ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — About a quarter of Navajo women and some infants who were part of a federally funded study on uranium exposure had high levels of the radioactive metal in their systems, decades after mining for Cold War weaponry ended on their reservation, a U.S. health official Monday.
The early findings from the University of New Mexico study were shared during a congressional field hearing in Albuquerque. Dr. Loretta Christensen — the chief medical officer on the Navajo Nation for Indian Health Service, a partner in the research — said 781 women were screened during an initial phase of the study that ended last year.
Among them, 26% had concentrations of uranium that exceeded levels found in the highest 5% of the U.S. population, and newborns with equally high concentrations continued to be exposed to uranium during their first year, she said.
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The three are pushing for legislation that would expand radiation compensation to residents in their state, including post-1971 uranium workers and residents who lived downwind from the Trinity Test site in southern New Mexico.
The state’s history has long been intertwined with the development of the nation’s nuclear arsenal, from uranium mining and the first atomic blast to the Manhattan project conducted through work in the once-secret city of Los Alamos. The federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, however, only covers parts of Nevada, Arizona and Utah that are downwind from a different nuclear test site.
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While no large-scale studies have connected cancer to radiation exposure from uranium waste, many have been blamed it for cancer and other illnesses.
By the late 1970s, when the mines began closing around the reservation, miners were dying of lung cancer, emphysema or other radiation-related ailments.
In an event at the Hanford nuclear reservation attended by 30,000 people Sept. 26, 1963, Kennedy presided over the groundbreaking for a nuclear reactor that would generate electricity while creating plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.
The N Reactor was the ninth — and last — reactor built at the facility north of Richland near the Columbia River. The previous eight reactors were built during World War II to supply plutonium for the Manhattan Project and, later, developing America’s nuclear arsenal.
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U.S. Sens. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson and Warren G. Magnuson as well as local officials pushed for the reactor in the 1950s to preserve jobs at the site as the older reactors were decommissioned.
General Electric initially proposed creating dual-purpose nuclear reactors to make a civilian nuclear-energy industry. The idea was that utility companies could operate the reactors to generate electricity, while the government provided the uranium fuel to run the reactor and would extract plutonium from the spent fuel rods.
The plan faced opposition, as there were people who felt that there was already enough plutonium being produced by other reactors in the country.
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Kennedy’s visit to Hanford came during an 11-state tour of the western United States, targeting states that had snubbed him during the 1960 election. Like Theodore Roosevelt’s and William Howard Taft’svisits to Yakima a half-century earlier, Kennedy’s visit inspired a giant wave of activity as the Tri-Cities rolled out the red carpet.
Schools in Richland dismissed early so children could go with their families to see and hear the president, and high school bands from the Tri-Cities and Prosser performed for the crowds. Contractors at the site cleared off 130 acres to accommodate the crowd and paved a landing pad for the presidential helicopter.
More than 1,500 dignitaries attended in a special roped-off area. It was said that the audience of 30,000 was the largest to attend an event on the nuclear reservation.
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The reactor, with a few upgrades, continued to operate at Hanford until 1987, when it was shut down due to its age and worries that it shared some of the same design features as the Chernobyl nuclear reactor that had exploded in Ukraine the previous year.
During its lifetime, it generated more than 65 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity — enough to power roughly 6 million homes for a year.
On June 14, 2012, the reactor, its fuel removed, was “cocooned” to wait for the core’s radiation levels to reach manageable levels, a process that is expected to be complete by 2087.
The “highly radioactive” control room at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s Reactor 4 at the center of the facility’s infamous 1986 catastrophe is open for tourists, so long as they wear a protective suit, helmet, and gloves while inside, CNN reported.
Chernobyl tour agencies confirmed to the network that the control room is now open for guided walkthroughs following Ukrainian President Vladimir Volydymyr’s July decision to proclaim the region an official tourist attraction(and perhaps not coincidentally, a surge of interest following the release of HBO’s wildly popular Chernobyl miniseries). Those who enter the unit must afterward submit to two radiology tests to measure exposure to contaminants.
Chernobyl and the neighboring town of Pripyat the epicenter of a roughly 1,000-square-mile (3,200-kilometer) exclusion zone, though parts of the areahave long been visitedby tourists and many places that remain officially off-limits are often entered by thrill-seekers. Reactor 4, including the control room, has been off-limits to all but a handful of people; according to Ruptly, radiation in the room is some 40,000 times higher than normal.
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The 1986 incident resulted in 28 deaths from acute radiation syndrome and 15 deaths from child thyroid cancer. The full death toll remains the subject of dispute, with most estimates pegging the number of expected long-term cancer cases from the disaster in the tens of thousands.
he Greta/AOC generation is marching for our place on this planet.
We can all turn off lights, get off plastic, go vegan, ride bikes, sail the Atlantic, demand eco-straws, solarize our homes.
But four gorillas block our way to survival. They demand a next step of mass action far beyond anything we can do as individuals:
1) ELECTION PROTECTION: Big corporations have stolen our democracy. When Jeb Bush ripped Florida 2000 for brother W, the corporate Democrats did nothing but rant at Ralph Nader. But Jeb was ALWAYS going to get George exactly the votes he needed. Trumputin did it in 2016. In 2020, stripped voter rolls and flipped vote counts could again steal the Electoral College. Our Mother Earth DEMANDS universal hand-counted paper ballots, easy and open registration, fair access to the polls, and much more. This year Al Gore should shift his climate organizing to election protection – and do it with Ralph.
2) NO NUKES: Reactors are killing us all. They (430 worldwide, 96 in the US) spew heat, radiation and carbon. Chernobyl killed more than a million people and cost more than a trillion dollars. Fukushima is poisoning the Pacific. More will explode. Radwaste is out of control. Fantasy designs (thorium, fusion, etc.) are absurd. All existing reactors can be replaced with cheaper, cleaner, safer, more reliable, and more job-producing solar, wind, batteries and LED/efficiency. DO IT NOW!! Before the next one blows!
3) MILITARY MADNESS: America’s imperial military (Earth’s worst polluter) wastes trillions. We need our soldiers here installing wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, efficiency/LED lighting, planting trees and hemp. The trillions wasted on worthless weapons (War is a racket!) must instead ride us to Solartopia.
4) KILL KING CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes & Gas): WE need to own and run the fossil-nuke corporations. The “free market” is a myth. A handful of billionaires suck up our cash. Why do we bail them out while they kill us and our planet?
Corporations are not human. They care about nothing except money. We need to control, own and reshape these industrial death machines.
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Western governors are disappointed that the U.S. Department of Energy didn’t consult their states’ nuclear waste experts before releasing a five-year plan for a nuclear waste facility in New Mexico, the governors say.
The Western Governors’ Association in a Sept. 30 letter to the Energy Department said the plan released in August for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant could have benefited with contributions from the states concerning transportation and safety.
The underground repository near Carlsbad, New Mexico, typically referred to as WIPP, takes in plutonium-contaminated clothing, tools and other material generated at 22 sites across the nation involved in Cold War-era nuclear research and bomb-making.
Among those sites are the Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and the Hanford site in Washington state.
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The Western Governors’ Association in 1989 created a Technical Advisory Group of nuclear waste and transportation experts that the governors said was left out of the latest Energy Department planning process for the repository.
