 |
|
|
| | | published Friday, October 30, 2009 | 2130 Views :: 6 Comments |
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board has again urged the
Department of Energy (DOE) to take immediate action to reduce the risk
of a release of plutonium from a fire at Technical Area 55 at Los
Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) following a seismic event.
http://www.dnfsb.gov/pub_docs/recommendations/lanl/rec_2009_02_la.pdf
This is the latest in a series of letters, reports and recommendations
to DOE about the potential consequences of a release of plutonium from
the Technical Area 55 Plutonium Facility following a seismic event
resulting in a fire. The Board stated that the consequences to people
living downwind and downstream of LANL have been underestimated by 100
times.
|
| read more.. |
|
| | | published Wednesday, September 30, 2009 | 1659 Views :: 2 Comments |
By Matthew Cardinale, North American Correspondent, Inter-Press
Service; and News Editor, The Atlanta Progressive News (September 30,
2009)
ATLANTA,
Georgia, Sep 30 (IPS) - Despite statements by U.S. President Barack
Obama that he wants to see the world reduce, and eventually eliminate
nuclear weapons, the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear
Security Administration continues to push forward on a programme called
Complex Modernisation, which would expand two existing nuclear plants
to allow them to produce new plutonium pits and new bomb parts out of
enriched uranium for use in a possible new generation of nuclear bombs.
Originally published at http://atlantaprogressivenews.com/news/0522.html
|
| read more.. |
|
| | | published Monday, September 14, 2009 | 941 Views :: 1 Comments |
Originally published at
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090910_a_hundred_holocausts_an_insiders_window_into_us_nuclear_policy/
Posted on Sep 10, 2009
By Daniel Ellsberg
Editor’s note: This is the first installment of Daniel Ellsberg’s
personal memoir of the nuclear era, “The American Doomsday Machine.”
The online book will recount highlights of his six years of research
and consulting for
the Departments of Defense and State and the White House on issues of
nuclear command and control, nuclear war planning and nuclear crises.
It further draws on 34 subsequent years of research and activism largely on nuclear policy , which followed the intervening 11 years of his preoccupation with the Vietnam War . Subsequent installments also will appear on Truthdig. The author is a senior fellow of theNuclear Age Peace Foundation .
American Planning for a Hundred Holocausts
One
day in the spring of 1961, soon after my 30th birthday, I was shown how
our world would end. Not the Earth, not—so far as I knew then—all
humanity or life, but the destruction of most cities and people in the
Northern Hemisphere.
What I was handed, in a White House office,
was a single sheet of paper with some numbers and lines on it. It was
headed “Top Secret—Sensitive”; under that, “For the President’s Eyes
Only.”
The “Eyes Only” designation meant that, in principle,
it was to be seen and read only by the person to whom it was explicitly
addressed, in this case the president. In practice this usually meant
that it would be seen by one or more secretaries and assistants as
well: a handful of people, sometimes somewhat more, instead of the
scores to hundreds who would normally see copies of a “Top
Secret—Sensitive” document.
|
| read more.. |
|
| | | published Friday, September 04, 2009 | 1289 Views :: 0 Comments |
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE September 4, 2009
Contact: Jay Coghlan, Nuclear Watch NM, 505.989.7342, c. 505.920.7118, jay@nukewatch.org
Santa Fe, NM – Nuclear Watch New Mexico (NWNM) has discovered Los Alamos National Laboratory viewgraphs showing that the U.S. nuclear weapons labs want to leverage “stockpile modernization” through formal Safeguards attached to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty during Senate ratification. This modernization would include “large changes” made to existing nuclear weapons refurbished during existing Life Extension Programs, and/or complete “replacement designs” as early as 2015. Congress has rejected funding a new-design “Reliable Replacement Warhead” (RRW) for the last two years, but the labs have clearly not given up. Moreover, there is a danger that the Obama Administration might concede to some form of RRW in order to win the Congressional supermajority of 67 needed to ratify the CTBT. Further, Obama has just reappointed a formerly strong proponent of RRW to again head up the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
A decade ago, under President Clinton, the Senate rejected CTBT ratification. This last April, while declaring that a world free of nuclear weapons is a long term U.S. national security goal, President Obama pledged, “my Administration will immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.” The Treaty’s declared purpose has always been to cut off the advancement of nuclear weapons. But the American labs, now endowed with supercomputer simulated testing, obviously believe that a ban to physical tests no longer blocks the deployment of new nuclear weapons designs. In contrast, they now even seek to enshrine the capability for major modifications and possible new-designs in CTBT Safeguards.
Ratification of the CTBT by the U.S. will be viewed internationally as a concrete sign of America’s commitment to fulfilling the 1970 NonProliferation Treaty’s mandate for nuclear disarmament. CTBT ratification before the May 2010 NPT Review Conference at the United Nations would be a diplomatic victory, if the Obama Administration can win the necessary Senate votes. Ironically, possible CTBT Safeguards enshrining new or heavily modified U.S. weapons designs could derail the strengthening of the global nonproliferation regime by demonstrating to other countries that the U.S. is not really serious about nuclear disarmament.
|
| read more.. |
|
| | | published Friday, July 10, 2009 | 1178 Views :: 0 Comments |
By John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer
7/7/09
A 40-year-old plant at Los Alamos National Laboratory that treats
liquid radioactive waste had another leak last month as some members
of Congress balk at the rising costs of the plant's replacement.
The leak happened when a plastic connector cracked, spilling 500
gallons of contaminated water onto the floor inside one of the plant's
buildings, according to a report from federal nuclear safety officials.
The water flowed into a sump inside the building, and none of it
escaped, according to the report.
