solar storms, EMP, and the future of the grid...,

ResourceInsights | In late August 1859 the most severe solar storm ever witnessed began and lasted through the first few days of September. It produced vivid auroras in the night sky as far south as Cuba and was so bright campers in the Rocky Mountains got up in the middle of the night thinking daylight had arrived. During the storm telegraph operators felt as if some alien force had overtaken their equipment. Even disconnecting power to the wires failed to quiet their telegraphs. In some places the paper strip used to record the dots and dashes of Morse code caught fire because of the electrical surges coursing through the telegraph lines.

Today, the world we live in might be thought of as one big telegraph system composed of computer chips, telephone lines, fiber optics, cellphone towers, satellites, undersea cables and an electrical grid that supplies energy to the terrestrial parts of that system. An event as severe as the 1859 solar storm--called the Carrington Event after the respected British astronomer Richard Carrington who detected it as it developed--could cripple vast areas of the world, shutting down entire national grids not just for days, but possibly for months or years.

The simple fact is that most electrical systems and equipment including computers are not shielded to protect against such an event. One critical link, electrical transformers, would quickly be knocked out and would have to be replaced. Since few spare transformers are available, and it can take 12 months to build one, the world might have to wait years to fully recover--and that's assuming it would still be possible to produce new transformers which, after all, take electricity to manufacture. There is also the problem of what state modern civilization might be in if it faced months or years without electricity. Critical systems that pump and purify water and treat sewage, for example, would no longer function.

A fictional version of what all this might look like in our communities comes to us in a book by William Forstchen entitled One Second After. (For a brief nonfiction version of such an event, see this 2009 piece from New Scientist.) One Second After is set in the not-so-fictional town of Black Mountain, North Carolina where the author not-so-coincidently lives. It turns out to be a good choice of settings since Forstchen can give us an intimate portrait of a town and region he knows well while treating us to detailed but unobtrusive illustrations coming from his meticulous research into the effects of a total and prolonged blackout. To be clear, the cause of the blackout in the novel is the explosion of a nuclear weapon high above the Earth's surface over the continental United States, an explosion designed specifically to produce a crippling electromagnetic pulse (EMP). The effects of an EMP are in most ways similar to those that would result from another Carrington Event, and so the novel gives us a portrait of how such a disaster caused by either might unfold.

Perhaps the first thing a sensitive urbanite residing in the northern part of the United States will notice about One Second After is the number of guns produced by the novel's characters. But having lived in both the northern and southern parts of the United States, I can assure you that this would hardly raise an eyebrow south of the Mason-Dixon line where armory and home are very often one and the same. What is clear in the aftermath of the blackout is that order has broken down. Guns offer some protection and ultimately provide the force behind the small group of town leaders trying to guide Black Mountain through the worst disaster it will ever experience. The leaders succeed to a certain extent, but at a terrible cost as they are forced to put the mere survival of the community above all other values.

north korea tests super EMP weapon...,

Video - National Geographic nuclear explosion in the sky.

benzinga | Gary Samore, a top Obama administration national security official, warned of new sanctions if North Korea conducted a third round of nuclear tests on Monday, as reports surfaced that North Korea has miniaturized its nuclear warheads so they can be delivered by ballistic missile.

North Korea's last round of tests, conducted in May 2009, appear to have included a “super-EMP” weapon, capable of emitting enough gamma rays to disable the electric power grid across most of the lower 48 states, says Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, a former CIA nuclear weapons analyst and president of EMPact America, a citizens lobbying group.

Samore, who handles arms control and non-proliferation issues, warned that “additional strong sanctions will be imposed on the North with the support of Russia and China.”

North Korea's nuclear tests have been dismissed as failures by some analysts because of their low explosive yield. But Dr. Pry believes they bore the “signature” of the Russian-designed “super-EMP” weapon, capable of emitting more gamma radiation than a 25-megaton nuclear weapon.

Pry believes the U.S. intelligence community was expecting North Korea to test a first generation implosion device with an explosive yield of 10 to 20 kilotons, similar to the bomb the U.S. exploded over Nagasaki in 1945. He said, “So when they saw one that put off just three kilotons, they said it failed. That is so implausible.”

The technology for producing a first generation implosion weapon has been around since 1945, and is thoroughly described in open source literature.

South Korean defense minister, Kim Kwan-jin, told his country's parliament on Monday that North Korea had succeeded in miniaturizing its nuclear weapons design, allowing them to place a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile.

His analysis coincided with Congressional testimony in March by Lt. Gen. Ronald L. Burgess, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who stated that North Korea “may now have several plutonium-based warheads that it can deliver by ballistic missiles.”

