For almost 40 years, beginning in the late 1940s, large quantities of uranium were mined on their land. Many Navajo still suffer related physical ailments. They are none too eager to open up their land to an industry they have been ravaged by, however safe and efficient they are told it will be. Unfortunately, they may have no choice. HRI has been working in conjunction with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to get a license to mine the land since the late 1990s, and it looks like they’re about to make a move.

The Navajo Nation covers a big piece of land, about 27,000 square miles, and stretches over parts of three states: Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. It is estimated to contain one of the largest uranium ore deposits in the world. That’s why, back in 1948, when the demand for uranium was high, the Navajo Nation seemed like a good place to get it. In addition to large deposits, the uranium in Navajo country is found in sandstone, making it ideal for the less invasive in situ method of extraction. Even this method is likely to create problems, however, according to the WISE Uranium Project. Among them: “the risk of spreading of leaching liquid outside of the uranium deposit, involving subsequent groundwater contamination; the unpredictable impact of the leaching liquid on the rock of the deposit; the impossibility of restoring natural groundwater conditions after completion of the leaching operations.” The report goes on to say “in-situ leaching releases considerable amounts of radon, and produces certain amounts of waste slurries and waste water during recovery of the uranium from the liquid.” No wonder the Navajo are worried. The land HRI plans to mine supplies the only source of drinking water for some 15,000 residents, many living below poverty level.

When HRI began their campaign to mine in Indian country they sent a request to the NRC. The NRC responded in March of 1997. Their response refers to an evaluation process that included a review of the environmental impact of the proposed mining project. The content of the review or Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) is not included as part of the docket entry, nor is it accessible online. Based on the FEIS, the NRC granted HRI a license to mine uranium, in situ, in McKinley County, New Mexico (aka: Indian country).

Interestingly, the Navajo people requested a complete study of the impact of uranium mining on the same stretch of land that they own. The study was never conducted. The rationale was that since uranium mining was not then taking place, there was no need to conduct such a study. This is despite the fact that “. . . Navajos have suffered from high cancer rates and respiratory problems. One study found that cancer rates among Navajo teenagers living near mine tailings are 17 times the national average. ”

The suffering of the Navajo due to uranium mining was so extreme it prompted Harry Tome, a Dineh activist, to work tirelessly throughout the 1980s to force the U.S. government to provide relief to minors and their families, who suffered as a result of the exposure to radiation. His efforts were long and arduous, largely because there were no extensive studies to document the full effects of the mining industry on the Indian nation. Still, in 1990, with the help of Stewart Udall (former U.S. Secretary of the Interior), the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was passed. Remediation programs covered in that act have still not been fully implemented. When HRI wanted to start mining again, they got their special study, and pronto. They even got the NRC to approve a mining license, and all without consulting the Navajo Nation Council.

HRI, a subsidiary of Uranium Resources, Inc. (URI) estimates that the area in question, which is located near two Navajo communities, Church Rock and Crownpoint, contains close to 100 million pounds of uranium. One can only imagine the kind of money that’s worth. So, in addition to working with the NRC, the folks at HRI have been actively recruiting Navajo residents to support their mining plan by offering large sums of money.

According to a recent airing of Democracy Now, HRI has coupled offers of big pay-outs with misleading propaganda campaigns designed to convince residents who live on the reservation there are no serious health risks to minors or their families. With no formal studies to prove HRI’s claims of safety suspect, those who stand to make a great deal of money are naturally leaning toward supporting the deal. This has, apparently, created a huge rift between those who fear the ultimate cost of allowing uranium mining and those who seek immediate compensation for the use of their land. Still, despite the contention among the Navajo, the Navajo Nation Council managed to pass a law banning uranium mining. One would think that would be the end of that. It is their country, after all. Or is it?

In January 2006, HRI submitted a request to the NRC suggesting that the land HRI wishes to mine be reclassified as “not Indian country under 18 U.S.C.§ 1151(b)…”. If the NRC grants the request, the land in Church Rock (referenced in the letter as “HRI’s Church Rock”) would be under the jurisdiction of the State of New Mexico, making any laws passed by the Navajo Nation, regarding the use of the land, inapplicable. And once again uranium mining will take place in Indian country.
Check-mate.

