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(by Eldan Goldenburg, via Flickr CC)
Please consider this post a public service announcement, and excuse the fact that it’s just copy and paste. It’s long…and it’s awful. My purpose is to remind us all of the dangers that nuclear power, pipelines and oil drilling, especially off-shore pose to our planet’s health, and ours by extension. Chances are you’ve already read Edward Teller’s series on the Kulluk and Noble Discovery problematic recovery rigs operating in the Beaufort Sea. To say my heart’s not in this post after all the reading I’ve done for it over the past few days would be an understatement. I had no idea of the scope of radioactive (plutonium) waste that’s at Hanford. (All bolds are mine.) And a hat tip to Fdl’s AitchD for giving me the breaking news.
USA Today, some background from their investigative series:
Seven decades after scientists came here during World War II to create plutonium for the first atomic bomb, a new generation is struggling with an even more daunting task: cleaning up the radioactive mess.
The U.S. government is building a treatment plant to stabilize and contain 56 million gallons of waste left from a half-century of nuclear weapons production. The radioactive sludge is so dangerous that a few hours of exposure could be fatal. A major leak could contaminate water supplies serving millions across the Northwest. The cleanup is the most complex and costly environmental restoration ever attempted.
A USA TODAY investigation has found that the troubled, 10-year effort to build the treatment plant faces enormous problems just as it reaches what was supposed to be its final stage.
In exclusive interviews, several senior engineers cited design problems that could bring the plant’s operations to a halt before much of the waste is treated. Their reports have spurred new technical reviews and raised official concerns about the risk of a hydrogen explosion or uncontrolled nuclear reaction inside the plant. Either could damage critical equipment, shut the facility down or, worst case, allow radiation to escape.
The plant’s $12.3 billion price tag, already triple original estimates, is well short of what it will cost to address the problems and finish the project. And the plant’s start-up date, originally slated for last year and pushed back to its current target of 2019, is likely to slip further.
“We’re continuing with a failed design,” said Donald Alexander, a senior U.S. government scientist on the project.
From Whistleblower.org:
Liz Mattson of Hanford Challenge set the context for the rousing discussion with a presentation about Hanford’s history – one shrouded in secrecy as the facility manufactured plutonium for atomic bombs. For over five decades, several hundred billion gallons of contaminants were released into the air, soil, and nearby Columbia River. While no longer producing plutonium, the facility is responsible for cleaning up the 53 million gallons of highly radioactive and hazardous waste that are sitting in 177 underground tanks … many of which are leaking and all of which are long past their designed lifespan.
Another important part of Hanford’s history is that of its whistleblowers. Since the 1980s, many employees have come forward about safety violations at Hanford, often resulting in outrageous forms of retaliation (one of the six stages whistleblowers often experience). Walt Tamosaitis worked as a Deputy Chief Process Engineer and Research & Technology Manager for the Waste Treatment Plant at Hanford, a government-owned, contractor-operated facility. Walt was terminated from the project by contractor Bechtel after raising concerns about issues that would impact the overall safety and operation of the plant. But he wasn’t fully fired – just sent to a windowless basement, literally to do nothing – a clear message to other workers who might wish to speak out.
The Hanford Challenge has other stories of whistle-blower abuse and retaliation.
A month ago a new containment tank was found to be leaking; the story of why the new leak wasn’t detected doesn’t add up to a layperson’s eyes.
But from Bloomberg News, Feb. 22:
Six tanks holding radioactive waste at the U.S. Energy Department’s Hanford site in Washington are leaking, more than reported earlier, Governor Jay Inslee said.
He learned of the new number, five more than identified as leaky a week ago, in a meeting yesterday with Energy Secretary Steven Chu in Washington, D.C., Inslee, 62, said in a statement.
“This is disturbing news for all Washingtonians,” the Democratic governor said. “One week ago, Secretary Chu told me there was one tank leaking. But he told me today that his department did not adequately analyze data it had that would have shown other tanks that are leaking.” [snip]
“This is the latest example of the U.S. Department of Energy’s failure to adequately resolve the significant threat posed by the nuclear waste at Hanford,” Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said in a statement. “Our office continues to explore all legal options.”
Chu’s revelation “certainly raises serious questions about the integrity of all 149 single-shell tanks with radioactive liquid and sludge at Hanford,” Inslee said. All six of the leaky vessels are the single-shell type, he said.
From Wikipedia on the ‘what the hell do you do with all this nuclear waste’ question:
The most significant challenge at Hanford is stabilizing the 53 million U.S. gallons of high-level radioactive waste stored in 177 underground tanks. About a third of these tanks have leaked waste into the soil and groundwater. As of 2008[update], most of the liquid waste has been transferred to more secure double-shelled tanks; however, 2.8 million U.S. gallons (10,600 m3) of liquid waste, together with 27 million U.S. gallons of salt cake and sludge, remains in the single-shelled tanks. That waste was originally scheduled to be removed by 2018. The revised deadline is 2040. Nearby aquifers contain an estimated 270 billion U.S. gallons (1 billion m3) of contaminated groundwater as a result of the leaks. As of 2008[update], 1 million U.S. gallons (4,000 m3) of highly radioactive waste is traveling through the groundwater toward the Columbia River. This waste is expected to reach the river in 12 to 50 years if cleanup does not proceed on schedule. The site also includes 25 million cubic feet (710,000 m3) of solid radioactive waste.
Grand opening of the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility (ERDF)
Under the Tri-Party Agreement, lower-level hazardous wastes are buried in huge lined pits that will be sealed and monitored with sophisticated instruments for many years. Disposal of plutonium and other high-level wastes is a more difficult problem that continues to be a subject of intense debate. As an example, plutonium has a half-life of 24,100 years, and a decay of ten half-lives is required before a sample is considered to be safe. The Department of Energy is currently building a vitrification plant on the Hanford Site. Vitrification is a method designed to combine these dangerous wastes with glass to render them stable. Bechtel, the San Francisco based construction and engineering firm, has been hired to construct the vitrification plant, which is currently estimated to cost approximately $12 billion. Construction began in 2001. After some delays, the plant is now scheduled to be operational in 2019, with vitrification completed in 2047. It was originally scheduled to be operational by 2011, with vitrification completed by 2028.