The Soviet Union conducted an atmospheric test of an EMP weapon in 1962 over Kazakhstan whose pulse wave set on fire a power station 300 kilometers away and destroyed it within 10 seconds.

Such a weapon — equal to a massive solar flare such as the “solar maxima” predicted by NASA to occur in 2012 — poses “substantial risk to equipment and operation of the nation's power grid and under extreme conditions could result in major long term electrical outages,” said Joseph McClelland of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Senate testimony last month.

Pry said that a group of Russian nuclear weapons scientists approached him in 2004 when he served as staff director of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, to warn the United States that the technology to make that weapon “had leaked” to North Korea, and possibly to Iran.

“They told us that Russian scientists had gone to North Korea to work on building the super-EMP weapon,” Pry told Newsmax. “The North Koreans appear to have tested it in 2006 and again in 2009.”

North Korea's main partner in its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs is Iran. Dr. William Graham, chairman of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, warned Congress three years ago that Iran had conducted missile launches in an EMP mode, detonating them high in the atmosphere.

let the flood of political narrative begin!

Video - RT goes in on DHS information blackout on nuclear power plants

AmericanThinker | The Missouri River basin encompasses a vast region in the central and west-central portion of our country. This river, our nation's longest, collects the melt from Rocky Mountain snowpack and the runoff from our continents' upper plains before joining the Mississippi river above St. Louis some 2,300 miles later. It is a mighty river, and dangerous.

Some sixty years ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) began the process of taming the Missouri by constructing a series of six dams. The idea was simple: massive dams at the top moderating flow to the smaller dams below, generating electricity while providing desperately needed control of the river's devastating floods.

The stable flow of water allowed for the construction of the concrete and earthen levees that protect more than 10 million people who reside and work within the river's reach. It allowed millions of acres of floodplain to become useful for farming and development. In fact, these uses were encouraged by our government, which took credit for the resulting economic boom. By nearly all measures, the project was a great success.

But after about thirty years of operation, as the environmentalist movement gained strength throughout the seventies and eighties, the Corps received a great deal of pressure to include some specific environmental concerns into their MWCM (Master Water Control Manual, the "bible" for the operation of the dam system). Preservation of habitat for at-risk bird and fish populations soon became a hot issue among the burgeoning environmental lobby. The pressure to satisfy the demands of these groups grew exponentially as politicians eagerly traded their common sense for "green" political support.

kids, this is why you cannot beat the state - umm-kayyy...?

NYTimes | The F.B.I. seized Web servers in a raid on a data center early Tuesday, causing several Web sites, including those run by the New York publisher Curbed Network, to go offline.

The raid happened at 1:15 a.m. at a hosting facility in Reston, Va., used by DigitalOne, which is based in Switzerland, the company said. The F.B.I. did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the raid.

In an e-mail to one of its clients on Tuesday afternoon, DigitalOne’s chief executive, Sergej Ostroumow, said: “This problem is caused by the F.B.I., not our company. In the night F.B.I. has taken 3 enclosures with equipment plugged into them, possibly including your server — we cannot check it.”

Mr. Ostroumow said that the F.B.I. was only interested in one of the company’s clients but had taken servers used by “tens of clients.”

He wrote: “After F.B.I.’s unprofessional ‘work’ we can not restart our own servers, that’s why our Web site is offline and support doesn’t work.” The company’s staff had been working to solve the problem for the previous 15 hours, he said.

Mr. Ostroumow said in response to e-mailed questions that it was not clear if the issues would be resolved by Wednesday.

A government official who declined to be named said earlier in the day that the F.B.I. was actively investigating the Lulz Security group and any affiliated hackers. The official said the F.B.I. had teamed up with other agencies in this effort, including the Central Intelligence Agency and cybercrime bureaus in Europe.

Mr. Ostroumow declined to name the company targeted by the F.B.I. and said that he did not know why it had drawn their interest. It was also unclear why the agents took more servers with them than they sought, he said.

gnurds fitna get shot or go to the big house...,

IBT | Hacktivist groups Anonymous and LulzSec are sailing out for a cyber war against "any and all" government agencies around the globe, without taking a breath from the recent rash of high-profit hacks.

"Operation Anti-Security is in effect. Join the fleet and tear the government and whitehat peons limb from limb," LulzSec tweeted on Monday. The hacker group continued, "You are all now lulz lizards. Add the finishing touches to your ships and sail into attack formation: we are now declaring war on the peons."

