Search Results for 'nuclear'

Atomic Tombstones – November 22, 2009

Nearly two years after EnviroReporter.com first found these soldiers’ tombstones sticking out of the ground in a nuclear and chemical toxic site, nothing has changed. The grave markers are disappearing back into the brush. Senator Feinstein’s staff failed to follow up on our January 2008 tip about this illegal dumping of soldiers’ headstones. The VA [...]

Atomic Tombstones – November 19, 2009

The brush-choked biomedical nuclear and chemical dump remains the same. The gravestones remain untouched. Soccer players practice on Brentwood School’s lower field where a 2006 VA-funded report says tests high in radiation.
“The average readings for the East Arroyo, West Arroyo, and the Brentwood School lower soccer fields were notably above the Control areas,” according to [...]

Atomic Tombstones – July 30, 2008

The biomedical nuclear and chemical dump at the West LA VA in Brentwood is supposed to be a closed site. Repeatedly, over the years, EnviroReporter.com has seen people access this dump usually chasing errant soccer balls. In this case, a man was walking through the dump with a child on his back.
(Click thumbnail to view [...]

Atomic Tombstones – February 24, 2009

At first this later winter trip to the dump produced no surprises – the soldiers’ gravestones still lay jutting out of the hillside of the West LA VA’s biomedical nuclear and chemical dump. The surprise came when EnviroReporter.com realized it wasn’t alone. A site inspection was taking place with someone from the government, presumably the [...]

Atomic Tombstones – January 13, 2008

These disconcerting photographs clearly show soldiers’ tombstones in the West Los Angeles VA’s biomedical nuclear and chemical dump. It is a surreal and sad scene. Three days later, EnviroReporter.com‘s Michael Collins told Senator Diane Feinstein (D-California) and her district director, Trevor Daley, about the situation and offered to show the site to the two. Daley [...]

Atomic Tombstones – January 9, 2008

The white marble slabs of the tombstones stood out, contrasting with the dirt, plants, concrete rubble and rebar in this part of the dump. The VA operates a huge Veterans’ cemetery on the other side of the property where VA supervisors and workers should know that it is against federal regulations to dump recognizable soldiers’ [...]

THE HILLS HAVE EYES – VC Reporter

Simi Valley residents unite to fight ‘hot’ KB Home development in Runkle Canyon
By Michael Collins
Ventura County Reporter – September 28, 2006

“I am not a tree hugger, an environmental activist, or an Erin Brockovich wannabe,” said Patricia Coryell before an August 21 meeting of the Simi Valley City Council. Coryell and about two dozen other concerned [...]

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 [...]

WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED – LA CITYBEAT

Brentwood dump contains radioactive remains from decades of animal and human tests
By Michael Collins
Los Angeles CityBeat – May 25, 2006
During the 1950s and ’60s, both UCLA and the Veterans Administration were deeply engaged in the Atomic Age, doing their part for the Cold War by performing radiation experiments on a wide variety of animal and [...]

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, [...]

Career Day

Recruiting men and women for aerospace and experimental nuclear reactor work in the 1950s for Rocketdyne was art, literally. The company used colorful brochures to attract the best and the brightest.

JONATHAN PARFREY

By Michael Collins
Los Angeles magazine’s “LA to Z” issue – December 1996
(1958- ) Atom smasher. As regional leader of Physicians for Social Responsibility, Parfrey has taken his battle against nuclear power around the Pacific Rim. Born in Manhattan, Parfrey attended Santa Monica High and UC Berkeley. After a brief acting career, [...]

There Lies the Fault

After extensive investigation, EnviroReporter.com may have discovered the source of Runkle Canyon’s heavy metal nightmare which has stalled KB Home’s development plans for over two years – Rocketdyne’s old polluted Empire State Atomic Development Authority site sits on top of Burro Flats Fault which transports toxins down into the canyon that the Radiation Rangers want tested.

Up in Smoke

The 6,400 fireworks at Santa Monica Pier’s 100th birthday celebration September 9 fail to ignite much excitement. The tepid pyrotechnics get lost in toxic smoke which descends on the city, gassing thousands of unsuspecting yuppies with perchlorate and heavy metals.

Riley’s Revenge

Former Rocketdyne toxics chief, Norman E. Riley, blasts Department of Toxics Substances Control as an agency “where obfuscation, abdication of authority, collusion, and other contemptible behaviors currently trump honesty and integrity.” In a fiery e-mail to EnviroReporter.com, Riley admits misleading community regarding Runkle Canyon and that no public comments about cleanup plan were used.

Double Vision

Fifty years after America’s worst nuclear meltdown 30 miles northwest of Los Angeles at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory’s “Sodium Reactor Experiment,” the government’s just-sacked head of lab remediation says the new Rocketdyne cleanup law is too strict and that site owner Boeing is going to sue the State over the standards. New Miller-McCune article and exclusive interviews.

Corn on the Coca

The Coca complex was involved with several missile programs including Navaho, Atlas, J-2, Saturn V second Stage Battleship (five J-2s), Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME), and Delta IV Expendable Launch Vehicle Tanks. Within the 141-acre Group 4, which Coca Area shares with Delta Area and the Propellant Load Facility, there are a number of chemicals that Boeing and NASA are responsible for remediating. They include volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including trichloroethylene or TCE, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), metals, and dioxins.

EnviroReporter.com’s Runkle Canyon Comments Analysis

Will new Department of Toxic Substances Control leadership in Runkle Canyon mean that DTSC will actually take citizen and media concerns seriously over development of this property that borders the nuclear area of Rocketdyne? EnviroReporter.com analyzes what the department has previously ignored as we conclude our seven-part series “Railroading Runkle Canyon?”

EnviroReporter.com Runkle Canyon Comments

When Runkle Canyon developer KB Home gave the Department of Toxic Substances Control 41 environmental reports on its property, EnviroReporter.com analyzed each one and presented its 28 pages of findings to DTSC in July 2008. The department ignored most of these analyses which we subsequently submitted to DTSC in February 2009 as public comments to the Runkle Canyon Response Plan. Will the department again ignore these questions and comments now that there is new leadership for the Runkle Canyon site?

Stalin Must Be Smiling

Sixty years ago today, the Soviet Union detonated their first atomic weapon, “Joe-1” which was the size of “Fat Man” that America dropped on Nagasaki four years before, killing 80,000 people. The biggest Soviet bomb ever was 2,273 times bigger! Despite the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, don’t expect an end to the threat of nuclear Armageddon anytime soon.

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.”

ACME Runkle Canyon Comments

Aerospace Cancer Museum of Education’s founder and director Bill Bowling says that the Runkle Canyon cleanup plan is inadequate and doesn’t address toxic trichlorethylene being found on the property. Bowling calls out city of Simi Valley for not caring about issue and says that developer KB Home has a questionable environmental track record including building on land without removing unexploded bombs from a former bombing range.

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.

“THE VISION WE SHARE”

The Joan Trossman Bien/Miller-McCune Interview with Boeing – August 14, 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 cleanup for half a [...]