He Must Have To Apologize an Awful Lot: Petraeus

Incalculable

Friday 04 March 2011


Recent polls suggest that while a majority of US people disapprove of the war in Afghanistan, many on grounds of its horrible economic cost, only 3 percent took the war into account when voting in the 2010 midterm elections. The issue of the economy weighed heavily on voters, but the war and its cost, though clear to them and clearly related to the economy in their thinking, was a far less pressing concern.

US people, if they do read or hear of it, may be shocked at the apparent unconcern of the crews of two US helicopter gunships, which attacked and killed nine children on a mountainside in Afghanistan's Kumar province, shooting them "one after another" this past Tuesday, March 1. ("The helicopters hovered over us, scanned us and we saw a green flash from the helicopters. Then they flew back high up, and in a second round they hovered over us and started shooting." (The New York Times March 2, 2011)).


Four of the boys were seven years old, three were eight, one was nine and the oldest was twelve. "The children were gathering wood under a tree in the mountains near a village in the district," said Noorullah Noori, a member of the local development council in Manogai district. "I myself was involved in the burial," Noori said. "Yesterday we buried them." (The Associated Press, March 2, 2011) General Petraeus has acknowledged, and apologized for, the tragedy.

He has had many tragedies to apologize for just counting Kunar province alone. Last August 26, in the Manogai district, Afghan authorities accused international forces of killing six children during an air assault on Taliban positions. Provincial police chief Khalilullah Ziayee said a group of children were collecting scrap metal on the mountain when NATO aircraft dropped bombs to disperse Taliban fighters attacking a nearby base. "In the bombardment six children, aged six to 12, were killed," the police commander said. "Another child was injured."

In the Bamiyan province of Afghanistan, Zekirullah, a young Afghan friend of mine, age 15, rises at 2:00 AM several mornings each week and rides his donkey for six hours through the pre-dawn to reach a mountainside where he can collect scrub brush and twigs, which he loads on the donkey in baskets. Then, he heads home and stacks the wood - on top of his family's home - to be taken down later and burned for heat. They don't have electrical appliances to heat the home, and even if they did, the villagers only get electricity for two hours a day, generally between 1:00 AM - 3:00 AM. Families rely on their children to collect fuel for heat during the harsh winters and for cooking year round. Young laborers, wanting to help their families survive, mean no harm to the United States. They're not surging at us, or anywhere: they're not insurgents. They're not doing anything to threaten us. They are children, and children anywhere are like children everywhere: they're children like our own.

Sadly, more and more of us in America are getting used to the idea of child poverty - and even child labor - as our own economy sinks further under the burden of our latest nine years of war, of two billion dollars per week we spend creating poverty abroad that we can then emulate at home. Things are getting bad here, but in Afghanistan, children are bombed. Their bodies are casually dismembered and strewn by machines already lost in the horizon as the limbs settle. They lie in pools of blood until family members realize, one by one, that their children are not late in returning home, but, in fact, never will.

In October and again in December of 2010, our small delegation of Voices for Creative Nonviolence activists met with a large family living in a wretched refugee camp. They had fled their homes in the San Gin district of the Helmand Province after a drone attack killed a mother there and her five children. The woman's husband showed us photos of his children's bloodied corpses. His niece, Juma Gul, age nine, had survived the attack. She and I huddled next to each other inside a hut made of mud on a chilly December morning. Juma Gul's father stooped in front of us and gently unzipped her jacket, showing me that his daughter's arm had been amputated by shrapnel when the US missile hit their home in San Gin.

Next to Juma Gul was her brother, whose leg had been mangled in the attack. He apparently has no access to adequate medical care and experiences constant pain. The pilot of the attacking drone, perhaps controlling it from as far away as Creech Air Force Base here in the United States, knows nothing of this family or of the pain that he or she helped inflict. Nor do the commanders, the people who set up the base, the people who pay for it with their taxes and the people who persist in electing candidates intent on indefinitely prolonging the war.


But, sometimes, the war is like it was this past Tuesday, March 1. Sometimes, the issue is right in front of us - as it was to those helicopter crews - it's up close so there can be no mistake as to what we are doing. According to the election polls, we see the cost of war, dimly, but, as with the helicopter crews, it doesn't affect - or prevent - our decisions. Afterward, we deplore the tragedy; we make a pretense of acknowledging the cost of war, but it is incalculable. We can't hope to count it. We actually, finally, have to stop making people like the nine children who died on March 1 pay it.truthout

A bit of humour for you Cletis.

The Department of Defence And It's Insatiable Appetite

And foreign wars, sad to say, account for but a small fraction of the Pentagon's total petroleum consumption. Possessing the world's largest fleet of modern aircraft, helicopters, ships, tanks, armored vehicles, and support systems - virtually all powered by oil - the Department of Defense (DoD) is the world's leading consumer of petroleum.



It can be difficult to obtain precise details on the DoD's daily oil hit, but an April report by a defense contractor, LMI Government Consulting, suggests that the Pentagon might consume as much as 340,000 barrels (53 million liters) every day. more. Previous. War Machines: Thirsty Business

War Machines: Thirsty Business

Where is the sanity in all this?

Shorter version below, longer version here.

As of September 30, 2005 the US Air Force had 5,986 aircraft in service. (1)

At the beginning of 2006 the US Navy had 285 combat and support ships, and around 4,000 operational aircraft (planes and helicopters). (2)

At the end of 2005, the US Army had a combat vehicle fleet of approximately 28,000 armored vehicles (tracked vehicles such as Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles)(3).

Besides those the Army and the Marine corps have tactical wheeled vehicles such as 140,000 High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles.

The US Army has also over 4,000 combat helicopters and several hundred fixed wing aircraft.

Add all those also 187,493 fleet vehicles (4) (passenger cars, busses, light trucks etc) the US Department of Defense (DOD) uses.