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The civil trial against British Petroleum, Transocean and Haliburton for damages caused by the blowout on the Deepwater Horizon began on Monday in New Orleans. From the Guardian just before the trial opened:
On Monday, barring last-minute reversals, teams of lawyers from BP, the rig’s owner, will face off with the US government’s finest legal minds, to determine the extent to which the British oil giant can be held accountable for those deaths and the wider damage done to the Gulf – the ninth-largest body of water in the world, one of the world’s most complex ecosystems and the US’s biggest supplier of seafood, which is home to 4,500 oil and gas platforms and structures.
From Reuters on the negligence issue:
The trial’s first phase focuses on how much each company is to blame and the degree of negligence. Luther Strange, Alabama’s attorney general, said he would seek to show all three companies had acted with “gross negligence and willful misconduct.”
“We will ask the court at the end of this trial to rule that all three – BP, Transocean, and Halliburton – are liable for punitive damages to the state of Alabama,” Strange said.
Simple negligence involves mistakes. Gross negligence involves reckless or willful disregard for human and environmental safety and is difficult to prove, experts say.
The Guardian again:
The risk for the government is also huge. Under the Clean Water Act, penalties plummet if the government fails to prove “gross negligence” – that the standard of BP’s Deepwater operation was so far below acceptable that a reasonable person would deem them to have been grossly negligent. Fines range from $1,100 for every barrel spilled through simple negligence to as much as $4,300 a barrel if gross negligence is found.
The trial is also meant to address claims from businesses that incurred losses that hadn’t been previously settled. Federal court Judge Carl Barbier expects the opening phase of the trial to last at least three months.
Opening day remark snippets from the LA Times:
BP was blinded by greed,” said Luther Strange, Alabama’s attorney general. “To BP, money mattered most. Greed devastated the gulf.”
In the days before the blowout the scene on the troubled rig — which some workers dubbed the “well from hell” — became increasingly chaotic, said Jim Roy, an attorney representing the plaintiffs’ steering committee. He promised that future testimony would illustrate “gross and extreme departure from the standards of good oilfield practice.”
The captain of the vessel, Roy said, had never been trained in operating the rig’s emergency systems. In fact, the Deepwater Horizon’s emergency systems — with their required audible alarms — were disconnected out of concerns that the claxons would wake the crew.
The Guardian has a timeline of the Macondo well blowout and devastation here. It comes as no surprise that the three corporations are busy pointing blame at each other.
Attorneys have told the Judge what evidence will be presented in this piece at nola.com; it’s a hard and disgusting read; when you consider the devastation it wrought, it’s tragic.
Underhill said the government’s case would demonstrate “a long series of missteps and reckless decisions made by BP” that, taken together, demonstrate willful misconduct. “The evidence will show that BP put profits above people, profits before safety and profits before the environment,” he said.
Attorney Jim Roy for the private plaintiffs speaking about Transocean’s auto-shutdown feature and blowout preventer:
Roy also contended that Transocean overrode several functions of its alarm and control system that was designed to automatically shut down drilling operations in the well in the event of an accident. The override required a crew member to manually activate the shutdown system. He said a Transocean chief electronics technician would testify that it was “done to avoid waking people up at night.”
He also took aim at the blowout preventer, saying it failed to prevent the rig from exploding, could not handle the maximum pressure and temperature conditions for the Macondo well, and therefore should not have been used. He also said Transocean did not conduct enough maintenance on the drilling rig.
“When the rig does receive maintenance time, that time is generally taken up by repairing the equipment that is broken,” Roy said, adding that Transocean was “making over half a million dollars a day instead of bringing the vessel into a shipyard for repairs.”
“Transocean’s safety culture was broken, and the evidence will show that management’s willful refusal to fix it led directly to the Deepwater Horizon disaster,” he said.
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In oil pipeline news from Rainforest Action Network:
Yesterday in Tyler County, TX, a pipeline operated by Sunoco Logistics sprung a leak and spilled 20,000 gallons (or 550 barrels) of oil into local East Texas waterways. Deep East Texas is known for its creeks and lakes, freshwater eco-systems and aquifers that provide water to the eastern part of the state, including mega-cities Dallas and Houston. But oil companies treat these forests and waterways as collateral damage.
Quality control requires that oil companies use “leak detection systems.” Those systems reported nothing until local residents began to report that oil was in the water. (Ummm… so, how do you not detect a 20,000 gallons oil leak?)
Sunoco’s spill is merely a prologue for leaks and spills that might come once the southern leg of the Keystone XL Pipeline is completed.
The site of the spill is not far from a Tar Sands Blockade (TSB) action in Diboll, TX in January. It’s only a few hour away from TSB’s tree blockade that prevented construction of TransCanada’s Keystone XL Pipeline for 85 days.
I’d run into this video by chance; Falling on Purpose was slated to be at Ocober2011 in DeeCee.; those pesky young OWS folks beat em to it, and headed to Zucotti Park.
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These are important matters concerning which we need to have ongoing attention, so thank you, wendydavis, for wading in. There’s a very good post by solartopia on the righthand column of MyFDL that describes early days in the NoNukes movement. It’s hard to believe we could have had it worse, but we could have.
Recommended.
Thank you for talking about the Hanford Superfund site, a painful read.
Heartbreaking. I have family in Washington, my parents call Hanford “terribly dangerous,” and “they’ve done nothing,” even though “we have paid billions for the cleanup.” My father’s first cousin began work at Hanford after his WWII service. He died with three types of cancer; his name was Clifford, and my mother ads, “Draw your own conclusions as to why Clifford died.” Washingtonians are very concerned about Hanford.
Although I cannot handle the pelican picture or much of any of the painful Guardian BP article, thank you for covering this as well.
Aloha, wendy…! Governor: Nuclear waste is leaking an estimated 1,000 gallons a year — “No available technology to plug the leaks”
Coincidentally I was watching Ibsen’s An Enemy Of The People when the news story was reported. Text of the play here.
Ibsen wrote it in 1882. Yeah, there’s nothing new under the sun except for the released energy of a thousand suns, as J. Robert Oppenheimer reminded us.
Oh, and some personal knowledge from the horse’s own mouth, late 1960′s/early 1970′s: a heat treating plant failed to treat pipes and fittings for nuclear plants but signed off on them anyway. Who knows where they’ve been installed …
Welcome, juliania. I figured since I’d collected all the links, I’d paste it together since as far as I know, the front page hadn’t covered either story.