When I imagine someone sounding the alert that the government has poisoned the masses, I imagine some wacko in the woods somewhere with a stockpile of bottled water in his basement and a high powered telecope perched on a tower to watch for aliens. Not so.

The tale of Aspartame is even more chilling, partly because it is a true story. Mostly because it’s common knowledge.

Donald Rumsfeld is implicated? Common knowledge. Aspartame causes brain tumors? This too, is well documented and is finally becoming common knowledge. And, the inevitable conclusion is that the U.S. government is apparently implicated in one of the more sinister mass poisonings in recent history.

Yes, poisoning. There are not one, not two, but ninety-two (92) symptoms of aspartame poisoning. These symptoms are not sneezing or vague malaise but humdingers such as convulsions, and the ultimate symptom, “death,” which is a fairly serious symptom and the last one you’ll never complain about.

Aspartame should have never been approved by the FDA, and in fact, the panel reviewing the manufactured sugar substitute voted against approval. Aspartame was “approved” out of corporate greed, despite evidence that it is a dangerous exitotoxin that causes brain tumors in laboratory animals.

Aspartame was successfully kept off the market for over ten years prior to GD Searle hiring Donald Rumsfeld as their CEO. Shortly after he was hired aspartame became approved through an unbelievable conflict of interest. Several FDA commissioners that voted against approving aspartame were replaced by those that voted for it [creating a tie]. Shortly after aspartame approval these FDA commissioners were given cushy jobs with quarter million dollar salaries as a reward for their help.
source

Who knows more about the toxicity of aspartame than the FDA? Their toxicologists, Doctors Adrian Gross and Jacqueline Verrett strenuously objected to aspartame approval for 16 years. It wasn’t just that aspartame is not safe, and in original studies triggered brain tumors, seizures, and all sorts of other tumors, it was that the manufacturer filtered out what they didn’t want FDA to see.

ASPARTAME WAS APPROVED BY PRESIDENTIAL ORDER: President Reagan knew it would take 30 days to get Hayes into the FDA so he wrote an executive order making the outgoing FDA Commissioner powerless to oppose aspartame. From the congressional record, Senate, page S5497, May 7, l985:

“Two FDA officials have told Common Cause Magazine that Hayes was determined to push aspartame forward, in part as a signal that the Reagan administration was ushering in a new regulatory era. One official privy to some of the deliberations made at Hayes’ level says the “people at the top” were not receptive to important concerns raised about the quality and validity of some of the key tests submitted in support of aspartame.”
Dr. Betty Martini

Our FDA has never been the same since. Deadly chemicals now being blessed by FDA are marketed as wholesome pharmaceuticals, are just the tip of the iceberg, and result of Rumsfeld’s damage to FDA. The reasonable FDA lawful standard is that a chemical must pass all toxicity tests at one hundred times the “maximum human dose,” in order to pass as a food additive. What the original tests showed is that at a dose of three cans of pop per day, scaled to the weight of the animal, aspartame releases DKP, a recognized virulent brain carcinogen. No other chemical causes the brain cancer rate to jump as much.”
Dr. James Bowen

So just how widespread is Aspartame? Well, it is in cereals, juices, candy, breath mints, sugar-free chewing gum, gelatin desserts, cocoa mixes, coffee beverages, tea beverages, instant teas and coffees, wine coolers, topping mixes, yogurt, vitamin supplements, herb supplements, soft-drinks, over the counter drugs, prescription drugs, laxatives, milk drinks, instant breakfasts, frozen desserts, shake mixes, tabletop sweeteners…and more. Do you or anyone you know ingest any of these?

It is in everything. In fact, I think your regular church-going Mid-western voting Amreican citizen is just about riddled with this toxic stuff. Next time you are in the grocery store, look at how many things have aspartame in them.

