Author Archive for Michael Collins
City of LA to Feds – Clean up SSFL
The Los Angeles City Council votes unanimously to demand that NASA clean its polluted 450 acres at the Santa Susana Laboratory to background levels of radiation and chemical contamination. The victory comes courtesy of Councilmen Mitch Englander and Dennis Zine, two Republicans who aren’t fooled by NASA’s crafty maneuvering and Boeing’s meltdown makeover. Activists in city hall rejoice in victory which could save Los Angeles River from decades more pollution sluicing off the former Rocketdyne lab, site of three partial meltdowns and astronomical radiological and chemical contamination.
Winter Hot Zones
EnviroReporter.com travels across the country once again on the heels of Rad Road Trip, this time taking to the hot skies which sizzle with over five times the amount of radiation that would be normally expected at 30,000 in pre-Fukushima meltdowns days. Michigan snow shows significant beta presence yet precipitation radiation in Midwest off its highs from a year ago. Upon return, Los Angeles air tested by EnviroReporter.com and the EPA’s RadNet show L.A. Basin crackling with beta radiation in the atmosphere.
Rad State Road Trip
A thirteen state EnviroReporter.com road trip through the West and Midwest of the United States this fall revealed a lower fallout rate of suspected Fukushima than anticipated. There were, however, heightened radiation readings in Utah, Colorado and southwest Michigan.
AEG Punts Perchlorate Football at Farmers Field
Like Wile E. Coyote roping himself to a perchlorate-powered rocket, the Los Angeles City Council is set to launch the city into unknown territory September 28. That’s when the council will make an historic deal to approve the $1.2 billion Farmers Field project in downtown adjacent Staples Center. If the council and mayor don’t douse the fuse of toxic fireworks at Farmers Field before it’s built, the city and it citizens could have just about the same amount of luck as the hapless cartoon character but with much more consequences.
AEG’s Perchlorate Problem
AEG’s Farmers Field $1.2 billion project gets the go-ahead from the Los Angeles Planning Commission despite plan’s environmental impact report leaving out crucial data about the use of the toxic oxidizer perchlorate in fireworks the facility will be able to shoot off every day of the year when it opens, perhaps in 2017. Activists are concerned over health effects while Los Angeles Times takes project boosterism to new and unseemly lows. EIR obscured by toxic smoke may open up city and developer to future lawsuits from fans, players, employees and people living around Farmers Field and impacted by perchlorate and heavy metals in the bursts.
No Place to Hide – Fukushima Fallout Findings Widespread
High alpha and beta air readings are the least of Southern California’s worries with new evidence of Fukushima meltdowns contamination in California oranges, dried plums, almonds and pistachios. Florida grapefruits and Missouri beef also impacted by Fuku-goo. Radiation-induced mutations in Japanese insects cause concern over mutated Santa Barbara sunflowers as radiation in jet plane cabins goes up. EnviroReporter.com
Fracked
While activists march on Sacramento with demands to “Stop Fracking with California,” and historic chemical legislation comes to the United States Senate floor, EnviroReporter.com‘s Michael Collins takes on Fracking Chemical Cocktail and Trichloroethylene in The Toxies Tapes. More brawl than interview, TCE clobbers Collins who defiantly jousts with the volatile organic compound. The reporter then truly meets his match in “Frackie” where the chemistry sparks and the subject turns to drilling and fracking.
Runkle Canyon Fraud and Folly
KB Home rolls out the big guns at the Simi Valley Planning Commission meeting deciding whether the developer gets a five-year extension on its permit to build in Runkle Canyon. An extension, however, may be exactly what the activists need because it won’t force KB Home’s hand with two years left on its present permit.
A Fracking Night to Remember
Fracking Chemical Cocktail heats up the Third Annual Toxies Awards for Bad Chemical Actors at the Silent Movie Theatre in Hollywood where the worst of the worst chemicals are honored for the harm they do to the environment. With new toxins to dishonor for the deadly work, the Toxies come through with a wild and wicked show that has to be the dirtiest awards celebration in Tinseltown.