Living near Boulder, CO for different patches of time, I knew about Rocky Flats, its dangers, and ‘clean-up’. But maybe because Hanford was comparatively new to me, and I could read way more info than was healthy about it, plus the whistle-blowers who weren’t heeded…the burning monstrosity of it buried me a bit. Grew up reading about Madame Curie…fear of the stuff never left me.
Oh, God, C-S; what I read about exposure of the early crews in…oh, the poor man; my throat’s closing. I’m so sorry. Hideous. Tempting fate of the highest order.
How glad I am that I decided not to include that…
The most prudent course may be to call upon metamarm to get his squadron of plucky amateur science sleuths to explain how this progressive catastrophist conspiracy to scare people is completely 180 degrees turned around from the REAL TRUTH of the matter, as well as of the anti-matter, and that since someone somewhere failed to dot an i or cross a t, these scaremonger Davisites are foolishly wrong-headed and not to be believed.
The leaks weren’t detected by available analysis’. Oh, Inslee said, it’ll be years before the radiation hits the Columbia… My stars. Maybe the GMO eel-salmon will like it.
I did read about pipes whose fitting were known to leak, but installed.
So many ‘demagogues’ willing to “acquiesce in subordinating themselves to the community.”
But at least now whistle-blowers are feted and given medals of honor now, eh? Oh. Damn.
Thank you for the Ibsen, HiDef.
LOL; thank you, UCT1. I did need the chuckles. Loved ‘Davisites’; makes me into a cult. :o)
I’d forgotten to put this dark irony in the post; I will.
Yeah. I knew that Clifford had worked at Hanford and died, but I did not know when, so I phoned my mother today when I saw this article and asked her for the details. Right after the war.
“Underhill said the government’s case would demonstrate “a long series of missteps and reckless decisions made by BP” that, taken together, demonstrate willful misconduct. “The evidence will show that BP put profits above people, profits before safety and profits before the environment,” he said. ”
Lotta that shit goin’ round these days. Every where ya look, or so it seems.
As good ole’ Uncle Al once said, “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
As has the greed.
Last Spring, on a trip to visit relatives in a few northern border states, I happened to drive past there. Always wondered where it was
And, if anyone thinks this is a local problem — they better think again
Map of the Columbia River basin
http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-columbia-river-basin.html
Might as well throw this in:
http://www.hoanw.org/more/index.cfm?Fuseaction=more_47323
So good to see you, Bootsie; sorry it’s over just hard news. Ack, the photos of the pelicans, turtles, dolphins…and what’s still left on the shore after big storms. I saw underwater photos again of all that shit that’s settled from the dispersant, and is choking off the coral reefs. Just endless devastation.
And the size of it pales in comparison to huge Exxon spill in Nigeria. Gads; googling this I saw another recent one there, this time Shell.
Plenty of shit like this, all right. Greed and lust for power and control. Goddam, we’re crazy.
And your Oppy quote reminded me of this post I put up some time back.
Sheep led to the slaughter, I’m pained to say, Rachel. Thanks for the piece with the timeline.
That is a big slog to go through, thanks wendydavis.
It appears Walker’s new state budget (hidden) proposal allowing foreign corporations to purchase large swaths of Wisconsin landscape, overturning an 1897 law aimed at limiting large “trusts,” from monopolizing and destroying property is just one of the environmental give-aways on his perpetual campaign for 2016 POTUS.
The new mining bill which passed the WI State Senate yesterday, sets up unlimited water use by the mining companies and filling of wetlands with mining waste for the duration of permitted mining activity. 35 yrs of activity for G-Tac iron ore mining projected.
Paraphrase of Oppy’s trans-quote of the Bhagavad Gita, which I mentioned cuz I’m no ingrate for the h/t ;o), figuring — blog pimp that I am — you’d link to your prose poem.
Stunning to contrast the dark and hideous poisons at Hanford with all that loveliness the map show, john in sacramento. No, not local.
That the Cayuse (others?) Reservation was stolen for the ‘Hanford Reservation’ makes me think of Buffy’s ‘We’re dying of their gravy spills’. Priests of the Golden Bull.
Jesus Christ in a canoe, nonquixote. Mining laws were beggin’ to be changed to aid The People, the planet! Federal law dates from 1863 or something, no? That is such horrid news.
My next post (or soon) will be about La Via Campesina’s call for an April 17 (iirc) call for global action against land grabs, GMOs, and demands for food sovereignty. I guess the World Social Forum is happening then in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia. I’d thought if I wrote it up early, everyone could spread the word to Tarsands Blockade, Idle No More, OWS…well…everywhere, and hold demonstrations on Turtle Island in solidarity.
Goddam Walker; what must it be like to live inside his skin? His insides must be rotting away.
Thank you for the chance to blogwhore, and welcome for the hat tip. You deserved it. And thank you for making my stomach ache, and mine eyes cry over it all, dear. ;o)
On my Oppenheimer diary was this comment by edve; sorry we don’t see her/him here any longer as far as I know. Just after Fukushima:
Wise edve; thank you.
*heh* A Davisite Fire Bagger…! Count me in…! ;-)
Good evening, wd, and I’m glad you’re up for another marathon.
As to the most recent horrors wrought by the nuclear fission process, which you so ably document in this post, it ought to be clear by now that the whole thing was a mistake. Here I want to contribute a little piece of history for those who don’t know the story. Namely, one of the originators of this process already divined the fact early on.
Oppenheimer and his Sanskrit quote are mentioned above, but he allowed himself to become a war criminal in agreeing to actually use nuclear weapons on Japanese civilian populations. More interesting is Leo Szilard, he who actually wrote the letter to Roosevelt that Einstein signed, which called for advanced nuclear fission research since the Nazis were engaged in it. Three years later, after FDR had agreed, a chain reaction was first achieved at UChi in 1942, whereupon, Szilard says,
He went on to organize a (failed) petition to offer a demonstration of the new weapon to the Japanese instead of using it on them, and after that to generally work for peace.
In short, one of history’s tragic figures.
Didn’t mean to stray from your post topic, but the continuing assault on finite clean water, whether neglect or open disregard was where i was attempting to tie in.
Kewaunee and Two Rivers nuclear facilities are slatted for shut down, old age, both directly on the western shore of Lake Michigan. This power mainly goes to Chicago. Much of electric power a little farther north is coal-fired generation. Hoping they shut this two down on current schedule and clean it up as best is possible and as soon as possible.
