tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24222346011661352772024-02-19T02:22:50.711-08:00Vortex Politicouncensored unembedded commentary and investigationskansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.comBlogger103125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-3429413002926516882012-05-15T14:01:00.001-07:002012-05-15T14:01:42.339-07:00The Shoofly Project...: Cloud Cliff Bakery, the Mennonite Name Game, and a Pie Crust<a href="http://theshooflyproject.blogspot.com/2012/03/cloud-cliff-albuquerque-mennonite-and.html">The Shoofly Project...: Cloud Cliff Bakery, the Mennonite Name Game, and a Pie Crust</a>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-53115727491231445692012-03-14T19:42:00.003-07:002012-03-24T14:22:22.616-07:00On Stopping the CMRR-Nuclear Facility, Nuclear Policy, and the Future of New Mexico<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Custodian: Ed Grothus</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Like so many other 'atom projects' the CMRR-Nuclear Facility is now on its way to the dustbin of history. </span>The CMRR-NF was to be built in Los Alamos, but in the latest Obama budget it will be indefinitely deferred (<i>for at least 5 years</i>).</div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Despite what Donald L. Cook (deputy administrator for defense programs for the NNSA) may declare in the NYT (“It’s really important to understand that we have not canceled the project”) in reality it is very unlikely that this ill considered project will ever be erected, or rather, be sunk into the earth. </span></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsbd56HcjZRPF30rjbzxevaXsTOhxolv_ZWsZDcPJZeBHjeMBhE1ebc_KtzBANRk5ttm7KQy4zX1gYfmSrY-XtpfSwO2ceZUBWyt-tAhIYenUiJVptYnLQaJ7TBeLGyTSpkfrrN66G7O0L/s1600/imgres.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsbd56HcjZRPF30rjbzxevaXsTOhxolv_ZWsZDcPJZeBHjeMBhE1ebc_KtzBANRk5ttm7KQy4zX1gYfmSrY-XtpfSwO2ceZUBWyt-tAhIYenUiJVptYnLQaJ7TBeLGyTSpkfrrN66G7O0L/s1600/imgres.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> Cook, brave face </td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Like Mr. Cook, some in the NNSA and NM congressional staff are also trying to put a brave face on all this, and tell people that CMRR-NF is just delayed. Careful analyses however, points at a different reality. This is not the first time that our representatives and so-called public servants have tried to deceive the public. For one, if the project was still alive in any form, why would the budget for this facility be exactly zero, nil, zilch and nada, in the year 2013 ? </span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">The mission of the CMRR-NF nuclear facility was always veiled in a fog, changing, like guests in a hotel, depending upon the political winds in Washington. The private contractor Bechtel, a privately held secretive corporation who now controls the Lab, would love to pour large amounts of concrete and mould it into a bunker, <i>presumably to provide employment for their employees/managers just back from "rebuilding" Iraq.</i> </span></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Udall: ignorance is bliss</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">However, any informed attempt to pierce the veil, to suggest the real mission of the CMRR-NF and expose the advanced planning and imminent execution of construction of CMRR in 2011, was met with stone faced denials of medium level lab employees, and absolute ignorance from the NM congressional staff. Senators Bingaman and Udall <i>always</i> protect their own political interests, which <i>always</i> totally coincide with maximum funding for the laboratories, Sandia and Los Alamos. They were singularly uninformed and unhelpful to their constituents. <i>Ahhhh, the joys of a corrupt 'colonial' 'patron' system reigning under the massive New Mexico sky.</i> </span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: right;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">koo koo, que no ? dr. Chu </td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyJwHWICIiACknUgc4M2pW9A4lZMFYmNglO5eBnbVPjpyVrXtCvMP3iR_t5IQx7ceEpNhoUYZAhUaITfgndmXvjkFprTP6QxUs3r8zpljvY1Sp7gWjy6AzQd6q6mvhY8P9w3JOcfhD-21w/s1600/imgres-1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="126" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyJwHWICIiACknUgc4M2pW9A4lZMFYmNglO5eBnbVPjpyVrXtCvMP3iR_t5IQx7ceEpNhoUYZAhUaITfgndmXvjkFprTP6QxUs3r8zpljvY1Sp7gWjy6AzQd6q6mvhY8P9w3JOcfhD-21w/s200/imgres-1.jpeg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bingaman, on his way out, tx God</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="p1"><span class="s1">When the axe fell on the CMRR-NF in Obama's 2013 </span>budget<span class="s1">, no one representing NM in Congress, would admit to have seen it coming -- their reactions were hovering between disenchantment and delusion. Despite numerous attempts by the Los Alamos Study Group to meet with the senators Bingaman and Udall and representatives Heinrich, Lujan and/or their staff, to try to inform them of the facts behind the lawsuit that was being brought against the CMRR-NF, LANS, the DOE, Dr. Chu, and the NNSA, LASG had more success in reaching out in other ways, penetrating both sides of the aisle in Congress (yes conservatives and republican, tea- whatever included), the </span><span style="text-align: left;">Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB)</span> and the White House itself. </div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Slowly but surely people in power started seeing the absurdity of the CMRR-NF --it went from being an "absolute priority" to "something we could do without" within a matter of one year. After hundreds of meetings, op-eds, blogs, and publications, people in the highest levels of government started seeing it our way. Three times members of the LASG, including Mello, Malten, and Lindberg participated in the NPT hearings at the UN, New york City, and brought the CMRR-Nuclear Facility to the attention of the international diplomatic corps and expose the real mission of this Nuclear Facility: new 'modernized' bombs and a production facility to make them. <span id="goog_1041631903"></span><span id="goog_1041631904"></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBZwP_4ahXI8wmciGgon_fSypVVVQ-Y0-4YqSlwuh9yUvgtwu3d1rk1wN57yyjTFVD-Qk9jElByidGlz7dl6WhDgRwcSfyJF-Y1TuY8OfsuKclmJ_wo_CodZdA4AXuP_uE1t3rU0W3yx9w/s1600/imgres-7.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBZwP_4ahXI8wmciGgon_fSypVVVQ-Y0-4YqSlwuh9yUvgtwu3d1rk1wN57yyjTFVD-Qk9jElByidGlz7dl6WhDgRwcSfyJF-Y1TuY8OfsuKclmJ_wo_CodZdA4AXuP_uE1t3rU0W3yx9w/s320/imgres-7.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rocky Flats, an example of how not to do things....</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKJebpXn94Byfe3xMIVQsjlProXaqZI6GrPIHx6FmbM5K8ljaXPMIlL8xJU7suIAzVSCT83Sq6pTz199i9UyytrYpl2yL30aU_Fn7hgorE3gReYYZg0P9G_a3RLZWdRGKBjW0KOsQ_FdYS/s1600/START_Treaty_25.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="151" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKJebpXn94Byfe3xMIVQsjlProXaqZI6GrPIHx6FmbM5K8ljaXPMIlL8xJU7suIAzVSCT83Sq6pTz199i9UyytrYpl2yL30aU_Fn7hgorE3gReYYZg0P9G_a3RLZWdRGKBjW0KOsQ_FdYS/s200/START_Treaty_25.jpeg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">START ? No Way</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Indeed, among other things the CMRR is a replacement for the notorious Rocky Flats Facility near Denver -- enabling LANL to ramp up production capacity to between 50-80 pits (plutonium bomb cores) per year.These would be used in newly minted bomb designs which would give "meaning" to the START treaty just signed by Medvedev and Obama. Under pressure by the hawks (like Senator Kyl, Az.) this so-called “disarmament treaty” ironically gave the green light to renewed investments in nuclear weapons: Obama pledged to spend 85 some billions over the next ten years, just in NNSA for warheads and not counting even larger sums in the Dept of Defense (DOD) to appease the war mongers in congress. Yes Machiavellian power politics are involved here, taking most of the disarmament community for a ride. Now we must all "claw back" these foolish promises, which turned out to be more than even most Republicans in Congress ever wanted to spend. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj16LWFLzrH3sm5KNsYYFqMQc5cSlthFxQ59QconwDxDery-bp0NXp3E6EPAeWSz40iSiVQtqqX1LKt4h-_MPqr2WIQgPSGSxonFcViF593RB0exEnbbX2d4aM2vjfTRJbsBNyV5lFv6wo7/s1600/mcmillan.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj16LWFLzrH3sm5KNsYYFqMQc5cSlthFxQ59QconwDxDery-bp0NXp3E6EPAeWSz40iSiVQtqqX1LKt4h-_MPqr2WIQgPSGSxonFcViF593RB0exEnbbX2d4aM2vjfTRJbsBNyV5lFv6wo7/s200/mcmillan.jpeg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">McMillan: yes pits, after all</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="p1"><span class="s1">The Los Alamos Study Group (LASG), concluded that one of the true reasons for CMRR-NF was exactly that: <i>pit production and weapon modernization</i>. We took a lot of flak for this.The Labs and their representatives wraped themselves in all kinds of guises to tell us that we were wrong: <i>the highly classified mission of Los Alamos CNRR-NF was so sensitive and secret that its mission was hidden, agreed, but we could rest assured that we were wrong in that the CMRR-NF would have something to do with Pit Production.</i> This lie was incessantly parroted by our Senatorial staff Udall and Bingaman. However, now that funding for the facility is zeroed out, lab Director Charlie McMillan tells us:<i>“Regarding future program needs, our message to the government and to members of Congress has been clear: without CMRR, there is no identified path to meet the nation’s requirement of </i></span><span class="s2"><i>50 to 80</i></span><span class="s1"><i> pits per year,”</i> which betrays the fact that <i>that</i> was CMRR’s irreplaceable mission after all: <i>making pits.</i> </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">pits...we have about 23000 of them</td></tr>
</tbody></table><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"><i></i></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><i>The </i>Associated Press had gotten the story out first (“<a href="http://www.lasg.org/press/2012/CanBus_13Feb2012.html"><span class="s3">Obama budget puts Los Alamos facility on hold</span></a>”). NNSA had always maintained that its chosen-but-changing CMRR was its <i>only</i> option, and a terrifically urgent national security need. Now it’s not an option, and not needed – at all. The stunned reaction of the New Mexico delegation, and a good New-Mexico-oriented overview was featured in the <i>Albuquerque Journal (</i>“<a href="http://www.lasg.org/press/2012/ABQ_JRNL_14Feb2012.html"><span class="s3">Sandia Wins, LANL Loses In Fed Nuke Proposal</span></a>”<i>).</i></span><br />
<span class="s1"><i><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyGgr8GkP1Nv_Rpc5nhZdcWzFncOdax889FmkbVvGEgE0eyuyPDPKIUv_LfDJx7isBF1PDIF0PXL8ycyaMYNpkZPWLq6qjYqpPk-M9GFmQfmrA9zetbA4nu4Hqm3oKCDAeHRTC5nVxLMeG/s1600/imgres-4.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyGgr8GkP1Nv_Rpc5nhZdcWzFncOdax889FmkbVvGEgE0eyuyPDPKIUv_LfDJx7isBF1PDIF0PXL8ycyaMYNpkZPWLq6qjYqpPk-M9GFmQfmrA9zetbA4nu4Hqm3oKCDAeHRTC5nVxLMeG/s1600/imgres-4.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">CMRR-NF design drawing....hey....<br />
what half a billion buys these days...</td></tr>
</tbody></table><span class="s1">But lets not talk about the past: Already $560 million or so, has been spent on what is in the NNSA’s words is soon to be “a substantially complete design”. Apparently it must be really good --even last year the laboratory raked in millions of dollars in bonuses for their "excellence". How come <i>I</i> am not so impressed? The design, though highly secretive, is apparently still so rudimentary that the decision whether the building will be seventy five or 125 feet into the ground has yet to be made. <i>Give me a break</i>. I would like to propose a peer review of the design that is already made and cost the taxpayer over half a billion dollars.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Restarting the CMRR-NF in 5 years will never happen-- it is like finishing the Tower of Babel. And <i>if I am wrong</i>, and CMRR-NF is started up again, there is still no way that the NNSA can rely on an EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) which, by that time will be at least 15 years old, or a supplemental SEIS (completed in 2011), which was a scam in the first place. This is the very essence of the lawsuit that LASG has brought against DOE, etc. to begin with:<i> there has to be a new applicable EIS with real alternatives before you can proceed with any design let alone put spates in the ground for a new Nuclear Facility.</i> </span><br />
<span class="s1">There is still a 165 million or so dollars for design purposes in the pipeline --already appropriated -- --and the NNSA, wants to scoop that up, as if nothing has happened in the face of the almost certain abandonment of the CMRR-Nuclear Facility Project. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI0MhQI3cCvixKrcg6KZZqTQsK85gFj7XppSaNB7Qlr1esqW7MVamRjjI7PLn0rnR3-uWqpnb-vl2uq77k7-_mOIxzykQ6E3Ag3NShNe1zsVcOhVXOHoZIbAeeq5MhoQ27jVuCZE8b35AX/s1600/imgres-3.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI0MhQI3cCvixKrcg6KZZqTQsK85gFj7XppSaNB7Qlr1esqW7MVamRjjI7PLn0rnR3-uWqpnb-vl2uq77k7-_mOIxzykQ6E3Ag3NShNe1zsVcOhVXOHoZIbAeeq5MhoQ27jVuCZE8b35AX/s1600/imgres-3.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">we can use money better than that</td></tr>
</tbody></table><span class="s1">I would say this. The Laboratory already shed some crocodile tears, and has announced 400-800 ‘voluntary lay-offs’ (political ?) and despite this wants to spend another 165 million dollars to finish a <i>design that has become obsolete</i>. T</span><span class="s4">he lab’s requested budget for the current fiscal year, at $2.2 billion, is $300 million lower than the previous year, and no growth is expected in future budgets, according to its official news release.</span><span class="s1"> <i>“This compounds an already difficult set of FY12 budget challenges and raises questions about whether we can meet the pace of the modernization path outlined in the 2010 Nuclear Posture review...... I want to stress to you that this decision has nothing to do with the performance of the Lab,” </i>said McMillan<i>, who noted that the rest of FY2012 would be used "to wrap up and close out design work on the (CMRR) facility.”</i></span></div><div class="p3"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: -webkit-auto;">There are a lot of voices now which question the legitimacy of nuclear weapons at all for any type of military mission.Some in the military want to scale back to as few as 300 nuclear weapons or so. The sophisticated critics point at our complicity in proliferation worldwide by our investments in modernization, and the loss of credibility that comes with that. Others point at the dire fiscal reality that forces choices between real priorities --whether they are social or military, and the CMRR-NF is but a low hanging fruit. In the best scenario taking the CMRR-NF off the table should be <i>"imagined"</i> as a <i>grand gesture</i> towards non proliferation and a de-emphasis on the illegal practice of “nuclear diplomacy” (<i>threatening Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Iran for instance)</i> towards meaningful nuclear disarmament worldwide (<i>including Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Iran for instance)</i>. It could lend a better angle to the new START treaty: going towards real dis-armament; a worldwide conference on nuclear disarmament at the UN and an update of the NPT Treaty could be next.</div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQQdz9stlVaprWEvM7P1XKva56rUVmXwnSzXjjdFbWkVjJW1zW1ynnX9kZDpFKaWvcggmpuL0EPuqqruM2qEPqkLnGT3HCuafHb9gLbA0thCZNdu6vZ9v4-qKM4u0MXqGdPChyphenhyphenY7cMFHnz/s1600/IMG_0350.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="144" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQQdz9stlVaprWEvM7P1XKva56rUVmXwnSzXjjdFbWkVjJW1zW1ynnX9kZDpFKaWvcggmpuL0EPuqqruM2qEPqkLnGT3HCuafHb9gLbA0thCZNdu6vZ9v4-qKM4u0MXqGdPChyphenhyphenY7cMFHnz/s200/IMG_0350.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bread....not Bombs, with Hibakusha</td></tr>
</tbody></table><span class="s1"> Finally this: as I mentioned, there are 165 million dollars in the pipeline for finishing the design of the CMRR-Nuclear Facility-- <i>a boondoggle bunker</i> <i>that doesn’t even have an applicable EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) and will never be built</i>. This money should immediately be re-directed and shifted from the “final design coffers” (of LANS and the NNSA) --to a public engineering and investment program which could easily put thousands of people to work and transform NM into an green energy haven, with lots of windmills and solar cells, alternative tourism and sophisticated high altitude and desert farming --totally outside of the now anyways privatized and apparently struggling Los Alamos lab. </span><br />
<span class="s5">Our congressional representatives and staff should petition the DOE and the Obama administration and demand to redirect those funds, as I mentioned --<i>165 million,</i> <i>already in the pipeline</i>-- into a civil engineering and employment program for Northern New Mexico that employs and benefits the people that are now being unemployed in Los Alamos, Espanola, San Ildefonso, White Rock, Santa Fe, Taos, and so many other communities in Northern New Mexico.</span></div><div class="p3"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeCgCPx7SyQW5kcnL-9T3LT0p9x9lWxHRoss2bdMdgcRYX1lt0YSW1F6g6ogvTIeSKIVd1l80zmRlYriws_eTLiQJodGCMBuwxlLWPw0vBkARJtkNfuDI44xyIId8Gaeow2yGpAx1r7-I8/s1600/fig36.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="388" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeCgCPx7SyQW5kcnL-9T3LT0p9x9lWxHRoss2bdMdgcRYX1lt0YSW1F6g6ogvTIeSKIVd1l80zmRlYriws_eTLiQJodGCMBuwxlLWPw0vBkARJtkNfuDI44xyIId8Gaeow2yGpAx1r7-I8/s640/fig36.jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">San Ildefonso, on whose ancestral lands Los Alamos Laboratory was built, will feel the impact of lay-offs.<br />
Here in a historical photograph<br />
--in the future there could be large photovoltaic arrays motoring up true sovereignty</td></tr>
</tbody></table><span class="s5"><br />
</span></div><div class="p4"><span class="s1"></span></div>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-3532297274183307642012-02-14T11:44:00.000-08:002012-02-14T11:44:56.763-08:00Starving the Real Beast » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/14/starving-the-real-beast/#.Tzq5lUQlgyc.blogger">Starving the Real Beast » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names</a>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-28937384538658055082012-02-13T16:43:00.000-08:002012-02-13T16:43:28.198-08:00Guest Op Ed #2 by Greg Mello: CMRR-NF De-funded in the Light of New Economic Realities<table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="width: 785px;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="content" style="border-top-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 11pt;" valign="top" width="700"><div align="center" class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">For immediate release 2/13/12 1:20 pm MST</div><div align="center" class="Heading1" style="color: #990000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: bold;"><strong>NNSA delays proposed plutonium warhead plant "for at least five years"<br />
Existing facilities are adequate if better managed<br />
Cost savings $1.8 billion in next five years, billions more after that</strong></div><div align="center" class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Contact: Greg Mello, 505-265-1200 (office) or 505-577-8563 (mobile)<br />
Peter Neils, 505-243-2546 (office) or 505-259-5437 (mobile)<br />
Willem Malten 505-920-1277 (Santa Fe)</div><div align="left" class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">As part of its fiscal year (FY) 2013 budget request, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today proposes to delay, "for at least five years," all spending on a proposed $4 to $6 billion (B) plutonium facility to be located in Los Alamos, New Mexico. <br />
<br />
This facility, called the "Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility," or "CMRR-NF," has been the flagship U.S. nuclear warhead infrastructure project and the first priority of the NNSA's program of weapons complex modernization for the past decade. <br />
<br />
The project has been under development since 2001 and will have absorbed a total of $994 million by the end of the present fiscal year, unless Congress halts current-year outlays. These funds have been used primarily for design, and also for construction of a multi-function support facility for the proposed new building, now indefinitely delayed. <br />
<br />
Background on the project can be found at <a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/open_page.htm" moz-do-not-send="true" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/open_page.htm</a>, especially in these references:</div><ul><li class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/Mello_Reasons_to_Delay_CMRR-NF_22May2011.pdf" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">Reasons Not to Build, or to Delay CMRR-NF</a> (pdf 1.9MB) May 22, 2011 (our single best technical analysis of the issues) </li>
<li class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/CMRR_alternatives.pdf" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">The Proposed Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF): New Realities Call for New Thinking,</a> (pdf 158KB) Dec 10, 2010 (exposition of possible alternatives, some of which NNSA ultimately chose)</li>
<li class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/Litigation/Mello_aff3_14Jan2011.pdf" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">Mello Affidavit #3</a> (pdf) in Study Group v. DOE et. al. (suggested alternatives, simpler version; analysis of severe decline in project value)</li>
<li class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/Litigation/von_Hippel_Frank_affidavit_6Jan2011.pdf" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">von Hippel affidavit</a> (pdf) in Study Group v. DOE et. al. (proposes alternative NNSA ultimately chose)</li>
<li class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/Mello_pit_recommendations_2Mar2010.pdf" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">U.S. Plutonium "Pit" Production: Additional Facilities, Production Restart are Unnecessary, Costly and Provocative,</a>(pdf 242KB) Mar 2, 2010 (why large-scale pit production facilities are unnecessary; contains outdated budget information) </li>