The issue is that except for 80 nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, almost all military fleet (including the ones that will be joining in the next decade) run on oil.

Yes, the US military is completely addicted to oil.

Unsurprisingly, its oil consumption for aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and facilities makes the Pentagon the single largest oil consumer in the world.

By the way, according to the 2006 CIA World Factbook rankings there are only 35 countries (out of 210) in the world that consume more oil per day than the Pentagon.

The Psychological Kevlar Act. A Moral Labotomy?

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I don't want to run the risk of turning this into a "War Blog" given that I have posted on the subject a few times of late, but this is not just about the war per se, it's the aftermath and it's knock on effect that not only relates to service personnel and their immediate families but the potential to effect society as a whole.

There is far too much material in the article to quote and I think I have done a poor job with what I have offered up.

Basically the proposed use of the drug Propranalol by the Pentagon is to put it mildly quite scary shit indeed.
I have in the past heard of the victims of sexual trauma being treated with this drug, the argument for it's use was quite obvious, to take away the trauma felt by the victim by means of desensitising the feelings and memory of the event.

And it is those very same reasons that are put forward by the opponents of such treatment, it being neither healthy nor wise. A victim should still have regard for the dangers and trauma that might arise from future everyday "at risk situations."

The writer makes brief mention of this towards the end of the article, but the gist is that combat troops would be treated in situ with Propranalol, and by being treated as such while still serving in a combat situation would end up as amoral desensitised killing machines.

At the end of the day it's only our inherent morality that stops us becoming monsters, take that away and the potential for horror is frightening.

Pentagon, Big Pharma: Drug Troops to Numb Them to Horrors of War


In June, the Department of Defense Task Force on Mental Health acknowledged "daunting and growing" psychological problems among our troops: Nearly 40 percent of soldiers, a third of Marines and half of National Guard members are presenting with serious mental health issues.........

And last month, CBS News reported that, based on its own extensive research, over 6,250 American veterans took their own lives in 2005 alone -- that works out to a little more than 17 suicides every day..........


The Psychological Kevlar Act "directs the secretary of defense to develop and implement a plan to incorporate preventive and early-intervention measures, practices or procedures that reduce the likelihood that personnel in combat will develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or other stress-related psychopathologies, including substance use conditions.........

I cannot convince myself that what is really being promoted isn't a form of moral lobotomy.more

Psychiatric Medication

It's only got one side effect,

You really must give it a try,

It's only got one side effect,

It makes you want to die.

Carol Batton

The Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz: Read of the Year

The Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz

Why a member of the Polish underground sent himself into the infamous prison camp

David de Sola 5 Oct 2012

WARSAW -- There are very few places that can accurately be described as hell on Earth. One of these is the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, where as many as 1.5 million people died during the five years the camp was in operation.

The Polish resistance had been hearing horrific first- or second-hand accounts about the conditions inside Auschwitz. These early accounts came primarily from released prisoners, but also from casual observers like railway employees and residents of the nearby village of Oswiecim. The resistance decided they needed someone on the inside.

 It is into this environment that Witold Pilecki, a 39-year old veteran of the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921 who fought against the initial Nazi invasion and a member of the Polish resistance, volunteered himself in 1940. Pilecki's mission was to allow himself to be arrested and, once inside Auschwitz, to collect intelligence for the Polish resistance in the country and the government-in-exile in London, and to organize a resistance from inside the camp.

"I think he knew, he realized what he was getting himself into," said Jacek Pawlowicz, a historian at Poland's Institute of National Remembrance. "But even so, he was not prepared for the things he was actually able to witness."

During the next three years, Pilecki was involved in one of the most dangerous intelligence-gathering and resistance operations of the war. He authored three reports about life inside the camp for the Polish resistance. During his incarceration, Pilecki witnessed from the inside Auschwitz's transformation from a detention facility for political prisoners and Soviet soldiers into one of the Nazis' deadliest killing machines.

An English translation of Pilecki's third and most comprehensive report -- a primary source for this article -- was recently published as a book titled The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery . It is a fascinating first-hand account of virtually all aspects of life inside the camp. The original document is in the custody of the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust in London.

"He was there in all of Auschwitz's worst periods, because he arrived at the moment when the camp was being created and was there until [1943]," Pawlowicz explained. "So while there he saw the camp growing, he saw [Birkenau] being built -- where the ovens were. But the ovens were not only in [Birkenau], there were gas chambers and crematoria on the territory of Auschwitz I.

" Pilecki's family was kept out of the loop regarding his activities for security reasons. His son Andrzej Pilecki recalls, "There was secrecy because of the danger, so that the children would know as little as possible. But I felt something. My father was in Warsaw. We were 100 kilometers away. We came to visit him sometimes and my father would teach us how to behave during the occupation."

Pilecki began preparations for his mission in the late summer of 1940. While staying at a safehouse, he found identity papers belonging to a man named Tomasz Serafinski, who was erroneously presumed killed in September of 1939. Because the Nazis asked for the names and addresses of inmates and their relatives as a method to keep the population under control, Pilecki wisely decided not to give his real name or those of his immediate family. Pilecki placed his photograph on Serafinski's papers and memorized his details. His plan was to be arrested and booked under the Serafinski alias.

In the early morning hours of September 19, Nazis did a roundup in Warsaw and arrested as many as 2,000 people. According to Adam Cyra and Wieslaw Wysocki's 1997 biography Rotmistrz Witold Pilecki, Pilecki was in the apartment of Eleonora Ostrowska the morning of the roundup. A caretaker and member of the resistance came in and made several suggestions to Pilecki for how to avoid being caught. According to Ostrowska, "Witold rejected those opportunities and didn't even try to hide in my flat." When a German soldier knocked on the door and asked who lived there, Pilecki walked out. As he was saying goodbye to Ostrowska, he quietly whispered to her, "Report that I have fulfilled the order."

Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who later became Foreign Minister of Poland, was arrested in the same roundup and taken to Auschwitz in the same transport as Pilecki, which left the morning of September 21 and arrived at the prison camp at 10 p.m. that same day.

"At the time we were not aware of what Auschwitz was," he wrote. "The underground movement was compelled to investigate what was happening to those people, to check the possibilities of organizing them somehow, possibly of helping them. And Witold Pilecki embarked on that tremendous task. It was his aware and voluntary decision to join another huge round up in Warsaw."

Pilecki was not happy with the behavior he saw of his fellow Poles. "What really annoyed me the most was the passivity of this group of Poles," he later wrote. "All those picked up were already showing signs of crowd psychology, the result being that our whole crowd behaved like a herd of passive sheep."

"A simple thought kept nagging me: stir up everyone and get this mass of people moving."

Pilecki was booked under the Serafinski alias, and was assigned the prisoner number 4859. Once inside, Pilecki immediately began work on organizing a network among the inmate population. In his own words, his objective was to set up a military organization on the inside to keep up morale, provide news from the outside world, distribute food and clothing to members, smuggle camp intelligence to the outside world, and to prepare detachments to take control of the camp by force if the order were given.

He called his network the Union of Military Organization, known by its Polish acronym ZOW, and would be part of the Home Army, the Polish resistance. The secrecy of the ZOW's existence was paramount. To ensure its continuity in the event of discovery by Nazi guards or informants, Pilecki created a highly compartmentalized system of five-man cells. The leader of each cell would be people of utmost confidence, committed to the Polish resistance and able to withstand possible interrogation or investigation by the German guards. Each cell leader swore an oath to Pilecki himself and only knew of the four men under his command, but not of the existence of any other cells. By doing so, Pilecki effectively minimized the risk of exposure to the entire network.

 Pawlowicz estimates that Pilecki's network included some 500 inmates at Auschwitz by March of 1942, but notes this number may have doubled by the time of Pilecki's escape the following year. In time, Pilecki was able to place informants and allies in key positions throughout the camp. In time, these would prove crucial for Pilecki and other ZOW members. more 

Witold Pilecki's Auschwitz Report, translated from Polish.
H/T Maren.

Andrew MacKinlay MP: A Rare Breed

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A Pol with integrity, they don't come rarer than that.

I would go as far to say even rarer than me agreeing with a Tory rag (Daily Mail) and a Tory leader (Cameron) but I have been following the Wail's campaign and Cameron's efforts in the house on behalf of Gary McKinnon, who embarrassingly, for the Pentagon, hacked into their zillion dollar security system and who now want to bury McKinnon underground in some hell hole of a supermax prison for decades to come.

And a word for Andrew MacKinlay, it might be quite noble to resign on principle but don't you think you ought to stay and fight your corner, or better said Gary McKinnon's corner.

Labour MP resigns in fury over Gary McKinnon: Veteran who stood up for Asperger's victim quits over colleagues' hypocrisy

Labour MP Andrew MacKinlay is quitting Westminster in disgust after MPs failed to stop computer hacker Gary McKinnon's extradition to the US.

The respected backbencher says he is 'disillusioned' about Parliament's inability to hold ministers to account.

He told the Daily Mail, which is campaigning for Mr McKinnon to stand trial here, that he had been frustrated for some time by MPs' willingness to follow party 'diktats', even if they contradicted their private views.

The Commons vote last week over Britain's unbalanced extradition arrangements with the US had been the final straw.

'It crystallised a view of Parliament I have had for some time,' Mr MacKinlay said.

The 60-year-old was one of just ten Labour MPs who had the courage to vote for a review of the 2003 Extradition Treaty in the wake of controversy over the case of the Asperger's Syndrome sufferer.

But 74 Labour MPs, who had previously signed motions backing Mr McKinnon, or demanding an extradition review, failed to oppose the party line.

The review move was defeated by 290 votes to 236.

Mr McKinnon's mother Janis Sharp said last night she was 'delighted' at the MP's decision....more

The Daily Mail campaign links.


This is the latest article by Labour MP Andrew MacKinlay

This feeble wobbling on McKinnon is bad for democracy

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1200270/ANDREW-MacKINLAY-This-feeble-wobbling-McKinnon-bad-democracy.html#ixzz0MfNDI3Ie


Trust in Parliament has never been lower. Respect for politicians has been heavily diminished, not just by the Commons expenses scandal but also because of the failure of MPs and Ministers to be straight with the public.

Lack of conviction, weasel words, submission to the party whipping machines and a reluctance to abide by previous pledges have all played their insidious part in undermining the reputation of the Commons.

Public faith is hardly likely to be restored by this week's vote on the extradition to the U.S. of Gary McKinnon, whom the Americans want to put on trial over charges of hacking into the Pentagon's computer systems...more

It was back in April 07 that I blogged about Gary McKinnon and the one sided extradition policy that the UK enjoys with the US.

UK Hacker Loses Extradition Fight

Pissed, seriously pissed am I to hear this, a few words from the text takes the words from my mouth.

Alleged threats by US authorities, including one from New Jersey prosecutors that "he would fry", would be among issues raised, Mr Cooper said.
And make no mistake fry he will, after the US has nailed him to a cross....more

Previous

G'day.Possums.
I have written previously on the shabby behaviour of the British Governments acquiescence in giving up one of it's own to the American injustice system and the even shabbier practice of fast tracking extradition requests from the US.
In both cases that I cited the alleged offences were committed on British soil, now it seems that Blair's antipodean counterpart, another eager fellator of Bush's cock, Howard of Australia (legacy of a mean nation) is throwing one of it's citizens to the baying pack at the American Department of Justice.
The same DoJ you no doubt recall headed by the despicable liar and perjurer Alberto Gonzales. Given then that this wonderful level of international cooperation exists can we expect of successive governments to be equally cooperative and acceding to shall we say a request from the international criminal court for the arrest of Tony Blair on the charge of war crimes, or that of Bush himself or one of his cabal on crimes against humanity?
What action then will the Us be taking against...more

And more

Fast Tracked Laws

Fast Tracked Laws.
Fast Tacked To Where. (Guantanamo Bay, Secret Prisons, or just Good Ol' US Ones?)
Fast Tracked To What. (American Justice?)
Fast Tracked To Whom. (A trusted partner?)

