Unreported World

Home

2010-02-02T20:15:00.050Z

Opening doors onto the unreported world

Free screenings

7pm. Sunday 4th September: Half Moon
Taking back the power of Community

Four videos telling heart warming stories of successful community renewable energy schemes around England [More]

7pm. Wednesday 7th September: Exeter Phoenix
Press for Truth

Powerful film of 911 families relentless

search for truth, ten years + several wars on

[More]

5pm. Saturday 10th September: Exeter Phoenix

911 Revisited

How can the laws of physics have been suspended on 9/11?An investigation.

[More]

7pm. Sunday 11th September: Half Moon

Press for Truth

Powerful film of 911 families relentless

search for truth, ten years + several wars on.

[More]

IN THE PIPELINE:

Indy docs.

Male Infertility - Investigation into Bisphenol-A (BPA), known as the "gender bending" chemical ... Kill the Messenger - FBI whistle blower speaks out about 911, the nuclear black market and illegal arms trafficking ... The Corporation - Taking its status as a legal "person" to the logical conclusion, the film puts the corporation on the psychiatrist's couch to ask "What kind of person is it?" ... The War Game - A drama documentary depicting the effects of nuclear war on Britain. It was made for the BBC in 1965 but banned for 20 years ... Masters of the Universe - Oligarchy steals the US Central Bank complete with the power to make money out of nothing ... Farm for the Future - Brilliant BBC documentary about woodland permaculture and low energy farming ... Press for Truth - the wives & mothers of 911 victims speak out .

Film & TV drama / satire

Dr Strangelove - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb ...

Screening History here
http://unreportedworld.2
http://unreportedworld.1

Phoenix 10th September

2010-02-02T19:25:00.004Z

Click image to enlarge
Click image to enlarge

or click [here for September 7th screening]

Phoenix 7th Sept

2010-02-02T19:22:00.003Z

Click on image to enlarge
Click on image to enlarge

or click [here for Sat Sept 10th screening]

Half Moon. 11th Sept

2010-02-02T19:19:00.000Z

Click image to enlarge

Half Moon. 4th Sept

2010-02-02T19:03:00.000Z

Click image to enlarge

Exeter Phoenix

2010-02-01T22:23:00.000Z

Gandy Street, EX4 3LS .. Off Queens Street 2 mins Central Station
Spring season of Indy documentaries revealing hidden truth. These films seriously challenge the massaged messages from the BBC & global media.

Last screening of the spring season was 24th May 2010. Autumn season will kick off in October if feedback from the Phoenix screenings warrants it.

Screening History here
http://unreportedworld.2
http://unreportedworld.1

Anyone wanting to screen these documentaries and needing the DVD's and equipment please contact me 01363 866414 (John)

Dr Shlomo Sand

2008-12-21T13:18:00.000Z

New Israeli Bestseller Argues That Need for Jewish State & Story of Exile Are Myths

By Jonathan Cook
No one is more surprised than Shlomo Sand that his latest academic work has spent 19 weeks on Israel's bestseller list – and that success has come to the history professor despite his book challenging Israel's biggest taboo.

Dr. Sand argues that the idea of a Jewish nation – whose need for a safe haven was originally used to justify the founding of the state of Israel – is a myth invented little more than a century ago.

An expert on European history at Tel Aviv University, Dr. Sand drew on extensive historical and archaeological research to support not only this claim but several more – all equally controversial.

In addition, he argues that the Jews were never exiled from the Holy Land, that most of today's Jews have no historical connection to the land called Israel and that the only political solution to the country's conflict with the Palestinians is to abolish the Jewish state.

The success of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? looks likely to be repeated around the world. A French edition, launched last month, is selling so fast that it has already had three print runs.

Translations are under way into a dozen languages, including Arabic and English. But he predicted a rough ride from the pro-Israel lobby when the book is launched by his English publisher, Verso, in the United States next year.

In contrast, he said Israelis had been, if not exactly supportive, at least curious about his argument. Tom Segev, one of the country's leading journalists, has called the book "fascinating and challenging."

Surprisingly, Dr. Sand said, most of his academic colleagues in Israel have shied away from tackling his arguments. One exception is Israel Bartal, a professor of Jewish history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Writing in Haaretz, the Israeli daily newspaper, Dr. Bartal made little effort to rebut Dr. Sand's claims. He dedicated much of his article instead to defending his profession, suggesting that Israeli historians were not as ignorant about the invented nature of Jewish history as Dr. Sand contends.

The idea for the book came to him many years ago, Dr. Sand said, but he waited until recently to start working on it. "I cannot claim to be particularly courageous in publishing the book now," he said. "I waited until I was a full professor. There is a price to be paid in Israeli academia for expressing views of this sort."

Dr. Sand's main argument is that until little more than a century ago, Jews thought of themselves as Jews only because they shared a common religion. At the turn of the 20th century, he said, Zionist Jews challenged this idea and started creating a national history by inventing the idea that Jews existed as a people separate from their religion.

Equally, the modern Zionist idea of Jews being obligated to return from exile to the Promised Land was entirely alien to Judaism, he added.

"Zionism changed the idea of Jerusalem. Before, the holy places were seen as places to long for, not to be lived in. For 2,000 years Jews stayed away from Jerusalem not because they could not return but because their religion forbade them from returning until the messiah came."

The biggest surprise during his research came when he started looking at the archaeological evidence from the biblical era.

"I was not raised as a Zionist, but like all other Israelis I took it for granted that the Jews were a people living in Judea and that they were exiled by the Romans in 70AD.

"But once I started looking at the evidence, I discovered that the kingdoms of David and Solomon were legends.

"Similarly with the exile. In fact, you can't explain Jewishness without exile. But when I started to look for history books describing the events of this exile, I couldn't find any. Not one.

"That was because the Romans did not exile people. In fact, Jews in Palestine were overwhelming peasants and all the evidence suggests they stayed on their lands."

Instead, he believes an alternative theory is more plausible: the exile was a myth promoted by early Christians to recruit Jews to the new faith.

"Christians wanted later generations of Jews to believe that their ancestors had been exiled as a punishment from God."

So if there was no exile, how is it that so many Jews ended up scattered around the globe before the modern state of Israel began encouraging them to "return"?

Dr. Sand said that, in the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era, Judaism was a proselytizing religion, desperate for converts. "This is mentioned in the Roman literature of the time."

Jews traveled to other regions seeking converts, particularly in Yemen and among the Berber tribes of North Africa. Centuries later, the people of the Khazar kingdom in what is today south Russia, would convert en masse to Judaism, becoming the genesis of the Ashkenazi Jews of central and eastern Europe.

Dr. Sand pointed to the strange state of denial in which most Israelis live, noting that papers offered extensive coverage recently to the discovery of the capital of the Khazar kingdom next to the Caspian Sea.

Ynet, the website of Israel's most popular newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, headlined the story: "Russian archaeologists find long-lost Jewish capital." And yet none of the papers, he added, had considered the significance of this find to standard accounts of Jewish history.

One further question is prompted by Dr. Sand's account, as he himself notes: if most Jews never left the Holy Land, what became of them?

"It is not taught in Israeli schools but most of the early Zionist leaders, including David Ben Gurion [Israel's first prime minister], believed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the area's original Jews. They believed the Jews had later converted to Islam."

Dr. Sand attributed his colleagues' reticence to engage with him to an implicit acknowledgement by many that the whole edifice of "Jewish history" taught at Israeli universities is built like a house of cards.
The problem with the teaching of history in Israel, Dr. Sand said, dates to a decision in the 1930s to separate history into two disciplines: general history and Jewish history. Jewish history was assumed to need its own field of study because Jewish experience was considered unique.

"There's no Jewish department of politics or sociology at the universities. Only history is taught in this way, and it has allowed specialists in Jewish history to live in a very insular and conservative world where they are not touched by modern developments in historical research.

"I've been criticized in Israel for writing about Jewish history when European history is my specialty. But a book like this needed a historian who is familiar with the standard concepts of historical inquiry used by academia in the rest of the world."

This article originally appeared in The National, a newspaper in Abu Dhabi.

5th Dec 6:30pm Free film

2007-08-19T15:54:00.011+01:00

Birkbeck Open Discussion Society
Presents the unreported world of:

Money as Debt:
by Paul Grignon, artist and videographer

A film clearly explaining the International banking cartel’s control over our lives by money creation and why the system had to fail

Birkbeck College Library Building
Torrington Square WC1 7HX

Financial crisis - credit crunch - taxpayers bail out bankers -

Why?

Who creates money? Government, corporate and household debt has reached astronomical proportions, how could there be that much money to lend? In truth - there isn’t.

Free film & discussion
Friday 5th Dec.
Birkbeck Library Building, Torrington Square
Rm 35 (Downstairs) Between Malet St and Russell Square opposite SOAS.

6:30 for seat 7pm for film

Click for UnreportedWorld
SCREENING HISTORY
Titles, length, description

Ritzy Page

2007-05-12T19:35:00.000+01:00

HOME

Free Indy film nights
RiTzY
Upstairs Cafe
Brixton Centre SW2 1JG
First Tuesday of the month
(more info below listings)

Tuesday 4th Dec-- Gratis
8.30 for seat - 9pm for film ... Q & A after with director

Nominated for an EMMY 2007

HACKING
DEMOCRACY
Documentary by Simon Ardizzone, Russell Michaels and Robert Carrillo Cohen

Exposes gaping holes in the security of
America’s electronic voting system.

In 2000 electronic voting machine recorded minus 16,022 votes for Al Gore in Volusia County, Fla. Electronic machines count about 87% of votes cast in America today. Proving our votes can be stolen without a trace “Hacking Democracy” culminates in a duel between voting machine and computer hacker - interesting.

The RITZY
In the heart of Brixton. London’s
busiest independent cinema with five screens.
It has a wonderful cafe which is a cornucopia
of global culture with live music, DJ’s and
film throughout the week.
Great food and drink.
3 min's Brixton Tube

WWW.unreportedworld.blogspot.com
Glimpse through modern media’s fog
See beyond the shopping crowds
Check perceptions of reality
Peer beyond the spin
Be more knowing
07985 065224

Screening films produced with conscience and
commitment to open and free expression.
These films seriously challenge
establishment "truths".

Bread & Roses

2007-05-10T16:38:00.001+01:00

HOME

Free Indy film nights
Bread & Roses
68 Clapham Manor St SW4 6DZ
Second & Third Tues of month
Map/Directions

WWW.unreportedworld.blogspot.com
Glimpse through modern media’s fog
See beyond the shopping crowds
Check perceptions of reality
Peer beyond the spin
Be more knowing
07985 065224

Screening films produced with conscience and
commitment to open and free expression.
These films seriously challenge
establishment "truths".

Screening History 2

2007-05-02T17:55:00.013+01:00

[Home]
[Screening History 1]

Exeter University Transition
Amory Building
Rennes Drive EX4 4RJ
March 15th at 7 pm.
End of Suburbia:
by the The Electric Wall Paper Co. (75 minutes)
Peak oil - car culture - and the cul-de-sac

Oil depletion and the collapse of the American dream. Critical look at the century of oil and the machinations of the corporations in coercing a society into the car culture

Sunday 27 th Feb
doors at 4 pm programme at 4:15
The Future of Food
by Deborah Koons Garcia [88 mins]

Patenting Life -
Corporate Control of our Food

Multiple award winning doc that has featured at a wide range of professional gatherings and grass roots activists events, including Soil Associations, Slow Food, Organic Trade Conventions, Farmers Unions etc.

