Bloomfield City Council withdraws from Jefferson Parkway Funding.
Based on high levels of Plutonium (Pu) in soil samples provide by CU scientists which contradicted assertions that Rocky Flats clean up was dependable. Bet you forgot!
This bit of local Colorado News was not disseminated much beyond the local activist community because it supports not just the need to close the “Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge” to human activity (too bad about the wildlife) but because it would lift into consciousness the big lie that humans can safely manage large scale production and disposal of nuclear material. Plutonium is a forever (24,000 year half life and dangerous to inhale for more that 200,000 years) It has been dispersed around our planet since the nuclear arms race began in 1945, not just in accidental fires at the Rocky Flats pit production facility but in decades of nuclear weapons testing mostly by the US and former USSR. In addition there have been accidental (and even intentional, permitted )releases of radio nucleotides from nuclear power facilities, most dramatically at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukishima
Like atomized Pu, the Corona virus is invisible to the human eye. Highly enriched uranium and plutonium are even more pernicious in that their lethal effects are hard to document especially when its handlers are well equipped with propaganda and secrecy to deny its harms. For instance, the military has long denied that its use of “Depleted Uranium” to harden ordinance, often mixed with some Pu, has poisoned battlefields in Serbia and Iraq leading to higher infant deaths and mutations. Denial, a human defense mechanism, is easy when a threat is invisible and hard to document.
Denial was our first response to the Corona Virus. It’s invisible spread with 3 or 4 day incubation made it possible to label it a hoax. But not for long. And even though we have some medical and public health tools to mitigate and perhaps reduce its lethality our initial denial of the magnitude of the threat means suffering and death far beyond what might have been if we had the social discipline respond immediately.
Uranium and Plutonium pollution grow over the years of our denial. And so does the threat of the nearly invisible WMD’s on our sophisticated missiles. We are so in denial of the threat that we claim they are essential to our national security. We have again devoted way more than a trillion $US to produce more plutonium, more highly enriched uranium and modernized “more useable” nuclear weapons and the nuclear waste that results. Should the release of these weapons and resulting nuclear exchange occur, there would be no hospitals, no flawed health care system, and no heroes to mitigate the disaster. Just what damage has already been done by the irresponsible handling of Uranium and Plutonium has poked its head up from the left overs of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons facility.