</ul><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Further background, including a partial chronology of recent events, can be found in our <a href="http://www.lasg.org/ActionAlerts/Bulletin143.html" moz-do-not-send="true" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">Bulletin of last night</a>. (We will also send out another more detailed bulletin tonight, with further background information and interpretation. We encourage interested parties to <a href="mailto:lasg-subscribe@lists.riseup.net" moz-do-not-send="true" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">subscribe</a> -- just send a blank email to the previous link).<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.cfo.doe.gov/budget/13budget/Content/Volume1.pdf" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">NNSA's FY2013 Budget Request</a> (pdf) requests zero (0) dollars for this project in FY2013 (p. 188) and requests $35 million (M) to replace the storage functions of this facility. NNSA's rationale for this indefinite deferral is as follows (p. 185).</div><br />
<blockquote class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">NNSA has designed CMRR Nuclear Facility for the following stockpile missions: plutonium chemistry, plutonium physics, and storage of special nuclear materials. Construction has not begun on the CMRR Nuclear Facility. NNSA has determined, in consultation with the national laboratories, that existing infrastructure in the nuclear complex has the inherent capacity to provide adequate support for plutonium chemistry, plutonium physics, and special nuclear materials. NNSA proposes deferring CMRR Nuclear Facility construction for at least five years. Studies are ongoing to determine long‐term requirements. Instead of the CMRR Nuclear Facility, NNSA will maximize use of existing facilities and relocate some nuclear materials. Estimated cost avoidance from FY 2013 to FY 2017 totals approximately $1.8 billion.<br />
<br />
In place of the CMRR Nuclear Facility for plutonium chemistry, NNSA will maximize use of the recently constructed Radiological Laboratory and Utility Office Building that will be fully equipped in April 2012, approximately one year ahead of schedule. In place of CMRR Nuclear Facility for plutonium physics, NNSA has options to share workload between other existing plutonium‐capable facilities at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.<br />
<br />
In place of CMRR Nuclear Facility for nuclear material storage, the budget request includes $35 million to accelerate actions that process, package, and dispose of excess nuclear material and reduce material at risk in the plutonium facility at Los Alamos. If additional space for special nuclear material is required, NNSA can stage plutonium for future program use in the Device Assembly Facility in Nevada. The Office of Secure Transportation Asset will execute shipments as needed.</blockquote><div align="left" class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">NNSA warhead budget request for its nuclear "Weapons Activities" budget line does not propose an overall decline but rather an increase of 5.0% or $363 M, from $7,214 M to $7,577 M, which is likely to be a significant real (inflation-adjusted) increase as well as a current-dollar increase. <br />
<br />
Curiously, detailed project data sheets for most NNSA infrastructure projects are absent from this budget request, as is any attempt to project spending in future years ("Future Years National Security Program"). Placeholders based on inflation rates from the proposed FY2013 levels are shown, with the disclaimer that these numbers are not based on program needs. These data omissions may be unprecedented. <br />
<br />
NNSA, in the face of withering congressional criticism, had previously announced its intent to terminate another proposed plutonium facility, also after an expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars with no final design to show for it, the Pit Disassembly and Conversion Facility (PDCF) at NNSA's Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina. <br />
<br />
Study Group Director Greg Mello:<br />
<br />
"We welcome NNSA's understanding that its plutonium warhead programs can be managed within existing buildings, an alternative we have been recommending for years. We hope that this change of heart augurs a deeper programmatic reexamination and a very aggressive effort to end the poor performance by NNSA's contractors, in this case Los Alamos National Security (LANS), which has contributed to a great waste of taxpayer money. In that light we also welcome NNSA's announcement of late last week that it would make public its evaluations of its site contractors. <br />
<br />
"The CMRR project has been a fiasco from the get-go. In the beginning, NNSA and LANL -- then run solely by the University of California -- proposed CMRR structures which even the most cursory examination revealed could never be built. The construction materials specified in environmental documents could not have built a shed, much less a fortified, seismically-sound nuclear facility to hold and protect several tons of plutonium. As the project developed, NNSA and its contractors kept the bad news from Congress, as they always do, until the last moment, which generated huge (tenfold and greater) cost increases before the design even began to firm up. At this point, after spending $665 M on the Nuclear Facility, NNSA had not even decided which major design concept to follow -- deeply-buried or shallow construction -- and is very far from a completed design. <br />
<br />
"The CMRR Nuclear Facility has never been, and will never be, needed to fulfill all of NNSA's missions. <br />
<br />
"Right now, NNSA is spending between one-half and one million dollars <em>per day</em> to design a facility which is highly unlikely to ever be built -- and if it were, much of the design would need to be redone anyway. Congress should end this unnecessary waste.<br />
<br />
"Had NNSA and LANS actually reformed its management of its existing LANL vault, as we had suggested (and as had others in government), the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars could have been avoided.<br />
<br />
"There needs to be a congressional investigation of how exactly the perennial bad management within NNSA has been allowed to persist, and what to do about it. The heroes in this story are the professional staff in Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon, who did their jobs.<br />
<br />
"What now needs to happen is a broader discussion of priorities. We spend far too much on nuclear weapons, not just because we have too many of them but also because our so-called "stewardship" of them has been designed to maximize, not minimize, spending in many program elements. At the labs in particular, there is abundant wasteful overhead, non-value-added work of all kinds, "vaporware" posing as science, and grandiose ideas that make no sense, of which CMRR-NF was one. In addition to this "pure" waste, there is waste associated with needless warhead modernization, which "churns" the warhead complex for highly dubious reasons. Beyond that, we have the waste embodied in superfluous warheads and delivery systems, which deliver no extra "value" even under the "nuclear deterrence" paradigm, which we believe to be destructive, absurd, and immoral in any case. Today's budget is a very tentative beginning at the deeper reforms we need. Failing those reforms, the nuclear warhead enterprise will eventually suffocate from its excessive privatization and its extremely high internal rate of inflation for the actual services rendered."</div><div align="center" class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">***ENDS***</div></td></tr>
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</tbody></table>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-69896194277746337022012-02-13T08:01:00.000-08:002012-02-13T08:01:51.416-08:00Guest Op-Ed by Greg Mello: The CMRR-Nuclear Facility is in trouble<table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="background-color: white; width: 785px;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="content" style="border-top-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; text-decoration: none;" valign="top" width="700"><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Send a blank email to <a href="mailto:lasg-subscribe@lists.riseup.net" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;"><em>subscribe</em></a> or <a href="mailto:lasg-unsubscribe@lists.riseup.net" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;"><em>unsubscribe</em></a> to these bulletins.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><em>Forward</em> to anyone interested. <a href="https://www.justgive.org/nonprofits/donate.jsp?ein=85-0438692" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;"><em>Contribute</em></a>. <a href="http://www.lasg.org/contact.htm" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;"><em>Contact us</em></a>.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">February 12, 2012</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #990000;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Dear friends –</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">It’s been a busy three weeks for us since our last bulletin. We’ve sent me (Greg) to Washington D.C. twice, where I’ve had some meetings on and around Capitol Hill, and to New York for other meetings. As always, we learn in the process.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">On Tuesday night I will take the red-eye back to D.C. again for the balance of the week. It is a critical moment in nuclear history. Not to put too fine a point on the matter, the experience and perspectives we bring are unique and not otherwise available in Washington. It is important for us to bring those perspectives to our colleagues in government, the contracting community, and the arms control community at this pivotal time.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Before we get into the details, all of us at the Study Group would like to thank each of you for your truly marvelous support. <u><em>The gist of this email can be simply stated: we have not let you down. We are winning.</em></u> In another day we will all know more.</div><div class="subheading1" style="color: #990000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>1. The Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF) is in deep trouble</strong></div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Tomorrow the executive branch will release its proposed budget for all federal functions for fiscal year (FY) 2013, including the Department of Energy (DOE) and its nuclear sub-agency the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><u>We are pleased to report that a large majority of decisionmakers in government reject the notion of building the CMRR-NF at this time.</u> Tomorrow’s budget will reflect that working consensus in one way or another.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">I think many of these parties also understand that this facility is not needed for NNSA’s missions – and it is not affordable.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">This is not an Obama-led “nuclear disarmament” decision. <em>This decision has nothing to do with disarmament.</em> CMRR-NF is being rejected, for now, on very strong factual and management grounds by the Pentagon, DOE, and NNSA itself, among many others. Basically these are the same reasons we’ve provided in what are by now hundreds of briefings on and around Capitol Hill. You can find most of them in this <a href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5COwner%5CAppData%5CRoaming%5CMicrosoft%5CWord%5CReasons%20Not%20to%20Build,%20or%20to%20Delay%20CMRR-NF,%20Mello,%20paper,%20%28pdf%201.9MB%29%20May%2022,%202011" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">detailed paper from last May</a>.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">We haven’t asked, and haven’t needed to know, the details of NNSA’s announcement. We will all find that out together, tomorrow.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Let’s look back over last twenty months of this project and our involvement with it.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">On June 10, 2010, Rick Holmes, LANL CMRR Division Leader, gave a presentation at an Energy Technology and Environmental Business Association (ETEBA) meeting in which he stated that CMRR-NF construction would begin in FY2011, then just three months away.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">On June 16, NNSA and LANL held a “Construction Forum” in Espanola for potential contractors, at which LANL’s Deputy Associate Director John Bretzke stated that by year’s end, 100 craft personnel would be working on CMRR-NF construction.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">On July 1, <a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/Litigation/LASG_LOI_1Jul2010.pdf" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">we wrote to DOE Secretary Steven Chu and NNSA Administrator Tom D’Agostino</a> (pdf), threatening litigation under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) if the project was not halted for proper environmental review.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">The <a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/Litigation/NNSA_reply_LASG_LOI_30Jul2010.pdf" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">reply from DOE and NNSA</a>, signed by Deputy NNSA Administrator Donald Cook, was underwhelming, offering nothing but a paper study of whether a supplemental environmental impact statement (SEIS) might be needed as the project proceeded. The study, as it turned out, recommended against a SEIS.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">On August 16, we filed <a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/Litigation/LASG_complaint_16Aug2010.pdf" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">our first lawsuit</a> (pdf) in this matter.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">On October 1, DOE issued a Notice of Intent to prepare a SEIS.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Three days later on October 4, DOE and NNSA filed a <a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/Litigation/NNSA_MTD_4Oct2010.pdf" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">motion to dismiss our lawsuit</a> (pdf), which included an <a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/Litigation/NNSA_MTD_Cook_aff1_4Oct2010.pdf" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">affidavit from Donald Cook</a> (pdf) stating that NNSA would suspend all planned construction until the completion of the new SEIS process.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">NNSA in fact <em><u>did</u></em> stop the planned construction. By early November, <a href="http://lasg.org/articles/2010/NWMM_CMRR_15Nov2010.pdf" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">NNSA had suspended nearly a dozen procurements</a>(pdf) for which LANL had begun releasing information over the previous month, including excavation for the facility, construction of a lay-down yard, relocation of utilities, and procurement of an array of specialized nuclear equipment for the CMRR-NF building itself.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Over the ensuring year we continued litigation – and conducted dozens of briefings in Washington, armed with detailed analysis of CMRR-NF and related pit production issues that we had generated over the preceding months.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">The judge never gave us a trial on the merits of our case, or the formal ability to gather evidence. After a two-day preliminary hearing in April, where we were supported by courtroom testimony from Frank von Hippel and, prior to this, by affidavits from von Hippel, retired Sandia Vice President Bob Peurifoy, and several others, our (first) case was <a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/Litigation/JudgeHerreraDecision_23May2011.pdf" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">dismissed</a>(pdf) on May 23, as I was preparing to brief appropriators and others in Washington.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Whatever relief this belated and Pyrrhic victory may have engendered among project advocates did not last long. On June 15 the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee proposed <a href="http://www.lasg.org/ActionAlerts/Bulletin118.html" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">slashing funding for the project and barring construction</a>for the duration of the coming fiscal year. Energy and Water Subcommittee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) spoke openly of NNSA “slush funds” and his committee targeted CMRR-NF for cuts – ten times more cuts than all other infrastructure projects combined. The House voted with the Committee.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">We did not rest. In July, we filed a Notice of Appeal and Docketing Statement, and on August 31, we filed <a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/Litigation/Appellant_Opening_Brief_31Aug2011.pdf" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">our opening brief</a>(pdf) and supporting evidence (nearly a foot thick) in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, in Denver. The Tenth Circuit denied Defendants’ motion for dismissal and <a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/Litigation/10th_circuit/Order_briefing_29Nov2011.pdf" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">recommended our case for oral argument</a> (pdf), a decision which reverberated in the White House. We await a courtroom date.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Meanwhile the vacuous SEIS process, which explicitly considered no alternatives to the project, finally concluded on October 18, 2011 with an Amended Record of Decision. The sole value of the SEIS was to shock even us with much greater expected environmental impacts than we had known about in selected areas (e.g. water and electricity usage, now several multiples higher, excavation, and number of technical areas affected).</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Not long after the AROD, and doubtless eager to create a show of momentum, NNSA quietly approached congressional appropriators, asking if it would be permissible to begin construction – even though there was no explicit appropriation to do that. The answer was no.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">At this point, i.e. after the AROD, all NNSA needed to legally begin construction was an appropriation that allowed it. Starting on August 9, even before the AROD, NNSA started the early procurement process by requesting interest in what came to be, by December 15, 43 separate procurement processes, with LANS, the LANL management contractor, reserving the top job for itself. Most of LANL then left for its annual Christmas vacation.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">By that time, parties on Capitol Hill and elsewhere had begun telling us that construction of CMRR-NF was unlikely any year soon. The first shoe dropped on December 23, when Congress, following the lead of House appropriators, cut CMRR-NF funds by 37% and barred construction for the balance of FY2012.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Project staff returned from Christmas to face quite a different future. Pending procurement activity declined down to nothing. By mid-month, one LANL official told the <em>Nuclear Weapons and Materials Monitor,</em> “We’re not expecting funding for CMRR.”</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">So now the stage is now set for tomorrow’s budget release. Today, the lab-boosting <em>Albuquerque Journal</em> gathered some of the current speculations under a front-page headline: “<a href="http://www.lasg.org/press/2012/ABQ_JRNL_12Feb2012.html" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">Multibillion Los Alamos Project Threatened: Budget Ax Hovers Over Earthquake-Proof Lab</a>.”</div><div style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Stay tuned. We will send more when we know it.</span></div><div class="subheading1" style="color: #990000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>2. Rep. Michael Turner (R-OH), Chair of the Armed Forces Strategic Forces Subcommittee, will likely soon introduce a bill to mandate CMRR-NF construction</strong></div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">We don’t know precisely what this bill will say, but Rep. Turner’s 2011 “<a href="http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:h.r.1750:" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">New START Implementation Act</a>” (H.R. 1750) will doubtless be the starting point, as veteran nuclear weapons complex journalist Todd Jacobsen has pointed out. There may be a companion Senate bill from Senator Kyl (R-AZ) & Co.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Last year H.R. 1750 had 9 co-sponsors and was referred to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as well as to Turner’s own subcommittee. It was never voted on or referred out of either committee. Senator Kyl’s companion bill also had 9 co-sponsors but it too was never voted on in the Senate Armed Services Committee to which it was referred. These bills died.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><u>Nevertheless this, and potentially other damaging congressional action, could occur. We will send out a bulletin as soon as we are aware of any such legislation. It must be opposed, not just for the sake of CMRR-NF, which would be plenty of reason alone, but also because of the military-nuclear deal-making process in which it will play some part. </u></div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Obviously any legislation that attempts to prevent the commander-in-chief from setting levels of armaments, or attempts to interfere with the conduct of foreign policy by this or any future President, will raise constitutional questions. This won’t stop them. Politically, such legislation is of a piece with the increasing paralysis of our government, caused primarily by the Republican Party and the activists associated with it who hate government. This paralysis is itself a powerful reason our country is now in decline.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Let’s make no mistake about how serious this moment is. We, as a country and in our various locales, are in the process of re-examining the basic priorities of government and the nature of the social contract we hold with each other and future generations, as well as our willingness to accept stewardship responsibilities for our lands and waters, and the wildlife around us.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">At the same time, in our foreign policy, we are in the process of deciding whether to base our relations on continuous overt and covert war, or to struggle in good faith to find a just <em>modus vivendi</em> based on protecting human life.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">These are very stark choices and our ability to temporize is ending. Whatever choices we now make are going to be increasingly binding on us and others, and heavily consequential in every sphere. There is no escape.