Or is that the new euphemism for riding rough shod over due process?

White collar criminals have been the main targets of draconian of new British "fast tracked" laws designed to speed up the extradition of terrorists to the US.
No alleged terrorists have yet to face US courts using the new rules which allow suspects to be sped through British courts without American prosecutors having to show a reasonable case against them.

The legislation brought in as a response to the September 11 attacks has seen the time taken from the arrest of a suspect to their removal for trial in America drop from nearly three years to just over eleven months.
But the home office admits that none of the twenty nine suspects so far sent to the US are alleged terrorists.

The new statistics are set to reignite the row over over the extradition of the so called Nat West Three were sent to the Us last July and charged with fraud relating to the collapsed energy giant Enron.
The row flared after British authorities investigating the alleged offences found their was no case to answer. snip.

Also included was Jeremy Crook, an IT executive who was flown shackled to to US agents to America in September last year. He is due to stand trial in August next year....more

Radioactive Discharge: Japan an Enduring Legacy. Sellafield Report and Chernobyl Twenty Years On

A few unpalatable facts and figures about the consequences and health hazards resulting from radioactive discharge from the damaged nuclear installations at Fukushima.

Twenty years after Chernobyl (2006) 374 UK hill farms were still operating under restrictions and produce banned from entering the food chain.

A 2009 report, Sellafield: the most hazardous place in Europe. Makes grim reading indeed.

Radiation: Nothing to See Here?
by: Brian Moench, MD
24 March 2011

Administration spokespeople continuously claim "no threat" from the radiation reaching the US from Japan, just as they did with oil hemorrhaging into the Gulf. Perhaps we should all whistle "Don't worry, be happy" in unison. A thorough review of the science, however, begs a second opinion.

That the radiation is being released 5,000 miles away isn't as comforting as it seems. The Japanese reactors hold about 1,000 times more radiation than the bombs dropped over Hiroshima.(1) Every day, the jet stream carries pollution from Asian smoke stacks and dust from the Gobi Desert to our West Coast, contributing 10 to 60 percent of the total pollution breathed by Californians, depending on the time of year. Mercury is probably the second most toxic substance known after plutonium. Half the mercury in the atmosphere over the entire US originates in China. It, too, is 5,000 miles away. A week after a nuclear weapons test in China, iodine 131 could be detected in the thyroid glands of deer in Colorado, although it could not be detected in the air or in nearby vegetation.(2)

The idea that a threshold exists or there is a safe level of radiation for human exposure began unraveling in the 1950s when research showed one pelvic x-ray in a pregnant woman could double the rate of childhood leukemia in an exposed baby.(3) Furthermore, the risk was ten times higher if it occurred in the first three months of pregnancy than near the end. This became the stepping-stone to the understanding that the timing of exposure was even more critical than the dose. The earlier in embryonic development it occurred, the greater the risk.

A new medical concept has emerged, increasingly supported by the latest research, called "fetal origins of disease," that centers on the evidence that a multitude of chronic diseases, including cancer, often have their origins in the first few weeks after conception by environmental insults disturbing normal embryonic development. It is now established medical advice that pregnant women should avoid any exposure to x-rays, medicines or chemicals when not absolutely necessary, no matter how small the dose, especially in the first three months. more truthout

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This report, is, as I mentioned earlier, twenty years after the event.

UK sheep above radioactive safety limits due to Chernobyl
12-Apr-2006

The radioactive fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident means sheep at 374 farms in the UK are still restricted from entering the food chain.

The UK's food regulator yesterday published three reports showing that sheep at the farms in Cumbria, Scotland and Wales still contain levels of radioactivity above safety limits.



The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is responsible for ensuring food safety by preventing products with unacceptable levels of radioactivity from entering the supply chain.

In 1986, an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in what is now the Ukraine released large quantities of radioactivity into the atmosphere. Some of the radioactivity, predominantly radiocaesium-137, was deposited in some upland areas of the UK, where sheep farming is the primary land-use.

Due to the particular chemical and physical properties of the peaty soil types present in the areas, the radiocaesium is still able to pass easily from soil to grass. The radiocaesium then accumulates in the sheep that feeds on the grass.

The FSA has used the Food and Environment Protection Act 1985 (FEPA) since 1986 to impose restrictions on the movement and sale of sheep exceeding the limit in certain parts of Cumbria, North Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Only sheep that have less than the maximum limit of 1,000 becquerels (a measure of radioactivity) per kilogram of radiocaesium are allowed to enter the food chain under the emergency orders in the FEPA.

Initially the restricted areas were large, but have been reduced substantially as levels of radioactivity have fallen. All restrictions were lifted in Northern Ireland in 2000, the FSA stated.

In 1986, almost 9000 farms were under these restrictions in the UK. Since then, the levels of radioactivity have fallen in some of the affected areas and the number of farms still under restriction in Cumbria, Scotland and Wales now stands at 374.

A management system known as the "mark and release: scheme operates in the restricted areas. Under this scheme, a farmer wishing to move sheep out of a restricted area can have them monitored to determine the level of radiocaesium.

Any sheep that exceed the working action level are marked with a dye and are not released from restrictions. Those that pass are allowed to enter the foodchain.

