bananas
bananas's JournalAstronomer royal calls for 'Plan B' to prevent runaway climate change
Source: Guardian
Hacking the planet's climate by launching mirrors into space, triggering algal blooms in the oceans and seeding clouds are among experimental "Plan B" schemes world leaders would have to consider if the rise in carbon emissions cannot be curbed within a couple of decades, according to one of Britain's most senior scientists.
Geoengineering, though controversial and "an utter political nightmare", would buy time to develop cleaner sources of energy, the astronomer royal Lord Rees will say in a speech to the annual British Science Festival in Newcastle on Thursday.
Rees, who is a former president of the Royal Society and a cosmologist at the University of Cambridge, will close the festival with a wide-ranging lecture covering everything from astronomy and global health to the place of science in culture.
<snip>
Looking ahead in his own field of astronomy, Rees will say he is excited by the regular discovery of planets orbiting other stars. In the past decade, space telescopes such as Nasa's Kepler have pushed the number of planets scientists know about into the thousands, but they predict there are probably many billions in our galaxy alone, and some of them could be twins of Earth. With ever-improving instruments, he will say, scientists who are now at the start of their careers may be able to answer the question of whether or not there is life beyond Earth.
Back on our own planet, Rees will also call for a more brotherly attitude from his fellow scientists to those of faith. Science, he will say, is the one culture that is truly global and should transcend all barriers of nationality and religion. "The scientists who attack mainstream religion, rather than striving for peaceful coexistence with it, damage science, and also weaken the fight against fundamentalism," he will say. "But that's a theme for another talk."
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/sep/11/astronomer-royal-global-warming-lord-rees
Proof that the nuclear industry has been dodging its responsibilities for over 50 years
Proof that the nuclear industry has been dodging its responsibilities for over 50 years
Blogpost by Justin McKeating - September 10, 2013
Information released today by Greenpeace Japan shows that the builders and suppliers of nuclear reactors were afraid of being held financially responsible for any accidents they might cause from the outset of the nuclear energy era in Japan.
A freedom of information request made by us has turned up documents from 1960 that show nuclear companies pressured the Japan Atomic Energy Commission to make sure they were exempted from all responsibility for a nuclear accident, except in the case of a deliberate act. The Commission was only too happy to agree.
But what if a nuclear company is grossly negligent? It needn’t worry. The Commission’s documents say:
"...we decided to delete 'gross negligence' to not make suppliers feel uneasy"
<snip>
EPA Documents Raise Doubts Over Intent of New Nuclear-Response Guide
Source: Global Security Newswire
Newly obtained government documents are prompting concern among critics that Environmental Protection Agency officials are seeking to use the organization’s new guide for nuclear-incident response to relax public health standards, but the agency is denying the claim.
The Freedom of Information Act release comes as the agency has yet to finish collecting public comments on the so-called protective-action guide, which it issued in April after years of internal infighting and public controversy. The document is meant to give federal, state and local officials advice on responding to a wide range of radiological incidents, such as “dirty bomb” attacks, nuclear power plant meltdowns and industrial accidents.
The documents obtained by Global Security Newswire show EPA officials have suggested at meetings around the world that the new guide could allow for the use of long-term cleanup standards dramatically less stringent than those the agency has enforced for decades at hundreds of sites throughout the United States, critics say.
In some cases, EPA officials have not only suggested that a drastic event akin to the Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown in Japan would necessitate more flexible guidelines, but also have made statements that critics say challenge the very science behind the agency’s everyday radiation rules.
<snip>
Read more: http://www.nationaljournal.com/global-security-newswire/epa-documents-raise-doubts-over-intent-of-new-nuclear-response-guide-20130911
Syria and the limits of realpolitik - by Hugh Gusterson
Syria and the limits of realpolitik
Hugh Gusterson
6 September 2013
Among the cacophony of voices arguing for and against US intervention in Syria, one opinion has stood out both for its cold clear logic and its chillingly frank amorality. The influential defense intellectual Edward Luttwak, writing on the opinion page of The New York Times, argued that in Syria “a prolonged stalemate is the only outcome that would not be damaging to American interests.” Saying that “it would be disastrous” if Assad won because this would strengthen Iran and Hezbollah, he observes that “a rebel victory would also be extremely dangerous” because Islamic extremists, “some identified with Al Qaeda,” would then prevail. “Given this depressing state of affairs,” he argues, “maintaining a stalemate should be America’s objective. And the only possible method for achieving this is to arm the rebels when it seems that Mr. Assad’s forces are ascendant and to stop supplying the rebels if they actually seem to be winning.”