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">To us here, nuclear weapons are not just weapons. They are quite real tokens of our readiness to commit national suicide, as well as genocide abroad. Our changing levels of investment in all that pertains to them are an important barometer of our national insanity and the internal corruption of the state by its most corrosive elements.</div><div class="subheading1" style="color: #990000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>3. Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) and 34 Democratic co-sponsors have introduced the SANE Act (“Smarter Approach to Nuclear Expenditures Act of 2012”), H.R. 3974.</strong></div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">We have been in close communication with Rep. Markey’s office over the past two years regarding CMRR, nuclear weapons budgets and programs, and contractor accountability – and <a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/Markey_SANE_ACT_8Feb2012.html" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">this legislation</a>. We support it and urge you to do so as well.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BAIxw-Qu0g&feature=youtu.be" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">Here is a short video</a> of Rep. Markey’s floor statement introducing the bill.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Unfortunately there are no Republican co-sponsors of this legislation. It has no chance of passage. It is a purely symbolic effort, but not without value for that. As a <a href="http://www.boston.com/Boston/politicalintelligence/2012/02/edward-markey-introduce-bill-trim-nuclear-capability/b7WtahrQF1bp1Ug08wMK4O/index.html" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;"><em>Boston Globe</em> article</a> correctly notes, there is Republican support for cutting wasteful nuclear spending.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">We know this first-hand, not just among appropriators, but also from several discussions in Republican offices on Capitol Hill. We have also seen and heard the support for cutting defense and nuclear weapons in some powerful right-wing think tanks and activist shops. We have worked with the Rio Grande Foundation and Rep. Ron Paul’s office, to pick two of these, to kill CMRR-NF.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">In the Pentagon, it is widely understood that nuclear weapons cutbacks will be necessary for financial reasons, as many have noted.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><em><u>Thus the principles animating this bill have more political legs than the bill itself.</u></em></div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">One of these principles is to <em><u>delay making expensive nuclear weapons commitments where it is possible to do so</u></em> under today’s policies or minor variations of them. Stockpile reductions, which will come, will have concatenating, synergistic effects on program costs. It is important to avoid potentially needless program startups.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Another is to <em><u>scale back excessive, and therefore excessively expensive, forms of nuclear deterrence.</u></em> This bill would not decrease the <em>number</em> of deployed U.S. strategic warheads, either now or in the future, but it would confine them to fewer delivery platforms. It would not immediately eliminate U.S. tactical warheads and bombs, but it would eliminate nuclear cruise missile deployments immediately and then stop life extensions for tactical gravity bombs (B61 -3, -4, and -10s), which would effectively end their deployment by the end of this decade.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">A third principle in the bill is to <em><u>avoid needless modernization – modernization for its own (or really contractors’) sake.</u></em></div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">The bill falls down in that it does not attack another category of waste, in many ways the most obvious, and with strong bipartisan potential: <em><u>pure waste</u></em>, stemming from featherbedding, production of vaporware, poorly-posed “science,” and various forms of excess overhead, all of which taken together comprise, in our view, the bulk of the workload at the two physics laboratories.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">All that said, it is far more important to kill CMRR-NF (which can certainly be done) than to support this bill (which will never pass). It is more important to prevent passage of whatever bills Rep. Turner, Sen. Kyl, and their colleagues may introduce than it is to support this bill. We must actually cut nuclear weapons programs, and we must not let posturing and political theater, however well-intended they may be, get in the way.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">It is not amusing to us that essentially all the other groups listed as supporting this bill were only recently lined up behind ratifying the New START treaty. In the process, they joined the administration in full support of CMRR-NF and what amounted to a blank check for U.S. nuclear weapons programs. For most of these groups this is quite a sudden reversal. </div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Some of the most prominent organizations endorsing this bill remain opposed to fully ending CMRR-NF, and some have told me this. Some of these organizations have argued vociferously and effectively in their circles <em>against</em> opposing CMRR-NF, in some cases for many years.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">One of the features of merely symbolic legislation is that folks can sign on without fear of the consequences of actual passage. And that’s OK, if a legislative program that will lead to concrete progress gets the lion’s share of energy and attention.</div><div class="subheading1" style="color: #990000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>4. NNSA’s schedule for the First Production Unit (FPU) of the proposed B61-12 bomb has slipped two years. </strong></div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">In part this is because NNSA still has no clear scope for this project, which would replace the B61 -3, -4, and -10 variants (all “tactical,” so-called), and the B61-7 (a high-yield strategic bomb), with a single new bomb, the proposed B61-12. The cost has ballooned to an estimated $5.2 billion, the scope of work is shrinking we are told, and the schedule, as noted above, is slipping.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">This is a big subject, meriting a discussion we cannot have here. The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) <a href="http://www.pogo.org/pogo-files/letters/nuclear-security-safety/nss-dod-20110201-pogo-panetta-taxpayers-shouldnt-bear-cost-of-b61-bombs-europe.html" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">shot off a very good letter on the subject</a> to DoD Secretary Panetta, pointing out some of the weaknesses and contradictions in the supposed B61 mission in Europe and in the proposed “life extension project” (LEP) – which is really much more than that. </div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Upon information and belief, <em>there are no targets for these bombs</em>. The assumption seems to be that any hostilities that would trigger nuclear war using these bombs would take at least six months to develop, during which time some targets could be found. Having no targets is certainly better than <em>having</em> targets, but the situation is absurd and grotesque, like all nuclear deterrence “missions.”</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Congress has withheld $134 million from this project this fiscal year while the JASON advisory group examines the scope of the proposed project, and whether the work can even be successfully completed.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">(For more please see “<em><a href="http://www.gao.gov/assets/320/317883.pdf" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">Nuclear Weapons: DOD and NNSA Need to Better Manage Scope of Future Refurbishments and Risks to Maintaining U.S. Commitments to NATO</a></em>,” Government Accountability Office, GAO-11-381, May 2011, pdf, for starters).</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">This delay may cause other delays. As described in the most recent (FY2012) Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan (SSMP), the proposed W78/88 LEP – for all intents and purposes a new warhead to replace the silo-based W78 and submarine-based W88 – was to begin production when B61-12 ended. Will the proposed replacement warhead schedule also be delayed? Stay tuned.</div><div class="subheading1" style="color: #990000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>5. DoD Secretary Panetta has announced that replacement submarines for the Ohio-class (Trident) ballistic missile submarines <a href="http://www.nti.org/gsn/article/us-pushes-back-future-ballistic-missile-sub/" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">will be delayed two years</a>.</strong></div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">This too merits considerable discussion, but the main thing I wanted to draw our attention to in this Bulletin is the delay itself. The new design is taking longer than anticipated, and the project competes with other priorities for cash under the national security budget ceiling (“sequester”) set by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_Control_Act_of_2011" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">Budget Control Act of 2011</a>. Under present assumptions, the first retirement from the present fleet of 14 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_class_submarine" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;">Ohio-class submarine</a>s (each with up to 24 Trident D-5 missiles armed with up to 8 warheads) would be in 2029. The Navy wants 12 new replacement submarines with fewer missile tubes (perhaps 16). Under the new plan, the first of these would be commissioned in 2031.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">That, friends, is a long time from now.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">With that pregnant remark, let’s close for tonight.</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Best wishes,</div><div class="content9pt" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Greg, Trish, and all of us at the Study Group</div></td></tr>
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</tbody></table><span class="statcounter" style="background-color: white;"><a class="statcounter" href="http://www.statcounter.com/" style="color: #9c3f23; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><img alt="StatCounter - Free Web Tracker and Counter" border="0" src="http://c.statcounter.com/t.php?sc_project=280104&resolution=1366&h=768&camefrom=http%3A//www.facebook.com/l.php%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Flasg.org%252FActionAlerts%252FBulletin143.html%2523.TzidMmiTydg.facebook%26h%3DLAQGwTd1oAQGpefq0-BeFPNuYfadTW0d6NFUKR_YfCkP6ww&u=http%3A//lasg.org/ActionAlerts/Bulletin143.html%23.TzidMmiTydg.facebook&t=Bulletin%20%23143%3A%20Tomorrow's%20budget%20release%3A%20the%20CMRR-NF%20is%20in%20trouble%2C%20Feb%2012%2C%202012&java=1&security=&sc_random=0.588484964100644&sc_snum=1" /></a></span>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-46476355514839488612011-12-22T00:25:00.001-08:002011-12-22T00:25:45.830-08:00Guest op-ed, by Russ Wellen: The year’s end brings real disarmament that you can touch and feel<div class="left"><h1 style="clear: both; font: normal normal bold 22px/normal Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: -12px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><i style="font-weight: normal;">Don't get this wrong, this fight isn't over. But under the leadership of Greg Mello, the Los Alamos Study Group has made significant headway in slowing down and eventually stopping this wrong-headed project. There are two lawsuits well under way to do so. As Russ Wellen points out here, this is disarmament you can taste -- this is more </i>real<i style="font-weight: normal;"> than much of the well intended but often ill informed rhetoric of many liberal peace groups. Case in point: the START 2 treaty. I remember well how we (the Los Alamos Study Group) were criticized for not automatically signing on to this fake Obama-Medvedev "disarmament treaty" while testifying at the NPT hearings at the UN in New York City. Sad thing is that the signing of this treaty enabled a lot of funding to go towards what amounts to the START of a renewed nuclear arms race --the last thing our world needs. This could have been all together prevented if there would have been less eagerness by the mostly democratic 'peace' community to hand Obama a 'win' in what will probably the only remotely 'disarmament oriented initiative' he will sign during his term (despite being a Nobel prize winner). It is time for foundations to take a deep look at the work that has gone into this, and support the Los Alamos Study Group in its efforts to halt the CMRR-Nuclear Facility. How ? By making sure that some of the 'liberal' foundation money streams reach the Los Alamos Study Group (</i><a href="http://lasg.org/" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: normal;">lasg.org</a><i style="font-weight: normal;">). Please donate generously, in this time of darkness and the return of light. You can make a real difference happen....</i></span></h1><div><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Willem Malten</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-size: x-small; font-weight: normal;"><br />
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</span></i></div></div><div class="post" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 14px; margin-right: 14px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">“In crisis lies opportunity” is more than just a cliché (and we’re not just talking about Naomi Klein’s<em>Shock Doctrine.)</em> For instance, what could be a better time than the recess-depression in which we’re mired to rethink the whole concept of a growth economy, which has become unsustainable in the face of climate change and dwindling resources? At the very least, it’s a chance to trim our defense budget. In fact, it might not be foremost in the minds of most Americans, or even of much consolation, but cuts to our nuclear-weapons program constitute a silver lining to our economic crisis.</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">If you’ll recall, earlier this year, the New START treaty was held hostage by Senate Republicans under the direction of Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). By way of ransoming it, the Obama administration forked over a proposal to spend $88 billion during the next decade on nuclear-weapon modernization. (As if to show the futility of that approach, while it was ultimately passed, Kyl still didn’t vote in favor of New START.) That figure represents a 20 percent increase above funding levels proposed during the Bush administration.<span id="more-39907"></span></div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Equally as sad, as <a href="http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2010/03/newstart.php" style="color: #880000; font-weight: bold;">Hans Kristensen wrote at the Federation of American Scientists’ Strategic Security Blog</a>:</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; padding-left: 30px; text-align: left;">… the treaty does not require destruction of a single nuclear warhead and actually permits the United States and Russia to deploy almost the same number of strategic warheads that were permitted by the 2002 Moscow Treaty [thanks, in part, to a] new counting rule that attributes one weapon to each bomber rather than the actual number of weapons assigned to them. [Even stranger, this] “fake” counting rule frees up a large pool of warhead spaces under the treaty limit that enable each country to deploy many more warheads than would otherwise be the case.</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; padding-left: 30px; text-align: left;">Indeed, the New START Treaty is not so much a nuclear <em>reductions</em> treaty as it is a<em>verification</em> and <em>confidence building</em> treaty.</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Confidence building is nice and all. But it’s been 62 years since both the United States and the former Soviet Union (and then Russia) have possessed nuclear weapons, 25 years since the pivotal Reykjavík nuclear summit, and 20 years since the end of the Cold War. We’re still just trying to build confidence?</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Meanwhile, what does disarmament look like when it’s not just pecking at the inside of its egg struggling to emerge? Regular readers of Focal Points know that we track the progress of the Los Alamos Study Group, a disarmament organization that monitors the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory (the heart of the Manhattan Project during World War II) and is today managed by a Bechtel-led consortium for the National Nuclear Security Administration.</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">In recent years, the mission of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) has been to halt the progress of a Soviet-era-sounding project called the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Facility (CMRR), intended, in the words of the <a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/cmrr/" style="color: #880000; font-weight: bold;">Los Alamos National Laboratory</a> itself, to perform “analytical chemistry, materials characterization, and metallurgy research and development,” for the production of nuclear pits.</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Upon first hearing the phrase, a nuclear pit might sound like a dump for nuclear waste and old warheads. But, as in the pit of a fruit, it’s an origin of life — where the chain reaction occurs in a nuclear warhead. You can be forgiven if you’re surprised that, in light of President Obama’s renowned Prague disarmament speech and New START, however watered down, we’re still creating these obscure objects of destruction. Especially considering that 14,000 pits have been recovered from warheads that have been retired.</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Physicist and nuclear policy authority <a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/Litigation/von_Hippel_27Apr2011.html" style="color: #880000; font-weight: bold;">Frank von Hippel</a> recently testified in a lawsuit that the LASG filed against the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; padding-left: 30px; text-align: left;">The need for large-scale pit production has vanished. In 2003, the [NNSA] was arguing that the [United States] needed the capability to produce 125 to 450 pits per year by 2020 to replace the pits in the US weapon stockpile that would be 30 to 40 years old by then. . . .But, in 2006, we learned that US pits were so well made that, according to a Congressionally-mandated review of … pit aging, “Most primary types have credible minimum lifetimes in excess of 100 years.”</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Of course, that’s as much bad news — these infernal engines will be around for another century unless they’re dismantled — as good news. Meanwhile, the CMRR project is now expected to cost between $4 and $6 billion. In order to halt or at least stall it, the LASG filed a case against the NNSA seeking a new Environmental Impact Statement (as mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act) to address, among other things, seismic concerns about the project. While that case was dismissed, the LASG is not only appealing it, but filing a second lawsuit toward the same end. In the latest <a href="http://lasg.org/ActionAlerts/Bulletin136.html" style="color: #880000; font-weight: bold;">LASG newsletter</a>, Executive Director Greg Mello writes (emphasis added):</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; padding-left: 30px; text-align: left;">On December 15, House and Senate conferees issued their <a href="http://rules.house.gov/Media/file/PDF_112_1/legislativetext/HR2055crSOM/psConference%20Div%20B%20-%20SOMl%20OCR.pdf" style="color: #880000; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">“megabus” appropriations bill for fiscal year (FY) 2012</a>. [Passed in the Senate and House, though 86 Republicans defied Republican leadership and voted against it. -- RW] … the bill appropriates <em>only 63% of the requested funds</em> for the [CMRR], <em>slashing $100 million (M) from the $270 M proposed spending level</em> in the project. … CMRR and [a project in proximity to it] were the only NNSA Weapons Activities construction projects cut. … The proposed CMRR cut is 90% of the total proposed cut in new NNSA construction. NNSA’s other proposed massive project, the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF), slated to be built at the Y-12 Nuclear Security Site in Tennessee, was not cut at all.</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">We have no wish to slight the forces arrayed against the Oak Ridge, Tennessee project. But we can’t help but conclude that, along with current economic climate, the Los Alamos Study Group made the difference in slowing progress of the CMRR.</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">As Mello writes, the funding cut “can be fairly described as one of the few concrete policy accomplishments of the entire arms control and disarmament community in the United States over the past couple of years.” Never mind your garden-party treaties that are guaranteed not to offend — when the construction of a facility designated for the manufacture of nuclear-weapons components is blocked, that’s disarmament you can taste and feel.</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><i><br />
