Eideard

Halliburton Co faces lawsuits over groundwater pollution near a now-closed facility in Oklahoma that cleaned missile casings for the U.S. Defense Department during the Cold War.

Halliburton, which now specializes in oilfield services, said one of its units cleaned solid fuel from missile casings between 1965 and 1991 at a semi-rural facility on the north side of Duncan, Oklahoma. It was closed in the mid-1990s.

A component of the fuel was ammonium perchlorate, a salt that is highly soluble in water. Halliburton said it had been discovered in the soil and groundwater on its site and in certain residential water wells near the property.

The company said it was determining the extent of that contamination and that it had arranged to supply residents with bottled water and, if needed, a temporary water supply system…

The lawsuits, filed in Oklahoma state and federal courts starting late last month, claim the plaintiffs have suffered health problems such as hypothyroidism, which is associated with exposure to perchlorate over time…

According to Halliburton, the lawsuits claim it knew about the releases into groundwater of ammonium perchlorate and, in a federal lawsuit, nuclear or radioactive waste as well, and that Halliburton did not take corrective actions.

But after conducting soil and groundwater sampling along with the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality, Halliburton said it only found nuclear or radioactive material in soil in a discrete area on the Duncan site, and that it was not present in groundwater.

“The radiological impacts from this discrete area are not believed to present any health risk for off-site exposure,” Halliburton said in the filing.

Rest easy. Folks in Duncan, Oklahoma, don’t really glow in the dark. They’re just poisoned.

Patients undergoing molecular imaging to evaluate their stomach’s ability to clear food are going to have an altogether new kind of breakfast. A study presented at SNM’s 58th Annual Meeting has confirmed that nuclear medicine technologists can effectively use oatmeal products radiolabeled with a medical isotope to target and image the emptying of the stomach.

“The current standard for molecular imaging of gastric emptying is radiolabeling egg meal, but there are patients who, either due to lifestyle choices or allergies, cannot eat eggs,” says Tory Maloy, senior nuclear medicine technologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago, Ill. “With this research we have demonstrated that there is an equally effective way to label oatmeal for gastric emptying studies…”

During the study, researchers used an imaging agent called Tc99m SC (sulfur colloid) both before and after boiling water for oatmeal preparation. Small amounts of water were added to samples of the oatmeal products. Separation of the oatmeal that was bound successfully with the agent from the remaining unbound agent was achieved with low-speed centrifugation for two minutes. Radiolabeling activity was gauged with a dose calibrator and compared to that of standard radiolabeled egg meal.

Results of the study showed that radiolabeling was significantly improved by labeling prior to boiling water and that radiolabeled oatmeal was just as effective as egg meal for the molecular imaging of gastric emptying. This study expands the current scientific literature regarding radiolabeling for gastric emptying studies and provides patients a safe and effective alternative to imaging with radiolabeled egg meal.

Add raisins, maybe a little cinnamon – and it rocks!

Tresa VanWinkle struggled to hold back tears as she glanced at family photos perched on her desk among the clutter of her downtown office. “I look at what has happened to members of my family, and I wonder if we are the children of the bomb,” said VanWinkle, 53, director of the Alamogordo-based Cancer Awareness, Prevalence, Prevention and Early Detection center…

“The bomb” was the 19-kiloton plutonium device nicknamed “The Gadget,” detonated just before dawn July 16, 1945, on the northwest end of what is now the White Sands Missile Range. The explosion, the product of the Manhattan Project, was the first-ever detonation of an atomic device and is considered the dawn of the nuclear age.

Now, more than six decades after the United States launched what some consider, in essence, a surprise nuclear attack on the citizens of south-central New Mexico, many feel they have been abandoned by their government and left to deal on their own with three generations of radiation-induced illnesses and deaths…

In the past 15 years, VanWinkle said, 14 members of her and her husband’s family, including two of her sisters, have been diagnosed with a variety of cancers; eight of them, including her sisters, have died…

A recently formed group known as the Tularosa Downwinders Consortium is attempting to raise awareness of the increase in cancer and autoimmune diseases in four counties adjacent to the Trinity Site (Otero, Lincoln, Sierra and Socorro) — up to nine times higher than nationwide figures — and to push for inclusion of the Trinity downwinders in the federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990…

The compensation act, initiated in great part by former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, father of U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., offered mea culpas and monetary compensation to uranium miners and residents of Nevada and other Western states who were downwind from above-ground atomic-weapons testing in the 1950s and early ’60s.