On the same day, the group released a statement saying, "As we're aware, the government and whitehat security terrorists across the world continue to dominate and control our Internet ocean. Sitting pretty on cargo bays full of corrupt booty, they think it's acceptable to condition and enslave all vessels in sight. Our Lulz Lizard battle fleet is now declaring immediate and unremitting war on the freedom-snatching moderators of 2011. Welcome to Operation Anti-Security (#AntiSec) - we encourage any vessel, large or small, to open fire on any government or agency that crosses their path. We fully endorse the flaunting of the word "AntiSec" on any government website defacement or physical graffiti art. We encourage you to spread the word of AntiSec far and wide, for it will be remembered. To increase efforts, we are now teaming up with the Anonymous collective and all affiliated battleships."

LulzSec's "battleship" seems to be gaining supporters - Iranian Cyber Army, a hacker group that has attacked government systems, expressed its support through Twitter, "@LulzSec @Anonymouse we do support you, from now on."

LulzSec set the top priority as "to steal and leak classified government information, including email spools and documentation," and their prime targets are "banks and other high-ranking establishments."

The high-profile hacking victims of LulzSec include the FBI, CIA and the US government among numerous game sites and companies.

Monday afternoon, LulzSec claimed a DDoS attack on SOCA, the UK's Serious Organized Crime Agency, making its website sporadically inaccessible. LulzSec tweeted a couple of hours ago, "DDoS is of course our least powerful and most abundant ammunition. Government hacking is taking place right now behind the scenes."

Before moving onto the next governmental target, LulzSec may need to combat some enemies from its own tribe. On a new blog called LulzSec Exposed, "Team Web Ninjas" has been doxing LulzSec members, claiming its knowledge of their identities.

"The Leader of LulzSec is Doxed. Game Over for you Guys !!! We are just posting his pic, We do have his Name, Address, location and work but we are not publishing," Web Ninjas stated on the website on Monday. The subsequent post claimed, "Web Ninjas" does and will stop Lulzsec." The information regarding LulzSec, due to its sensitivity, will be directly sent to FBI, while the website has already revealed photos and information regarding several other persons believed to be LulzSec members.

While the warfare between hacker groups may end up in their self-destruction, the increased hacking activities pose a serious threat to the authorities around the world, and they have not remained silent.

mebbe they'll pat down some nuclear power plants?

Video - TSA bus station VIPR swarm.

AmericanThinker | Americans must decide if, in the name of homeland security, they are willing to allow TSA operatives to storm public places in their communities with no warning, pat them down, and search their bags. And they better decide quickly.

Bus travelers were shocked when jackbooted TSA officers in black SWAT-style uniforms descended unannounced upon the Tampa Greyhound bus station in April with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies and federal bureaucrats in tow.

A news report by ABC Action News in Tampa showed passengers being given the signature pat downs Americans are used to watching the Transportation Security Administration screeners perform at our airports. Canine teams sniffed their bags and the buses they rode. Immigration officials hunted for large sums of cash as part of an anti-smuggling initiative.

The TSA clearly intends for these out-of-nowhere swarms by its officers at community transit centers, bus stops and public events to become a routine and accepted part of American life.

The TSA has conducted 8,000 of these security sweeps across the country in the past year alone, TSA chief John Pistole told a Senate committee June 14. They are part of its VIPR (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response) program, which targets public transit related places.

All of which is enough to make you wonder if we are watching the formation of the "civilian national security force" President Obama called for on the campaign trail "that is just as powerful, just as strong and just as well funded" as the military.

The VIPR swarm on Wednesday, the TSA's largest so far, was such a shocking display of the agency's power that it set the blogosphere abuzz.

In a massive flex of muscle most people didn't know the TSA had, the agency led dozens of federal and state law enforcement agencies in a VIPR exercise that covered three states and 5,000 square miles. According to the Marietta Times, the sweep used reconnaissance aircraft and "multiple airborne assets, including Blackhawk helicopters and fixed wing aircraft as well as waterborne and surface teams."

When did the TSA get this powerful? Last year, Pistole told USA Today he wanted to "take the TSA to the next level," building it into a "national-security, counterterrorism organization, fully integrated into U.S. government efforts."

What few people realize is how far Pistole has already come in his quest. This is apparently what that next level looks like. More than 300 law enforcement and military personnel swept through a 100-mile stretch of the Ohio Valley alone, examining the area's industrial infrastructure, the Charleston Gazette reported.

Federal air marshals, the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Coast Guard, the FBI, the Office of Homeland Security and two dozen other federal, state and local agencies teamed up to scour the state's roads, bridges, water supply and transit centers under the TSA's leadership.

What is remarkable about these security swarms is that they don't just involve federal, state and local law enforcement officials. The TSA brings in squads of bureaucrats from state and federal agencies as well, everything from transportation departments to departments of natural resources.

the owners give the checkbook to management?!?!?!

Video - Nebraska aerial flood tour.

