By Marylia Kelley, Executive Director of Tri-Valley CAREs
On Wednesday, Tri-Valley CAREs will host a time-critical community forum featuring environmental, legal and nuclear weapons experts from New Mexico and California. We will discuss the potentially illegal transport of plutonium bomb cores from Los Alamos Lab in New Mexico to Livermore Lab.
These bomb cores are part of the government's "Life Extension Programs" for nuclear weapons. After arriving by truck at Livermore Lab, the plutonium cores will undergo a series of tests, including vibration, thermal and drop tests, to determine how the bomb cores will perform in a "storage, transportation or use environment." Following the diagnostic tests, the plutonium bomb cores will be put back on trucks and sent on the highway again to Los Alamos.
On Sept. 30, 2012, Livermore Lab's security status was downgraded from a Category I/II facility to the lower threshold of a security Category III facility, meaning it is no longer authorized to handle, test or store bomb-usable quantities of plutonium, including these plutonium bomb cores.
According to various officials I interviewed, the Dept. of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration has yet to complete any detailed written plan, and so the number of bomb cores that will be put on the road is not known. One official told me the shipments could go back and forth "around six times a year." The number could vary greatly, however, depending on the nuclear weapon "campaigns" going on that year. There has been no stringent environmental review of the hazards, which could be extreme.
Livermore Lab stands at a crossroad. Without the large quantities of plutonium and security infrastructure it once had, its nuclear weapons R&D capabilities are necessarily limited. Thus, the Lab faces two options. It can hang on to its bomb-testing apparatus and give itself security variances (potentially violating environmental and safety laws), or, instead, it can forge a new path, focused on cleanup of the poisons that have already leaked in our environment and far safer civilian science missions like non-polluting renewable energy technologies and global climate modeling.
The Jan. 30 forum will feature Jay Coghlan, Executive Director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. Coghlan has worked on issues involving Los Alamos Lab, nuclear weapons and the environment for 22 years. I will speak as Tri-Valley CAREs Executive Director with 30 years of experience investigating programs at Livermore Lab, its role in the nuclear weapons complex and its impacts on community and worker health and the environment. Together, we will share information from numerous meetings with decision-makers in Washington, DC.
The forum will also feature Tri-Valley CAREs Staff Attorney, Scott Yundt, on the legal questions posed by the plutonium plan, and Peter Strauss, an environmental scientist and technical advisor on the Superfund cleanup of toxic and radioactive contamination at Livermore Lab.
There will be Spanish translation available, refreshments and plenty of time for community discussion. Presented free of charge, the event takes place from 7-9 pm on Wed., Jan. 30 at the Livermore main library, 1188 South Livermore Avenue. For more information, contact Tri-Valley CAREs at 443-7148 or www.trivalleycares.org.
So this is what it means to have super computing power that alleviates underground testing. We just bring the "safe and really-hard-to-mess-with-bomb-cores" to town and look them over here. What could possibly go wrong with this much safety awareness and training? I'm obviously not smart enough to appreciate the brilliance of this concept. I try so hard but I just don't get it. http://tinyurl.com/a89tw2h
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_the_United_States Maybe it's just me, but could anyone explain why we would choose to recertify nuclear warheads on the eastern edge of the densely populated Silicone Valley? What if we instead set up an expanded lab right where these warheads are actually manufactured? The Kafka-like thinking of the outside managers of LLNL (the group that recently took over from UC Berkeley) that plans our nuclear stockpile maintenance, seems to harbor such an embedded conflict of interest in the nuclear power industry and military industrial complex they are making what seems to be end-of-days confrontational, risk-it-all-effort to set up the next major false flag incident to start, rather than avoid, WWIII. Realistically it would require 2 warheads a day, 60 per month to set up a re-certify plan. Brining 1 warhead to town is unacceptable. What unbelievable cynicism and hubris.
Hey people, wake up and smell some coffee – they are Cores, nothing more. There is a whole lot more that has to be done to make them grow.
The hubris of this scheme to psychologically condition us to live and love bomb cores, is an all too obvious high risk set-up for another False Flag attempt to start WWIII. If there is any group of people that need to wake up and smell the coffee, it is the replacement team managers that took over the UC Berkeley management functions to manage the Labs. Think through the dynamics and logistics of any plan to bring in bomb cores and you will quickly encounter a series of "Oops, we didn't think of that" security concerns, which are not worth taking regardless of the jobs. http://tinyurl.com/6pv4m8c
http://tinyurl.com/87n23fx
Any group of 10 determined warrior spirits could breech security on this plan and hold an entire country hostage over this decision. Worse yet, there are forces at play within the military bent on a New World Order, and Livermore would be as good an area as any to topple our liberty once and for all. We're armed about as well as a boy scout camp. The Department of Homeland Security is near paranoid enough over these concerns to be purchasing enough ammunition of (non-Geneva Convention) hollow point 40-caliber rounds in the multi-millions of rounds count, to fight a full theater of war domestically... just in case. So sober up friend. When even one war time attack, just one, not two, not several, but just one, is all that is needed to render the real estate for a 15 mile radius, unlivable, your call for patriotism and flag-waving is exactly what brings many of us on the defensive against the unbelievable hubris of these outside, new Lab managers. We are thinking like school children playing a game of doge-ball but underlying real forces at play here Buckhorn, are playing for keeps. They don't give a damn about killing thousands of innocents in their world power games. If loosing eastern Alameda County and all that went with it got them what they wanted, they'ed do it in a heart beat. So I shouldn't rush to start calling us names and insulting our patriotism just yet. It won't work on us.
Bringing nuclear warheads to Livermore for check ups several times a year via our freeways sounds like a safe and cost effective means of travel...NOT!
Bringing weapons-grade materials into any highly urbanized area should be front page reporting and stay there. So far a check in other Bay Area communities indicates the topic has been kept hyper-local in Patch. Not even a poll is offered to keep it alive? http://tinyurl.com/alhxr7p Expect misdirection, debunking, concealment and intimidation in regards to this topic. The replacement managers to the formerly prudent UC Berkeley managers are absentee Globalists whose agenda has little bearing on prudence.
http://tinyurl.com/a3snstz