elM_0kgHWi6GxVQbr3nT0n8bL1l_fFvY5Mnud8WVAZgpJLk/s320/Hahn+and+Strassmann.+Nuclear+Fission+Experimental+Apparatus%252C+1938.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hahn and Strassmann. Tabletop Nuclear Fission Apparatus, 1938 </td></tr>
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Things then began to move very quickly. The development of particle accelerators enabled physicists to routinely transmute one element into another by the 1930s. In December 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann observed that bombarding uranium with neutrons resulted in the formation of lighter, rather than the heavier elements that they expected. Hahn was mystified by the results and communicated the findings to his former colleague Lise Meitner who had taken refuge in Sweden because of Hitler's anti-Jewish policies. She was visited soon after by her nephew Otto Frisch, a physicist at Neils Bohr's laboratory in Copenhagen, and spoke with him about Hahn's letter. In the discussions that followed, they realised that Hahn had unwittingly described the phenomenon of nuclear fission - the breaking apart of atoms of uranium. Together, they pieced together a plausible account of the process and submitted <a href="http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Begin/Nature_Meitner.shtml" target="_blank">a short paper outlining their theory</a> to the scientific journal <i>Nature</i>. It was published in February 1939.<br />
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<h4>
The Human Chain Reaction </h4>
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In the meantime, Otto Frisch had returned to Copenhagen and chanced to meet with his boss Neils Bohr, the early theorist of quantum mechanics. Bohr was just about to board a ship for New York City with a physicist colleague, Leon Rosenfeld. <a href="https://www.aip.org/history/exhibits/mod/fission/fission1/fission.pdf" target="_blank">Otto Frisch later recalled</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"When I came back to Copenhagen, I found Bohr just on the point of parting, of leaving for America and I just managed to catch him for five minutes and tell him what we had done. And I hadn't spoken for half a minute when he struck his head with his fist and said, "Oh, what idiots we have been that we haven't seen that before. Of course this is exactly as it must be." </i></blockquote>
As the ship steamed across the Atlantic, Bohr and Rosenfeld had ample time to reflect on the revolutionary news that Frisch had delivered. During those six days, they developed a detailed theory of the nature of nuclear fission. Otto Frisch in the meantime had confirmed that uranium atoms in fact were capable of dividing into smaller atoms with the release of large amounts of energy.<br />
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The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, who was also among the new cadre of quantum theorists, was waiting on the pier when Bohr and Rosenfeld arrived in New York. Like many of his colleagues, Fermi had fled Europe because of the anti-Jewish policies of both Mussolini and Hitler and had taken up a position at Columbia University. Over the next few days, Bohr and Rosenfeld excitedly passed on this new revelation of the behaviour of uranium atoms to the close-knit group of elite physicists at Columbia and Princeton Universities. The implications <a href="https://www.aip.org/history/acap/topics/fission.jsp" target="_blank">were immediately understood</a> by all.<br />
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These pivotal events in the early weeks of 1939 sent the world of physics into a fury of activity that culminated six years later in the detonation of the world's first atomic bomb at Alamogordo in the New Mexico desert.<br />
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<h4>
The Nuclear Chain Reaction</h4>
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In the four months after Niels Bohr arrived in the US, the theoretical foundations for the creation of both a controlled nuclear chain reaction and a uranium-based weapon of unthinkable destructive power had been laid. Bohr and his colleagues were fully aware that after annexing Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Adolph Hitler had immediately seized the uranium mines at Joachimsthal and prohibited the export of uranium ore to any other country. They also knew that German physicists were actively engaged in atomic research.<br />
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More than 100 nuclear physicists left central Europe between 1933 and the early 1940s because of Hitler's policies. Most of them ended up in universities and laboratories in England and America. They, together with their newly-found colleagues, quickly put the dots together. Soon after, a small group of expatriate European physicists persuaded Albert Einstein to sign <a href="http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/pdfs/docsworldwar.pdf" target="_blank">a letter addressed to Theodore Roosevelt</a>. In it, Einstein called for the immediate acquisition of uranium in large quantities and also for the development of a vigorous research program into both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The letter, dated August 2nd 1939, stated:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"In the course of the past four months it has been made probable . . . that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which large amounts of power and vast quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future. </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable - though much less certain - that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may be constructed. . . . In view of this situation, you may think it desirable to have some permanent contact maintained between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America.</i></blockquote>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoR73jyKL2B0tHNad9ZIMCm_rGYQrRauTdFRj7Cf2VY9EWoTPAccUUbjJv4eGf1QcXw8TdjIrssoGRZ_0dnv9EVqanVsA5Dz4SUmT7nIDorCToMCj2OIuuEdm9P5wauxtO3SyAWhXTUZeO/s1600/Building+Chicago+Pile-1.+Layer+17.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoR73jyKL2B0tHNad9ZIMCm_rGYQrRauTdFRj7Cf2VY9EWoTPAccUUbjJv4eGf1QcXw8TdjIrssoGRZ_0dnv9EVqanVsA5Dz4SUmT7nIDorCToMCj2OIuuEdm9P5wauxtO3SyAWhXTUZeO/s200/Building+Chicago+Pile-1.+Layer+17.jpg" width="160" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chicago Pile-1, layer 17</td></tr>
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Three years later, Enrico Fermi and his group at the University of Chicago succeeded in their efforts to produce a controlled nuclear chain reaction. The world's first
nuclear reactor, named Chicago Pile-1 consisted of 40 tons of uranium oxide and 6
