The land was declared safe for residential housing. No threats to the public.
Now, the U.S. Navy is conducting house-to-house testing for radiation after an empty home on a former Naval base was found to contain radium.
The homes are located on a man-made island called “Treasure Island.” The area once served as a U.S. Navy base and has been redevelopments under an agreement from the Department of Defense with San Francisco’s Treasure Island Development Authority.
The Navy cleaned up the base after closure in 1997. The DoD then leased the homes to civilians that were once military housing.
The Navy had declared the residential area was free of any radiological contamination because the item containing radium was found in the empty home. Now, residents are concerned not only for radiation beneath their homes but also in the groundwater supply.
“In the event a radiological survey of a housing unit reveals a health concern, the Navy will take immediate action to protect the residents,” the Navy said in a statement.
New air samples taken near the New Mexico nuclear storage facility where a leak had been detected after an underground fire now has a second leak of radiation.
Department of Energy officials confirmed that an elevated radiation reading was found outside the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico on March 11th.
The leak comes less than a month after a Valentine’s Day leak contaminated 17 works and closed the facility to incoming waste. The plant is the only storage site for nuclear waste from the country’s bomb program.
Officials say it’s likely the contamination in the air comes from previous radioactive deposits on the inside of exhaust ducts. The low-level release of radiation is believed to happen on a rare basis but is what is called “well within safe limits.”
There has been no date offered for the opening of the plant after shipments were stopped following a fire on a truck hauling salt through the repository’s tunnels in February.
Scientists say that forecast models predict the first waves of low-level radiation from the 2011 Japan Tsunami and nuclear meltdown will begin to hit the U.S. West Coast during April.
Ken Buesseler, a chemical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, presented a report to the issue last week saying that more monitoring is necessary now that radiation is starting to appear.
No federal agency is monitoring the Pacific Ocean for radiation levels.
“I’m not trying to be alarmist,” Buesseler said, “we can make predictions, we can do models, but unless you have results how will be know it’s safe.”
A report last week showed that Cesium 134 has been detected in the waters off Canada near the Gulf of Alaska. Buesseler said that Cesium 134 is part of the release from the Fukushima nuclear plant.
“The models show it will reach north of Seattle first, then move down the coast,” Buesseler said.
Naval troops who rushed to Japan to help following the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear power plant are now reporting multiple health issues including losing the ability to walk.
Lt. Steve Simmons, a first responder who served on the USS Ronald Reagan, was among the first troops to arrive as part of Operation Tomodachi. The ship rushed into the disaster zone but was not told they were in the middle of a massive radiation plume released from the meltdown of the plant.
Simmons returned from his deployment and began to experience deterioration of his health. Seven months after returning home, he was no longer able to walk.
Simmons and over 100 other soldiers are now suing Tokyo Electric Power Company, who operate the plant, saying they never told their government nor the U.S. government of the massive radiation release into the ocean and that rescue ships were sitting in the middle of it.
Congressional officials are now getting involved, asking the Department of Defense about the medical conditions of troops aboard the Ronald Reagan and what the DoD is doing to help them.
The nation’s first underground nuclear waste site is reporting more airborne radiation leaks.
The Department of Energy said Monday they found radiation in air samples collected last week at various monitoring stations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico, and also in some stations outside of the grounds of the Plant.
The Plant’s first confirmed leak of radiation came last week.
The site is the storage location for plutonium-based waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and other government nuclear locations.
Scientists and Plant officials insist that the public is not in any danger from the radiation release.
Like a slow-motion train wreck, the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster is still causing damage long after the world’s media has left the news story behind.
Reports are coming in that the North American food supply is already being affected by Fukushima.
Bluefin tuna caught off the San Diego coast is showing evidence of radioactive contamination. This is the first time that a migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity 3,000 miles from Fukushima to the U.S. Pacific coast. It is a nutrition source that accounts for approximately 20,000 tons of the world’s food supply each year.
According to the report published by the National Academy of Sciences, “We report unequivocal evidence that Pacific Bluefin tuna, Thunnus orientalis, transported Fukushima-derived radionuclides across the entire North Pacific Ocean.”
Source: WND Health – Japan radiation poisoning America?
Typhoons that strike Japan each year help spread nuclear fallout from the 2011 Fukuskima Nuclear Plant disaster according to a new research study.
Contaminated soil is washed away by high winds and rain and then placed in streams and rivers according to the French Climate and Environmental Science labrator and Japan’s Tsukuba University.
The accident sent radioactive particles into the atmosphere that normally cling to soil. The storms then loosen radioactive cesium-134 and cesium-137 from surrounding area into rivers and then into the Pacific Ocean.
Researchers say the mild typhoons of 2012 brought moderate levels of radiation into rivers but the violence storms of 2013 showed a significant increase in radioactivity in rivers.
They said people who use rivers to bathe or coastal fishermen are at risk from the radiation.
A day after the Japanese government announced plans to fund an “ice wall” to keep radioactive material from the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactor facility from reaching the ocean, officials admitted that radiation levels at the site of a leak is 20% higher than previously mentioned.
The current level around the most recent leak is 2200 millisieverts, enough to give a lethal dose of radiation to a human without hours if they had no protective materials. Continue reading →
After various worldwide news sources discovered the leaking of contaminated water from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant was worse than previously known, the Japanese government has pledged to create an “ice wall” that will stop damage to the environment.
The “wall” would be a series of pipes placed in the ground that will contain coolant materials aimed at freezing the Earth around the facility. Government scientists believe this will keep radioactive water from seeping into the groundwater or flowing into the ocean. Continue reading →