A stark reminder of speed of change to a corporate controlled world.

Amber Rooms
161 Sidwell Street, Exeter, EX4 6RH
New Season - New Venue - New Programme
Sundays from four - opening doors onto the unreported world

Indy documentaries plus politically inspired feature films in a comfortable lounge environment.
Free screenings 4 to 8 pm.

February
Sunday 13th Feb.
Doors 4 pm ..... documentary starts 4:15 pm
The Power of Community -
How Cuba Survived Peak Oil ...
(50 minutes)

A living example of how a country can successfully traverse what we will allhave to deal with sooner or later:-

the reduction and loss of finite fossil fuel resources.

Classic feature film at around 6:15 pm
He who controls the present,controls the past.
He who controls the past,controls the future.
SEASON OPENER - SUNDAY 6th
ORWELL ROLLS IN HIS GRAVE
Corporate control of media, politicians & the people
[84 mins]
A 2003 documentary film written and directed by Robert Kane Pappas. Covered topics include the Telecommunications Act of 1996, concentration of media ownership, political corruption, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the controversy over the US presidential election of 2000(particularly in Florida with Bush v. Gore), and the October surprise conspiracy theory.
[More info]
Pitcher & Piano
Queen St, Exeter, Devon, EX4 3RP
01392 426 907

This coming Monday 19th July
.... "Installation Evening" ....
Exeter campaign & community groups are welcome to cooperate in these screenings.

7 pm. "The Matrix" - a video poem by South London poet Paradox. (10 mins). 7:30 "The Story of Stuff" Annie Leonard on how global corporatism works (20 minutes)

8 pm. Viewed by millions - Another opportunity to see the most viewed Indy documentary on the global money system.
...
Money is the tragedy and alternatively the hope for our world. It offers the key to a brighter future both for us & for those that will come after us.

Money as Debt
by Paul Grignon (55 mins)

Financial crisis - credit crunch - taxpayers bail out "free market" bankers ..... Hmmm just what is going on?

Who creates money? - Government, corporate and household debt has reached astronomical proportions, how could there be that much money to lend? in truth there isn’t. Today money is debt.

A seriously revealing film. We owe it to future generations to find out how we are being duped.

Monday 24th May at 7 pm
Free screening & optional discussion

Iron Wall
A film by Mohammed Alatar for The Palestinian
Relief Committees. (55 mins ) Starts 7pm

Life behind the Israeli public relations spin. The hidden story of the Oslo “Land for Peace” deal.

Three times as high as the Berlin Wall, this so called “security fence” runs, according to Israel, “generally” along the Green Line, the truce lines from the 1948 War of Occupation.

However the Green Line is 315 kilometres long - the Wall is 670 kilometres long.

"Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population - behind an IRON WALL, which the native population cannot breach."Vladimir Jabotinsky .. 1923
Can we open our minds to the conundrum of Israel?

Free screening - Come & See

Monday 17th May at 7 pm
Free screening & optional discussion

A seminal moment for 21st century human kind. The Emperor stands naked before our eyes yet most citizens still doff their caps and keep silent. Is the issue terrorism? or incompetent state power? or could it be psychology?

6:40 pm for a couple of 911 related shorts - (10 mins each) 7 pm for this stunning documentary - (75 mins).

Monday May 10th 7:00 pm

Free screening & optional discussion

Now I can help teach the world how to live without oil says Rebecca Hosking the woman who helped banish plastic bags from her home town.

FARM FOR THE FUTURE

A 50 mins BBC documentary by Rebecca Hosking who investigates how to transform her family’s farm in Devon into a low energy farm for the future. Sound farming practice for healthy food & sustainable local communities, plus forest permaculture delightfully revealed.

SUNDAY 2nd of May 2:30 pm ....
FREE SCREENING ...
Ground Floor Studio
Outfoxed by Robert Greenwald
Rupert Murdoch's war on journalism
Examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, have been running a race to the bottom in tv news. The film provides an in depth look at Fox new and the dangers of ever enlarging corporations taking control of the public’s right to know (70 mins)

More information visithttp://www.outfoxed.org/
SUNDAY 18th April 2:30 pm ....
FREE SCREENING ...

PIG BUSINESS
a film by Tracy Worcester
Reveals the impact of factory farming
Abusing animals: 1.2 billion pigs worldwide slaughtered for meat yearly, more than half have been reared by intensely cruel methods giving rise to new and potentially deadly viruses that can infect human kind.
Destroying small farmers: Small independent farmers are relentlessly driven out of business by the economies of scale which large pig production systems can command.
Jeopardising lives by polluting the environment: It is not only animals which are harmed by factory pig farms. Intensive farming puts human health at risk not only by infectious diseases transmitted to human populations
SUNDAY 11th April 2:30 pm ....
FREE SCREENING ...
Ground Floor Studio
Money as Debt

by Paul Grignon, artist and videographer, exposes the International banking cartel’s control over our lives through usury & the power of private money creation as debt. (55 mins)

Financial crisis - credit crunch - taxpayers bail out "free market" bankers.. Hmmm .

Just what's going on?

Who creates money? - Government, corporate and household debt has reached astronomical proportions, how could there be that much money to lend? in truth there isn’t. Today money is debt. A seriously revealing film. You owe it to yourself to find out how we are being duped.

Film followed by opportunity for open conversation. Space for what you want to say facilitated by Andi Tobe of Transition Exeter.

Screening Future

2007-03-05T10:30:00.002Z

A big thank you to The Amber Rooms for hosting UnreportedWorld on Sundays for 4 weeks during Feb. 2011. This is a rare opportunity to glimpse through a door onto another world that the main stream media does not show you.

Interspersed with the dark and profoundly challenging independent investigations into criminal conspiracies, will be bright & positive cameos on the brilliance of humans. Evolving & rediscovered wisdom for people and our planet: ecology, architecture, agriculture, education, health, diet and technology - all the seeds we need to gift our descendants a good life NOT abject suffering and an unfulfilled life of mental torture.

Screening history

2007-02-27T14:50:00.017Z

[Home] [Screening history 2]

Monday May 10th 7:00 pm

Free screening & optional discussion

Now I can help teach the world how to live without oil says Rebecca Hosking the woman who helped banish plastic bags from her home town.

FARM FOR THE FUTURE

A 50 mins BBC documentary by Rebecca Hosking who investigates how to transform her family’s farm in Devon into a low energy farm for the future. Sound farming practice for healthy food & sustainable local communities, plus forest permaculture delightfully revealed.

SUNDAY 2nd of May 2:30 pm ....
FREE SCREENING ...
Ground Floor Studio

Outfoxed by Robert Greenwald
Rupert Murdoch's war on journalism

Examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, have been running a race to the bottom in tv news. The film provides an in depth look at Fox new and the dangers of ever enlarging corporations taking control of the public’s right to know (70 mins)

More information visit http://www.outfoxed.org/

SUNDAY 18th April 2:30 pm ....
FREE SCREENING ...

PIG BUSINESS
a film by Tracy Worcester

Reveals the impact of factory farming
Abusing animals : 1.2 billion pigs worldwide slaughtered for meat yearly, more than half have been reared by intensely cruel methods giving rise to new and potentially deadly viruses that can infect human kind.
Destroying small farmers : Small independent farmers are relentlessly driven out of business by the economies of scale which large pig production systems can command.
Jeopardising lives by polluting the environment: It is not only animals which are harmed by factory pig farms. Intensive farming puts human health at risk not only by infectious diseases transmitted to human populations

SUNDAY 11th April 2:30 pm ....
FREE SCREENING ...
Ground Floor Studio
Money as Debt

by Paul Grignon, artist and videographer, exposes the International banking cartel’s control over our lives through usury & the power of private money creation as debt. (55 mins)

Financial crisis - credit crunch - taxpayers bail out "free market" bankers.. Hmmm .

Just what's going on?

Who creates money? - Government, corporate and household debt has reached astronomical proportions, how could there be that much money to lend? in truth there isn’t. Today money is debt. A seriously revealing film. You owe it to yourself to find out how we are being duped.

Film followed by opportunity for open conversation. Space for what you want to say facilitated by Andi Tobe of Transition Exeter.

FREE SCREENING 7 pm --- Tuesday 22nd
December 2009

Two short films from the Holy Land - part of a dark story of which it is extremely difficult to speak - but impossible to be silent. [Dec 2009]

BETHLEHEM
Hidden from View [28 minutes]
by Canon Garth Hewitt
Director of the Amos Trust
Happy Christmas, good will to all men - sing of the little town of Bethlehem in Christmas carols and hear of the birth of the Prince of Peace. But today there is another story about the strangling and imprisonment of the little town of Bethlehem.

followed after 10 minute break by

A SUMMER NOT TO FORGET
The Tragedy of Lebanon 2006 [29 minutes]

Short documentary by Carol Mansour, on the spot to film a travelogue but witnessing barbarism inflicted with shameless audacity.

Tues 22nd Dec - Christmas Screening at 7 pm
St Sidwell's Centre -
Sidwell St - EX4 6NN - Tel: 01392 666222
Or try the organiser on 07985 065224

[HOME]

Dogstar

Top floor Lounge Bar - Free Indy documentaries & alt. cinema
A part of Antic's Commitment to Community
Thursday 22nd 6:30 for film at 7 pm

DEMO Sat 24th BBC Portland Place W1A 1AA.

Israel Out Of Gaza Now: Lift The Blockade

Assemble BBC Broadcasting House (Nearest Tube Oxford Circus)
March To Trafalgar Square
[Stop the War Campaign]

Stop the lies - Stop the distortion

22nd January 2009
Gaza Holocaust
Phosphorus carpet bombing
Women and children victims of Israeli
chemical warfare. What is to be done?

Find out more about the State of Israel
and the crimes against humanity being
committed in the name of their God
[NEW BOOK: Dr Sand on the Myth of Israel]

Iron Wall

A film by Mohammed Alatar for The Palestinian
Relief Committees. (55 mins ) Starts 7pm

Life behind the Israeli public relations spin. The hidden story of the Oslo “Land for Peace” deal. With events in Gaza fresh on our minds can we bear witness to what is right and what is wrong? Can we open our minds to the conundrum of Israel?

Three times as high as the Berlin Wall, this so called “security fence” runs, according to Israel, “generally” along the Green Line, the truce lines from the 1948 War of Occupation.

However the Green Line is 315 kilometres long but the Wall is 670 kilometres long.

Free screening - Come & See - Free Screening

Junction of Coldharbour Lane & Atlantic Rd [Map]

BRIXTON SW9 8LQ

The Dogstar was the first DJ Bar in the World and has enjoyed a legendary reputation for putting on some of the finest Dance Music Acts combined with amazing bar, live music, comedy, theatre and spoken word events. [Map]

DOGSTAR

January 15th
Free Screening ( 47 minutes ) Starts 7 pm

Money as Debt

by Paul Grignon, artist and videographer, exposes the International banking cartel’s control over our lives through usury & the power of private money creation as debt.

