THE GHOST IN THE FISHES

Why would strontium be found in 4 fish, and not found in 8 other fish? Why would a reputable lab find 7 times less (or more) strontium, than another reputable lab? Is there a conspiracy, with Doctor Strangelove secretly irradiating some fish in his underground lair, and then releasing them in the Hudson at Troy, to mislead us all, for political purposes? Are the strontium tests themselves unreliable as performed, and should we not take their results as "scientific proof" of anything?

To educate myself, I googled "Strontium test protocols" , and waded in, reading half a dozen DOE documents so dense, that 3 or 4 cups of coffee are definitely recommended for anybody else so inclined.One document is Sr-03-RC, Vol.1, HASL-300, 28th edition "Strontium 90 in Environmental Matrices".

This is DOE's own short description:
Strontium is separated from calcium, other fission products, and other natural radioactive elements.Fuming HNO3 (fuming nitric acid >86% pure) separations are used to remove the calcium and most of the other interfering ions.Radium, lead and barium are removed with BACRO4, (barium chromate).Traces of other fission products are scavenged with iron hydroxide adsorbent. The sample is isolated and Yttrium ingrowth is allowed to occur, 97% ingrowth taking place in 14 days. After ingrowth Yttrium/Strontium equilibrium has been attained, the yttrium 90 is precipitated as a hydroxide and then converted to an oxylate for counting on a low background gas proportional beta counter. Chemical yield is determined with a strontium 85 tracer by counting in a gamma well detector.

Got all that?

This being a Department of Energy test procedure, it is geared to gross amounts of strontium, in such places as the Hanford atom bomb plant in Washington. The procedure for testing soil states: "Weigh out enough soil to generate an activity at least 10 times background (ideally 100 times) into an appropriate container....."

In order to get a good test run, the technician is being advised to use enough sample, to have 100 times the background radiation, just to begin. No Hudson river fish ever had anywhere near this level, in fact by this warning alone, the test ought not to have been run. (background is the level a geiger counter reads, when it is nowhere near any radiation). As a matter of fact, by geiger counter alone, the Hudson fish had NO DETECTABLE ACTIVITY. (When frisked, the fish were clean).

So was there ever strontium in any fish to begin with?
Maybe not.

The ground beneath Indian Point is not soil, not aggregate gravel, It is solid ancient rock, straight down to China, rock with no interstices, except from fracture cracks induced by the blasting to build Indian Point. The fracture cracks, not being geological in origin, do not go anywhere, but exist in a small circle around each blast location, So, rather than some "pool" existing, or some "groundwater" (as you might find in some midwestern area, like the oglala aquifer) there actually is no pool, and there is no groundwater (no aquifer-- All drinking water in the area is piped in from upstate reservoirs.)
What does sit beneath Indian Point is a solid rock mass, with microscopic fracture cracks of very short length, centered on the Indian Point excavation profile. Water from plant activities over the last 50 years has entered the fracture cracks, and now exists within tiny feathered spaces inside solid rock, kind of the way your 3 fingers exist in the holes in a bowling ball, but just imagine the solid part of the bowling ball being 1000 feet across, and 1000 feet deep, and imagine the finger holes shrunk down to a millionth of an inch in diameter. The trapped water is not going anywhere, is not free, and is not connected (as far as anyone knows) with any geological flow channel able to move it anywhere.THAT'S why it was able to collect, and be found. It's in a jar.
Looking globally at the 3 dimensional outline of the "jar" (the part of the bowling ball that's drilled out) you get the misnomered "plume" of some 350 feet, a non-plume because it is just a virtual object, an autocad outline of those drill samples where microscopic water is trapped within rock. Actually, the whole thing, plume, and non-plume are all solid rock.
"Cleaning the Rocks"
Right now Entergy, using the virtual "plume" as a drilling guide, is emptying the "plume" with suction shafts, and reverse pumping these shafts, to draw whatever is in the feathered cracks BACK UP to a treatment station, and to draw whatever is seeping down toward the feathered cracks OUT through the suction shafts. Meanwhile, at the top, in the old Con Edison fuel pool where the original leak happened in 1996, Entergy has set up a cleaning station to remove all radioactive stuff from the water by chemical absorption means, thus removing any potential future leaks, and when they are done, the entire fuel pool will be dried, hermetically sealed, emptied, epoxied, fitted with permanent sensors to note any recurrances, and retired, empty of any fuel, with the fuel going to dry casks, or Yucca mountain. Finito, strontium leak.
If and/or when Entergy leaves, this cleaning operation will cease. It is not mandated by law, and Entergy is doing it to be a good enough neighbor to be able to run their revenue making units a few more years for us....NRC has not ruled on these leak issues elsewhere, and is actually looking to Entergy to invent the new technological framework right here, in their proactive and environmentally helpful suction & cleanout routine. If NRC likes it, they may make all the other nuke plants do it too. If Entergy is politically prevented from finishing it, no nuke plant anywhere will be forced to do it, and NRC will probably drop it, and not return to it. So everybody better let their single environmental hero in this--Entergy-- do its job, or misguided activism will have had the effect of crapping up the environment permanently, around EVERY nuclear plant. So, that kinda covers the "strontium plume" issue.There actually IS no water plume. It's solid rock, with water trapped inside in micro-cracks.

