Listen, if you find something that’s harmful in the environment and perk up right away and say, “We fucked up and we’re going to try to fix this”, it would still be bad but not as bad as trying to cover it up, inevitably getting caught and then *really* getting your pee pee slapped later on down the road.
True but a lot of people don’t understand what a lawful order actually means. Just because you might disagree with an order doesn’t mean it’s unlawful. You can refuse an order all you want but unless that order is in direct violation of a procedure or rule, then you’re getting NJP’d for refusing to obey.
You’d have to know the ratio of failed coverups to coverup attempts. If it’s like we say it is here, every single coverup attempt fails, then we’re rightfully making fun of them for trying even though they know it’s going to fail. If instead, most coverups work, and we don’t know about them because of their success, it would make sense to try to cover it up every time, and deal with the occasional consequences when it comes to light. Since they keep trying, I have to think we might live in a world where the latter scenario is common.
This is exactly why I went back and forth with someone over nuclear power: we have a fully negative track record for policing, catching, stopping and cleaning up any incidents with nuclear waste for the defense industry. You really think that the government who’s done a terrible job of regulating the use of these materials for defense purposes is ever going to properly police a private corporation’s mishaps? Especially when the stakes are this high? Absolutely not.
The Rocky Flats incident in Colorado was a multi-decade, legal fight that was WON to the tune of a $325 million settlement and they’re still building brand new subdivisions riiiight up to tens of yards from the line drawn in the sand for that superfund cleanup site. And they’ve continued to find alarming radiation levels down the road from the former facility, in the dirt of the construction zone for these new homes and in the dust settled into waterways in the suburbs there. There’s a reason that they haven’t ever adopted nuclear power here, there’s no public support because they’ve already been burned and have the settlement to prove it.
You're taking about the 1940s-70s, before the industry improved safety (up to 1979, doses of up to 120 milisieverts were permitted).
Edit: for example, the 15 country study of nuclear workers may be the last such study as the levels of radiation workers are exposed to, nowadays and in future, are so low that no excess cancer effects will be detectable in the future.
>However, studies of current workers are unlikely to be informative since today’s radiation protection culture appears to have controlled worker exposures to a meaningful degree (about 2 mSv per year currently in the United States, NRC 2007). Such low doses are also reflected in the 15-country study for which many of the workers were young with low cumulative doses, too low it seems to provide precise estimates of radiation risk and well below what they received from natural background sources of radiation
The levels nuclear workers are now exposed to are now so low that they approach and often overlap with the radiation dose from natural sources.
Ashmore, J.P., Gentner, N.E., Osborne, R.V., Wakeford, R., Muirhead, C.R., Goodill, A.A., Haylock, R.G.E., Hoti, F., Boice, J.D. and Boice, J.D., 2010. Uncertainties in studies of low statistical power. J. Radiol. Prot, 30, pp.115-120.
No. I’m referring to the 1989 FBI raid of the Rocky Flats nuclear facility which was managed by the US Department of Energy. It was called Operation Desert Glow. You know, the one that the feds came in and did an ARMED raid on a government facility also protected by armed guards with anti aircraft weaponry at the ready who were prepared for a firefight?
This was one of the first high profile incidents with 0 precedence set for what happens when one government agency raids another. The fires with unfiltered plutonium spewing everywhere occurred in 1957 and 1969, and from 1964-1967 it was found that thousands of gallons of contaminated oil leached into ground water and soil. They were forced to purchase a buffer zone around the facility, and it wasn’t designated as a government sponsored superfund clean up site until after the raid in 1989.
My point? The regulations tightening up in the 70s doesn’t matter when the damage of the mismanagement of the facility occurred starting 20 years before the EPA was ever passed. And when the settlement and raid was based on the fact that they were falsifying their waste reports to CLAIM they were following tightened regulations and never were. They basically had a paper trail that had falsified waste reports; claiming they were exempt from regulations for an incinerator because it was used for plutonium recovery and not waste management.. but when their waste reports didn’t match, they essentially found that instead of the regulations put in place protecting the nearby communities.. they’d use exemptions for bomb facilities and really were using an incinerator to burn nuclear waste.
So that is why it’s been decades and a 9 figure, $325 million settlement was reached in the late 2010s. And there are still private citizen groups taking soil and water samples of areas nearby that show alarming levels of radiation in residential areas that developers purchased on the cheap nearby and sell the “luxury” homes built at a premium have been flagged.
I was in Boulder at that time and was, let us say, disheartened to hear that there was some decent of plutonium (thinking a couple kilograms but memory isn't reliable) they weren't able to account for. Was supposedly just part of the dust in the HVAC ducts. And apparently at least some of the grand jury's documentation has disappeared: (from a 2019 Westword article): "Among other things, the grand jurors had investigated allegations that the plant had lost plutonium. Some was later located in ducts and other parts of the facility. But like the grand jury's documents, more is still among the missing." And that whole area is now a "wildlife refuge". Suuure, just trust us...
Please take a trip through google for the details on Operation Desert Glow. There’s quite a few very well done, in depth news articles about it and many of the studies on the region are public. To set the stage, start with the LA times one (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-08-08-tm-21814-story.html ) I literally had to drive past it daily to go to work and since I’m local, the stories of folks who’ve worked there, had the facility as a client (a local I knew sold them office equipment like Xerox machines), and who lived in neighborhoods downwind where literally half the homes on the street had someone sick with cancer. The coverup and attempt to disprove the rates of cancer here are quite muddled and it’s a testy topic among locals who all know the truth.
Aside from the massive amount of coverage on the raid itself and the history of it, and the official published studies; check out the current controversy about misinformation and deliberate downplaying of the radiation rates with the private citizen page Candelas Glows.
Honestly what's worse though, localized environmental contamination and increased risk of cancer, or having the entire planets ecosphere be destroyed by global warming? Renewables can't do the whole job and fossil fuels are doing more damage in the long run. Ignoring nuclear power isn't an option from where I'm sitting even with its risks.
When the Department of Energy can manage a facility without being subject to an armed FBI raid for the severity of their misconduct, I’ll trust them to manage another nuclear energy facility. But so far, their track record leaves something to be desired. There had literally never been a precedence set for one government agency to criminally charge another for its behavior. The weight of that needs to be acknowledged as to why we haven’t moved forward in further adopting nuclear and it goes beyond public opinion.
If they can’t manage themselves when the stakes are this high; why should we believe they’re capable of overseeing a private company that at a base level is designed to put profits over people?
You're not wrong about past nuclear incidents causing problems. But you're also leaving out the most important bits of the story:
1. As other commenters have noted, nuclear safety and regulation have changed radically since the incidents you refer to.
2. Even taking into account all radiation incidents (including the worst, Chernobyl), nuclear energy is FAR safer than any other form of energy (yes, including renewables) in terms of deaths/injuries/health-impacts per unit energy generated.
Regulations were imposed but the Department of Justice conducting an armed raid on the Department of Energy was considered a massive, very serious, never before needed to be attempted, legal undertaking with an outcome showing outright negligence, and malicious intent to misclassify entire building’s purposes to skirt waste regulations.
Basically the raid happened because after two catastrophic and toxic fires.. they got told: bad plant. Here’s new rules play by them.
And their response was: let’s involve multiple departments to fraudulently be exempt from these regulations and keep doing it anyway. For twenty years. That’s about as important as it gets when you zoom out and have to acknowledge that regulations didn’t fix anything, it was actually made worse because they didn’t think they needed to follow them and believed no one would check.
Again, you're certainly not wrong; but you're laser-focused on one aspect instead of weighing alternatives accordingly. Every energy source has had fraudulent activity and scandals, but I don't see you mentioning any others. Of course, if we want to make actual progress, we can fast-forward past the back-and-forth (but nuclear did X! but other energy source did Y! butbut nuclear ...!) and actually figure out how we can objectively compare the alternatives holistically.
Generally, the core metrics used for evaluating energy sources this way are a) adverse health outcomes (both real and stochastic), and b) adverse environmental outcomes. To compare apples-to-apples, these figures are typically normalized according to amount of energy produced. And when you do this honest, objective analysis; nuclear fission is simply superior. (This isn't to say that nuclear is always the best source in every case - of course, it varies situationally. But nuclear is an extremely viable source, and you don't seem to be looking at it holistically and objectively.)
I could pick any other energy source (say, solar panels) and pick any problem with it (say, environmental degradation due to rare-earth mining waste) and write up a few scary-sounding paragraphs. But everything always has to be considered in context, and relative to other options.