The legislation, administered through the Justice Department, authorizes lump-sum compensation payments and sometimes medical coverage to individuals in three categories who contracted any of 27 types of cancer or other radiation-related diseases…

Despite numerous amendments and expansion of the coverage over the years, the Trinity downwinders have never been included in the legislation.

RTFA. None of this is a surprise to folks in my neck of the prairie.

Some of what folks face is the American tradition of denial in the face of responsibility. Doesn’t matter which disaster we confront, Americans are always supposed to be the Good Guys – our government even more so. It’s easy to refuse compensation if you convince yourself nothing happened, nothing’s wrong in the first place.

White phosphorus being used in Falluja

A study examining the causes of a dramatic spike in birth defects in the Iraqi city of Falluja has for the first time concluded that genetic damage could have been caused by weaponry used in US assaults that took place six years ago.

The research, which will be published next week, confirms earlier estimates revealed by the Guardian of a major, unexplained rise in cancers and chronic neural-tube, cardiac and skeletal defects in newborns. The authors found that malformations are close to 11 times higher than normal rates, and rose to unprecedented levels in the first half of this year – a period that had not been surveyed in earlier reports…

“We suspect that the population is chronically exposed to an environmental agent,” said one of the report’s authors, environmental toxicologist Mozhgan Savabieasfahani. “We don’t know what that environmental factor is, but we are doing more tests to find out.”

The report identifies metals as potential contaminating agents afflicting the city – especially among pregnant mothers. “Metals are involved in regulating genome stability,” it says. “As environmental effectors, metals are potentially good candidates to cause birth defects.

The findings are likely to prompt further speculation that the defects were caused by depleted uranium rounds, which were heavily used in two large battles in the city in April and November 2004. The rounds, which contain ionising radiation, are a core component of the armouries of numerous militaries and militias…

The report acknowledges that other battlefield residues may also be responsible for the defects. “Many known war contaminants have the potential to interfere with normal embryonic and foetal development,” the report says. “The devastating effect of dioxins on the reproductive health of the Vietnamese people is well-known….”

The United States has owned up to nothing to help the victims of that environmental poisoning.

The researchers believe that the figures understate what they describe as an epidemic of abnormalities, because a large number of babies in Falluja are born at home with parents reluctant to seek help from authorities…

“An epidemic of birth defects is unfolding in Fallujah, Iraq,” said Savabieasfahani. “This is a serious public health crisis that needs global attention. We need independent and unbiased research into the possible causes of this epidemic.

RTFA. Having worked at thwarting the testing and development of DU weapons in New Mexico, I don’t need to be convinced of the dangers of depleted uranium ammo. It’s a pyrophoric metal that burns to dusty completion after ignition leaving it’s deadly structure blowing in the wind.

FedEx could learn today [Friday] what happened to a package containing radioactive materials that went missing a day before.

The company said it is searching in the Tennessee area and that the item is safe as long as nobody tampers with the protective packaging around it.

The item is a cylinder containing rods used for hospital machinery that were being sent to a person in Knoxville, Tennessee, said Sandra Munoz, a company spokeswoman. “The rods are used for quality control calibration,” Munoz said. “We have lots of experience in handling this kind of shipment.”

Munoz said the company may learn more Friday morning when two employees who handled the shipment return to work.

Uh, no one swiped the bar code in transit?

My experience, memory of screw-ups like this – unfortunately – usually ends in tragedy. Often, someone walked off with the radioactive marker source, putting themselves and their families at serious risk.

Phew! They found it. It had been double-boxed and the outer box with shipping info went to the destination. The inner box containing the radioactive rod inside a protective tube – was left aside because of no shipping info – in a FedEx terminal in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Some books are written to be read, others to be put in a cannon and blasted at the seat of power. Two such blasts have just crossed my desk, from academics on either side of the Atlantic. Both are on the same subject, the consequence of the irrational fear of radiation.