Based on a new survey results, the reports propose that none of the farms still under restriction in Cumbria and Wales should have their restrictions lifted in the near future. In Scotland, the results led to one farm being released from restrictions in January 2006.

The FSA plans further surveys so farms can be released from restrictions when the levels of radioactivity in sheep are within safety limits. foodproductiondaily

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Sellafield: the most hazardous place in Europe
19 April 2009

Last week the government announced plans for a new generation of nuclear plants. But Britain is still dealing with the legacy of its first atomic installation at Sellafield - a toxic waste dump in one of the most contaminated buildings in Europe. As a multi-billion-pound clean-up is planned, can we avoid making the same mistakes again?

Building B30 is a large, stained, concrete edifice that stands at the centre of Sellafield, Britain's sprawling nuclear processing plant in Cumbria. Surrounded by a three-metre-high fence that is topped with razor wire, encased in scaffolding and riddled with a maze of sagging pipes and cabling, it would never be a contender to win an architectural prize.

Yet B30 has a powerful claim to fame, albeit a disturbing one. "It is the most hazardous industrial building in western Europe," according to George Beveridge, Sellafield's deputy managing director.

Nor is it hard to understand why the building possesses such a fearsome reputation. Piles of old nuclear reactor parts and decaying fuel rods, much of them of unknown provenance and age, line the murky, radioactive waters of the cooling pond in the centre of B30. Down there, pieces of contaminated metal have dissolved into sludge that emits heavy and potentially lethal doses of radiation.

It is an unsettling place, though B30 is certainly not unique. There is Building B38 next door, for example. "That's the second most hazardous industrial building in Europe," said Beveridge. Here highly radioactive cladding from reactor fuel rods is stored, also under water. And again, engineers have only a vague idea what else has been dumped in its cooling pond and left to disintegrate for the past few decades.

During the miners' strike of 1972, the nation's nuclear plants were run at full stretch in order to supply electricity to a beleaguered nation. As a result, it proved impossible to process all the waste that was being generated. Cladding and fuel were simply thrown into B38's cooling ponds and left to disintegrate.

But the building, like so many other elderly edifices at Sellafield, is crumbling and engineers now face the headache of dealing with its lethal contents.

This, then, is the dark heart of Sellafield, a place where engineers and scientists are only now confronting the legacy of Britain's postwar atomic aspirations and the toxic wasteland that has been created on the Cumbrian coast. Engineers estimate that it could cost the nation up to £50bn to clean this up over the next 100 years.

The figure is, by far, the largest part of the £73bn that has been committed to cleaning up Britain's nuclear-polluted past. It is also an acute embarrassment to the government, which is now anxiously promoting nuclear power as the solution to Britain's energy problems.

Last week ministers revealed a list of 11 sites for new nuclear plants around Britain. Atomic power will be the nation's salvation as it battles global warming and seeks to cut its carbon emissions, they insisted.

But the condition of edifices such as B30 and B38 - and all the other "legacy" structures built at Sellafield decades ago - suggest Britain might end up paying a heavy price for this new commitment to nuclear energy. After all, if it is going to cost that much to decommission early reactors, green groups and opponents of nuclear energy are asking, what might we end up paying for a second clean-up if we go ahead with new nuclear plants?

For its part, the nuclear industry is adamant. New reactors will produce little waste and pose few threats to the environment, say UK nuclear chiefs who point to the example of France where almost 80% of electricity is generated by atomic fission and waste is safely reprocessed. Atomic energy today is safe and

Sellafield's problems are merely a historic accident - the result of Britain's desperation to be a leading postwar power, they say.

The disused plutonium reactors at Sellafield are a 'slow-motion Chernobyl', according to Greenpeace campaigners against nuclear energy.

But it will be a tricky job convincing the public that modern nuclear plants are the answer to Britain's energy worries, given that there are buildings in Sellafield filled with "appalling radioactive crap", as one senior nuclear physicist put it, and which will cost tens of billions of pounds to clean up.

"It is going to be a very difficult business," admitted Dr Paul Howarth, executive director of Dalton Nuclear Institute at Manchester University. "The taxpayer now has to pay around £1.5bn a year to clean up Sellafield's waste problems and will have to maintain that investment for years to come.

"That is a very large financial commitment. Nevertheless it would be wrong to dismiss nuclear energy out of hand. Modern reactors are indeed very different creations compared to the first reactors that were built at Sellafield in the 1940s and 1950s. New ones produce relatively little waste, will be easy to decommission and are intrinsically clean and safe. Convincing the public of these points will not be easy, however."

A former second world war ordnance factory, Sellafield was chosen to be the site for Britain's first atomic reactors - known as Pile 1 and Pile 2. These were not built to generate electricity, but to produce plutonium for the nation's independent nuclear deterrent. Construction was carried out at breakneck speed as political leaders pressed scientists to complete the project quickly.

As a result of these efforts, Britain was able to explode its own atomic bombs by 1952. The UK became a nuclear power and won itself a permanent seat on the UN security council, thanks to its nuclear engineers and scientists.

But success came at an appalling price. Those scientists had no time to think about the waste produced by their atomic bomb programme, a point starkly demonstrated by another Sellafield legacy building, B41. It still stores the aluminium cladding for the uranium fuel rods that were burnt inside Piles 1 and 2. That aluminium posed serious disposal problems when it was removed, in a highly radioactive state, from the two reactors as their fuel was decommissioned and their plutonium extracted.

So scientists hit on what seemed to be an ingenious solution: they would dump it in a silo. "If you drive across the plains of North America, you see these isolated grain silos where farmers store their grain," says Beveridge. "And that, essentially, is what B41 is - a grain silo."