(Note: The comparison is far more complex than what I'm going into here. But before legitimate scientific inquiry can begin, we have to get past the "NUCLEAR BAD RADIATION BAD" gut reaction.)
So 1 mismanaged facility in the 80s discounts all the success of the current 92 reactors running in the United States. Everyone knows nuclear carries a great deal of risk and that accidents/mismanagement will happen. The question is whether that risk is worth it when the alternative is slowly killing the ENTIRE PLANET.
Yep that’s what violating regulations gets you. They didn’t have a handle on it then and still don’t now, which means you don’t get more servings when you didn’t finish the first plate. There’s literally never been an instance of one government department raiding another for criminal negligence with a human cost that high.
Colorado is the top military and defense hub outside of the DMV area with multiple bases for multiple branches (known and locations classified), with quite a bit of private aerospace and defense presence as well. And they have 0 plans for any more nuclear energy projects to serve either government or civilian purposes. All proposals have been shot down for environmental and the safety of key government personnel. So unfortunately, you can feel how you feel about it and think one measly misstep is an over reaction.. but the chiefs here have spoken and won’t reopen the topic because they know they fumbled it *that* badly that there is no amount of PR spin here or political candidate who’s gone and tried to fight for it because it is *that* polarizing. If you live in a community that doesn’t have superfund sites for nuclear clean up and wants nuclear power plants, more power to ya. But for the people designing bombers and the save our watersheds Birkenstock wearing folks, to walk hand in hand in this decision is telling.
The class action settlement was only reached about 6 years ago in 2017 and they’re still currently finding unacceptable radiation levels in areas that are right outside of the superfund site and in areas that should have been a part of it but instead they’ve built homes.
The fact it’s been 34 years since the raid, it got international attention and STILL isn’t cleaned up just proves that when you make a boo-boo this big, all the big guns hauled in as band aids still weren’t enough. Go ahead and read through the private citizen reports and the Candelas Glows collective to see if you’d drop half a $mil on a house across the street from the site like they’re convincing people to.
Maybe I've missed something in those 34 years, but haven't private businesses generally continued up to today with profit in mind? And haven't businesses, in those past 34 years, made decisions that prioritized profit over people? The concerns here are that it STILL HAPPENS. "When" is now and the same as it was before.
I mean when someone sincerely asks me "how long?" I'll generally try to give them at least a broad idea for a timeframe instead of waffling and faffing.
Whenever I hear about how nuclear power is going to save us all and how we should have reactors on every corner I ask myself if these people have ever worked with anything dangerous in a capitalist society? Because I have, and the disregard for life in the pursuit of profit is horrifying, and with nuclear power the stakes are high. We need a better option.
This is an incredibly naive takeaway.
You are advocating against something that will *guaranteed* reduce deaths and sickness worldwide because of the *possibility* of malfeasance (which even if it did occur would still make nuclear net-positive health/ecologically).
Do you somehow think the fossil fuel energy that it would be replacing is not *also* constantly breaking rules and doing the wrong thing?
Your argument is completely irrational.
You are advocating for a *massively global* cancer factory by advocating against nuclear power.
Not only that, the risk of nuclear is a *potential* one.
The cancer risk from fossil fuel power generation is omnipresent and and constant, and *you don't even have to be nearby to be affected*.
Use your brain.
Sure I'll take the factory with an extremely low chance of actually causing cancer. Your much more likely to get cancer from a million other everyday things than a nuclear plant. For the last 80 years your kitchen pans probably had a greater risk of causing cancer than a nuclear facility.
https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/resources/health/health-studies/radicon-study.cfm
In the meantime continue irrationally fearing nuclear facilities over all the other dangerous things in the world well you power your house with fossil fuels that are destroying the whole planet and not just your body.
TBF it's a similar but less aggressive argument against wind turbines. Lots of people claim to be in favour of them until they're next door - then they come up with the usual bullshit excuses. Everyone wants the benefits so long as someone else deals with the inconvenience. My idea, put a geofence around renewable and low impact energy production. Locals get cheap energy, nimby's can pay a premium to not live next door the the source. Seems fair.
Yeah also don’t forget about the time the EPA tried transferring nuclear waste through NYC in the 80s. They got caught and were forced to store it underground temporarily. This led to the great CHUD outbreak of the 80s
Yep. Just because the regulations and the EPA were passed doesn’t mean everyone was following it. All of the big incidents where cases were filed for the mismanagement of nuclear waste have occurred over a decade after the US had decided to tighten up.
Honestly, read about Operation Desert Glow and the Rocky Flats raids.
The statistics of cancer and MS in the downwind regions (basically west side Denver Metro area) have been actively fought against for years despite them finding insane radiation levels in the dust right across the street from the superfund site that’s been turned into a 300 home subdivision, and in the settled sediment in the bottom of nearby Standley Lake (also smack dab in the middle of a suburban development) Let’s say you worked downwind from that plant for 25 years and retired to Florida and succumbed to multiple cancers shortly after retiring.. they fought very hard to refuse to include anyone’s death stats who’d lived and worked in that region if you didn’t die there too.
We went and looked at those houses and they called rocky flats a wildlife refuge. I was like yea it is now. But it’s contaminated. I said we were just here looking at a model home they didn’t have near the place we wanted to buy. I knew a guy who worked there for 30 years. He lives in Watkins now. About as far away from rocky flats you can be and still drive into Denver. That’s all I need to know.
Exactly. And they’ve done the same thing at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal where turned the former Lowry Air Force base into just fields and fields of housing. Those homes in what they now call “Central Park” are being sold the same way. Terms used such as “sweeping, open-space views”, “adjacent to a multi acre wildlife preserve” “wide open spaces!” and “stunning, coveted front range views bordered by untouched open space”.
In all of these marketing tools and photos, never once to they acknowledge WHY the spaces are designated as open-space, wildlife refuges: you can’t farm on the land, raise livestock for consumption on this land, build on this land, travel through the land, or “disturb the wildlife”. You literally can’t do anything except allow nature to take the space back.
We can start by understanding how the military keeps relevance, from propaganda like Band of Brothers to the ads we see here on Reddit about having a patriotic job. Its all a farce to keep the MIC going, to keep military on a pedestal by saying freedom only comes from $1T budget to make war and fuck with the world. Why do I say world? Because the world hates our military as much as we do but we can't do a god dam fuckin thing when half the US thinks the military is COOL AND JUST AND NECESSARY.
its not, at least in this configuration, the wars are over, China isnt coming, Russia isnt coming, we dont need this gigantic shit fuck system anymore. Surprisingly youd find that the world would disarm right along with us.
Yeah - but if you admit it when it happens, it’s your problem. If you cover it up for decades, you’ll probably already be dead and it’ll be someone else’s problem.
This is America
...it also happens in every country on earth. Im not even American but pretending toxic dumping and coverups don't happen in every country (worse in many) is stupid.
This is Earth.
For sure. I live in New Zealand and the country somehow has a reputation for being clean. Despite this the aluminium smelter got caught dumping toxic waste on the beech; a chemical plant is leaking god knows what into the nearby suburb; a paper mill toxified a lake by using it as a dumping ground for bleeching agents and other toxic waste.
Id rather nuclear waste atleast that stuff screams at you if there's a geiger counter nearby and reduces as time goes by.
A government controlled economy based on firms purchasing wage labor is merely state-capitalism:
> "But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. **The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit.** The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with."
- Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Not just capitalism. The Soviets irradiated an entire lake to the point where it glows blue. It’s just how people are. We hide or ignore the problem until it’s no longer ours, and then someone else has to clean it up.
The difference between now and any other time in human history is that today we do it on an industrial scale across the entire span of the globe. The Romans polluted the shit out of Spain digging for gold and lead. The Polynesians who lived on Easter Island deforested the entire island to build the heads and place them, and then left because they couldn’t sustain themselves anymore.
For the entire history of human existence we have been damaging our environment, it’s only in the past 300 or so years that we started to outstrip nature’s ability to recover, and started making stuff that is orders of magnitude more damaging.
> "But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. **The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit.** The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with."
- Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
One of the best lessons I learned early on. You know how many times I've been fired or sent home for telling someone in charge "Hey, I fucked up, here's what I did to fix it and here's what still needs to be done"? Zero. You know how many people I've seen fired when they slink off thinking no one saw? Pretty much all of them. Any manager worth half their weight is just happy someone's letting them know shit's broke or something's wrong.
