Karl Grossman - Meltdown at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

The resignation last week of the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is another demonstration of the bankrupt basis of the NRC. Gregory Jaczko repeatedly called for the NRC to apply "lessons learned" from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster in Japan. And, for that, the nuclear industry quite successfully went after him fiercely.

The New York Times in an editorial over the weekend said that President Obama’s choice to replace Jaczko, Allison Macfarlane, “will need to be as independent and aggressive as Dr. Jaczko.”

That misses the institutional point.

The NRC was created in 1974 when Congress abolished the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission after deciding that the AEC’s dual missions of promoting and at the same time regulating nuclear power were deemed a conflict of interest. The AEC was replaced by the NRC which was to regulate nuclear power, and a Department of Energy was later formed to advocate for it.

However, the same extreme pro-nuclear culture of the AEC continued on at the NRC. It has partnered with the DOE in promoting nuclear power.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/28-5

Gareth Porter - U.S. Hard Line in Failed Iran Talks Driven by Israel

Negotiations between Iran and the United States and other members of the P5+1 group in Baghdad ended in fundamental disagreement Thursday over the position of the P5+1 offering no relief from sanctions against Iran.

The two sides agreed to meet again in Moscow Jun. 18 and 19, but only after Iran had threatened not to schedule another meeting, because the P5+1 had originally failed to respond properly to its five-point plan.

The prospects for agreement are not likely to improve before that meeting, however, mainly because of an inflexible U.S. diplomatic posture that reflects President Barack Obama's need to bow to the demands of Israel and the U.S. Congress on Iran policy.

The U.S. hard line in the Baghdad talks and the failure to set the stage for an early agreement with Iran means that Iran will not only increase but accelerate its accumulation of 20-percent enriched uranium, which has been the ostensible reason for wanting to get Iran to the negotiating table quickly.

Iran's enrichment to 20 percent, which Tehran has justified over the past two years as needed by its Tehran Research Reactor to produce medical isotopes, can be turned into high enriched uranium more quickly than the 3.5 percent enriched uranium for Iran's nuclear power programme.

Read More:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/gareth-porter/43412/u-s-hard-line-in-failed-iran-talks-driven-by-israel

Pratap Chatterjee - Bailing out Germany: The Story Behind the European Financial Crisis

Bankia, Spain’s fourth largest bank, asked the government for a €19 billion ($24 billion) bail out on Friday night.  Four Greek banks - Alpha Bank, Bank of Piraeus, Eurobank and National Bank of Greece – were together given €18 billion ($23 billion) from their government last week also.

The sudden economic crash in several southern European countries: Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain as well as Ireland (sometime called the PIIGS, a rather dubious and perjorative name); is commonly blamed on lazy workers, a bloated social security system and unwise borrowings by greedy governments. This is why lenders like the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are now asking these governments to cut social spending (austerity measures) and pay ever higher interest rates, despite the fact that only serves to make the situation worse.

"As far as Athens is concerned, I … think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax," Christian Lagarde, the French head of the IMF told the Guardian.

In reality, a large chunk of the bailouts are for debts created by private banks in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain borrowing abroad – for speculative real estate schemes and such like - not by shopkeepers, small entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens. And a surprisingly big chunk of the rash loans were handed out by private (and some public) banks in just four countries: France, Germany, the UK and Belgium (in that order).

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/28-7

Climate change led to collapse of ancient Indus civilization, study finds

A new study combining the latest archaeological evidence with state-of-the-art geoscience technologies provides evidence that climate change was a key ingredient in the collapse of the great Indus or Harappan Civilization almost 4000 years ago. The study also resolves a long-standing debate over the source and fate of the Sarasvati, the sacred river of Hindu mythology.

Once extending more than 1 million square kilometers across the plains of the Indus River from the Arabian Sea to the Ganges, over what is now Pakistan, northwest India and eastern Afghanistan, the Indus civilization was the largest—but least known—of the first great urban cultures that also included Egypt and Mesopotamia. Like their contemporaries, the Harappans, named for one of their largest cities, lived next to rivers owing their livelihoods to the fertility of annually watered lands.

"We reconstructed the dynamic landscape of the plain where the Indus civilization developed 5200 years ago, built its cities, and slowly disintegrated between 3900 and 3000 years ago," said Liviu Giosan, a geologist with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and lead author of the study published the week of May 28 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Until now, speculations abounded about the links between this mysterious ancient culture and its life-giving mighty rivers."