WorldNuclearNews | On 6 June, Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) declared a 'notification of unusual event' at its Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant due to the rising level of the Missouri River and some onsite flooding. This is the least-serious of four emergency classifications that are standard in the US nuclear industry.

The utility noted projections from the US Army Corps of Engineers that the river level at the plant site - 19 miles (31 kilometres) north of Omaha, Nebraska - was expected to reach 1004 feet (306 metres) above mean sea level and to remain above that level for more than one month. The alert is set to remain in effect at Fort Calhoun until OPPD can be sure the level of the river would remain below 1004 feet.

The single 482 MWe pressurized water reactor at Fort Calhoun has been in safe shutdown since 9 April, when it entered a scheduled refuelling outage.

OPPD said, "In addition to the existing flood-protection at the plant, OPPD employees and contractors have built earth berms (raised barriers) and sandbagged around the switchyards and additional buildings on site. They also are filling water-filled berms around the plant and other major buildings on site, have staged additional diesel fuel inside the Protected Area and are building additional overhead power lines to provide another option for power for the plant's administration building, training centre and one of its warehouses."

Separately OPPD declared a level two alert at the plant on 7 June due to smoke in an electrical switchgear room. An investigation found no fire or release of radiation and the plant was subsequently returned to the level one emergency classification. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which is monitoring the situation at Fort Calhoun, said, "Although the plant briefly lost its normal ability to cool the spent fuel pool, temperatures in the pool remained at safe levels and the plant recovered pool cooling without the need for any of the plant's multiple back-up systems."

On 16 June, OPPD's board of directors approved a measure to authorize plant management to buy any material, equipment or services it needed to prevent flooding at Fort Calhoun, without having to go through the usual procurement process.

"The high volume of water released from upstream dams already has caused some flooding in OPPD's service area," the company said in a statement. It added, "Those water releases continue to pose a threat to the electric system and generation facilities along the river."

The company stressed, "No release of radioactive material requiring offsite response or monitoring has occurred or is expected."

man down...,

Video - Domestic violence arrests spark homelessness

Kunstler | Last week, in an incident that didn't get much attention in the national news, a man named Tom Ball set himself on fire in front of the county courthouse in Keene, NH. He left a fifteen-page suicide note explaining his actions. He was angry at the state child protection bureaucracy and the courts after a ten-year battle over a child abuse charge that became, for him, a Kafkaesque struggle with cruel authority. The long suicide note he left was a thoughtful and disturbing indictment of the legal procedures now common across America that have had many unanticipated consequences - from breaking up families to homelessness - but it was also a grim comment on the condition of American manhood.

A casual Martian observer hanging around any convenience store in the "fly-over" zones of this nation must be impressed with the striking way that American men present themselves to the world. Forgive me for revisiting an oft-dredged-up theme - male costuming and adornment in our time - but I wouldn't keep bringing it up if I didn't think it was significant. On the whole, American men present themselves as savages. I think they do it because they feel very insecure about themselves - similar to the insecurity that prompts a politician to wear a flag lapel pin. Should there be any doubt that an elected official cares about his country? Or maybe we should ask: what kind of country produces such craven, weak, pandering elected officials? What kind of culture produces men who get themselves up like chain-saw murderers?

The same country that furnishes an endless diet of super-hero movies to pubescent males who are not expected to develop normal adult coping powers. The same country that supplies gruesome, sado-masochistic video games to occupy the idle hours of young men - and then lets them take those "skills" to some tilt-up bunker in Nevada where they sit in air-conditioned comfort and direct drone aircraft ten thousand miles away to incinerate suspected "enemies" in mud villages. (Sometimes "mistakes are made" and they blow up a wedding party or something - but the drone controllers still get to leave the bunker at the end of their shift and roll down the strip for a plastic tray full of burritos.)

This month's WeinerGate was another instructive incident. Up-and-coming wonderboy politician revealed to be secret sex schlemiel, undone by "social media" - which turns out to have the unanticipated consequence of undermining the impulse control of supposedly grown men. Who knew? But what interested me more than Weiner's pitiful dishonesty was the parade of women journalists on cable TV news who all agreed that poor Weiner's downfall was yet another conclusive demonstration of how hopeless men are - not to mention that their male colleagues on-screen, Blitzer, King, O'Donnell, sheepishly agreed with them. This ceremonial posturing for moral brownie points in an extremely moralistic and puritanical culture does tend to obscure the reality that adult male humans are sexually alert in an inconvenient way that is not identical to the experience of females.

finger in the dyke

Video - Especially those who work at the Cooper nuclear power plant in Browneville.

KCUR | The Missouri River approaching Kansas City is becoming more bloated than it's been in decades. Overflow, by millions-of-gallons a minute is being dumped from brimming reservoirs in the Dakotas. Interests along the river watch with a keen eye. They range from farmers to railroads to people who live behind levees. KCUR's Dan Verbeck has been attuned to the river for weeks and filed this account.