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</span></span></div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"></div><span style="font-size: 12px;"><a href="http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2011/12/21/the-years-end-brings-real-disarmament-that-you-can-touch-and-feel/print/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: #f4f4f4; color: #880000; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-weight: bold; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" title="Print This Post"></a></span></div>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-14790401123918599932011-12-22T00:24:00.000-08:002011-12-22T00:24:10.035-08:00Guest op-ed, by Russ Wellen: The year’s end brings real disarmament that you can touch and feel<div class="left"><h1 style="clear: both; font: normal normal bold 22px/normal Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: -12px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"><i style="font-weight: normal;">Don't get this wrong, this fight isn't over. But under the leadership of Greg Mello, the Los Alamos Study Group has made significant headway in slowing down and eventually stopping this wrong-headed project. There are two lawsuits well under way to do so. As Russ Wellen points out here, this is disarmament you can taste -- this is more </i>real<i style="font-weight: normal;"> than much of the well intended but often ill informed rhetoric of many liberal peace groups. Case in point: the START 2 treaty. I remember well how we (the Los Alamos Study Group) were criticized for not automatically signing on to this fake Obama-Medvedev "disarmament treaty" while testifying at the NPT hearings at the UN in New York City. Sad thing is that the signing of this treaty enabled a lot of funding to go towards what amounts to the START of a renewed nuclear arms race --the last thing our world needs. This could have been all together prevented if there would have been less eagerness by the mostly democratic 'peace' community to hand Obama a 'win' in what will probably the only remotely 'disarmament oriented initiative' he will sign during his term (despite being a Nobel prize winner). It is time for foundations to take a deep look at the work that has gone into this, and support the Los Alamos Study Group in its efforts to halt the CMRR-Nuclear Facility. How ? By making sure that some of the 'liberal' foundation money streams reach the Los Alamos Study Group (</i><a href="http://lasg.org/" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: normal;">lasg.org</a><i style="font-weight: normal;">). Please donate generously, in this time of darkness and the return of light. You can make a real difference happen....</i></span></h1><div><i><span style="font-size: x-small; font-weight: normal;">Willem Malten</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-size: x-small; font-weight: normal;"><br />
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</span></i></div></div><div class="post" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 14px; margin-right: 14px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">“In crisis lies opportunity” is more than just a cliché (and we’re not just talking about Naomi Klein’s<em>Shock Doctrine.)</em> For instance, what could be a better time than the recess-depression in which we’re mired to rethink the whole concept of a growth economy, which has become unsustainable in the face of climate change and dwindling resources? At the very least, it’s a chance to trim our defense budget. In fact, it might not be foremost in the minds of most Americans, or even of much consolation, but cuts to our nuclear-weapons program constitute a silver lining to our economic crisis.</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">If you’ll recall, earlier this year, the New START treaty was held hostage by Senate Republicans under the direction of Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). By way of ransoming it, the Obama administration forked over a proposal to spend $88 billion during the next decade on nuclear-weapon modernization. (As if to show the futility of that approach, while it was ultimately passed, Kyl still didn’t vote in favor of New START.) That figure represents a 20 percent increase above funding levels proposed during the Bush administration.<span id="more-39907"></span></div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Equally as sad, as <a href="http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2010/03/newstart.php" style="color: #880000; font-weight: bold;">Hans Kristensen wrote at the Federation of American Scientists’ Strategic Security Blog</a>:</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; padding-left: 30px; text-align: left;">… the treaty does not require destruction of a single nuclear warhead and actually permits the United States and Russia to deploy almost the same number of strategic warheads that were permitted by the 2002 Moscow Treaty [thanks, in part, to a] new counting rule that attributes one weapon to each bomber rather than the actual number of weapons assigned to them. [Even stranger, this] “fake” counting rule frees up a large pool of warhead spaces under the treaty limit that enable each country to deploy many more warheads than would otherwise be the case.</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; padding-left: 30px; text-align: left;">Indeed, the New START Treaty is not so much a nuclear <em>reductions</em> treaty as it is a<em>verification</em> and <em>confidence building</em> treaty.</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Confidence building is nice and all. But it’s been 62 years since both the United States and the former Soviet Union (and then Russia) have possessed nuclear weapons, 25 years since the pivotal Reykjavík nuclear summit, and 20 years since the end of the Cold War. We’re still just trying to build confidence?</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Meanwhile, what does disarmament look like when it’s not just pecking at the inside of its egg struggling to emerge? Regular readers of Focal Points know that we track the progress of the Los Alamos Study Group, a disarmament organization that monitors the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory (the heart of the Manhattan Project during World War II) and is today managed by a Bechtel-led consortium for the National Nuclear Security Administration.</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">In recent years, the mission of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) has been to halt the progress of a Soviet-era-sounding project called the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Facility (CMRR), intended, in the words of the <a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/cmrr/" style="color: #880000; font-weight: bold;">Los Alamos National Laboratory</a> itself, to perform “analytical chemistry, materials characterization, and metallurgy research and development,” for the production of nuclear pits.</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Upon first hearing the phrase, a nuclear pit might sound like a dump for nuclear waste and old warheads. But, as in the pit of a fruit, it’s an origin of life — where the chain reaction occurs in a nuclear warhead. You can be forgiven if you’re surprised that, in light of President Obama’s renowned Prague disarmament speech and New START, however watered down, we’re still creating these obscure objects of destruction. Especially considering that 14,000 pits have been recovered from warheads that have been retired.</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Physicist and nuclear policy authority <a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/Litigation/von_Hippel_27Apr2011.html" style="color: #880000; font-weight: bold;">Frank von Hippel</a> recently testified in a lawsuit that the LASG filed against the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; padding-left: 30px; text-align: left;">The need for large-scale pit production has vanished. In 2003, the [NNSA] was arguing that the [United States] needed the capability to produce 125 to 450 pits per year by 2020 to replace the pits in the US weapon stockpile that would be 30 to 40 years old by then. . . .But, in 2006, we learned that US pits were so well made that, according to a Congressionally-mandated review of … pit aging, “Most primary types have credible minimum lifetimes in excess of 100 years.”</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Of course, that’s as much bad news — these infernal engines will be around for another century unless they’re dismantled — as good news. Meanwhile, the CMRR project is now expected to cost between $4 and $6 billion. In order to halt or at least stall it, the LASG filed a case against the NNSA seeking a new Environmental Impact Statement (as mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act) to address, among other things, seismic concerns about the project. While that case was dismissed, the LASG is not only appealing it, but filing a second lawsuit toward the same end. In the latest <a href="http://lasg.org/ActionAlerts/Bulletin136.html" style="color: #880000; font-weight: bold;">LASG newsletter</a>, Executive Director Greg Mello writes (emphasis added):</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; padding-left: 30px; text-align: left;">On December 15, House and Senate conferees issued their <a href="http://rules.house.gov/Media/file/PDF_112_1/legislativetext/HR2055crSOM/psConference%20Div%20B%20-%20SOMl%20OCR.pdf" style="color: #880000; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">“megabus” appropriations bill for fiscal year (FY) 2012</a>. [Passed in the Senate and House, though 86 Republicans defied Republican leadership and voted against it. -- RW] … the bill appropriates <em>only 63% of the requested funds</em> for the [CMRR], <em>slashing $100 million (M) from the $270 M proposed spending level</em> in the project. … CMRR and [a project in proximity to it] were the only NNSA Weapons Activities construction projects cut. … The proposed CMRR cut is 90% of the total proposed cut in new NNSA construction. NNSA’s other proposed massive project, the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF), slated to be built at the Y-12 Nuclear Security Site in Tennessee, was not cut at all.</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">We have no wish to slight the forces arrayed against the Oak Ridge, Tennessee project. But we can’t help but conclude that, along with current economic climate, the Los Alamos Study Group made the difference in slowing progress of the CMRR.</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">As Mello writes, the funding cut “can be fairly described as one of the few concrete policy accomplishments of the entire arms control and disarmament community in the United States over the past couple of years.” Never mind your garden-party treaties that are guaranteed not to offend — when the construction of a facility designated for the manufacture of nuclear-weapons components is blocked, that’s disarmament you can taste and feel.</div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><i><br />
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</span></span></div><div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"></div><span style="font-size: 12px;"><a href="http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2011/12/21/the-years-end-brings-real-disarmament-that-you-can-touch-and-feel/print/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: #f4f4f4; color: #880000; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica; font-weight: bold; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" title="Print This Post"></a></span></div>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-83279116629600451582011-11-26T20:13:00.000-08:002011-12-01T19:31:29.010-08:00Mello speaks to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), on the CMRR Nuclear Facility, Santa Fe, Nov 17, 2011Not many people know that to maintain the CMRR-Nuclear facility once it is built, will cost about 150 million per year. Imagine that. It is not just the 6 billion dollar price-tag, it is the recurring costs if it ever gets built: an additional artificial indebtedness of the 99% to a monstrosity that only serves the interests of the 1 %. Debt is the money of slaves. Let's not be slaves any more to bankers who hold safes of worthless derivative papers, <i>that prove we owe them</i>.... or masquerading scientists in Los Alamos who want to hold a hoard of plutonium in their private bunkers to play with.....yes, on the backs of the tax payers. How long can this farce last in a time of economic crisis and ecological holocaust ?<br />
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<br />
Here Greg Mello, head of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) here puts the proposed DMRR-Nuclear Facility in the context of larger societal developments, in particular an environmental crisis and a financial crisis.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dxqvD-W0DdMXn8RDEt4pnEOxlxqoh5mQmHH9YvDxxyNlBkepSh0wX1mmEgoUE_niPG99o9c6ObVe4qMRSQF' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div> kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-29041950758770440082011-11-25T06:49:00.000-08:002011-11-26T13:58:31.148-08:00Open letter to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB)<div class="p1"><span class="s1">Dear Sirs,</span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">First, let me thank you for coming to Santa Fe and taking the time to listen to Santa Fe and NM citizens and questioning publicly to the existing NNSA and LANS employees about the subject of safety at Los Alamos, in particular PF-4 and the newly proposed CMRR-Nuclear Facility.</span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">In my own, kind of rambling presentation (my apologies), I wanted to mainly draw your attention to the ‘wet finger’ historical safety record of LANL. Here I want to re-iterate my points more succinctly:</span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">-Fire: Los Alamos is an area of tremendous natural beauty, but also fraught with danger. Fire Hazards (Cerro Grande and Las Conchas) seem to plague the region with almost predictable regularity once every 10 years or so. The fires have become more intense and devastating in acreage and also ‘heat’, because of the increased drying conditions throughout the South West, due to global warming. </span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHOuFkPWHMWFAiA4hQE00PdFzQrbsq2YS7XrN9szReIwTLfwnBJ3og-XbCGZsm9NtCjVtJVuaB8MKLdNzJDPr9B89c2uXP4B2SMMDCBnim0P83Uv_VDoFBOfBIhMfXhZy1Xn4McDYcgJxn/s1600/conchas+fire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHOuFkPWHMWFAiA4hQE00PdFzQrbsq2YS7XrN9szReIwTLfwnBJ3og-XbCGZsm9NtCjVtJVuaB8MKLdNzJDPr9B89c2uXP4B2SMMDCBnim0P83Uv_VDoFBOfBIhMfXhZy1Xn4McDYcgJxn/s400/conchas+fire.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Las Conchas fire snake initially marching straight towards Los Alamos</td></tr>
</tbody></table><span class="s1">Ultimately controlled burns and the fire suppression ability of the Los Alamos emergency teams are no match for the havoc that fire can create in a place like Los Alamos. As someone mentioned during the meeting, Los Alamos and its laboratory is a very complex place to practice fire suppression. </span>The lay of the land, with many arroyos and disjointed mesas, make fire suppression difficult, particularly in a compounded emergency scenario (fire and earthquake). The historical contamination, and current activities include a vast array of chemical, radiological and to a lesser extend biological contaminants that threaten to become volatile during a fire. Mercury, PCB’s, high explosives, etc. have all been used and disposed of, in high quantities. </div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">During the Cerro Grande fire in 2000 there was one large historical underground storage bunker and waste facility (in TA-16), that caught fire and emergency teams were unable to suppress it, while the exact nature of the available contaminants were no longer traceable since records had either been lost or destroyed. This underground bunker burned even 6 weeks after the rest of the Cerro Grande fire was long extinguished. By conservative estimates there are an estimated <a href="http://enenews.com/highest-priority-los-alamos-lab-trying-stop-nuclear-contamination-spreading-800-contaminated-sites-remain"><span class="s2">800 smaller and larger historical contaminated waste sites</span></a> all over the Los Alamos grounds, though a precise number of these is unknown.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"> Other buildings and structures (including for instance power transformers, full of PCB’s) were also destroyed during the Cerro Grande fire. What was in the thick smoke and its precipitation residues and particles was never fully investigated, yet covered some of the finest agricultural productive land in Northern New Mexico (Velarde, Taos, Penasco, and to a lesser extend Espanola and Nambe) and if there were any credible studies done, the results have been unavailable to the public. When asked the NMDA (NM dept of Ag) officials respond that the reason these results were not made public was that it would hurt farmers in Northern New Mexico, and the public would get unduly alarmed.</span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhlyO4rWPnBap0co_MAUr44rHBkGTgLHxmGQGbuneTbXy6aIA22WCkPDRj55RB9FAk3n0qb7HSBYSaipq1hfr01rG7zyr1nWISTSCmy7D8UjWU_BpEIlcpoHsb1ZvsqQbHuJiVLYHs0mGt/s1600/IMG_8929.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhlyO4rWPnBap0co_MAUr44rHBkGTgLHxmGQGbuneTbXy6aIA22WCkPDRj55RB9FAk3n0qb7HSBYSaipq1hfr01rG7zyr1nWISTSCmy7D8UjWU_BpEIlcpoHsb1ZvsqQbHuJiVLYHs0mGt/s320/IMG_8929.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">normally this daikon is one straight root...pray tell me about this abnormality</td></tr>
</tbody></table><span class="s1">Now 11 years later I personally have seen some abnormal plant growth in the region in particular</span> deformed radishes (large white daikon), that instead of being a long root (like a carrot) are shaped like a bunch of disheveled limbs. Whether or not this has anything to do with Los Alamos is an open question. </div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">-Seismic: As your board has already noticed there is a lot of new seismic information that requires study, and construction adjustments. I was really surprised by the quantity and increasing magnitude of seismic activity, when I attended one of the recent LANL meetings on the subject. Hereby I will share two of the slides that caught my attention in particular. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe9jd2_xYTQGnXSPnnHciaNB8q30E1huw4owKTDm5AoEoxxAjnvxIRC1X6RZxr733MDOrl6hyphenhyphenwbTJM6ro6741FSEo0R7EWsC_2Kk08M5Bvx3EWBn9FAZzO_SkxJk6mhxyO0KfI3N3CMscJ/s1600/IMG_8301.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe9jd2_xYTQGnXSPnnHciaNB8q30E1huw4owKTDm5AoEoxxAjnvxIRC1X6RZxr733MDOrl6hyphenhyphenwbTJM6ro6741FSEo0R7EWsC_2Kk08M5Bvx3EWBn9FAZzO_SkxJk6mhxyO0KfI3N3CMscJ/s320/IMG_8301.jpg" width="256" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">222 local earthquakes around Los Alamos 1973-2007</td></tr>
</tbody></table><span class="s1">Between 1973 and 2007 there we</span>re 222 earthquakes registered of which 91 were located within 20 miles from LANL. Though the exact number of earthquakes since 2007 has not been published, it is becoming clear that there have been more earth quakes still, with increasing intensity. Earlier this year we saw two larger earthquakes: a 5.3 magnitude quake in the Raton Trinidad area (a little bit farther away from Los Alamos on the border with Colorado), and a 3.8 magnitude quake in Nambe, only 18 miles away from the proposed CMRR-NF site.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Hereby I would also like to once more draw your attention to the fault lines located under the LANL. Somehow, in the map provided by LANL itself,(see map) incredulously the fault lines stop at the Labs boundary lines (RCF, RCF), and then seem to continue just beyond the borders of the Labs on the south side. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN9JSenc-u2Sqx8Xd6e6KK_1YoxEJ99xqk9zh478yV3QsHk-N8uHo6RtSApX6UI23sK-ytVydOhO-P33g-iZ8eBMDYCOG2VeJF-S8PcVc-lEA_jQ8ym1Z3-ItoGjwNHRCgOSakNvzWDnbm/s1600/IMG_8296.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="306" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN9JSenc-u2Sqx8Xd6e6KK_1YoxEJ99xqk9zh478yV3QsHk-N8uHo6RtSApX6UI23sK-ytVydOhO-P33g-iZ8eBMDYCOG2VeJF-S8PcVc-lEA_jQ8ym1Z3-ItoGjwNHRCgOSakNvzWDnbm/s400/IMG_8296.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The most generous thing that can be said here, is that it is apparently difficult, <br />
even for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, to establish the exact location of fault lines</td></tr>
</tbody></table><span class="s1">But if one were to connect the south side fault-lines with the north-side --one would realize that there are fault lines </span>right underneath the proposed CMRR-NF building site. Engineering may be pretty good these days, but even so, it doesn’t seem prudent to store 13000 pound of plutonium or more, on top of these fault lines, on the side of one of the largest calderas in the world.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">-Water: After the Las Conchas fire there have apparently many problems with water testing. Every time there has been a big rain, the testing water intakes have been shut down, since there was too much ash and slurry to not clog up the testing instrumentation. Predictably, no radiation to speak of has been measured so far. I don’t want to be an alarmist about water, or hysterical about the Buckman wells supplying water to Santa Fe: I belief that in many ways the Rio Grande does provide an effective barrier between the Los Alamos and Santa Fe side and that drinking water in Santa Fe is relatively safe. However I would be interested to see what contaminants from Los Alamos are released over time (not just after a fire with hit and miss testing) and how these contaminants are taken up and concentrating in different biological cycles. After all, downstream, a lot of species, humans included, are dependent on the Rio Grande Bioregion water, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. What I am suggesting here is to take a look at Cochiti lake, an artificial lake that was created as a de- facto containment of last resort for the laboratory. Most water run off from the laboratory collects there. It would behoove us to test that water and muck and see what contaminants there are and in what quantities. Also there are fish and other aquatic life living in Cochiti lake that would have absorbed and concentrated contaminants -- this too may be of interest.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjziv-Da02uBpyGPaiPs-F_lUUPLMNImOpb8h1UOXCP5Wc8t_Hsl3bvd5ViuV_yLo9QM3ZA7CgSSAipEES0G4h8oZArOVuPORsyBq2_sXWp77TUShzQVEpiMQKH7RqhnnQ9ZcmxrQSyXtH5/s1600/IMG_8808.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjziv-Da02uBpyGPaiPs-F_lUUPLMNImOpb8h1UOXCP5Wc8t_Hsl3bvd5ViuV_yLo9QM3ZA7CgSSAipEES0G4h8oZArOVuPORsyBq2_sXWp77TUShzQVEpiMQKH7RqhnnQ9ZcmxrQSyXtH5/s400/IMG_8808.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Staff of the DNFSB clearly frustrated by the inadequate answers of the NNSA and LANS officials</td></tr>