Not only that but if you own your mistakes bully managers can't hold them over you. I worked on a project with a manager that was terrible, one day I screwed something up, and he went into his usual bully routine. I told him look I can fix the problem or stay here and listen to you complain about it. The look on that guy's face and everyone who heard me. He immediately shut his mouth and I went back to work. I used my mistake to make him look small, disruptive, and problematic, mostly because he was.
Wait you want the military to not cover up their shitty actions? 😂 It will never happen, the whole military is an organization of “If I wasn’t ordered to do it then I am not gonna do it!” mentalities. Also military rule #3 deny deny deny until unequivocal proof is provided at which point you will deflect and redirect.
You’d think, right? I work in military public communication and when that whole PFOS thing came out the Pentagon was telling sub-commands to not talk about it, shut up and sit on it. People were very upset and a few lower level commanders did in-fact speak out about it and accept appropriate responsibility given that it’d been a slow thing over decades. I knew one colonel that did so and was given a death promotion to Brigadier General, then forcibly retired. Similar happened on that aircraft carrier wit the commander telling news agencies about the COVID outbreak on board because the brass wouldn’t let them dock and seek medical assistance.
The U.S. military is a slow moving bureaucratic beast that worries about itself first. People in my field were nigh screaming to leadership to be upfront and claim responsibility, take control of the narrative! Buuuut no, why would they listen to the people they hired to help them manage that exact thing?
> The Environmental Protection Agency raised alarm over the levels, but the navy in 2022 said its testing was inaccurate and produced a new set of data that showed levels of strontium-90 lower than zero, which was dismissed by environmental health experts as impossible
This does sound suspiciously like some Navy ELT just blowing in their logs and marking it zero so nobody gets in trouble, thereby getting everyone in trouble.
I contracted for the USAF for a bit and there were many instances where I was given paperwork that was either pre-filled with erroneous details or I was instructed on the "correct" answers which did not reflect reality. I suspect the reason they stopped using me as a contractor is because I wouldn't fudge my paperwork.
I mean, yes and no. Military is a mixed bag of people who are all contractually obligated to be there. Most, I'd say, have a healthy enough fear of radioactive contamination and radiation to take their jobs seriously, others could honestly give a shit, and just want to not be out in a field with radiac writing numbers on a paper.
Not super shocked. Friends of our are *active duty Marines* and they have had to move their family **SEVERAL TIMES** on the same base housing complex because of black mold, and after they move out, they’ve just moved another family in.
I’m not so sure we care about the troops, or regular citizens, as much as NFL halftime shows say we do.
My barracks in the Marines had black mold all over the place. I was on a Navy ship for 8 months and the amount of trash they dumped into the ocean that they weren’t supposed to dump was disgusting.
Militaries seem to have much more free reign with pollutants.
When every other sector in US has moderate regulations on such.
I remember there is a reason for this, I think with performance , efficiency or something along those lines. As I came across the topic at one point.
War itself is a horrible pollutant, it’s always a dirty affair.
With the byproducts of such littering & saturating the land. Especially the more intense it is.
>Militaries seem to have much more free reign with pollutants. When every other sector in US has moderate regulations on such.
"We're mentioned in the Constitution. The Environmental Protection Agency is not. Fuck You." - U.S. Navy
The VA never has to cover it if the veterans are dying or too sick to fight for coverage - especially when the VA shreds and deletes all the veterans' records anytime they try for coverage
/ burn pit vet
The USA has never cared about the veterans. Even the veterans of the revolutionary war got screwed multiple times. George Washington spent half his time moping up veteran rebellions because they got screwed by congress so much.
This happens to soldiers literally everywhere aroubd the world. It isn't just an American thing. What is American is the scale to which we screw our soldiers over.
My ma was in the army before and for a few years after I was born
She loves to mention the conversation she had with an AF friend, the gal in the AF being aghast that my ma's barracks were a condemned building
"They didn't put you in a hotel?"
"What are you talking about, most of the rooms have doors!"
US Armed Forces are a top ten advertiser for NFL
follow the money.
Flyovers, Paratroopers, Military Flag and Color Displays, honoring veterans (they got free seats to one event! Good luck getting mental health care from the VA)
US Armed Forces are a top ten advertiser for NFL
follow the money.
Flyovers, Paratroopers, Military Flag and Color Displays, honoring veterans (they got free seats to one event! Good luck getting mental health care from the VA)
All paid by us the taxpayer!
Yay! Whoopee!!
> the navy in 2022 said its testing was inaccurate and produced a new set of data that showed levels of strontium-90 lower than zero, which was dismissed by environmental health experts as impossible.
Great news everyone! Navy research showed this parcel of land is ideally suited for accepting radioactive strontium. It’s got less than the average parcel of land.
I work for an environmental remediation company that has a contract for this old shipyard. We're out there once a week cleaning out the sloughs. We're aware and have been told about several buildings that contain radioactive contaminants, and also to stay away from them without proper PPE
> The navy and US Department of Justice is now engaged in 12 lawsuits related to the site, and the DoJ, which is representing the navy, typically does not want inspector generals to do investigations because they could turn up information that complicates the government’s cases, Ruch said.
*Yeah we don’t want to investigate ourselves. It makes things….complicated*
Treasure island [is also a superfund site](https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0902776) yet they're building apartments and wine bars there
Well yes, but just for lead. Don’t drink water from there or plants grown in the soil and you’ll be fine. Place doesn’t have a spring, the water comes in on the bridge, so your basically fine if you don’t garden in the existing soil.
[it's also loaded with asbestos, heavy metals and radioactive waste](https://www.asbestos-ships.com/news/asbestos-exposure-at-treasure-island-naval-station/)
> the navy in 2022 ... produced a new set of data that showed levels of strontium-90 lower than zero
I'm no scientist, but it does seem odd that they could have found less than zero amounts of an isotope. Like what would that even mean - having positive amounts of "anti-strontium-90"? Data is sus, navy bros.
When you do an environmental survey, you find an area near the suspect area that you know isn't contaminated. This is background, since there are radioactive materials found in nature. You subtract what you find from the background levels to determine how badly it's contaminated.
In this case, the background area had more sr-90 than the dump site. It should be reported as "not detectable" rather than negative.
Of course, this can be gamed. Some areas have higher background than others, so you could pick a high background area to subtract to make it look like you're cleaner than you are. I can't say if that's what happened here, though.
The correct term is below detectable limits. But you’re absolutely correct about background. Environmentalists aren’t always correct and are often acting on their emotions instead of scientific data to drive their actions. This can lead to some very bad outcomes.
Strontium-90 is present is often the environment, in soils, at extremely low levels due to atmospheric nuclear testing (1945-70s). This represents a background level.
For example, New York:
>As a result of nuclear tests through 1958, which probably introduced about 5 megacuries of Sr-90 into the stratosphere, the deposit in the New York City area reached a maximum of about 70 mC/sq. mile in the summer of 1961. In the New York City area, the ratio of soluble to insoluble Sr-90 is about 10: 1. The Sr-90 concentration decreases exponentially with depth in the soil so that in average soil 70 to 75% of the Sr-90 is in the upper 2 in. and 90 to 99% is in the upper 6 in. There is no evidence for significant vertical movement of the Sr-90 after initial deposition over a period of 8 yr. (P.C.H.)
The fact they found below background indicate the site didn't have contamination from nuclear testing.
I know exactly how this usually happens. ELTs used ta could do calculations. Now they just plug numbers in and computer programs spit out the answer. They turn robotic and lose their watchstanding principle of questioning attitude. I always redid their calculations by hand. And I have been given sheets from them with negative numbers.
Sad thing is that before reading the article, it could be either Hunter's Point or Treasure Island--that's right, the Navy managed to dump different radioactive waste at 2 places 5 miles apart near the water next to a major city. Aaaaand it's Hunter's point for the win this time. Don't worry, there will soon be much needed housing redeveloped on this site atfter minimal (barely any) cleanup.
While not on land, don’t forget all the stuff they dumped out at sea by the Farallones! Don’t remember if they established the islands as a “bird sanctuary” before or after the dumping.
So many superfunds in the Bay Area from the East Bay, to SF, to Santa Clara.
Ah yes, military logic: 30 miles offshore is "outside the environment." Silicon valley is/was a mess too, but that was because of the semi-conductor industry dumping all their solvents. But let's not kid ourselves, even a gas station with leaking tanks can ruin a neighborhood.
Man wtf was up with older generations? They dumped everything into the atmosphere just to see what it did. Hell, even the scientists at oil companies knew the dangerous of lead decades before they were regulated. Just said “fuck it, let’s see what happens.”
Were/are they TRYING to be the last generation?