My corner of the Internet lit up with outrage when Luttwak’s op-ed came out. “How immoral can a man be?” was the title of one message. The fury focused on Luttwak’s apparent indifference to the loss of Syrian life: He seems to see Syria as a piece in a board game rather than a country inhabited by people who can bleed and suffer. But framing a critique of Luttwak in moral terms implies that he may be right on realist grounds—and he’s not. Luttwak’s op-ed was appalling not just because of its callous indifference to Arab life, but because it suggests that many self-styled realists—who argue that states should follow their self-evident interests regardless of morality—still have not learned the intellectual lesson of the failed interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, namely that violence, once unleashed, is hard to control. Luttwak’s argument is not only immoral; it is unrealistic and naïve.
Luttwak espouses what we might call a Newtonian approach to international security. His world is full of forces, balances, equilibria, and solutions. Conflict participants are clearly-defined units with positive charges if they are US allies (in this case, Israel), and negative charges if they are not (the Assad regime, Iran, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda). It is the analyst’s job to arrange them in stable configurations that will advance US interests.
<snip>
But there is a still deeper flaw in Luttwak’s argument. From the lofty distance of his Washington think tank, where the Middle East looks like a board game, Luttwak does not seem to understand the profoundly deformative effects of war on those who are, willingly or unwillingly, inside it. While Washington defense intellectuals like to speak of violence in terms of “surgical strikes” and “calibrated attacks,” those who are inside the violence may have a very different experience. The violence that envelops their world may seem thrilling or terrifying, depending on their relationship to it, but in its vividness, unpredictability and sensory force, it is unlikely to feel surgical. They will see children, comrades, and loved ones blown apart and they may break the taboo against killing other humans—a transgression that, however licensed, changes a person forever. Whether they experience the rush of the executioner, the terror of the victim, or the grief of the bereaved, war will remake them. After the war is over, some will pile the skeletons in the mental closet and go on with civilian life, and some will quietly spiral downwards into alcoholism, homelessness, or a chafing mental isolation. But some, twisted and disinhibited by war, will carry the violence forward. Timothy McVeigh, before he blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building, fought in the first Gulf War. Adolf Hitler’s murderous ambitions were shaped by trench warfare in World War I. And in Afghanistan in the early 1980s, Osama bin Laden developed his disinhibition against killing, partly at the US taxpayer’s expense, in a war that American national security officials saw as a cunning way of tying down their Russian adversary—just as Luttwak sees endemic civil war in Syria as a clever way of distracting America’s enemies today.
<snip>
An anthropologist, Gusterson is a professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason University. His expertise is in nuclear culture, international security, and the anthropology of science. He has conducted considerable fieldwork in the United States and Russia, where he studied the culture of nuclear weapon scientists and antinuclear activists. Two of his books encapsulate this work--Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (University of California Press, 1996) and People of the Bomb: Portraits of America's Nuclear Complex (University of Minnesota Press, 2004). He also coedited Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong (University of California Press, 2005) and the sequel, The Insecure American (University of California Press, 2009). Previously, he taught in MIT's Program on Science, Technology, and Society.
UN team finds no proof on chemical weapons
Source: Agence France-Presse
United Nations investigators have listed a wide range of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Syria, but provided no conclusion on the issue of chemical weapons use.
<snip>
The report does not address the period after July 15, which includes the August 21 suspected chemical attack on civilians near Damascus that sparked international outrage and could still lead to US-led military strikes, despite intense diplomatic efforts to avoid them.
In Wednesday's statement though, the four-member commission led by Brazilian Paulo Sergio Pinheiro insisted on the "need for accountability, both to bring to justice those who used them (chemical weapons, if confirmed) ... and to deter anyone else from using these abhorrent methods of warfare."
<snip>
"Failure to bring about a political settlement has allowed the conflict not only to deepen in its intransigence but also to widen, expanding to new actors and to new, previously unimaginable crimes," the commission said.
<snip>
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/un-team-finds-no-proof-on-chemical-weapons-20130911-2tkv1.html
Ex-TVA executive pleads guilty to sending money to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions
Ex-TVA executive pleads guilty to sending money to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions
by Dave Flessner
Thursday, September 5th, 2013
The former head of one of America's biggest nuclear power construction programs admitted Wednesday that he illegally sent money to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions.