Now on to the issue of maybe-there-is and maybe-there-isn't strontium in Hudson river fish. The world was blanketed in strontium from 1945 through 1995, when all the nuclear powers tested atom bombs above ground.Future archeologists will date the earth by its pre-strontium, and post strontium layers, just like the pre and post Santorini layers, or the 65 million year ago asteroid hit. It is everywhere, including in Andrew Spano's molars. If Mr. Spano was chopped up and ground to a mush, centrifuged to a paste, cleansed with 8 successive baths of nitric acid, re-centrifuged to a crystalline residue, which was then mixed with ion-free distilled water, boiled for 8 hours, put through a barium chromate reduction, re-centrifuged, dried, and then put through a set of iron hydroxide scavenging runs, and cooked onto the surface of a special stainless steel disk, which was then heat-dried for 2 days, before being isolated in a sealed flask for a month, and then unsealed, and run through a geiger counter looking for a tell tale 20,000 decays per minute beta particle profile, specific to Yttrium, and those Yttrium radiations extrapolated backwards by a very nebulous calculus computation , inferring the PREVIOUS presence of Strontium, from the current presence of its daughter product Yttrium 90, then, depending on whether the lab tech had cleansed and calibrated every solution correctly, run every reaction exactly the right time, not contaminated any step of the 238 steps, and had then computed the back-track correctly, we would get EITHER just background levels OR a level just a wee bit above background. Taking into account the fact that bone & tooth COLLECT strontium, concentrating it by about 5.7 times over background, it means that any ground-up-tooth reading near or just above background actually implies an environmental level BELOW background (by a factor of 5.7), Knowing that any detection of Strontium is by inference, by circumstantial evidence only, and that the minimum detectable level is not friendly to the tester, we now have an explanation of why different labs get different readings. Without the advised "100 times background" sample size, mentioned above, the test is so nebulous, so easy to do "wrong", and so tied to background, that it can't be believed, unless you set up a program of constant fish collection, and constant testing, to generate a body of samples that would screen out individually unsatisfactory test runs..... AND you would need to compare this to a CONTROL COHORT , of "definitely-non-strontium" fish, and run each one of those tests at the same time as each of the "strontium-fish" tests, doing it under the typical double blind protocol, in order to determine where MDL lies (Minimum Detectable Level). Our challenge as a scientific community is to find a control cohort anywhere on the planet. There just might not BE one....Maybe cave fish from deep underground somewhere (provided no strontium rain ever penetrated their cave). The test protocols are tough, making up about a 160 page document altogether.. One surprising and dismaying thing I found was the test procedure for finding strontium in Bikini Atoll fish, was double the length of the test used for finding strontium in freshwater fish. the "Marine Protocol" is much longer and more rigorous, because the dissolved residual actinides in the high mineral content of seawater causes false positives, and must be religiously screened out, by an additional 175 steps not done in the non-marine protocol. Once a person has read up on the marine protocol the fact will hit you, that THE HUDSON RIVER IS BRACKISH! Did the test lab use the Marine Protocol, or the freshwater protocol? Since the Hudson salt line moves up and down river with the tides and the rains, unless a separate "Semi-Marine-Protocol" were devised (AND CORRECTLY APPLIED), a large error trap, one might even say a GAPING ERROR TRAP yawns beneath a single test run, on a much-too-small sample of 12 Hudson fish, done only once and with no control cohort , and a deceptive well-nigh impossible to determine MDL level, depending on just how salty each fish was.

Conclusion? Almost all of these tests so far have been reading technician errors, and mistaken MDL computations, and reporting them out as the possible existence of non-existent strontium. THAT'S why the levels vary, and THAT'S why its supposedly in some fish but not in others. We are reading the technician's inability to validly run the test, on such tiny non-radioactive samples.
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Greenpeace.....WHERE ARE YOU?

Much was made of NYC banning transfats in restaurants, a groundbreaking intrusion of dietism into the free enterprise world. The banning of smoking in public went over rather easily a decade ago, its negative impact more or less proven by assent, (and a successful near-billion dollar class action suit). We await the next lifestyle pogrom, and earnestly hope it bans only those activities we ourselves avoid. Seeing as all the broken limbs, fostbitten extremities, and a gaggle of participant deaths recently, have set the stage for "A Perfect Banning", it remains only for the Pelosista hordes to caucus, and rid America of the scourge of mountain climbing. Mountain climbing, mountain biking, mountain skiing, mountain leveling, and mountain-purchasing ought to be thrown in the pot, too. Thus can we save the mountains. See how it works? We ban, we save. It's easy. Mindless, even. The banning of alcohol would be a good second-next, if it wasn't for the fact that it was tried, and made things worse. What a fine world it could be without all the nasty drunks beating spouses, and killing innocents on the roads. I guess we're kinda stuck with the drunks, the DWI events, the endless rehab costs, and even the liver surgery bills, which come into play only at the endstage.

