XIAM007 - Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World: 09/23/11

Friday, 23 September 2011

10 Most Radioactive Places on Earth -

While the 2011 earthquake and worries surrounding Fukushima have brought the threat of radioactivity back into the public consciousness, many people still don't realize that radioactive contamination is a worldwide danger. Radionuclides are in the top six toxic threats as listed in the 2010 report by The Blacksmith Institute, an NGO dedicated to tackling pollution. You might be surprised by the locations of some of the world’s most radioactive places — and thus the number of people living in fear of the effects radiation could have on them and their children.

10. Hanford, USA

The Hanford Site, in Washington, was an integral part of the US atomic bomb project, manufacturing plutonium for the first nuclear bomb and "Fat Man," used at Nagasaki. As the Cold War waged on, it ramped up production, supplying plutonium for most of America's 60,000 nuclear weapons. Although decommissioned, it still holds two thirds of the volume of the country’s high-level radioactive waste — about 53 million gallons of liquid waste, 25 million cubic feet of solid waste and 200 square miles of contaminated groundwater underneath the area, making it the most contaminated site in the US. The environmental devastation of this area makes it clear that the threat of radioactivity is not simply something that will arrive in a missile attack, but could be lurking in the heart of your own country.

9. The Mediterranean

For years, there have been allegations that the ‘Ndrangheta syndicate of the Italian mafia has been using the seas as a convenient location in which to dump hazardous waste — including radioactive waste — charging for the service and pocketing the profits. An Italian NGO, Legambiente, suspects that about 40 ships loaded with toxic and radioactive waste have disappeared in Mediterranean waters since 1994. If true, these allegations paint a worrying picture of an unknown amount of nuclear waste in the Mediterranean whose true danger will only become clear when the hundreds of barrels degrade or somehow otherwise break open. The beauty of the Mediterranean Sea may well be concealing an environmental catastrophe in the making.

8. The Somalian Coast

The Italian mafia organization just mentioned has not just stayed in its own region when it comes to this sinister business. There are also allegations that Somalian waters and soil, unprotected by government, have been used for the sinking or burial of nuclear waste and toxic metals — including 600 barrels of toxic and nuclear waste, as well as radioactive hospital waste. Indeed, the United Nations’ Environment Program believes that the rusting barrels of waste washed up on the Somalian coastline during the 2004 Tsunami were dumped as far back as the 1990s. The country is already an anarchic wasteland, and the effects of this waste on the impoverished population could be as bad if not worse than what they have already experienced.

7. Mayak, Russia

The industrial complex of Mayak, in Russia's north-east, has had a nuclear plant for decades, and in 1957 was the site of one of the world’s worst nuclear accidents. Up to 100 tons of radioactive waste were released by an explosion, contaminating a massive area. The explosion was kept under wraps until the 1980s. Starting in the 1950s, waste from the plant was dumped in the surrounding area and into Lake Karachay. This has led to contamination of the water supply that thousands rely on daily. Experts believe that Karachay may be the most radioactive place in the world, and over 400,000 people have been exposed to radiation from the plant as a result of the various serious incidents that have occurred — including fires and deadly dust storms. The natural beauty of Lake Karachay belies its deadly pollutants, with the radiation levels where radioactive waste flows into its waters enough to give a man a fatal dose within an hour.

6. Sellafield, UK

Located on the west coast of England, Sellafield was originally a plutonium production facility for nuclear bombs, but then moved into commercial territory. Since the start of its operation, hundreds of accidents have occurred at the plant, and around two thirds of the buildings themselves are now classified as nuclear waste. The plant releases some 8 million liters of contaminated waste into the sea on a daily basis, making the Irish Sea the most radioactive sea in the world. England is known for its green fields and rolling landscapes, but nestled in the heart of this industrialized nation is a toxic, accident-prone facility, spewing dangerous waste into the oceans of the world.

5. Siberian Chemical Combine, Russia

Mayak is not the only contaminated site in Russia; Siberia is home to a chemical facility that contains over four decades' worth of nuclear waste. Liquid waste is stored in uncovered pools and poorly maintained containers hold over 125,000 tons of solid waste, while underground storage has the potential to leak to groundwater. Wind and rain have spread the contamination to wildlife and the surrounding area. And various minor accidents have led to plutonium going missing and explosions spreading radiation. While the snowy landscape may look pristine and immaculate, the facts make clear the true level of pollution to be found here.