tons of uranium metal fashioned into 22,000 cylindrical slugs embedded in 380 tons of highly-purified graphite. Chicago Pile-1 went critical on the afternoon of December 2nd 1942.<br />
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As soon as the sustained nuclear reaction had been confirmed, Arthur Compton, the head of the Chicago laboratory, called
his colleague James Conant, fellow physicist and director of the National Defense Research Committee in Washington. He cryptically reported: "The Italian navigator has landed in the new
world." Conant inquired, "How were the natives?" Compton
replied "Very friendly."<br />
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In the intervening decades, we have come to learn that the natives are not so friendly after all.<br />
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<h4>
First Fruits</h4>
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It was soon after confirmed - as Fermi had predicted - that the controlled fission in Chicago Pile-1 produced a new element, plutonium-239 in significant quantities. Plutonium promised to be even more fissionable - and hence more suitable for creating an atomic bomb - than the uranium-235 that physicists in the U.S. and the U.K. were hastily attempting to extract from uranium ores. The separation of uranium-235 tested the ingenuity of physicists on both sides of the Atlantic. But within three years of Fermi's kindling of the first atomic fire at Chicago, both fissionable uranium and plutonium had been produced in sufficient quantities to construct three nuclear bombs.<br />
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The first was successfully detonated in the <i>Trinity</i> test at Alamogordo in the New Mexico desert on the morning of July 16th 1945. The second, a uranium bomb similar to the first, was dropped on the city of Hiroshima three weeks later. Three days after that terrible event, the world's first plutonium bomb was ruinously "tested" on the people of Nagasaki. In <a href="http://thehealingprojectweblog.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/while-world-burns-remembering-hiroshima.html" target="_blank">those two atomic lashings</a> visited on the people of Japan, 200,000 lives were vaporised by the unearthly infernos that erupted from the fissioning of less than two kilograms of heavy metal.<br />
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So as not to lose the edge that it had thereby gained, the U.S, military set about creating stores of plutonium as a matter of urgency. And nuclear reactors were now a ready means of producing virtually limitless supplies of this new element. The US military was not, however, alone in its aspirations. <br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg63w-jXyKFdQgJ8p0nQ6AYj78eqBwj3LjRQK0jdWnCqsVoRe0j-AvS6RiklFemx_l4KEWmVMoB0G-IpLBp13RlCWoBO1A-URhnM6-HneDpBk3emvB9rf46A7r_ghS2Q7UNJfWgTVdbGrEO/s1600/First+UK+Atomic+Bomb+Test.+Montebello+Islands%252C+1952.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg63w-jXyKFdQgJ8p0nQ6AYj78eqBwj3LjRQK0jdWnCqsVoRe0j-AvS6RiklFemx_l4KEWmVMoB0G-IpLBp13RlCWoBO1A-URhnM6-HneDpBk3emvB9rf46A7r_ghS2Q7UNJfWgTVdbGrEO/s200/First+UK+Atomic+Bomb+Test.+Montebello+Islands%252C+1952.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">First UK Atomic Bomb Test. Montebello Islands, Australia, 1952</td></tr>
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The Soviets built their first nuclear reactor in 1946 using confiscated German uranium. In August 1949, they detonated their first atomic bomb. Its core consisted of plutonium. By 1951, the U.K. had built four nuclear reactors. On October 3rd 1952, the U.K.'s first atomic bomb was successfully tested in the Montebello Islands off the West Australian coast. It too was a plutonium device. By that time it was clear to all who coveted such power that nuclear reactors were essential for the creation of new arsenals of atomic weapons.<br />
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Thus were the beginnings of the nuclear age. <br />
<br />
<h4>
Catching Butterflies With Sledgehammers</h4>
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A strategy was needed to redeem these technologies of death and make them more acceptable to the general public. Under the rubric of <a href="http://ifpafletcherconference.com/pdf/eisenhower_speech.pdf" target="_blank"><i>Atoms For Peace</i></a>, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower addressed the United Nations General Assembly in December 1953. <a href="http://voices-of-democracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/parry-giles-eisenhower.pdf" target="_blank">In his carefully-crafted speech</a>, Eisenhower launched the idea of creating an International Atomic Energy Agency that would oversee the development of a global nuclear power industry. He thereby initiated a soft sell that would, by 2016, see the world populated with 444 nuclear power plants in over 30 countries, with a further 63 reactors in the pipeline. <br />
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Nuclear reactors <i>do not</i> generate electricity. They generate ferocious amounts of heat, and that heat is used to produce steam that then drives powerful turbines. Nuclear reactors <i>do</i>, however, generate immense quantities of highly radioactive materials that are lethal to all forms of life. These materials must be kept isolated from living ecosystems for geologic periods of time because of their inherent dangers. These dangers were clearly understood long before the first commercial nuclear power plants began to appear in the late 1950s. <br />
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Within two years of Eisenhower's <i>Atoms For Peace</i> speech, <a href="http://www.nap.edu/catalog/18527/disposal-of-radioactive-waste-on-land-report" target="_blank">a conference on the disposal of radioactive wastes</a> was organised at Princeton University in New York. It was attended by an elite group of physicists, nuclear engineers and representatives of private companies. Its purpose was to both address the growing problem of radioactive wastes from the U.S. nuclear weapons program, and to anticipate the consequences of the future deployment of large numbers of commercial<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b> </b></span>nuclear power plants, each of which would produce dangerous wastes as a result of their operation.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjihT7dUl4OB6u_1OGYUZmbGvmyYeWe3Ak2H0TOi6lqPeVmXRGVpIQ789S7hd_tI2W0_xpHozkw5_xcU387nOjJGdDyz8om4aBvSrqM9-WvvdbCXGc8QyMyejPNNwWg5H8pZJGPHh0rnKGa/s1600/Nuclear+Waste+Disposal%252C+Hanford%252C+1950.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjihT7dUl4OB6u_1OGYUZmbGvmyYeWe3Ak2H0TOi6lqPeVmXRGVpIQ789S7hd_tI2W0_xpHozkw5_xcU387nOjJGdDyz8om4aBvSrqM9-WvvdbCXGc8QyMyejPNNwWg5H8pZJGPHh0rnKGa/s320/Nuclear+Waste+Disposal%252C+Hanford%252C+1950.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nuclear Waste Disposal, Hanford, 1950</td></tr>