</tbody></table></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Thanks again for coming to Santa Fe. It was a breath of fresh air to see your authority make the officials from the NNSA and LANS squirm, something we commoners have never been able to do. It is a question of power, and we live in a colonized state. </span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Sincerely,</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Willem Malten </span></div>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-23451119678057342132011-11-14T21:57:00.000-08:002011-11-26T19:11:46.604-08:00guest op-ed by Greg Mello: A Nuclear Facility We Don’t Need<div class="abColumn" id="abColumn" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; float: left; font-size: 10px; line-height: 15px; margin-right: 1px; overflow-x: visible; overflow-y: visible; text-align: left; width: 617px;"><div id="article"><div class="columnGroup first" style="clear: both; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 7px; width: auto !important;"><div class="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><div style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 12px;">Hot of the press: finally.....our case reaches the New York Times. Now that the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) has thus found legitimacy in the "liberal press", by printing this op-ed by Greg Mello, will you help us make sure that we win our case ? Not one more penny to the new Nuclear Weapon Facility in Los Alamos, NM (CMRR-NF). Visit </span><a href="http://lasg.org/" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 12px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://lasg.org/</a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 12px;">, and please don't forget to push the "donate Now" button. Through activism and litigation together we can win this one: it will be your (X-mas) present to humanity...Willem Malten </span></i></div><div style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">It has been over 20 years since the end of the cold war, and yet the United States continues to spend enormous sums on its nuclear arsenal and related programs. In fact, rather than looking for ways to save money in this budget-conscious time, the National Nuclear Security Administration is asking for even more money to build one of its most unnecessary projects yet: a second big plutonium facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory.</div><div style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The facility, which the administration says it needs to produce more nuclear warhead cores, called pits, would cost between $4 billion and $6 billion to build, and roughly a quarter billion a year to operate. Strikingly, despite the decade (and about $450 million) spent developing the proposal, the administration still doesn’t have a firm cost estimate or a final design. That hasn’t kept it from asking for money, though: this year it is requesting an additional $270 million to continue planning, part of a proposed $621 million increase for warhead management.</div><div style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">A better cost estimate may be available in early 2013, when the final design nears completion, though the administration hopes to begin construction long before that, in January 2012, if Congress allows it. Even after that, experience strongly suggests that further cost increases are likely between now and 2023, when the project is expected to finally come online. By then it will be needed even less than it is now; by the time it is completed the entire nuclear arsenal, except for cruise missile warheads, will have been successfully upgraded without this investment.</div><div style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The laboratory needs fewer grand ambitions, not more space. Its existing plutonium facility, which has about twice the space inside as the proposed one, already has a high-capacity manufacturing line that takes up just a third of the building. Why does the nuclear administration need to produce more pits, let alone at a faster rate? Scientists agree that the existing stock of pits will last a century or so without replacement. There are also large reserves of extra warheads and pits for each delivery system, more than enough to replace every warhead and bomb deployed.</div><div style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The nuclear administration says it needs more capacity to facilitate large-scale production of pits for “replacement,” i.e., to produce new types of warheads. It optimistically claims that such new designs can be certified in the absence of nuclear testing. The new building would be built to handle the large steel tanks needed for the explosive “subcritical tests” and “scaled experiments” that are considered helpful in certifying these otherwise untested replacement warheads.</div><div style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The new building would also house a large new vault containing “the plutonium stores of the nation,” as Don Cook, the administration’s deputy director, has said. Yet the administration already has nuclear storage facilities in South Carolina and Nevada, which are more than sufficient. Meanwhile, it is spending additional billions on other questionable plutonium facilities to dispose of excess plutonium around the country and is even emptying a large modern plutonium facility in Livermore, Calif.</div><div style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">One reason the facility’s estimated costs continue to rise is a new appreciation of how the region’s seismic profile affects the design of the facility. The proposed facility would sit above a thick layer of loose volcanic ash, which amplifies seismic accelerations and provides little resistance to sliding. The entire Los Alamos laboratory complex sits on a fault system capable of shallow magnitude 7.3 earthquakes that give rise to sharp high accelerations.</div><div style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">To top it off, the administration is still not even sure how to design the building: whether to anchor the bunkerlike structure deep in the mesa or let it “float” up near the surface, its upper part protected by earthen berms.</div><div style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">There are alternatives — simpler, faster, cheaper and safer ones — but the nuclear administration refuses to examine them. For example, it could make better use of existing facilities, which were very costly to acquire and are very expensive to maintain and make safe, but which are not being used efficiently. But the nuclear administration and its predecessor agency within the Department of Energy have been continuously on the Government Accountability Office’s watch list of agencies most prone to waste and poor management since the list began 20 years ago.</div><div style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Even setting these criticisms aside, the case for building more nuclear weapons, at a time when the United States’ arsenal is already by far the most sophisticated and most expensive in the world is growing harder to make. The Congressional supercommittee, which will soon wrap up its plans for cutting federal spending, might or might not want to touch the politics of maintaining our nuclear arsenal — but cutting resources for this dangerous and unnecessary project should be something every member of Congress can get behind.</div><nyt_author_id></nyt_author_id><br />
<div class="authorIdentification" style="margin-bottom: 2.8em;"><div style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.467em;">Greg Mello is the executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group, a nuclear disarmament advocacy organization.</div></div><nyt_correction_bottom><div class="articleCorrection" style="margin-bottom: 2.8em;"></div></nyt_correction_bottom><nyt_update_bottom></nyt_update_bottom></div></div><div class="columnGroup " style="clear: both; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 7px; width: auto !important;"><div class="articleFooter"><div class="articleMeta"><div class="opposingFloatControl wrap"></div></div></div></div><div class="columnGroup " style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 7px; width: auto !important;"><div id="articleExtras"><div class="expandedToolsRight"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-transform: uppercase;"><br />
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</div></div></div></div>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-32622778522984573982011-11-10T19:25:00.000-08:002011-11-10T19:25:22.913-08:00Resurrection of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights<em style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">“...... I was participating in a truly significant historic event.... a consensus had been reached as to the supreme value of the human person, a value that did not originate in the decision of a worldly power, but rather in the <u>fact of existing</u>—which gave rise to the inalienable right to live free from want and oppression and to fully develop one’s personality …there was an atmosphere of genuine solidarity and brotherhood among men and women from all latitudes, the like of which I have not seen again in any international setting....”</em><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"> Hernan Santa Cruz, Chilean member of the drafting committee, 1948</span><br />
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</div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA5mejQm6RVBc7Ml46QwPb-_UGz8n2xImuCu2tLS_w-xHAjm_1H6Kus2aFvCqju-gViLtc97CfRkOaj1UmoOeyt-JfNV5pPLaApW0E8YHCEwEm5YMqLvJnmPjNTFe4UBKdCGg2eSioGzhd/s1600/unis_udhr.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><br />
</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">There was real hope after the second world war that the human atrocities perpetuated </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">during the second world war (1940-1945) would never occur again....</span><span style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red; font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">.by law. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">The unanimous adoption (with some abstentions) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights also heralded a new era of optimism and a kind of enlightened attitude (inspired by </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">Eleanor Roosevelt),</span><span style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> in which the United Nations would settle disputes and the USA was the new world leader, liberal, freedom loving and different from any empire that bit he dust before.</span></span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA5mejQm6RVBc7Ml46QwPb-_UGz8n2xImuCu2tLS_w-xHAjm_1H6Kus2aFvCqju-gViLtc97CfRkOaj1UmoOeyt-JfNV5pPLaApW0E8YHCEwEm5YMqLvJnmPjNTFe4UBKdCGg2eSioGzhd/s1600/unis_udhr.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA5mejQm6RVBc7Ml46QwPb-_UGz8n2xImuCu2tLS_w-xHAjm_1H6Kus2aFvCqju-gViLtc97CfRkOaj1UmoOeyt-JfNV5pPLaApW0E8YHCEwEm5YMqLvJnmPjNTFe4UBKdCGg2eSioGzhd/s640/unis_udhr.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">a wave of optimism</td></tr>
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Today the actual force of content of this declaration has all been falling by the wayside. Though the words 'human rights' are frequently used in news papers of stature, thanks to Bush and his cronies Cheney and Rumsfeld, torture --perhaps the most comprehensive transgression of human rights-- has become a way of war and a career for many. Extra judicial killings perpetuated by the presidency of Obama, and facilitated by drone warfare are now a commonplace, almost daily occurrence. Hardly anyone raises an eyebrow that once more we are ruled by blood thirsty murderers parading in civilian clothes, who know most certainly that the attorney general of the USA will not prosecute. However, let there be no doubt: crimes against humanity do exist and violations of human rights are crimes. One day, heinous acts will once more be recognized as heinous crimes. With 7 billion of us justice can no longer just be a matter of brute power, if humanity wants to have a future at all. Treaty law actually surpasses national law --it is the supreme law of the land. It is up to us to give it teeth.<br />
<br />
What I am suggesting here is to once more give meaning to this document: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yes, this is a legal document and presumably dry --however it is not: it is amazingly accessible. One can see how much the drafters tried to make human rights easy to grasp: in 30 small paragraphs, laws that represent the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red;">highest human aspirations </span>are laid out for the masses. But just in case these paragraphs are not simple and clear enough, the panel took the trouble to distill these principles once again. Here I will give you the whole summary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Why? Because I believe this is a profound testament to our own humanity: this is what we all agreed upon as a human family. Hopefully in this manner this document will come alive for you and becomes a useful tool in challenging the injustices we are facing globally now, including assaults on your own liberty and ability to express yourself. What are <i>your</i> rights brother ? Only if you know, you can move from warfare to "lawfare". We will see this move in many areas that are increasingly intertwined with human rights such as issues of global warming, nuclear proliferation, mining, poverty, health, economic development, education, employment, inequality, etc. This new framing of the issues in the light of human rights, gives impetus also for action.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;"> Let's examine article 1, arguably the foundation of all other principles.<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>article 1: All humans are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood</i><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">Here I will stick to the abbreviated versions of the 30 different articles. But if you 'd like to see the whole version, <a href="http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/">click here</a>.</div><div style="text-align: left;"></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><ol><li>Right to Equality</li>
<li>Freedom from discrimination</li>
<li>Right to life, liberty and personal security</li>
<li>Freedom from slavery</li>
<li>Freedom from torture and degrading treatment</li>
<li>Right to recognition as a person before the law</li>
<li>Right to equality before the law</li>
<li>Right to remedy by competent tribunal</li>
<li>Freedom from arbitrary arrest and exile</li>
<li>Right to fair public hearing</li>
<li>Right to be considered innocent until proven guilty</li>
<li>Freedom from interference with privacy, family, home and correspondence</li>
<li>Right to free movement in and out of the country</li>
<li>Right to asylum in other countries from persecution</li>
<li>Right to a nationality and freedom to change nationality</li>
<li>Right to mariage and family</li>
<li>Right to own property</li>
<li>Freedom of belief and religion</li>
<li>Freedom of opinion and information</li>
<li>Right to peaceful assembly and association</li>
<li>Right to participate in government and in free elections</li>
<li>Right to social security</li>
<li>Right to desirable work and to join trade unions</li>
<li>Right to rest and leisure</li>
<li>Right to adequate living standard</li>
<li>Right to education</li>
<li>Right to participate in the cultural life of community</li>
<li>Right to a social order that articulates this document</li>
<li>Community duties essential to free and full development</li>
<li style="text-align: center;">Freedom from state or personal interference in the above rights</li>
</ol><div style="text-align: left;">Well....here they are. When people talk about human rights, this is what they are really talking about. Obviously this is not the world we live in ...<i>but it should be</i>, since these are the basic principles we agreed upon with all nations. Laws that insure our ability to flourish fully as human beings. These laws will only gain force in the shifting narrative of history, if we, the 99%, become much more aware of their content and insist that these laws have meaning in our daily lives. They are the Law.</div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-3851463073312186512011-11-08T20:27:00.000-08:002011-11-08T20:27:44.806-08:00Occupy Wall Street and the meaning of Bread<div class="p1"><span class="s1">First day in New York City . A little challenged by having a cold, probably attracted in Santa Fe and of course exacerbated by the second hand air in the airplane. However today I made it to Occupy Wall Street and I was impressed with OWS: its chaotic ramshackle tents, its attempt to find organization in the midst of an overwhelming amount of interrelated but at the same time disjointed issues, its ability to recognize intelligence in methods of communication that will eventually tie one another into a real community of intent and purpose -- something historic is taking shape here. Inevitably they (OWS movement) are under tremendous commercial pressures and also political pressures from people that one way or another want to co-opt the movement --even unconsciously. Some celebrities don't just want to be part of OWS --they want to carry the flag and be recognized for it, because they are conditioned to do so. The large spontaneous public discussion was on the meaning of the cult of celebrity, and what role it has in the 'movement'. I think the larger question should be: what role does celebrity have in a system that fosters inequality and marginalizes most people ? We never quite got there, but people spoke up eloquently one after another. When a celebrity did show up (Johnny Simons ?), and expected to speak before everyone else, he was told to wait his turn and so (predictably) he left. Habits run deep on all sides. I spoke too: "there is no revolution without bread --there is no solution without breaking bread". Then magically I pulled one of the Cloud Cliff Nativo Breads out of my bag and we broke and ate it together as strangers no more. Made me think about the symbolism of bread. In the past 6000 years or so bread was recognized as the staff of life, because it fed plebs and nobility alike. It was the common denominator. Our bodies then, were recognizably made of bread (perhaps more so than now). So bread as a symbol is the great equalizer. That is why bread is so revolutionary: it focusses us humans on our commonality. "We all have red blood" the native American elder Corbin Harney used to proclaim. Forget celebrity, let's get to know ourselves, let's enjoy each other --as is......</span></div>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-84144862054610411962011-10-10T18:47:00.000-07:002011-10-10T18:58:36.140-07:00Children of Agent Orange - People & Power -<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;"></span><br />
<h6 class="uiStreamMessage" data-ft="{"type":1}" style="color: black; font-size: 11px; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;"><span class="messageBody translationEligibleUserMessage" data-ft="{"type":3}"><div class="text_exposed_root text_exposed" id="id_4e939e234f6470611797666" style="display: inline;">This is a very profound documentary and so beautifully made -- in many ways hard to watch without crying aloud. But we have to open our eyes and see: this is a problem of humanity and we all have to engage and be part of the solution. We have to understand that a huge crime was committed here, in the order of Hiroshima or worse. Mutagenic weapons, that is weapons that affect future generations,<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;"> like nuclear weapons and biological weapons such as Agent Orange are an assault on evolution itself and are and should be illegal. Producers and users of these types of mutagenic weapons need to be questioned in court. We need to stand with our brothers and sisters in Vietnam and the US alike who have become victims of Agent Orange. The least we can do is make sure that this will never be repeated.</span></div></span></span></h6><div class="mvm uiStreamAttachments clearfix" data-ft="{"type":10}" style="margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; zoom: 1;"><div class="UIImageBlock clearfix" style="zoom: 1;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;"><a aria-hidden="true" class="external UIImageBlock_Image UIImageBlock_MED_Image" data-ft="{"type":41}" href="http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/peopleandpower/2011/09/2011928111920665336.html#.TpOX8SCtrPE.facebook" rel="nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin-right: 10px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title=""><img alt="" class="img" height="400" src="https://s-external.ak.fbcdn.net/safe_image.php?d=AQA4KwmNpO-oDCNo&w=90&h=90&url=http%3A%2F%2Fenglish.aljazeera.net%2Fmritems%2Fimagecache%2F89%2F135%2Fmritems%2FImages%2F2011%2F9%2F28%2F201192811332388140_20.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; display: block; max-height: 90px; max-width: 90px;" width="400" /></a></span><br />
<div class="UIImageBlock_Content UIImageBlock_MED_Content fsm fwn fcg" style="color: grey; display: table-cell; font-size: 11px; vertical-align: top; width: 10000px;"><div class="uiAttachmentTitle" data-ft="{"type":11}" style="color: #333333; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;"><strong><a href="http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/peopleandpower/2011/09/2011928111920665336.html#.TpOX8SCtrPE.facebook" rel="nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Children of Agent Orange</a></strong></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;"><span class="caption">english.aljazeera.net</span></span><br />
<div class="mts uiAttachmentDesc translationEligibleUserAttachmentMessage" style="color: grey; margin-top: 5px; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;">How a group of US veterans in Vietnam are trying to atone for the mistakes of the past.</span></div></div></div></div><a href="http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/peopleandpower/2011/09/2011928111920665336.html#.TpOgIWpv-zt.blogger">Children of Agent Orange - People & Power - Al Jazeera English</a><br />
<div><br />
</div><div><i> my gratitude to you for picking this issue up</i></div>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-61668248652334116162011-10-02T21:49:00.000-07:002011-10-02T23:07:47.008-07:00Occupy Wallstreet, Decolonize Washington, Liberate AllBrothers and Sisters, first we have to clearly focus on understanding our enemy.<br />
<br />
The enemy is a militarized state, which has become top heavy by endless wars, and which is financed by Wallstreet's sleight of hand banksters, aided and abetted by a corrupt body of politicians and media. These wars only benefit corporate wealth and provide <i>'raison d'etre'</i> for the security state: a direct transfer of your taxes into a corporate war-prison-torture-machine (ultimately stacked against<i> you</i>). Through the media this violence, poverty and inequality are accepted as 'normal events' --even infecting our own minds.<br />
<br />
"Occupy Wallstreet" has to be about decolonizing Washington-- money out of politics--. Decolonizing Washington means throwing off this yoke of oppression that comes from unregulated capitalism and the deepening monopolization of resources in the hands of the very few ultra rich, who own their politician lackeys, who own the military, and who are forming a spiderweb of extraction of resources around the globe. They are the 'supranational' elite who back themselves up with the terror of nuclear weapons.<i> Don't kid yourself. </i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>In its current manifestation, money only represents endless debt. Money should be more like water: by circulation, water fertilizes everything it touches and stimulates the diversity and abundance of nature (and culture I may add). In its essence money is like the water of the economy -- it has be real, like silver or gold --not just debt hanging like a noose around the neck of us all. Like with water or blood, i</i><i>f money </i><i>gets stuck in a few hands and no longer circulates the corpus becomes sick: there is desertification everywhere, people go hungry, people are no longer educated, resources are raped, and the earth goes barren. That is the situation we are in.</i><br />