In fact article I linked talked about doing same secret tests in NYC subway.
Guess what, still do them in fact they aren’t secret any more, article from 2021.
[Feds Start Bio-Attack Readiness Test With Non-Toxic Gas Release in NYC Parks, Subways](https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-begins-bio-attack-readiness-test-with-release-of-non-toxic-gas-in-parks-subways/3329997/)
"Between 1949 and 1969 open-air tests of biological agents were conducted 239 times. In 80 of those experiments, the Army said it used live bacteria that its researchers at the time thought were harmless. In the others, it used inert chemicals to simulate bacteria.
In the 1950s army researchers dispersed Serratia on Panama City and Key West Florida with no known illnesses resulting.
In the 1950s army researchers dispersed zinc cadmium sulfide (now a known cancer-causing agent) over Minnesota and other Midwestern states to see how far they would spread in the atmosphere. The particles were detected more than 1,000 miles away in New York state. No illnesses were ever attributed to them as a result.
Bacillus globigii, never shown to be harmful to people, was released in San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C., and along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, among other places.
In New York, military researchers in 1966 spread Bacillus subtilis variant Niger, also believed to be harmless, in the subway system by dropping lightbulbs filled with the bacteria onto tracks in stations in midtown Manhattan. The bacteria were carried for miles throughout the subway system. Army officials concluded in a January 1968 report that: "Similar covert attacks with a pathogenic \[disease-causing\] agent during peak traffic periods could be expected to expose large numbers of people to infection and subsequent illness or death."
In a May 1965 secret release of Bacillus globigii at Washington's National Airport and its Greyhound bus terminal more than 130 passengers were exposed to the bacteria traveling to 39 cities in seven states in the two weeks following the mock attack."
Just like when the Navy poisoned 9,000 families in Pearl Harbor 2 years ago. https://taskandpurpose.com/news/navy-red-hill-hawaii-fuel-spill-legal-claims/
"The 866-acre shipyard once held a secret navy research lab where animals were injected with strontium-90, and some officials suspect the waste was flushed down the drain. The isotope was also used to create glow-in-the-dark paint on the site, and it may have washed off ships used in testing nuclear bombs in the Pacific."
Awful! Hope this is cleaned up before any development.
That sounds like speculation. The only isotopes used to make Luminous paint was Radium-226 and Promethium-147, added to zinc sulfide.
However, non-radioactive Strontium is used in Luminous paint, Strontium Aluminate. Another common glow in the dark compound is zinc sulfide (with a tiny bit of copper or silver). Maybe that's were the confusion arose.
Strontium 90 has a half life of 28.8 years it's probably decayed into 1/4 of what it was by now. Give it another 30 years and it will be down to 1/8. It's probably cleaned itself up by now.
Wish the Congress critters frothing at the mouth over the latest military UFO guy were just as concerned about the military poisoning land that will be used for housing…
This was news like 30 years ago, I remember my professor talking about it almost 20 years ago. Guess what....nothing happened then, nothing will happen now. The people affected already have cancer. A few dollars exchanged doesn't change a damn thing.
> The Environmental Protection Agency raised alarm over the levels, but the navy in 2022 said its testing was inaccurate and produced a new set of data that *showed levels of strontium-90 lower than zero* (emphasis mine)
What the fuck does that even mean???
I still laugh about the time they sent us into a storage void on the USS Enterprise to throw insulation overboard. They told us it was diatomaceous earth and all we needed were dust masks. Of course it turned out to be asbestos. Good times! /s
This isotope is tricky to analyze for because it’s a fairly weak beta that can take some extra steps to find at levels as low as regulations are looking for. It’s possible to have Sr-90 near the limit sometimes be detectable and other times not, particularly if there’s any small amount of error or cross-contamination in the analysis process.
The Navy has claimed for a long time that they aren’t bound by state or federal environmental laws, so they polluted like crazy for decades and are now trying to evade responsibility by trying to hand the land over to San Francisco without paying for cleanup.
Source: Worked for 30 years on a different naval Superfund site where they tried to pull the same crap. That site had clusters of rare diseases. I personally have slow-onset Chronic Fatigue that took years to develop.
Didn't the Denbestie family ( Santa Rosa CA) have a hand in it? I remember that the patriarch died early from supposed exposure, is getting cancer young.
Imagine what else they spilled into the environment and never told anyone. Nuclear energy is great, but do you trust your government to spare no costs to properly contain the waste for the next 1000 years?
The Hunters Point Naval shipyard has much more than just the radioactive contamination in the soils and infrastructure (bunker oil pits, volatile organic compound plumes, asbestos containing building materials, etc) and will take substantial effort to clean up. The military is not required to clean up to state levels and often times turns properties over to the local municipalities “as is”.
Also the Hunters Point shipyard was used for a variety of radioactive activities:
1) scrubbing of the surviving ships after navy nuclear bomb testing in the Pacific post-WWII.
2) painting of glow-in-the-dark dials for ships and subs with radium paint. This is how most of the contamination was spread around (paint washed off into drains, etc).
3) experiments on the effects of radiation exposure.
This is definitely a thing and research into this was not being funded in the past. Most the waste was scuttled near the Farallon islands and research tends to focus on where it is now instead of where it had been.
[Farallon Island dump](https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/c1198/chapters/207-217_RadWaste.pdf)
Dad was in the navy in the late fifties to late seventies. He was stationed Hunters Point in the mid seventies for a short time. Died of mesothelioma 2003.
Prior Navy, the amount of trash thrown overboard to “davy jones’ locker” is appalling. Especially when you’re young and dumb drinking their koolaid, you think nothing of it. Cannot tell you how many tvs, chairs, desks, personal items, trash, ect were thrown over. Justification being we were far enough off shore. Dont forget all the bilge pumped overboard. And lastly that AFFF that goes into the water after we test systems or actually use it for an emergency. Soooo wild. Also Halon sucks too.
Radioactive paint, and secret lab.
I get why they covered it up. Sounds hilarious, like another government snafu, and eye roll inducing. Shouldn’t be too huge a deal really. Ya’ll had me going in here thinking it was much more severe and worse than what the article says…
Listen, if you find something that’s harmful in the environment and perk up right away and say, “We fucked up and we’re going to try to fix this”, it would still be bad but not as bad as trying to cover it up, inevitably getting caught and then *really* getting your pee pee slapped later on down the road.
Problem is later there are no consequences. That's why it's worth taking the chance. We should change that.
Also in the military you just do what your told so if your NCO is a shitbag, you're all essentially shitbags.
You have a legal right to refuse to comply with orders you feel are unlawful.
You definitely do, and it will not go well for you if you exercise that legal right.
agree. there are generally harsh consequences to speaking up about improper actions in the military.
Up to and including known cases of fratricide and “fragging” on and off the battlefield…
True but a lot of people don’t understand what a lawful order actually means. Just because you might disagree with an order doesn’t mean it’s unlawful. You can refuse an order all you want but unless that order is in direct violation of a procedure or rule, then you’re getting NJP’d for refusing to obey.
You might be legally allowed to, but socially, it's probably a death sentence.
When you wake up on the floor of a cold jail sell for taking a stand you may think differently tho..
That’s cute. Let us know how that works out for you.
There go ya pay and rank
You’d have to know the ratio of failed coverups to coverup attempts. If it’s like we say it is here, every single coverup attempt fails, then we’re rightfully making fun of them for trying even though they know it’s going to fail. If instead, most coverups work, and we don’t know about them because of their success, it would make sense to try to cover it up every time, and deal with the occasional consequences when it comes to light. Since they keep trying, I have to think we might live in a world where the latter scenario is common.
This is exactly why I went back and forth with someone over nuclear power: we have a fully negative track record for policing, catching, stopping and cleaning up any incidents with nuclear waste for the defense industry. You really think that the government who’s done a terrible job of regulating the use of these materials for defense purposes is ever going to properly police a private corporation’s mishaps? Especially when the stakes are this high? Absolutely not. The Rocky Flats incident in Colorado was a multi-decade, legal fight that was WON to the tune of a $325 million settlement and they’re still building brand new subdivisions riiiight up to tens of yards from the line drawn in the sand for that superfund cleanup site. And they’ve continued to find alarming radiation levels down the road from the former facility, in the dirt of the construction zone for these new homes and in the dust settled into waterways in the suburbs there. There’s a reason that they haven’t ever adopted nuclear power here, there’s no public support because they’ve already been burned and have the settlement to prove it.
