Guest Column: The Government and Radiation Poisoning

Connecting the dots, do we want to accept the government’s control of radiation?
By David Lonier

New Picture (19)The Department of Energy (DoE) was formerly known as the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The Smart Meter Program was initiated by the U.S. Department of Energy. Congress appropriated $4.5 Billion to the DOE to implement the Smart Meter Program nationwide. The DoE awarded DTE $85 Million toward the cost of installing smart meters in Michigan.

Government has no money of its own. From whom did it get the $4 Billion/$85 Million?

DTE had $9.63 Billion in earnings in 2013. From whom did it get that money?

Do multibillion dollar corporate monopolies such as DTE hold sway over government? Do they pay taxes? Does not almost all the money originate from one source? … working class Americans? Does the U.S. government have a history of protecting people against radiation poising? Has it shown any reservations when it comes to the lethal radiation of great numbers of people?

How about the people of other nations? More recently?

When the U.S. government, DTE and DTE’s lackey MPSC tell us the radiation from their meters is safe, should the public have fair reason to question their credibility? Are they to be trusted?

Read below and ask yourself the question:

Based on the historical record would protecting the American public from harmful radiation be high on the U.S. government’s list of priorities? The government wouldn’t knowingly allow the radiation of its own people, would it?

Experiments performed in the United States

From storehouse of mainstream ‘official knowledge’ Wikipedia: Unethical human experimentation in the United States § Human radiation experiments

Numerous human radiation experiments have been performed in the United States, many of which were funded by various U.S. government agencies[3] such as the United States Department of Defense and the United States Atomic Energy Commission. Experiments included, but were not limited to:

  • irradiating the heads of children[4]
  • feeding radioactive material to mentally disabled children[5]
  • exposing U.S. soldiers and prisoners to high levels of radiation[5]
  • irradiating the testicles of prisoners, which caused severe birth defects[5]
  • exhuming bodies from graveyards to test them for radiation (without the consent of the families of the deceased)[6]

References from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_radiation_experiments

Cracks in the Wall of Silence

The Clinton administration’s first halting step toward taking responsibility for past government misdeeds occurred on Pearl Harbor Day 1993, when DoE Secretary Hazel O’Leary confirmed that the AEC, her agency’s predecessor, had sponsored experiments in which hundreds of Americans were exposed to radioactive material, often without their consent.

That O’Leary had decided to break with her agency’s long tradition of secrecy and deception was something of a surprise. After all, she came to the job after a career in the nuclear power industry. But, confronted by a media firestorm over the government’s Cold War nuclear experiments, O’Leary was left with few options.

Her decision to confirm some government abuses and reveal others was precipitated by a series of reports by journalist Eileen Welsome in the Albuquerque Tribune last November and the nearly simultaneous release of a Government Accounting Office (GAO) report on radiation releases. Following a six-year investigation, Welsome uncovered details of five experiments in which plutonium was injected into 18 people without their informed consent.

The GAO report, meanwhile, is an important finding that government scientists deliberately released radioactive material into populated areas so that they could study fallout patterns and the rate at which radioactivity decayed. It profiles 13 different releases of radiation from 1948-52. All were part of the U.S. nuclear weapons development program. The report concludes that other planned radioactive releases not documented here may have occurred at … U.S. nuclear sites during these years. The disclaimer suggests that a good deal of information about radiation experiments remains locked away in government files.

Top DoE aide Dan Reicher pulled O’Leary out of a meeting just before the story broke to warn her that people were injected with plutonium back in the 1940s, and there’s a newspaper in New Mexico that’s about to lay out the whole thing. O’Leary provided information about experiments at major universities, including MIT, the University of Chicago, California, and Vanderbilt. Experimenters exposed about 2,000 Americans to varying degrees of radiation. These numbers may grow as more information about experiments is released.

Deliberate Atmospheric Radiation Releases

Nuclear researchers did not limit themselves to small groups of selected guinea pigs or large groups of soldiers under orders. The U.S. government also deliberately released radioactive materials into the atmosphere, endangering military personnel and untold numbers of civilians. Unsurprisingly, the people exposed during these tests were not informed.

In four of these tests at the AEC’s facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, bomb-testers set off conventional explosives to send aloft clouds of radioactive material, including strontium and uranium. When the AEC tracked the clouds across northern New Mexico, it detected some radioactivity 70 miles away. According to a Los Alamos press officer, there may have been as many as 250 other such tests during the same period.

Nor was this intentional release the largest. During the December 1949 Green Run test at the Hanford (Washington) Nuclear Reservation, the AEC loosed thousands of curies of radioactive iodine-131 several times the amount released from the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster into the atmosphere simply to test its recently installed radiological monitoring equipment. Passing over Spokane and reaching as far as the California-Oregon border, Green Run irradiated thousands of downwinders, as civilians exposed to the effects of airborne radiation tests are known, and contaminated an enormous swath of cattle grazing and dairy land. A team of epidemiologists is now looking into an epidemic of late-occurring thyroid tumors and other radiogenic disorders among the downwind residents in eastern Washington state.

The plant’s emissions control systems were turned off during the experiment, releasing into the atmosphere almost twice as much radioactive iodine-131 as originally planned. The GAO report notes that the off-site population was not forewarned [nor] made aware of the [test] for several decades. It also notes that although adverse weather patterns kept the radiation from spreading as far as expected, monitoring Air Force planes detected hot clouds over 100 miles northeast of the site.

http://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/ppecorino/medical_ethics_text/Chapter_7_Human_Experimentation/Case_Study_Radiation_Experiments.htm


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