Financial crisis - credit crunch - taxpayers bailing out "free market" bankers - Just what is going on?

Who creates money? - Government, corporate and household debt has reached astronomical proportions, how could there be that much money to lend? in truth there isn’t. Today money is debt. A seriously revealing film. You owe it to yourself to find out how we are being duped.

Film followed by opportunity for open discussion. What do you think?

Hope & Anchor, Ritzy, Bread & Roses 2007

Tuesday 4th Dec-- Gratis Ritzy
8.30 for seat - 9pm for film ... Q & A after with director

Nominated for an EMMY 2007

Tuesday 6th November Ritzy

Debunking BBC 911 Conspiracy Files
Auntie Beeb in step with Goebbels

The BBC's "counter conspiracy" documentary on 911
undressed to reveal the intelligent design to deceive.

Tuesday 16th October B & R
Free Screening ( 57 minutes ) Starts 9 pm

BANG! BANG! In Da Manor
- UK, 2004 Film provided By Rice N Peas
Directed by: Sean Mendez & Negar Esfandiary

Black on Black Violence in South London
Drugs - Guns - Fear - Fast Money and the Shimmer of Bling
Why? - and what's the future?

Exposes the disproportionate level of violence and murder suffered by the black community of Britain. Points to the failure of the British educational system and consumerism/capitalism as significant contributory factors to this phenomenon.

Interviews with gunmen, arms dealers, drug users and victims of the violence reveal the social environment, which conditions and nurtures the desire to “bling” and destroy. It points to the near future when this manufactured social phenomena will seriously encroach on the more comfortable lives of the “middle classes”.

Tuesday 9th October B & R

Free Screening ( 47 minutes ) Starts 9 pm

Money as Debt:
by Paul Grignon, artist and videographer

Exposes the International banking cartel’s control
over our lives through money creation.

Who creates money? - Government, corporate and household debt has reached astronomical proportions, how could there be that much money to lend????? ....... in truth - there isn’t. Today money is debt. Seriously revealing - like finding out the earth wasn’t flat.

Tuesday 2nd October Ritzy
Free Screening (50 minutes) Starts 9 pm

Energy Crossroads
A burning need to change course

"What made our western world great and
powerful in the last century may well be the
cause of its own demise in the 21st century if
we don’t change course today"
(More info)

Tuesday September 18th B & R
Free Screening (80 minutes) Starts 9 pm

Zeitgeist the Movie
Debunking the official 911 story and mapping a path to Iraq and the world's monetary system. Wide range of tv clips ripping the covers off a can of worms. Director's quote:- "my hope is that people will not take what is said in the film as the truth, but find out for themselves,
for truth is not told, it is realized".

Tuesday September 11th B & R
Free Screening (50 minutes) Starts 9 pm

The Power of Community -
How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

A living example of how a country can successfully traverse
what we will all have to deal with sooner or later:-
the reduction and loss of finite fossil fuel resources.

Tuesday September 4th Ritzy
Free Screening (50 minutes) Starts 9 pm

OIL SMOKE & MIRRORS

The story of money continues

Joining dots between peak oil, 911, Iraq
and the secret financial cartel that
controls our planet's wealth

Featuring Colin Campbell, Michael Meacher MP,
Nafeez Ahmed, Webster G Tarpley, Christopher Bollyn,
Paul Roberts and more. Putting a complex story
into short clear message to humanity warning
of unprecedented change effecting everybody

Tuesday 7th August Ritzy
Free Screening (50 minutes) Starts 9 pm

Masters of the Universe
Film by Daniel Hopsicker
http://www.madcowprod.com/

The Secret Birth of the Federal Reserve, the creature from Jekyll Island

Was there a take-over of the US by
international bankers? Visit the scene
of a crime so perfect that for thirty years,
no one knew it had even taken place.

The birth of a criminal conspiracy to rob
each and every bank vault in America.
And now the tentacles of the $ are global

Tuesday 3rd July
Free Screening (60 minutes) Starts 9 pm

FIAT EMPIRE: a James Jaeger film

How the Federal Reserve system violates the
US Constitution, encouraging war and devastation
whilst creating inflation in an exponential curve
to disaster; for us that is - not them.

Find out why the owners of the Federal Reserve System are a “bunch of organized crooks” in violation of the US Constitution. Discover why experts claim the Fed is a banking cartel that only benefits the banking families and their cronies. Studies show the Fed system encourages war, destabilizes the economy, generates inflation (a hidden tax) and is unsustainable.

Tuesday 5th June
Free Screening ( 47 minutes ) Starts 9 pm

Money as Debt: by Paul Grignon,
artist and videographer

Exposes the International banking cartel’s control
over our lives through money creation.

Who creates money? - Government, corporate and household debt has reached astronomical proportions, how could there be that much money to lend????? ....... in truth - there isn’t. Today money is debt. Seriously revealing - like finding out the earth wasn’t flat.

Hope & Anchor: Chilly Season 2007

Unreported World
The Hope & Anchor - 123 Acre Lane SW4
(More info below listings)
CLOSED FOR SUMMER
Come and relax in comfortable surroundings and learn a
little more of the unreported world of Indy filmmakers.
Lounge-bar environment. No speeches or collections.
A place to contemplate and chill.

Monday 7th May

Free Screenings - Short at 8 o/c
Main film starts 9 pm

BANG! BANG! In Da Manor - UK, 2004
Film provided By Rice N Peas
Directed by: Sean Mendez & Negar Esfandiary (57 minutes)

Black on Black Violence
Devastated underclass in South London
Drugs - Guns - Fear - Fast Money and the Shimmer of Bling
Why? - and what's the future?

SHORT AT EIGHT

"Big Brother" Starts 8pm (30 mins)

Mussolini said the "Fascism should more correctly be called Corporatism, as it is a merger of State and Corporate power". This short reveals the agenda for "chipping" the populations, election fraud and more. Worth getting to the Hope & Anchor early.

Monday 30th April

Free Screenings - Short at 8 o/c
Main film starts 9 pm

FIAT EMPIRE: a James Jaeger film (60mins)

How the Federal Reserve violates the US Constitution, encouraging war and devastation whilst creating inflation in an exponential curve to disaster; for us that is - not them.

Find out why the owners of the Federal Reserve System are a “bunch of organized crooks” in violation of the US Constitution. Discover why experts claim the Fed is a banking cartel that only benefits the banking families and their cronies. Studies show the Fed system encourages war, destabilizes the economy, generates inflation (a hidden tax) and is unsustainable.

SHORT AT EIGHT

"New World Order" Myth or reality? (30mins) Overview of various theories

Monday 23rd April

Free Screenings - Short at 8 o/c
Main film starts 9 pm

Beyond the Pale: Four shorts from 8 pm
(90 mins with intervals)

An evening of UFO’s, Zero Point Energy and Bloodlines.

David Icke on oligarchy, Dan Ackroyd on ET’s and independent scientists on untapped energy sources. Is this light relief or do some of the dots fall in line with other themes from the UnreportedWorld?

8 o/c slot: David Icke on oligarchy (30 mins)

Monday 16th April
Free Screenings - Short at 8 o/c
Main film starts 9 pm

September 11th Revisited:
Produced & directed by Dustin Mugford (60mins)

Were explosive used to bring the three WTC buildings down?

Melting point of steel is 3000 degrees(F)
The steel in the WTC was certified for 6 hours at 2000 degrees(F)
Kerosene burns at a maximum of 1700 degrees(F).
Weeks after the attack workers were finding molten pools of steel deep under the wreckage. And then there’s Galileo’s theory of the velocity of objects in free fall. Officially 2 + 2 = 3. Hmmmmmmm.

Plus:- short primer at 8 o/c

"De-bunking the BBC's 911 Conspiracy Files"
(30 mins)

Monday 9th April

Free Screening ( 78 minutes ) Starts 9 pm

Visit Palestine: a film by Kate Barlow

What drives a young, well educated Westerner to volunteer as a “peace activist” in occupied Palestine?

Caiombe Butterly is one of a growing number of volunteers who risk their lives to intervene in the bloody occupation and settlement war in Palestine. Raw urgent film making ... the Guardian

Monday 2nd April
Free Screening ( 60 minutes ) Starts 9 pm

Plan Colombia: by Gerard Ungerman & Audrey Brohy

Sheds light on the drug-trafficking, civil struggle and impact of a multi-billion dollar “aid” for the brutal Colombian military.

20 years of drug-wars in the Andes have actually increased cocaine imports to the U.S. “Fumigation” has had more effect on the local populations than on coca leaf eradication.

Could there be ulterior motives to a plan focused on beefing up the local military and spraying coca-fields in rebel-held parts of the country when coca is grown all around Colombia?

Short at Eight: First Night -

ITN News manipulates war in Bosnia - (30 mins) Free

I’d read about this story around 911 time; that the famous scenes of emaciated “concentration camp inmates” - victims of Serbian atrocities, were in fact OUTSIDE the enclosure i.e. it was a fabricated story to win acquiescence to the forthcoming bombing of Serbia. Do you know the tv scene / newspaper front page, I’m referring to?

Now I have the film. It’s taken by a German film crew FILMING the ITN crew engineering history.

Monday 26th March
Free Screening ( 60 minutes ) Starts 9 pm

Outlawed:
Produced by an association of International Human Rights Groups.
DVD provided by Amnesty Lambeth

Extraordinary rendition, torture and disappearances in the “war on terror”

The very personal and human cost of the barbarism inherent in the US & UK’s crusade for, so called, “freedom and democracy”. Reveals the reality for those that live on the land above our oil - plus anyone suspected of sympathetic association with them.

Monday 19th March
Free Screening ( 55 minutes ) Starts 9 pm

The OIL Factor: documentary by Gerard Ungerman & Audrey Brohy

“The American way of life is not negotiable” Dick Cheney

Examines the big geo-strategic picture of US and British policy in the Middle East. A must see for anyone wanting to fill the blanks to see what’s really at stake in today’s “war on terror”
.

Monday 12th March
Free Screening ( 47 minutes ) Starts 9 pm

Money as Debt: by Paul Grignon, artist and videographer

Exposes the International banking cartel’s control over our lives through money creation.

Who creates money? Government, corporate and household debt has reached astronomical proportions, how could there be that much money to lend????? ....... in truth - there isn’t. Today money is debt. Seriously revealing - like finding out the earth wasn’t flat.

Monday 5th March
Free screening ( 56 minutes ) Starts 9 pm

Uncovered: by Robert Greenwald
Truth about the Iraq War

An arresting film about the actual arguments, speeches, and spin of Bush and his close advisors before, during and after the Iraq invasion. Compelling footage of Bush, Cheney, Rice and Powell painting themselves into a treasonous corner.

Monday 26th February
Free Screening ( 75 minutes ) Starts 9 pm

Loose Change 2: by Dylan Avery
Throws light on the unanswered questions of 911.