LOL! (When I blogged at tpm Cafe, there was a little squid who was soooo proud that he’d gotten that term into the Urban Dictionary. Little cretin; that’s back when I read and lurked here, and defended Jane Hamsher.)
OTOH, it might be: ‘the Branch Davisians‘
Evening, EF Beall. I didn’t reckon this post’d get but a few comments, actually, but…there it is.
I actually did know the Szilard story, which is amazing on accountta how little history I do know. And I know that about Oppy, but wrote it up with him in the Afterlife, grieving.
One of my favorite books of fiction was Chaim Potok’s Book of Lights:
etc. Did me in every time I read it. ;o)
Thank you for bringing it.
So do I, then, and goodness, I know that it’s *all* connected.
I got to thinking about how many energy companies bought underground water rights (never get how that works, but Water Commissioners do know).
And the Western Slope of CO has another energy boom in oil shale development and more uranium mining, so the corporations are filing on *non-existent* (meaning all the historically filed rights have already been sold)rights in the Yampa, maybe Green Rivers. Our heads just swivel from one horror to the next, I swear, nonquixote.
As well as globally, water is now being essentially financialized with the land grabs, as are foods. Next will be rights to canning fresh air from the top of K-2 or something.
“I didn’t reckon this post’d get but a few comments.”
It’s time you recognized your star power, m’dear.
Nah; it’s just a li’l bit of affirmative action at play since I’m a blind widdy with several (six?) deaf kids. And hell, this ain’t even on the rec’d list. ;o) It’s not an uplifting post, but…
But like, Buffy, I do love the Starwalker.
Don’t give em any ideas, they’re apt to do it.
Oh, THAT Buffy; before clicking on the link I assumed you meant the Vampire Slayer. As for the rec’d list, look again.
…‘the Branch Davisians‘… *snort* Here I was thinking we were a ‘subset’ of Fire Baggers…! ;-)
Btw, I finally got off my duff…! MENA Mashup: AIPAC, Iran, And Syria…
Ah, shucks, Rachel. Quicksilver already front-loaded the notion soooo many years ago. Back when I was just a young psychedelic pup. ;o)
I haff heard of ziss Vampire Szlayer; vass iss eet? Brrrrrr.
(It pops on, pops off, on, off…who da hell knows? Shouldn’t matter, eh?)
love to you,
wd
Oh, lord, we’re doomed.
For real, both of these issues are huge. Thanks for covering them.
I’ll read, but I have so much trouble reading those quote thingies unless they’re bolded (bad brain stuff). And to say the truth, my brain goes a bit bonkers with your ….! *g* thingies. But then: some websites I can’t read when they’re peppered with red and yellow and blue. Dead in the water.
And I must say, I have so totally lost track of Syria and all the players, I’ve just given up trying to grasp any of it. Too many things to try to know, so I lurk and listen. ;o)
But shoot; I wonder if there’s a Branch Davisians corporate charter, and I can see the shell organizations involved, lol.
Welcome C-S; really all I could manage was copy-paste, even knowing it’s Bad Form. (I almost blew it off entirely.)
As a boy, I often crossed the street in front of my house and walked down the park’s (sled-riding) hill, crossed another road in the park (where the swings and slides were) and walked down a steep grade into Panther Hollow, where Rachel Carson also once walked. I could see the smooth rocks and stones in the creek that snaked through the Hollow, though its taste was sour but not unhealthy. At the other end of my neighborhood was another park, where my contemporary Annie Dillard grew up and played before she spent her time at Tinker Creek. Twenty miles east was where I played golf as a kid. An underground spring opened and flowed at the sixth and 15th holes, where rusted pipes served as nozzles — everyone had collapsable tin cups in their bags for that cold, sweet water that came from the Laurel Mountains twenty miles farther east (where Rolling Rock was brewed). Ten years later no one would dare to drink from those nozzles. Ten years after that revisionists defamed Rachel Carson’s pioneering efforts. We are the cause of the sixth extinction of most life on the planet.
Good job, wendydavis. Bechtel, eh. A company that deserve some serious investigation for a lot of issues. How damn hard is it to encase this stuff in melted glass? Oh, I forgot. Hanford has one hell of a lot of radioactively hot stuff. US arsenal maxed at 40,000 plus warheads that we know of. Between Hanford and Savannah River, that’s a hell of a lot of waste. And no one gives a shit about Savannah River.
In other news, just saw this on FB:
Thanks for the Solartopia plug. It’s an excellent post.
aaagh! how horrible!
Thank you for the little time trip with Rachel and Annie. I think one of the books I haven’t parted with yet is ‘Pilgrim’ in wraps with the nubby, velvety feel.
I was made to play golf, and my favorite time was walking up the hill on the No. 5 hole to prime the pump and drink from a cup the cold, clear water. That was on Catawba Island on Lake Erie. Last time I ever went back there, the nearby Port Clinton beach was adorned with skull-and-crossbones signs. Must have been about the time the Cuyahoga River caught on fire. God, what idiots we are. Rachel and so many others warned us. Helen Caldicott.
Anyway, nice on the silky, stony memories.
Reminds me of a few years ago when I lived in Denver, moving there I knew about Rocky Flats and what had happened and what was happening there, when I talked to people I met there about it the general consensus was, “Yeah, they grow great cantaloupe there”!
My suggestion, Davisobites, using the Desert Rose as its symbol.
That whole vitrication process was new to me. Can’t count on th official ‘radioactive water won’t reach the river for ten years’ story, either. Especially since they have no clue how saturated the ground’s become by all the leaks they never admitted, or never tracked.
Bechtel, Haliburton. You can always count on them to get no-bid contracts, and fuck up whatever they can. Self-electrocuting showers in Iraq? But those processing plants at Hanford, oh, my.
Nice news from Minnesota; it sure must be cold. We had 8 degrees this morning still. Brrrrr; thank God for juniper logs. ;o)
My guess is that they had Rocky Flats confused with Rocky Ford, the Cantaloupe Capital of the World, yahoo! It’s out on the northeastern plains. (Some farms there had been spreadin’ some disastrous pathogen summer before last, quite a health scandal, ish.)
The DOE swore there were no traces left of radioactivity left after the clean-up, but how deep did they measure? And to say the truth, I don’t even know where they moved all the stuff, blueokie.
Well, as I see it, the timeliness, when you have to get material out, it’s okay with some cut and paste, not a problem.