4. The Polygon, Kazakhstan

Once the location for the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons testing, this area is now part of modern-day Kazakhstan. The site was earmarked for the Soviet atomic bomb project due to its “uninhabited” status — despite the fact that 700,000 people lived in the area. The facility was where the USSR detonated its first nuclear bomb and is the record-holder for the place with the largest concentration of nuclear explosions in the world: 456 tests over 40 years from 1949 to 1989. While the testing carried out at the facility — and its impact in terms of radiation exposure — were kept under wraps by the Soviets until the facility closed in 1991, scientists estimate that 200,000 people have had their health directly affected by the radiation. The desire to destroy foreign nations has led to the specter of nuclear contamination hanging over the heads of those who were once citizens of the USSR.

3. Mailuu-Suu, Kyrgyzstan

Considered one of the top ten most polluted sites on Earth by the 2006 Blacksmith Institute report, the radiation at Mailuu-Suu comes not from nuclear bombs or power plants, but from mining for the materials needed in the processes they entail. The area was home to a uranium mining and processing facility and is now left with 36 dumps of uranium waste — over 1.96 million cubic meters. The region is also prone to seismic activity, and any disruption of the containment could expose the material or cause some of the waste to fall into rivers, contaminating water used by hundreds of thousands of people. These people may not ever suffer the perils of nuclear attack, but nonetheless they have good reason to live in fear of radioactive fallout every time the earth shakes.

2. Chernobyl, Ukraine

Home to one of the world’s worst and most infamous nuclear accidents, Chernobyl is still heavily contaminated, despite the fact that a small number of people are now allowed into the area for a limited amount of time. The notorious accident caused over 6 million people to be exposed to radiation, and estimates as to the number of deaths that will eventually occur due to the Chernobyl accident range from 4,000 to as high as 93,000. The accident released 100 times more radiation than the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs. Belarus absorbed 70 percent of the radiation, and its citizens have been dealing with increased cancer incidence ever since. Even today, the word Chernobyl conjures up horrifying images of human suffering.

1. Fukushima, Japan

The 2011 earthquake and tsunami was a tragedy that destroyed homes and lives, but the effects of the Fukushima nuclear power plant may be the most long-lasting danger. The worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, the incident caused meltdown of three of the six reactors, leaking radiation into the surrounding area and the sea, such that radiative material has been detected as far as 200 miles from the plant. As the incident and its ramifications are still unfolding, the true scale of the environmental impact is still unknown. The world may still be feeling the effects of this disaster for generations to come.

US Federal government has doled out more than $600 million in benefit payments to dead people over the past five years -

The federal government has doled out more than $600 million in benefit payments to dead people over the past five years, a watchdog report says.

Such payments are meant for retired or disabled federal workers, but sometimes the checks keep going out even after the former employees pass away and the deaths are not reported, according to the report this week from the Office of Personnel Management's inspector general, Patrick McFarland.

In one case, the son of a beneficiary continued receiving payments for 37 years after his father's death in 1971. The payments - totaling more than $515,000 - were only discovered when the son died in 2008.

The government has been aware of the problem since a 2005 inspector general's report revealed defects in the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund. Yet the improper payments have continued, despite more than a half dozen attempts to develop a system that can figure out which beneficiaries are still alive and which are dead, the report said.

"It is time to stop, once and for all, this waste of taxpayer money," it said.

Office of Personnel Management spokesman Edmund Byrnes said he could not immediately comment on the findings. But the report said OPM Director John Berry agrees that stopping the improper payments should be a priority.

There are about 2.5 million federal workers who receive over $60 billion in benefit payments from the program each year.

Federal officials have tried matching the fund's computer records with the Social Security Administration's death records, checking tax records and improving the timeliness of death reporting.

OPM has also sampled its records of all recipients over 90 years old to confirm whether they are still alive. In 2009, there were more than 125,000 recipients identified as over 90 and about 3,400 over 100 years old.

Both the Obama administration and Congress have made it a higher priority to crack down on improper government payments.

Cocoa genome will lead to chocolate that can improve your health - Chocolate capable of fighting heart disease -

Researchers working with confectionary giant Mars are scouring the genome of the tree Theobroma cacao to find ways of enhancing the health benefits of cocoa beans produced by the plant.