Controversial Indy production that is one of the most watched films on the Internet, with over 5 million viewers in 2006. Through news clips and computer simulations this film gives an overview of the events on September 11th hijacks. Forcefully presents many of the questions that remain unanswered by the 911 Commission and the Executive.

Monday 19th February
Free Screening ( 75 minutes ) Starts 9 pm

End of Suburbia: by the The Electric Wall Paper Co

Peak oil - car culture - and the cul-de-sac

Oil depletion and the collapse of the American dream. Critical look at the century of oil and the machinations of the corporations in coercing a society into the car culture

Monday 12th February
Free Screening ( 65 minutes ) Starts 9 pm

Unconstitutional: a film by Robert Greenwald

The War On Our Civil Liberties

The real story behind the USA Patriot Act and other authoritarian policies that
have come on stream since September 11th. Concerning revelations of how “anything goes’ with the US military machine. A police state apparatus is well developed in the USA with important ramification for us living here in Britain.

Mon 5th Feb.

Ludicrous Diversions ( 50 mins )

Is our government, police force and intelligence service telling us the truth?

A professionally made film about the contradictions and omissions in the
governments story about what happened on July 7th in 2005.

Mon 29th. Jan

Iron Wall ( 80 mins )

Life behind the Israeli public relations spin. A Palestinian Relief Committee film of the hidden story of the Oslo “Land for Peace” deal.

Mon 22nd. Jan

Outfoxed ( 1 hour )

Examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, have been running a race to the bottom in tv news. The film provides an in depth look at Fox new and the dangers of ever enlarging corporations taking control of the public’s right to know.

Mon 15th. Jan

9/11 Press for Truth (55 mins )

A revealing story of the wives and mothers of 9/11 victims that refused to stop asking difficult questions. Stitches together rare and overlooked news clips, buried stories and government press conferences revealing the pattern of official lies, deception and spin that you’ll never forget.

Be more knowing
Check your perception of reality

See far beyond the shopping crowds
Glimpse through the fog content of modern media
Lift yourself above the rote of their current affairs spin

Films produced with conscience and a commitment to open and free expression, these films seriously challenge establishment "truths".

Films above at the Hope & Anchor, a contemporary Young’s Pub cum restaurant on the borders of Brixton and Clapham, 123 Acre Lane SW4, next to Heritage Listed Sunlight Laundry. 200 metres from Kings Avenue and 1/2 a mile from Clapham Common or Brixton tube. Buses 35 - 37 - 355 - P5 pass the door.

More films at the Hope & Anchor and other venues. Check this blog for
details or text:- 07985 065224 with your e-mail to be added to mailing

TV TV TV

2000-05-11T19:02:00.001+01:00

[Home]

War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press ... have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence- death - is hidden from public view.": Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for New York Times

"Television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation... Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.": Neil Postman

" The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.": Gore Vidal

2000-05-02T15:19:00.002+01:00

Exeter Philosophy Circle
Meets at the St Sidwell's Centre, Sidwell Street, to discuss the nature of knowledge, existence & reality. Email for more information:- exeterphilo [at] defena [dot] me [dot] uk

Usually meets on second Wednesday of the month at 7 pm.

Chernobyl 'still causing cancer in British children'

2000-01-01T20:55:00.001Z

The Independent & The Independent on Sunday

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor Published: 23 April 2006

Cancer

More than a third of Britain is still contaminated by radioactivity from the Chernobyl disaster two decades ago, and children are getting cancer as a result, an Independent on Sunday investigation has established.

Official measurements - published in a report launched in London yesterday - show that at least 34 per cent of the country will remain radioactive for centuries as the result of the accident, which took place 20 years ago on Wednesday.

And scientists have found rates of thyroid cancer in children in Cumbria, the worst-affected part of England, rose 12-fold after the catastrophe - and blame fallout from the radioactive cloud that spread from the stricken reactor. This confounds government assurances at the time that the radiation in Britain was "nowhere near the levels at which there is any hazard to health".

The report - presented at a conference at the Royal College of Surgeons organised by Medact, a health charity - cites official figures to show that most of the highly radioactive caesium emitted in the disaster was blown across Europe by winds.

In Britain, about 81,000 sq km (31,000 sq miles) - mainly in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the west of England - were contaminated above 4,000 bequerels per square metre.

The report says the radioactive caesium - and the doses of radiation it gives Britons - will only "decline slowly over the next few hundred years".

Scientists at Newcastle University examined rates of thyroid cancer in children across northern England before and after the Chernobyl cloud passed overhead.

They found slight increases across the region - and an abrupt 12-fold jump in Cumbria, which received most fall-out. Professor Louise Palmer, who led the study, said yesterday that the results were "consistent with a causal association with the Chernobyl accident".

Chernobyl: The Great Cover-Up, Le Monde

2000-01-01T18:29:00.005Z

The World Health Organisation and Nuclear Power

ALISON KATZ / Le Monde diplomatique 1apr2008

http://mondediplo.com:80/2008/04/14who

For 50 years dangerous concentrations of radionuclides have been accumulating in earth, air and water from weapons testing and reactor incidents. Yet serious studies of the effects of radiation on health have been obscured – not least by the World Health Organisation.

In June 2007 Gregory Hartl, World Health Organisation (WHO) spokesman for Sustainable Development and Healthy Environments, claimed that the proceedings of the international conference held in Geneva in 1995 on the health consequences of the Chernobyl disaster had been duly published (1). This was not so. And the proceedings of the Kiev conference in 2001 have never been published either. Challenged by journalists a few months later, the WHO repeated the claim, providing references to a collection of abstracts for the Kiev conference and just 12 articles (out of hundreds) submitted to the Geneva conference.

Since 26 April 2007 (the 21st anniversary of Chernobyl), a large placard has informed WHO employees each day that one million children in the area around Chernobyl are irradiated and ill. IndependentWHO, the group organising the action, accuses the WHO of a cover-up of the health consequences of the catastrophe, and of failing to assist populations in danger.

The WHO, they insist, must end the agreement made in 1959 which binds it to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) (2) and prevents it from initiating a programme or activity in the area of nuclear power without consulting the IAEA “with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual agreement” (Article 1, Point 2).

Independence from the IAEA would permit the WHO to conduct a serious, scientific evaluation of the disaster and provide appropriate health care to contaminated people. A resolution to this effect is in preparation for the World Health Assembly in May 2008 (3) and an Appeal by Health Professionals has been launched (4).

Industrial and military lobby

According to its statutes, the IAEA (a UN agency which reports to the Security Council) is mandated to “to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world”. It is in fact a lobby, industrial and military, which should have no role to play in public health policymaking or research.

The IAEA has vetoed conferences planned by WHO on radioactivity and health and, in turn, the WHO has endorsed the nuclear lobby’s grotesque statistics on mortality and morbidity relating to the Chernobyl accident – 56 dead and 4,000 thyroid cancers (5). Denial of disease inevitably implies denial of health care. Nine million people live in areas with very high levels of radioactivity; for 21 years now these populations have had no choice but to consume contaminated food, with devastating effects on their health (6).

For the nuclear lobby, any research indicating harm from ionising radiation represents a commercial threat that must at all costs be averted. Research on damage to the human genome (one of the most serious consequences of the contamination) was not part of the international project requested of the WHO in 1991 by the health ministers of Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian Federation. Yet dental caries was made a research priority. And although these countries had addressed their research request to the WHO, it was the IAEA which planned the project.

This conflict of interest has already been fatal for hundreds of thousands of people according to studies by independent scientists and institutions (7). And the greatest burden of disease and death is yet to come – given long latency periods, the increasing concentration of radionuclides in internal organs from food grown in contaminated soil, and damage to the human genome over many generations.

Hundreds of epidemiological studies in Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian Federation have established that there has been a significant rise in all types of cancer causing thousands of deaths, an increase in infant and perinatal mortality, a large number of spontaneous abortions, a growing number of deformities and genetic anomalies, disturbance and retardation of mental development, neuropsychological illness, blindness, and diseases of the respiratory, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, urogenital and endocrine systems (8).

But who will believe them? Four months after the meltdown Morris Rosen, the IAEA’s director of nuclear safety, said: “Even if there were an accident of this type every year, I would still regard nuclear power as a valuable source of energy” (9). Public information on the real health consequences of Chernobyl could seriously change the debate about nuclear options. And that is why the WHO is afraid of the children of Chernobyl.

Stronger than the tobacco lobby

For decades the tobacco, agrochemical and petrochemical lobbies have obstructed implementation of public health and environmental measures that might interfere with their profits. But the nuclear lobby is incomparably more powerful than any of these as it comprises governments of nuclear states, most significantly, the United States, the United Kingdom and France, and powerful intergovernmental organisations. The disinformation emanating from industrial and military lobbies is overwhelming – and dangerously, it carries state authority.

Furthermore, the corruption of science also concerns our most prestigious academic institutions which, as an editorial in The Lancet reported, “have become businesses in their own right, seeking to commercialise for themselves research discoveries rather than preserve their independent scholarly status” (10). Peer-reviewed studies, cited as evidence of the safety of nuclear activities, all too often emanate from, or are financed by, the nuclear lobby.

Corporate science, through denial, cover-ups and lies, has brought us to the brink of self-destruction in relation to global warming. So how can we contemplate trusting corporate science in relation to nuclear power? While the emissions responsible for climate change are amenable to control (in theory), nuclear technology and its waste products are not, and its consequences, even if nuclear activities ceased tomorrow, will affect life on earth for millennia.

The “science” that has informed the nuclear debate in general, and the Chernobyl catastrophe in particular, is corporate science in which the industry is judge and jury in relation to the health consequences of its own activities. The entire edifice of nuclear institutions, governmental, regulatory, military, industrial, scientific, research and intergovernmental, including Euratom and some UN agencies, is one incestuous happy family (11).

Pseudo science

The flaws in this pseudo science range from the flagrant and preposterous to the subtle and dishonest, as shown by expert Chris Busby, journalist Wladimir Tchertkoff, as well as the Permanent People’s Tribunal (12).

The first category includes falsification and suppression of data; failure to measure exposure, screen for cancer and investigate the relationship between the two; attacks on independent researchers and their institutions; censorship of studies revealing adverse effects, discounting thousands of untranslated studies from the three most affected countries; and exclusion from conference agendas of entire scientific domains (such as the health effects of chronic, low dose, internal radiation, accounting for almost all the contamination in populations around Chernobyl).

The second category involves dozens of manipulations of data, among them: averaging exposures over entire populations and ignoring local sources of concentrated contamination; ending studies after 10 years thereby excluding long term morbidity and mortality; qualifying five year survival as “cure”, only considering cancer, those still alive and the three most affected countries; claiming decreases in childhood cancers when in fact children have become adults with cancer and therefore no longer appear in that database.

According to the National Cancer Institute, cancer incidence (all sites) in the US increased by 55% between 1950 and 1995; the trends in Europe and other industrialised nations are similar. Non-smoking related cancers are responsible for about 75% of the overall increased incidence of cancer since 1950, and cannot be explained in terms of better detection or ageing (13). Cancer incidence increases in parallel with gross national product and industrialisation but the obvious explanation for this phenomenon – environmental pollution, chemical and radioactive – is ignored. Perversely, victims are blamed for their lifestyles.