As one who grew up in Oregon and lived in Washington for most of my adult life, having fallen in love with the Columbia and the Willamette Rivers as the best years of my life, Hanford has always been a painful subject, but now reading about the Columbia River Valley, hearing my parents (Seattle) talk about their concern about the danger at Hanford, and I have family in Yakima, Portland, Edmonds/Seattle, and Bellingham, most of my family is in Washington, it is really heartbreaking. Everyone is concerned.
Hanford Pools, sounds like a vacation resort with heated water in the pools.
I just finished an account of Lewis and Clark’s trip down the Columbia, two hundred years from pristine to plutonium, the march of progress.
I haven’t ever been in those river valleys, but they do sound sublime. Images of whitewater, salmom and conifers fill my mind. It must have been a wonderful place to grow up. (I’ve never seen a rain forest, and pine to.)
That coast was due to have some of the worst radioactivity from Fukushima, both by air and by ocean, wasn’t it? You might google iodine rich foods for them for thyroid help?
Sleep well, dream well, Rachel. It’s so hard to hear that your relatives are so naturally concerned. There be monsters there.
Oooh, which one, wayoutwest? I’ve read a couple in my life, and have a gift one sitting unread, though I forget now who even wrote it.
Yep, Fool’s Progress. We only pretend to be evolving.
I’m for bed; good night everyone. Dream well.
But for my certainty that you’d humbly reject the honorific, I’d call you a saint, wendydavis, for this and every other essay of yours that I’ve had the privilege to read.
And I am not a man of faith.
Speaking of saints, do you have a favorite? Mine is St. Brigid of Ireland and the miracle she performed that most inspires my faithless imagination was turning her dirty bath-water into beer to quench the thirst of lepers.
Can you imagine what she could do with 56 million gallons of radioactive waste?
A follow-up comment to nonquixote @ #19 above and also a comment in response to this wd Davisite infested MyFDL diary as well… ;->
What good are wetlands anyway? Who needs swamplands? Can’t sell swampland to build factories and houses on. Too wet for corn or wheat. Cranberries? — okay — sure — but cranberries can’t be converted into ethanol ( or can they? )– so what good are cranberries other than being on than on the holiday dinner table? May as well just fill in these worthless wetlands — at least it serves a purpose and lets mining companies cut mining waste handling expense(s) and make some money. Scott Walker may not be much of a planet or WI visionary — Scott Walker is a practical guy and is not going to waste WI wetlands on water retention,filtering or on just to have some unmolested by humans natural habitat around. So fill’em in — mines make and making someone some money — now that’s being practical. Scott Walker — the last guy to have making these critical decisions in Madison,WI. Sheesh.
Scott Walker — a self confessed Reaganaut — appears to have some Kochian carpetbagger politician instincts that will be leaving scars on Wisconsin long after this born in Colorado charlatan has moved on from contaminating Madison with the serial wretched politics Scott Walker seems to find and take delight in doing.
Scott Walker is a genuine political throwback who evidently simply disregards the names LaFollette or Nelson or what these two last names represent in Wisconsin statehouse long vision legacy and politics and State of WI governance history. I do not still get how Scott Walker has managed to climb so far up the ladder in WI … Walker’s Milwaukee County debris field is not very hard to discover and what Walker has done and keeps doing in Madison as WI Govenor seems consistently dubious and always done for worst of Koch Inc. motives and sought goals. Walker slithered in as WI Governor due in large part due to WI D Party being so pathetic — a word that describes DLC run D Party here in early 21st century repeatedly. See Clintons. See Obama. See my last 5-10 sta FDL comments.
Here at FDL where it is deemed useful and sporting to beat up on the GOPs ceaselessly by some Lakers because for them its all about R vs. D junk it remains unknowable that the real problem is not how bad the GOPs are but how bad and rotted out the D Party is. Fix the D Party ( if possible — I doubt it is ) and the GOPs become a non-problem. What? Not mock the GOPs? Getouttahere! Expose how craven the Ds are?! Oh my!! That is far too radical!! Besides making fun of John “Boner” ( get it?) Boehner — thats so funny! — is easy to do R vs. D junk.
Scott Walker thinks Ronald Reagan was a Great American POTUS. Gosh — so does Barack Obama. How does that work and bring a R like Walker and a D like Obama to the same page? James Watt — Ronald Reagan’s Voldermort like Interior Secretary — and Scott Walker — a would be Kochian cats-paw –appear to be of similar composition when it comes to Man vs. Planet Earth. How Walker gets away with doing junk politics in Madison as he does is sad –Wisconsin is my home state and I deplore seeing or hearing what nonquixote highlighted in #19 comment.
wd — the atomic weapons/electric power generation waste looming/here now disaster story in USA is one that will be with us for a very long time ( likely centuries )… if the Commies or Terrorists had created this Hanford Atomic Waste TimeBomb we would be getting barraged non-stop with how vile and venal the Commies ( Chinese?)and/or Terrorists ( Iranians?) had been/were for hatching such a scheme.
I suggest ( only partly in jest ) moving WH and U.S.Capitol to Hanford,WA atomic waste site …doing so would perhaps solve either one problem or the other problem …either way …we could with some accuracy at least call it genuine progress.
Recomended … thank you wd … stay with it :-)
Couple of points of information.
Rocky Ford, indeed the cantaloupe capital of the world, is in the southeast corner of the state in Otero county. The health scare was ecoli, much as the California spinach problem, it was traced to “feedlot fertilizer”. (Bovines!)
The clean-up at Rocky Flats was initially to take 60 years and 30+ billion, until a computer model was ‘discovered’ that allowed it to only be 10 years and $9 billion. The waste was taken to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad New Mexico, and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. As to the veracity of its safety, a road was proposed from the new airport in Jefferson county to Golden. It is being built as a private toll road, being private allows it avoid further testing or an environmental impact study. Anybody want a job building a road with 25K year half-life plutonium in the dust?
This was the novel Sacagaweh by Anna Lee Waldo, great if long, 1400pg, book. The author was sued by Benjamin Capps for plagiarism and I even found passages she took from George Catlin’s writing.
Hello March,
I doubt they’ll can it, they’ll just build a pipeline and you can bet they won’t leak or spill any of that precious commodity.
Had the PBS Nature show on in the background about wolves in Canada, million acres, Woods Buffalo National Park, last shots of the show were the encroachment of tar-sand extraction, (four hundred years worth of energy for Canada, presumptive basis of any humans even being around that long or any of that “energy,” is actually going to be used in Canada)enough to make one cry, but my little heart says, resistance is not futile.