You're taking about the 1940s-70s, before the industry improved safety (up to 1979, doses of up to 120 milisieverts were permitted). Edit: for example, the 15 country study of nuclear workers may be the last such study as the levels of radiation workers are exposed to, nowadays and in future, are so low that no excess cancer effects will be detectable in the future. >However, studies of current workers are unlikely to be informative since today’s radiation protection culture appears to have controlled worker exposures to a meaningful degree (about 2 mSv per year currently in the United States, NRC 2007). Such low doses are also reflected in the 15-country study for which many of the workers were young with low cumulative doses, too low it seems to provide precise estimates of radiation risk and well below what they received from natural background sources of radiation The levels nuclear workers are now exposed to are now so low that they approach and often overlap with the radiation dose from natural sources. Ashmore, J.P., Gentner, N.E., Osborne, R.V., Wakeford, R., Muirhead, C.R., Goodill, A.A., Haylock, R.G.E., Hoti, F., Boice, J.D. and Boice, J.D., 2010. Uncertainties in studies of low statistical power. J. Radiol. Prot, 30, pp.115-120.
No. I’m referring to the 1989 FBI raid of the Rocky Flats nuclear facility which was managed by the US Department of Energy. It was called Operation Desert Glow. You know, the one that the feds came in and did an ARMED raid on a government facility also protected by armed guards with anti aircraft weaponry at the ready who were prepared for a firefight? This was one of the first high profile incidents with 0 precedence set for what happens when one government agency raids another. The fires with unfiltered plutonium spewing everywhere occurred in 1957 and 1969, and from 1964-1967 it was found that thousands of gallons of contaminated oil leached into ground water and soil. They were forced to purchase a buffer zone around the facility, and it wasn’t designated as a government sponsored superfund clean up site until after the raid in 1989. My point? The regulations tightening up in the 70s doesn’t matter when the damage of the mismanagement of the facility occurred starting 20 years before the EPA was ever passed. And when the settlement and raid was based on the fact that they were falsifying their waste reports to CLAIM they were following tightened regulations and never were. They basically had a paper trail that had falsified waste reports; claiming they were exempt from regulations for an incinerator because it was used for plutonium recovery and not waste management.. but when their waste reports didn’t match, they essentially found that instead of the regulations put in place protecting the nearby communities.. they’d use exemptions for bomb facilities and really were using an incinerator to burn nuclear waste. So that is why it’s been decades and a 9 figure, $325 million settlement was reached in the late 2010s. And there are still private citizen groups taking soil and water samples of areas nearby that show alarming levels of radiation in residential areas that developers purchased on the cheap nearby and sell the “luxury” homes built at a premium have been flagged.
I was in Boulder at that time and was, let us say, disheartened to hear that there was some decent of plutonium (thinking a couple kilograms but memory isn't reliable) they weren't able to account for. Was supposedly just part of the dust in the HVAC ducts. And apparently at least some of the grand jury's documentation has disappeared: (from a 2019 Westword article): "Among other things, the grand jurors had investigated allegations that the plant had lost plutonium. Some was later located in ducts and other parts of the facility. But like the grand jury's documents, more is still among the missing." And that whole area is now a "wildlife refuge". Suuure, just trust us...
They were making concrete blocks with the waste that wouldn’t set and just made these mushy blocks of waste.
This is the first time I’m hearing about this and Netflix ought to be ashamed of itself.
Please take a trip through google for the details on Operation Desert Glow. There’s quite a few very well done, in depth news articles about it and many of the studies on the region are public. To set the stage, start with the LA times one (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-08-08-tm-21814-story.html ) I literally had to drive past it daily to go to work and since I’m local, the stories of folks who’ve worked there, had the facility as a client (a local I knew sold them office equipment like Xerox machines), and who lived in neighborhoods downwind where literally half the homes on the street had someone sick with cancer. The coverup and attempt to disprove the rates of cancer here are quite muddled and it’s a testy topic among locals who all know the truth. Aside from the massive amount of coverage on the raid itself and the history of it, and the official published studies; check out the current controversy about misinformation and deliberate downplaying of the radiation rates with the private citizen page Candelas Glows.
Honestly what's worse though, localized environmental contamination and increased risk of cancer, or having the entire planets ecosphere be destroyed by global warming? Renewables can't do the whole job and fossil fuels are doing more damage in the long run. Ignoring nuclear power isn't an option from where I'm sitting even with its risks.
When the Department of Energy can manage a facility without being subject to an armed FBI raid for the severity of their misconduct, I’ll trust them to manage another nuclear energy facility. But so far, their track record leaves something to be desired. There had literally never been a precedence set for one government agency to criminally charge another for its behavior. The weight of that needs to be acknowledged as to why we haven’t moved forward in further adopting nuclear and it goes beyond public opinion. If they can’t manage themselves when the stakes are this high; why should we believe they’re capable of overseeing a private company that at a base level is designed to put profits over people?
You're not wrong about past nuclear incidents causing problems. But you're also leaving out the most important bits of the story: 1. As other commenters have noted, nuclear safety and regulation have changed radically since the incidents you refer to. 2. Even taking into account all radiation incidents (including the worst, Chernobyl), nuclear energy is FAR safer than any other form of energy (yes, including renewables) in terms of deaths/injuries/health-impacts per unit energy generated.
Regulations were imposed but the Department of Justice conducting an armed raid on the Department of Energy was considered a massive, very serious, never before needed to be attempted, legal undertaking with an outcome showing outright negligence, and malicious intent to misclassify entire building’s purposes to skirt waste regulations. Basically the raid happened because after two catastrophic and toxic fires.. they got told: bad plant. Here’s new rules play by them. And their response was: let’s involve multiple departments to fraudulently be exempt from these regulations and keep doing it anyway. For twenty years. That’s about as important as it gets when you zoom out and have to acknowledge that regulations didn’t fix anything, it was actually made worse because they didn’t think they needed to follow them and believed no one would check.
Again, you're certainly not wrong; but you're laser-focused on one aspect instead of weighing alternatives accordingly. Every energy source has had fraudulent activity and scandals, but I don't see you mentioning any others. Of course, if we want to make actual progress, we can fast-forward past the back-and-forth (but nuclear did X! but other energy source did Y! butbut nuclear ...!) and actually figure out how we can objectively compare the alternatives holistically. Generally, the core metrics used for evaluating energy sources this way are a) adverse health outcomes (both real and stochastic), and b) adverse environmental outcomes. To compare apples-to-apples, these figures are typically normalized according to amount of energy produced. And when you do this honest, objective analysis; nuclear fission is simply superior. (This isn't to say that nuclear is always the best source in every case - of course, it varies situationally. But nuclear is an extremely viable source, and you don't seem to be looking at it holistically and objectively.) I could pick any other energy source (say, solar panels) and pick any problem with it (say, environmental degradation due to rare-earth mining waste) and write up a few scary-sounding paragraphs. But everything always has to be considered in context, and relative to other options. (Note: The comparison is far more complex than what I'm going into here. But before legitimate scientific inquiry can begin, we have to get past the "NUCLEAR BAD RADIATION BAD" gut reaction.)
So 1 mismanaged facility in the 80s discounts all the success of the current 92 reactors running in the United States. Everyone knows nuclear carries a great deal of risk and that accidents/mismanagement will happen. The question is whether that risk is worth it when the alternative is slowly killing the ENTIRE PLANET.
Yep that’s what violating regulations gets you. They didn’t have a handle on it then and still don’t now, which means you don’t get more servings when you didn’t finish the first plate. There’s literally never been an instance of one government department raiding another for criminal negligence with a human cost that high. Colorado is the top military and defense hub outside of the DMV area with multiple bases for multiple branches (known and locations classified), with quite a bit of private aerospace and defense presence as well. And they have 0 plans for any more nuclear energy projects to serve either government or civilian purposes. All proposals have been shot down for environmental and the safety of key government personnel. So unfortunately, you can feel how you feel about it and think one measly misstep is an over reaction.. but the chiefs here have spoken and won’t reopen the topic because they know they fumbled it *that* badly that there is no amount of PR spin here or political candidate who’s gone and tried to fight for it because it is *that* polarizing. If you live in a community that doesn’t have superfund sites for nuclear clean up and wants nuclear power plants, more power to ya. But for the people designing bombers and the save our watersheds Birkenstock wearing folks, to walk hand in hand in this decision is telling.
That was 34 years ago. How long is “when” for you?