By time the river is past St. Joseph and Leavenworth, it's ready to push through curves and wriggles in its path toward the heart of the metro region.

We picked an arbitrary segment of flatland to watch. This extends from a few miles south of Weston down to the community of Waldron. Two levees guard it. The federal government paid for installation in the 1950's. Local taxes pay for upkeep.

Menno Attema farms 2500 acres of it and he's head of the levee board. The Army Corps of Engineers sets standards for how they're supposed to be built.. The Corps also is releasing the deluge upstream-- "there's no such thing as guarantees but I'm confident our system can withstand that. Its always to which degree because the Corps has indicated with their models, a low flow event. That means minimal rainfall for this area. We would be able to manage it relatively easy. During an extreme high rainfall situation, even our system would be challenged to withstand that." This is about protecting land from flooding. And people, ultimately.

Drivers passing on Missouri Highway 45, also known as Northwest 64th closer to Parkville, may not notice a lot of homes out in the flatland. The levee board president says--"There's 70 some homes still in the Farley-Beverly District. And then, in the Waldron area quite a bit less but still more than you would think." Attema and his family are among those 70 families and the levee holding is vitally important to them all.

corps general in jefferson city...,

Video - General John McMahon on Missouri river flooding.

OzarksFirst | The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' commander for the Missouri River basin came to the state capital Monday and stayed on script before an audience best described as skeptical.

Brigadier General John McMahon answered questions in front of an audience of about 40 people at Jefferson City's city hall Monday for about 20 minutes, before meeting with business owners at a private lunch and finally touring the city's northern river front.

For weeks, the corps has been saying its management plan for releasing water from the upper Missouri River basin through it's series of reservoirs and dams was on schedule until heavy rains struck Montana in May.

Farmer Terry Hilgedick from nearby Hartsburg, an area prone to flooding, questioned McMahon about the corps' policy of releasing water at a relatively slow rate, despite record snowfall and snow-pack in Montana and the Dakotas.

"You knew that you had a larger snow -pack and even larger projections than even last year, which was the second highest (snow fall and snow-pack) in a year," said Hilgedick.

"We had everything in place to accommodate the snow-pack," said McMahon. "What we didn't have in place was this unprecedented amount of rain in the upper basin states that took away our flexibility."

The general's comments echo the corps' position on the reasoning behind its record releases of water over the last month or so. As of Monday, the dams along the upper Missouri, including the final dam, Gavins Point near Yankton South Dakota, continue to pump out a record volume of 150,000 cubic feet per second.

The Gavins Point Dam began pumping that full volume of water on June 14. The first of that surge is just now reaching Kansas City. McMahon said it would be at least another week before river levels came up in Jefferson City, and another three days or so beyond that before the surge reaches St. Charles and the confluence with the Mississippi River.

Already, levees are being overtopped and breached in northwest Missouri where residents of the town of Big Lake have evacuated. The river reached an all time record level at Rulo Nebraska earlier Monday, and officials in southwest Iowa continue to eye flood waters that are lapping at a new flood wall built to protect the south end of the community of Hamburg. McMahon said the corps will continue running water at Gavins Point and its other dams at their current volume until at least the middle of July, and could go longer if rain continues over the northern basin. And McMahon said the reservoirs continue to take in more water than they are pumping out.

McMahon and Kansas City corps commander, Col. Anthony Hoffmann came to Jefferson City at the request of Ninth District Congressman Blaine Luetkemeyer and Fourth District congresswoman Vicky Hartzler.

"There's a lot of questions out there about how the corps arrived at the decisions they have," said Rep. Hartzler. "This is a precarious situation."

fukushima usa?

DailyMail | Dangerous radioactive leaks and cracked foundations go unpunished at American nuclear power plants. Safety has taken a back seat to cost-cutting at most of the nation's nuclear power plants, sparking fears that America could be facing its own Fukushima disaster.

An investigation by the Associated Press has revealed federal regulators are repeatedly weakening - or simply failing to impose - strict rules.

Officials at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission have frequently decided that original regulations were too strict, arguing that safety margins could be eased without peril.

The constant danger of aging reactors operating without the highest standards has resulted in rising fears the NRC is significantly undermining safety.

Such negligence is destined to to bring the plants closer to a catastrophic accident that could harm millions and jeopardize the future of nuclear power in the U.S.

Examples abound.

When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed — up to 20 times the original limit.