She’s a good Saint to choose, then, bigchin. If there were one any closer to the Patron Saint of Spiritual Alchemy, maybe that one, but in the meantime, thank you, Brigid.
Somewhere in my noodle are images of turning poison into medicine, and once upon a time I tried to weave together a post on ways we collectively might be able to undo some of the damage we’ve wrought, both on the planet and onto each other. Somewhere in the mix was Masaru Omato’s evidence, if you might call it that. Anyhoo, I’m a hippie, so I put a lot of stock in mindfulness and positive intentionality, and in many ways tome, it’s what’s left, in that only higher consciousness can bring solutions.
Sainthood, lol. See all ya have to is whinge about how hard it was to paste together a depressing diary, and whoosh; more affirmative action votes ‘r comin’ yer way. ;o)
I’ve always enjoyed reading your clear, intelligent, and morally unambiguous comments on the Mothership, bigchin. One day you spoke a bit about being an opera star (not your words), the many parts you’ve performed, and the musically grand company you’re among. Can’t tell you how pleased I was that it’s so, and I reckon we’d all love to hear more. Here, if you’d be so good, would work for me. Or a diary would be even better, cuz see I’ve forgotten the particulars already.
Best to you, amigo; thanks for reading and caring.
Added: I’d forgotten to mention that newish member EF Beall is an opera aficianado, and while I hadn’t been so much, our friend Ryan Brown of Opera Lafayette is trying hard to educate us to appreciate it more. ;o)
Hallo, arrow. It’s not hard to imagine why you say that only in partial jest, but the galloping rate of this calumny related to a general sense that the US is going under as a world power? Meaning hurry up and grab what ya can now? Or is any of it related to some nagging sense that people have invested in the wrong currency values, as in: materialism and lust for power rather than soul cleansing and spiritual fulfillment?
Anyway, to your complaint about so many grabbing the low-hanging fruit of partisan politics as a worthy effort, you might like this piece by Pham Binh in which he reviews ‘Democrats: A Critical History‘. It allowed me to see a bit more clearly why reforming the D party may not be possible, at least in my lifetime.
Many folks claim WI as a cautionary tale concerning the folly (sorry, fightin’ Bob) of turning a mass movement into a partisan political one. Dunno, but it’s sure worth thinking about, though in that one case, those in favor of collective bargaining may have needed to highlight the D’s as allies.
Yes, thanks for correcting Rocky Ford’s location; just east of Pueblo, Mr. wd said. But are people really growing crops at Rocky Flats, or was that just snark you’d heard?
Shiver me timbers, blueokie; I’d thought they’d never actually activated the WIPP site after ‘discovering’ the folly of its ever having been considered stable! Savannah I don’t even know about, so thank you for that info.
So…once again, corporatization of what should be The Commons…means no oversight on safety, tra la la. Sure, I’d pay to drive on that toll road. With my life, I guess. Building it? That’s for the peons to do!
Her book Watch the Face of the Sky looks interesting too (googled). That is a lot of pages. Even with a web search, I can’t recall which ones I’d read; it was so long ago, and all I’m left with are images by now.
Good morning, Branch Davisians.
Another little bit of history: It was Otto Hahn who got the experimental results in 1938 that could only be explained as fission of uranium into barium and krypton, but it was his former collaborator, who had had to get out of Dodge because she was Jewish, the great Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch who were able to explain the result theoretically. It was Hahn who got the 1944 Nobel Prize (in chemistry, not physics) for the work, a snub of female scientists that was protested even in those times.
Ah, the old nuclear ceiling, eh wot? Poor Lise, poor Otto, but they may have saved themselves from eventual infamy…
Interesting Wiki info, but I confess to misunderstanding most of it, not having much acquaintance with physics.
Mornin’, EF Beall. How fun is it that such an uninspired, rote, karma labor diary brought so many hilarious sobriquets, though?
By the by, I was just reading this piece at NC; the co-founder of the oil drum was extolling the virtues of, and need for, small nuclear power plants. Arrgh. Haven’t made it through the comments yet to know how much pushback on that there was.
Do you ever get the paranoid thought that MOTU and their Koch minions are trying to push Wisconsin into armed revolt? It’s such a steady attack.
Rocket science …
Maybe once the darn polluted areas are on the surface pristine and wild, us old folks can be allowed there (seventies and up) to join the beasties and maybe report on the damage from time to time – I’d like to make a monastery up there among the wolves, away from what they’re calling civilization nowadays.
Some oldies have done that in Chernobyl I hear; might be a lovely way to spend last planetary moments. Far, far better than a retirement home, and our bodies could maybe help the earth recover…
That was d-a-r-n up yonder, not ‘dam’ . :)
Aaaahhhhhh…. Oooooohhhhmmmm…. Now that’s my kind of rocket science.
But wait! Wot? Couldn’t you find a video of the chef who said the dough should feel like a baby’s bum when it’s juuuuust riiiiight, and proofing and test had to be accompanied by jazz playing on the radio?
Do you mean up in nonquixote’s referenced Woods Buffalo Park? Or at Rocky Flats? The latter is bleak beyond bleak, but I can’t get these images to pop out individually.
But what a good idea, juliania, if our decaying stardust and water…reverted to stardust only, and healed the earth. Spiritual alchemy of a sort. ;o)
Oh, and the bad news is that I’m working on another sad PSA post, but it needs to be seen, I think. John Kiriakou went to prison yesterday.
I was thinking of your example of Hanford, but anywhere nature had been left to deal with the terrible consequences would do. I’m not a builder, but I can do gardening a bit okay – used to be you could be buried anywhere in New Mexico, and you know the Amazonians created incredible soils (google terra preta) from their living leavings. Pueblo middens are something like, though mostly they’re treasured by archeologists not agronomists.
Monasteries started out in deserts, so it isn’t a totally daft idea. And many became famous for the gardens they built – Saint Fiacre is one I used to paint – he was an herbalist. Of course the produce wouldn’t be generally healthful, but some ways looking down the eons…
My birds have short lives; maybe I could take them with me…
Unfortunately the Rocky Flats/Ford comment wasn’t snark, not that a lot of people weren’t aware, but on more than one occasion I was asked if I wasn’t confusing Rocky Ford with something else. Hard to believe people could be living within 20-30 miles of a major man-made plutonium dump and be unaware. It went along with many who believed that the gov would never do something unsafe. The comments about Hanford irradiating the Columbia (sigh) that brought it to mind.