Today, numerous remains of the Harappan settlements are located in a vast desert region far from any flowing river. In contrast to Egypt and Mesopotamia, which have long been part of the Western classical canon, this amazingly complex culture in South Asia with a population that at its peak may have reached 10 percent of the world's inhabitants, was completely forgotten until 1920's. Since then, a flurry of archaeological research in Pakistan and India has uncovered a sophisticated urban culture with myriad internal trade routes and well-established sea links with Mesopotamia, standards for building construction, sanitation systems, arts and crafts, and a yet-to-be deciphered writing system.

Read More:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-05/whoi-ccl052312.php

Sayer Ji - Eating Aluminum: Is It As Safe As Our Regulators Say?

Aluminum toxicity, a characteristically manmade problem, is now impossible to avoid, and has become a postmodern rite of passage. Our environment has become so polluted with the stuff, that even our crop plants are being threatened, with biotechnology firms now scrambling to genetically engineer aluminum-tolerance into them as a possible, though still desperate solution.

Not only are we being exposed, daily, through increasingly polluted water, soil and air, but many of our regulatory agencies consider it perfectly safe to intentionally consume or inject the stuff directly into our bodies.

While there is no known physiologic need or positive biological role for aluminum in the human body, the FDA is perfectly content with the population it is charged with protecting eating it as a "food grade" additive. This same "regulatory agency" promotes the mythical concept of a "safe" food grade petroleum, allowing food manufacturers to surreptitiously feed us over half a pound a year, which is likely why human autopsies have revealed that almost half of us have pathological deposits of the stuff in our livers and spleen.*

Technically, there are 8 forms of aluminum the government considers benign enough to receive GRAS, or Generally Recognized As Safe, status - a designation which basically exempts the substance from adequate safety testing. Those 8 forms are:

Read More:

http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/eating-aluminum-it-safe-our-regulators-say

Knowing Genetic Makeup May Not Significantly Improve Disease Risk Prediction

Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers have found that detailed knowledge about your genetic makeup - the interplay between genetic variants and other genetic variants, or between genetic variants and environmental risk factors - may only change your estimated disease prediction risk for three common diseases by a few percentage points, which is typically not enough to make a difference in prevention or treatment plans. It is the first study to revisit claims in previous research that including such information in risk models would eventually help doctors either prevent or treat diseases. 

"While identifying a synergistic effect between even a single genetic variant and another risk factor is known to be extremely challenging and requires studies with a very large number of individuals, the benefit of such discovery for risk prediction purpose might be very limited," said lead author Hugues Aschard, research fellow in the Department of Epidemiology. 

The study appears online May 24, 2012 and will appear in the June 8, 2012 print issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics. 

Read More:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/245840.php

Yale study concludes public apathy over climate change unrelated to science literacy

Are members of the public divided about climate change because they don't understand the science behind it? If Americans knew more basic science and were more proficient in technical reasoning, would public consensus match scientific consensus?

A study published today online in the journal Nature Climate Change suggests that the answer to both questions is no. Indeed, as members of the public become more science literate and numerate, the study found, individuals belonging to opposing cultural groups become even more divided on the risks that climate change poses.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the study was conducted by researchers associated with the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School and involved a nationally representative sample of 1500 U.S. adults.

"The aim of the study was to test two hypotheses," said Dan Kahan, Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School and a member of the study team. "The first attributes political controversy over climate change to the public's limited ability to comprehend science, and the second, to opposing sets of cultural values. The findings supported the second hypothesis and not the first," he said.

"Cultural cognition" is the term used to describe the process by which individuals' group values shape their perceptions of societal risks. It refers to the unconscious tendency of people to fit evidence of risk to positions that predominate in groups to which they belong. The results of the study were consistent with previous studies that show that individuals with more egalitarian values disagree sharply with individuals who have more individualistic ones on the risks associated with nuclear power, gun possession, and the HPV vaccine for school girls.

