All Entries Tagged With: "radiation"
Radiation Station
EnviroReporter.com‘s “Radiation Station” will go online tomorrow. We will be able to show, in live time, just what the radiation readings are in Santa Monica which will give some indication of what the Los Angeles Basin is going to be exposed to since Santa Monica is upwind of most of the basin.
No More Monkey Business
NASA backs off its plans to irradiate 18 squirrel monkeys in a $1.75 million experiment that our Pasadena Weekly investigation found was not only cruel and scientifically useless but also redundant since an Italian space radiation experiment, using humans not harmed, had already been underway to understand longterm cosmic radiation exposure’s effects on astronauts.
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.
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.
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.
“Your journalistic practices”
“Dear Mr. Collins – without getting into the content of your story, I’d like to point out to you that your quote from Ms. Winger on our staff was so badly twisted out of context that it is utterly meaningless,” began the rant that we were about to read that confirmed to us what we have found wanting in the councilman’s office — competence and follow-through.
More Meltdown Man
“They had two broken fuel rods they had to remove from the reactor core with a cherry picker. The last one pulled and fell off the cherry picker and fell on the floor before they could get it into the lead cask, and contaminated the High Bay area.”
Merry Widow Health Mine
This being the vacation time of year, we thought we’d check up on the Merry Widow Health Mine in Montana to see if we should recommend it to you folks still searching for an exciting and hot place to visit with the fam. Sure enough, the mine is not only going strong, there are a couple of YouTube videos about the place hailing its radium waters and radon gases as the ultimate cure for just about all that ails you.
Reading Writing & Radiation
Sound like fun? It is and you get the added benefit of not coming off like a complete ding-a-ling when you try to explain away a meltdown that the Department of Energy itself, the very agency that owned the failed reactor, calls a meltdown (and not even a “partial” one at that).
Sodium Reactor Experiment promo brochure
Exactly 50 years ago today, Atomics International was in the second-to-last day of the SRE meltdown that began on July 13, 1959. The amount of radiation released during this time, and after, was 260 to 459 times the same amount of radionuclides that escaped the more infamous Three Mile Island meltdown in Pennsylvania twenty years later, according to various sources including a comprehensive analysis of EnviroReporter.com. This fascinating brochure from 1957 presents the reactor in happier times.
Blow In Place
Does the state toxic department’s $46 million Aerojet Chino Hills cleanup plan go far enough? Missing munitions, untested groundwater, depleted uranium issues and radiation possibly running off the Cold War-era weapons facility into the headwaters of the Santa Ana River are concerns.
Down the Test Tubes
KB Home’s lab Dade Moeller & Associates has produced a 10-page report that shows strontium-90 radiation only a quarter of “background” for the area, and a fraction of previous sampling results. Simi Valley’s “split-samples,” to double-check KB Homes’ tests for accuracy, came in over a hundred times less than previous samplings.
Rep. Waxman releases nuke dump docs!
Congressman’s Waxman’s office yields over 5,000 pages of VA data about the radiation dump under Brentwood School and dog park. EnviroReporter.com and Los Angeles CityBeat are analyzing this treasure trove of dump docs held by Waxman’s office since mid-December 2006.
Waxman waffles on nuke dump
The office of Congressman Henry Waxman has refused repeated media requests to see 5,500 pages of information supplied to him by the Department of Veterans Affairs regarding the West Los Angeles VA. The Congressman is portrayed by staffers as not wanting to share any “sensitive financial” documents that might violate an agreement with VA Secretary R. James Nicholson.
Brentwood School study claims no rads on campus
ENVIRON International tests surface and subsurface of Brentwood School’s athletic fields in December. No evidence of tritium or carbon-14 contamination is found. Brentwood nuke dump expert says ENVIRON’s 12 subsurface soil borings are insufficient to make safety claims.
Runkle EIR radiation report “not considered useful”
Simi Valley residents, at the invitation of the City of Simi Valley, submitted questions for the California Department of Health Services, Radiologic Health Branch regarding health issues uncovered in
Brentwood nuke dump controversy mushrooms
In a January 30, 2007 letter to the parents and colleagues of students of Brentwood School, Head of School, Dr. Michael D. Pratt, revealed that the exclusive private school on leased West LA VA land had hired two firms to evaluate school soil for radioactive and chemical contamination first reported by Los Angeles CityBeat and EnviroReporter.com last May.
Developer claims contradict investigation’s findings
KB Home’s subcontractors claim that their testing indicates that only .26 out of a million people exposed to the Sr-90 at Runkle Canyon, even though the U.S. EPA clearly states otherwise. The government’s findings further highlight problems with the project’s EIR that EnviroReporter.com has analyzed. Those problems could give the city grounds to ask for a new EIR.