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The gravity of the waste problem was made clear to the group even during its first meetings in 1955, and was acknowledged within the first few paragraphs of the conference report: "The hazard related to radioactive waste is so great that no element of doubt should be allowed to exist regarding safety." (p. 3) Later, Harry H. Hess, the conference chairman was to state:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"The waste we have on hand is not being disposed of, in any strict
sense, and it is something to worry about. . . . For the immediate
future, extending to many years, wastes will constitute a serious
problem." (p. 75)</i></blockquote>
Regardless, the dark horse of nuclear power was deemed ready to be set free and to gallop where it would through the steadily thickening airs of the twentieth century.<br />
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<h4>
The Great Impasse </h4>
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Participants at the conference agreed that arrangements should be made as a matter of urgency to develop and implement a program for <a href="http://www.nap.edu/read/10294/chapter/9#119" target="_blank">the disposal of nuclear wastes in abandoned salt mines and deep salt beds</a>. Vast deposits of bedded salt were known to exist along the southern edge of the Great Lakes extending from New York state to Michigan. Other potentially suitable sites were nominated in the Gulf states of Texas and Louisiana, and also in Utah, Colorado and Kansas. The conference also recommended that concurrent research be undertaken to find ways of stabilising nuclear wastes in the form of ceramics or insoluble slag.<br />
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Yet a curious inertia permeated the U.S. nuclear establishment. It took a further 45 years before the first (and only) functioning underground nuclear waste depository was actually constructed. The safe disposal of radioactive wastes was clearly not as straightforward as many had assumed. <br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGEbafx8fVWze4s4TbX0PJaBlduLJaxiGxGrm4LR0sKgKL9thW-mejIl6Bvg48j6dBsogOccWQFT71CziORcXxW6SJc8AiwyqQ0JA3BcT1gsExkkXWZLUGdPshr-Kf0SYYhiuO1GKcGjD2/s1600/WIPP.+Stacked+Drums+of+Transuranic+Wastes.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGEbafx8fVWze4s4TbX0PJaBlduLJaxiGxGrm4LR0sKgKL9thW-mejIl6Bvg48j6dBsogOccWQFT71CziORcXxW6SJc8AiwyqQ0JA3BcT1gsExkkXWZLUGdPshr-Kf0SYYhiuO1GKcGjD2/s320/WIPP.+Stacked+Drums+of+Transuranic+Wastes.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stacked Drums of Transuranic Wastes. WIPP, New Mexico</td></tr>
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The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico was built in a deep underground salt deposit and eventually opened in 1999 after years of contention between Federal and State regulators. The WIPP does not actually house any wastes from commercial nuclear reactors. It was specifically assigned to store the extremely long-lived transuranic wastes - which include large quantities of plutonium produced by the U.S. military nuclear weapons program between 1944 and 1988.<br />
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The WIPP repository has not been without its problems. In February 2014, a deflagration reaction within one of the barrels containing radioactive waste caused an intense fire that consumed the contents of the barrel. This resulted in <a href="https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/794/wipp-waste-accident-horrific-comedy-errors" target="_blank">the release of radioactive contamination</a> throughout the underground tunnel system and into the surrounding environment. Above-ground monitors soon after detected the spread of radiation one kilometre away from the site of the fire. Waste storage operations were shut down immediately after the incident but <a href="http://www.wipp.energy.gov/wipprecovery/recovery.html" target="_blank">are slated to resume</a> in December 2016. The clean-up cost is already in the hundreds of millions of dollars.<br />
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More recently, <a href="http://phys.org/news/2015-11-nuclear-storage-sites-salt-vulnerable.html" target="_blank">doubts have been raised</a> regarding the ultimate suitability of salt mines and salt domes as safe storage sites for radioactive wastes. Water has been found flowing through what were earlier believed to be impermeable salt deposits. This has certainly been the case <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/07/photogalleries/100708-radioactive-nuclear-waste-science-salt-mine-dump-pictures-asse-ii-germany/" target="_blank">in Germany's Asse II underground salt chambers</a> in which over 100,000 barrels of low to medium level nuclear wastes have been stored from the 1960s. The unexpected movement of water into these chambers has raised fears of longer term radioactive contamination of local groundwater.<br />
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In the meantime, most of the 70,000 tons of spent fuel in the U.S. continues to quietly glow in cooling ponds located alongside nuclear power plants. Many of these cooling ponds have reached their storage capacity with some 20% of the spent fuel stockpile having been transferred to above-ground dry storage casks. The situation is similarly fraught in Canada, the U.K., continental Europe, Russia and the Ukraine, China, Japan, Korea and many other countries where nuclear wastes continue to accumulate even as new reactors are commissioned.<br />
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<h4>
Resuscitating a Nightmare</h4>
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It is a curious thing to observe the confidence with which the recent Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission has embraced the promotion of South Australia as the ideal destination for over one third of the world's accumulated stores of spent nuclear fuel. This spent fuel, together with the 400,000 cubic metres of intermediate-level nuclear waste that the Royal Commission recommends be transported to South Australia, represents a problem that nations with decades-long histories of nuclear energy production have failed to resolve. The entrancement induced by a whiff of billions of dollars of new revenue presently has a closed circle of nuclear advocates and politicians <a href="http://nuclear.yoursay.sa.gov.au/state-wide-program" target="_blank">straining to persuade the people of South Australia</a> to obligingly make their way as latter-day lemmings towards a dangerous and uncharted nuclear abyss.<br />