Complicity of academe

The cancer epidemic is already affecting more privileged and articulate sectors of society who are demanding serious scientific explanations and real primary prevention, which means addressing root causes – chemical and radioactive pollution – not screening for early detection of disease, which is secondary prevention. Patients’ associations are calling for a boycott of the powerful cancer charities, closely linked with the billion dollar medical equipment and pharmaceutical industries, and cancer victims are attempting to bring those responsible for the cover-up to justice (14).

The commercialisation of science and the close relationship between industry and academic institutions should be at the centre of the WHO’s concerns. Upon election as director-general, Margaret Chan cited technical authority as one of the WHO’s unique assets. “We can be absolutely authoritative in our guidance,” she said. In the area or radiation and health, it would be more accurate to say that the IAEA (which has no competence in public health) can be absolutely authoritative in the WHO’s guidance.

Can we count on the WHO’s member states to take action? The Lancet editorial noted: “Governments, nationally and regionally, have consistently failed to put their people before profit” (15). We need serious, independent research on the health consequences of civil and military nuclear activities, and the results disseminated without hindrance. nuclear activities, and the results disseminated without hindrance.

Original text in English
Alison Katz is a board member of Centre Europe Tiers Monde (CETIM), Geneva, and was for 18 years an international civil servant with the World Health Organisation
(1) Charaf Abdessemed, “Les antinucléaires font le piquet devant l’OMS”, Geneva Home Information, 6-7 June 2007.
(2) The IAEA is an autonomous organisation placed under the auspices of the United Nations in 1957; it serves as the world’s intergovernmental forum for technical cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear technology.
(3) During the Assembly, delegates of 193 member states decide on the organisation’s policy.
(4) See Sign the Appeal by Health Professionals!
(5) The Chernobyl Forum, “Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts”, Vienna, April 2006.
(6) Michel Fernex, “La santé: état des lieux vingt ans après” in Galia Ackerman, Guillaume Grandazzi and Frédérick Lermarchand, Les Silences de Tchernobyl, Autrement, Paris, 2006.
(7) Pierpaolo Mittica with Rosalie Bertell, Naomi Rosenblum and Wladimir Tchertkoff, Chernobyl: The Hidden Legacy, Trolley Ltd, London, 2007.
(8) Alex Rosen. “Effects of the Chernobyl catastrophe: literature review”, January 2006.
(9) Le Monde, 28 August 1986.
(10) “The tightening grip of big pharma”, The Lancet, vol 357, n° 9263, London, 14 April 2001.
(11) Rosalie Bertell, No Immediate Danger: Prognosis For a Radioactive Earth, Women’s Press, Toronto, 1985.
(12) Chris Busby, Chris Busby, Wolves of water: a study constructed from atomic radiation, morality, epidemiology, science, bias, philosophy and death, Green Audit, Aberystwith, 2006; Wladimir Tchertkoff, Le crime de Tchernobyl: le goulag nucléaire, Actes Sud, Arles, 2006 ; Permanent People’s Tribunal, International Medical Commission on Chernobyl, “Chernobyl: Environmental health and human rights”, Vienna, 12-15 April 1996.
(13) Samuel Epstein, Cancer-Gate: How to Win the Losing Cancer War, Baywood, New York, 2005.
(14) In France for example, Professor Pierre Pellerin (director at the time of the Central Service of Protection from Ionising Radiation) is being tried for fraud in the case of Chernobyl and thyroid patients.
(15) The Lancet, op cit.
source: 7apr2008

"Little" NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS:

2000-01-01T18:23:00.002Z

NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS: BOTHERED, BEWITCHED OR BEWILDERED?

Nation Union Journalists

http://www.nujcec.org/paris/NUCLEAR-ACCIDENTS-BOTHERED

Wednesday 11 February 2009, by Patricia Brett

A version of this article appeared in the IHT in October 2008.

Nuclear energy results in the release of radioactivity into the atmosphere and into bodies of water, either through routine, scheduled releases or because of accidents. Each nuclearized country has a watchdog to control the industry, but how well do they actually perform? This article looks at a few worrisome examples of regulators at work.

A host of nuclear accidents [1] across Europe this summer, including 100 workers inadvertently contaminated and an off-site release of radioactive iodine, served as reminders that far from being clean, the industry is a source of routine and accidental radioactive pollution [2]. Operators and regulators were prompt to assure that public health was unharmed. Yet, when Anne Lauvergeon, CEO of AREVA came to visit SOCATRI, the subsidiary guilty of dumping uranium by error in local waterways, she was met by public outcry.

AREVA, the world’s largest nuclear group, was responsible for three of the events – six of which occurred in France, the most nuclear-dependent country with 80% of nuclear-produced electricity. Four of the French events concerned the 600 hectare Tricastin site.

Responding to critics on the 75 Kg uranium spill, Lauvergeon, said that nuclear installations are subject to “the most draconian international norms” and deplored public “confusion” about the “incident”. [3]

That nuclear power is a source of confusion is undeniable but comments such as Lauvergeon’s do nothing to dissipate it. For example, there are no binding international radio-protection standards. National regulators follow the ill-defined ALARA – As Low As Reasonably Achievable – guidelines allowing them suitable flexibility to set dose limits for each radionucleide.

ALARA itself is a source of bafflement. Many believe that exposure to ALARA levels is risk-free but that’s not the case, warns Jean-René Jourdain, head of internal dosimetry at the IRSN, the technical support provider for the French nuclear regulator, the ASN. Low-dose radiation produces the same damage to target tissues as high doses but with lower probability. How much lower is unknown, Jourdain says, because “what we know about low-level radiation was extrapolated from studies on atom bomb victims that were flawed” both in methodology and type of exposure studied.

Chernobyl provided unanticipated results on the effects of cumulative low-dose exposure, Jourdain says. “We expected leukemia in children, instead we found that infants were more prone to thyroid cancer – and much sooner than we’d expected, only five years after the accident rather than 10 to 15 years as we’d thought,” he adds.

SOCATRI added to the bewilderment by providing conflicting information and failing to inform the ASN in a timely manner [4]. As in most countries, the ASN relies heavily on operator data. Based on that, it classified the event, at a level 1 on its scale of 0 to 7. And this is discombobulating because on the ASN web site, an unauthorised off-site release ranks as a more serious level 3. [5]

Furthermore, the ASN waited two days before sending a team on site. “This is normal procedure based on the information given by the operator” Jean-Luc Lachaume, deputy director of ASN says. Even if the operator had released 360kg of radioactive uranium, as initially reported, this wasn’t a problem because the agency knows what the plant releases “it is one of a hundred such incidents in France each year,” he says.

President of the CRIIRAD, an independent laboratory, Roland Desbordes is perplexed by this reasoning because “360kg of uranium is equivalent to at least 9,000 MBq or more than 100 times SOCATRI’s annual limit. Brought down to ‘only’ 75kg the annual limit is overshot by 27 times”.

After the spill, the IRSN monitored radioactivity in surface and groundwater around Tricastin. In a report issued on Sept 4 [6], it found radiation levels three times higher than the national average in marine life and sediments in surface water.

An IRSN study released on Sept. 15, [7] on radioactive water pollution around all nuclear installations found radioactive pollution downstream of and groundwater contamination at nearly all sites. Tricastin again, chalked up some of the highest levels but the IRSN says it can’t identify the source of the groundwater contamination. The CRIIRAD incriminates a mound of radioactive waste buried on site since the 1970s. The IRSN report does point to old waste storage sites, in general, protected by obsolete technology as a source of leakage and pollution, some of it on-going for years. Asked what the ASN would do about the Tricastin mound, Lachaume testily replied that it was a defence issue and the ASN had no authority over it.

With 104 reactors, the US leads in the number of nuclear power plants. The Union of Concerned Scientists and others petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2006 to take action on a similar issue, documenting chronic leaks, some decades-old. [8] “The NRC responded that an industry voluntary initiative, that is by those that have been obfuscating for years, to report the leaks would suffice,” says Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear.

Radiation levels around Tricastin have been higher than average for over a decade but this doesn’t worry the IRSN which notes, in the Sept 4th report, that in 1991 (while investigating a previous spill [9]) it found radiation levels five times above the national average. The IRSN implies that since radiation is now lower than in 1991, which has apparently become the standard for “background” radiation at Tricastin, there is no need for concern.

“Background” radiation, often called “natural”, is baffling when confused with “naturally-occurring” radiation. Background includes artificial radiation produced by, among others, nuclear power plants – the more radioactivity is released and stays in the environment, the higher background levels become, explains Jourdain, of IRSN.

All nuclear installations routinely release radioactive liquids or gases. The releases authorised by the ASN and other regulatory bodies are site-specific and cover a variety of radioneuclides. Limits can vary greatly from one country or even from one installation to the next. In France, for example, one installation will be authorised to release 60,000 GBq of radioactive tritium while another is allowed 18,000 TBq [10]. Even allowing for differences in activity and location, these discrepancies can muddle the public mind.

To understand how these limits are set, the example of SOCATRI is enlightening. In 2006, SOCATRI began a new waste reconditioning activity and requested authorisation to release 85 MBq/yr of Carbon 14, a low-level radioactive gas. In 2006 and 2007, SOCATRI exceeded it’s authorised levels by 40 times at around 3,400 MBq/yr so it asked the ASN to increase its authorisation to 3,400 MBq/yr. The request was granted, Lachaume explains, because “we didn’t know how much would be released at first so we set the levels very low but when it turned out that these were unrealistic, they were slightly revised”. [11]

In June – reported in August – SOCATRI exceeded its annual limit and was shutdown. Lachaume says the Carbon 14 limit will not be raised again but has no suggestion as to how the plant should deal with the problem. “That’s their business,” he says.

In a 2006 review of the ASN, the International Atomic Energy Agency, found that “…some states may encounter difficulties in separating the regulatory control from the promotion and operation of facilities and activities…”. [12] . This is understandable in the newly independent (since 2006) ASN as the State is a majority shareholder in both AREVA and EDF, France’s nuclear utility. But even in the US where the industry is in private hands, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, headed by five presidentially-appointed commissioners, has been known to ignore safety issues in favour of financial arguments advanced by operators.

In 2002, the Davis-Besse (DB) plant came to within 3/8th of an inch of a nuclear disaster because the bottom line took priority over public safety, NRC records show. Both the NRC and the industry were aware of severe premature ageing problems due to boric acid corrosion which plagued reactor vessels world-wide since the 1980s. Yet the NRC allowed the industry to treated the issue as a financial problem, not a safety issue [13]. Loss of coolant can lead to reactor meltdown and massive release of high-level radiation. . In 2001, the NRC suspected DB of serious corrosion issues and told the operator, FENOC, to shutdown by Dec 31 to visually check for and repair corrosion damage.

FENOC planned to shutdown for refuelling in April and requested an extension citing the economic toll early shutdown entails. Convinced that safety requirements were not met, NRC staff drafted a shutdown order and sent it to the five-member Commission for approval. But Commission staff questioned the order, requiring 100% proof, available only by shutting the plant, that imposing a financial burden was warranted, a report by the NRC inspector-general shows In the end the NRC allowed the plant to run for an extra six weeks. When workers scrapped off years-old boric acid crud they found that a cavity 7 inches deep and 5 inches wide had bored through the entire outer layer of the reactor lid leaving only the 3/8th of an inch of inner lining to retain the primary coolant inside the vessel [14]. Loss of coolant can lead to reactor meltdown and massive release of high-level radiation.

