Here are some interesting reads from CHRIS MARTENSON’S BLOG. There are many more contained within the read more link.
Friday, June 3, 2011, 3:54 pm, by Adam
“I have said it’s worse than Chernobyl and I’ll stand by that. There was an enormous amount of radiation given out in the first two to three weeks of the event. And add the wind and blowing in-land. It could very well have brought the nation of Japan to its knees. I mean, there is so much contamination that luckily wound up in the Pacific Ocean as compared to across the nation of Japan – it could have cut Japan in half. But now the winds have turned, so they are heading to the south toward Tokyo and now my concern and my advice to friends that if there is a severe aftershock and the Unit 4 building collapses, leave. We are well beyond where any science has ever gone at that point and nuclear fuel lying on the ground and getting hot is not a condition that anyone has ever analyzed.”
So cautions Arnie Gundersen, widely-regarded to be the best nuclear analyst covering Japan’s Fukushima disaster. The situation on the ground at the crippled reactors remains precarious and at a minimum it will be years before it can be hoped to be truly contained. In the near term, the reactors remain particularly vulnerable to sizable aftershocks, which still have decent probability of occuring. On top of this is a growing threat of ‘hot particle’ contamination risk to more populated areas as weather patterns shift with the typhoon season and groundwater seepage.
In Part 1 of this interview, Chris and Arnie recap the damage wrought to Fukushima’s reactors by the tsunami, the steps TEPCO is taking to address it, and the biggest operational risks that remain at this time. In Part 2, they dive into the health risks still posed by the situation there and what individuals should do (including those on the US west coast) if it worsens.
Click the play button below to listen to Part 1 of Chris’ interview with Arnie Gundersen (runtime 36m:31s):
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Saturday, June 4, 2011, 10:53 am, by DailyDigest
- U.S. Jobless Rate ‘Unacceptably High’
- Can We Please Stop Pretending the GDP Is “Growing”?
- U.S. Faces Credit-Rating Review From Moody’s
- Treasury Continues To Dip Into Retirement Accounts, Prepares To “Take Out” $66 Billion Chunk To Make Room For New Bond Issuance
- Yemen Slides Towards All-Out War After President Saleh Survives Rocket Attack
- Goldman Sachs ‘Issued With Subpoena’ Over Actions During Credit Crisis
- Rational Irrationality: Will Lloyd Blankfein End Up In The Dock?
- Debating The Value Of College In America
Follow our steps to prepare for a world after peak oil, such as how to store & filter water
Friday, June 3, 2011, 10:45 am, by DailyDigest
- A Way Through The Debt Mess
- Awesome Wrongness
- The Wacky World Of Gold
- Can We Make Another Billion Today?
- No Worse Than Expected
- Is QE2 A Savior, Inflator, Or A Dud?
- German Energy: Nuclear? Nein, Danke
- Massachusetts Begins Cleanup After Tornadoes
Own the Crash Course Special Edition Set with Presenter’s Pack (NTSC or PAL)
Thursday, June 2, 2011, 10:49 am, by DailyDigest
- With Deals Turning Scarce, Car Buyers May Want To Wait
- Land Of The Rising Silence
- Outlaw Josey Wales – Part 4
- Home Ownership Declines In Philadelphia
- Wild Which-Way Wednesday
- Greece, Please Do The Right Thing: Default Now
- Fukushima Radiated Water May Overflow
- Japanese Elderly Offer to Take Over Fukushima Nuclear Cleanup
Wednesday, June 1, 2011, 10:50 am, by saxplayer00o1
- Belarus Freezes Food Prices
- Deposits By Irish Residents Fall 9.1% In April From Year Ago
- Monopoly lost: Atlantic City’s rise and fall
- Illinois Senate vote is next up for massive gambling expansion
- Economists predict no immediate end to government debt purchases
- China Has Done Study On Converting US Debt To Equities: Press
- Fitch Confirms France’s AAA Rating, Warns Over Growing Debt
- Keeley Says Greece Debt Needs `Massive Restructuring’ (Video)
- German FDP expert calls for Greek euro zone exit-report
- Democrats: No pay for lawmakers if U.S. defaults
- Congress Plans Symbolic Vote On U.S. Debt Ceiling
- Goldman Sachs lost 98% of Gaddafi’s $1.3bn investment
- Heat Sends Some to Salvation Army for Breath of Cool Air
- Shoppers Find Pain in Rising Food Costs
- Europe locked in ‘chaotic’ debate over Greece
- Cincinnati city manager: Raise taxes
- Venezuelans battling soaring food prices
- Rising water costs lead to uncertain future for farmers (California)
- Global food crisis: Counting the real cost of biofuels
- Cities that weathered housing bust now suffering
- Gas Prices Threaten Meals On Wheels
- U.S. Dollar May Weaken on Debt Ceiling Breach, Citigroup Says
Tuesday, May 31, 2011, 10:40 am, by DailyDigest
- A Crackdown On Employing Illegal Workers
- China’s Economy Slows, But Inflation Still Looms
- Moody’s Places Japan Aa2 Rating On Downgrade Review, Notes Possibility Of JGB Funding Crisis
- Money Blows in to a Patch of Oregon Known for Its Unrelenting Winds
- Germany To Shut Down All Nuclear Reactors
- In Japan, A Culture That Promotes Nuclear Dependency
- TEPCO: Fukushima Live Camera
- China’s Three Gorges Dam Facing Low Water Levels
- Hunger Crisis Worsens, Food System Broken: Oxfam
Get started building resilience into your life with our ‘What Should I Do?’ guide
Monday, May 30, 2011, 10:33 am, by DailyDigest
- Utah Law Makes Coins Worth Their Weight in Gold (or Silver)
- Greece Set for Severe Bail-Out Conditions
- USPS Report Says Total Collapse is Imminent
- To QE3 or Not to QE3 and Does it Matter?
