..this could be our Fukishima.. and much more..

Should you have decided not to read (or not all of it) Michael Lewis's brilliant article..  

"Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House"

I'm sharing this blog post with you, in hopes of changing your mind. 
Here below is just a briefly outlined facet of his insightful, very important piece. It is so much more than just about Hanford, on several different levels.. and maybe helps gets the world to understand and question what we need to know and do heading towards our very dubious future.

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The Hanford Site (here are pictures) is a mostly decommissioned nuclear production complex operated by the United States federal government on the Columbia River in the state of Washington.
The Hanford Site occupies 586 square miles —roughly equivalent to half of the total area of Rhode Island—within Benton County, Washington. Closed to the general public, it is a desert environment receiving under 10 inches of annual precipitation, covered mostly by shrub-steppe vegetation. The Columbia River flows along the site for approximately 50 miles, forming its northern and eastern boundary.

Established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project in Hanford, south-central Washington, the site was home to the B Reactor, the first full-scale plutonium production reactor in the world. During the Cold War, the project expanded to include nine nuclear reactors and five large plutonium processing complexes, which over almost a half-century produced plutonium for most of the more than 60,000+ weapons built for the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

The weapons production reactors were decommissioned at the end of the Cold War, and decades of manufacturing left behind 53 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste stored within 177 storage tanks, an additional 25 million cubic feet of solid radioactive waste, and 200 square miles of contaminated groundwater beneath the 
site.

“Nobody in the world has waste like ours”..  No one has so much strontium 90, which behaves a lot like calcium and lodges inside the bones of any living creatures it penetrates, basically forever. Along with chromium and tritium and carbon tetrachloride and iodine 129 and the other waste products of a plutonium factory, it is already present in Hanford’s groundwater.

In 2007, the Hanford site represented two-thirds of the nation's high-level radioactive waste by volume. Hanford is currently the most contaminated nuclear site in the U.S. 
Beneath Hanford is a massive underground glacier of radioactive sludge moving slowly, but relentlessly, toward the Columbia River.

The place is now an eerie deconstruction site, with ghost towns on top of ghost towns. Much of the old plutonium plant still stands: the husks of the original nine reactors, built in the 1940s, still line the Columbia River, like grain elevators. Their doors have been welded shut, and they have been left to decay—for another century.

Three years ago the D.O.E. sent local Indian tribes a letter to say they shouldn’t eat the fish they caught in the river more than once a week. And downwind of Hanford, people experienced unusually high rates of certain kinds of cancer, miscarriages, and genetic disorders that went largely ignored.

They call it T-plant, the long gray concrete building where they brought the irradiated material from the reactors, to cull the plutonium that went into the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. Because it, too, is cold and dark, it is of less concern than the land surrounding it, for that is where the waste from the plant got dumped. The Nagasaki bomb contained about 14 pounds of plutonium (each gram of plutonium leaves a ton of solid and liquid waste), and the radioactive waste generated fills acres of manicured dirt (plutonium production ended in 1989 after 70 metric tons of plutonium had been produced), the texture of a baseball infield, just downhill from the plant. “The tank farm,” it's called.

On these farms lay buried 177 tanks, each roughly the size of a four-story apartment building and capable of holding a million gallons of “high-level waste.” Fifty-six million gallons now in the tanks are classified as “high-level waste.” What, you might ask, is high-level waste? “Incredibly dangerous stuff,” says Tom Carpenter, executive director of the Hanford Challenge, the organization which has monitored the site since the late 1980s. “If you’re exposed to it for even a few seconds you probably got a fatal dose.”

Hanford turns out to be a good example of an American impulse: to avoid knowledge that conflicts with whatever your narrow, short-term interests might be. What we know about Hanford we know mainly from whistle-blowers who worked inside the nuclear facility—and who have been ostracized by their community for threatening the industry in a one-industry town.

One hundred and forty-nine of the tanks in the Hanford farms are made of a single shell of a steel ill-designed to contain highly acidic nuclear waste. Sixty-seven of them have failed in some way and allowed waste or vapors to seep out. Each tank contains its own particular stew of chemicals, so no two tanks can be managed in the same way. At the top of many tanks accumulates a hydrogen gas, which, if not vented, might cause the tank to explode. “There are Fukushima-level events that could happen at any moment,” says Carpenter. “You’d be releasing millions of curies of strontium 90 and cesium. And once it’s out there it doesn’t go away—not for hundreds and hundreds (or thousands) of years.”