Plants are ageing faster than expected, says Laurent Foucher, IRSN’s head of equipment and structural analysis, and finding replacement parts is becoming difficult.

Tony Pietrangelo, vice president for regulatory affairs at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry lobby group, says that “there’s a supply chain issue with ultra heavy equipment.”

Asked if deteriorating plans resulted in more near misses, Scott Burnell, press officer at the NCR says no but adds that “we’re having to deal with more complex situations”.

P.S.

This subject is highly controversial and I anticipate dissent from some quarters, hence the footnotes. But if you think it’s too much, I can take them out. Also not sure where it should go?!

Footnotes

[1] In nuke-speak these events are referred to as “anomalies” or “incidents”. I chose to use the Collins English Dictionary definition of accident – “an unforeseen event”

[2] 100 workers contaminated. See ASN Avis d’incident du 31 juillet 2008
iodine. See Agence Federale de Controle Nucléaire (Belgium) Communique de Presse du 6 Septembre 2008;

[3] interview to the JDD July.

[4] Confirmed in interview to JL Lachaume deputy director of ASN. Sept 8, 2008.

[5] INES scale

[6] IRSN Fiche technique SOCATRI du 4 septembre 2008.

[7] IRSN Report on Water around Nuke sites 4 septembre 2008.

[8] UCS petition and response to NRC response

[9] The 1991 spill is not mentioned in the Sept 4 report but is alluded to in the Sept 15 report.

[10] IRSN Report on Water around Nuke sites 15 septembre 2008.

[11] Figures confirmed by Lachaume at ASN .

[12] IAEA Integrated Review Service, Full Scope to France 2006.

[13] NRC INSPECTOR GENERAL DAVIS-BESSE REPORT DEC 2002
NRC Generic Letter 88-01 March 17, 1988
NRC Information Notice 90-10 Primary Stress Corrosion Cracking PWSCC Feb 23, 1990
NRC Lessons Learned
NRC Information Notice 86-108. Jan 5, 1995
NRC Degradation of Control Rod Mech… Generic Letter 97-01 April 1, 1997
NRC Bulletin 2001-01 Aug, 3 2001
NRC Bulletin 2002-01. March 18, 2002
NRC INSPECTOR GENERAL DAVIS-BESSE REPORT DEC 2002.

[14] idem.

4 Forum messages

19 February 2009 21:01, by Alison Culliford
1. Sellafield’s small ad in the Whitehaven News: ’We need your help. Did you work at Sellafield in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s? Were you by chance in the job of disposing of radioactive material? If so, the owners of Britain’s nuclear waste dump would very much like to hear from you: they want you to tell them what you dumped - and where you put it.’ Is this some kind of joke? Was it really placed by Sellafield or an anti-nuclear power group?
2. I read an official report on Chernobyl issued by Nuclear Electric to all chief charge engineers in the UK (my dad was one, at Hinkley Point). It drew the conclusion that the normal safety valve of self-preservation was no longer present among workers in post-Communist Ukraine, and smugly judged that this could never happen in Britain. The latter is probably true if we retain our democracy, but selling reactors to the likes of Libya surely must be questioned.
3. That said, Dad was disillusioned after privatisation. My brother met a 60-year-old surfer on the beach at Croyde Bay who was high up in Nuclear Electric. "Ah yes, the three awkward charge engineers," he said. My Dad and his colleagues, who had started out in nuclear power believing it was the new clean power, were given golden handshakes to get them out of the way in the mid-1990s. They insisted on doing things the old way. Dad, who used to leave on holiday with a suitcase full of Hinkley Point paperwork, constantly phoned in to work, and made us visit any nuclear site within a 500 mile radius in any country we were in (even if it meant staring at it through binoculars), ended his days walking on the Quantocks and gazing ruefully at the twin blocks of his former workplace. I think the worry finally killed him (if it wasn’t the radiation. He had a form of leukemia).
4. But give me a good alternative. I would like to see nuclear power regulated by a stringent UN-enforced international regulatory body, staffed by people like my father, who wasn’t just in it for the money.
Reply to this message
24 February 2009 14:47, by Pat
Atomic power has, from its inception in the 1950s, benefited from both generous subsidies and unfailing governmental support. Many people believed in the radiant future it promised.
Little was known at the time of the effects of nuclear power, especially of low-level radiation, to which we are routinely exposed. The only data available was extrapolated from data collected on the survivors of high-level exposure from the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over the years, the data results were revised when what was considered the radiation-free control groups turned out to be contaminated by low-level radiation and developed cancers, cardiac and reproductive problems as well as genetic mutations typical of radiation exposure. [For additional information see: http://www.rerf.or.jp/]
In addition to these flawed studies, other evidence indicated the nefarious effects of low-level exposure including among Navaho uranium miners and their families whose drinking water was contaminated by uranium tailings and sludge in the US. [See: http://www.downwinders.org/cortez.html]. And there was the high level of cancer and leukaemia deaths in the towns located near the US test sites – St. George, Utah, to name the most blighted of these.
But the industry and the governments that regulate it chose not only to ignore this information but to suppress it. I too have visited nuclear sites where I am told that the radiation released is “safe?. Yet, the International Committee for Radio Protection, hardly a hotbed of anti-nuke activists, states that: “It is assumed that any exposure is capable of causing an effect, with no threshold.? Limits are set only to limit cancer deaths to “an acceptable frequency and “to prevent unacceptable levels of risk.? It all depends on the definition of unacceptable.
Nuclear industry workers are the first to be affected by the suppression of mounting evidence that low-level radiation is more harmful than first believed. They are often over-exposed without being warned of the possible ill effects.
Nuclear pioneers, such as your father, at least knew that they were dealing with a dangerous technology. But this attitude has faded with the years. For example, according to the EDF inspector general for safety, the safety culture at EDF is poor and a certain complacency has set in. [See http://energies.edf.com/html/IGSN/2007/rapportIGSN-2007.pdf]
Regulators depend on the industry for information about everything that goes on at nuclear installations. Independent monitoring is deemed unnecessary.
It is true that we lack studies to back up claims of the effects of low-level radiation. This is because only governments are capable of implementing such comprehensive studies but are too busy burying their heads firmly in the sand on this issue to do so. In a recent broadcast of “Pieces à Conviction? on FR3, André-Claude Lacoste, chair of the Authorité de sureté nulcéaire, said it was unnecessary for the ASN to undertake such a study because the effects of low-level radiation were too negligible to show up. In other words, he doesn’t need to study a controversial issue because he already knows the answer. It is always the same broken record “Don’t worry, be happy?.
Last but decidedly not least, there is the problem of radioactive waste. The industry generates radioactive pollution that is a zillion times more toxic than anything found in nature and offers no viable way to dispose of it. Reprocessing plants such as Sellafield or La Hague spend a lot of energy and resources to simply recondition the waste and make the raw materials for bombs – plutonium and enriched uranium – more easily available by separating them from the rest of the waste. But it remains waste and as such, still needs to be disposed of and therein lies the rub. There is no way to predict what will happen to geologic formations hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years from now. To claim that deep repositories will withstand, without leaching into ground water reservoirs, the massive radioactive bombardment that they will be subjected to for the required centuries is a further example of nuclear industry hubris.
Reply to this message
28 March 2009 18:13, by peter russell
Over recent years some extremely worrying facts have been brought to light by a number of scientists working independently of the establishment and therefore able to state their findings without fear of losing their jobs (though they might, one surmises, worry for their lives).
First among these is Dr. Chris Busby, who has been measuring and making tests on the radioactivity around nuclear sites in England - notably Sellafield, the North Wales coast and Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset which is close to the Hinkley Point nuclear power station. His surveys in each of these places has produced considerably elevated figures for cancers and leukaemias, especially among children, close to the coasts of Cumbria, Conway, N.Ireland, and the Bristol Channel. Some of his results have been reported in Richard Bramhall’s periodical "Radiation Times". Busby produced a DVD, called "Nuclear Cover-ups", about the effects on the children of N. Wales some years ago, which I believe is still available. In 2006 Dr. Busby wrote a substantial treatise on the effects of low-level radiation, especially regarding particles inhaled or imbibed and lodging in the human system. This was unfortunately titled "Wolves of Water", which means little to most people, and expansively subtitled "A study constructed from atomic radiation, morality, epidemiology, science, bias, philosophy and death". In about 500 pages this covers the whole field of the effects of low-level radiation and the reasons for its serious effects on the human system and human health and human geneology. Busby also co-operated with A. V. Yablokov in the mainly-Russian report on the long-term effects from the Chernobyl disaster, titled "Chernobyl: 20 years after", another harrowing 250-page document full of unhappy facts relating to the continuing sickness and death caused all over Europe but particularly in Belarus and around Chernobyl.
Another telling document is the 2006 book by Dr. Helen Caldicott, another dedicated expert on the effects of radiation, and called "Nuclear Power is not the Answer". Her reasoning and her references back up the findings of Dr. Rosalie Bertell, in her 1985 book "No Immediate Danger", and her subsequent pontifications on the subject of the millions who have died as a direct or indirect result of our nuclear activities.
These and other writers are sufficient to persuade less academic but concerned people that the human race is indeed doomed, if not from climate change, epidemics, rain-forest loss and species loss, or just outright warfare, certainly without fail from the legacy of radioactive materials. All of these, sooner or later, will escape their storage places and contaminate the planet more and more to the point where the "background" radioactivity is so high that not one in three people will die from cancer, but everybody, and many in their pre-reproductive years. Unfortunately, the dire effects will also disrupt animal and plant life in general, and it may be many millions of years before the total radioactive load has diminished enough for life to be sustainable again, and Darwin’s process of evolution start all over again.
I am one of those who are convinced that this is the scenario on which we are already well-embarked, and the pie-in-the-sky assertion that "science will solve the problem" is just not going to happen.
Reply to this message
3 April 2009 13:16, by Pat Brett
Thank you for pointing out the work of Dr. Chris Busby, I am not familiar with it and will try to look it up.
I am familiar with the work done by Drs. Rosalie Bertell and Helen Caldicott. Interviewing them in the late 1970s combined with covering the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s totally inefficient response to the accident at Three Mile Island raised my concerns about the effects of radiation and the lack of public information on the issue.

Yuri Bandazhevsky

2000-01-01T18:07:00.000Z

Yuri Bandazhevsky

Yuri Bandazhevsky (born on January 9 1957 in Belarus), former director of the Medical Institute in Gomel (Belarus), is a scientist working on sanitary consequences of the Chernobyl accident.

