Search Results for 'radiation net'

We, Robot

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, home of America’s greatest robotic explorations of the heavens, isn’t sold on deep-sixing the manned space program. Part Two of a special Pasadena Weekly cover story investigation that also explores the origins of NASA’s manned space program, the brainchild of an infamous Nazi rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun, whose V-2 rockets killed thousands during the London Blitz of World War II, rockets built by concentration camp slave labor who were worked to death, tortured and executed during the production of these American-coveted missiles. Von Braun is considered by NASA to be the 20th Century’s greatest rocketeer illustrating that one man’s Nazi is another man’s hero.

SPACE MONKEY BUSINESS

Critics say NASA is taking a giant leap backwards by irradiating monkeys in space-travel tests

By Michael Collins
Pasadena Weekly – February 25, 2010
The future of manned space exploration was revealed Feb. 1 when President Obama unveiled his 2011 budget request for NASA. The president proposed ending the Constellation program, an initiative introduced by President Bush in [...]

Mike Sander Interview

As part of our research for part two of the cover story “Space Monkey Business” (Pasadena Weekly – February 25, 2010) we interviewed Mike Sander of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Quotes from this interview were used in “We Robot” published the following week.
Our February 17 interview appears after Sander’s biography, which is impressive:
Mike Sander [...]

Space Monkey Business

Critics say NASA is taking a giant leap backwards by irradiating monkeys in space-travel tests designed to simulate the intense radiation astronauts would experience in voyages to the moon and Mars. The Pasadena Weekly discovers that Italian human radiation tests aboard the International Space Station obviate the need for these crude and inhumane radiation tests on primates, the first of their kind in nearly three decades.

BRENTWOOD’S TOXIC GRAVE

Historic dumping grounds beneath the spectacular VA land finally get tested.

LA Weekly – December 10, 2009
Several days ago, men wearing radiation dosimeters stood on the Veteran Administration’s West Los Angeles property, atop an old toxic dump that partially underlies Barrington Recreation Center’s baseball fields and a city dog park, and began the federal government’s long-delayed [...]

NASA’s MONKEY BUSINESS

With Bush’s manned space initiative headed for the chopping block, why is NASA nuking monkeys?
EnviroReporter.com – February 1, 2010
The future of manned space exploration may be revealed Monday when President Obama unveils his 2011 budget request for NASA. The budget’s approval by Congress may also determine the future of 28 squirrel monkeys and renewed animal [...]

NASA’s Monkey Business

The future of manned space exploration may be revealed Monday when President Obama unveils his 2011 budget request for NASA. The budget’s approval by Congress may also determine the future of 28 squirrel monkeys and renewed animal radiation experiments.

Grave Mistakes

Despite public outrage over soldiers’ tombstones disposed of in the VA’s biomedical nuclear and chemical dump in Brentwood, focus turns to the VA’s $1 million Phase II testing for toxins. VA refuses to answer LA Weekly and EnviroReporter.com questions about its million dollar boondoggle as it cores for contamination away from the known dump, ignoring Phase I recommendations to test near upscale Barrington Avenue condominiums and exclusive Brentwood school despite high radiation readings in 2006.

REAL HOT PROPERTY – LA CITYBEAT

A popular Brentwood dog park on Veterans Administration property is built over an old radioactive waste dump that may soon be unearthed by proposed development
By Michael Collins
Los Angeles CityBeat – May 25, 2006
SUVs and luxury sedans glide into the Barrington Dog Park just south of Sunset Boulevard in Brentwood, where industry types and soccer moms [...]

Darkness Over the Land

EnviroReporter.com experiences the tragedies and triumphs of California’s Inyo County and it’s timeless treasure, Death Valley National Park. This rowdy romp includes a cast of characters whose devotion to their earthly paradise is devilishly dangerous. Their sizzling tales shed light on the hopes and hazards of the hottest, lowest land in North America.

DARKNESS OVER THE LAND

A Love Story
By Michael Collins
EnviroReporter.com – November 18, 2009

The October moon rose over the Funeral Mountains and shed its ghostly light upon Darkness. She was perched on a sun burnt spit of land above the salt pan, a dark angel ready for flight. Her black wings cast a long shadow on the tortured earth below, [...]

The Aerospace Runkle Canyon Comments

D’Lanie Blaze questions developer KB Home’s use of controversial lab Dade Moeller & Associates to retest Runkle Canyon for strontium-90. Blaze reminds then-Department of Toxic Substances Control project head, Norm Riley, that Dade Moeller himself claimed that he’s “just not worried about radiation exposure because of the likelihood that we’ll soon have a cure for cancer.” Blaze burns DTSC over issue and questions if the Response Plan is a “dog and pony show.”