The people who created the plutonium for the first bombs, in the 1940s and early 1950s, were understandably in too much of a rush to worry about what might happen afterward. They simply dumped 120 million gallons of high-level waste, and another 444 billion gallons of contaminated liquid, into the ground. They piled uranium (half-life: 4.5 billion years) into unlined pits near the Columbia River. They dug 42 miles of trenches to dispose of solid radioactive waste—and left no good records of what’s in those trenches.

In early May of this year a tunnel at Hanford collapsed, built in the 1950s to bury low-level waste. In response, the workers dumped truckloads of dirt into the hole. That dirt is now classified as low-level radioactive waste and needs to be disposed of. “The reason the Hanford cleanup sucks—in a word—is shortcuts,” said Carpenter. “Too many goddamn shortcuts.”

Toward the end of his time as secretary of energy, Ernie Moniz suggested the department, for the first time ever, conduct a serious study of the risks at Hanford. Once the risks were spelled out, perhaps everyone would agree that it was folly to try to turn it into, say, a playground. Maybe the U.S. government should just keep a giant fence around the place and call it a monument to mismanagement. Maybe the people at the labs could figure out how to keep the radioactivity from seeping into the Columbia River and leave it at that. Maybe it shouldn’t be the D.O.E.’s job to deal with the problem at all, as the problem had no good solution, and the political costs of constant failure interfered with the D.O.E.’s ability to address problems it might actually solve.

It turned out no one wanted to make a serious study of the risks at Hanford. Not the contractors who stood to make lots of money from things chugging along as they have. Not the career people inside the D.O.E. who oversaw the project and who feared that an open acknowledgment of all the risks was an invitation to even more lawsuits. Not the citizens of Eastern Washington, who count on the $3 billion a year flowing into their region from the federal government. Only one stakeholder in the place wanted to know what was going on beneath its soil: ..the local Indian tribes. These tribes have inhabited these lands for thirteen thousand years, and they deal with this incursion with the dignity and determination of an ancient people. 

A radioactive ruin does not crumble without consequences, and yet, even now, no one can say what these are.

Here is where the Trump administration’s willful ignorance plays a role. If your ambition is to maximize short-term gains without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing those costs. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems. 

 There is a downside to knowledge. It makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a certain worldview.

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As of April 2017, 31 countries worldwide are operating 449 nuclear reactors for electricity generation.. and 60 new nuclear plants are under construction in 15 countries. It was not that long ago, that there were nine processing reactors at this one site in Hanford.
All of these nuclear reactors, as they keep aging (shelf-life is 40-50 years) become greater and greater risks. Hanford is so dangerous, because it just contains so much more radioactive material.. is so old.. and may soon be, through the actions of this administration, without necessary funds to do the utmost to contain itself.. to ultimately protect all of us.

It might take a little while (or not), but this Pandora's box definitely has all the earmarks of becoming the largest man-made disaster the world has ever seen, or potentially ever will see... and NO one wants to deal with that possibility... not yesterday, today, not ever..   as always, nature eventually will.

The Pacific Ocean is being attacked by Fukushima on one side, and still to come, Hanford on the other. Over time all the oceans, and then the entire planet will be subjected to ever increasing levels of deadly radiation... taking hundreds, thousands, even millions of years to lessen the threat to life.

Were we the 'intelligent' species we claim to be, we would have understood nuclear technology is distinctly two-fold.. to get energy... you also get massive amounts of extremely dangerous radioactive waste as a by-product from production of that energy.
Trying to have the one without the ability to control the other was (and is) insanely dangerous, and completely reckless to start with. Yet here we are.. continuing to try and use a technology we might not have effective control over for a completely undetermined length of time.. if ever. And whenever it is the real sh*t-hits-the-fan in Hanford, it's then going to be way too late to put the genie back in the bottle.

Either way, we'll probably all eventually come to realize, it would have been our unwavering demand for energy (fossil fuels and nuclear) that was to bring about our ultimate demise.

