Radiation In the U.S. Is Scary
By James Donahue
September 2017
After watching a review of John Oliver’s warning about the effects of accumulated nuclear waste during a recent Sunday night television show, I decided to take a new look at Bob Nichol’s website Radiation This Week. Nichols report is technical but if you study it, it is scary as hell. He not only backs what Oliver had to say, he suggests that our situation is so bad we may have unwittingly allowed for our own looming extinction.
Oliver believes “one out of three Americans live within 50 miles of high-level nuclear waste, some of which like Plutonium, is lethally dangerous and will be around for an incredible long time.” If there is a nuclear powered electric generating plant serving your community you are probably among those unfortunate Americans. There currently are 104 operating plants in the United States. Others have been shut down but the waste from them may still be hanging around.
Oliver quoted the Nuclear Energy Institute, saying there is more than 71,000 tons of nuclear waste “stranded” at 104 reactors all over the United States. “It was a problem we should have solved in the 1980's, much like a Rubik’s Cube,” he said.
Even though we have been using nuclear energy since the end of World War II, the county has never established a permanent place to dispose of that growing accumulation of “hot” nuclear waste which offers deadly radiation that hangs around for hundreds if not thousands of years. So the stuff has just been piling up.
Nichols warns that the operating nuclear power plants are spewing deadly radiation into the air and water around them on a regular basis. He said the reactors “are venting radioactive gases and steam at nights and on weekends” and he warns that during these times “all residents must stay inside at nights and on weekends.” Of course we all know that isn’t what people do. They love the nightlife and don’t realize they are playing in a silent and deadly environment.
Nichols, a former government worker who has access to some of the major government devices used to measure radiation in local environments, publishes his readings regularly on his website. While normal radiation is from 5 to 20 counts per minute, Nichols is finding that radiation assaults in places near these power plants and a few other peculiar areas is measuring well over 1,000 counts, or CPM. This means that people living in these areas are being exposed regularly to Sieverts of Gamma radiation.
A Sievert is a means of measuring radiation. A single Sievert is considered to be enough radiation to make a person very sick. Five Sieverts is enough to kill a person within a month. A single exposure to 10 Sieverts will kill within weeks.
Out of 97 cities where measurements were found to be dangerously high, Nichols said the worst numbers were found in Colorado Springs, Idaho Falls, Raleigh, Kansas City, Little Rock, Mason City, Navajo Lake, Spokane, Portland and Louisville, Ky. They were all at or above 10,000 CPM. Colorado Springs read the highest at 18,149 CPM in the most recent reading, Nichols said.
“These annual totals are really big radiation numbers,” he wrote. “The numbers are your annual exposure to the Rad. How much you already absorbed is really hard to find out.”
Describing just how serious these findings are, Nichols noted that the readings for Kearney, Nebraska are 5.58 times more radioactive than Tokyo, Japan, which sits under the daily nuclear spray of the Fukushima disaster. The Kearney radiation was recently measured at 301 times the Tokyo Equivalent Rads (TER) per hour on a Sievert monitor, he explained.
An examination of the EPA’s RAD net data website for Kearney shows that hourly exposure has averaged just over a .01 dose rate in the international units of nanoSieverts per hour. This may seem small but consider that this is only a one-hour exposure for people exposed to whatever is flying at them while they are out of protective cover.
“The amount of Rad in the air now dooms humanity to a relatively quick extinction,” Nichols wrote. The irony here is that “we have been done in by our own war toys and electric utilities . . . How moronic is that?”
By James Donahue
September 2017
After watching a review of John Oliver’s warning about the effects of accumulated nuclear waste during a recent Sunday night television show, I decided to take a new look at Bob Nichol’s website Radiation This Week. Nichols report is technical but if you study it, it is scary as hell. He not only backs what Oliver had to say, he suggests that our situation is so bad we may have unwittingly allowed for our own looming extinction.
Oliver believes “one out of three Americans live within 50 miles of high-level nuclear waste, some of which like Plutonium, is lethally dangerous and will be around for an incredible long time.” If there is a nuclear powered electric generating plant serving your community you are probably among those unfortunate Americans. There currently are 104 operating plants in the United States. Others have been shut down but the waste from them may still be hanging around.
Oliver quoted the Nuclear Energy Institute, saying there is more than 71,000 tons of nuclear waste “stranded” at 104 reactors all over the United States. “It was a problem we should have solved in the 1980's, much like a Rubik’s Cube,” he said.
Even though we have been using nuclear energy since the end of World War II, the county has never established a permanent place to dispose of that growing accumulation of “hot” nuclear waste which offers deadly radiation that hangs around for hundreds if not thousands of years. So the stuff has just been piling up.
Nichols warns that the operating nuclear power plants are spewing deadly radiation into the air and water around them on a regular basis. He said the reactors “are venting radioactive gases and steam at nights and on weekends” and he warns that during these times “all residents must stay inside at nights and on weekends.” Of course we all know that isn’t what people do. They love the nightlife and don’t realize they are playing in a silent and deadly environment.
Nichols, a former government worker who has access to some of the major government devices used to measure radiation in local environments, publishes his readings regularly on his website. While normal radiation is from 5 to 20 counts per minute, Nichols is finding that radiation assaults in places near these power plants and a few other peculiar areas is measuring well over 1,000 counts, or CPM. This means that people living in these areas are being exposed regularly to Sieverts of Gamma radiation.
A Sievert is a means of measuring radiation. A single Sievert is considered to be enough radiation to make a person very sick. Five Sieverts is enough to kill a person within a month. A single exposure to 10 Sieverts will kill within weeks.
Out of 97 cities where measurements were found to be dangerously high, Nichols said the worst numbers were found in Colorado Springs, Idaho Falls, Raleigh, Kansas City, Little Rock, Mason City, Navajo Lake, Spokane, Portland and Louisville, Ky. They were all at or above 10,000 CPM. Colorado Springs read the highest at 18,149 CPM in the most recent reading, Nichols said.
“These annual totals are really big radiation numbers,” he wrote. “The numbers are your annual exposure to the Rad. How much you already absorbed is really hard to find out.”
Describing just how serious these findings are, Nichols noted that the readings for Kearney, Nebraska are 5.58 times more radioactive than Tokyo, Japan, which sits under the daily nuclear spray of the Fukushima disaster. The Kearney radiation was recently measured at 301 times the Tokyo Equivalent Rads (TER) per hour on a Sievert monitor, he explained.
An examination of the EPA’s RAD net data website for Kearney shows that hourly exposure has averaged just over a .01 dose rate in the international units of nanoSieverts per hour. This may seem small but consider that this is only a one-hour exposure for people exposed to whatever is flying at them while they are out of protective cover.
“The amount of Rad in the air now dooms humanity to a relatively quick extinction,” Nichols wrote. The irony here is that “we have been done in by our own war toys and electric utilities . . . How moronic is that?”