“When has gone wrong with our way of thinking when it is considered “normal” that 1 in 3 people get cancer? IT IS NOT NORMAL. Cancer is not a natural disease and even if it were, it wouldn’t be “normal” for cancer to claim the lives of 25% of the population.”
Stephen Lester, Is There a Toxic Connection, 1996

Forget about the toxicity for a moment. Aspartame happens to be a rip-off. It causes people who eat the stuff to crave carbohydrates. They don’t lose any weight.

“The fact that aspartame fattens people is generally well known. We have all seen the post cards and comics that depict an overweight person with a Diet Coke in one hand while reaching for a bowl of corn chips with the other hand. The reason aspartame so strikingly stimulates the appetite is it provides over half of its content in a form of a phenylalanine isolate.

The amino acid phenylalanine outcompetes all the other at enzyme sites in the body. This suppresses the formation of dopamine from tyrosine and the formation of serotonin from tryptophan. The serotonin is the neurotransmitter that reports carbohydrate metabolism. When your serotonin levels are not allowed to raise as they normally do when you eat carbohydrates you crave more and more food. The dopamine is the neurotransmitter that lets you feel satisfied, so when you use aspartame you have unsatisfiable cravings. The aspartame also poisons your metabolism so you cannot burn calories.
rense.com

At the same time, Monsanto, and its buy-out partner Ajinmoto dress up in the pep squad gear to tout just how cool they claim aspartame is. It’s bold.

Monsanto’s previous incarnation, G.D. Searle, was the ugly elephant Donald Rumsfeld was riding when he promised to get aspartame approved by the FDA despite nine years of evidence that it caused severe illness in laboratory animals. Evidence? What evidence? The laboratory rats had their brain tumors cut out and voila! Suddenly, the removed evidence made it appear that there were NO deleterious effects of aspartame. I am not making this up.

Action based on fact in the United States is never based on fact. Iraq had nuclear weapons, therefore the U.S. invaded. Aspartame causes no cancer, therefore Americans eat it.

So what makes Aspartame so toxic? Well, like most creepy things that have no business on the skins of or in the bodies of humans, it was discovered by accident. Just as the crop pesticides used in the United States are incarnations of chemical warfare substances, so too was Aspartame never meant to be food. Aspartame was a byproduct of research on ulcer drugs. Looking for a compound that would inhibit the release of gastrin, a gastrointestinal hormone, the intermediate compound aspartylphenylalanine-methyl-ester (aspartame) was created. The researching scientist accidentally got some aspartame on his finger, tasted it, and the rest, as they say, is mystery.

In 1969 the Journal of the American Chemical Society reported:

We wish to report another accidental discovery of an organic compound with a profound sucrose (table sugar) like taste . . . Preliminary tasting showed this compound to have a potency of 100-200 times sucrose depending on concentration and on what other flavors are present and to be devoid of unpleasant aftertaste. (Mazur)

I wonder what would happen if one went to the local drugstore and loaded up on ulcer drugs. Sprinkled them on one’s breakfast cereal every morning and added them to one’s coffee.

As soon as you swallow, your body converts aspartame converts to a particularly dangerous form of free methanol, then to formaldehyde, and then to formic acid.

Methanol is basically wood alcohol, and formaldehyde is a known carcinogen, as is formic acid. But the clearest way to describe what aspartame does in the human body is to explain what an exitotoxin is. Aspartae acid, in aspartame, is an exitotoxin. This means that it over-excites neurons to the point of death. Exitotoxins destroy human nerve cells. Ingested by the young, they destroy the proper formation of nerve cells. Children’s brains develop in severely miswired patterns, resulting in ADD, hperactivity disorder, and learning disorders.

The damage, unfortunately, does not stop there. I cannot do justice to the panoramic scope of harm caused by aspartame without simply listing the illnesses caused by caused by this chemical.

Here is a list of symptoms and illnesses caused by or worsened by Aspartame compiled by Mark Gold.