Nuclear waste was tipped in at the top of B41 once it was erected and then allowed to fall to the bottom. Later, when it was realised that pieces of aluminium and magnesium among this waste could catch fire and cause widespread contamination, inert argon gas had to be pumped in to smother potential blazes. And so, for the past 60 years, building B41 has remained in this state, its highly radioactive contents mingling and reacting with each other. Now engineers have been told to clear it up.

They do, fortunately, have a plan. In a few years, vast metal-cutting machines will be brought into Sellafield and used to slice into the sides of the B41 silo before mechanical grabs pull out and sort through its contents. Then this radioactive debris will be mixed with liquid glass and allowed to solidify, a process known as vitrification, before it is kept for subsequent storage in underground vaults. Isolating this material will be immensely difficult, however: B41 will have to be covered and sealed to ensure no leakage of radioactive material. At the same time, the giant cutting machines employed to slice open the silo will have to negotiate the treacherous, tight concourses that separate Sellafield's different buildings. These are lined with cabling, ducts and, most worrying of all, elevated pipes, called pipe-bridges, that carry radioactive liquid waste around the site. Damaging or opening up one of these could have disastrous consequences.

Hence the care taken by engineers as they prepare their plans for B41 while their colleagues continue their work at the silo's sister plant, B29, where decommissioning work has already begun.

In effect, B29 is simply a huge covered cooling pond that once stretched between the heat stacks of Piles 1 and 2.

Fuel rods were removed from these two reactors, moved into the cooling pond of B29 and split open. Most of this material was removed for reprocessing but several tonnes of waste and old fuel still lies below the pond's thick milky waters and it is the task of Steve Topping, leader of the building's decommissioning team, to ensure that this is extracted and safely stored.

Calm, with greying hair, Topping has a reassuringly confident air about his work despite the fact he has to deal with tonnes of nuclear waste and old oxide fuel whose exact composition and location is unknown. "The trouble is there is no one left at Sellafield to tell us where things were put down there. The stuff in the pond has been down there for 50 years," says Topping.

Today B29 is showing its age and looks more like a dirty old dock than a pool with its crumbling grey concrete, grimy brickwork and old ducts and sections of corroding pipes. The water is filled with green algae and has the clarity of Milk of Magnesia, which defies all efforts to see what lies beneath.

To clean it up, robot machines will soon begin to split open the submerged skips in which old waste and fuel from Piles 1 and 2 are stored. The radioactive sludge at the bottom of the pool will then be pumped into a new tank that is now under construction beside B29. Then the internal linings of its walls will be scraped clean of radioactivity before the edifice is taken down, concrete section by concrete section. At the same time, the most dangerous waste will be vitrified ready for disposal.

The whole process will take at least 10 years to complete - and that is just for a single building. On top of the dismantling of B29 and B41, in which the waste from Britain's atom bomb programme is stored, there are the headaches that will be involved when dealing with the contents of B30 and B38.

These hold the leftovers from the nation's first civil reactor programme, a series of reactors known as Magnox plants. Eleven of these were built and two are still in operation. Piles of the waste they have generated is to be found around Sellafield awaiting the attention of engineers like Topping, who has spent his working life at the site.

"Sometimes I think this is the best job in the world," he said. "There are real skills needed to dismantle buildings like these. Every action has to be carefully planned. I love being among it all. On other days, though, it is really frustrating work. Everything has to be done in such a slow, safe and controlled manner."

The key problem for Sellafield is that so much of its highly radioactive waste has been stored in water. This was done to cool fuel rods and cladding as they emerged from reactors heated to hundreds of degrees celsius. But once in water, they disintegrated and immediately posed a hazard in case a pond wall became breached.

And that is why Sellafield is now undergoing its massively expensive clean-up. Those pond walls are getting old and their contents - forgotten by politicians for half a century - must be turned into solid waste that can be contained safely and buried once Britain has finally decided on the location of a deep underground repository.

"We are delivering the largest environmental restoration programme in Europe and making safe and disposing of some of the most hazardous material anywhere in the world, much of which originates from early nuclear research and military projects," says Richard Waite, acting chief executive of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. "At the same time we are providing essential services to enable current nuclear sites to 'keep the lights on'."

Nuclear opponents have less complimentary views about what goes on at Sellafield, of course. The place is "a slow-motion Chernobyl", according to campaigners from Greenpeace, a group which has a reputation for never missing out on the catchy phrase.

Nevertheless, Greenpeace has a point. Many of Sellafield's buildings are, essentially, no more than containers of highly radioactive scrap whose disposal is set to devour tens of billions of pounds of taxpayers' money.

The site has become the biggest, and mostly easily waved, stick in the armoury of the green movement. As one senior employee admitted: "If you want to object to anything nuclear, you just have to point to Sellafield."

In fact, Sellafield is a classic illustration of the failure of British industry. We were pioneers of nuclear power but in our desire to build our own atomic weapons, failed abysmally when it came to developing and managing our own civil reactors and reprocessing plants.

As a result, we have been left with a multibillion-pound clean-up bill and the prospect of buying either American or French reactors for our next generation nuclear plants. The lesson of Sellafield is not so much that nuclear power is dangerous but that Britain seems incapable of implementing any long-term engineering plan that comes its way, from high-speed trains to wind turbines or rocket launchers.
Gruniad

Inside The Nuclear Exclusion Zone. Chernobyl big site

Fukushima Prefecture Unscientific Optimism

Fukushima Prefecture, where concern for the local economy seems to take precedent over all other matters. My emphasis.

Fukushima Residents Seek Answers Amid Mixed Signals From Media, TEPCO and Government
21 April 2011
by: Makiko Segawa, The Asia-Pacific Journal

Mistrust of the media has surged among the people of Fukushima Prefecture. In part this is due to reports filed by mainstream journalists who are unwilling to visit the area near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. But above all it is the result of contradictory reports released by the media, TEPCO and the government.