The incident highlights the
increasingly fragile nature of the aging plant. In a report to Congress
earlier this year, the National Nuclear Security Administration said
portions of the plant's waste treatment systems "are over 40 years old
and their reliability is significantly diminishing."
|
| read more.. |
|
| | | published Tuesday, June 30, 2009 | 2030 Views :: 1 Comments |
Grant Finks
Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety
6/27/2009
www.santafenewmexican.com
As one of the "public interest advocacy groups" mentioned in The New
Mexican's editorial of June 20 ("LANL's contaminated history is a
product of a different time"), Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety
takes issue with two of the principal points made in that piece.
We
agree that the release of the Centers for Disease Control historical
review of Los Alamos National Laboratory activities is a significant
event. The CDC document makes fascinating reading. Through hundreds of
pages of committee-speak prose punctuated by scientific charts and
graphs, there emerges a story that is by turns exciting, terrifying,
tragic and even occasionally comical.
|
| read more.. |
|
| | | published Friday, June 26, 2009 | 2592 Views :: 11 Comments |
Sante Fe Reporter: Toxic Potpourri with Joni Arends
By: Corey Pein 06/24/2009
This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the final draft of a 558-page report 10 years in the making, the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment Project. It found dangerous “airborne releases” from Los Alamos National Laboratory “were significantly greater than has been officially reported,” and that “exposure rates in public areas from the world’s first nuclear explosion”—the 1945 Trinity test—“were measured at levels 10,000 times higher than currently allowed.” SFR spoke to Joni Arends, executive director of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety—which watchdogs the environmental and health effects of the work done at LANL—about the report. The CDC will hold a public meeting on the report at 5 pm Thursday, June 25 at the Hilton at Buffalo Thunder.
|
| read more.. |
|
| | | published Wednesday, April 08, 2009 | 4799 Views :: 1 Comments |
FOR RELEASE, April 8, 2009 Contact: Jay Coghlan, Nuclear Watch NM, 505-989-7342 cell 505.920.7118 jay@nukewatch.org
Transforming the U.S. Strategic Posture and Weapons Complex
For Transition to a Nuclear Weapons-Free World
“…as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act... So today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” President Barack Obama, April 5, 2009, Prague, Czech Republic.
Washington, DC - - Today, April 8th, in the nation’s capital, Nuclear Watch New Mexico and the Nuclear Weapons Complex Consolidation Policy Network released a major report outlining how the President’s vision of a nuclear weapons-free world can begin to be concretely realized in the near-term. First, the United States must declare that its strategic stockpile exists for only one purpose — to deter the use of nuclear weapons by others until the world is free of nuclear weapons. For that interim deterrence, a total stockpile of 500 warheads is more than sufficient, and the nuclear weapons complex can be downsized from eight sites to three.
Maintaining a Potent Deterrence
The U.S. stockpile has been extensively tested. Further, recent lifetime studies have shown it to be even more reliable than previously thought. The stockpile can be maintained through a nuts-and-bolts “curatorship” program, instead of the expensive and speculative “Stockpile Stewardship” Program that erodes confidence by intentionally introducing changes to existing nuclear weapons. Under a minimalist (but still extremely potent) nuclear deterrent, U.S. strategic forces can be progressively reduced step-by-step and the weapons complex downsized accordingly, in alignment with the President’s stated national goal of a world free of nuclear weapons.
Re-focusing Research Critical for the 21st Century
Our plan is the plan that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) under the Bush Administration should have proposed for its misnamed “Complex Transformation” – but did not. NNSA’s archaic plan is dead on arrival in the Obama Administration, while our plan sets a reasonable path for 21st Century security on which the U.S. can and should embark. Our plan takes the Lawrence Livermore Lab out of nuclear weapons programs and directs it toward the energy, environmental and global climate change research that our country so desperately needs. It also ends NNSA control of the Sandia Lab in California and the Nevada Test Site by 2012, and ends weapons work at the Kansas City Plant by 2015. As the arsenal is reduced toward 500 warheads, the Savannah River Site near Aiken, SC, and then the Y-12 Site near Oak Ridge, TN, would also cease to be part of the nuclear weapons complex.
|
| read more.. |
|
| |
2009 Fact Sheet Plutonium "Triggers" for Nuclear Bombs | |
| | published Monday, February 23, 2009 | 535 Views :: 0 Comments |
Plutonium pits — carefully fabricated spheres of metal — and high explosives are the “triggers” for modern thermonuclear weapons. The U.S. manufactured pits at the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver until 1989, when the FBI raided the facility to investigate environmental crimes, effectively ending industrial-scale plutonium pit production.
Download 2009 Fact Sheet: Pits5 final.pdf
|
|
| | | published Tuesday, February 17, 2009 | 2333 Views :: 0 Comments |
Congress refused to fund production of the last two new nuclear warheads proposed by DOE—the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (“Bunker Buster”) and the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). At the same time, DOE is making an end run around the Congressional rejection of new nuclear weapons by modifying the W76 through its Life Extension Program.
The FY 2008 LEP budget is $234 million; for FY 2009: $211 million. The decrease reflects the completion of the B61 LEP, but the W76 LEP is now ramping up. Additional monies may be included in other parts of the DOE budget.
DOE just finished a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for “Complex Transformation.” The estimated cost for refurbishing the nuclear weapons complex is more than $150 billion. Despite claims that the overall “footprint” of the complex will be reduced, the eight production sites will all add manufacturing facilities in order to construct new design nuclear weapons. This plan is in addition to the current Life Extension programs which are already in place and the Stockpile Stewardship Programs that annually certify that the nuclear arsenal is safe and secure.
-From ANA's 2008 DC Days Fact Sheet
|
| read more.. |
|
|
 |
|