When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards.

within 18 inches of shutdown, and only 8 more rainy weeks to go..,

Video - Brownsville NE levee is breaching at Brownsville Bridge (Cooper Nuclear plant is in Brownsville)

Joplin Globe | The bloated Missouri River rose to within 18 inches of forcing the shutdown of a nuclear power plant in southeast Nebraska but stopped and ebbed slightly Monday, after several levees in northern Missouri failed to hold back the surging waterway.

The river has to hit 902 feet above sea level at Brownville before officials will shut down the Cooper Nuclear Plant, which sits at 903 feet, Nebraska Public Power District spokesman Mark Becker said.

Flooding is a concern all along the river because of the massive amounts of water that the Army Corps of Engineers has released from six dams. Any significant rain could worsen the flooding especially if it falls in Nebraska, Iowa or Missouri, which are downstream of the dams.

The river is expected to rise as much as 5 to 7 feet above flood stage in much of Nebraska and Iowa and as much as 10 feet over flood stage in parts of Missouri. The corps predicts the river will remain that high until at least August.

Becker said the river rose to 900.56 feet at Brownville on Sunday, then dropped to 900.4 feet later in the day and remained at that level Monday morning. The National Weather Service said the Missouri River set a new record Sunday at Brownville when its depth was measured at 44.4 feet. That topped the record of 44.3 feet set during the 1993 flooding.

The Cooper Nuclear Plant is operating at full capacity Monday, Becker said.

The Columbus-based utility sent a "notification of unusual event" to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission when the river rose to 899 feet early Sunday morning. The declaration is the least serious of four emergency notifications established by the federal commission.

"We knew the river was going to rise for some time," Becker said Sunday. "It was just a matter of when."

The nuclear plant has been preparing for the flooding since May 30. More than 5,000 tons of sand has been brought in to construct barricades around it and access roads, according to NPPD.

war evolves with drones, some as small as bugs...,

NYTimes | Two miles from the cow pasture where the Wright Brothers learned to fly the first airplanes, military researchers are at work on another revolution in the air: shrinking unmanned drones, the kind that fire missiles into Pakistan and spy on insurgents in Afghanistan, to the size of insects and birds.

The base’s indoor flight lab is called the “microaviary,” and for good reason. The drones in development here are designed to replicate the flight mechanics of moths, hawks and other inhabitants of the natural world. “We’re looking at how you hide in plain sight,” said Greg Parker, an aerospace engineer, as he held up a prototype of a mechanical hawk that in the future might carry out espionage or kill.

Half a world away in Afghanistan, Marines marvel at one of the new blimplike spy balloons that float from a tether 15,000 feet above one of the bloodiest outposts of the war, Sangin in Helmand Province. The balloon, called an aerostat, can transmit live video — from as far as 20 miles away — of insurgents planting homemade bombs. “It’s been a game-changer for me,” Capt. Nickoli Johnson said in Sangin this spring. “I want a bunch more put in.”

From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones, the Cessna-sized workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far less widely known are the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it.

The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones, compared with fewer than 50 a decade ago. Within the next decade the Air Force anticipates a decrease in manned aircraft but expects its number of “multirole” aerial drones like the Reaper — the ones that spy as well as strike — to nearly quadruple, to 536. Already the Air Force is training more remote pilots, 350 this year alone, than fighter and bomber pilots combined.

“It’s a growth market,” said Ashton B. Carter, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer.

remote control killing - america's newest sport?

Video - RT goes in on the growing culture of the steel sky.

SJL | Defense contractor giants like Boeing, Lockeed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and others, as well as smaller rivals compete for growing demand for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). They include remote control operated killer drones, also called unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs).

It's America's newest sport. From distant command centers, far from target sights, sounds, and smells, operators dismissively ignore human carnage showing up as computer screen blips little different from video game images. The difference, of course, is people die, mostly noncombatants. More on that below.

On March 10, 2010, Der Spiegel writer Marc Pitzke headlined, "How Drone Pilots Wage War," saying:

They "sit in air-conditioned rooms far away from (America's wars). They guide their weapons with joysticks and monitors. The remote warriors work with a high degree of precision - at a fraction of the cost of a fighter jet," but just as deadly.

Operators use computer keyboards and five monitors. One says "I've got eight missiles and two bombs on two Predators. Weapons ready."

The main monitor shows a target's aerial view "from a considerable height....Three, two, one. Impact," after pushing a red button. "Excellent job," the man says after a destructive explosion. The entire mission lasted two minutes "against a faceless enemy" attacked by remote control half a world away.

"The whole thing looks like a computer game," virtual war "that doesn't require combatants to get their hands dirty" or perhaps souls compromised for mindlessly slaughtering civilians lawlessly - what America's media never explain or why Washington wages war.