The first book, Radiation and Reason, is by an Oxford professor of physics, Wade Allison. It narrates the history and nature of nuclear radiation, culminating in an attack on the obsessive safety levels governing nuclear energy. These overstate the true risk, in Allison’s view, by up to 500 times, thus rendering nuclear prohibitively expensive and endangering the combat of global warming.

The second is Atomic Obsession by John Mueller, professor of political science at Ohio State University. Mueller describes the toxic fear associated with radiation from nuclear weapons. It distorts the balance of international relations and senselessly makes enemies of friends. The books jointly undermine conventional wisdom on the two greatest political challenges of the day, in the fields of energy and defence. As such, they are sensational.

Radiation, says Allison, is nothing like as dangerous as the anti-nuclear lobby and its paranoid regulators claim. The permitted radiation level in the waste storage hall at Sellafield is so low (1 mSv per hour) as to be negligible, a figure achieved at vast cost in construction and inspection. This compares with the 100 mSv threshold for even remote cancer risk and 5,500 for radiation sickness. According to Allison, someone would have to live for a million hours in Sellafield to absorb the same radiation as is administered in a hospital radiotherapy suite. Higher doses are permitted in food processing and even in medicinal resorts, with supposed beneficial or at least harmless effects…

Meanwhile, over in Ohio, Mueller describes the same terror infecting reaction to nuclear weapons. He points out that nuclear bombs are extremely hard to make, let alone deploy, and their destructive power and radiological aftermath are grossly overstated. The devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was largely the result of the buildings bombed being made of wood. Numbers killed were similar to those dying in conventional bomb attacks at the time. Yet we memorialise Hiroshima but not Tokyo, where 100,000 were killed in March 1945…

As for the much-vaunted risk of a terrorist getting a nuclear weapon – the “1% chance” that kept poor Dick Cheney awake at night – Mueller points out that the chance must be not one in a hundred but one in millions. Cheney would have done better worrying about the proliferation of AK47s…

This is all a massive failure of science to pierce the carapace of public ignorance. As Allison and Mueller argue, nothing is as potent as the politics of fear, and there is no fear as blind as that which comes from a bomb and a death ray. So what is science doing? The world is in the grip of a prejudice from which nothing seems able to free it. At least these books try.

Added to my Wish List at Amazon

More than 20 percent of the nation’s water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data.

That law requires communities to deliver safe tap water to local residents. But since 2004, the water provided to more than 49 million people has contained illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage.

Regulators were informed of each of those violations as they occurred. But regulatory records show that fewer than 6 percent of the water systems that broke the law were ever fined or punished by state or federal officials, including those at the Environmental Protection Agency, which has ultimate responsibility for enforcing standards…

“This administration has made it clear that clean water is a top priority,” said an E.P.A. spokeswoman, Adora Andy, in response to questions regarding the agency’s drinking water enforcement. The E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, this year announced a wide-ranging overhaul of enforcement of the Clean Water Act, which regulates pollution into waterways.

“The previous eight years provide a perfect example of what happens when political leadership fails to act to protect our health and the environment,” Ms. Andy added.

Federal regulators fined or punished fewer than 8 percent of water systems that violated the arsenic and radioactive standards. The E.P.A., in a statement, said that in a majority of situations, state regulators used informal methods — like providing technical assistance — to help systems that had violated the rules.

But many systems remained out of compliance, even after aid was offered, according to E.P.A. data. And for over a quarter of systems that violated the arsenic or radioactivity standards, there is no record that they were ever contacted by a regulator, even after they sent in paperwork revealing their violations.

When government is run by ideologues who only answer to corporate directives, draw only conclusions friendly to extractive industries and investors – the needs of a healthy nation are of little interest.

We probably could spend an equivalent eight years just uncovering all the dirty secrets swept under the rug by the Bush/Cheney gang.

“Chemical Rummie”
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Doctors in Iraq’s war-ravaged enclave of Falluja are dealing with up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants and a spike in early life cancers that may be linked to toxic materials left over from the fighting.