EnviroReporter Best 2011 Online News Organization Website at 2012 LA Press Club Gala
EnviroReporter.com wins First Place for “Website – News Organization – Exclusive to the Internet” at the 54th Annual Southern California Journalism Awards Gala Dinner was held at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles June 24, 2012. The win for the website is a strong affirmation that our coverage of the ongoing Fukushima meltdowns is valued by alternative and mainstream media. The team of Denise Anne Duffield and Michael Collins, who serve as editor and reporter respectively for the website, also placed in the competition for Online Journalist of the Year and Online Investigative series also for their radiation contamination in North America work.
The Unforgettable Fire
An unforgettable, and inextinguishable, fire will break out if Fukushima’s Reactor 4 building collapses taking its spent fuel pond with it. The uncontrollable blaze would lead to full meltdowns on Fukushima’s other three reactors in addition to the trio already destroyed, as well as alighting the common spent fuel pond with over 6,000 incredibly radioactive spent rods. The disaster, ignored by the American and Canadian governments as Japan blunders along, would make Tokyo uninhabitable and ruin Japan and lands beyond possibly including our own.
A Radioactive Nightmare
The Ventura County Reporter alternative weekly newspaper is the first print media in the United States that tackles the real threat that Fukushima triple meltdowns radiation poses to the Pacific and West Coast.
Runkle Canyon Tanks
For the first time in seven years of residents battling KB Home’s massive Runkle Canyon development in the shadow of the old Rocketdyne lab over pollution problems in the canyon, company representatives and the community face off at a Simi Valley Planning Commission meeting over a five-year option to build permit extension. The fur flies as the developer’s representative and his attorney, perhaps flustered by the vocal opposition to the project, proceed to embark on an odyssey of ‘factual inaccuracies’ about the controversial building scheme.
Runkle Roulette
KB Home goes for a five year extension on a construction permit to build 461 residences in Runkle Canyon. Problem is that new contamination has been found on the site and evidence that the developer has blocked government requests for Clean Water Act data.
Attack of the Show!
EnviroReporter.com was featured on G4TV’s “Attack of the Show!” on April 16, 2012 where host Kevin Pereira and journalist Michael Collins discuss Fukushima meltdowns’ fallout and contamination of the Pacific Ocean and North America. This mainstream media coverage, seen by nearly 2 million AOTS! viewers, is historic in it being the first such program to boldly explore this subject.
L.A. Air Even Hotter with Radiation
Topping EnviroReporter.com‘s last radiation readings of HEPA filter dust in the western Los Angeles Basin, a 40-day accumulation of dust and debris by three HEPA filter machines at Radiation Station Santa Monica yields the highest air rad readings we’ve taken yet: 7.46 times normal. The California Highway Patrol considers anything 3 times normal radiologically to be a hazmat situation making this detection doubly dangerous.
Japanese Seaweed Radiation Doubles
EnviroReporter.com journeys back to the same Japanese store in Los Angeles to purchase the same brand and make of Nori seaweed it had bought last August. The green sheets of seaweed, prized for its nutty, crispy flavor by hipsters and locals alike, comes in at double background radiation, with a substantial part of that ionization coming from alpha radiation which is 60 to 1,000 times more dangerous than beta and gamma radiation because of its lethality if ingested or inhaled. The eight-month old Nori seaweed bought last year still radiates far above background but loses some of its punch strongly suggesting the presence of medium and long-lived radionuclides like cesium-137 and the lethal brew captured in uranium-60 “buckyballs.” Worse still is the fact that the gelling substances in seaweed, 90% of which is grown in the Far East, are used in toothpaste, milk shakes, beer, desserts and all manner of food and drink products that are made with alginate and carrageenan. Hot seaweed sold in 49 Japanese and Japanese-American stores in Southern California as well as over 900 stores.