Masoud Bajestani, the Iranian-born nuclear engineer who previously served as a TVA vice president in charge of finishing the Unit 2 reactor at the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant, agreed to forfeit the $600,000 authorities said he illegally sent to Iran from 2008 to 2010. Bajestani now faces up to five years in prison for violating U.S. sanctions imposed after Iran refused to suspend its uranium enrichment program.
Bajestani pleaded guilty Wednesday to a single count of conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and two counts of filing false income tax returns. He was arrested in December 2012 when he returned from a visit to Iran and was subsequently charged with 11 counts of illegal money shipments and tax payments. Bajestani previously had pleaded not guilty to the charges, which could have cost him penalties of up to $1.25 million and up to 20 years in prison.
Bajestani, who once owned a $330,000 house in Apison where he lived with his second wife, was in charge of TVA's initial $2.5 billion completion project for the Unit 2 reactor at TVA's Watts Bar Nuclear Plant. The 58-year-old vice president was fired in 2011 for lying about a financial hardship he claimed to get an early withdrawal of $1.5 million from his TVA deferred compensation account.
<snip>
Via http://www.nucpros.com/content/ex-tva-executive-pleads-guilty-sending-money-iran-violation-us-sanctions
Birds live with cataracts in Chernobyl
Radiation and birds
Not so blindingly obvious
Birds live with cataracts in Chernobyl
Sep 7th 2013 |From the print edition
CATARACTS are relatively common in people who live to a ripe old age. They are sometimes seen in animals that live in zoos as well, but in the wild they are almost unheard of. The reason is simple. Losing eyesight is in effect a death sentence for a wild animal that must find its own food and, should that animal live long enough to develop the disease, starvation or predation would quickly follow. But cataracts unrelated to age are surprisingly common in birds living near the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.
This is revealed in a new study by a pair of ornithologists, Timothy Mousseau of the University of South Carolina and Anders Moller of the University of Paris-Sud, which is published in the Public Library of Science. That cataracts and ionising radiation are related is well known. As high energy ions, usually produced by the sun’s rays, slam into the water found next to the lenses of the eyes, free radicals are created that damage DNA and cause errors to develop in the formation of proteins that make up the lenses, resulting in cataracts.
<snip>
In all, 391 of the birds the researchers caught had cataract scores of one or more, and were thus suffering some level of visual impairment. However, contrary to the way cataracts work in the rest of the world, those in the eyes of birds living near Chernobyl appeared regardless of whether they were young or old. When Dr Mousseau and Dr Moller examined their radiation measurements, they found that the key factor determining the presence of the disease was the intensity of local radiation, with cataract scores of over one proving to be far more common in areas that were above ten microseiverts per hour.
The twist in this story, however, is that in a previous study Dr Mousseau and Dr Moller reported last year that, compared with the bird populations near the site of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, the birds around Chernobyl seemed able to tolerate the effects of radiation better. This finding hinted that natural selection was already under way and that birds unable to cope with high radiation levels had already been culled from the Chernobyl population, leaving behind only those most suited for survival. Exactly which traits were being selected for by this vicious process remains a mystery, but with the discovery of so many birds living with cataracts it seems likely that being able to function with limited vision is one.
Via http://nuclear-news.net/2013/09/06/cataracts-in-the-eyes-of-birds-in-chernobyl-and-fukushima/
12 U.S. Intelligence Officials Tell Obama It Wasn’t Assad
Source: Consortium News
Editor Note: Despite the Obama administration’s supposedly “high confidence” regarding Syrian government guilt over the Aug. 21 chemical attack near Damascus, a dozen former U.S. military and intelligence officials are telling President Obama that they are picking up information that undercuts the Official Story.
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Is Syria a Trap?
Precedence: IMMEDIATE
We regret to inform you that some of our former co-workers are telling us, categorically, that contrary to the claims of your administration, the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was NOT responsible for the chemical incident that killed and injured Syrian civilians on August 21, and that British intelligence officials also know this. In writing this brief report, we choose to assume that you have not been fully informed because your advisers decided to afford you the opportunity for what is commonly known as “plausible denial.”
<snip>
Our sources confirm that a chemical incident of some sort did cause fatalities and injuries on August 21 in a suburb of Damascus. They insist, however, that the incident was not the result of an attack by the Syrian Army using military-grade chemical weapons from its arsenal. That is the most salient fact, according to CIA officers working on the Syria issue. They tell us that CIA Director John Brennan is perpetrating a pre-Iraq-War-type fraud on members of Congress, the media, the public – and perhaps even you.