The extraordinary rise in birth defects has crystallised over recent months as specialists working in Falluja’s over-stretched health system have started compiling detailed clinical records of all babies born.

Neurologists and obstetricians in the city interviewed by the Guardian say the rise in birth defects – which include a baby born with two heads, babies with multiple tumours, and others with nervous system problems – are unprecedented and at present unexplainable.

A group of Iraqi and British officials…have petitioned the UN general assembly to ask that an independent committee fully investigate the defects and help clean up toxic materials left over decades of war – including the six years since Saddam Hussein was ousted…

Other health officials are also starting to focus on possible reasons, chief among them potential chemical or radiation poisonings. Abnormal clusters of infant tumours have also been repeatedly cited in Basra and Najaf – areas that have in the past also been intense battle zones where modern munitions have been heavily used.

Falluja was the scene of the only two setpiece battles that followed the US-led invasion. Twice in 2004, US marines and infantry units were engaged in heavy fighting with Sunni militia groups who had aligned with former Ba’athists and Iraqi army elements.

The first battle was fought to find those responsible for the deaths of four Blackwater private security contractors working for the US. The city was bombarded heavily by American artillery and fighter jets. Controversial weaponry was used, including white phosphorus, which the US government admitted deploying.

Having supported efforts to prevent testing of depleted uranium projectiles here in New Mexico, knowing something of the residue from radioactive pyrophoric metals, I’m not surprised by any of this.

Presumably, most of you won’t be surprised by the protestations of innocence and patriotic rationales that will flow from the Pentagon, politicians and other pimps of our military-industrial complex. Those who authorized most of this, those who continue to do so, will not relent until we stop them, folks.

LANL’s number one product

More than 60 years after scientists assembled the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, lethal waste is seeping from mountain burial sites and moving toward aquifers, springs and streams that provide water to 250,000 residents of northern New Mexico.

Isolated on a high plateau, the Los Alamos National Laboratory seemed an ideal place to store a bomb factory’s deadly debris. But the heavily fractured mountains haven’t contained the waste, some of which has trickled down hundreds of feet to the edge of the Rio Grande, one of the most important water sources in the Southwest.

So far, the level of contamination in the Rio Grande has not been high enough to raise health concerns. But the monitoring of runoff in canyons that drain into the river has found unsafe concentrations of organic compounds such as perchlorate, an ingredient in rocket propellent, and various radioactive byproducts of nuclear fission.

Laboratory officials insist that the waste doesn’t jeopardize people’s health because even when storm water rushing down a canyon stirs up highly contaminated sediment, it is soon diluted or trapped in canyon bottoms, where it can be excavated and hauled away…

Except that when Lab officials aren’t lying about the dangers, they’re spending time stonewalling programs designed to clean up the waste.

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The best-known product of LANL

No one knows for sure what is buried in the Manhattan Project-era dump here. At the very least, there is probably a truck down there that was contaminated in 1945 at the Trinity test site, where the world’s first nuclear explosion seared the sky and melted the desert sand 200 miles south of here during World War II.

But now a team of workers is using $212 million in federal stimulus money to clean up the 65-year-old, six-acre dump, which was used by the scientists who built the world’s first atomic bomb. They are approaching the job like an archeological dig — only with even greater care, since some of the things they unearth are likely to be radioactive, while others may be explosive.

The dump has become part of the $6 billion stimulus program to clean up the toxic legacy of the arms race, which is one of the biggest sources of direct federal contracts in the $787 billion stimulus act. More than $1.9 billion is being spent at the Hanford site in Washington, the home of the nuclear reactor that made the plutonium for the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. Another $1.6 billion is being spent cleaning up a Savannah River site, in South Carolina.

After the stimulus bill passed, some Republicans questioned the wisdom of devoting so much money to nuclear cleanups, noting that the Department of Energy’s environmental management program had been bedeviled by cost overruns in the past…

Work that was delayed, diverted, disputed by conservative beancounters for decades. There is nothing more frustrating than political hacks who lament disbursing funds for the clean-up of their pet weapons – more than the life and safety of ordinary citizens affected by radioactive detritus.

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