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In the short term, the Commission calls for the transportation of vast tonnages of highly radioactive materials from around the planet for decades-long storage in above-ground facilities. In the longer term, it proposes the construction of a deep underground repository for the "permanent" burial of the most dangerous wastes produced by a destructive and senescent civilisation.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGPCfLKS1YW2Abz7djH57o_2lQKIl4eQrTPYDlDOi4G4fGG10hH_T4bXzyqRS6jhcGc4sbGrDkl-UssW-dh1fuS5W56ono0MkejX_A4co0t3xvZDuAh2vsFGOmCtGDhKP8Jp75rM2Xt8-8/s1600/Onkalo.+Repository+Under+Construction.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGPCfLKS1YW2Abz7djH57o_2lQKIl4eQrTPYDlDOi4G4fGG10hH_T4bXzyqRS6jhcGc4sbGrDkl-UssW-dh1fuS5W56ono0MkejX_A4co0t3xvZDuAh2vsFGOmCtGDhKP8Jp75rM2Xt8-8/s320/Onkalo.+Repository+Under+Construction.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Onkalo. Nuclear Repository Under Construction</td></tr>
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The pursuit of projects such as that envisioned by the South Australian Royal Commission has been plagued by unanticipated complications as has been shown at both the WIPP repository in New Mexico and Yucca Mountain in Nevada. <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-08/finns-to-bury-nuclear-waste-in-world's-costliest-tomb/7488588" target="_blank">The Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository</a> at Olkiluoto in Finland has been held up as the gold standard in nuclear waste repository design, but at the present time it remains an idea that has yet to be tested. The repository has been under construction since 2004 and is expected to open in the 2020s. It will eventually cost around $5 billion and is designed to store 5,000 tons of spent fuel from Finland's four nuclear reactors for a period of at least 100,000 years. Meanwhile, Finland's nuclear program continues to expand with a fifth reactor under construction and another on the drawing board.<br />
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<h4>
Quo Vadis? </h4>
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The project to bury the world's nuclear poison in the heart of the Australian desert has not sprung out of a void. It is an idea that has been insidiously festering for two decades in a variety of incarnations. The first stirrings of the hellish project to turn Australia into the world's nuclear dumping ground emerged in the late 1990s when Pangea Resources, a U.K. based company promoted the construction of a commercially-operated international waste repository in Western Australia. The project was supported by a $40 million budget, 80% of which came from British Nuclear Fuels Limited (wholly owned by the U.K. government), with the remaining 20% from two nuclear waste management companies.<br />
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That particular project came to an abrupt halt in 1999 after Friends of the Earth in the U.K. came into possession of a promotional video produced by Pangea Resources and sent it on to its sister organisation in Australia. The project did, however, excite the imagination of <a href="https://australianmap.net/pangea-former-proposed-high-level-nuclear-waste-dump/" target="_blank">a number of prominent Australian politicians</a> including former prime ministers Bob Hawke and John Howard. In 2005, Bob Hawke <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2005-09-27/hawke-backs-aust-as-nuclear-waste-repository/2111938" target="_blank">excitedly proclaimed</a>: "Forget about current account deficits . . . we could revolutionise the economics of Australia if we did this."<br />
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The situation is no different today. Current Prime Minister <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/28/australia-could-store-nuclear-waste-for-other-countries-malcolm-turnbull-says?CMP=share_btn_tw" target="_blank">Malcolm Turnbull</a> and opposition leader <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-16/shorten-and-weatherill-of-one-mind-on-sa-nuclear-waste-dump/7174002" target="_blank">Bill Shorten</a> seem to be in lock-step regarding the desirability of importing the world's high level nuclear waste into South Australia. Neither has listened to the voices of <a href="http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2987853/radioactive_waste_and_the_nuclear_war_on_australias_aboriginal_people.html" target="_blank">indigenous traditional owners</a> or of the more informed advocates of restraint and sanity.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht0d5zrrggNB93hJY-HTZLECp-Attxhmxo1WAJKQ8yP85nfAAzjA4xThueBJIvuxA6mi3hie8qRnyTrpJjEtxFZGuCjoSwIZ54k9nO3exkuq31A9mxPGgY2q9mUiohJMQckMy2YnLrsAv5/s1600/Olympic+Dam+Mine+3.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht0d5zrrggNB93hJY-HTZLECp-Attxhmxo1WAJKQ8yP85nfAAzjA4xThueBJIvuxA6mi3hie8qRnyTrpJjEtxFZGuCjoSwIZ54k9nO3exkuq31A9mxPGgY2q9mUiohJMQckMy2YnLrsAv5/s320/Olympic+Dam+Mine+3.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Olympic Dam Uranium Mine, South Australia</td></tr>
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One of the more disturbing elements of the Royal Commission report is its explicit endorsement of the progressive nuclearisation of the planet over the course of the next century. But <a href="http://www.foe.org.au/sites/default/files/RC-critique-16Dec2015-final.pdf" target="_blank">given the make-up of the Royal Commission,</a> this comes as no surprise.<br />
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The fact that the earth presently heaves under the detritus, the violence, and the unquenchable excesses of a terminally destructive civilisation blind to its own approaching convulsions has simply not entered the consciousness of those who would sell the future for a mess of pottage. The projections of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission report are prefaced on the assumption of continuing social, political, economic, climatic and existential stability for the next 120 years - which is the nominated life-span of the project - and <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20120410062832/http://eps.mq.edu.au/media/veevers1.htm" target="_blank">continuing geological stability</a> for tens of thousands of years thereafter.<br />