We have observed John Brennan closely over recent years and, sadly, we find what our former colleagues are now telling us easy to believe. Sadder still, this goes in spades for those of us who have worked with him personally; we give him zero credence. And that goes, as well, for his titular boss, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who has admitted he gave “clearly erroneous” sworn testimony to Congress denying NSA eavesdropping on Americans.
<snip>
There is a growing body of evidence from numerous sources in the Middle East — mostly affiliated with the Syrian opposition and its supporters — providing a strong circumstantial case that the August 21 chemical incident was a pre-planned provocation by the Syrian opposition and its Saudi and Turkish supporters. The aim is reported to have been to create the kind of incident that would bring the United States into the war.
<snip>
For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Thomas Drake, Senior Executive, NSA (former)
Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan
Larry Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.)
W. Patrick Lang, Senior Executive and Defense Intelligence Officer, DIA (ret.)
David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East (ret.)
Todd Pierce, US Army Judge Advocate General (ret.)
Sam Provance, former Sgt., US Army, Iraq
Coleen Rowley, Division Council & Special Agent, FBI (ret.)
Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret); Foreign Service Officer (ret.)
Read more: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/09/12-u-s-intelligence-officials-tell-obama-it-wasnt-assad.html
Cross-posted from http://warisacrime.org/content/whos-lying-brennan-obama-or-both
Originally posted at http://consortiumnews.com/2013/09/06/obama-warned-on-syrian-intel/
(bananas note: I don't know if this is true, but I have a lot of respect for Robert Parry, where this was originally posted, and for the 12 people who signed it.)
NRC "Nuke Waste Con Game" draft GEIS published online, public comments to be accepted from Sept. 13
Source: Beyond Nuclear
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) Nuclear Waste Confidence draft GEIS (Generic Environmental Impact Statement) has been published online. Critics dub it a "Nuke Waste Con Game." The draft GEIS is nearly 600 pages long.
Once the draft GEIS has been officially published in the Federal Register next Friday, September 13th, a 75-day clock starts ticking. NRC will only accept public comments on the draft GEIS until November 27th.
Public comments will be accepted by NRC through various means: electronically, via fax or snail mail, or by way of oral testimony presented at a dozen public comment meetings to be held around the country from October 1st to mid-November.
Beyond Nuclear will provide the ways you can submit public comments to NRC beginning on September 13th. We will also provide sample comments, as well as talking points, to help you prepare your own written comments and/or oral testimony for the public meeting nearest you.
Read more: http://www.beyondnuclear.org/home/2013/9/6/nrc-nuke-waste-con-game-draft-geis-published-online-public-c.html
Why we might not be able to live on the Moon
Why we might not be able to live on the Moon
Philip Ball
6 September 2013
The suggestion that regions of the Moon have ancient ice triggered much hope that we could colonise it. Sadly, it’s looking ever less likely that it’s possible.
<snip>
A new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters drives another nail into the coffin of lunar living. It suggests that what was at first taken to be bright, reflective ice in the Shackleton crater is in fact more likely to be white rock.
<snip>
Led by Junichi Haruyama of the Japan Aerospace Space Exploration Agency (Jaxa), based in Kanagawa, they have analysed data from Jaxa’s lunar orbiter Selene – better known in Japan as Kaguya after a legendary moon princess. Last year the team reported that Selene (which operated from 2007 to 2009) had found rocks made of the mineral anorthosite all over the Moon. This stuff is thought to be formed when meteorites hit the Moon and melt its surface, and the researchers suggested that the Moon might have a thick layer of it several kilometres beneath its surface, created by a massive impact soon after it was formed.
Lunar anorthosite is very pure and bright white, as shown by the lumps of it brought back by the Apollo missions. But here’s the clincher: unlike ice, anorthosite absorbs infrared radiation strongly at a wavelength of 1.25 micrometres, providing a distinctive signature of this mineral. And that absorption was just what was seen by Selene on the inner wall of the Shackleton crater. So it looks as though it isn’t ice.
Haruyama and colleagues don’t rule out the existence of water elsewhere on the Moon, for example hidden away in sub-surface caverns. But they suspect that the amounts might be small. That may still be scientifically interesting, raising questions about how it got there and how it might move around on the surface. Yet without a significant amount of water on the Moon, it is hard to see how any substantial space colony could be established there – the cost of sending up regular water supplies (which would be used not just for drinking but for making hydrogen as fuel) just doesn’t look viable.
<snip>
Profile Information
Member since: Wed Nov 10, 2004, 12:55 AMNumber of posts: 27,509