“Contaminated in-area groundwater is still flowing freely into the Columbia River”

(June 2017)

"...a dreadful feeling we’re going to end up with a new pile of orphan waste"
(June 2017)

(now seriously.. be sure to read carefully the entire article by Michael Lewis)

 

“Michael Lewis knows how to tell a story. ” —Vanity Fair

Michael Lewis has published many New York Times bestselling books on various subjects. His most recent works are Flash Boys, The Big Short, and Boomerang, narratives set in the global financial crisis. The Blind Side, published in 2006, tells the story of Michael Oher, a poor, illiterate African-American kid living on the streets of Memphis whose life is transformed after he is adopted by white Evangelical Christians.

Before that he wrote Moneyball, a book ostensibly about baseball but also about the way markets value people. Both of his books about sports became movies, nominated for Academy Awards, as did his book about the 2008 financial crisis, The Big Short. His other works include The New New Thing, about Silicon Valley during the Internet boom; Coach, about the transformative powers of his own high school baseball coach; Losers, about the 1996 Presidential campaign; and Liar’s Poker, a Wall Street story based in part on his own experience working as a bond salesman for Salomon Brothers.

Mr. Lewis is a columnist for Bloomberg View and a contributing writer to Vanity Fair. His articles have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Gourmet, Slate, Sports Illustrated, Foreign Affairs, and Poetry Magazine. He has served as editor and columnist for the British weekly The Spectator and as senior editor and campaign correspondent for The New Republic. He has filmed and narrated short pieces for ABC-TV’s “Nightline;” created and presented a four part documentary on the social consequences of the internet for the British Broadcasting Corporation; and recorded stories for the American public radio show, This American Life.

Mr. Lewis grew up in New Orleans and remains deeply interested and involved in the city. He holds a bachelor’s degree in art history from Princeton and a master’s degree in economics from the London School of Economics. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their three children: Quinn, Dixie and Walker. In 2009 he published Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, about his attempts to raise them.

Michael Lewis - Vanity Fair Articles

...the one to read first is the July 26th, 2017 piece.. 'Scariest Nuclear Threat'...
..understandably it has caused quite the stir.. you know where.. to you know who !!

 

..right now, as a species... we don't appear to be quite ready for what we have conceived..

Climate Change Is Happening Faster Than Expected, and It’s More Extreme

...human-caused emissions will lead to bigger impacts on heat and extreme weather, and much sooner than expected

..if we had really been concerned, we would have taken this last election to act..
..and now it's most evident we're not going to be making meaningful change in time..
..the leadership in charge at the moment does not have the spine to go up against the oligarchs bribing them and leading them on, and so our fate is sealed..

..ten more years of this.. twenty at the most, and miracles will be necessary..
..there was a candidate that could have started enacting the changes needed, but his party was shortsighted and would not heed the message, and get behind the progressive cause..

..money without wisdom always makes bad decisions.. why so many with it are not capable of such insight is a question for the ages..
..civilizations before us have come to similar ends.. but this time the scale will be unmatched in human history..

..there are billions of us, and no way to guess how many, if any, will pull through.. and what their life will be like in a very dubious future..
..but getting there is going to be long, and hell-on-earth.. many of those futuristic films we've been watching for all these years will have been windows into our future..

.."the most ominous risks of surprises like "tipping points" or "compound extremes"—sucker punches, combination punches, and even knockout punches...the more climate changes, the greater the potential for these...
 ...uncertainty is not our friend... we are seeing increases in extreme weather going well beyond what has been predicted or projected in the past... we're learning that there are factors we were not previously aware of that may be magnifying the impacts of human-caused climate change"

.."increasingly, science suggests many of the impacts are occurring earlier and with greater amplitude than was predicted..
...there should be more monitoring of global warming impacts, but all those programs are threatened under the current administration.. continued funding to support research is critical.. and here, again, we encounter a very unfavorable political environment where fossil fuel-beholden politicians that run the White House and Congress are doing everything they can to defund and suppress research on climate change science and impact assessments."

 'More Dangerous Than Climate Change is Lying'

... "climate change threatens us all, regardless of political affiliation... with serious consequences for people and the ecosystems of the only planet that can support us."

 
..we are nothing short of.. 'very serious trouble'.. and as every time-frame gets shortened, eventually there comes an end.. and none is left for us..

 

The "Nickname" Narrative

Nicknames can be tricky things... most times chosen for us, not by us.. some are liked (by us).. others, not so much.