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At a time when our collective energies could be given over to creating the conditions that will bring to an end the excess and wastefulness that have brought us all to such a perilous edge, we find ourselves being quietly goaded into a more-of-the-same, business-as-usual entrancement that ignores the realities we presently face and those that await our children and their generations. One can only hope for a general awakening whereby people everywhere will come to recognise the deceits, the distractions and the seductions perpetrated by those who would move the world the way it goes.<br />
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It has been said that the beginning of a situation holds the seeds of its future fruition. The will to power and the disregard of consequence that were made manifest by the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has already borne the dreadful fruits of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima and worldwide radioactive contamination. Let us nonetheless continue to strive to find the will to live in ways that honour the delicacy of life, the sublime coherence of nature, and the mystery of the love that brings forth all beings.<br />
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<h4>
The Pangea Story</h4>
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The video clip below was produced by the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1999. It offers a remarkable account of how the shadowy dealings of corporate entities acting in concert with governments can be brought to light and held to account by attentive vigilance and informed commitment.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ykRb0Iibckk" width="420"></iframe>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Vincent Di Stefano M.H.Sc., D.O., N.D.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Inverloch, July 2016 </span></b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>A pdf copy of this essay can be downloaded</i> <a href="https://archive.org/details/PoisonInTheHeart" target="_blank">here</a></span></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>RELATED POSTS</b></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ivy Mike. The 1st Thermonuclear Bomb</td></tr>
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<h4>
1. <a href="http://satanscauldrons.blogspot.com.au/2017/08/the-ruin-of-rongelap-when-protectors.html" target="_blank">On the Ruin of Rongelap. When Protectors Become Destroyers</a></h4>
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This post carries a 30 minute audio production together with a substantive essay <i>When Protectors Become Destroyers</i> that detail the effects of atomic testing in the Marshall Islands during the 1950s. The essay presents an historical overview of the events that led to the development of thermonuclear weapons by Edward Teller and his group. It also recalls the role of the Greenpeace yacht <i>Rainbow Warrior</i> in the relocation of the people of Rongelap from their highly contaminated island in 1985.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTqPiMxGapfrEQMlmtDv5Um4BHj60nFmTy9f53_kmhLC0d8KkNjYouQeakJKpXhkJMBq4C3EqRFNDJy-r9_quM8mzrw-INhe3YMhEaP61r4RIEAB1kLRD3iK1bzyEaM84N7WWFPAC8k95K/s1600/Jaduguda+mine+and+processing+mill.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="121" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTqPiMxGapfrEQMlmtDv5Um4BHj60nFmTy9f53_kmhLC0d8KkNjYouQeakJKpXhkJMBq4C3EqRFNDJy-r9_quM8mzrw-INhe3YMhEaP61r4RIEAB1kLRD3iK1bzyEaM84N7WWFPAC8k95K/s200/Jaduguda+mine+and+processing+mill.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jaduguda Mine and Processing Mill</td></tr>
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<h4>
2. <a href="http://thehealingprojectweblog.blogspot.com.au/2016/01/expendable-lives-disposable-earth_31.html" target="_blank">The Art of Disregard. Jaduguda and the Indian Nuclear Project</a></h4>
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This post offers an account of the activities of UCIL, the Indian government owned Uranium Corporation of India on the lives of several Adivasi communities in Jharkhand, where a number of villages are situated close to uranium mines with their tailings dams. The post includes embedded video produced by Indian film-maker Shri Prakash which reveals the extent of disregard by Indian authorities of the consequences of their mining activities on local communities.<br />
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<br />Vincent Di Stefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09559307846832090756noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6238912176297249441.post-56592463058011027152016-06-03T00:41:00.002-07:002021-01-26T19:47:05.752-08:00The Devil's Century<div style="text-align: right;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinCeEX0WJmv7JuThEyMHXwNxkIasGTquTvrxFn7OsvZ3PgV2UrcCk2gJhLlGaQpSSok3Uo_kD51Z5qG6qiOBM63hCq9qXGaCymjERKtACu4lWtoVjR5omg0Of93sSbje9H6IZrd-9G8AGv/s1600/Raphael+ca.+1505.+St.+Michael.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinCeEX0WJmv7JuThEyMHXwNxkIasGTquTvrxFn7OsvZ3PgV2UrcCk2gJhLlGaQpSSok3Uo_kD51Z5qG6qiOBM63hCq9qXGaCymjERKtACu4lWtoVjR5omg0Of93sSbje9H6IZrd-9G8AGv/s320/Raphael+ca.+1505.+St.+Michael.jpg" width="273" /></a></div>
Our present generation is living out of the spiritually vacuous philosophies of modernism and post-modernism, the cancerous ideologies of free-market economics and unrestrained economic growth, and the corporate and political tyrannies that have nurtured an energised ethos of transience. The triumphalism of modernity has effectively wiped from our collective memories a coherent view of just what has gone down in the flourish and flash of the late twentieth century. The immensity of human misery and the degree of cultural waste wrought over the past century have been largely forgotten. <br />
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We have succeeded in erasing from our consciences the terrible crimes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We have similarly glossed over the outpouring of vast torrents of radioactive elements into the earth's atmosphere. Every living human being now carries radioactive elements in their bodies as a result of the <a href="https://www.ctbto.org/nuclear-testing/the-effects-of-nuclear-testing/general-overview-of-theeffects-of-nuclear-testing/" target="_blank">520 atmospheric nuclear tests</a> - with an explosive power equivalent to 29,000 Hiroshima bombs - that were conducted between 1945 and 1980. We also choose to ignore the insidious infiltration of radioactive elements throughout the biosphere from every stage of the nuclear cycle, from the mining and processing of uranium to <a href="http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/routineradioactivereleases.htm" target="_blank">the routine ventings</a> of nuclear power plants. And despite the global dispersal of a devil's brew of long-lived radionuclides from the catastrophic accidents at <a href="https://nuclear-news.net/information/nuclear-history/nuclear-history-the-forgotten-disaster/" target="_blank">Chelyabinsk</a>, Chernobyl and more recently <a href="http://www.countercurrents.org/stefano150416.htm" target="_blank">Fukushima</a>, our technocratic minders and their political puppets continue to steer public opinion towards the embrace of a salvific nuclear renaissance that will put to rest all nasty prospects of runaway climate change.<br />