On the one hand, many local officials and residents in Fukushima insist that the situation is safe and that the media, in fanning unwarranted fears, are damaging the economy of the region. By contrast, many freelance journalists in Tokyo report that the central government is downplaying the fact that radiation leakage has been massive and that the threat to public health has been woefully underestimated. While the government long hewed to its original definition of a 20 kilometer exclusion zone, following the April 12 announcement that the Fukushima radiation severity level has been raised from a level 5 event (as with Three Mile Island) to a level 7 event (as with Chernobyl), the government also extended the radiation exclusion zone from 20 kilometers to at least five communities in the 30-50 kilometer range.

In recent weeks, many Fukushima residents who fled in the first week of the nuclear crisis have begun returning home and attempting to resume normal activities. For example, some local people in Iwaki city, 40-50 km from the Fukushima Daiichi reactor, are convinced that it is now safe to return despite the high radiation levels recorded. Here is one example.

In Japan, April's cherry blossoms signal a symbolic beginning, a new stage in life. On April 6th, along with school children across the nation, Iwaki City, within the 40 km radiation exclusion zone, held many school entrance ceremonies for elementary, middle and high schools.

Iwaki's Yumoto Daini Middle School's ceremony was a bit different: not only were there 33 new students, but refugees living on the school grounds and some members of the Self Defense Force also attended. Overall 107 people participated in the ceremony. Headmaster Sawai Shiro may have exceeded his authority in taking the humanitarian step of granting permission for the refugees to remain on campus as the school year begins, at the risk of being punished later for breaking rules.

Local sources report that in the first week or so after the nuclear crisis began, Iwaki City experienced difficulties in receiving supplies like food and fuel because many agents refused to deliver. Since early April, refugees who had evacuated outside the prefecture started returning. Restaurants in downtown Iwaki are reopening and many convenience stores boast reasonably well-stocked shelves, while gas, water and electricity have been restored. Iwaki City has repeatedly confirmed that "radiation is at a stable level which is not harmful to human health." Iwaki officials explain that this judgment is based on figures provided by the Fukushima prefectural government regularly updated since March 11.

Principal Sawai began his welcome speech by saying, "I am glad to be able to confirm that all 33 new students are participating in this ceremony amidst a disaster that had forced many people to leave Yumoto." "In our district," he continued,"some people survived by drinking water from their bath for weeks as there was no running water. I want you to care for each other especially for anyone who is in trouble." He concluded, "You young students, are the future of Japan. Now, we should be bound as one beyond differences in ideas, position or self interest."

Though all the new students attended, not all teachers were there. As a result of the catastrophe, personnel for the school was frozen and new teachers were not dispatched to the school, Sawai explained. As a result of the lack of teachers, there will be only one class run by a teacher for each grade.

Following the principal's speech, the school's doctor in his white coat stated matter-of-factly that, based on science, people should know that the worst of the earthquake damage had passed and that radiation leakages from the Fukushima Daiichi plant were decreasing and would soon fade away.

"The radiation problem is already finished," he told the children and their parents. "You can go to school and go outside without any problem. You should not fear malicious gossip."

While the doctor's assurance that all major risks have ended would certainly raise eyebrows among most people outside the prefecture, many locals share this belief. We note the difference in perspective between radiation experts and people assessing the issues at a distance and those on the ground facing the destruction of their livelihood. While rumors of the dangers of radiation continue to swirl, many locals are even more afraid that rumors will destroy their businesses and any hope of securing their livelihood and rebuilding their communities.

Ikarashi Yoshitaka, 33, is one who is particularly keen on restoring his business and the local economy, a goal that leads him to downplay warnings of radiation risk."It is just an emotional thesis that ours is 'a city in danger!'" he insisted. Together with dozens of volunteers from across Japan, Ikarashi has visited many areas throughout the radiation exclusion zone. He confidently asserts that his $600 made in U.S "Geiger counter" has detected no abnormal amount of radiation.

Ikarashi is troubled by the fact that the milk business he manages suffered a 90% drop in sales as a result of radiation fears. Some farmers have been forced to throw away their milk, and at least one local farmer is rumored to have committed suicide over the ruin of his business.

Following the government announcement of level 7, Ikarashi observed that "residents will not listen; they don't trust the government. The greatest concern for locals is to restore their towns and I'm doing my best to restore Iwaki City."

Honma Hiroshi, 56, on patrol with the SDF in Iwaki comments: "I'm surprised that local people are so calm. Even within the 30 km radiation exclusion zone, they don’' even wear special anti-radiation clothes (Taibex). Even after the level 7 announcement, there has been no panic in the city."

Desperation over the destruction of the local economy appears to have provoked an unscientific optimism concerning radiation in some local communities struggling to get back on their feet.

Ikarashi points out that the reason for the absence of trustworthy information and the presence of baseless gossip is "lack of information"; the national media tend to avoid entering the radiation exclusion zone, fearing contamination and merely regurgitate the claims of the local government and officials obtained by telephone.

A more intense form of the same crisis struck Minami-Soma City, closer to the nuclear plant within the 20 km zone but on its northern side. For more than a week, the city was like an island bereft of food, water, and gasoline. Finally, in desperation, on March 24, Mayor Sakurai Katsunobu sent an SOS to the world through YouTube begging for support to his dying community.

Mayor Sakurai explained that his gambit of airing a Youtube call for help succeeded in drawing the attention of the central government, and Tokyo has taken seriously subsequent requests. However, Sakurai, said that as of April 6, only 20,000 residents remained of a population of 70,000. "We have to think of the means to save the remaining weak people (aged people and someone who do not have money to evacuate)", Sakurai said sadly.

On April 7, the mayor made a second Youtube, observing that "Many businesses had started operating. But, there is no reliable information on the nuclear reactor!"

