Environment

The roll call of U.S. Sailors who say their health was devastated when they were irradiated while delivering humanitarian help near the stricken Fukushima nuke is continuing to soar. So many have come forward that the progress of their federal class action lawsuit has been delayed. Petitions on their behalf are now circulating worldwide at www.nukefree.org and elsewhere. Bay area lawyer Charles Bonner says a re-filing will wait until early February to accommodate a constant influx of sailors from the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and other American ships. Within a day of Fukushima One’s March 11, 2011, melt-down, American “first responders” were drenched in radioactive fallout.

USEC Inc., the company building the American Centrifuge Plant (ACP) to enrich uranium at Piketon, OH, announced it will file for bankruptcy in the first quarter of 2014. USEC said they are restructuring to pay off $530 million in debts to bondholders. Unbelievably, the bankruptcy did not end government subsidy for the ACP. * Just hours after USEC announced bankruptcy, the U. S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) announced it would give the company $30 million to keep the ACP alive—around $10 million per month for the next 3 months. * In an article critical of the DOE’s subsidy decision, the online stock market news 4-traders wrote about how USEC, on the same day as the bankruptcy, announced that they are seeking new investor money because of a “National Security Train Program” utilizing ACP technology to be funded by the government for not less than $750 million. No official DOE or other government documents could be found mentioning a “National Security Train Program,” and neither DOE nor USEC would comment on the program. USEC has put about $2.5 billion, much of this subsidized by the DOE, into the ACP.

And now in at the end of 2013, Canadian Dan Boeckner is once again paling around our fair city. At least that was the aura of the unveiling of Operators, a new project Mr. Boeckner has with Sam Brown, the Columbus Minister of being a professional drummer and a musical Statesman as well. To create repeated anomaly context aside from saying the Divine Fits have spawned a project now that a new Spoon record calls Brit Daniels away; Dan Boeckner’s other projects include Wolf Parade, and the Handsome Furs. When I say Sam Brown, of course you must also think Gaunt, New Bomb Turks, V-3, the Sun, RJD2, and Anna Ranger. When I say Devojka you should say, “how do I pronounce that,” and ask “whom” and then will later say ‘oh the tall female keyboardist of Operators.’ I say all of that to say this: Double Happiness felt really intimate, and almost “house partyish” for the second performance of Operators.

Fukushima continues to spew out radiation. The site has been infiltrated by organized crime. There are horrifying signs of ecological disaster in the Pacific and human health impacts in the United States. But within Japan, a new State Secrets Act makes such talk punishable by up to ten years in prison. Taro Yamamoto, a Japanese legislator, says the law “represents a coup d’etat” leading to “the recreation of a fascist state.” The powerful Asahi Shimbun newspaper compares it to “conspiracy” laws passed by totalitarian Japan in the lead-up to Pearl Harbor, and warns it could end independent reporting on Fukushima. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been leading Japan in an increasingly militaristic direction. Tensions have increased with China. Massive demonstrations have been renounced with talk of “treason.” But it’s Fukushima that hangs most heavily over the nation and the world. Tokyo Electric Power has begun the bring-down of hot fuel rods suspended high in the air over the heavily damaged Unit Four. The first assemblies it removed may have contained unused rods.

On December 2, 2013, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) held a public meeting on “Waste Confidence” in Perrysburg, OH. The NRC has “confidence” that the high-level radioactive nuclear waste problem will be solved sometime in the future! In 1984, in an Orwellian act, they ruled that they can continue to hand out new licenses for nuclear power reactors and give 20-year license extensions to aging, brittle, accident prone nuclear reactors – without considering public concerns about the safety, storage and disposal of thousands of tons of radioactive waste. The NRC also maintained that high-level radioactive waste is a “generic” issue. So issues specific to particular sites – such as the amount of waste accumulating in overcrowded fuel pools or in aged, deteriorated casks, or in areas prone to flood or earthquake—cannot be raised. A year ago, after legal action by a group of organizations, including the Sierra Club, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, DC overturned the NRC waste confidence ruling. This forced the NRC to halt all licensing of reactors.

Earlier this year the FBI and the state Inspector General’s office investigated mineral rights lease flipping and falsification of public records in Noble County. Environmentalists at the time claimed it was a precursor to massive fracking planned in the rural Ohio area. One family affected by this was the Bonds. They charge that state officials are harassing them and covering up the theft of gas and mineral leases at the behest of Ohio Governor John Kasich and his quest to unleash the forces of fracking on rural Ohio. The investigation focuses on Form 7, a public record that is filed with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) to identify who actually owns the mineral rights under the surface land. Each Form 7 is supposed to be accompanied by a mineral lease recorded at the County Recorder’s office. In the Muskingum water conservancy area there are massive discrepancies between the Form 7s filed with the ODNR and the County Recorder’s records. Greg Pace, an environmental activist confirmed to the Free Press that at least one of the Form 7s appears to be fraudulent with a tampered notarized signature.