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One does not need an overheated imagination to conclude that the past century has been in the thrall of demonic forces that have somehow subverted our capacity for thoughtful evaluation and corrective restraint. Having witnessed the holocaust of the so-called Great War, William Butler Yeats wrote in 1919:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;</i><br />
<i>Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.</i><br />
<i>The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere</i><br />
<i>The ceremony of innocence is drowned;</i><br />
<i>The best lack all conviction, while the worst</i><br />
<i>Are full of passionate intensity.</i></blockquote>
A century later, some things seem not to have changed at all . . . .<br />
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<h4>
<b>Echoes from a Cathedral</b></h4>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pope Leo XIII</td></tr>
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There is a story told in certain circles that offers a most unusual view regarding the nature of the forces unleashed on the world during the twentieth century:<br />
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After celebrating a morning mass in 1884, Pope Leo XIII attended a mass of Thanksgiving, as was his practice. At a certain point, he lifted his head and began to look steadily towards the altar. He was staring motionlessly without batting an eye. His expression alternated between horror and awe and the appearance of his face was alternately flushed and pale. He seemed completely overtaken by what he was experiencing. As his facial colour returned and he became more settled, he rose from his seat and went straight to his office without speaking to anybody or giving any indication of what he had just experienced. When he emerged half an hour later, Pope Leo handed his secretary a newly composed prayer to Saint Michael with instructions that it was thenceforth to be read in Catholic churches after every mass. This practice commenced soon after and continued for many decades. It was abandoned only after the reforms of Vatican II during the 1960s.<br />
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Pope Leo later described how during the time of his entrancement, he had heard two voices emanating from the tabernacle. One was a deep guttural voice that boasted that he could destroy the Church if given enough time and power. A strong but gentle voice replied asking how much time and how much power was needed. The other said that a century would be sufficient but that he needed greater power over those whose service he could avail himself of. Pope Leo then heard the reply: "You have the time. You will have the power. Do with them what you will."<br />
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The twentieth century has in fact seen not only the destruction of much within the Catholic Church that was held sacrosanct during the time of Pope Leo who held office from 1878 to 1903, but the unleashing of destructive forces on a scale never before witnessed on the earth.<br />
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<h4>
<b>Leviathan Awakens</b></h4>
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The decades following Pope Leo's vision saw a consolidation and expansion of the new powers that the industrial revolution had spawned. But the high intelligence that brought forth the many innovations of the time carried its own dark shadow as an unshakeable companion. There were some with prescience who descried the oppression that lay hidden within emerging industrial developments. Among the first were the romantic poets who lamented the destruction of the natural world that invariably accompanied urban and industrial expansion. As early as the first decade of the nineteenth century, William Blake had envisioned the new forms of enslavement and the forfeitures of freedom that lay in wait in the nascent industrialism revealed by the <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/54684" target="_blank"><i>dark satanic mills</i></a> of Georgian England.<br />
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The development of new industrial methods of production enabled the exploitation of coal reserves, mineral deposits, and newly discovered petroleum fields on a hitherto unimagined scale. They gave rise to new dynasties of immense wealth and power. As factories began to proliferate, vast numbers of people found themselves subjected to lives of bondage in servitude to the Machine. In the United States, Andrew Carnegie's steelworks poured out thousands of kilometres of railway tracks that carried coal-fired locomotives and their heavy cargoes to all parts of a newly opened continent. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company drew forth the energy-rich black blood stored in ancient forests that had been hidden in the earth. Crude oil was progressively fractionated and manipulated by a new class of chemists to produce fuels and lubricants for internal combustion engines, fertilisers for agriculture, explosives for military and industrial use, and the building blocks of powerful new drugs that would completely alter the way medicine was practised.<br />
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That creativity was, however, shadowed by a destructive aspect of equal magnitude. This was made manifest in its tragic fullness during World War I that raged from 1914 to 1918. During those four years, some 17 million people died violently and a further 20 million were wounded. Even greater numbers of those who were not killed by bullets, mortars, bombs or chemical weapons were later taken out by <a href="https://virus.stanford.edu/uda/" target="_blank">the influenza pandemic of 1918</a>. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgV8EQztvCY3qWjZQ65H28AETy8NVPvlONetW4RltW95weXr0NtmditKIdvrHZxwZ2aD_MQNqojlQ-CQWZ-_2YtG4SQ6gxYdFfbGbq_8bW4DZtTc0NtUcpdW3GckYfxZs6yo6DQHI9E7lDh/s1600/Woman+in+Prayer.+Hiroshima+2015.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgV8EQztvCY3qWjZQ65H28AETy8NVPvlONetW4RltW95weXr0NtmditKIdvrHZxwZ2aD_MQNqojlQ-CQWZ-_2YtG4SQ6gxYdFfbGbq_8bW4DZtTc0NtUcpdW3GckYfxZs6yo6DQHI9E7lDh/s320/Woman+in+Prayer.+Hiroshima+2015.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Woman in Prayer at Hiroshima Memorial Park </td></tr>