In the nuclear radiation exclusion zone close to the plant, large numbers of people are out of work. The Fukushima Labor Bureau, on March 29, said that as a result of the East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami disaster, about 58,000 people in approximately 4,800 work places within the 30 km exclusion zone around the Fukushima Nuclear Reactor have lost jobs.

Local people voice concern that the jobless rate is being inflated as a result of pernicious rumors. At the same time that the school ceremony was being held, a long queue of people was lined up in front of the Public Employment Agency in Taira, Iwaki from 8 a.m. in hope of finding work.

"Before, people formed queues several kilometers long at gas stations; now people stand in a long line at the employment agency," Mori Akira, 63, pastor of the Global Mission Chapel, sighed.

Shimoyamada Matsuto, 50, director of public relations for Iwaki city Disaster Management Headquarters, explained, "Since harmful rumors are so powerful, not only are farming and fishing industries affected, even some industries have been damaged as a result of claims that even machines are contaminated!"

Fukushima provides one third of the electric power for the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, including both nuclear and thermal power plants. "If Fukushima goes down, the entire capital region will panic!" Shimoyamada warned.

Study Session with Hatoyama Yukio and Freelance Journalists: Questioning the Media, the Government and TEPCO

In Tokyo, on April 6, a group of freelance journalists centered on Uesugi Takashi, 43, held a media session with dozens of DPJ lawmakers, including former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio, to question the performance of the media in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

Kawauchi Hiroshi, a DPJ member of the House of Representative, stated that "Information about radiation diffusion should be correctly revealed to the nation. However, so far only once was this done."He explained the frustration of local officials. "The information from TEPCO (Tokyo Electronic Power Company) should be precisely conveyed. I talked to the mayor of Iidate village (in the 30km zone), whotold me, 'There is no information and I do not know what to do.'"

The Media Corruption that Protects TEPCO

Uesugi Takashi explained the core of the problem behind misinformation and rumors.

"Freelance journalists and foreign media are pursuing the facts, even going into the radiation exclusion zone. However, surprisingly, the Japan government continues to prevent freelance journalists and overseas media from gaining access to official press conferences at the prime minister's house and government."

Uesugi stated that since March 11th, the government has excluded all internet media and all foreign media from official press conferences on the "Emergency Situation". While foreign media have scrambled to gather informationabout the Fukushima Reactor, they have been denied access to the direct information provided by the government and one consequence of this is that "rumor-rife news has been broadcast overseas."

In fact, access has been limited in two ways. First, while Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio holds twice daily press conferences for representatives of the big Japanese media, registered representatives of freelance and internet media are limited to a single press conference per week. Second, in contrast to Japanese media who are briefed regularly by Edano and periodically by Prime Miniser Kan, foreign media are briefed exclusively by administrative staff.

Uesugi also notes that at TEPCO press conferences, which are now being held at company headquarters, foreign correspondents and Japanese freelancers regularly ask probing questions while mainstream journalists simply record and report company statements reiterating that the situation is basically under control and there is nothing to worry about. One reason for this, Uesugi suggests, is that TEPCO, a giant media sponsor, has an annual 20 billion yen advertising budget. "The media keeps defending the information from TEPCO!" "The Japanese media today is no different from the wartime propaganda media that kept repeating to the very end that 'Japan is winning the war against America,'" Uesugi exclaimed.

There is one particularly telling example of the media shielding TEPCO by suppressing information. This concerns "plutonium". According to Uesugi, after the reactor blew up on March 14, there was concern about the leakage of plutonium. However, astonishingly, until two weeks later when Uesugi asked, not a single media representative had raised the question of plutonium at TEPCO's press conferences.

On March 26, in response to Uesugi's query, TEPCO stated, "We do not measure the level of plutonium and do not even have a detector to scale it." Ironically, the next day, Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano announced that "plutonium was detected".

When TEPCO finally released data on radioactive plutonium on March 28, it stated that plutonium -238, -239, and -240 were found in the ground, but insisted that it posed no human risk. Since TEPCO provided no clarification of the meaning of the plutonium radiation findings, the mainstream press merely reported the presence of the radiation without assessment (link). Nippon Television on March 29 headlined its interview with Tokyo University Prof. Nakagawa Keiichi, a radiation specialist, "Plutonium from the power plant—No effect on neighbors."

On March 15, Uesugi criticized TEPCO for its closed attitude toward information on a TBS radio program. For this, he was immediately dismissed from his regular program. The scandal involving TEPCO's silencing of the media took an interesting turn two weeks later. At the time of the disaster on March 11, TEPCO Chairman Katsumata Tsunehisa was hosting dozens of mainstream media executives on a "study session" in China.When asked about this fact by freelance journalist Tanaka Ryusaku at a TEPCO press conference on March 30, Katsumata defended the practice.

"It is a fact that we traveled together to China," he said, "[TEPCO] did not pay all the expenses of the trip, but we paid more than they did. Certainly they are executives of the mass media, but they are all members of the study session."

When Tanaka requested the names of the media executives hosted by TEPCO in China, Katsumata retorted, "I cannot reveal their names since this is private information." But it is precisely such collusive relations between mainstream media, the government and TEPCO, that results in the censorship of information concerning nuclear problems.

Now the Japanese government has moved to crack down on independent reportage and criticism of the government’s policies in the wake of the disaster by deciding what citizens may or may not talk about in public. A new project team has been created by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, the National Police Agency, and METI to combat "rumors" deemed harmful to Japanese security in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

The government charges that the damage caused by earthquakes and by the nuclear accident are being magnified by irresponsible rumors, and the government must take action for the sake of the public good. The project team has begun to send "letters of request" to such organizations as telephone companies, internet providers, cable television stations, and others, demanding that they "take adequate measures based on the guidelines in response to illegal information." The measures include erasing any information from internet sites that the authorities deem harmful to public order and morality. japanfocus