Scientists took two years to unlock the genetic code of the tree and now hope to use the information it contains to improve the quality, flavour and nutritional value of the beans, which are used to produce chocolate.

They believe they can boost the levels of compounds known as flavonols in the beans. Flavonols have been found in recent research to improve blood pressure and have beneficial effects on the cardiovascular system.

The researchers also hope to increase other health qualities that have been attributed to chocolate such as increasing brain function and combating diabetes, while also working to make the fat it contains healthier.

Dr Howard-Yara Shapiro, who is global director of plant science and research at Mars Incorporated, said: "The idea is that this is something that will become the norm – healthy fats, high levels of flavonols.

A lock of hair collected almost 100 years ago has helped rewrite the history of early human migration -

Genetic information extracted from the lock of hair, which was donated by a young Aboriginal man to a British anthropologist in the 1920s, suggests that instead of leaving Africa in one single migratory movement, humans departed in two separate waves.

An international team of scientists used DNA within the hair to sequence the Aboriginal genome for the first time.

Their results revealed that the man was directly descended from a migration out of Africa into Asia that took place about 70,000 years ago.

The researchers believe this proves that Aborigines were the first group to separate from other modern humans.

Their remarkable findings, published in the journal Science, suggest that modern Aborigines moved out of Africa 24,000 years earlier than the humans who went on to form the populations of Asia and Europe, challenging current theories of a single phase of dispersal from Africa.

New World Trade Center Tower To Be Made With Glass From China And Steel From Germany -

Did you know that the new World Trade Center tower is being constructed with glass from China and steel from Germany? 1 World Trade Center, also known as “The Freedom Tower”, is not just another skyscraper. It is essentially a national monument. But that doesn’t mean that we are above awarding construction contracts to the lowest bidder. The new World Trade Center tower will contain 250 tons of steel from Germany and the lower floors will be surrounded with blast-resistant glass from China. This is yet another example of how the U.S. economy is being hollowed out. Once upon a time, the United States produced more steel and glass than anyone else in the world. But now we are being deindustrialized at a blinding pace. We have lost tens of thousands of factories and millions of jobs over the past decade. We are going to have a trade imbalance of about a half a trillion dollars this year. Meanwhile, our federal, state and local governments are going into massive amounts of debt in order to keep funding government activities at a level that our hollowed out economy simply cannot support any longer.

Did you also know that the new MLK memorial on the National Mall was also made in China?

Yet there was very little uproar about that in the mainstream media. A few activists out there made some waves, but generally people do not seem troubled by this.

The following is an excerpt from a report about the new MLK memorial in The Telegraph….

However, there has been controversy over the choice of Lei Yixin, a 57-year-old master sculptor from Changsha in Hunan province, to carry out the work. Critics have openly asked why a black, or at least an American, artist was not chosen and even remarked that Dr King appears slightly Asian in Mr Lei’s rendering.

Mr Lei, who has in the past carved two statues of Mao Tse-tung, one of which stands in the former garden of Mao Anqing, the Chinese leader’s son, carried out almost all of the work in Changsha.

More than 150 granite blocks, weighing some 1,600 tons, were then shipped from Xiamen to the port of Baltimore, and reassembled by a team of 100 workmen, including ten Chinese stone masons brought over specifically for the project.

Well, if you don’t care about where our national symbols are made, you should at least care about the millions of jobs that we have been losing.

Since 1975, the United States had run a total trade deficit of more than 7.5 trillion dollars with the rest of the world.

All of that money could have gone to U.S. businesses and U.S. workers. In turn, those businesses and workers would have paid taxes on all of that wealth.

But instead, all of that wealth went out of the United States.

The proponents of the theory of “comparative advantage” tell us that each country should focus on the things that they are most efficient at making, and then they should all trade with each other.

Well, when we merged our economy with the economies of nations where it is legal to pay slave labor wages, suddenly we made it more “efficient” for big corporations to make almost everything overseas.

The more we have “liberalized” our trade, the faster we have lost jobs.

The American people need to learn the facts. The United States has losta staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000, andover 42,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been closed down since 2001.

Between December 2000 and December 2010, 38 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Ohio were lost, 42 percent of the manufacturing jobs in North Carolina were lost and 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost.

Thank you George W. Bush and Barack Obama for such a wonderful economic miracle!