http://www.thedish.org/TheDISHv8no26.htm


Intuit's Vibe

On Rongelap Radiation

By Chiyoko Tamayose



I am Chiyoko Tamayose; I was born May 2, 1937. I am from Rongelap atoll in the Marshall Islands. I returned to Rongelap in 1957, three years after the nuclear fallout contaminated my homeland; scientists informed us that the land was clean and safe.

I noticed that not everything was right. The arrowroots that before grew everywhere were gone. Coconut trees were bearing green and yellow nuts from the same tree. Water changed color when we cooked our foods. Some of our fish had thyroid problems, small hard nodules in fish gills that were very hard to crack. After opening and tossing them in the water, the water changed to the colors of a rainbow.

We did not understand the change in the water; we played and splashed in it. We were only instructed not to eat coconut crabs, but during food shortages, we ate these delicacies and other locally grown food. We developed blisters all over our mouths, but continued to eat them because we were hungry.

I became very sick. I could not bear to be in bright daylight. The Department of Energy officials sent me to New York for treatment. I was told that the radiation content in my body was higher than some of the survivors of the 1954 fallout in Rongelap.

DOE doctors assigned us numbers; we were referred to only in numbers and as the 'Control Group'. I believe this program was called 'Project 4.1.' It was people not exposed to nuclear fallout, but became exposed and sick from injections that doctors gave us without our consent and from eating foods grown in the contaminated soil. I trusted American doctors to treat me fairly and take good care of my illness, rather than using me as a guinea pig as I later on learned.

I have 12 children; some of them are physically handicapped. I believe in my heart that their problems began with me. I have one son that had liver cancer; he was operated on at the Kuakini Hospital in Honolulu; he died during the operation. Another son had problems with his thyroid - so severe he could not eat or swallow water. A daughter was born with the lower body so soft as if there was no bone. I have a 40 year-old son who was born with a big blister on his back. Doctors informed me that they'd never seen that type of case. These cases involve my immediate family, but there are numerous cases. One of my cousins gave birth to what is known these days as a jellyfish baby; another one of her babies was born without any backbone.

Hearings need to be held here so our stories can be told. The Changed Circumstances Petition is critical. If not approved by Congress, survivors and their affected descendants are left to fend for themselves. There will be no funds to treat their health conditions. If the Petition is not approved, Congress is washing its hands off its moral obligation to care for the problems that it created.

Today, I am 68 years of age. More than half of my life I've lived with many types of health problems. I believe health problems in the Marshall Island will continue beyond my time. Your support is critical for as long as these problems that derived from the nuclear testing program exist. (For more on the petition, click on www.ncseonline.org/NLE/CRS/abstract.cfm?NLEid=64160 and for a complete copy of this letter, click on Chiyoko_Letter.htm)





Politics Y2K5

ERUB: Nuclear Fallout Victims

Nuclear Fallout at the Air Force

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,...1812228,00.html

Nuclear fallout brought the careers of the Air Force's top two officials to an inglorious end Thursday, as they were ousted by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. In response to the service's lackadaisical approach to atomic-weapons security, Gates fired Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne and General T. Michael Moseley, the chief of staff. "The focus of the Air Force leadership has drifted with respect to perhaps its most sensitive mission," Gates told reporters at a hastily called, late-afternoon press conference.
Gates said the "trigger" for the double-barreled firing — both men officially resigned, although they were given no choice, Pentagon officials said — was the discovery in March that the Air Force had mistakenly shipped parts for nuclear missiles to Taiwan, wrongly believing the equipment to be helicopter batteries. That embarrassment followed the August 2007 flight of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles under the wing of a B-52 bomber from North Dakota to Louisiana without anyone knowing the warheads were aboard the plane, or even that they had gone missing from their base. The Taiwan mistake involved four non-nuclear nose-cone elements vital to detonating nuclear warheads atop Minuteman missiles.