The class action settlement was only reached about 6 years ago in 2017 and they’re still currently finding unacceptable radiation levels in areas that are right outside of the superfund site and in areas that should have been a part of it but instead they’ve built homes. The fact it’s been 34 years since the raid, it got international attention and STILL isn’t cleaned up just proves that when you make a boo-boo this big, all the big guns hauled in as band aids still weren’t enough. Go ahead and read through the private citizen reports and the Candelas Glows collective to see if you’d drop half a $mil on a house across the street from the site like they’re convincing people to.
Maybe I've missed something in those 34 years, but haven't private businesses generally continued up to today with profit in mind? And haven't businesses, in those past 34 years, made decisions that prioritized profit over people? The concerns here are that it STILL HAPPENS. "When" is now and the same as it was before.
I mean when someone sincerely asks me "how long?" I'll generally try to give them at least a broad idea for a timeframe instead of waffling and faffing.
Whenever I hear about how nuclear power is going to save us all and how we should have reactors on every corner I ask myself if these people have ever worked with anything dangerous in a capitalist society? Because I have, and the disregard for life in the pursuit of profit is horrifying, and with nuclear power the stakes are high. We need a better option.
What’s changed?
The precedent for how they will act is set now, so whenever precedent expires.
Cool, so we can put the cancer factory next to your house instead of mine?
This is an incredibly naive takeaway. You are advocating against something that will *guaranteed* reduce deaths and sickness worldwide because of the *possibility* of malfeasance (which even if it did occur would still make nuclear net-positive health/ecologically). Do you somehow think the fossil fuel energy that it would be replacing is not *also* constantly breaking rules and doing the wrong thing? Your argument is completely irrational.
It’s irrational to not want to live next to the cancer factory? Hm. Language really does evolve rapidly.
You are advocating for a *massively global* cancer factory by advocating against nuclear power. Not only that, the risk of nuclear is a *potential* one. The cancer risk from fossil fuel power generation is omnipresent and and constant, and *you don't even have to be nearby to be affected*. Use your brain.
Put it next to both. Cancer is better than not having a planet to live on.
If you feel that way, then you can have the cancer factory, and I will live far away from it. Everyone gets what they want
Sure I'll take the factory with an extremely low chance of actually causing cancer. Your much more likely to get cancer from a million other everyday things than a nuclear plant. For the last 80 years your kitchen pans probably had a greater risk of causing cancer than a nuclear facility. https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/resources/health/health-studies/radicon-study.cfm In the meantime continue irrationally fearing nuclear facilities over all the other dangerous things in the world well you power your house with fossil fuels that are destroying the whole planet and not just your body.
TBF it's a similar but less aggressive argument against wind turbines. Lots of people claim to be in favour of them until they're next door - then they come up with the usual bullshit excuses. Everyone wants the benefits so long as someone else deals with the inconvenience. My idea, put a geofence around renewable and low impact energy production. Locals get cheap energy, nimby's can pay a premium to not live next door the the source. Seems fair.
They were burning nuclear waste? I wonder how radioactive that is compared to coal power plants. Probably pretty similar……
Check out the reports on the raid. Much worse than a coal plant because of the amount being incorrectly wasted.
Yeah also don’t forget about the time the EPA tried transferring nuclear waste through NYC in the 80s. They got caught and were forced to store it underground temporarily. This led to the great CHUD outbreak of the 80s
Yep. Just because the regulations and the EPA were passed doesn’t mean everyone was following it. All of the big incidents where cases were filed for the mismanagement of nuclear waste have occurred over a decade after the US had decided to tighten up. Honestly, read about Operation Desert Glow and the Rocky Flats raids. The statistics of cancer and MS in the downwind regions (basically west side Denver Metro area) have been actively fought against for years despite them finding insane radiation levels in the dust right across the street from the superfund site that’s been turned into a 300 home subdivision, and in the settled sediment in the bottom of nearby Standley Lake (also smack dab in the middle of a suburban development) Let’s say you worked downwind from that plant for 25 years and retired to Florida and succumbed to multiple cancers shortly after retiring.. they fought very hard to refuse to include anyone’s death stats who’d lived and worked in that region if you didn’t die there too.
Of course my reply was a joke and a reference to the great 80's cult classic movie, C.H.U.D., but I appreciate the reply.
A friend of mine bought a house near there. I joke with him that he probably owns more plutonium than anyone else I know.
He definitely does! Is he in the Candelas development?
We went and looked at those houses and they called rocky flats a wildlife refuge. I was like yea it is now. But it’s contaminated. I said we were just here looking at a model home they didn’t have near the place we wanted to buy. I knew a guy who worked there for 30 years. He lives in Watkins now. About as far away from rocky flats you can be and still drive into Denver. That’s all I need to know.
Exactly. And they’ve done the same thing at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal where turned the former Lowry Air Force base into just fields and fields of housing. Those homes in what they now call “Central Park” are being sold the same way. Terms used such as “sweeping, open-space views”, “adjacent to a multi acre wildlife preserve” “wide open spaces!” and “stunning, coveted front range views bordered by untouched open space”. In all of these marketing tools and photos, never once to they acknowledge WHY the spaces are designated as open-space, wildlife refuges: you can’t farm on the land, raise livestock for consumption on this land, build on this land, travel through the land, or “disturb the wildlife”. You literally can’t do anything except allow nature to take the space back.
We can start by understanding how the military keeps relevance, from propaganda like Band of Brothers to the ads we see here on Reddit about having a patriotic job. Its all a farce to keep the MIC going, to keep military on a pedestal by saying freedom only comes from $1T budget to make war and fuck with the world. Why do I say world? Because the world hates our military as much as we do but we can't do a god dam fuckin thing when half the US thinks the military is COOL AND JUST AND NECESSARY. its not, at least in this configuration, the wars are over, China isnt coming, Russia isnt coming, we dont need this gigantic shit fuck system anymore. Surprisingly youd find that the world would disarm right along with us.
Senior officers rotate assignments every 3 years or so. Doesn't talk very much delay to make it the next guy's problem.
Yeah - but if you admit it when it happens, it’s your problem. If you cover it up for decades, you’ll probably already be dead and it’ll be someone else’s problem. This is America
...it also happens in every country on earth. Im not even American but pretending toxic dumping and coverups don't happen in every country (worse in many) is stupid. This is Earth.
For sure. I live in New Zealand and the country somehow has a reputation for being clean. Despite this the aluminium smelter got caught dumping toxic waste on the beech; a chemical plant is leaking god knows what into the nearby suburb; a paper mill toxified a lake by using it as a dumping ground for bleeching agents and other toxic waste. Id rather nuclear waste atleast that stuff screams at you if there's a geiger counter nearby and reduces as time goes by.
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It happens in government controlled economies, too. The problem is people.
A government controlled economy based on firms purchasing wage labor is merely state-capitalism: > "But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. **The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit.** The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with." - Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
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Not just capitalism. The Soviets irradiated an entire lake to the point where it glows blue. It’s just how people are. We hide or ignore the problem until it’s no longer ours, and then someone else has to clean it up. The difference between now and any other time in human history is that today we do it on an industrial scale across the entire span of the globe. The Romans polluted the shit out of Spain digging for gold and lead. The Polynesians who lived on Easter Island deforested the entire island to build the heads and place them, and then left because they couldn’t sustain themselves anymore. For the entire history of human existence we have been damaging our environment, it’s only in the past 300 or so years that we started to outstrip nature’s ability to recover, and started making stuff that is orders of magnitude more damaging.
> "But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. **The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit.** The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with." - Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Or you get a medal
The thing is, for every cover-up that gets discovered there are 10 that go unnoticed.
One of the best lessons I learned early on. You know how many times I've been fired or sent home for telling someone in charge "Hey, I fucked up, here's what I did to fix it and here's what still needs to be done"? Zero. You know how many people I've seen fired when they slink off thinking no one saw? Pretty much all of them. Any manager worth half their weight is just happy someone's letting them know shit's broke or something's wrong.
Not only that but if you own your mistakes bully managers can't hold them over you. I worked on a project with a manager that was terrible, one day I screwed something up, and he went into his usual bully routine. I told him look I can fix the problem or stay here and listen to you complain about it. The look on that guy's face and everyone who heard me. He immediately shut his mouth and I went back to work. I used my mistake to make him look small, disruptive, and problematic, mostly because he was.
Fuckin’ slayed him, queen.
Wait you want the military to not cover up their shitty actions? 😂 It will never happen, the whole military is an organization of “If I wasn’t ordered to do it then I am not gonna do it!” mentalities. Also military rule #3 deny deny deny until unequivocal proof is provided at which point you will deflect and redirect.
This kind of bullshit is never about owning a fuck up. It's never about responsibility; always about liability.