Abdominal Pain
Anxiety attacks
Arthritis
Asthma
Asthmatic Reactions
Bloating, Edema (Fluid Retention)
Blood Sugar Control Problems (Hypoglycemia or Hyperglycemia)
Brain Cancer (Pre-approval studies in animals)
Breathing difficulties
Burning eyes or throat
Burning Urination
Can’t think straight
Chest Pains
Chronic cough
Chronic Fatigue
Confusion
Death
Depression
Diarrhea
Dizziness
Excessive Thirst or Hunger
Fatigue
Flushing of face
Hair Loss (Baldness) or Thinning of Hair
Headaches/Migraines dizziness
Hearing Loss
Heart palpitations
Hives (Urticaria)
Hypertension (High Blood Pressure)
Impotency and Sexual Problems
Inability to concentrate
Infection Susceptibility
Insomnia
Irritability
Itching
Joint Pains
Laryngitis
Marked Personality Changes
Memory loss
Menstrual Problems or Changes
Migraines and Severe Headaches (Trigger or Cause From Chronic Intake)
Muscle spasms
Nausea or Vomiting
Numbness or Tingling of Extremities
Other Allergic-Like Reactions
Panic Attacks
Phobias
Poor memory
Rapid Heart Beat
Rashes
Seizures and Convulsions
Slurring of Speech
Swallowing Pain
Tachycardia
Tremors
Tinnitus
Vertigo
Vision Loss
Weight gain

Aspartame Disease Mimics Symptoms or Worsens the Following Diseases
Alzheimer’s Disease
Arthritis
Birth Defects
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Diabetes and Diabetic Complications
Epilepsy
Fibromyalgia
Lupus
Lyme Disease
Lymphoma
Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCS)
Multiple Sclerosis (MS)
Parkinson’s Disease

Looking at the exhaustive lists of hurts caused by Aspartame, I begin to wonder if there is anything that Aspartame doesn’t cause. Could all of this be true?

When considering the idea of truth, my mind wanders inevitably to coporate advertisers. Like Thai underworld pimps, they inevitably take innocent small truths and quickly warp them into something else entirely for their own profit.

I was looking at that red and white Nutrasweet swirl logo the other day and I was impressed with how much it reminds me of familiar, comforting patterns. It looks like a peppermint candy. Yum. It also looks like a barbershop pole, thereby insinuating old-fashioned and hygenic dependability. The brains that went into making and marketing Aspartame were no dummies.

As often occurs when big money and big greed get going, great advertisers step in and make their enticing propaganda to feed the wheel of consumption. My favorite piece of Aspartame drivel was disseminated by Nutrasweet AG’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Hans Heezen, when he stated: “Aspartame is a unique sweetening ingredient not only because it tastes like sugar but also because it is treated by the body in exactly the same way as other foods.”

The crucial question here is, “which other foods?” An unearthed portion of pickled sixty year old Kim-Chee from Hiroshima and Nagasaki? It’s worth mentioning that saying that Aspartame “tastes like sugar” is a whopper of an understatement – it’s over 200 times sweeter.

For more giggles, check out the Nutrasweet advertisement that slyly compares Aspartame to human breastmilk. Now here’s a big, bold, spare-no-prisoners statement:

“Remember your first taste of NutraSweet? Mothers’ milk doesn’t contain NutraSweet, but it might as well. Aspartame is made from things which occur in much larger quantities in other parts of our diet, and our bodies digest it completely naturally. The principal components of aspartame are two building blocks of protein – phenylalanine and aspartic acid, which are just like those found in eggs, fruit, cheese or fish. And even in mothers’ milk. So when you’re looking for a partner for sugar, pick the sweetener which your body will recognise.”
Source

Mother’s milk is made in a place like this? It’s also a superfund site that has leached arsenic into the adjacent river

Trade names for Aspartame are NutraSweet, Equal, Spoonful, Canderel, Benevia, Misura. In Europe Aspartame hides under the seemingly innocuous “E 951″ label. World-wide, warning labels that say “contains a source of phenylalanine” or “phenylchetonurics should not consume this product,” signal the presence of aspartame.
Truth In Labeling