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Never before in the history of humanity had so much metal been used to such destructive purpose. Never before had such explosive power been so catastrophically released. Never before had so many young and old men in uniform been mobilised over such vast distances. Never before had so many people been destroyed in such numbers by fellow human beings. Yet the experience of World War I proved to be but a prelude to the far greater devastation that erupted a short 21 years later culminating in the dropping of two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. <br />
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The dual nature of modernism had revealed its extremity.<br />
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<h4>
<b>Lengthening Shadows</b></h4>
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The Great War was but a first manifestation of the unleashing of the prodigious powers and capabilities that would come to dominate the twentieth century landscape. These powers found expression in virtually all domains of human endeavour - economic management, political ideology and methods of social control, mineral extraction and utilisation, electricity generation and supply, and ways of land, air and maritime transport. The ingenuity and brilliance embodied in these developments were, however, accompanied step by step by forces that darkened all the visionary rhetoric promising the arrival of a new golden age, a tomorrowland of prosperity, freedom and happiness for all.<br />
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The opposing ideologies of capitalism and communism began to crystallise, the one marked by a philosophy and practice of unrestrained privately-owned production and a similarly unrestrained consumption, the other by a forfeiture of private property and the creation of state-owned enterprises built on totalitarian methods of social and political control. By the late 1920s, the seeds had been sown for a massive collapse in the economies of both the United States and Europe. By the early 1930s, millions of workers and tens of thousands of financial institutions in the so-called free world had been brought to ruin by the Great Depression.<br />
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The Soviet Union was declared by Vladimir Lenin in 1922. When he died two years later, Joseph Stalin consolidated his own power and outmanoeuvred his opponents to become supreme dictator by the late 1920s. Vast tracts of agricultural land were seized by the State and millions were imprisoned in an archipelago of labour camps. Stalin's <a href="http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/stalin.htm" target="_blank">suppression of all opposition in the Ukraine</a> was merciless. Between 1929 and 1933, seven million Ukrainians - three million of whom were children - had been systematically starved to death.<br />
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Meanwhile, Adolph Hitler's rise to power had become irresistible, fuelled as it was by the growing resentment of a German people who had been subjected to regional dismemberment, economic degradation and deep humiliation by the <a href="https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005425" target="_blank">Treaty of Versailles</a> imposed in 1919.<br />
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Yet the party rolled on. America and Europe recovered, the Soviet Union continued to gain in power, and Germany became increasingly militarised. By the time World War II erupted in 1939, the machinery to both create and deploy technologies of destruction on an immense scale was fully in place. Under Hitler, entire populations were herded into mechanised death camps. Aerial warfare enabled a totally new level of devastation. In the latter stages of the war, it was directed to the complete destruction by fire of entire cities, as occurred in Hamburg in July 1943, Dresden in February 1945, and Tokyo in March 1945.<br />
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The deadliest fruit that ripened on the flaming tree of war was, however, that born of the Manhattan Project. In the final furious exhalation of hell's fire that drew the curtain down on World War II, 70,000 human lives were vaporised in just 4 seconds after <i>Fat Man</i>, a single bomb carrying four kilograms of plutonium, exploded above the city of Nagasaki on August 9th, 1945.<br />
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<h4>
<b>Opening the Portals</b></h4>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNoteqOouIxkUjdYlbHBuifF1Jy6xlyUw79hJoCiSG9ugO1rjj65EI0WPgtZIH50pN7ExAN-n0PkPoPUfQkuFiIBI2vRWvfgAgsa9wQjc1zASlRkpFqNTmvdNVrqHLwNO5tZWKwuCTKS8U/s1600/Ernest+Lawrence+with+Particle+Accelerator%252C+1939.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNoteqOouIxkUjdYlbHBuifF1Jy6xlyUw79hJoCiSG9ugO1rjj65EI0WPgtZIH50pN7ExAN-n0PkPoPUfQkuFiIBI2vRWvfgAgsa9wQjc1zASlRkpFqNTmvdNVrqHLwNO5tZWKwuCTKS8U/s320/Ernest+Lawrence+with+Particle+Accelerator%252C+1939.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Particle accelerator, Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, 1939</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Uranium was discovered in the late 1700s. It took another century before the element had revealed its hidden fire to the French physicist Henri Becquerel in 1896. Becquerel discovered that salts of uranium not only glowed in the dark but darkened photographic plates when placed in contact with them. He concluded that the salts emitted some form of radiation. Ernest Rutherford also worked with uranium, and by 1911 had established the atomic structure of matter. He also discovered that certain elements were inherently unstable and underwent radioactive transformations into other elements. Within eight years, Rutherford succeeded in replicating these transformations by bombarding a range of elements with alpha particles, one of the three forms of radiation emitted by uranium. By the mid 1920s, particle accelerators had appeared on the scene and made easier the manipulation of atomic nuclei in the laboratory.<br />
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In 1934, <a href="http://www.3rd1000.com/history/nuclear2.htm" target="_blank">it occurred to the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi</a> that bombarding uranium with neutrons might create heavier atoms by the capture and transformation of the neutrons in the nucleus of uranium atoms. His hunch eventually proved to be correct. Others who were conducting similar experiments observed that neutron bombardment of uranium atoms could also produce highly radioactive smaller atoms that were approximately half the size of uranium atoms. It was soon understood that uranium was capable of undergoing fission, of breaking into smaller radioactive fragments, when its nuclei absorbed neutrons.<br />