Each drone system includes four aircraft, a ground station, a satellite link, and launch site maintenance crew, keeping UAVs ready to use round-the-clock on a moment's notice. Like America's wars, moreover, drone technology is a growth business, Insitu's Steven Sliwa saying the industry is well positioned like the aeronautical one during WW II - up-up-and-away for big profits.

sinsethesis of the nebraska nuclear flooding situation

Video - Dutchsinse provides a work-in-progress analysis of the Nebraska nuclear flooding situation.

ft. calhoun - how bad can it get?

Video - Arnie Gunderson on Fort Calhoun near Omaha, Nebraska

Hawaiinewsdaily | Radiation, at minimum in the form of tritium, and more likely other particles and radionuclides, are leaking into the Missouri River from the Fort Calhoun nuclear generation plant in Nebraska.

I do not have proof. What I do have is the knowledge that every reactor is susceptible to small leaks at any time. Typically they are undiscovered and thus unreported – they are a few drops here and a few drops there from an improper weld or a stressed fitting – maybe the last one of the day before pau-hana time. And he intended to check it later, but never did. New baby, vacation, other things to think about. So thirty years later there are a couple gallons of it sitting under a pipe somewhere, not visible from the inspection point – and hey, this is all sealed up anyway….except for that pesky water leak the NRC is upset about…but a little water can’t hurt….

Until the plant gets submerged — or nearly so by a fast-running river which doesn’t cover the top (yet) but sure washes out all the leaky lines and the incomplete repair jobs which we didn’t care much about at the time because the river would never go that high.

So we are all standing on top of the buildings watching water pour in one side and out the other. Sandbags are sandbags. One million gallons of water a second washes sandbags away and all the cute little plastic pipes full of water – supported by sandbags and chain and not designed to hold 8 million pounds of water a second. Tomorrow it might be 150 million gallons of water a minute. If the dams hold. But we all know they aren’t going to — they are are right at the top of the US DAM potential failure list. The ‘domino’ dams.

Let’s skip that. At least we know why there is a no-fly zone around the plant. Workers are being brought in by helicopter and boat — to the roof and to SECOND STORY windows — maybe third story by tomorrow.

So….it’s a sand castle and the tide is coming in. Once the water washes out the underpinnings, the whole thing may happily slosh downstream until it hits the next one…

Is that all? Not hardly. The Cooper nuclear plant can’t discharge sludge and it’s partially submerged just like Fort Calhoun. We don’t require any special knowledge to grasp what is going on. The plants have windows and doors and control rooms and pumps and heat exchangers and expended fuel pools. And they are all going underwater – but not like Fukushima where the water washed in and washed out. This is just going to get worse through August.

But it isn’t all bad. The Missouri river is cold enough to keep the pools and cores cool all by itself. And it’s also powerful to pull the fuel out and irradiate half the country.

And about that time, the hemp ropes are gonna come out.

nosebleed, diarrhea, lack of energy in children in koriyama city, fukushima

ex-skf | What's happening to children in Koriyama City in Fukushima right now? Nosebleed, diarrhea, lack of energy - "Effect of radiation unknown" says the doctor

Report by Ao Ideta, Tokyo Shinbun, June 16, 2011

On June 12, a non-profit organization called "The Bridge to Chernobyl" (チェルノブイリへのかけはし) held a free clinic in Koriyama City in Fukushima Prefecture, 50 kilometers [west] from Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant.

Worried about the effect of radiation exposure, 50 families brought their children to see the doctor.

A 39-year-old mother of two told the doctor that her 6-year-old daughter had nosebleed everyday for 3 weeks in April. For 1 week, the daughter bled copiously from both nostrils. The mother said their doctor told her it was just a seasonal allergy from pollen. Her other child, 2-year-old son, had nosebleed from end of April to May.

The pediatrician from The Bridge to Chernobyl, Yurika Hashimoto, told the mother it was hard to determine whether the nosebleed was the result of radiation exposure, but they should have the blood test done for white blood cells. It was important to keep record, the doctor advised.

The family move out temporarily from Koriyama City to Saitama Prefecture after the March 11 earthquake, but came back to Koriyama at the end of March.

The mother said about 10% of pupils at the elementary school have left Koriyama. Each school in Koriyama decides whether to have the pupils drink local milk that the school provide, which tends to concentrate radioactive materials. In her daughter's school, it is up to the parents to decide. But the mother said she let the daughter drink milk with other children because the daughter didn't want to get excluded by other children for not drinking milk with them.

A 40-year-old father of a 4-month-old baby daughter was so worried that he never let the daughter go outside, even though she didn't exhibit any ill effect of radiation so far. He said, "I'm so worried. I don't know how to defend ourselves."