On June 2001 Yuri Bandazhevski was sentenced to eight years imprisonment on the grounds that he had allegedly received bribes from students' parents. The institute's Deputy Director, Vladimir Ravkov, also received an eight-year prison sentence. Bandazhevski's lawyer claimed that he had been convicted on the basis of two testimonies made under duress, without any material evidence. According to many human rights groups Dr. Bandazhevski was a prisoner of conscience. Amnesty International has stated on their website "His conviction was widely believed to be related to his scientific research into the Chernobyl catastrophe and his open criticism of the official response to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster on people living in the region of Gomel." His arrest came soon after he published reports critical of the official research being conducted into the Chernobyl incident.

Yury Bandazhevsky was released on parole from prison on August 5, 2005, and prohibited for five months of leaving Belarus. He was afterward invited by the mayor of Clermont-Ferrand, in France, to work at the university and at the hospital on Chernobyl's consequences. Clermont-Ferrand has been since 1977 linked to Gomel where Bandhazevsky used to work.

Lancet reports Chernobyl dissent

2000-01-01T17:39:00.000Z

Debate over health effects of Chernobyl re-ignited

Lancet Ed Holt 24 April 2010

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2810%2960605-8/fulltext

Controversy surrounding the true toll and disease burden caused by fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 has resurfaced following the release of a new study. Ed Holt reports.

Calls have been made for comprehensive studies into the continuing health effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster after a rise in birth defects was identified in one of the regions most affected by the catastrophe.

A study by Wladimir Wertelecki of the University of Southern Alabama, AL, USA, found above average rates of a number of birth defects in one province in Ukraine—where the devastated nuclear power plant, which exploded 24 years ago, remains encased in concrete. Wertelecki says that the rise could be linked to continuing exposure to low-level radiation doses.

The findings, published in Pediatrics, are in stark contrast with a major, but highly criticised, 2005 study by WHO and other groups, which suggested that there was no evidence of an increased risk of birth defects in areas contaminated by the accident. Wertelecki says that the results of his study show claims that birth defects are not linked to the disaster need to be re-evaluated. He told The Lancet: “The official position is that Chernobyl and birth defects are not connected. That position needs to be reconsidered at the very least.”

When unit number four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in April, 1986, it caused the world's worst nuclear disaster. WHO has estimated that the total radioactivity from Chernobyl was 200 times that of the combined releases from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The blast and following fires sent a huge radioactive cloud spreading across Europe and 350 000 people in areas near the plant had to be evacuated.

The UN, WHO, International Atomic Energy Agency, and other bodies joined with the Russian, Belarus, and Ukraine Governments to set up the Chernobyl Forum to undertake a major study into the effects of the disaster and in 2005 released their findings.

According to their study, there had only been 56 direct deaths (47 accident workers and nine children with thyroid cancer) and an estimated 4000 deaths in future because of the accident. Also, there was no evidence of an increased risk of birth defects or other reproductive effects in areas contaminated by radiation from the accident.

The report included data from WHO showing that although an increase in birth defects had been found between 1986 and 1999 in Belarus—whose southern border is 30 km from Chernobyl and which was badly affected by radioactive fallout from the disaster—those rates were rising in both contaminated and uncontaminated areas.

But the study was heavily criticised by other groups who said it grossly underestimated the deaths and the potential future health effects of the disaster and had used selective reporting of data.

Alternative studies contradicted some of the Chernobyl Forum findings and suggested that the health effects of the disaster were much greater. One, the TORCH report published in 2006 by British scientists Ian Fairlie and David Sumner and commissioned by a German Green Party MEP, indicated the uncertainty surrounding the health effects of low doses of radiation and of internal radiation doses through ingestion and inhalation of nuclides.

Wertelecki's study concentrated on the Rivne province of Ukraine, about 200 km from the Chernobyl plant. Its northern half, Polissia, was classified as being “significantly affected” by the disaster and the ground, as well as food, in the area still contains low doses of radioactive caesium 137.

The study, which covered births in the years from 2000 to 2006 in Rivne, showed that of 96 438 babies born in the province in that time, the rate of some birth defects was far above the European average. It showed that 22 of 10 000 babies were born with a neural tube defect compared with the European average of nine per 10 000 babies.

The rate was even higher in the Polissia region with 27 of 10 000 babies born with a neural tube defect. Polissia also had high rates of microcephaly and microphthalmia than in other parts of Rivne. The study recorded 3·7 cases of microcephaly per 10 000 children in Polissia, while the rate in the rest of Rivne was 1·3 per 10 000. Meanwhile, the rate of microphthalmia was 1·8 per 10 000 while it was just 0·4 per 10 000 in other areas of the province.

But Wertelecki is keen to point out that the study does not claim that radiation exposure is definitively the cause of the defects. The study lacked data about prenatal drinking and the diet of mothers in the region, he stresses. Both are key to understanding the causes of the defects as fetal exposure to alcohol and a lack of folates during pregnancy can lead to both types of birth defects.

Alcoholism is rife in the Ukraine and generally low standards of living for much of the population also mean diet can be poor. “Alcohol and folates are among the factors involved in certain birth defects. A lack of folates combined with ionizing radiation could multiply the risks of birth defects or at least greatly enhance them. Alcohol is a factor in microcephaly, as ionizing radiation can also be, and combined their effects could be enhanced”, says Weretlecki.

“That data [on prenatal fetal exposure and folates in mothers' diets] was not available to us and to prove that one factor is behind the birth defects rather than others or that the factors are all combined is a matter of resources. But what is key is that these birth defects can be prevented.”

He adds that so far studies on the possible effects of radiation had been focused on external exposure to radiation near Chernobyl rather than other forms. “Models used so far have mainly concentrated on external exposure levels—eg, permissible levels of radiation in the air and how much these have been exceeded etc. But what needs to be studied is the internal exposure—eg, in what is eaten, drunk, consumed, or breathed in through the air”, says Wertelecki.

When contacted by The Lancet regarding Wertelecki's study and its apparent contradictions to the Chernobyl Forum's findings, WHO said it supported efforts to undertake new studies, but stuck by its own findings in the 2005 report. Igor Pokanevych, head of the WHO office in the Ukraine, tells The Lancet: “The conclusions of the Chernobyl Forum study were based on the data collected in the Forum's studies. We found that there would likely be no major effects on birth defects. But our conclusions do not match those of Dr Wertelecki. We are not saying that he is wrong, or that he is right, just that our data was different to his and our conclusions were different. He perhaps had access to data that we did not.”

Pokanevych says that Wertelecki's method was different to the WHO study and that he made conclusions based on studies of one particular part of the wider Rivne province rather than at nationwide level. “We would definitely welcome more studies on this and any efforts that will help prevent birth defects. But any studies need to have the same methodology to be comparable”, he says.

Both local and international studies into the long-term effects of the disaster have been hindered by difficulties in the health sectors in affected countries, including lack of funding, infrastructure, and lack of local experience in chronic disease epidemiology.

Wertelecki is also critical of the claims made by the Chernobyl Forum that one of the greatest dangers to health in the wake of the nuclear plant disaster was the fear of becoming ill because of it, rather than actual illnesses as a result of the disaster. The Forum's report said: “The mental health impact of Chernobyl is the largest public health problem unleashed by the accident to date.” It suggested that the psychological effects of the disaster had led some to ignore warnings of collecting food from contaminated areas and turn to overuse of alcohol and tobacco, and unprotected promiscuous sexual activity in the belief that such behaviour was no less risky than their exposure to the effects of Chernobyl.

But Wertelecki thinks that such statements hindered further studies. “At grassroots level in the Ukraine people are offended when they hear that the biggest health threat is radiophobia [anxiety about radiation safety] and the fear of illness from Chernobyl. Statements like that can also put a deep freeze on funding sources for other studies”, he says.

The Ukrainian health ministry and health authorities in Rivne declined to comment when contacted by The Lancet. But Wertelecki says that the authorities in Rivne are keen to create international partnerships with other bodies to do research in the area. Ukraine still spends between 5—7% of its gross domestic product every year on Chernobyl-related matters, including health. Benefits programmes have been set up for people classed as Chernobyl victims and Ukrainian authorities have designated 2·4 million Ukrainians, including more than 400 000 children, as having health problems related to the disaster.

Wertelecki says that the most important thing now was to begin wide-scale studies to try to identify the cause of birth defects in the region and prevent them. “Chernobyl is a complete tragedy and work needs to be done now to prevent birth defects”, he says.

Nuclear Power - What's the Problem?

2000-01-01T17:22:00.037Z

This is an index to a variety of articles, reports and books on the issue of nuclear power. Intro with link to full article. See also Low Level Radiation Campaign [documentary]

1. Questioning the validity of research / reports from institutions & academic bodies responsible for overseeing the nuclear industry.

2. Alternatives to a nuclear future.

3. Politics of nuclear power.

1. Questioning:

Lancet reports Chernobyl dissent
Debate over health effects of Chernobyl re-ignited

Lancet Ed Holt 24 April 2010

Calls have been made for comprehensive studies into the continuing health effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster after a rise in birth defects was identified in one of the regions most affected by the catastrophe.

The findings, published in Pediatrics, are in stark contrast with a major, but highly criticised, 2005 study by WHO and other groups, which suggested that there was no evidence of an increased risk of birth defects in areas contaminated by the accident. Wertelecki says that the results of his study show claims that birth defects are not linked to the disaster need to be re-evaluated. He told The Lancet: “The official position is that Chernobyl and birth defects are not connected. That position needs to be reconsidered at the very least.”
[Read more]

Chernobyl 'still causing cancer in British children'

The Independent & The Independent on Sunday

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor Published: 23 April 2006

Cancer

More than a third of Britain is still contaminated by radioactivity from the Chernobyl disaster two decades ago, and children are getting cancer as a result, an Independent on Sunday investigation has
established. ...
[Read more]

Chernobyl: The Great Cover-Up
The World Health Organisation and Nuclear Power

ALISON KATZ / Le Monde diplomatique 1apr2008

http://mondediplo.com:80/2008/04/14who
For 50 years dangerous concentrations of radionuclides have been accumulating in earth, air and water from weapons testing and reactor incidents. Yet serious studies of the effects of radiation on health have been obscured – not least by the World Health Organisation.
[Read more]

Chernobyl Effects Could Last for Centuries
By Pavol Stracansky 30.08.2010
http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/30-08-2010/114807-chernobyl_effects_could_last_fo-0/#
Nearly 25 years after the worst nuclear accident in history, new scientific findings suggest that the effects of the explosion at Chernobyl have been underestimated. Experts last month published a series of studies indicating that, contrary to previous findings, populations of animals decreased in the exclusion zone surrounding the site of the former nuclear power plant, and that the effects of radioactive contamination after the outbreak had been "overwhelming." [Read more]

NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS: BOTHERED, BEWITCHED OR BEWILDERED?

Nation Union Journalists

http://www.nujcec.org/paris/NUCLEAR-ACCIDENTS-BOTHERED

Wednesday 11 February 2009, by Patricia Brett

A version of this article appeared in the IHT in October 2008.