- Why Keystone pipeline will weaken the US
- Shale Boom in Texas Could Increase US Oil Output
- Entropy, Peak Oil and Stoic Philosophy
Sunday, May 29, 2011, 11:38 am, by DailyDigest
- U.N. sees risk of crisis of confidence in dollar
- Gross Believes Not Raising Debt Ceiling Would Crush Dollar
- Another Volcker Moment at Hand? An Appraisal of $1500 Gold
- BBC HARDtalk – Jim Rogers Interview (part 1)
- Biggest Inflection Point of the Year
- What To Do With All The Nuclear Waste
- China is ravenous for farmland: Attempting to buy up millions of acres here
- Estimating the critical levels of petroleum consumption necessary to sustain the modern food production system
Saturday, May 28, 2011, 1:05 pm, by DailyDigest
- Greek leaders fail to agree as IMF deadline looms
- Too Big To Punish
- Gas tanks are draining family budgets
- Global Industrial Growth To Slow Soon
- Western Australia shuns Canberra, eyes China
- Peak oil and the Fall of the Soviet Union: Lessons on the 20th Anniversary of the Collapse
- Russia Grain Curbs Ending as Drought Wilts Europe Crops
Friday, June 3, 2011, 3:55 pm, by Adam
Friday, May 27, 2011
Executive Summary
- Identifying the health dangers from radiation & contamination
- Steps those living in Japan and the US West Coast should be taking today
- Precautions to take with food
- The implications of radioactive seawater
- Urgent steps to take in a worst-case scenario if reactor 4 collapses
Part I: Exclusive Arnie Gundersen Interview: The Dangers of Fukushima Are Worse and Longer-lived Than We Think
If you have not yet read Part I, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
Part II: Arnie Gundersen Interview: Protecting Yourself If The Situation Worsens
Let’s review the situation in the KSA:
- Despite assurances of 12.5 mbd of total capacity, the KSA has not yet produced more than 9 mbd on a sustained basis in 2011.
- The IEA is begging the KSA to pump more.
- The KSA has turned to outside companies to help it begin to unlock heavy oil reserves that will take a lot of time, energy, and money to prosecute.
Chris Martenson: So yes, I am interested in personally, now much more than I used to be, I think in really thinking these issues through. So the first thing is here is where I’d like to start because here is where a huge source of confusion, and the media hasn’t helped this one a lot. Is the difference between radiation dangers and contamination dangers from radioactive particles. Can you talk to us about that?
Arnie Gundersen: There are three kinds of radioactive material. There are gamma rays, initially when the nuclear reactors blew they emitted large clouds of xenon and krypton gases, those are noble gases. They don’t react with your skin or anything but they emit gamma rays. So the readings you saw with people walking around with the Geiger counters were from essentially being in a cloud of gamma rays hitting them from the outside. And that’s significant but it is also dispersed over your entire body. To my mind, the bigger problem, are the two ways that radioactive material decays and those are called beta particles and alpha particles. They don’t travel as far but they have an enormous amount more energy than a gamma ray. So if they lye on your skin, you are just fine. You can wash it off and life goes on. The problem is if they get inside they can selectively go to an organ and bombard a very small piece of tissue with a lot of exposure and potentially cause a cancer and that is what we call a hot particle.
All of these particles are radioactive. But when you talk about contamination it means almost always that one of these particles gets attached to an organ and begins to bombard that organ.
Your faithful information scout,
Chris Martenson
ChrisMartenson.com
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