Dr. John Hoey, writing about the book The Truth About the Drug Companies says according to Angell, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the pharmaceutical industry’s U.S. trade association has “the largest lobby in Washington,” which in 2002 employed 675 lobbyists (including 26 former members of Congress) at a cost of more than $91 million. The result has been above-average growth in corporate profits during both Republican and Democratic administrations. The most recent and perplexing lobbying effort caused Congress explicitly to prohibit Medicare from using its huge purchasing power to get lower prices for drugs, thus opening up a dollar pipeline, in the form of higher drug prices, directly from taxpayers to corporate coffers. These changes, along with the cave-in by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in l997 that permitted direct-to-consumer advertising to bypass mention in their ads of all but the most serious side effects, have further augmented profits. The overall effect has been a corruption not only of science but also of the dissemination of Science.” No wonder new books keep being published like Dr. Carolyn Dean’s “Death of Medicine”.
wnho.net

Reading all of this, I cannot help but think of the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz when she says “Poppies will put them to sleep.” Poppies are drugs, of course, but alluringly sweet. Aspartame is sweet and destructive… and it’s everywhere. But it will do more than put us to sleep. It will cause tumors, seizures, heart arhythmia, a whole cornucopia of discomfort and pain.

And we won’t lose any weight.

If you’re like me you have no idea. Ever since some of us have been alive, the good stuff comes out of that wall socket all of the time. The juice flows. Just pay that bill.

Odds are nuclear fission is not a major source of the energy that you consume in an average day, yet that doesn’t make the discussion of its possible impact on your quality of life any less important. Truthfully, it is not only the quality of your life that is in question; it is the very future of such life.

What you are looking at is the LaSalle Nuclear Reactor located in Seneca, Illinois- from an effective altitude of 81 miles above sea level.

Looks harmless enough, like some sort of abstract art. hanging on a clean wall in an aluminum clad museum, or one of Larry Ellison’s houses.

LaSalle is the 34th largest nuclear reactor in the country. One of 13 reactors in Illinois. By some estimates if Illinois were a separate country it would rank seventh or eighth in the world in nuclear capacity.

On top of creating approximately 20% of the state’s nuclear energy The LaSalle plant has become known as a crucial safety concern. In the neighborhood of nuclear reactors, this is akin to being the bad house on the block.

In 1996, LaSalle was ranked #12 on the Public Citizen’s list of the “25 Worst Nuclear Reactors in the Nation.” LaSalle’s dismal safety ranking was not without its warnings. In November of 1992, the governor of Illinois was notified that all of the state’s nuclear reactors, LaSalle included, were using a fire-retardant barrier that has been proven not to work. Despite such formal notification the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has still not required replacing these necessary fire barriers.

Imagine what else they’re not fixing.

Some good friends of mine are renovating an old house. There are surprises involved, some good and some not so good.

When you are renovating an old nuclear facility, the surprises are all bad.

The NRC placed LaSalle on its “adversely trending” list. The list is meant to identify plants with deteriorating conditions. LaSalle is also identified as having high worker radiation exposure. Additionally, Commonwealth Edison, which licenses the LaSalle plant, has been fined numerous times for safety violations and worker horseplay.

These problems are not unique to LaSalle. Nuclear reactors are proving to be much more dangerous than its industry would like for you to believe. In 1985 Congress heard testimony from the NRC itself that the “probability of a severe nuclear accident in this country over the next 20 years involving large releases of radioactive materials was roughly 45%.” I don’t know about you, but that sounds like quite a gamble. Furthermore the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has examined the way that the NRC conducts its risk assessments and has found their methods “seriously flawed.”

In effect, the NRC has been calculating risk on the assumption that everything will run perfectly as it should. There will be no human error, safety violations, equipment malfunctions, or engineering miscalculations. Of course if everything always ran perfectly there would be no use for risk calculations at all as there would be no risk.

Accurate calculations would place the risk of a US nuclear accident at a significantly higher level.