Nuclear energy results in the release of radioactivity into the atmosphere and into bodies of water, either through routine, scheduled releases or because of accidents. Each nuclearized country has a watchdog to control the industry, but how well do they actually perform? This article looks at a few worrisome examples of regulators at work. [Read more]

2. Alternatives
Summarising "non-nuclear" opinion in the sustainable energy world: there are a vast array of alternatives to nuclear power. The first is conservation of energy. The second is to change the economic and social structure in ways that reduce demand for energy e.g. transport, housing, consumer goods etc. The third is the development and expansion of existing technology with appropriate fiscal and monetary stimulus coupled with planning for local production for local consumption. These technologies include , wind, tidal & wave [in wide range of innovative models] together with solar thermal for heating and electricity and photo voltaics. Big saving are made from combine heat and power both large and small scale such as micro CHP for small housing complexes.
There are innumerable developments under way from algae breeding to fuel cell storage to ground & air heat pumps to hydrogen production from bacteria working on biodegradable organic matter. The links below are just a starter to news & views on some of the innovative clean, sustainable, safe, efficient and appropriate methods of producing and or conserving energy.
Most of these technologies are controllable by the community and local society. Nuclear power is most certainly not controllable by those it supplies. Nuclear power represents an enormous trust in the mechanism of power in the UK and the infallibility and accountability of private corporations. Alternative options are posted below.

Greenpeace paper on decentralised energy versus nuclear power [2007]

http://www.mng.org.uk/gh/resources/no2n_decentralised_energy.pdf
50% electricity from marine renewables by 2050

http://www.renewableenergyfocus.com/view/13581/europe-50-electricity-from-marine-renewables-by-2050/
http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_releases/safe_alternatives_to_nucle_27062006.html
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-08/haog-ef080609.php
http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/news/2007/11/hydrogen_bacteria
x

3. Politics

Economics of nuclear power:

Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute reports that the US Government is offering massive subsidies to the nuclear industry to construct new nuclear plants. There are no takers as yet. Lovins also questions the energy & carbon accounting of the industry. Interview here on Democracy Now - interview 3/4 though programme.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/16/amory_lovins_expanding_nuclear_power_makes

Reuters reports on a Vermont Law School study

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS16237343320100916 warning of risks to the taxpayer from the development of nuclear power.

When the Soviet Union collapsed there was panic in nuclear regulator circles as the nuclear programme was bankrupt, haemorrhaging skilled staff and without the possibility of funding basic safety guidelines. Are we so confident that Europe, Britain etc. can guarantee financial security for ever?

Prisoner of Conscience on Chernobyl

Dr. Bandazhevski was a prisoner of conscience. Amnesty International has stated on their website "His conviction was widely believed to be related to his scientific research into the Chernobyl catastrophe and his open criticism of the official response to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster on people living in the region of Gomel." His arrest came soon after he published reports critical of the official research being conducted into the Chernobyl incident. [Read more]

http://unreportedworld.blogspot.com/2000/01/yuri-bandazhevsky.html

The Rocky Mountain Institute has undertaken some detailed analysis which demonstrates that alternatives to nuclear power can achieve similar objectives at lower cost. Amory Lovins, of RMI says:

“So the big question about nuclear "revival" isn't just who'd pay for such a turkey, but also...why bother? Why keep on distorting markets and biasing choices to divert scarce resources from the winners to the loser — (3)
http://www.rmi.org/rmi/

CURRICULUM VITAE (Mar 2010)

Prof. Dr Christopher Busby
http://unreportedworld.blogspot.com/2000/01/dr-c-busby-cv.html

Download at http://www.llrc.org/misc/subtopic/cvbusby.pdf

Chernobyl -poisoned centuries

2000-01-01T17:14:00.002Z

Chernobyl Effects Could Last for Centuries

By Pavol Stracansky 30.08.2010

http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/30-08-2010/114807-chernobyl_effects_could_last_fo-0/#

Nearly 25 years after the worst nuclear accident in history, new scientific findings suggest that the effects of the explosion at Chernobyl have been underestimated. Experts last month published a series of studies indicating that, contrary to previous findings, populations of animals decreased in the exclusion zone surrounding the site of the former nuclear power plant, and that the effects of radioactive contamination after the outbreak had been "overwhelming."

More and more pigs with high levels of cesium are found at the scene. This information was disclosed months after doctors detected increased rates of cancer in Ukraine and Belarus, mutations and diseases of the blood, which they believe are related to Chernobyl.

Meanwhile, an American investigation published in April found an increase in birth defects, apparently due to sustained exposure to low level doses of radiation.

For activists against nuclear power, these studies demonstrate that the inhabitants of the affected area will suffer devastating consequences for decades, perhaps centuries.

"This is a problem that will not go away in few years. It will be there for centuries," said Rianne TeuleI, from the environmental organization, Greenpeace.

"The new research confirms that the problems are larger than what the World Health Organization (WHO) said in 2006 and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and will remain, and they will keep on existing and appearing in other studies. It is not anything that is going to go away soon," he added.

The disaster occurred in April 1986 after one of the blocks of the nuclear power plant exploded in what is now Ukraine.

It is estimated that the total radioactivity from Chernobyl was 200 times greater than the combined releases of nuclear bombs dropped by the United States in 1945 against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The explosion and fire generated a huge radioactive cloud that spread across Europe, forcing the evacuation of 350,000 people in areas near the plant.

Years later, the United Nations Organization (UNO), WHO, the IAEA and other agencies joined the governments of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine to create the so-called Chernobyl Forum, to conduct a major study on the effects the disaster and publish its findings in 2006.

The investigation concluded that there were only 56 direct deaths (47 responders and nine children with thyroid cancer), and about 4,000 estimated indirect deaths.

However, the report was criticized by other groups, who claim it vastly underestimated the number of deaths and potential deaths due to the accident.

Some questioned the position of the IAEA, which for decades has supported the use of nuclear energy for civilian purposes. Alternative studies contradict some of the Chernobyl Forum findings and warned that the health effects would be far more devastating.

The TORCH report, published in 2006 by British scientists Ian Fairlie and David Sumner, mentioned the uncertainty that exists about the health effects of exposure to low doses of radiation or to internal radiation entering the body by ingestion of contaminated food.

They also pointed to an underestimation by at least 30 percent of the amount of radioactive particles that the explosion released into the environment. Official figures from the countries concerned also contradict the findings of the Chernobyl Forum.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer, affiliated with the UN, concluded that the most likely number of disaster-related deaths was 16,000, while the Russian Academy of Sciences estimated that, to date, there have been 140,000 deaths in Ukraine and Belarus, and 60,000 in Russia. The Ukrainian National Radiation Commission puts the figure at 500,000.

Doctors informed Ukrainian and Belarusian media in Ukraine earlier this year that there was an increase in cases of cancer, infant mortality and other health problems, and are convinced that they are most certainly the effects of the disaster.

"The figures from the UN and the IAEA do not match with the other agencies of the world body forecast in terms of cancer deaths," said Oksana Kostikov, the Children's Cancer Hospital in Minsk.

In contrast, the 16,000 deaths predicted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer is a "more accurate assessment of what we see every day," she added.

In April, American doctor Wladimir Wertelecki published the results of an extensive research on birth defects in children of Ukraine, which revealed higher levels of abnormalities in certain areas of the country. According to the expert, this phenomenon might be related to sustained exposure to low doses of radiation. Wertelecki argued that the Chernobyl Forum findings should be reviewed to know the real effects of this atomic accident.

"The official position is that Chernobyl and birth defects are not related. That position should seriously be reviewed," he said.

Cafe Scientifique: Nuclear Cover-ups

2000-01-01T17:06:00.002Z

[Screening History / documentary list]

Monday - 6th December 7:30 pm
Very important one off special by Cafe Scientifique
at the University of Exeter

Nuclear Power - what's the problem?
.
Nuclear Cover Ups

Low Level Radiation Campaign

Chris Busby 2005 [50 mins]

Free screening followed by discussion

Monday - 6th December 7:30 pm
University of Exeter, Byrne House,

German's Road, Exeter, EX4 4PJ
"The attainment of knowledge does not come from the refusal to reflect" (source unknown)

Therefore due respect must be paid to Cafe Scientifique for organising the screening of this documentary.

"Nuclear Cover Ups" presents a challenging view of the Cafe Scientifique talk given in July by Dr Jim Smith, reader in environmental physics at Portsmouth University. Dr Smith's advice was that nuclear power is safer than cigarette smoking and that alternatives were not plausible.

This documentary focuses on the integrity of institutions who's interest is in promoting nuclear power including the IAEA. There will be a brief introduction highlighting other key areas of debate over nuclear power indicating information in the public domain contradicting the assertions of the nuclear industry & its supporters.

For background info on the Chernobyl debate, the viability of nuclear power and the alternatives please click

Nuclear Power - what's the problem? for a brief compendium which includes a CV for Dr Chris Busby.

Unreported World

Home

Phoenix 10th September

Phoenix 7th Sept

Half Moon. 11th Sept

Half Moon. 4th Sept

Exeter Phoenix

Dr Shlomo Sand

5th Dec 6:30pm Free film

Ritzy Page

Bread & Roses

Screening History 2

SUNDAY 18th April 2:30 pm ....

SUNDAY 11th April 2:30 pm ....FREE SCREENING ... Ground Floor StudioMoney as Debt

Screening Future

Screening history

SUNDAY 11th April 2:30 pm ....FREE SCREENING ... Ground Floor StudioMoney as Debt

Israel Out Of Gaza Now: Lift The Blockade

TV TV TV

Chernobyl 'still causing cancer in British children'

Chernobyl: The Great Cover-Up, Le Monde

"Little" NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS:

Yuri Bandazhevsky

Lancet reports Chernobyl dissent

Nuclear Power - What's the Problem?

Debate over health effects of Chernobyl re-ignited

The Independent & The Independent on Sunday

The Independent & The Independent on Sunday

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor Published: 23 April 2006

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor Published: 23 April 2006

CancerMore than a third of Britain is still contaminated by radioactivity from the Chernobyl disaster two decades ago, and children are getting cancer as a result, an Independent on Sunday investigation has established. ... [Read more]Chernobyl: The Great Cover-Up

CancerMore than a third of Britain is still contaminated by radioactivity from the Chernobyl disaster two decades ago, and children are getting cancer as a result, an Independent on Sunday investigation has established. ... [Read more]

Cancer

Cancer

More than a third of Britain is still contaminated by radioactivity from the Chernobyl disaster two decades ago, and children are getting cancer as a result, an Independent on Sunday investigation has

More than a third of Britain is still contaminated by radioactivity from the Chernobyl disaster two decades ago, and children are getting cancer as a result, an Independent on Sunday investigation has

established. ...

established. ...

Chernobyl -poisoned centuries

Cafe Scientifique: Nuclear Cover-ups

SUNDAY 11th April 2:30 pm ....
FREE SCREENING ...
Ground Floor Studio
Money as Debt

SUNDAY 11th April 2:30 pm ....
FREE SCREENING ...
Ground Floor Studio
Money as Debt

Cancer

More than a third of Britain is still contaminated by radioactivity from the Chernobyl disaster two decades ago, and children are getting cancer as a result, an Independent on Sunday investigation has
established. ...
[Read more]

Chernobyl: The Great Cover-Up

Cancer

More than a third of Britain is still contaminated by radioactivity from the Chernobyl disaster two decades ago, and children are getting cancer as a result, an Independent on Sunday investigation has
established. ...
[Read more]