I’ve always remembered about the WIPP because it struck me as a fun anagram that means “hole full of unholy shit”. Perhaps its just an attempt to make the Cavern self-lighting. Savannah River Site was one of the first places Uncle Sugar saw a rural area full of poor people which made it a perfect site, until someone looked at a map and noticed all that “empty” space west of the Pecos.
The thing that gets me is how it was thought a good idea to spread the waste in three different water sheds, evidence of a philosophy that says the Earth isn’t a system, just different locations that never interact.
Wouldn’t even want to search for such a video, knowing how snake-eyed the k-porn police are. Probably could find one mentioning a memory foam pillow instead of a tushie. Have no radio or speakers in my kitchen — how would I hear the microwave beeps?
But you reminded me of a joke I heard in 1953 (the kid who told it grew up to lawyer for the ACLU in California): Two polar bears are sitting in a tub, and one says, “Pass the soap”, and the other says, “No soap, radio”.
holy shit, i used to protest there in the old days, haven’t been back since. It’s hard to wrap my head around that!
Ronald Reagan approved and promoted nuclear fly ash use in concrete. They’ve been doing it for decades. I learned that accidently when I was working with acrylic cement as an art medium. The secret to strength was in the fly ash.
Playgrounds, sidewalks, buildings. As a concrete man said,”Every time those fuckers have something they don’t know how to get rid of, they want to put it in my fucking concrete.”
my world changed
Hanford’s new ‘clean-up’ date is 2045; hope I’m not alive still then, lol.
But no, I hadn’t thought about the earliest monasteries having been in the deserts. And yes, the old farming methods of building humus and beneficial bacteria are on the rise, under several different names and techniques.
Taking your birds with me touched my heart, woman. You’re an extraordinary human, and I’m proud to know you.
Again, Buffy Sainte Marie: ‘third-worlders see it first: the dynamite, the dozers and the acid rain…’
‘We’re dying of their gravy spills’. Which in the end, is why I push so hard toward affinity and alliance with the poor and the Indigenous: we’re all fast becoming third-worlders.
I hear you on the ignorance of the continent as wholly inter-connected, but also as the whole planetetary ecosystem is dynamically of a piece.
Ummm. Not to harsh your mellow totally, but I read a larger version of this at some website the other day. Put it in the ‘don’t look now category‘.
Silly man, the chef doesn’t *use* a bum to demonstrate, he just mentions the simile. And recommends jazz playing. But dammit, man; I don’t get the joke, and I hate that!
More than mutual.
Having a good sense of humor means knowing when not to laugh. No soap radio.
Yes, that and going down to Pueblo when Uncle was playing “Risk” and moving his pieces around like they were trailer loads of Rocky Ford cantaloupe.
Soon radiation will be showing up in processed food with an RDA next to it.
You realize that wendydavis has been typing b-u-m and not b-u-r-n? I’d support your efforts to permit the use of all caps until FDL figures out how to kern its fonts better.
Whew; good news is I dinnae laugh, lol! Is there an award er something?
But on the ‘it just keeps getting better all the time’ front:
China announces the vast number of cyber attacks on military websites by the US (and others).
And nice on the bum’s rush.
John Doe was closed yesterday, who knows what is going to happen next for better or worse?
I doubt Walker is ready to surrender his
criminal defenselegal cooperation fund quite yet, though.http://www.uppitywis.org/john-doe-era-ends
Fret not Openhope, the flyash in concrete ends up radiating little more than, in some cases less than, the other ingredients in crete. It does reduce the amount of CO2 emmitted in the manufacturing process, it is Green.
Radon gas is a problem for some structures even those without any flyash in the concrete and the structure of flyash actually reduces its emmission.
(I’ve been away because I went to a midday concert — the only kind I get to anymore — of the amateur/semipro music group I hang out with. They did Beethoven’s “Archduke” piano trio nicely. Then I had to go for groceries.)
I confess, wd, that after some 35 years away from the field, I still find it easier to read the kind of physics discussion in those wikis than the interview you link too. (I do see that the comments you mention have a lot of nonsense.) But that may be because it’s late afternoon and I haven’t had my 15 minute nap yet.
The thing about Meitner is that she studied under Boltzman and Planck, both household names in physical science circles, and then worked under the latter before she teamed up with Hahn for a long time. Since she was the physicist and he the chemist I naturally take her to have been the brains of the team, although I haven’t really studied the point.
But as to “infamy,” if you read the wiki on Hahn too (2nd link in my earlier comment), he felt a deep sense of guilt upon hearing of Hiroshima, and spent a good part of the rest of his life working against nuclear weapons.
My ‘infamy’ remark was more ‘in comparison to Oppy’, who I’d remembered did in fact try to limit nukes later, but was forestalled by Teller, iirc, and was sort of McCarthy-ed and called a Communist, etc. He also could have not evaded early questions about how he felt after discovering the true destructive power of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It’s good to hear that Hahn worked so hard against them. From what I’d read, I’d thought a case was made that Oppy was somewhat unstable, but I can’t remember the source of that image I hold.
Yes, those comment streams at NC are wicked; the colors and layout hurt my eyes, too, so I try to catch a thread early on. As I was saying to CTuttle, same for his quotes he doesn’t color more darkly, and his free use of extra punctuation: my eyes and brain go haywire. (I had some brain damage some time ago that never repaired itself, so the problem is decidedly mine, but…nonetheless.)
The following links are for wendydavis alone… everyone else can ignore them!
wendydavis – if you listen to the b. button clips (that’s me under the blue baby blanket, b.b. born as an old man), you should know that the composer, John Eaton (MacArthur Genius Award winner) writes in quarter tones (damn difficult to sing, btw) so if it sounds out of tune to you it’s supposed to! Also, as you’ll surmise, I’m using a “character” voice and the difference in my tone might be startling. The first (The Stranger) is a song by my friend Ben Yarmolinsky.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sCCiU-XYiM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZGwNj5UFSo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uKXmsp8Y-E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqABlJTXJLo
Bless you, my son.
(Mr. wd and I decided that as a saint, I can offer blessings, lol.)
Such range you have – how many octaves? A lot. I had about one and a half, lol, not unlike Grace Slick.
Why would anyone ignore them? Only if they don’t see them, I’d reckon.