<br />
This system of mindless extraction for profit is what <i>occupies</i> of all our public space and discourse and IT<i> is</i> our 'enemy'. The way to fight this enemy is to make sure that its bloodsucking ability is de-fanged by:<br />
banning hi-frequency trading,<br />
breaking "too big to fail" apart,<br />
decentralizing energy,<br />
dismantling the corporate prison state of fear and intimidation,<br />
capping personal wealth at one hundred million $$,<br />
imprisoning banksters and<br />
stop killing people<br />
Ending the resource and drone wars that only serve the corporate 'personhoods'.<br />
<br />
This movement is about throwing off the yoke of oppression and poverty. Rejecting the violence. Liberation of people and resources.<br />
<i>This is about every-one's birth right of walking on this earth free from fear and free of hunger.</i>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-87554984434381756052011-09-24T15:17:00.000-07:002011-09-24T16:58:59.435-07:00Report on the Second International Conference on Agent Orange/ Dioxin (Hanoi, 8-9 August 2011), guest op-ed by Bob Rigg<div class="p1"><i>I wish I could have been there.....but my friend Bob Rigg was there and has written this moving and also funny account here --well worth reading. </i></div><div class="p1"><i>We need to find ways to support our Vietnamese brothers and sisters, by breaking the silence that is surrounding this issue and challenging the official American denial that Agent Orange was used as a weapon in the Vietnamese conflict. I call on all veterans and their deformed children, to start speaking out loudly, once again, about the reality of their suffering and that of their Vietnamese colleagues. Somehow there should be a lot more peoples' exchanges between the US and Vietnam that expose the extend of the ongoing genetic damage done. </i></div><div class="p1"><i>Mutagenic weapons such as Agent Orange tie generations of former enemies together into a branch of evolution which serves to witness the aberration and horror of modern warfare. We need to accept that the damage is done, but should never be repeated, and the victims should not have to struggle for survival without the genetic make up do so. We have to hold the corporations that created Agent Orange, and the American governments which used it accountable......We need to insist on compensation to the victims, who are innocent </i><i>by default: at </i><i>the time of the crime they were not yet born.</i></div><div class="p1"><i><br />
</i></div><div class="p1"><i>Willem Malten</i></div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p1">This was my first trip to Vietnam, except in my imagination as an anti war protester in the early sixties. I arrived at my military hotel in Hanoi at about 11 pm in the night before the beginning of the second international conference on agent orange/ dioxin. A very likeable Indian from New Delhi was, like me, as hungry as a hunter, so we hired a taxi into the middle of Hanoi. As all restaurants were closing the only option open to us were the numerous street eateries where food is prepared on the street, often in what may to us appear to be squalid conditions. I had been advised that, provided all food eaten at these places is grilled under your eyes, the risk of any serious infection is minimised. And this is how most Hanoians eat. My Indian friend, whose entire life has been spent in Asia, is, it turned out, from a well-heeled family. He has never in his life eaten at one of these eateries, and was afraid of the possible consequences. He succumbed and very nervously took a few bites and then decided that he quite enjoyed the meat and vegies that we were grilling over a mini barbecue. The next morning at breakfast he and his delightful wife fell all over me and reported that diarrhea had spared him a visitation. <span class="s2"> </span></div><div class="p3"><br />
</div><div class="p4">When the conference opened at 8:15 am I was still shell-shocked from jet lag and tiredness, and was stunned when the distinguished Vietnamese former Deputy Minister of Defence who was chairing the meeting called out my name and invited me to sit next to him on the<br />
podium, to help guide the proceedings of the conference. We were joined by a German woman whose husband had died of agent orange. Before he died they had begun to establish a village in Vietnam aiming to provide high quality care for children who are victims of agent orange. [I did not know this at the time] The other person called up to the stage was a US woman who looks a bit like everyone's favourite grandma, in whose mouth<span class="s3"> </span>everything turns to butter. It turns out that she is the chair of an international association of lawyers dedicated to justice, has worked with Ralph Nader, has dedicated herself unrelentingly to the anti-war movement, and has been a quiet and persistent pain in the ass of the US establishment ever since. Each woman is very different; both are compelling and quietly powerful figures.</div><div class="p4">As I sat next to the Vietnamese chair, I could observe him at close range. Although he appeared not to speak English, when the conference concluded he popped over to me and said that he was looking forward to seeing me in Vietnam next year. There will need to be continuous follow up on such an important conference, and they want my participation, I am pleased to say.<br />
<br />
The conference was attended by about 200 people, many of them Vietnamese. Iran, Venezuela, and Iraq were represented by ambassadors. Fascinating, from a political point of view, was the surprise arrival of the ambassador of China later in the day. Because I was next to the chair I could see that this was unexpected. China and Vietnam have been at loggerheads ever since the Vietnam war, with parts of the northern provinces of Vietnam having been overrun by Chinese troops, including Sapa, which I was later to visit. <span class="s4"> </span>And there are ongoing tensions, amongst other things in relation to oil and gas reserves off the coast of Vietnam. And the US, influenced by its undeclared China containment policy, is seeking to improve relations with Vietnam, which shares a border with China. I interrupted the plenary session which I was chairing, welcomed His Excellency and called upon the chair to formally greet him. He announced that the staff of his embassy (not the govt of China, note) had donated US$500 to help victims of agent orange. Intriguing. <br />
<br />
These were the diplomatic frills. The day was taken up by a succession of papers, about 35% of which were presented by individuals who were either victims of agent orange or individuals from all over Vietnam who are overseeing the enormous effort of trying to care<span class="s3"> </span>for the approx 3.5 million Vietnamese requiring intensive care and treatment (3/4 of the human population of NZ). Resources are lacking. The US and the US chemical companies which made a mint out of producing prodigious quantities of dioxin continue to deny liability, or even to provide humanitarian assistance without admitting liability. Many US veterans, some of whom were exposed to agent orange, have also had to discover that, although their own government has established a fund to assist vets suffering from agent orange, at the end of the day there are always very good bureaucratic reasons why they should either be<br />
denied assistance, or granted so little that it is hardly worth jumping through numerous flaming hoops to get it.</div><div class="p4">I called on one US vet who I did not know at that stage, to come forward to speak. There was a delay of a couple of minutes, and I began to wonder whether he had left the room. Suddenly this gigantic black man rose from his seat (I would guess that he is not too far off seven feet tall) and walked very slowly, with the body language of someone carrying the world on his shoulders, to the podium, where he spoke in a slow sepulchral voice. He had tipped large quantities of agent orange out of helicopters onto Vietnam. He had vaguely known that this stuff was pretty deadly, but wasn't worried about it then. After the war, however, he began to reflect on what he had done, possibly helped by the growing availability of information about its terrible consequences. He fell apart, lost his job, and went onto dope, especially heroin. His marriage disintegrated, and he found himself at the top of the great US scrap heap. Decades later he is off the dope, has found a lovely German wife, and teaches meditation. He can still not forgive himself for what he has done. The conference did not make it easy for him either, as he had to sit through never ending horrific accounts of the appalling misery dioxin, now into its fourth generation of victims,<br />
continues to inflict.</div><div class="p4">A 34 year old US woman victim delivered a moving speech. Her dad came home from the war. She was born with webbed hands and feet, and with part of one leg missing. Her dad<br />
was dying of dioxin poisoning, then not recognised at all by the US administration. Her dad lost his job and died aged 50, leaving behind an impoverished wife and family, with a severely disabled daughter. He never forgave himself for what, as he saw it, he had done to his daughter, and worried that she would never marry, and would be condemned to a half life. She is now married with kids, and is an agent orange activist. <br />
<br />
Several Vietnamese got up and told heart-rending stories. It is important to realise that many of the disabilities are internal, often of the most terribly painful and disabling variety. Check it out on the net if you are interested. The list of internal complications that can afflict a single individual can occupy half a page or more. The Vietnamese government is doing everything in its power to deal with agent orange and to support its victims. But Vietnam is a developing country lacking the resources to deal effectively with this gargantuan problem, which is now getting worse. Many of the absolutely incapacitated victims are being cared for at home by mums, dads, and extended families. But this kind of care, esp for people living in poverty who have to work very hard to survive, is more than slightly demanding. Many of the victims require 24 hour seven day a week non stop care. Many care-givers are now dying out, either<br />
from stress and exhaustion or from old age, or both. Who is now to care for those who they have loved for 30-40years?</div><div class="p4"><span class="s2"><br />
</span>By and large the West has turned a blind eye to all of this misery, and gives little or nothing. When I say West I mean here Western governments. But Western non governmental<span class="s3"> </span>groups and organisations are all too frequently blind in this eye as well. Not a single Western media organisation was present at the conference, although many were invited. Because the focus is on the victims, the predominant emotion was grief. The fact that this was done by the US government is understood by all. As is the fact that neither the US government nor the US chemical industry has ever come to the party. But the Vietnamese waste no breath on outbursts of politically charged rhetoric. What animates them is the terrible suffering which they alone must try to mitigate. Just inside the main door of the conference room was a fourth generation victim - a boy, maybe ten years old, with the face of a saint and the fresh, innocent smile of an angel - both arms are missing at the shoulder, and are tiny little shirt-sleeved stumps. I have several photos of him. Some second and third generation victims just managed to make their way up to the stage. They were often university educated. One spoke nearly perfect English. I had to step down from the stage to help them up onto the stage, and then back down again. They spoke about their situations with searing detachment, as though they were scholars reporting on case studies. They all came from poor families economically ruined by this disaster, but they all understand the reality of the political situation their government is in, and value and appreciate its attempts to come to their assistance. They also understand the role of the US in all of this, but are neither bitter nor angry. What would be the point? It wouldn't change a thing. </div><div class="p4"><span class="s2"><br />
</span>They focus all their energy on living with their manifold sufferings and making the most of what they can achieve and can enjoy, with the love and support of others. Indirect victims were also present. The aunt of the little armless boy, who cares for him full time. The German woman next to me on the stage, who lost her husband. The Vietnamese father of<span class="s3"> </span>five second generation children, all of whom are massively disabled and unable to care for themselves in any way. He was poor before he and his wife were hit by this disaster. Now they are poorer, but they face up to their situation unflinchingly. As an outsider I weep, and I also feel a smouldering anger which, if they feel it, they do not show.</div><div class="p4">I have never been to a conference like this. I will certainly attend conferences like this in the<span class="s3"> </span>future. I want to devote as much as possible of my time and energy to helping mobilise an effective international campaign on behalf of the victims. In the conference I was able to do one thing which has changed the life of one person in the conference room - the hulking US veteran who I wrote about above. It struck me during the conference that there were all<span class="s3"> </span>kinds of group photos, but none of the victims. Although some victims were speaking, most were silent and invisible. I consulted with the key Vietnamese players, who liked my idea, but said Bob, you are chairing this session of the conference. We have confidence in you. Do your thing. I did something which, it turned out, has never happened in years of meetings of agent orange victims. I announced that I wanted them all to find their way to the front of the room for a group photo. I emphasised that indirect victims such as the German woman sitting next to me on the stage were very much included in this invitation. After a bit of milling<span class="s3"> </span>around - we had excellent Vietnamese interpreters who were vainly trying to keep up with my rapid fire Kiwi-English - everyone, wheelchairs, crutches and the works, came up front and stood together embracing each other and feeling good together for the first time.<span class="s3"> T</span>he entire remaining audience then spontaneously stood up and applauded loudly for several minutes. Then I took a small risk (there was no opportunity to consult with the victims) and announced that I was going to take advantage of the power vested in me as chairman to invite anyone in the audience who had dropped agent orange over Vietnam and who had repented, to join the victims. After another very long - for me - pause the hulking American veteran stood up and walked beaming to join the victims. He embraced them and they welcomed him. He was still beaming, with a huge Colgate smile, when I last saw him. We later swam together in the hotel pool and became underwater blood brothers. </div><div class="p4">I was about to sign off when I realised that I simply had to include a paragraph on an official event on the third and last day of the conference. It took place in the top Hanoi venue, a grand old opera house along French lines. That day marked the 50th anniversary of the first day on which the US dropped agent orange over Vietnam. The event was attended by every senior political figure in Vietnam. No one who mattered was missing. There were Vietnamese opera and song renditions, all relating to the theme. There were a few speeches from Vietnamese dignitaries, and one from the distinguished US woman lawyer mentioned<span class="s3"> </span>above. As the dancing etc proceeded, never-ending gut-wrenching images of victims of agent orange were flashed across the back of the stage. No one could accuse the Vietnamese of falsely sentimentalising things. As far as I could tell, there was absolutely no anti US rhetoric. It was not necessary. Everyone knows quite well who dropped this stuff. So<span class="s3"> </span>why rant on about it? The Americans don't want to know about it. But that is another story. An army band provided live music from high up in the gods. When we left we were all<span class="s3"> </span>absolutely wrung out. <br />
<br />
Yet the Vietnamese were so restrained, almost gracious. And the leadership, seemingly without any bodyguards, mingled warmly and informally with sweet little girls carrying burning candles, dancers and others. <br />
<br />
I had intended to paint a picture of my wonderful personal travels, as a privileged foreigner with money and perks. Somehow it does not fit after what I have just written. Also, this draft has taken about three hours to hammer out with my primitive hunt ‘n peck typing skills. <br />
Just back from a walk around Hanoi in the middle of a very hot and humid day. Bought one of those peasant straw hats and was admired by many Western tourists. Met a very interesting French banker in an Australian bar called the Kangaroo. He has recommended a French-Vietnamese fusion restaurant called the Green Tangerine. Will let you know how it turns out.</div>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-87603208348893643902011-09-07T21:57:00.000-07:002011-11-27T12:33:57.145-08:00Agent Orange: Agent of Death.....guest op-ed by N.D. JAYAPRAKASH<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">This is a very important and comprehensive article that recounts the atrocious history of Agent Orange. Since Agent Orange affects the makeup of genetic codes in nature and humans alike, it needs to be recognized as a "mutagenic weapon". Mutagenic weapons in effect target future generations and thus are not just immoral -- they are a violation against all of creation </span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">--<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red;">they are and must be illegal</span>.</span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">. The only way to treat crime, or torture, or war on civilians is to demand accountability of the different actors: whether they are </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">whole nations, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"> corporations, politicians, soldiers, or presidents for that matter (on this blog, see also <a href="http://kanseki-vortex.blogspot.com/2010/10/case-against-agent-orange-and-all.html">The Case against Agent Orange and all Mutagenic Weapons</a>). </span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">We need to support our Vietnamese brothers and sisters in their demand for compensation and responsibility. And we have yet to come to grips with the devastation Agent Orange has perpetuated on our veterans and their families in our midst. </span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">If there was any conscience at all in the Obama administration, minimally it would have send an envoy to attend the proceedings of this Second International Conference of Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin. Or perhaps a cameo appearance of Hillary Clinton. But no, no-one showed up.....Obama is a disappointment on so many humanitarian issues as well. He did not even speak out as police chemically sprayed totally non-violent protesters in UC Davis, etc. Chemical warfare, not only perpetuated in Vietnam, but also, for instance in the drugwar in South and Middle America, now also is directed against the US's own citizens. Against the same people that made it possible for Obama to become president. This man, Barack Obama, really knows how to put shame on the Nobel Price for Peace.....</span></i><br />
<i>Willem Malten</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<br />
<table bgcolor="white" border="0" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="font-size: 13px;"><b>On the 50th anniversary of the use of the deadly Agent Orange in Vietnam, an international conference seeks justice for its victims.</b></td></tr>
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<div align="justify" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;"></div><div align="justify" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;"></div><blurb1 style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></blurb1><br />
<div align="justify" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;"></div><div align="left" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;"></div><br />
<center style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">HOANG DINH NAM/AFP </span><br />
<img align="center" border="1" height="350" src="http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2819/images/20110923281905901.jpg" width="289" /><br />
<b>A March 2000 picture showing two sisters, both victims of Agent Orange, at the doorway of their home in Dong Ha, in the central Vietnamese province of Quang Tri.</b></center><br />