In addition to being extremely unsafe and unstable nuclear power in current commercial form is uneconomical. Nuclear power has cost the US over $492 billion. Since 1950 nuclear power has received over $97 billion in subsidies from the federal government. These subsidies include deferred taxes and lower limits on liability.

You would think that nuclear power must somehow be cheaper to the consumer in order to justify this level of federal spending. It isn’t. Commonwealth Edison’s customers pay the highest electric bills in the region.

If you’re like me, you might have thought that nuclear power is a necessity. You may even assume that United States of America, the largest consumer of power in the world, depends on nuclear power to supply a bulk of its energy.

No. Nuclear power supplies approximately 20% of US electricity supply. However, numerous studies have placed the level of wasted electricity due to inefficiency somewhere between 25-44% of all total electricity. If investment is made to increase efficiency, the US could conserve the equivalent output of 145-210 nuclear reactors. That is more than double the amount of reactors that are currently in use.

Unfortunately, there is another problem with nuclear reactors, if of course you need the possibility of just one more disaster to turn you off of nuclear power. The problem, which has been highly publicized as of recent, is the threat of terrorist activities aimed at nuclear plants.

Nearly four years after the terrorist attacks of September 11th there are still no regulations that address the threat a commercial airliner may pose to the public if it came into contact with a nuclear reactor. Worse than “crossing the streams.”

In fact the government has failed to adequately address any type of large scaled terrorist attack to its numerable nuclear reactors. The NRC maintains that such attacks are “improbable,” or very unlikely at the least, which of course they are. Most Americans believed the same before September 11th.

The first commerical nuclear plants were built like the engines of huge nuclear submarines. Maybe they had the right idea, and a vehicle is the best way to make nuclear power. When the plant gets too old, scuttle it over the Marinas trench. Didn’t the film Godzilla start like that?

Nuclear plants are enormous weapons capable of being used by people desiring to economically bankrupt the U.S., cause irreparable environmental damage, and kill massive amounts of people. After previously publishing important design elements to nuclear plants the government is now reconsidering the brilliance of such moves and increasing security in order to limit access to nuclear reactors. But they are easy to spot.

Security measures often include extra guards, obtrusive shrubbery, and more demanding background checks of nuclear plant employees. However, these tactics are nothing more than what the average tall office building has been doing since 2001.

In an opinion paper dated October of 2001, referring to the safety of nuclear plants, Ralph Nader states that “If these facilities can’t be made secure, the federal government has no choice but to shut down the plants. The risk is too great to do otherwise.” Nader may not be famous for moderate opinions, but no one can deny that he speaks with public safety in mind.

Is the risk to great? What do you think should be done?

Sources:
Nuclear Energy Information Service
Union of Concerned Scientists
Energy Information Administration-Illinois State
Nuclear Tourist
washingtonpost.com. Vedantam, Shankar. “Nuclear Plants are Still Vulnerable, Panal Says”
Public Interest-Critical Mass Energy Project
The Nader Page

According to an article by Matthew L. Wald published in the New York Times and excerpted below, Florida Power & Light shipped radioactive waste to regular landfills, municipal sewage treatment plants, and “some unknown locations.” According to the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, the company has concealed these shipments from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

As a game, ask yourself if you would have concealed this information.

If you knew it. If your job might depend on it.

You would of course know that it would take a few decades before it would have any effect on anyone. That it would never be traced back to you.

How would you live with the knowledge?

…a week after the cleanup was completed at a dump site, the company found contamination at a level 20 times what was proposed by the state, and thousands of times higher than what the Environmental Protection Agency allowed for agricultural land; the surrounding area is used for cattle and citrus. emphasis added

[Plaintiff's attorney] Nancy La Vista said she planned to argue that tests of the boys’ baby teeth showed abnormally high levels of radioactive strontium, which is produced when atoms are split and that when ingested binds to human bones. Older people have strontium in their bones that was created from atmospheric nuclear testing. But, Ms. La Vista said, “These kids were all born after Chernobyl, after Three Mile Island, and after atmospheric testing.”