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Building on these developments, Fermi constructed a nuclear pile at the University of Chicago in order to generate such reactions on a massive scale. On the first day of December 1942, Fermi succeeded in igniting a controlled chain reaction. The mix of fast and slow neutrons that were produced not only tore atoms apart, but created the whole new litany of man-made elements - including plutonium - that Fermi had predicted eight years earlier. Four weeks later, on the 28th December 1942, President Roosevelt authorised the Manhattan Project.<br />
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The portals of the nuclear abyss had been thrown open. <br />
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<h4>
The Violent Century</h4>
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One of the key signatures of industrial/technological civilisation has been its willingness to exercise an ever-increasing violence in the pursuit of its aims. That violence has been made shockingly manifest in the wars conducted over the past century. Seventeen million people died violently during World War I. By the time World War II was drawing to a close, sixty million people - some 3% of the world's population - had been killed. In the short period between the two wars, the instruments of death had changed from bullets and mortars to air-borne bombs and rockets. The final act of infamy was the killing of over 200,000 Japanese people by two nuclear explosions in August 1945.<br />
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_nuclear_weapons_stockpiles_and_nuclear_tests_by_country" target="_blank">Within twenty years</a>, the United States had constructed over 31,000 nuclear weapons. And by 1985, the Soviet Union possessed over 39,000 nuclear weapons. This feast of hubris and insane excess was made possible by the generation of enormous amounts of plutonium in nuclear reactors. That flush of militaristic madness began to subside once the situation came to be more widely known. The present time has seen some small retreat. Yet <a href="http://www.icanw.org/the-facts/nuclear-arsenals/" target="_blank">more than 15,000 nuclear weapons</a> continue to grace the arsenals of nine nations.<br />
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Nuclear reactors themselves are another story. There are more than 440 operational nuclear power plants in 31 countries. Over 60 new reactors are under construction. <a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/radioactive-waste-management.aspx" target="_blank">According to the World Nuclear Association</a>, some 220,000 tons of highly radioactive spent fuel rods are presently immersed in cooling ponds around the world. An additional 25,000 tons are presently stored in dry casks.<br />
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Thousands of tons of new high-level wastes continue to be produced by existing nuclear reactors each year. Meanwhile, the shadowy supporters of the nuclear project blithely champion an increasingly nuclearised future.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgakoLHu_OwHHp3WIQ2YIA6Qb0gE9HSWYxKwPpC9q0rCY6PRaX5LLOctjhjTiceyUA6ZC1hf68MltElinSepxHX8Umlg0D0nC-oA5drRc1LyCXHE3x7T031LusurJ6kuzkYGWGulUBzzPF_/s1600/Olympic+Dam+Mine+3.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgakoLHu_OwHHp3WIQ2YIA6Qb0gE9HSWYxKwPpC9q0rCY6PRaX5LLOctjhjTiceyUA6ZC1hf68MltElinSepxHX8Umlg0D0nC-oA5drRc1LyCXHE3x7T031LusurJ6kuzkYGWGulUBzzPF_/s320/Olympic+Dam+Mine+3.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Olympic Dam Uranium Mine, South Australia</td></tr>
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The shattering of atoms, whether cataclysmically in nuclear bombs or in controlled chain reactions within nuclear power plants is an inherently violent act. That violence is itself the end of a sequence of violence that begins with the extraction of uranium from the earth. Violence is inflicted on the many indigenous peoples whose ways of life and whose health and safety have been over-ridden by governments and mining companies determined to draw forth the power and wealth hidden within uranium ores. That violence is further contained in the slowly seething nuclear wastes that litter the hinterlands of Canada, the United States, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Namibia, South Africa, <a href="http://thehealingprojectweblog.blogspot.com.au/2016/01/expendable-lives-disposable-earth_31.html" target="_blank">Jharkhand</a>, and Australia among other places. The same violence is silently experienced by <a href="http://www.ratical.org/radiation/inetSeries/RB89.html" target="_blank">millions of people</a> throughout the world who contend with the debilitating and often lethal effects of the assimilation into their bodies of radioactive elements released by atmospheric tests, nuclear accidents, and the slow bleed of radionuclides into the lands, airs and waters of the earth through the mining of uranium and from the operation of nuclear reactors. <br />
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Successive posts on <a href="http://satanscauldrons.blogspot.com.au/" target="_blank">Satan's Cauldrons</a> will progressively reveal the many faces of the nuclear project during this time when the forces of nature begin to return the violence that has been exercised so recklessly against the earth and her creatures for so long.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Vincent Di Stefano</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Inverloch, June 2016</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>A pdf copy of this essay can be downloaded</i> <a href="https://archive.org/details/TheDevilsCentury" target="_blank">here</a></b></span> </span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTQh2U5yXwYHoKz9Ag0SJ3_gCbAaFeWfcyeCfXeEA2lDCMLBFSrGgqmuF03l_XJFArK3HS836nskmSGauZOqIHMCij8FmLEwptQ-rEEsgZuVUgJ28GKZgwmRh8pTUB7hQZt6cVra7w8ISf/s1600/Henry+Moore.+Nuclear+Energy+Sculpture.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTQh2U5yXwYHoKz9Ag0SJ3_gCbAaFeWfcyeCfXeEA2lDCMLBFSrGgqmuF03l_XJFArK3HS836nskmSGauZOqIHMCij8FmLEwptQ-rEEsgZuVUgJ28GKZgwmRh8pTUB7hQZt6cVra7w8ISf/s320/Henry+Moore.+Nuclear+Energy+Sculpture.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Nuclear Energy</i>. Sculpture by Henry Moore, University of Chicago </td></tr>
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<br />Vincent Di Stefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09559307846832090756noreply@blogger.com0