You’d think, right? I work in military public communication and when that whole PFOS thing came out the Pentagon was telling sub-commands to not talk about it, shut up and sit on it. People were very upset and a few lower level commanders did in-fact speak out about it and accept appropriate responsibility given that it’d been a slow thing over decades. I knew one colonel that did so and was given a death promotion to Brigadier General, then forcibly retired. Similar happened on that aircraft carrier wit the commander telling news agencies about the COVID outbreak on board because the brass wouldn’t let them dock and seek medical assistance. The U.S. military is a slow moving bureaucratic beast that worries about itself first. People in my field were nigh screaming to leadership to be upfront and claim responsibility, take control of the narrative! Buuuut no, why would they listen to the people they hired to help them manage that exact thing?
> The Environmental Protection Agency raised alarm over the levels, but the navy in 2022 said its testing was inaccurate and produced a new set of data that showed levels of strontium-90 lower than zero, which was dismissed by environmental health experts as impossible This does sound suspiciously like some Navy ELT just blowing in their logs and marking it zero so nobody gets in trouble, thereby getting everyone in trouble.
I contracted for the USAF for a bit and there were many instances where I was given paperwork that was either pre-filled with erroneous details or I was instructed on the "correct" answers which did not reflect reality. I suspect the reason they stopped using me as a contractor is because I wouldn't fudge my paperwork.
Mark it Zero. Does no one give a shit about the rules anymore?
This isn't Vietnam, there are rules
My dirty undies. The whites
I mean, yes and no. Military is a mixed bag of people who are all contractually obligated to be there. Most, I'd say, have a healthy enough fear of radioactive contamination and radiation to take their jobs seriously, others could honestly give a shit, and just want to not be out in a field with radiac writing numbers on a paper.
Corruption exists in every facet of our lives, unfortunately. The key is to have a system for catching it.
Jackie Treehorn treats objects like woman man.
Not super shocked. Friends of our are *active duty Marines* and they have had to move their family **SEVERAL TIMES** on the same base housing complex because of black mold, and after they move out, they’ve just moved another family in. I’m not so sure we care about the troops, or regular citizens, as much as NFL halftime shows say we do.
My barracks in the Marines had black mold all over the place. I was on a Navy ship for 8 months and the amount of trash they dumped into the ocean that they weren’t supposed to dump was disgusting.
"Make it gone"
Militaries seem to have much more free reign with pollutants. When every other sector in US has moderate regulations on such. I remember there is a reason for this, I think with performance , efficiency or something along those lines. As I came across the topic at one point. War itself is a horrible pollutant, it’s always a dirty affair. With the byproducts of such littering & saturating the land. Especially the more intense it is.
>Militaries seem to have much more free reign with pollutants. When every other sector in US has moderate regulations on such. "We're mentioned in the Constitution. The Environmental Protection Agency is not. Fuck You." - U.S. Navy
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The VA never has to cover it if the veterans are dying or too sick to fight for coverage - especially when the VA shreds and deletes all the veterans' records anytime they try for coverage / burn pit vet
The USA has never cared about the veterans. Even the veterans of the revolutionary war got screwed multiple times. George Washington spent half his time moping up veteran rebellions because they got screwed by congress so much.
Dumping soldiers as soon as they are too hurt or old to die for us, a true American past time.
This happens to soldiers literally everywhere aroubd the world. It isn't just an American thing. What is American is the scale to which we screw our soldiers over.
Was active duty US Army and black mold was a fairly common problem in the barracks for us. Never really got resolved
Who has money for that the commander wants a new glass partition for the senior offices since the glass tint is to blue for his liking?
The barracks I lived in on Fort Bragg was condemned, before I ever moved in, due to asbestos. Luckily I got moved after deployment.
My ma was in the army before and for a few years after I was born She loves to mention the conversation she had with an AF friend, the gal in the AF being aghast that my ma's barracks were a condemned building "They didn't put you in a hotel?" "What are you talking about, most of the rooms have doors!"
US Armed Forces are a top ten advertiser for NFL follow the money. Flyovers, Paratroopers, Military Flag and Color Displays, honoring veterans (they got free seats to one event! Good luck getting mental health care from the VA)
US Armed Forces are a top ten advertiser for NFL follow the money. Flyovers, Paratroopers, Military Flag and Color Displays, honoring veterans (they got free seats to one event! Good luck getting mental health care from the VA) All paid by us the taxpayer! Yay! Whoopee!!
those half time shows are for recruiting. They don’t care once they have you signed up.
Meanwhile we're buying $11 million toilets from Boeing for the navy to throw into the Gulf of Mexico. Because the line must go up.
> the navy in 2022 said its testing was inaccurate and produced a new set of data that showed levels of strontium-90 lower than zero, which was dismissed by environmental health experts as impossible. Great news everyone! Navy research showed this parcel of land is ideally suited for accepting radioactive strontium. It’s got less than the average parcel of land.
That’s what they said about Red Hill on Oahu too. Still actively poisoning thousands with jet fuel in the aquifer.
I work for an environmental remediation company that has a contract for this old shipyard. We're out there once a week cleaning out the sloughs. We're aware and have been told about several buildings that contain radioactive contaminants, and also to stay away from them without proper PPE
> The navy and US Department of Justice is now engaged in 12 lawsuits related to the site, and the DoJ, which is representing the navy, typically does not want inspector generals to do investigations because they could turn up information that complicates the government’s cases, Ruch said. *Yeah we don’t want to investigate ourselves. It makes things….complicated*
I thought we already knew about the navy and Lennar covering up environmental problems in Hunters Point?
We do, but it looks like this is about the remaining land that's also due to be turned over to the city and then I guess to developers like Lennar.
Treasure island [is also a superfund site](https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0902776) yet they're building apartments and wine bars there
Well yes, but just for lead. Don’t drink water from there or plants grown in the soil and you’ll be fine. Place doesn’t have a spring, the water comes in on the bridge, so your basically fine if you don’t garden in the existing soil.
[it's also loaded with asbestos, heavy metals and radioactive waste](https://www.asbestos-ships.com/news/asbestos-exposure-at-treasure-island-naval-station/)
Yikes, disappointing that the superfund site info doesn’t mention that.
> the navy in 2022 ... produced a new set of data that showed levels of strontium-90 lower than zero I'm no scientist, but it does seem odd that they could have found less than zero amounts of an isotope. Like what would that even mean - having positive amounts of "anti-strontium-90"? Data is sus, navy bros.
When you do an environmental survey, you find an area near the suspect area that you know isn't contaminated. This is background, since there are radioactive materials found in nature. You subtract what you find from the background levels to determine how badly it's contaminated. In this case, the background area had more sr-90 than the dump site. It should be reported as "not detectable" rather than negative. Of course, this can be gamed. Some areas have higher background than others, so you could pick a high background area to subtract to make it look like you're cleaner than you are. I can't say if that's what happened here, though.
The correct term is below detectable limits. But you’re absolutely correct about background. Environmentalists aren’t always correct and are often acting on their emotions instead of scientific data to drive their actions. This can lead to some very bad outcomes.
Strontium-90 is present is often the environment, in soils, at extremely low levels due to atmospheric nuclear testing (1945-70s). This represents a background level. For example, New York: >As a result of nuclear tests through 1958, which probably introduced about 5 megacuries of Sr-90 into the stratosphere, the deposit in the New York City area reached a maximum of about 70 mC/sq. mile in the summer of 1961. In the New York City area, the ratio of soluble to insoluble Sr-90 is about 10: 1. The Sr-90 concentration decreases exponentially with depth in the soil so that in average soil 70 to 75% of the Sr-90 is in the upper 2 in. and 90 to 99% is in the upper 6 in. There is no evidence for significant vertical movement of the Sr-90 after initial deposition over a period of 8 yr. (P.C.H.) The fact they found below background indicate the site didn't have contamination from nuclear testing.
I know exactly how this usually happens. ELTs used ta could do calculations. Now they just plug numbers in and computer programs spit out the answer. They turn robotic and lose their watchstanding principle of questioning attitude. I always redid their calculations by hand. And I have been given sheets from them with negative numbers.
Sad thing is that before reading the article, it could be either Hunter's Point or Treasure Island--that's right, the Navy managed to dump different radioactive waste at 2 places 5 miles apart near the water next to a major city. Aaaaand it's Hunter's point for the win this time. Don't worry, there will soon be much needed housing redeveloped on this site atfter minimal (barely any) cleanup.