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;"></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">THE shocking images of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York are well etched in the minds of almost everyone who had access to a television set at that time. Similarly, all those who were adults or were in their teens in the late 1960s and early 1970s and had access to radio or newspapers must have heard or read about the Vietnam War. Some of them may be familiar with the term “Agent Orange” and may even have come across some fleeting references to the same. However, the devastating effect of the chemical warfare that the United States military unleashed on Vietnam from 1961 to 1971 is hardly ever in the news, despite being hundreds of times deadlier than the 9/11 attack in terms of the scale of death and devastation and long-term impact. This report is an attempt to shed light on some aspects of this critical issue that has gone largely unnoticed and unaddressed to date.</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">THE Second International Conference of Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin was held in Hanoi from August 7 to 10 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first use of herbicides in Vietnam by the U.S. military during the civil war between the Ho Chi Minh-led communist regime of North Vietnam and the U.S.-propped regime of South Vietnam. (The First International Conference was held in 2006.) The U.S. began ruthlessly using chemical weapons on Vietnam (notably in areas theoretically under the “protection” of the U.S.-backed regime) exactly 16 years after President Harry Truman had shocked the world with his decision to test nuclear weapons by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. The thoughtless use of these chemical weapons, especially the one in the form of a herbicide called Agent Orange, which contained trace amounts of a by-product called TCDD (dioxin – one of the most toxic chemicals known to humans), had devastating effects. (See “The Effects of Herbicides in South Vietnam”; Report of the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C., 1974; and Jeanne Stellman, et al; Nature, April 17, 2003.) No less than 80 million litres of herbicides was sprayed over Vietnam between 1961 and 1971, which effectively destroyed over three million hectares of forests, mangroves and cultivable land and devastated the lives of more than three million people in Vietnam alone.</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">More than 200 delegates, half of whom were from 24 other countries, attended the conference. They included Agent Orange victims from not only Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia but also the U.S., South Korea, Australia, Canada and Thailand. Victims of chemical warfare* from Sardasht (Iran), Marivan (Iran) and Halabja (Iraq) and victims of chemical disasters from Seveso (1976) and Bhopal (1984) also attended the conference.</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">Sanjay Verma, who lost his parents and six siblings in the Union Carbide pesticide factory disaster and in its aftermath, along with this writer represented the Bhopal gas victims at the event.</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">The fact that U.S. and allied soldiers also became victims of Agent Orange testifies to the recklessness with which the U.S. military sprayed the herbicide. The most striking example of this is the case of the Zumwalt family. Admiral Zumwalt, as commander of the U.S. Naval Forces in Vietnam between 1968 and 1970 and as the one who commanded the flotilla of Swift Boats that patrolled its coasts, harbours and rivers, was instrumental in increasing the area and intensity of Agent Orange spraying. His son, Lieutenant Zumwalt, who was the commander of one of the Swift Boats that patrolled the areas that were worst hit by Agent Orange, died of cancer in 1988 at the age of 42. His grandson, Russell Zumwalt (born in 1977), is mentally retarded. Their unenviable plight is recounted in a moving account titled My Father, My Son (Macmillan, 1986). Lt. Zumwalt believed that it was Agent Orange that had caused his cancer and his son's severe learning disabilities.</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">Heather Bowser, a second-generation American victim (whose father, Bill Morris, had served as a soldier in Vietnam in 1968 and died of an Agent Orange-related disease in 1998) was born without her right leg below the knee, the big toe on her left foot and several fingers. Heather, 38, the first second-generation U.S. victim to interact with her counterparts in Vietnam, was there to seek justice for Agent Orange victims. Lawyers, scientists and social activists and the Ambassadors of China, Greece, Iran, South Africa and Venezuela were among others who attended the conference.</div><div align="left" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;"></div><br />
<center style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">KHAM/REUTERS </span><br />
<img align="center" border="1" height="350" src="http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2819/images/20110923281905902.jpg" width="300" /><br />
<b>HEATHER BOWSER (LEFT), a second-generation Agent Orange victim whose father, Bill Morris, was a U.S. soldier in Vietnam's southern Bien Hoa city during the war, is photographing inmates of Friendship Village, a hospice for Agent Orange victims outside Hanoi, on August 9.</b></center><br />
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;"></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">Rosemarie Höhn-Mizo of Germany and Masako Sakata of Japan, who are now in their early 60s, had nothing to do with the war in Vietnam. It was their misfortune that they married U.S. war veterans who had served in Vietnam in areas that were sprayed with Agent Orange. Their husbands, George Mizo and Greg Davis, who realised that they were suffering from the effects of Agent Orange and went back to Vietnam to seek justice for the victims of Agent Orange, subsequently died of cancer in 2002 and 2003 respectively. Rosemarie, as president of the International Committee of the Vietnam Friendship Village Project which supports Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange, and Masako, as a documentary film-maker, are carrying on the struggle to seek justice for all Agent Orange victims. They attended the conference.</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">It is not known whether President John F. Kennedy, who first sanctioned the use of herbicides, was aware of the presence of dioxin in them and about the nature of their toxicity. Official reports have tried to argue that at the time these herbicides were permitted to be used in Vietnam, they were in fact sold commercially in the U.S. ( The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam – 1971-1973; Willard J. Webb and Walter S. Poole; page 378.) In other words, these herbicides were legally produced and used in the U.S. However, there was one crucial difference: there was a wide variation in the amount of dioxin present in the batch of Agent Orange that was sold domestically and in the consignment that was exported to Vietnam. It appears that “in domestic preparations it is present in much lower concentrations, 0.05 ppm (parts per million), as opposed to peaks of 50 ppm in stock shipped to Vietnam. Therefore, dioxin contamination of Agent Orange was up to 1,000 times higher than in domestic herbicides” ( The Ecologist; Hugh Warwick; Sept-Oct 1998; page 264.)</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">While 0.05 ppm is considered the “safe” level for domestic sale of Agent Orange in the U.S., the manufacturers (Dow Chemical, Monsanto, and five other companies) and the U.S. administration consciously manufactured and exported Agent Orange to Vietnam with unacceptable levels of toxicity. They knew very well that using herbicides with high levels of dioxin would cause irreparable harm to the Vietnamese people who happened to be in the vicinity of the spraying area and would result in widespread destruction of the exposed environment. Thus, the U.S. and the manufacturers of the herbicide knowingly committed an abhorrent war crime – a crime against humanity – for which they have to be held accountable and punished. However, Dow has conveniently placed the entire blame on the U.S. administration by propounding the specious plea that: “As a nation at war, the U.S. government compelled a number of companies to produce Agent Orange under the Defence Production Act. The government specified how it would be produced and controlled its use” (http://www.dow.com).</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">Monsanto has taken the following position: “We believe that the adverse consequences alleged to have arisen out of the Vietnam War, including the use of Agent Orange, should be resolved by the governments that were involved” (http://www.monsanto.com/).</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">The U.S. cannot claim that it had the right to use chemical weapons because it was not a party to the Geneva Protocol of 1925 until 1975. If the signing of international protocols is the yardstick for determining culpability, no action should have been contemplated against terrorists such as Osama bin Laden for the 9/11 attack because he was not a party to any international treaty governing conduct of war.</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">The U.S. is guilty of wilfully poisoning the people of Vietnam (as well as its own soldiers and those of its allies) and of destroying the environment; it can in no way claim ignorance about the grievous consequences of its action. Thus, there is a strong case for the Government of Vietnam to seek suitable remedy before the International Court of Justice and to highlight the matter before the Non-Aligned Movement, the United Nations General Assembly, and every available international forum for eliciting appropriate support for its just cause.</div><div align="left" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;"></div><br />
<center style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">KHAM/REUTERS </span><br />
<img align="center" border="1" height="237" src="http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2819/images/20110923281905903.jpg" width="350" /><br />
<b>VICTIMS AT A hospice in Da Nang in central Vietnam.</b></center><br />
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;"></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">In view of the consistent protest from North Vietnam and the mounting evidence about the high toxicity of dioxin, concerned people and organisations across the U.S., including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), expressed their firm opposition to the use of dioxin-based herbicides. As a result, “On 15 April, 1970, the Secretaries of Health, Education, Welfare, Interior and Agriculture announced the suspension of uncontrolled domestic use of herbicides containing 2, 4, 5–T. That same day, the Deputy Secretary of Defence suspended temporarily all use of Orange in military operations pending a more thorough evaluation of the situation.” (Webb and Poole; op cit.; page 380). This decision practically ended yet another diabolical and sordid act of the U.S. in the 20th century because the decision was never rescinded.</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">Considering the enormous level of destruction and devastation that the U.S. had unleashed on Vietnam, at the time of signing the Paris Peace Accord on January 27, 1973, the U.S. made a solemn commitment to undertake necessary action to heal the wounds of war. Under Article 21 of the Accord, it pledged that: “In pursuance of its traditional policy, the United States will contribute to healing the wounds of war and to post-war reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and throughout Indochina” (Webb and Poole; op cit.; page 407). This promise was followed by a letter dated February 1, 1973, in which President Richard Nixon promised that the U.S. would contribute “in the range of $3.25 billion” in post-war reconstruction assistance to Vietnam over a five-year period (Congressional Research Service Report for Congress; Michael F. Marti; Washington, D.C., March 2009; page 4). The U.S. has failed to comply with this commitment despite the National Academy of Sciences' report affirming in 1974 that: “It is the committee's firm belief that rehabilitation and reconstruction efforts should …be undertaken as rapidly as conditions permit… since any delay will make its accomplishment more difficult” (Report of the National Academy of Sciences; op cit.; page 41 [s-16]).</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">Considering the enormity of the task of detoxifying three million hectares of affected land area and of medically, economically and socially rehabilitating three million dioxin victims, the proposed plan of the “U.S.-Vietnam Dialogue Group on Agent Orange/Dioxin” to tackle the problem over the next 10 years (2010-2019) with a total budget of just $300 million is rather a far-fetched one (http://www.aspeninstitute.org/policy-work/agent-orange). It amounts to an average expenditure of just $5 per dioxin victim for meeting all their needs every year and another $5 per hectare for detoxifying the affected land annually. Effectively, the Dialogue Group's proposed plan belittles the enormity and gravity of the problem while making a pretence that effective steps are being taken to remedy the same.</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">U.S. representatives on the Dialogue Group, who include senior members of the Ford Foundation and the Aspen Institute, did not attend the Second International Congress despite claiming that the Dialogue Group was set up to support the cause of Agent Orange victims.</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">It is, indeed, ironical that the U.S. which had no qualms about spending an estimated $658 billion (at 2008 prices) for waging the Vietnam war and in spending an almost equal amount for waging the Iraq war is so financially hard-pressed when it comes to the question of raising requisite funds for healing the wounds of war (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/07/25/national/main4296368.shtml, July 16, 2009). Retribution in the case of the 9/11 attack has been dealt with on an entirely different level. This was despite the fact that the impact of the chemical warfare on Vietnam was hundreds of times greater than the impact of the 9/11 attack in terms of human loss and environmental damage.</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">The U.S. has either arrested or killed most of the alleged perpetrators of the 9/11 attack. Over $38 billion has been paid as compensation to the 9/11 victims, including $8.7 billion for 2,880 cases of death (at an average of $3.1 million each) and $23.3 billion as compensation for property damage. Injury cases, numbering about 2,680, were also paid over $1 billion as compensation, which works out to an average of over $373,000 each (http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/defenseandsecurity/a/randon911.htm and http://www.justice.gov/final_report.pdf). Whereas, in the case of the Agent Orange attack no one has been arrested or prosecuted in the past 50 years.</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">Of the 105,000 U.S. war veterans who served in Vietnam and reportedly suffered from the effects of Agent Orange, 52,000 have been awarded a total compensation of just $197 million at an average of about $3,800 each (http://www.vba.va.gov/bln/21/benefits/herbicide/AOno2.htm). The double standards in the award of compensation even to its own citizens are evident on the face of it. Vietnam has been promised a total of just $300 million in the next 10 years for remediation of the affected land and as medical assistance. Under the circumstances, despite President Kennedy's questionable role in ordering the use of herbicides on Vietnam, it has to be noted that he was the one who actually tried for a rapprochement with that country as early as 1962 ( The Boston Globe; June 6, 2005). Not only was Kennedy against the escalation of the war in Vietnam but he initiated the process of rapprochement with the Soviet Union through what became known as the McCloy-Zorin Accord on General and Complete Disarmament, which was signed on September 20, 1961 (http://www.nuclearfiles.org/). On December 20, 1961, the McCloy-Zorin Accord was adopted unanimously by the U.N. General Assembly (http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/resguide/r16.htm [A/RES/1722(XVI)]) and serious negotiations began under the aegis of the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee (ENDC) for implementing it. However, after the assassination of Kennedy, the entire process was reversed at the instance of the military industrial complex, which felt threatened by the prospect of world peace if the disarmament process progressed. Kennedy's assassination, thus, cleared the way for U.S. combat troops to land in Vietnam and for the escalation of the war.</div><div align="left" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;"></div><br />
<center style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">AP </span><br />
<img align="center" border="1" height="264" src="http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2819/images/20110923281905904.jpg" width="350" /><br />
<b>A U.S. B-52 Stratofortress drops a load of 750-pound bombs over a coastal area in Vietnam on November 5, 1965.</b></center><br />
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;"></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">The Second International Conference, in its appeal (www.vava.org.vn), called upon the U.S. administration and U.S. companies such as Dow and Monsanto to assume responsibility for the horrendous crime they committed against the people of Vietnam and against the U.S.' own soldiers and those of its allies. The appeal noted that the U.S. and the said companies had an abiding duty to take appropriate remedial measures to detoxify the affected environment and to provide medical, economic and social rehabilitation for all the victims.</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">Unfortunately, the appeal is silent on the role of the Government of Vietnam and other governments and peoples concerned in pressuring the U.S. administration to fulfil its duties and responsibilities towards the victims of Agent Orange and in taking the U.S to task for the war crimes it committed against the people of Vietnam and against humanity in general.</div><div align="justify" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;"></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;"><i>N.D. Jayaprakash is Co-Convener, Bhopal Gas Peedith Sangharsh Sahayog Samiti (BGPSSS) and Joint Secretary, Delhi Science Forum.?</i></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 15px;">* Saddam Hussein, as an ally of the U.S., had used a variety of chemical weapons (including phosgene, sarin and mustard gas) primarily on the Kurdish people during the Iraq-Iran war of 1980-1988.</div><br />
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</tbody></table>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-45373030055411244812011-08-08T09:24:00.000-07:002011-08-08T17:53:21.280-07:00Low Hanging Fruit: the CMRR Nuclear Facility<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-RGOSmJ4RXtcKw1kaKRtaChyphenhyphenZEcaoByek33fBjAOBXCQWBDEBrPxl67bLSv5dBYV3iNc2h0XsRWKfSx0oY2ZE6bhijRhYRKpG6zzzAQTfmVsflWb0aR7zyUBeaP6o7EHfgFZGTXWvAWkF/s1600/dollar+tree.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-RGOSmJ4RXtcKw1kaKRtaChyphenhyphenZEcaoByek33fBjAOBXCQWBDEBrPxl67bLSv5dBYV3iNc2h0XsRWKfSx0oY2ZE6bhijRhYRKpG6zzzAQTfmVsflWb0aR7zyUBeaP6o7EHfgFZGTXWvAWkF/s200/dollar+tree.jpg" width="140" /></a></div><br />
<div class="p1">If it ever gets built, the newly proposed CMRR-Nuclear facility in Los Alamos, NM, would consume 6 billion or more of increasingly scarce tax money. Construction would clog the roads with trucks hauling 400.000 metric tons of volcanic ash to be stored somewhere. Three newly constructed concrete batch plants along Pajarito Road would produce some 350.000 metric tons of concrete to fill a 125 feet freshly dug hole in the earth. The CMRR-Nuclear Facility will essentially be a 406.000 square feet bunker, mainly hidden under the ground for fear of incoming enemy rockets. Despite the enormous size of the building the utilized space will be less than 10 %: the CMRR-NF will be hosting a 22.500 square feet most secretive laboratory -- the evil holy grail of nuclear weapons work. It will be built on what is known to be a 7 magnitude earthquake fault line and it is slated to vault 6 metric tons of plutonium, as much as is needed to replace the nation's entire nuclear weapons stockpile --<i>an accident ala Fukushima waiting to happen right here</i>.</div><div class="p3"><br />
</div><div class="p2">As you know, I believe this is a terrible waste of public resources, especially in a time where many people are scraping by from meager paycheck to meager paycheck. Contrary to what our senatorial staff, Udall and Bingaman have been implying, the construction phase of this project does not even offer an employment stimulus to speak off. With all that money, an average of only 400 construction jobs would be created over the construction period, of which a minority would come from New Mexico. Including planning and engineering, this project would create only 1 temporary job for every 10 million dollars of investment. </div><div class="p3"><br />
</div><div class="p2">Once the facility is done, in 2023 or so, even these few jobs would come to an end, and this behemoth would be populated by Los Alamos technicians and scientists now working in other facilities. Despite continued tiresome and misleading denials from LANL, the CMRR-NF is the centerpiece of a nuclear "pit" factory meant to replace the Rocky Flats Plant. With CMRR-NF, there would be less science, and more bombs, in LANL's work. It's not for the bombs we have; not one U.S. warhead requires CMRR-NF -- now, or ever. By the time CMRR-NF is finished, the whole stockpile would already have been upgraded by other means. This facility is for building new warheads in quantity, not maintaining old ones. In many ways the CMRR-NF is the START of the new arms race we don't want to have. Yes, believe it or not, it's still about Russia. </div><div class="p3"><br />
</div><div class="p2">The Los Alamos Study Group (LASG.org) is working to halt this tragic and misguided waste -- in the courts and in Washington, where we have conducted hundreds of briefings over the past few years. This summer, the House of Representatives proposed to slash 100 million dollars from next year's funding for the project, and has urged the Senate to join its call to postpone construction pending further analysis of the whole project, from mission and utility to the specific design chosen. </div><div class="p3"><br />
</div><div class="p2">Especially now that the financial realities of the US are becoming clear to the general public and congress alike, there is a growing groundswell of resistance against this superfluous project. Local communities, including Santa Fe have formally adopted resolutions calling for re-examination of this project. CMRR-NF is becoming a ‘joke’ on the streets -- a bad joke being perpetrated on New Mexicans. </div><div class="p3"><br />
</div><div class="p2">On August 25th Hiroshima survivor Shigeko Sasamori, filmmaker Godfrey Reggio, actor Ali MacGraw, and others will speak out against this <i>fiasco-in-the-making</i> at a fundraiser event at the home of Tom Hnasko, lead lawyer for the Los Alamos Study Group. Please attend if you can. Litigation is expensive and we ask for your generous support to attend this special ‘Tipping the Balance’ event. Together we can make the difference and halting this facility is within our reach. Preventing the CMRR-NF from being built, means preventing a whole new nuclear arms race. Nullifying the CMRR-NF will be our gift of <i>good will to all people</i> and a true start in diplomacy towards meaningful non-proliferation and a world free from nuclear weapons.</div><div class="p3"><br />
</div><div class="p2">For more info on the event itself and the CMRR-NF, please visit <a href="http://lasg.org/"><span class="s1">LASG.org</span></a></div>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-63632409167074795942011-07-25T22:18:00.000-07:002011-07-28T16:17:49.492-07:00Fires died down in New Mexico, drought may turn into desert, 7/25/2011The fires around most of New Mexico have died down. A feeble monsoon brought apparently just enough water to the mountains to douse the flames of the "Las Conchas" fire which consumed 160.000 acres but only 'licked' the laboratory and didn't enter the town of Los Alamos.<br />