Children of the Atomic Bomb

“This used to be marsh and reeds,” said Dr. James Yamazaki, 93, as we pass by Maltman Avenue on Wilshire Boulevard approaching Koreatown. “Now look at all these big buildings!” I was chauffering Yamazaki and his wife of 65 years, Aki, to the Japanese American National Museum in downtown Los Angeles where he would speak about the human toll of nuclear warfare and the specific vulnerability of children to the effects of these weapons.

“MELTDOWNS AND HORRIBLE ACCIDENTS”

The Joan Trossman Bien/Miller-McCune Interview with Committee to Bridge the Gap – July 8, 2009
(Bien conducted this interview as part of our co-bylined August 24, 2009 Miller-McCune article “50 Years After America’s Worst Nuclear Meltdown – Human error helped worsen a nuclear meltdown just outside Los Angeles, and now human inertia has stymied the radioactive [...]

Runkle Rousing

The Department of Toxic Substances Control is about to approve a Runkle Canyon cleanup response plan. Interestingly, the DTSC project manager for the KB Home/DTSC cleanup agreement, Norm Riley, said nothing about all the public comments he had received about the plan, including the Radiation Ranger response plan comments.

Meltdown Dustup

The worst meltdown in U.S. history happened 30 miles northwest of Los Angeles from July 13-26, 1959. A reactor spewed hundreds of times more radiation than Three Mile Island did in 1979. The effects of this covered-up meltdown still reverberate throughout Southern California today.

Sodium Reactor Experiment Meltdown

The 50th anniversary of the worst nuclear reactor disaster in U.S. history happened just outside of Los Angeles July 13-26, 1959 and still resonates today.

READ “Wrinkles in Runkle Canyon – 50 Years After a Santa Susana Nuclear Accident Holds Up Land Development” in the LA Weekly where EnviroReporter.com‘s Michael Collins takes you in the Atomics [...]

Brentwood School

North of the main dumping area lies VA land leased to Brentwood School. A VA-funded study in 2005 said, on pages 62-64, that there was nuclear waste buried on the property there and that either the parents didn’t know about it or didn’t care. Now they know.
A 2000 ash map shows where three deposits [...]

Runkle Canyon Presentation 11-17-08

On November 17, 2008, the DTSC’s Norm Riley, project head for the Runkle Canyon voluntary cleanup agreed to with KB Home, gave a presentation about the site to the Simi Valley City Council and community. The meeting was televised and streamed online. The Radiation Rangers also gave a Powerpoint presentation which was aided by EnviroReporter.com’s [...]

Sodium Reactor Experiment 6 – Demolition

JIM GARNER WORKED IN THE LATE 70S for a company; called Brownyard Steel Fabrication, which was doing contract work for Rocketdyne at the Santa Susana lab, we wrote in “Hot Zone,” a 1998 Los Angeles magazine cover story. He recalls standing in a steel vault 60 feet underground, tearing out old ironwork and putting new [...]

SSFL Area IV – Sodium Reactor Experiment

The Sodium Reactor Experiment, or SRE, was the first nuclear reactor in this country to supply commercially-available electricity. It powered the lights for the-then tiny town of Moorpark in Ventura County, California, population 1,200. The reactor is best known for suffering the worst meltdown in American history, releasing hundreds of times more radiation in the [...]

SSFL Area IV – SNAP

EnviroReporter.com wrote about the SNAP reactor’s two partial meltdowns in a September 23, 2004 Ventura County Reporter article entitled “In Hot Water – More good news about contamination from your friends at Rocketdyne,” where it was noted:
“At the meeting last week, Rocketdyne divulged that two new wells had high levels of tritium registering approximately 82,000 [...]

Ten Years After – Two Years On – Letters

Congratulations Michael and Denise on two very impressive years at Enviroreporter. My involvement with you and Denise, as both a “Radiation Ranger” and a friend, has been very rewarding for me. A special thanks to you both for keeping this old brain working on all the scientific reporting you share with me. I am [...]

COURTS MUST RESOLVE SAFETY OF FORMER NUCLEAR RESEARCH SITE FOR PUBLIC USE

By Bennett Ramberg
Los Angeles Daily Journal – January 12, 2005
Although the Cold War ended a decade ago, its environmental legacy lives on. How to resolve nuclear contamination risks at government sites across the United States has become a matter of contention. A precedent-setting standard may emerge from recent litigation initiated by the city of Los [...]

1996 Department of Energy list of UCLA human radiation experiments

Thirteen radionuclides involved: iodine-131, zinc-65, strontium-85, calcium-47, gold-198, iodine-125, cobalt-60, technetium 99m, copper-67, manganese-54, xenon 133, indium-113m and fluorine-18
UCLA-1. Early Experimental Imaging of the Thyroid Gland Using Iodine 131
IN 1951, the University of California, Los Angeles conducted a series of tests on humans to study the uptake of radioiodine into the thyroid gland. [...]