“The tremendous menace of this day and age is not the stockpile of nuclear weapons which human ingenuity has devised, but the grim fact that the men in charge of them are as mediocre as those who invented them are brilliant.”

Peter Ustinov, Actor

“Oh, my. Now I really know something happened at Three Mile Island! It must be poison gas. I just fell down. I had no strength to get up. I said, ‘Must I really die at Three Mile Island.”

Marie Holowka, Farmer and three-Mile Island survivor and cancer victim receiving chemotherapy 25 years later

To the 30-and-under set, a meltdown is what you have when someone lost in their phone conversation rams in the back of your pimped-out ride that you just washed, causing you to spill your bev all over your nice, new shirt. TMI is short for ‘too much information,’ and not ‘Three Mile Island.’

To those Americans old enough to remember March 28, 1979, the nuclear meltdown at Three-Mile-Island was, like September 11, a tragic day when America lost some of her innocence. On this day, public confidence in the safety of nuclear power was decimated in a cloud of toxic blue smoke.

The planets were certainly not in alignment on March 28 at Three Mile Island near Middletown, Pennsylvania. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), responsible for overseeing such plants, says an unfortunate, unlikely mix of things — equipment malfunctions, design related problems and worker errors — led the TMI-2 reactor core to melt and release its frightening brew of radioactive materials into the neighboring community.

Worker error, indeed — former control room operator Harold W. Hartman, Jr. told NRC investigators that the plant’s owner, Metropolitan Edison, had been falsifying primary-coolant, leak rate data for months prior to the accident, according to Three-Mile Island Alert, a nonprofit nuclear watchdog group and outspoken critic of TMI.

The NRC concedes that the Three Mile Island explosion was “the most serious in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant operating history,” yet claims that plant workers and members of the nearby community escaped without a scratch. The NRC finds a silver lining in the event, in that it brought about “sweeping changes involving emergency response planning, reactor operator training, human factors engineering, radiation protection, and many other areas of nuclear power plant operations {and] caused the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to tighten and heighten its regulatory oversight.”

Public health research conducted over two decades’ worth of data with TMI residents and workers has for the most part sided with the NRC’s claim that no lives have been taken as a result of the radiation, though stress-related conditions were definitively linked to the event.

Many TMI survivors, some of which have suffered from cancers of the thyroid and bladder — or the families of non-survivors, as the case may be — would disagree with scientists’ conclusions, however. Sam Retherford, a former TMI employee, died of bladder cancer just shy of the 25th anniversary of the explosion, according to an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer. He was convinced that he got sick from cleaning up the “hot stuff,” the article reported.

“In the back of our minds, we knew there had to be something with TMI,” his daughter, Tracy Long, reported to the Inquirer. “I just think they tried to hide a lot of that.”

Furthermore, there was no study of cancer conducted among the workers who did the 10-year, $1 billion cleanup, as the feds were unable to persuade the Metropolitan Edison to maintain a health registry.

While questions remain about what did happen, some scientists are clearer on what could have happened. “It is quite possible that in another 20 minutes or so, the lower portion of the reactor vessel would have melted, releasing hot molten fuel onto the floor of the containment building, posing an even greater, possibly uncontrollable release of radiation into the environment,” according to Bonnie A. Osif, Anthony J. Baratta, and Thomas W. Conkling. Professor emeritus of nuclear engineering at Penn State, who co-authored TMI 25 Years Later: The Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant Accident and Its Impact (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).

25 years later, the TMI-2 reactor has been permanently shut down, and the radioactive waste, reactor fuel and core debris shipped off-site. The rest of the site sites idle, biding its time until it can be decommissioned. The last of the survivors’ lawsuits were dismissed or dropped by 2002, the records from the long-term health studies sealed, the $5 million public-health fund used to conduct research on TMI long gone. Two generations have already grown up free of the fading memory of Three-Mile Island, now a sidebar in 20th-century history textbooks.

Until recently, “no new nukes” was a dying slogan — simply because it was no longer needed. The nuclear industry was barely hanging on, it being to hard to turn a profit on nuclear energy than hoped, and public opinion was still down on nuclear energy, having not yet completely forgotten Three-Mile Island and its Russian counterpart, Chernobyl.