Bush faces nuclear fallout in Nevada over £60bn mountain of radioactive waste

No mention is made of the native American name for the mountain, Moving Hill, nor scientists' nickname for it, Old Leaky. Nor is there space for a Geological Society of America report which warned that should moisture enter the mountain where nuclear waste is stored in bundles of rods, "radioactive volcanoes could form on the surface".

http://www.bellona.org/english_import_area...e_imports/23563

Russia to dump radwaste in volcano

Atomic Minister Alexandr Rumyantsev announced that Russia would be willing to except low active radioactive waste for permanent burial on a seismically unstable volcanic island in Russia’s far eastern Kuril chain from Taiwan.
Speaking in Izvestiya Thursday, Rumyantsev casually said that Russia would be willing to work with Japanese engineers to build on Simushir Island — home to the active 1539 meter Milna volcano — a permanent radioactive waste burial facility that would be capable of withstanding the island’s shifting and jarring earth. The volcano is one of several such volcanoes on the island chain located off the northern coast of Japan add south of Kamchatka

According to confidential Duma documents obtained by Vladimir Slivyak, co-chairman of Moscow’s Ecodefense!, the Taiwanese will supposedly be paying the Russian government up to $10bn, including $2.5bn of construction costs, to host its radioactive waste in this seismologically volatile environment on a permanent basis.

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/du.htm

Depleted Uranium

In military applications, when alloyed, Depleted Uranium [DU] is ideal for use in armor penetrators. These solid metal projectiles have the speed, mass and physical properties to perform exceptionally well against armored targets. DU provides a substantial performance advantage, well above other competing materials. This allows DU penetrators to defeat an armored target at a significantly greater distance. Also, DU's density and physical properties make it ideal for use as armor plate. DU has been used in weapon systems for many years in both applications.

Depleted uranium results from the enriching of natural uranium for use in nuclear reactors. Natural uranium is a slightly radioactive metal that is present in most rocks and soils as well as in many rivers and sea water. Natural uranium consists primarily of a mixture of two isotopes (forms) of uranium, Uranium-235 (U235) and Uranium-238 (U238), in the proportion of about 0.7 and 99.3 percent, respectively. Nuclear reactors require U235 to produce energy, therefore, the natural uranium has to be enriched to obtain the isotope U235 by removing a large part of the U238. Uranium-238 becomes DU, which is 0.7 times as radioactive as natural uranium. Since DU has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, there is very little decay of those DU materials.

http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2004/DU-Trojan-Horse1jul04.htm

Depleted Uranium:
The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War
LEUREN MORET / World Affairs – The Journal of International Issues 1jul04

The use of depleted uranium weaponry by the United States, defying all international treaties, will slowly annihilate all species on earth including the human species, and yet this country continues to do so with full knowledge of its destructive potential.

LEUREN MORET

Since 1991, the United States has staged four wars using depleted uranium weaponry, illegal under all international treaties, conventions and agreements, as well as under the US military law. The continued use of this illegal radioactive weaponry, which has already contaminated vast regions with low level radiation and will contaminate other parts of the world over time, is indeed a world affair and an international issue. The deeper purpose is revealed by comparing regions now contaminated with depleted uranium — from Egypt, the Middle East, Central Asia and the northern half of India — to the US geostrategic imperatives described in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 book The Grand Chessboard.



The fact is that the United States and its military partners have staged four nuclear wars, "slipping nukes under the wire" by using dirty bombs and dirty weapons in countries the US needs to control. Depleted uranium aerosols will permanently contaminate vast regions and slowly destroy the genetic future of populations living in those regions, where there are resources which the US must control, in order to establish and maintain American primacy.

Described as the Trojan Horse of nuclear war, depleted uranium is the weapon that keeps killing.

http://www.cuttingedge.org/NEWS/n1843.cfm
AMERICAN SOLDIERS ARE ILL AND DYING OF "MYSTERIOUS ILLNESS" -- IS IT DEPLETED URANIUM POISONING?
Resources to aid your Understanding

Subtitle: The answer is a qualified "Yes!" American troops are beginning to show symptoms of Depleted Uranium poisoning, a situation being magnified by the heat in which they are operating. From Gulf War I, fully 75% of our fighting men who were on the ground are now dead, dying, or sick from Depleted Uranium.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...va&aid=6009

If the BBC follows up with an investigation on the health effects of DU, it may be hard for the U.S. media to maintain their cover-up. More than 500,000 “Gulf War Era” vets currently receive disability compensation, many of them for a variety of symptoms generally referred to as Gulf War Syndrome. Experts blame DU for many of these symptoms.