The Buckyball Stops Here
EnviroReporter.com finds that isotopic identifiers not only cost tens of thousands of dollars, they are thousands of times less sensitive than the Inspector Alert nuclear radiation monitors that we’ve been using since 2000. Now we don’t have to raise money to buy one and will offer to return a dozen donations made to us for that purpose.
L.A. Rain Radiation Over Five Times Normal
An imperfect storm swept into Southern California on, perhaps appropriately enough, April Fools weekend creating the conditions that tested EnviroReporter.com‘s scientific hypothesis that radioactive “buckyballs” and other fission radionuclides from the triple Fukushima Japan meltdowns are already impacting the region. Sure enough, a rain composed primarily of sea mist formed over a choppy ocean with high winds tested higher than any other Los Angeles Basin rain since Radiation Station Santa Monica began fallout radiation tests March 15, 2011, four days after the unabated meltdowns began. The rain, not impacted by so-called “natural” radon progeny, came in at a whopping 506% above normal, more than high enough to qualify as a hazardous material situation for the California Highway Patrol. This is the hottest L.A. rain detected with our Inspector Alert nuclear radiation monitor in the over 1,500 radiation tests we’ve taken since last year’s Ides of March.
Rocketdyne Still Hot
The U.S. EPA has spent millions on assessing the radiation and chemical contamination at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, the old Rocketdyne site in the hills between Chatsworth and Simi Valley, California. In this Ventura County Reporter news feature, we find out that not only is Rocketdyne far more polluted than previously thought, even in places twice cleaned by lab owner Boeing and nuclear area responsible party, the Department of Energy, we learn that U.S. EPA has deliberately skewed the cleanup numbers. The result could be radionuclides like cesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-239/240 being left in place at high levels in violation of agreements between the State and DOE.
The Endless Bummer
Sunny Southern California has been the bulls eye for Fukushima meltdowns fallout and radiation contamination with more Cesium-137 impacting L.A. more than anywhere else in the U.S. after the disaster began March 11, 2011. Now with levels of radiation hammering the West Coast with levels that dwarf Chernobyl’s 1986 meltdown, the danger of Uranium-filled “buckyballs” threatens to irradiate the West Coast turning the seashore a silent unseen cesspool of radioactive goo. This abridged and updated version of Beta Watch, with new data, information and interviews was so shocking that even EnviroReporter‘s favorite print editors were dumbstruck by The Endless Bummer. An EnviroReporter.com exclusive.
Highest Radiation in L.A. Air Yet
Now 43 days later, we tested the same HEPA filters in the same environment and setup. This time, as you can see in the video, the dust was a lot hotter. A spot test was ~377% of the previous background. Then we vacuumed out the filters with a HEPA filter Eureka vacuum cleaner and tested the aggregate. The March 6 test of the combined dust came in at a sizzling 668% of background or 6.68 times normal. Since the last testing period, the radiation detected has risen another 130% indicating a continued upward trend.
Radiation Readings Soar at Rocketdyne*
Shocking new radiation readings from the old Rocketdyne Santa Susana Field Laboratory show cesium-137 at nearly 9,300 times normal background levels along with a witches’ brew of deadly radionuclides on “The Hill.” Worse yet, the U.S. EPA has bait and switched the radiation background numbers threatening an agreement to clean the radioactive site back to its normal condition. Sly maneuver fools legislator and nuclear watchdogs.
What’s in Pepper Spray?
An LA Weekly investigation finds the cancer-causing chemicals trichloroethylene (TCE) and tetrachloroethylene (PCE) being used as the base of pepper sprays sold in California with no Prop. 65 warnings. Sprays with these carcinogens are being sold all over the country. True Value and Do It Best hardware stores sell PCE-based pepper sprays at the Southern California stores LA Weekly investigated.
Beta Watch
An 11-month EnviroReporter.com investigation with over 1,500 Fukushima fallout tests, a new UC Davis report about uranium-filled “buckeyballs” and proof that sea mist carries radiation inland for hundreds of miles all add up to one thing: it’s going to be a long hot Endless Bummer at the beach this year. Bay Watch has just turned into Beta Watch.