I would certainly agree that Oppenheimer was unstable, since with his break from Szilard and the really moral people who worked on the bomb because they were afraid the Nazis would get it first, to go along with Gen. Groves and Truman and murder Japanese civilians after the Nazis were defeated, represented a complete reversal of the ideals of his younger years.
Two further anecdotes: 1. I went to an academic seminar somewhere around 1970 whose ostensible purpose was to discuss the book Lawrence and Oppenheimer by the English professor Nuel Pharr Davis (whose detailed thesis I have forgotten, but I remember it was panned by physicists and historians alike). We were sandbagged, because Leslie Groves himself (in uniform) was imported to insist that Oppenheimer and the other scientists who built the bomb had no ulterior motives, but “were only following my orders.”
2. I knew one of the many historians who have written about “the real reasons” the bomb was used, since he hung out at the Library of Congress until his death sometime in the 1990s. His thesis was that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed because there were two types of bombs, uranium and plutonium, and both had to be field-tested.
I’d love to exchange e mails!..
but I think you forgot to include yours in the last comment. If you repost it, I’ll make sure you know it’s me in the subject header as I don’t want to put mne out there.
Don’t worry, I forget those little details all the time and, contrary to the prevailing notion, I kinda cherish that part of being an old guy, heh!
Right, Oppenheimer was unstable, the evidence being that he hadn’t accepted Jesus Christ as his savior. Lotsa ways to view the use of The Bomb, but one that’s never bothered with is that FDR apparently had suffered a stroke during the Yalta meeting (February 1945), so it’s impossible to know how he would have dealt with Stalin and Churchill had he been in control of his faculties. Were his aides, and staff, cabinet, and military still loyal to the commander-in-chief at that point? Churchill was already well into dementia; Stalin’s paranoia was clinical. As far as we know, we don’t yet know who’s responsible for pulling The Trigger. We do know that Truman was laughing an instant before he put on his official countenance for the camera and mic when he announced the bombing of Hiroshima had taken place.
How come no one blames Galileo or Newton, or both?
I need to apologize for being absent. Given the axiom that parents never really stop parenting, as joss would have it, this afternoon both our kids, a few of their kids, and Mr. wd’s father…all needed parenting, crises happening when they will, not when you’re ready.
It seems I’ve pretty much hit the wall for today. Bigchin, I’ll try to look back and delete my email address if I see you’ve snagged it.
Otherwise, thank you all for such a good conversation. The State Dept. just okayed the draft EIS for the XL pipleline, with a 45-day comment period to come before…the final okay, I reckon. Or else this Prez will become a hero to the…oh, wait, never mind.
Africom News: Frankin Spinney’s up with ‘Neo-liberalism and the arrogance of ignorance’. Good read, maps, links to experts, etc. Poor Africa.
Read if you will, then listen to bigchin’s ‘L’Albatros‘. Good for the soul. Look at the night sky if you can see it; wish you could see the foxes climbing trees here tonight. ;o)
I appreciate your take on Oppy’s history, but your number 2 is too arrgh too handle, and yet…
Thanks, EF Beall, and sorry to be gone so long.
My memory re: Oppy’s instability was more concerning his wife and brother, but as I said, my memory’s fuzzy, and sources often have agendas, so, there’s that. He was under pressure to convert, or is that just an assumption due to the atmospherics and other scientists religions?
Didn’t even know Churchill had dementia by then, but tell me what you know, or have understood about the meme that Hirohito had actually surrendered before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. So many versions of that, and worse, the many different claims for numbers of Allied casualties that were predicted if an invasion of Japan were deemed ‘necessary’.
My skimpy knowledge includes the declassified information about the terms of surrender and the negotiations (as they’re called) during the late spring of 1945. Summarizing: the English-language term ‘unconditional surrender’ was a sticking point, for the Japanese side wondered if it meant that their emperor and ‘religious’ ideas would be dissolved, abolished. There remains uncertainty whether assurances that the emperor and societal norms would be retained were transmitted to the Japanese highest authorities prior to the Enola Gay’s flight. Opinions vary about what convinced the Japanese to give up the fight. Some scholars believe the bombs were not the decisive factor, but the Soviet declaration of war against Japan and the imminent invasion by the Soviets were the factors (August 8 & 9, though dates are unreliable with respect to the International Date Line). I have no idea what ‘unconditional surrender’ means or meant. I know, because I’ve seen it, there’s a very creepy photograph of MacArthur et al. aboard the USS Missouri during the signing ceremonies in September, which depicts an old US flag (like pre-WW1) oriented upside-down on a wall (said to have been ordered so by MacArthur).
(Incidentally, I watched the Oliver Stone program about that history, and I found his portrayal to be hasty, incomplete, and misleading — not recommendable.)
I thought a lot about ‘unconditional surrender’ in the 1980s, when I could no longer repair and maintain my automobile with all the EPA-mandated hose contraptions. I supposed it was like trade protectionism, as the French, British, and Italian automobile industries pretty much disappeared from the US market, while the Japanese and German auto industries thrived here, easily meeting and conforming to the EPA regulations. Did I change the subject? Didn’t the Japanese attack the US Naval fleet in late 1941 because that fleet was preventing the Japanese from getting oil around Indonesia a few months earlier?
About Oppy, I don’t know anything, but there was, umm, suspicion, about non-native, immigrant nuclear scientists and others, especially Jews, especially after the Rosenberg electrocutions. Very chilling times.
That’s almost too much to ponder, mon ami, and answer sensibly. No, I didn’t ever make the connection to the US fleet keeping Japan from getting oil from Indonesia, nor the EPA regs being motivated by trade protectionism. I do know that’s when home servicing of cars went impossible, though.
Um; I never even thought about Jew/Gentile with regard to the Manhattan Scientists. Speaking of which, a friend sent me this staggering piece this morning concerning the compilation of the vast network of Nazi holocaust facilities all over Europe.
Gads, did I love Ethel Rosenberg in ‘Angels in America’.
Now will come the unravelling and naming of names: most of those facilities were privately owned, subcontracted businesses, just like the trains that charged the government for all the transport runs. I have a fantasy, that like the WW1 allies stripped Bayer of its Aspirin (now aspirin) patents as consideration for crimes (and thereby provided dirt-cheap medical relief), a similar fate awaits those companies who facilitated the crimes of WW2. Their names are large in pharmaceuticals, agricultural poisons, and GMOs.
From your mouth to G*d’s ears, amigo. G’night.