“The numbers are overwhelming, but the potential horrors only get worse,” Robert C. Koehler of the Chicago-based Tribune Media Services wrote in an article about DU weapons entitled “Silent Genocide.”

“DU dust does more than wreak havoc on the immune systems of those who breathe it or touch it; the substance also alters one’s genetic code,” Koehler wrote. “The Pentagon’s response to such charges is denial, denial, denial. And the American media is its moral co-conspirator.”

U.S. GOVERNMENT KNOWS

The U.S. government has known for at least 20 years that DU weapons produce clouds of poison gas on impact. These clouds of aerosolized DU are laden with billions of toxic sub-micron sized particles. A 1984 Department of Energy conference on nuclear airborne waste reported that tests of DU anti-tank missiles showed that at least 31 percent of the mass of a DU penetrator is converted to nano-particles on impact. In larger bombs the percentage of aerosolized DU increases to nearly 100 percent, Fulk told AFP.

DU is harmful in three ways, according to Fulk: “Chemical toxicity, radiological toxicity and particle toxicity.”

http://www.the7thfire.com/Politics%20and%2...ted-Uranium.htm

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/12/1/05542/6088

He said DU may well be associated with increased birth defects.

"We continue to get these sporadic reports of various places where a lot of people are getting sick, and nobody is willing to connect the dots yet," he said. "I'm afraid we're going to have a lot of people get sick before they finally admit that depleted uranium really causes a problem for us (U.S. veterans and their families) as well as for the Iraqis."

After NATO's use of DU weapons in Kosovo in 1999, the Council of Europe parliamentarians called for a worldwide ban on the manufacture, testing, use and sale of weapons using depleted uranium, asserting that NATO's use of DU weapons would have "long term effects on health and quality of life in South-East Europe, affecting future generations." The call went unheeded.



"What is clear ... is that elements of the U.S. government will manipulate information and even lie about the health of U.S. combat veterans to avoid liability for DU's health and environmental effects," said Dan Fahey, who has testified on DU at a number of congressional hearings. "Equally as clear is the willingness of some anti-DU activists to promote theories as fact, fabricate data and manipulate statistics, and exploit the suffering of people to further political or financial interests."

HOW IT SPREADS:
When a depleted uranium round hits a hard target, as much as 70 percent of the projectile can burn on impact, creating a firestorm of depleted uranium particles. The toxic residue of this firestorm is an extremely fine insoluble uranium dust that can be spread by the wind, inhaled and absorbed into the human body and absorbed by plants and animals, becoming part of the food chain. Once in the soil, it can pollute the environment and create up to a hundredfold increase in uranium levels in ground water, according to the U.N. Environmental Program.

"Trojan Horse of Nuclear War"
The fact is that the United States and its military partners have staged four nuclear wars, "slipping nukes under the wire" by using dirty bombs and dirty weapons in countries the US needs to control. Depleted uranium aerosols will permanently contaminate vast regions and slowly destroy the genetic future of populations living in those regions, where there are resources which the US must control, in order to establish and maintain American primacy.

Described as the Trojan Horse of nuclear war, depleted uranium is the weapon that keeps killing. The half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years, the age of the earth. And, as Uranium-238 decays into daughter radioactive products, in four steps before turning into lead, it continues to release more radiation at each step. There is no way to turn it off, and there is no way to clean it up. It meets the US Government's own definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

After forming microscopic and submicroscopic insoluble Uranium oxide particles on the battlefield, they remain suspended in air and travel around the earth as a radioactive component of atmospheric dust, contaminating the environment, indiscriminately killing, maiming and causing disease in all living things where rain, snow and moisture remove it from the atmosphere. Global radioactive contamination from atmospheric testing was the equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs, and still contaminates the atmosphere and lower orbital space today. The amount of low level radioactive pollution from depleted uranium released since 1991, is many times more (deposited internally in the body), than was released from atmospheric testing fallout.