I [the reporter of the story] used the radiation monitoring device over the low bush near the place where this event was being held. It measured 2.33 microsieverts/hour. As I raised the device higher, the radiation level went down to 1 microsievert/hour. The highest air radiation measured in Koriyama City was 8.26 microsieverts/hour on March 15. Since middle of May, it has been about 1.3 microsievert/hour.

If you live one year in a place with 1.3 microsievert/hour radiation, the cumulative radiation will exceed 11 millisieverts. [And that's only the external exposure.]

hot particles - slow death

Video - nighttime view of toxic radioactive steam rising off Fukushima 24/7

IMVA | Here in the above video we are looking at nuclear hell on earth, a night film of the radioactive steam that continues to rise from Fukushima 24 hours a day. Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear power industry executive, is one of the experts who has been saying from day one that the nuclear crisis in Japan was much worse than they were telling us.

He was absolutely correct. Finally, three months later we are getting some numbers on what the real dangers are. And finally we can begin to understand the enormous cover-up of the nuclear doom that is reaching lungs all over the west coast of America, Canada, Alaska, Hawaii and at least half of Japan! For infants it’s a terrible valley of death we have created for them. As we shall see for years all of them have been born with already polluted bloodstreams and now the very young ones are dying in greater numbers on the west coast of the United States since Fukushima blew up.

After the first week, officials had enough information to call for evacuation of a wide area in Japan and also Hawaii, Alaska and the entire west coast of North America. They really should have evacuated all of northern Japan and also the west coast but that was almost as impossible as evacuating the entire planet or the entire northern hemisphere.

Evacuation of planet earth might be the best way for humanity to avoid the terrible nuclear, heavy metal and chemical toxicity we are now facing all at the same time. Avoiding exposure is always the best plan but there is no way to avoid breathing in air contaminated with tiny hot particles. Inhalation issues are much more frightening than ingestion issues because you can pick and choose what you eat and drink but you can’t buy bottled air.

Nuclear Toxicity Syndrome is about how to survive in nuclear and chemical hell. But one cannot do what is necessary to survive hell if a person doesn’t know they are living in one. It just keeps getting worse by the day and now we have Fort Calhoun nuclear plant outside Omaha, Nebraska on emergency alert as first fire and now flooding threatens to overwhelm yet another nuclear facility. With Mother Nature now angry (in a most bitter sense) we are really in more serious trouble than any of us would be comfortable imagining. We knew nuke power plants were bad news but who would think they would build them on fault lines or in flood zones?

japan strains to fix a reactor damaged before the quake

NYTimes | Three hundred miles southwest of Fukushima, at a nuclear reactor perched on the slopes of this rustic peninsula, engineers are engaged in another precarious struggle.

The Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor — a long-troubled national project — has been in a precarious state of shutdown since a 3.3-ton device crashed into the reactor’s inner vessel, cutting off access to the plutonium and uranium fuel rods at its core.

Engineers have tried repeatedly since the accident last August to recover the device, which appears to have gotten stuck. They will make another attempt as early as next week.

But critics warn that the recovery process is fraught with dangers because the plant uses large quantities of liquid sodium, a highly flammable substance, to cool the nuclear fuel.

The Monju reactor, which forms the cornerstone of a national project by resource-poor Japan to reuse and eventually produce nuclear fuel, shows the tensions between the scale of Japan’s nuclear ambitions and the risks.

The plant, a $12 billion project, has a history of safety lapses. It was shuttered for 14 years after a devastating fire in 1995, one of Japan’s most serious nuclear accidents before this year’s crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Prefecture and city officials found that the operator had tampered with video images of the fire to hide the scale of the disaster. A top manager at the plant recently committed suicide, on the day that Japan’s atomic energy agency announced that efforts to recover the device would cost almost $21.9 million. And, like several other reactors, Monju lies on an active fault.

Even if the device can be removed, restarting the reactor will be risky, given its safety record and its use of highly toxic plutonium as fuel, said Hideyuki Ban, co-director of the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, a watchdog group, and a member of an advisory government committee on Japan’s long-term nuclear energy policy. The plant is 60 miles from Kyoto, a city of 1.5 million people, and the fast-breeder design of the reactor makes it more prone to Chernobyl-type runaway reactions in the case of a severe accident, critics say.

“Let’s say they make this fix, which is very complicated,” Mr. Ban said. “The rest of the reactor remains highly dangerous. And an accident at Monju would have catastrophic consequences beyond what we are seeing at Fukushima.”

there must be some kind of way out of here - said the joker to the thief...,

Video - All Along the Watchtower 1970 Atlanta

Book of Isaiah, Chapter 21, verses 5-9:

Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise ye princes, and prepare the shield./For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth./And he saw a chariot with a couple of horsemen, a chariot of asses, and a chariot of camels; and he hearkened diligently with much heed./...And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.