Read More:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-05/yu-ysc052512.php

Tom Engelhardt - How to Forget on Memorial Day

It’s the saddest reading around: the little announcements that dribble out of the Pentagon every day or two -- those terse, relatively uninformative death notices: rank; name; age; small town, suburb, or second-level city of origin; means of death (“small arms fire,” “improvised explosive device,” “the result of gunshot wounds inflicted by an individual wearing an Afghan National Army uniform,” or sometimes something vaguer like “while conducting combat operations,” “supporting Operation Enduring Freedom,” or simply no explanation at all); and the unit the dead soldier belonged to.  They are seldom 100 words, even with the usual opening line: “The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.” Sometimes they include more than one death.

They are essentially bureaucratic notices designed to draw little attention to themselves.  Yet cumulatively, in their hundreds over the last decade, they represent a grim archive of America’s still ongoing, already largely forgotten second Afghan War, and I’ve read them obsessively for years.

Into the Memory Hole

May is the official month of remembrance when it comes to our war dead, ending as it does on the long Memorial Day weekend when Americans typically take to the road and kill themselves and each other in far greater numbers than will die in Afghanistan.  It’s a weekend for which the police tend to predict rising fatalities and news reports tend to celebrate any declines in deaths on our roads and highways.

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175546/

Susanne Posel - UN Says Radiation Levels are Safe, Despite Empirical Data on Fukushima

First the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) claimed that their research confirms Japanese milk and vegetables are safe for human consumption. They reported that radiation levels are below cancer-causing levels.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has also assessed the problem of radioactive levels at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant.

This concept, known as the Linear No-Threshold Dose hypothesis (LNT), was accepted in 1959 as the global regulating philosophy and remains entrenched despite all scientific evidence to the contrary.

With regard to radiation this belief has been unsuccessful.

The LNT theory has been long since disproven. We are encompassed in natural radiation every day and we know that low levels of radiation or even ten times background levels have never hurt anyone.

It doesn’t cause cancer.

Yet nuclear power, with its real threat of unleashing massive amounts of unnatural radiation onto our biosphere has been proven true, not once (with Chernobyl) but twice. The Fukushima influence is still with us and will continue to be for quite some time.

Read More:

http://occupycorporatism.com/un-says-radiation-levels-are-safe-despite-empirical-data-on-fukushima/

Rosalind Peterson - U.S. NAVY’S TWELVE 5-YEAR WARFARE TESTING PROGRAMS & THE INCREASING & ONGOING THREAT TO THE GULF OF MEXICO, ATLANTIC & PACIFIC OCEANS

Revealed today that a “New Navy study says use of sonar, explosives may hurt more marine mammals than once thought”[25]. “…HONOLULU-The U.S. Navy may hurt more dolphins and whales by using sonar and explosives in Hawaii and California under a more thorough analysis that reflects new research and covers naval activities in a wider area than previous studies…”  (The Public Comment period for the new U.S. Navy Atlantic/Gulf of Mexico 5-Year Warfare Testing Range that will use bomb blasts and Sonar is from May 11, 2012 through July 10, 2012 [8C]).     U.S. Navy Website: http://aftteis.com/Home.aspx

The Washington Post also stated:  “…The Navy estimates its use of explosives and sonar may unintentionally cause more than 1,600 instances of hearing loss or other injury to marine mammals each year, according to a draft environmental impact statement that covers training and testing planned from 2014 to 2019. The Navy calculates the explosives could potentially kill more than 200 marine mammals a year…”  (The Public Comment period for the new U.S. Navy Pacific 5-Year Warfare Testing Range that will use bomb blasts and Sonar is from May 11, 2012 through July 10, 2012 [8B]).    U.S. Navy Website:  http://hstteis.com/Home.aspx

On May 17, 2012, news reports that “Mass dolphin deaths in Peru caused by acoustic trauma” were announced by “…Dr. Carlos Yaipen Llanos of ORCA in Peru informed Hardy Jones of Blue Voice that acoustical trauma is the cause of the Mass Mortality Event (MME) that killed an estimated one thousand dolphins along the coast of northern Peru in March 2012…” [28].  This is another reason to begin to limit sonar, laser, radar, and electromagnetic weapons testing in the Atlantic, Pacific, and the Gulf of Mexico.

Read More:

http://theintelhub.com/2012/05/02/the-u-s-navys-twelve-5-year-warefare-testing-programs-and-the-increasing-and-ongoing-threat-to-the-gulf-of-mexico-atlantic-and-pacific-oceans/