Historical Overview of Radiation Injury

Radiation in the form of "x-rays" was discovered in 1895 by the German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen. Radioactivity in ore was discovered by Antoine Henri Becquerel in 1898. Within a few years of discovery, ionizing radiation was used for a wide variety of medical diagnostic and treatment purposes. Radiation was found to be an extremely useful modality for medical imaging and an effective means for treating a variety of conditions from acne to malignancies. However, some of the side effects of radiation became known within a few years. Some early radiologists developed radiation skin injury and leukemia from their exposure to ionizing radiation.

Since 1940, there have been over 300 significant radiation accidents in the United States alone. These include both medical and industrial errors, as well as accidents involving the production and storage of nuclear weapons. Some of the most significant worldwide events associated with radiation injury are described below.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan—1945

The atomic bomb blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 during World War II resulted in massive firestorms that obliterated much of the city. They also provided information on the medical effects of uncontrolled ionizing radiation over a wide dose range among those casualties who initially survived the blast and firestorm. The bomb detonated over Hiroshima was equivalent to 15,000 tons (15 KT) of TNT, while the Nagasaki weapon was equivalent to 22 KT of TNT.

It has been estimated that 50% of those exposed to a 2.7-3.1 Gray (Gy) bone marrow dose died within 60 days from their radiation exposure, as little medical assistance was available. Radioactive fallout was very limited, because both of the detonations were airbursts, in which the actual fireball does not reach the ground. The estimates of maximum dose due to fallout are 1-3 centigray (cGy) in Hiroshima and 20-40 cGy in Nagasaki.

The principal effects of radiation in unborn infants in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were small head size (microcephaly) and mental *******ation. Of the 1,600 children exposed before birth who were followed, 30 were found to have severe mental *******ation. Those with severe mental *******ation were noted to have received radiation exposure between 8 weeks and 25 weeks gestation. The most sensitive time of the gestational period was found to be 8-15 weeks after conception.

Ionizing radiation is a relatively weak carcinogen. Among 86,000 atomic-bomb survivors at Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed from 1950 to 1990, there were 7,578 deaths from solid cancer (versus 7,244 expected) and 249 deaths from leukemia (versus 162 expected), representing 421 additional deaths from cancer. The minimum elapsed time between radiation exposure and clinical disease was 2-3 years for leukemia, 3-4 years for bone cancer, 4-5 years for thyroid cancer, and 10 years for other solid tumors.
Mayak, Russia, Former Soviet Union—1948-1990

The Mayak Production Association (Mayak) is an industrial complex in the Southern Urals of Russia, where the former Soviet Union produced tons of plutonium for nuclear weapons. Between 1948 and 1956, radioactive waste was poured directly into the Techa River, which was the source of drinking water for many villages. It is reported that 124,000 people were exposed to medium and high levels of radiation. In 1957, one of the cooling systems at Mayak exploded, and more than half the amount of radioactive waste released at Chernobyl went into the atmosphere. Another incident occurred after a reservoir for waste storage evaporated during a dry hot summer. Windstorms then carried 600,000 curies of radioactive dust over 2,700 square kilometers. According to one source, the radiation accidents and radioactive discharge at Mayak killed thousands and made many more ill. The implications for children who were living in this area are enormous, although health data for this population are not readily available.
Marshall Islands—1954

Fallout played a large role in the Marshall Islands after a 1954 nuclear weapons test on Bikini Island caused fallout on nearby islands, resulting in significant health effects in children. Acute effects included skin injuries from beta radiation (so-called "beta burns"), especially of the feet. The most heavily exposed were the 64 people of Rongelap Island, who were exposed to 190 cGy of external radiation plus 1000-5000 cGy to the thyroid from radioactive iodine. Of 32 individuals who were younger than 20 years old when exposed to the radioactive fallout, 4 developed thyroid cancer and 1 developed leukemia. Two individuals who were younger than 1 year old at exposure developed myxedema and short stature.

http://www.ahrq.gov/research/pedprep/pedchap6.htm

Other Radiation Uses and Injuries

Prior to the 1960s, ionizing radiation was deemed nearly innocuous and was often believed to be beneficial. Individual exposures to low-level radiation commonly occurred from cosmetics, luminous paints, medical and dental x-ray machines, and gadgets for fitting shoes in retail stores. Fluoroscopy was widely used, as in the routine monthly well-baby visits of at least one large pediatric practice, and to shrink the thymus gland in other pediatric practices. This put infants at risk of thyroid cancer years later. Radium-224 was given intravenously to treat tuberculosis of the bone, resulting in an excess incidence of bone malignancies. Thorotrast® was also used as an intravenous radiographic contrast medium in Europe, Japan, and the United States, producing excess malignancies of the liver, bile ducts, spleen, brain, and bone in all age groups. Children and adults were also subjected to radiation exposure as part of experimental research in people that would not have met today's ethical standards.