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The"Cerro Grande" fire, which did devastate about 300 houses in Los Alamos in the year 2000 and lit up the South West corner of the laboratory (Tech Area 16), turned out in many ways the prescribed fire it was meant to be --in the sense that it prevented the 2011 Las Conchas fire from being much more destructive.<br />
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Around Santa Fe it stopped raining around the middle of January and by the end of June had only received just over 1/2 inch of rain for the year. Someone remarked that there is a point where you no longer talk about drought....instead you speak of desert and that is really where the whole SouthWest of the US is going rapidly. From Las Vegas to Phoenix, from Santa Fe to Albuquerque and El Paso, there is no longer any available water; the Sonoran desert is spreading.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">a feeble intermittent monsoon....where? oh where? is Avanyu, the water guardian deity of this area....</td></tr>
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In the beginning of July finally some rain arived in New Mexico --but plentiful it is not. Even 15 minutes of rain seems to be a blessing, but what this land really needs is a good dousing of rain. Of course after the Las Conchas fire, we may run into all kinds of problems even with a little rain: ashes, landslides, pollution they may all come down the Los Alamos arroyos rapidly, causing erosion and water filtration problems. In the Santa Clara pueblo, people are continuously sand bagging to prevent the expected deluge to flood their village.<br />
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The mountains themselves will never be the same: the heat of the flames has even 'burned the roots' as one of the elders of the San Ildefonso pueblo recently proclaimed.<br />
Some (fundamentalist) people in Los Alamos think that the fact that Los Alamos was mostly spared in these last fires, is a sign of God's grace and endorsement of its mission. I too bow to the grace, but I take the omnipotent message a little differently:<br />
Cerro Grande was the first and Las Conchas is the second warning....... <i>three strikes and you are out.</i>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-74314608030994414022011-07-06T23:27:00.000-07:002011-07-06T23:29:03.125-07:00Firesnake still pretty active close to Los Alamos, 7/6/2011<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">I was there around 6 or so. More cars going down 'the hill' than up.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">(<i>click on photos to enlarge</i>)</div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuQv825YqfOodCLHixxdHmTMmHfoSmbqdZ_NxY8AMWtB2BsbT0iitYUhrlbHDvxu41OhHbsqA7TEeLfY54uyKI8qvyc-SdIKkTtuoiRNNOXxGiWx6qGc8r9Ut9RBGZ5rmRi0qg3pOQbn9H/s1600/IMG_7791.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuQv825YqfOodCLHixxdHmTMmHfoSmbqdZ_NxY8AMWtB2BsbT0iitYUhrlbHDvxu41OhHbsqA7TEeLfY54uyKI8qvyc-SdIKkTtuoiRNNOXxGiWx6qGc8r9Ut9RBGZ5rmRi0qg3pOQbn9H/s320/IMG_7791.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>We have been lucky with the winds....They are mainly going South to North and so far that has helped skirt of Los Alamos. But that doesn't mean that all danger is passed. Here the fire is 3 or 4 miles north west of Los Alamos.<br />
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</div>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-57527136523930908952011-07-05T07:51:00.000-07:002011-07-05T08:23:22.845-07:00Sunset over Los Alamos....like a Bruegel Painting<div style="text-align: center;"><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd1-HuHIIy-j1tOC9OFErge0ryyZVzNbzWgdtBzUGtLiolDwqsmtu9nFqzqRU3cf_7n4ilct50tRfdEHpnBhBjrObDAEmtq4Jrc1pwqkI6NwlCACBQr_JLJNHkWPR8D1StA1dkztN4GGJQ/s1600/IMG_7733.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="145" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd1-HuHIIy-j1tOC9OFErge0ryyZVzNbzWgdtBzUGtLiolDwqsmtu9nFqzqRU3cf_7n4ilct50tRfdEHpnBhBjrObDAEmtq4Jrc1pwqkI6NwlCACBQr_JLJNHkWPR8D1StA1dkztN4GGJQ/s400/IMG_7733.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwsWhUaoP401GQsBjhinsyFXDDJ4lyRmDWWYJ5QHrkxQaXndjA48WZqbfC_obCoUth9pTjnKNn35u5y0ZaA8w3PBOfLJDsIorhJAVWILixoVrMfXWS_TKnHQ3_pxARmHjjlCnYB96dPTzi/s1600/Breugel1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwsWhUaoP401GQsBjhinsyFXDDJ4lyRmDWWYJ5QHrkxQaXndjA48WZqbfC_obCoUth9pTjnKNn35u5y0ZaA8w3PBOfLJDsIorhJAVWILixoVrMfXWS_TKnHQ3_pxARmHjjlCnYB96dPTzi/s400/Breugel1.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">....going back to Los Alamos....</td></tr>
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-34313890835913266222011-07-02T20:08:00.000-07:002011-07-03T18:23:36.584-07:00A three headed fire snake consumes over 100.000 acres and briefly licks the lab....<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Though the fire briefly 'licked' lab grounds at TA 16, luckily the worst case scenario (nuclear releases) has so far been avoided. Nevertheless Los Alamos and its mountains will never be the same and it may well come to pass that the whole area will experience desertification, and giant soil erosion --for when the rains finally come, there will be little to hold the soil from washing away. If nothing else the Concha fire is an environmental catastrophe of a large order and the fires are only its second chapter -- <i>drought its first.</i><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifQojBPrguYqHJFXzha3__ipVZLnZ8Dp7UgYQ8JMuxames8wErvS_TPvvbV1g0OQ52fabGRrCzyK-GzsR0C8p9ZVmH8dEPlQ6FdrPRvEzTwXQgrIK3uDNlhaDvkWq1voMUSw9d1wSJc1Bz/s1600/fires2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="468" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifQojBPrguYqHJFXzha3__ipVZLnZ8Dp7UgYQ8JMuxames8wErvS_TPvvbV1g0OQ52fabGRrCzyK-GzsR0C8p9ZVmH8dEPlQ6FdrPRvEzTwXQgrIK3uDNlhaDvkWq1voMUSw9d1wSJc1Bz/s640/fires2.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">red is most recent activity: morphing up...a three headed fire-snake with a long tail.. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>Right now it looks as if the fire has split up like a three headed snake with some free launching satellites and a long tail. They seems to be creating their own wind pattern -- possibly because of the high heat. According to the records Bandelier and surrounding areas only received half an inch of rain since January 2011. Each of the fire cores is a large fire by itself, and positioned to consume large amounts of fuel. Santa Clara is threatened and a lot of sacred lands may be destroyed by the fires. Devastation will be abound.<br />
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A message to my Los Alamos (scientist) friends: Why go back to Los Alamos ? Wind, dust, smoldering after fires, and a laboratory that is dedicated to unleash fire storms on others.........? What is the fun living in the midst of so much irony....... ?kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-83213524494127145972011-06-29T13:27:00.000-07:002011-06-29T13:27:54.137-07:00Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory Update: TA 16 on Fire<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8Rx8pbREOyjJeDkDGepJ6i37YP4YqEvorVG1vdv4T_-UsarrePuNa_gKLrOuPxgmupLOocvjOZWONr7Aog0UzQKlevLxypd7RPNVnLrCdyY29WIjEw_tfJ_URGKvft7UEJCOXleHYddYV/s1600/fire1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8Rx8pbREOyjJeDkDGepJ6i37YP4YqEvorVG1vdv4T_-UsarrePuNa_gKLrOuPxgmupLOocvjOZWONr7Aog0UzQKlevLxypd7RPNVnLrCdyY29WIjEw_tfJ_URGKvft7UEJCOXleHYddYV/s320/fire1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Just in the last hour or so the Concha fire has entered the LANL laboratory grounds: it looks like TA 16 and TA 28 are on fire as we speak, whereas TA 47, TA 11, TA 13, TA 08 and TA 09 are threatened with what looks like a very hot and wild fire. Because this area is kind of remote, it has been used for high explosive experiments and there are lots of potentially contaminated buildings and areas there. If I remember correctly some of the long term burning bunkers with unknown toxic legacy contents in 2000 were also in this general area and there may be more. Explosives storage, tritium facilities, x-ray equipment, experimental explosives, they are all located in this area and it is going up in flames as we speak. From here the fire has an open road towards the plutonium and administration facilities which presumably will be protected one way or another --but who knows? The laboratory is totally unwieldy and many people have become depressed by the lack of meaningful work and hence there are screw-ups abound. This is really terrible news: code purple I would say --very close to code black. I will let you know.kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-69745546527177204772011-06-27T16:32:00.000-07:002011-06-27T18:39:27.090-07:00Fires in Los Alamos: Danger Assessment: Code Red<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDabCN3lB0XlPfhAekDfbTF4qJUiDhnlVPc9Z35KCHMjVfvhU2u-QzHhT4KL4Y9v7luGVPXqNeX_CgGnHH1PWxLFLZOIFI9kIEu9_2NxWYBikd2-vWUky5DE18lywlcfuFQOhHP0a371_A/s1600/conchas+fire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="328" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDabCN3lB0XlPfhAekDfbTF4qJUiDhnlVPc9Z35KCHMjVfvhU2u-QzHhT4KL4Y9v7luGVPXqNeX_CgGnHH1PWxLFLZOIFI9kIEu9_2NxWYBikd2-vWUky5DE18lywlcfuFQOhHP0a371_A/s640/conchas+fire.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>like the pueblo people say..... Avanyu the water snake can turn into the fire snake</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>Los Alamos: where-ever you look there are accidents waiting to happen, one way or another --but the fires are really one of the worst immediate threats.<br />
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It looks on the Google maps plus wind direction that the Concha fires are making a B-line for the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory buildings. The vinyl tents over area G filled with contaminated drums waiting to be shipped to Wipp and some poorly designed nuclear waste pools are perhaps the worst case scenario. But vegetation is rather sparse up there and it is built next to a swamp water win area (<i>smart -- que no ?</i>). The Avanyu water snake petroglyph just underneath area G will be be blackened.<br />
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In other areas of the laboratory there are sprinkler systems to prevent spontaneous combustion of contaminated areas and that would be an easy target for a hot fire. Furthermore I am concerned about burning transfer stations, old bunkers, material storage, failing back up systems, and the town itself. This could be a firestorm consuming a lot of the old wooden (laboratory) buildings, but remember the 2000 fire also took out easily 25 houses, and very little was left of them.<br />
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To me this looks a lot worse than the 2000 fire, which was bad enough with underground material storage spaces (with God knows what? in them) burning even 6 weeks after the rest of the fires had long died down. We could have a 2011 sequel here, much more blackened than the first edition. And what about the animals ?<br />
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20000 people are fleeing their homes now. Since Santa Fe and this whole region is singularly unprepared, one should consider moving back to where-ever one came from at least for the time being. I know that the Los Alamos fire brigade is unprepared for a calamity like this, and who could blame them. There is wrath in this fire.<br />
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If there is a need to make extra bread, due to the influx of Los Alamos into the Santa fe Area -- let me know (505 920 1277) Also I would like to make people aware of a fire info meeting that Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) will host this tuesday 7-9 pm in room 116 at <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, 'Allegro BT'; font-size: 13px;"><strong> <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=1200+Old+Pecos+Trail,+Santa+Fe,+NM+87505&aq=0&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=36.726391,93.251953&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=1200+Old+Pecos+Trail,+Santa+Fe,+New+Mexico+87505&ll=35.671539,-105.935819&spn=0.009204,0.022767&z=16&iwloc=A" style="color: #0000cc; text-decoration: none;"><u>St. John's United Methodist Church,</u></a>1200 Old Pecos Trail</strong></span>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-60720685350283896012011-06-27T07:39:00.000-07:002011-06-27T07:39:40.009-07:00The Railrunner runs Amuck in Santa Fe<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Like so many little tourist towns, Santa Fe depends on a combo of mystique and 'special events'. Santa Fe has been hosting the Spanish Market, the Indian Market, the Folk Art Market, and many 'festivals, such as the Santa Fe Film festival, the Japan Festival, Greek Festival, Ethnic Arts, etc. --these are all large national and international events. To top it off, throughout the year many farmers travel many miles from all over Northern New Mexico to gather for a large regional Farmers Market (with a piggyback art market) attended by thousands of people each week.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0HO2Go7Rs65oI5tK77yGJOOCncvgyb-HqCE6gNXIfD2UjKelHxnYQrKaYjFYO16kb3ayuvbflAC7EeRykLC44o8KvnKTruEt39tmnYiL8OETeRtGb0ViO6oj_XpmDwh-rnvJU-Q3nxusr/s1600/IMG_7722.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0HO2Go7Rs65oI5tK77yGJOOCncvgyb-HqCE6gNXIfD2UjKelHxnYQrKaYjFYO16kb3ayuvbflAC7EeRykLC44o8KvnKTruEt39tmnYiL8OETeRtGb0ViO6oj_XpmDwh-rnvJU-Q3nxusr/s200/IMG_7722.jpg" width="200" /></a></div> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe8YSvH_B-TyC4ZoCUxRUT8XI0dEyVS7aFucO1ihSA5XIGAaC-EFILzLsmTcsUfre4z43GWjuzjvr9AElVxPKULXUG3akFKHxvPigyYQ-HVJdk-5xpQTTSdTcaa8rQw2e2bgxGgeZ3dA7n/s1600/IMG_7723.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe8YSvH_B-TyC4ZoCUxRUT8XI0dEyVS7aFucO1ihSA5XIGAaC-EFILzLsmTcsUfre4z43GWjuzjvr9AElVxPKULXUG3akFKHxvPigyYQ-HVJdk-5xpQTTSdTcaa8rQw2e2bgxGgeZ3dA7n/s200/IMG_7723.jpg" width="200" /></a><br />
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All these markets have one thing in common: They gravitate towards the weekends: Saturday and Sunday are usually the big days, with lots of traffic and a lack of adequate parking. Everyone knows this.<br />
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But what happens here? Somehow the train service to Santa Fe is cut out during the weekend. Yes, you are reading it right: despite gas prices where they are at, despite lack of accessibility, regardless of a lack of parking spaces and regardless of all the 'special events', there will not be any trains coming to Santa Fe on the weekends.<br />
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This is not the place to complain about the price-tag for the <i>one track</i> 'railrunner' (440 million) or all the corruption that surrounded its construction (<i>thanks Bill</i>). As a participant in the Santa Fe Farmers-market I already noticed a remarkable drop off in business in this venue. Whereas some weeks ago one could always count on an influx of people from Albuquerque arriving at the SF train station at 11 o'clock, <i>ready to buy</i> --they are not there any longer. Result is that all these markets, and Santa Fe itself will suffer.<br />
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The railrunner train service is a community resource. We paid for it. If it is suffering somehow, from lack of sufficient revenue to keep it running --we need to think about that. Trains could have more prominence in our area with much better service (it takes almost 2 hours to get to Albuquerque). Furthermore it could be marketed much better and be an integral part to all the special events. But to dismantle it for the weekends is another example of short sighted policy in a time of climate crisis. Not to hear a peep squeak from any politician or the mayor here, is yet another indication that the local 'body politico' is totally out of touch with the economic and ecological realities of this area. Sooner or later the price tag will come due: a lost desert town, with fires all around, and poverty abound.kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422234601166135277.post-31391985612040361382011-05-25T17:04:00.000-07:002011-05-25T17:04:13.805-07:00Federal Judge Rules In Favor of Continuing Los Alamos Nuclear Project Without Applicable Environmental Impact Statement, Dismisses Environmental Lawsuit<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: 800;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: Arial, 'Allegro BT'; font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal;"><i>Contact: Greg Mello, 505-577-8563 (cell phone, in Washington DC)</i></span></span></span></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><i></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, 'Allegro BT'; font-size: x-small;"><i><br />
</i></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, 'Allegro BT'; font-size: 13px;">Albuquerque, NM -- Earlier today U.S. District Judge Judith Herrera <a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/Litigation/JudgeHerreraDecision_23May2011.pdf" style="color: #0000cc; text-decoration: none;">dismissed the lawsuit</a> (pdf) brought last August by the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG), an Albuquerque-based nonprofit, against the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Department of Energy (DOE) over these agencies' evolving <a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/open_page.htm" style="color: #0000cc; text-decoration: none;">Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF)</a>, a $6 billion plutonium complex at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The lawsuit (the entire docket is available <a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/Litigation/CMRR-NF_litigation.html" style="color: #0000cc; text-decoration: none;">here</a>) was brought under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and related law. <br />
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The lawsuit sought to compel NNSA and DOE to pause design and construction of the massive project to prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) that examined alternatives to the project, which is much bigger, with far greater environmental impact, than when it was originally proposed and analyzed under NEPA in 2003. <br />
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"We believe our arguments were sound and remain sound, factually and legally. We are studying the judge's opinion closely and will decide our legal course of action over the next few days," said Study Group Director Greg Mello. "It is never legal for a federal agency to decide to implement a project with significant environmental impact without an applicable, objective EIS, and that is what is happening here." <br />
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"This decision, while disappointing, will not stop our opposition to this highly destructive project. It's a speed bump. If NNSA thinks they are in the clear now, they are wrong. This ruling doesn't change the facts on the ground -- the high seismicity, the cramped site and poor geology, the lack of need, the lack of money, and the basic horror and immorality of the mission. All of these are unfavorable to this project." <br />
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The Study Group is represented by Thomas Hnasko and Dulcinea Hanuschak of the Hinkle Law Firm in Santa Fe, Lindsay Lovejoy of Santa Fe, and Diane Albert of Albuquerque. <br />
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Study Group Director Greg Mello is currently in Washington, DC, meeting with congressional staff, federal safety officials, and executive branch officials, <a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/Mello_Reasons_to_Delay_CMRR-NF_22May2011.pdf" style="color: #0000cc; text-decoration: none;">carrying the message</a> (pdf) that attempting to pursue this project at the same time as eight (8) or more $100+ M construction projects at LANL in the same immediate area, and also at the same time as five (5) other multi-billion-dollar nuclear facilities elsewhere around DOE's weapons complex, would be highly imprudent. The Study Group believes the project is unnecessary and damaging to national security.<br />
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A call to pause the project on safety grounds was <a href="http://www.lasg.org/ActionAlerts/Bulletin107.html" style="color: #0000cc; text-decoration: none;">also voiced by Dr. Everett Beckner</a>, who managed the nuclear weapons complex for President G.W. Bush.<br />
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Judge Herrera's opinion rested heavily on the "supplemental" EIS process now underway, stating that this process itself, which began only after the Study Group's litigation was filed, and its "public participation" component in particular were sufficient for the court to stay its hand -- and dismiss the lawsuit. The judge did not rule on the Study Group's motion to enjoin the project. <br />
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The Study Group has been urging members of the public to stay away from the SEIS hearings, which it regards as illegitimate. "We need to call them 'hearings,' in quotations," Mello said, "because the public record is replete with Administration statements saying it is not under any circumstances going to reconsider its commitment to this project, unlike what is implied in the hearing process; because the SEIS openly and illegally rejects <i><u>all</u></i> alternatives but the favored project in its opening pages; and, more broadly, because we believe experience has shown that DOE has never changed its course of action as a result of NEPA "public participation." <br />
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The Study Group has instead called citizens to engage substantively with government on all levels to challenge and reform NNSA's position in regard to this giant project. Local government resolutions supporting the Study Group's lawsuit were passed by <a href="http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/Govt_resolutions_ltrs_CMRR-NF_EIS.html" style="color: #0000cc; text-decoration: none;">four local governments</a>. <br />
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Mello: "In numerous discussions public and private spanning many years we have concluded that unless citizens can find the courage to face the abyss of freedom and learn to act politically, they will largely remain incapable of self-governance."<br />
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The Study Group's recent bulletins discussing these matters can be found <a href="http://www.lasg.org/ActionAlerts/action.htm" style="color: #0000cc; text-decoration: none;">here</a>. </span></div>kansekihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11418207668038332567noreply@blogger.com1