Informed on Information: Christian Science Monitor: "Traces of Japanese radiation detected in 13 US states"

“Radiation has been detected in the air or water in 13 states, but ‘far below levels of public health concern.’ Rainwater is called safe to drink. Massachusetts is monitoring milk supply.”

“Elevated yet still very low levels of radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis have now been detected in the air or water in more than a dozen US states and three territories, federal and local authorities say.

Higher than usual levels of radiation were detected by 12 monitoring stations in Alaska, Alabama, California, Guam, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, and Washington State over the past week and sent to Environmental Protection Agency scientists for detailed laboratory analysis, the agency said in a release Monday.

Unusual, yet still very low “trace amounts” of radiation, were also reported in Massachusetts rain water and by state officials and nuclear power plant radiation sensors in Colorado, South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, and Pennsylvania, the Associated Press and Reuters reported.”

“One key area being watched is the US milk supply. After the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, it was found that cows had eaten grass tainted by radioactive fallout from the reactor. Concentrated radioiodine in the milk was blamed later for causing health problems in humans who drank it.”

Christian Science Monitor – Traces of Japanese radiation detected in 13 US states

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Informed on Information: Wired: How Much Money Do Spammers Make?

“After deleting the 10,000th Viagra offer from your inbox, you might wonder, does anyone actually make money off this crap? Chris Kanich and his colleagues at UC San Diego and the International Computer Science Institute wondered too—so they hijacked a botnet to find out. Kanich’s team intentionally infected eight computers with a middleman virus, software they found in the wild that was relaying instructions between a botmaster computer and the network of computers it had secretly turned into spam-sending zombies. Then they changed the orders, effectively zombifying the botnet for their own research. Instead of sending hapless rubes to the botmaster’s website, spam ads would instead funnel them to a site built by Kanich’s team. It looked like an authentic Internet pharmacy, but instead of taking credit card numbers in return for a bottle of sugar pills (or worse), the site coughed up an error message and counted the clicks. Then the researchers calculated an estimate of how much money the spammer grossed per day: about $7,000.”

Wired – Equation: How Much Money Do Spammers Rake In?

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Informed on Information: Christian Science Monitor: "Reports: Lax oversight, ‘greed’ preceded Japan nuclear crisis"

“Reports are emerging that both the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency and the Japanese government failed to properly ensure the safety of country’s nuclear power industry. The reports are challenging the recent refrain that the world’s No. 3 economy couldn’t have done better and once again highlighting how poor government

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Informed on Information: Christian Science Monitor: "Reports: Lax oversight, ‘greed’ preceded Japan nuclear crisis"

“Reports are emerging that both the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency and the Japanese government failed to properly ensure the safety of country’s nuclear power industry. The reports are challenging the recent refrain that the world’s No. 3 economy couldn’t have done better and once again highlighting how poor government

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Informed on Information: Japan Nuclear: Spent Fuel Containment Pool May Be Open To Atmosphere; Sattellite Images Appear To Show Missing Roof

“…the total amount of long-lived radioactivity in the pool is at least five times that in the reactor core…”

“The spent fuel produced by reactors has been a challenge since the dawn of the nuclear industry, with most reactor operators opting to store it in pools of cooling water on site. At the 40-year-old Fukushima plant, which was built by General Electric, the fuel rods are stored at a pool about three stories up, next to the reactor. Satellite photos raise concerns that the roof of the building housing the pool has been blown off, says Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and a senior policy adviser to the secretary of energy and deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment from 1993 to 1999. He and other experts are now warning that any release of radioactivity from the spent-fuel pool could make the releases from the reactors themselves pale in comparison.”

“The pools “contain very large concentrations of radioactivity, can catch fire, and are in much more vulnerable buildings,” he warns. If the pools lose their inflow of circulating cooling water, the water in the pools will evaporate. If the level of water drops to five or six feet above the spent fuel, Alvarez calculates, the release of radioactivity “could be life-threatening near the reactor building.” Since the total amount of long-lived radioactivity in the pool is at least five times that in the reactor core, a catastrophic release would mean “all bets are off,” he says.”

The Daily Beast – The Japan Nuke Problem No One’s Talking About

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OK – my usual motif is to toss a story out and then editorialise on the story. So here’s my editorialisation:

“So, how’s that nuclear safety workin’ for ya?”

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“Moreover, in the spent fuel pools usually situated next to nuclear power plants, there are large numbers of additional fuel rods, used ones, disposed of as waste. There must be constant water circulation in the spent fuel pools. In what is labeled a “loss-of-water’ accident in a spent fuel pool, the zirconium cladding of the fuel rods is projected as exploding—sending into the environment the lethal nuclear poisons in a spent fuel pool…….”


nuclear-news
latest news on the uranium/nuclear industry
Technical information on the Fukushima nuclear loss of coolant

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Image Credit:

nuclear-news
latest news on the uranium/nuclear industry
Technical information on the Fukushima nuclear loss of coolant

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Informed on Information: U.S. Supreme Court: Corporations Do Not Have Personal Privacy Rights

““The protection in FOIA against disclosure of law enforcement information on the ground that it would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy does not extend to corporations,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 12-page decision.

He added: “We trust that AT&T will not take it personally.””

“Corporations do not enjoy a right to personal privacy that would prevent disclosure of certain embarrassing documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the US Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday.

The unanimous decision came in a case examining whether telecommunications giant AT&T could claim an exemption from required disclosure under FOIA because government release of its documents to competitors would cause the corporation to suffer an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

Lawyers for AT&T argued that the company was a private corporate citizen with personal-privacy rights that protect it from government disclosure of embarrassing documents.”

Christian Science Monitor: Supreme Court: Corporations do not enjoy personal privacy rights

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While I haven’t been a fan (to say the least) of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding Corporate Rights ™, I am pleased that they got this one right.

Corporations are not persons. They should not have human rights. They should not be allowed to contribute to political campaigns (neither should unions in my mind).

Intelligent beings have “human rights” not the legal fiction we call corporations (this is where we veer into my personal feeling that a number of “higher animals” – thinking and self-aware species like dolphins, whales, and elephants [an example list, not a complete one] – should have essentially “human” rights).

Corporations are an economic and legal fiction created to allow people to pool resources in an ordered manner.

They have no more inherent rights than than a copy of valley of the dolls. They are a set of rules not a person, and should not be a vehicle to allow those who control them to use the benefits of asset pooling to further the narrow agenda of those very same people who control those corporations.

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