In 1956, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences—National Research Council and the U.K. Medical Research Council published similar conclusions about the potential hazards and the late effects of radiation. Since that time, the uses of ionizing radiation have come under increasing scrutiny and regulation.

http://www.dukeemployees.com/nuclear32.shtml

Hiding Nuclear Damage Admitted
Employee Advocate – www.DukeEmployees.com – January 23, 2006

FirstEnergy, owner of Davis-Besse nuclear plant, admitted that serious damage was hidden from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), according to the U.S. Justice Department and the Associated Press. It agreed to pay $28 million in fines, restitution and community service projects.

Davis-Besse Reactor HoleIn 2002, an acid leak ate a hole through 6 inches of steel in the reactor head. A thin metal liner was bulged out from the reactor pressure. It is estimated that the damage had been increasing for at least four years.

Why would a company ignore such a potential catastrophe? The usual corporate reason – GREED.

Profits are only made when the reactor is splitting atoms, not when it is down for repairs. FirstEnergy acknowledged that it "knowingly made false representations to the NRC."

Two former Davis-Besse employees and a contractor have been indicted by a federal grand jury. They are charged with hiding damage from federal regulators, through the use of fake documents.

Nationwide and regional surveys have been conducted to evaluate natural radiation exposure of people in the vicinity of the Spanish nuclear power stations.
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=
Nationwide and regional surveys have been conducted to evaluate natural radiation exposure of people in the vicinity of the Spanish nuclear power stations. In these surveys, indoor radon, external gamma dose rates outdoors and indoors and radioactivity in soils were measured. Measurements of indoor radon concentrations were performed in 214 dwellings by using nuclear track-etched detectors. External exposure from terrestrial gamma rays outdoors and indoors were measured in a total of 596 points. Radioactivity in soil samples collected at 293 sampling sites are also reported in this paper. By taking into account all sources of natural radiation exposure, mean annual effective doses to the population in the surroundings of the six Spanish nuclear power stations have been estimated and compared with those coming from their normal operation.

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/radiation.html
Q. What are the other causes of human exposure to radiation?

1. Cosmic rays. These come from outer space and are only partly stopped by the atmosphere. The higher the altitude, the more cosmic rays. Naturally, scientists looked to see if cancer rates were larger in high altitude places. They aren't.

2. From rocks. Many rocks and soils, especially those containing granite, are more radioactive than most rock. There is an area in India where a mineral called monazite containing thorium is very radioactive. There is no measurable health effect from this either.

In the 1970s or 1980s it was noticed that the radioactive gas radon was prevalent in basements in areas where the underlying rock is granite. According to EPA rules, many places have more than EPA considers safe, and EPA advocates mitigating it, e.g. by sealing basements. Bernard Cohen compared death rates from lung cancer in elderly women (who rarely had smoked) in counties where there is lots of granite with the death rates where the underlying rock does not emit radon. He found no increase, suggesting that the linear hypothesis exaggerates by at least a factor of 4.

3. From potassium in the blood. Potassium is essential for life, but it contains a small fraction of a radioactive isotope. It would be difficult, but perhaps not impossible to tell whether this natural radiation within the body contributes to cancer.

4. The largest average human exposure to radiation is from medical X-rays.

5. As part of radiation treatments for cancer, people are sometimes exposed to radiation up to where they get acute radiation sickness. If they survive the treatment and survive the cancer, they don't seem to get additional cancer from the treatment.

Depleted Uranium
How the Pentagon Radiates Soldiers & Civilians with DU Weapons
http://www.iacenter.org/depleted/mettoc.htm