Being born Bernard Joseph (Anthony was the later confirmation-addition) in Yonkers, New York.. when brought home, I was instantly declared to be "Brother" by my four year old sister, Diane.
When I was very small, we moved from Westchester County to upper Riverside Drive in Manhattan, so my father (Bernard.. aka "Benny") could be closer to his work as a blacktop construction foreman.

As I grew older, and he would sometimes take me to job sites to help with odd jobs (cleaning 'smudge-pots' was NOT a personal favorite), I became "Benny Jr" to all his friends and co-workers.
When he transferred work locations up to the Bronx, we then moved to 169th Street on Jerome Avenue, a few blocks north of Yankee Stadium. It was at that time when in middle school that I first became "Bernie."

My mom, Josephine, always disliked Bernie, she didn't like being called "Josie," and so my new handle to her was none better. She wanted to have me go around telling everyone to call me Bernard.. for that's all she ever called me her entire life.
Good luck with that... young people, especially teenagers, will most times call you what they know you don't especially care for, no matter WHAT you ask them !!

That stuck through most of high school and early years of college until I met (later to become a life-long good friend). Mike Hart, at Iona College in New Rochelle, NY. It was Mike that first started calling me "BJ".. and I preferred that moniker to all the others.
So from then on, most times when someone asked.. I was BJ.
(There have been exceptions, where folks make assumptions, and I don't always correct them.. and I take full responsibility.)

Trying to get old dogs (or people) to change ways at best has mixed results. One or two balk incessantly.. some over time will adjust to the change.. and others just say ok right from the time you tell them (my favorite)... and a good portion will flip back and forth (like Mike), one to the other.. at times, in the course of the same conversation.

So on my headstone, don't be surprised to find...Bernard.. Brother.. Benny Jr... Bernie.. & BJ (w/ the largest lettering).

..and BTW.. Bernadette has similar feelings regarding her nickname(s).. she accepts "Bern".. but could totally take a pass on the "other" one...(but will respond).

 

..tweeting is good.. calling is better..

Six key senators haven’t finally decided whether or not to support a tax bill that puts health coverage on the line for millions — and they could cast a deciding vote this week.

These key lawmakers need to hear from as many of us as possible before they vote. Tweet at them now and make sure they reject any tax bill that puts coverage at risk. 
 

The Senate’s tax bill would repeal the individual mandate, which is critical to ensuring as many people as possible stay enrolled. Without the individual mandate, fewer people will sign up for health insurance. Costs would then go up for others signed up for health coverage. That could force more Americans to forego coverage.

The Senate’s tax bill could lead to a domino effect that could result in the loss of coverage for millions of people and result in significant cuts to Medicare.

That’s why we’re speaking up now — and letting key senators know that their vote could seriously harm their constituents, and all Americans.

Make a call and stop this bill !!   
Phone the United States Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121. 
A switchboard operator will connect you directly with the Senate office you request.

 
 

..KEEP LOOKING UP..!!!

..have posted about this catastrophe-in-progress numerous times..
..yet talking with many, and they have no clue as to what's happening..

..the most widespread experiment the world has ever seen..
..we do not have the wisdom to comprehend what we are attempting..
..long term effects will be devastating and irreversible for many lifetimes..

.watch the entire film.. it's a pretty good one for explanation..

FRANKENSKIES FULL LENGTH DOCUMENTARY (GEOENGINEERING / CHEMTRAILS) DIRECTOR'S CUT

..as we 'advance'.. we abandon logic out of desperation and fear..
..dumping millions of tons of toxic aerosols into the atmosphere, in the hope of what..
..it's ass-backwards to the ultimate degree..

..we're experiencing huge insect (and other species) population crashes..
..not rocket science.. it ain't good for 'living' things..
..breathing this shit in is seriously dangerous..

Geoengineering..More Harm Than Good

 ..collected these guys from out on our deck in 'one' day several months back..
..they just don't fall out of the sky together meaninglessly..

..our 'canary-in-the-mine'.. has been conferred
..we're lots bigger.. so we'll take longer..
..as for avoiding it.. the ultimate effect has to be the same..
...'detrimental towards all living things'..

..ps.. the article's talkin like it's not yet a foregone conclusion..
..dispelling that falsehood.. just look up at the skies most every day, no matter where you are in the world..

..toxins.. sprayed in the air.. and applied on the ground..
..chem-companies rule..

Researchers Warn Massive Insect Die-off Is Harbinger Of “Ecological Armageddon”

..KEEP LOOKING UP..!!!