Sunday, May 28, 2017

 
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Radioactive Wastelands at the End of the Anthropocene
Human beings are both brilliant and stupid all at once.  People evolved through the ages from basic primates to modern humans.  They (we) also evolved from tilling the soil to splitting the atom.  This might be seen as progress, or viewing the larger picture, it might be seen as suicide.  
We have clearly turned the corner.  Our current epoch, the Holocene, is 12,000 years of stable climate since the last ice age.  It is during this period that all human civilisation developed.  
But, now we are in a period called the Anthropocene.   This is a period of time during which the most important happening on planet Earth is human activity.  Science recognizes that we have arrived at this new period and the current debate is attempting to define when this new period started.
As human brilliance and innovation modernized the world, we have caused carbon dioxide emissions to rise to damaging levels.  We have caused massive global extinctions of species.  We have caused sea levels to rise.  We have change the face of the planet by deforestation and urban development.
Now, Earth is influenced not by the slowly evolving natural environment but by the rapid transitions of human activity.  Earth has become so profoundly altered that the Holocene has become the Anthropocene.  And, worse yet, we can already visualize the end of the Anthropocene... it appears as a vast radioactive wasteland... and that's the truth !!!
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For historians, the first atomic bomb blast in 1945 ushered in the nuclear age. But for a group of geologists, the 16 July test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, marks the start of a new unit of geological time, the Anthropocene epoch.

The term Anthropocene was coined 15 years ago to refer to the age of widespread human influence over the planet. Ever since, geologists have debated when people first left a clear mark in the rock record, and whether to enshrine that moment as the start of a formal geological unit. Some researchers have proposed setting the beginning of the Anthropocene — and the end of the current epoch, the Holocene — at the start of the Industrial Revolution, or even further back, at the dawn of agriculture. Others look to the vast expansion in human activity in the second half of the twentieth century.

Now an international group of scientists has thrown its weight behind the latter possibility, and suggested using the first nuclear blast as a starting point. “It’s a well defined spot in time — it’s a big historical event,”
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Nuclear test explosion in Mururoa atoll, French Polynesia, in 1971. The official expert group says the Anthropocene should begin about 1950 and is likely to be defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across Earth by nuclear bomb tests. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
A History of Cover-Ups and Ineptitude Leads to Catastrophe

One of the most costly, self-inflicted wounds engineered by techno-capitalist man is the never-ending Fukushima nuclear disaster. The groundwork for epic failure at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant began in the 1960’s when TEPCO bulldozed 25 meters off of a 35-meter-high hill in order to facilitate the delivery and set up of the plant’s large equipment, which was delivered by boat, as well as to provide easier and cheaper access to seawater used as a coolant pumped through the reactors. TEPCO then dug even further downward another 14 feet to construct the basement where emergency diesel generators would be installed. Decades later a tsunami would easily flood this area, knocking out the emergency electrical back-up generator and making nuclear meltdown a certainty.

In the early 1970’s, several memos circulated within the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) expressing concern over design flaws of the Mark I nuclear reactors made by General Electric, the same type installed at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant. Recommendations were made to stop licensing reactors with these faulty designs and the top safety official at the AEC, Jospeh Hendrie, agreed with them but rejected their implementation on the grounds that it could do irreparable damage to the nuclear industry:
Some ask why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt and repopulated so soon after a nuclear bomb blast, yet Fukushima and Chernobyl remain unsafe to inhabit into the indefinite future. The answer lies in the vast difference of irradiating potential between a nuclear bomb and a nuclear reactor.
Nuclear bombs are designed to cause maximum concussive damage within the shortest amount of time by creating as much energy as possible from a runaway nuclear fission reaction. Nuclear reactors on the other hand are designed to create a low-level of energy from a very controlled and sustained nuclear fission reaction.

The nuclear bombs used in World War II were detonated roughly 2,000 feet above ground and their radioisotopes were carried by the wind and dispersed over a very large area. The nuclear bomb called “Little Boy” used over Hiroshima contained only 140 pounds of fissionable material (Uranium-235) and “Fat Man” used over Nagasaki contained just 14 pounds of Plutonium-239.

These are minute amounts of radioisotopes when compared to the 180 tons of nuclear fuel at Chernobyl and the staggering 1,600 tons at Fukushima. Explosions and meltdowns at nuclear reactors occur at ground level, creating more radioactive isotopes due to neutron activation with the soils while spreading their radiation across the planet, year after year after year.

​Today the background radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is said to be the same as the global average anywhere on Earth. Ground zero at Chernobyl and Fukushima won’t be habitable for 20,000 years or longer. Nuclear bombs kill hundreds of thousands of people instantly while a nuclear reactor meltdown kills people over years, decades, and generations.
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The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle.
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Radioactive water? You're soaking in it, Pennsylvania
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