Yet according to a July 2005 article in Forbes magazine, the future of nuclear power is suddenly looking very bright again. “If oil prices stay high, if people worry about carbon dioxide causing global warming, if the Middle East stays violent, nuclear power may make a huge comeback in the U.S.,” writes Christopher Helman and his co-authors.

“The last five years fans of atomic power have quietly lined up the support of federal and municipal governments and have cozied up to General Electric and Westinghouse Electric…in service to an ambitious agenda: building perhaps 5 new reactors by 2015, a dozen by 2020 and 50 by midcentury.”

If this prediction bears out, one can only hope that the NRC is right in claiming that Three Mile Island was a blessing in disguise, teaching us an innocuous lesson about the dangers of nuclear power so that the worst-case scenario would never come to pass.

April Thompson

Related links: China Syndrome

Special thanks to Jan Blair

If you spend any length of time in St. Lucie County, Florida, you’re carrying something special from this place inside of you. A bonus. From Florida Power and Light, now The FPL Group, one of the United State’s largest power companies.

Like their website says, they are not just located in the community, they are part of the community.

The part of the community that causes cancer.

Located on a barrier island off of Florida’s central east coast in Jensen Beach, the twin St. Lucie reactors are about eight miles upwind of the town of Port St. Lucie, where an astronomically high percentage of children have brain cancer.

The death rate for breast cancer in St. Lucie County has also skyrocketed.

“Gould’s numbers, based upon US Vital Statistics, showed that in St. Lucie County, the age-adjusted white female breast cancer mortality rate from 1950-54 was 6.5 deaths per 100,000 women. But the rate jumped to 20.7 for the years 1980-84, and 23.5 for 1985-89. Thus the rate of increase in these deaths, comparing 1950-54 to 1980-84, was 221%! And comparing 1950-54 to 1985-89, the increase was 263%. ” Michael Steinberg

There is no mystery here, even though the license for the power plant was renewed for another 20 years in 2002. Something in the water, that’s the culprit.

A study of baby teeth from children in St. Lucie County found high levels of strontium-90, a product of uranium fission. The six counties surrounding the nuclear plants in Florida had a 44% higher concentration of strontium-90 than the rest of Florida. Children who had cancer had 80% more strontium-90 in their teeth.

“What is St. Lucie’s safety record? St. Lucie is one of the best performing nuclear power plants in the country, as well as in the world. The World Association of Nuclear Operators has rated St. Lucie Plant as one of the top performing U.S. nuclear power plants.” FPL website

“I checked the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission records for radioactive releases from the St. Lucie reactors, as reported by their owner and operator, Florida Power and Light Company. The NRC records showed that the St. Lucie 1 reactor, operating commercially since 1976, had released nearly 283,000 curies of airborne radiation into the environment through 1991. The St. Lucie 2 reactor, operating since 1983, reported airborne emissions through 1991 of almost 50,000 curies. Thus the reactors, through 1991, had released over 333,000 curies of radiation into the air, much of it probably drifting towards Port St. Lucie.”

“The NRC records also indicated that over these years the St. Lucie reactors had released over 6800 Curies of liquid tritium—radioactive hydrogen—into local waters. Community groups in western Massachusetts have implicated liquid tritium releases from the now defunct Yankee Rowe nuclear reactor as the cause of abnormally high rates of five kinds of cancer and Down’s Syndrome. And in Suffolk County on New York’s eastern Long Island, residents have filed a $2 billion lawsuit against the operators of a research reactor at Brookhaven National Laboratory, contending that its leaks of tritium and other radioactive substances into the groundwater have contaminated their community water supply.”

Not just located in the community, part of the community. The part you don’t want.

Coming to your community. The nuclear waste from this facility must be shipped out and buried somewhere forever, and the nuclear fuel shipped in.

FPL plans to build a coal-fired power plant in the west of St. Lucie County in 2008.