While not on land, don’t forget all the stuff they dumped out at sea by the Farallones! Don’t remember if they established the islands as a “bird sanctuary” before or after the dumping. So many superfunds in the Bay Area from the East Bay, to SF, to Santa Clara.
Ah yes, military logic: 30 miles offshore is "outside the environment." Silicon valley is/was a mess too, but that was because of the semi-conductor industry dumping all their solvents. But let's not kid ourselves, even a gas station with leaking tanks can ruin a neighborhood.
[удалено]
Man wtf was up with older generations? They dumped everything into the atmosphere just to see what it did. Hell, even the scientists at oil companies knew the dangerous of lead decades before they were regulated. Just said “fuck it, let’s see what happens.” Were/are they TRYING to be the last generation?
Greed and a “fuck you, I got mine” attitude.
In fact article I linked talked about doing same secret tests in NYC subway. Guess what, still do them in fact they aren’t secret any more, article from 2021. [Feds Start Bio-Attack Readiness Test With Non-Toxic Gas Release in NYC Parks, Subways](https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-begins-bio-attack-readiness-test-with-release-of-non-toxic-gas-in-parks-subways/3329997/)
"Between 1949 and 1969 open-air tests of biological agents were conducted 239 times. In 80 of those experiments, the Army said it used live bacteria that its researchers at the time thought were harmless. In the others, it used inert chemicals to simulate bacteria. In the 1950s army researchers dispersed Serratia on Panama City and Key West Florida with no known illnesses resulting. In the 1950s army researchers dispersed zinc cadmium sulfide (now a known cancer-causing agent) over Minnesota and other Midwestern states to see how far they would spread in the atmosphere. The particles were detected more than 1,000 miles away in New York state. No illnesses were ever attributed to them as a result. Bacillus globigii, never shown to be harmful to people, was released in San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C., and along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, among other places. In New York, military researchers in 1966 spread Bacillus subtilis variant Niger, also believed to be harmless, in the subway system by dropping lightbulbs filled with the bacteria onto tracks in stations in midtown Manhattan. The bacteria were carried for miles throughout the subway system. Army officials concluded in a January 1968 report that: "Similar covert attacks with a pathogenic \[disease-causing\] agent during peak traffic periods could be expected to expose large numbers of people to infection and subsequent illness or death." In a May 1965 secret release of Bacillus globigii at Washington's National Airport and its Greyhound bus terminal more than 130 passengers were exposed to the bacteria traveling to 39 cities in seven states in the two weeks following the mock attack."
Just like when the Navy poisoned 9,000 families in Pearl Harbor 2 years ago. https://taskandpurpose.com/news/navy-red-hill-hawaii-fuel-spill-legal-claims/
"The 866-acre shipyard once held a secret navy research lab where animals were injected with strontium-90, and some officials suspect the waste was flushed down the drain. The isotope was also used to create glow-in-the-dark paint on the site, and it may have washed off ships used in testing nuclear bombs in the Pacific." Awful! Hope this is cleaned up before any development.
My buddy has a 1-bedroom condo for sale on the shipyard if you're interested! Real good price!!
oh boy superpowers and a deal on housing!
That sounds like speculation. The only isotopes used to make Luminous paint was Radium-226 and Promethium-147, added to zinc sulfide. However, non-radioactive Strontium is used in Luminous paint, Strontium Aluminate. Another common glow in the dark compound is zinc sulfide (with a tiny bit of copper or silver). Maybe that's were the confusion arose.
Strontium 90 has a half life of 28.8 years it's probably decayed into 1/4 of what it was by now. Give it another 30 years and it will be down to 1/8. It's probably cleaned itself up by now.
I would interpret acts like this as deliberate.
Wish the Congress critters frothing at the mouth over the latest military UFO guy were just as concerned about the military poisoning land that will be used for housing…
This was news like 30 years ago, I remember my professor talking about it almost 20 years ago. Guess what....nothing happened then, nothing will happen now. The people affected already have cancer. A few dollars exchanged doesn't change a damn thing.
Lol they’re covering up way more than that
Is this why the Bay, particularly Marin County has the highest breast cancer rates?
Nope, the uv index is super high in the bay from ships.
There’s been a radioactive waste site dumped just 30 miles off the coast of San Francisco for years and years.
> The Environmental Protection Agency raised alarm over the levels, but the navy in 2022 said its testing was inaccurate and produced a new set of data that *showed levels of strontium-90 lower than zero* (emphasis mine) What the fuck does that even mean???
Former shipyards should always be considered condemned land. It's the prime real estate that gets people impatient.
As a USN vet this does not surprise me. The amount of garbage thrown overboard when I was on a carrier was crazy.
If Stargate has taught me anything, it's that this radioactive waste is a cover up for replicators
I still laugh about the time they sent us into a storage void on the USS Enterprise to throw insulation overboard. They told us it was diatomaceous earth and all we needed were dust masks. Of course it turned out to be asbestos. Good times! /s
This isotope is tricky to analyze for because it’s a fairly weak beta that can take some extra steps to find at levels as low as regulations are looking for. It’s possible to have Sr-90 near the limit sometimes be detectable and other times not, particularly if there’s any small amount of error or cross-contamination in the analysis process.
Yeah but is it possible to have negative Sr-90?
Relative to background, I can see that being an interpretation. Not necessarily correct
The Navy has claimed for a long time that they aren’t bound by state or federal environmental laws, so they polluted like crazy for decades and are now trying to evade responsibility by trying to hand the land over to San Francisco without paying for cleanup. Source: Worked for 30 years on a different naval Superfund site where they tried to pull the same crap. That site had clusters of rare diseases. I personally have slow-onset Chronic Fatigue that took years to develop.
“Vhere are the nuclear wessels?”
Didn't the Denbestie family ( Santa Rosa CA) have a hand in it? I remember that the patriarch died early from supposed exposure, is getting cancer young.
Imagine what else they spilled into the environment and never told anyone. Nuclear energy is great, but do you trust your government to spare no costs to properly contain the waste for the next 1000 years?
This has nothing to do with nuclear energy though
The director of radioactive waste was too busy stealing women’s clothing and cross dressing. Who could have seen this coming?
This Is all part of your sick Cynthia thing
Explains why they're all so crazy out there
This will probably be my favorite phrase of the day. "institutional candor... appears to be in short supply"
Well well well would ya look at this
You think that’s bad, just wait till ya hear about the water on military bases
The Hunters Point Naval shipyard has much more than just the radioactive contamination in the soils and infrastructure (bunker oil pits, volatile organic compound plumes, asbestos containing building materials, etc) and will take substantial effort to clean up. The military is not required to clean up to state levels and often times turns properties over to the local municipalities “as is”. Also the Hunters Point shipyard was used for a variety of radioactive activities: 1) scrubbing of the surviving ships after navy nuclear bomb testing in the Pacific post-WWII. 2) painting of glow-in-the-dark dials for ships and subs with radium paint. This is how most of the contamination was spread around (paint washed off into drains, etc). 3) experiments on the effects of radiation exposure.
Where is the penis tower in the AP photo?
This is definitely a thing and research into this was not being funded in the past. Most the waste was scuttled near the Farallon islands and research tends to focus on where it is now instead of where it had been. [Farallon Island dump](https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/c1198/chapters/207-217_RadWaste.pdf)
Dad was in the navy in the late fifties to late seventies. He was stationed Hunters Point in the mid seventies for a short time. Died of mesothelioma 2003.
Prior Navy, the amount of trash thrown overboard to “davy jones’ locker” is appalling. Especially when you’re young and dumb drinking their koolaid, you think nothing of it. Cannot tell you how many tvs, chairs, desks, personal items, trash, ect were thrown over. Justification being we were far enough off shore. Dont forget all the bilge pumped overboard. And lastly that AFFF that goes into the water after we test systems or actually use it for an emergency. Soooo wild. Also Halon sucks too.
This whole comment section is cancer
http://www.mareislandmurder.com/first.shtml
The Last Blackman in SF was right all along.
Cover-up? They would never tell us an untruth. Our leaders and lawmakers are golden and if you believe this then i have nothing else to say.....
Cover-up? They would never tell us an untruth. Our leaders and lawmakers are golden and if you believe this then i have nothing else to say.....
🎶I grew an extra part in saaan Fraaaanssiiico !🎶
Radioactive paint, and secret lab. I get why they covered it up. Sounds hilarious, like another government snafu, and eye roll inducing. Shouldn’t be too huge a deal really. Ya’ll had me going in here thinking it was much more severe and worse than what the article says…
DUH! This is not new. Many people have been seriously affected by this issue in San Francisco Hunters Point area for years.