Funny thing about banning. The Islamics banned alcohol 1000 years ago, and made it stick. (except for during Ramadan, and only after sundown). So you never get 100% from a good banning, I suppose. You see, its the escape clause that makes it workable, and aiming for 1000% would have ruined everything. Deuced clever, those Muslim rulemakers, truly cognizant of human limitations! When 'Greenpeace Incorporated' sends its attack boats up the Hudson to ban our local power plant, I'm hoping they recall the "Ramadan Exclusion", and let us use nuclear power for at least the sweltering July-August dog days, and maybe for the December blow-up-yard-decoration fest, a simple-minded but happy aberration, somewhat beloved of non-Marxists, and now attracting world interest in its various guises as Chanukka, Kwanzaa, and even the agnostic "Festivus".

Yes, a few simple exclusions, like for instance, maybe allowing Hudson Valley Hospital Emergency Room to continue to use nuclear power, (seeing as Entergy donated the place to us 2 years ago) might make the "No Nukes" pill go down a little easier! I hope the "Masters of Banning" remember to keep Valhalla prison on good steady nuke power, seeing as a blackout there might release a horde of banned individuals back out among us, unwanted. We definitely would not want THAT!

With all the right exclusions in place (let's say--- RFK jr's manse at Howland's Lake, Andy Spano's digs, and sloop Clearwater's dock burglar alarm), the stage could be set for Westchesterites to "bite the bullet" and go non-nuclear at last!

I can't wait!

Greenpeace..... WHERE ARE YOU?

THE P-STINGER REBUTTALS Ch.1, No.1

Mr. "P-stinger" has made much of his supposed "code of conduct", namely that commentors must identify themselves before he will air the comment. Aside from the fact that he has not identified himself .........except as a nom-de-plume alias, those few who have actually read his swarm of ever-changing blogs have seen that NO comments ever appear. Either nobody is reading, or P-stinger just ain't ever in the mood to discuss anything. Obviously, he has an idee fixe', and that is all he will publish.


The thoughts of local people are of no interest to him. He does , however, dissect, rearrange, and reuse whatever copy is sent to him, disrespectfully slicing, dicing, and cherry picking, to carefully appropriate only that part that will maintain his negative outlook, at all cost, (and destroying whatever truth generous stakeholders have sent him, intentionally obscuring their realities for his idee fixe'.). An uninvolved observer might call him a rabid propaganda hack. Those closer to the issue can see his epic struggles to evade the obvious, and sympathize with his strange discomfiture a bit.

This guy is in over his head.

P-stinger cites worker injury claims from an Ohio factory, as if they are relevant to Indian Point, and its place in the local community. Nothing could be further from the truth. Far from being some exploitive mine cartel, abusing West Virginia, or South Ohio Appalachian unfortunates , Entergy has come into the area to clean up whatever shoddy conditions it might find, and its relation to the local environment, and the local communities is an excellent, open, helpful stance, one which the few local "activists" like to suspect as not truly felt, but they are wrong.

Now on to a comment on "P-stinger's" Portsmouth Diffusion Plant article.

Let's talk about materials handling, versus a safe deposit box in a bank. If I have a business pouring concrete, there's a very good chance my entire business, and everyone in it, is going to end up with concrete dust on them.The job is to move the concrete around, to handle it, to process it, to change it from a dusty form into a wet form, and then to pour it. It is absolutely hands-on , in the most intimate sense.(when I built a wall on my property ten years ago, the concrete got in my clothing, under my nails, and even deep into my ears-- the texture of the skin on my hands was changed, roughened..it took months to get back to normal). On South Street in Peekskill, just outside the local concrete factory, the wheel tracks from the cement trucks are permanently etched into the blacktop, in grey. I would not buy, or live in, a house that was next to a cement company.

My safe deposit box, in a local bank, is entirely different from this. From outside my safe deposit box, there's no way to know that my house deed, and my securities ownership certificates are in the box. No dust emerges from the box, and I only visit it perhaps twice a year, preferring to allow its silent, hidden financial power to uphold my existence as a homeowner and citizen, from deep inside a secure, clean fortress, from which no threat emerges, no dirt, no dust, no wheel tracks etched in the road. Carefully reading my financial documents once a year does not roughen my hands, or make me cough with silicosis.

The process of mining and transforming any mineral is a dirty hands-on job, and America's miners suffer great sacrifices to bring us our coal, our gold, our copper.(two miners were killed in West Virginia just days ago). In China, 5000 mine workers are killed each year, in China's pursuit of modernity via coal power.When America had it all on the line, not knowing whether the Axis powers would prevail and conquer the USA, America's mining and materials handling capabilities were called on to save our country.The need was so great, that current notions of environmental preservation, or worker safety were totally ignored. The feeling was, that if 5000 young marines could sacrifice their lives on Iwo Jima, the injuries of a few miners or gaseous diffusion plant workers was a much more limited sacrifice. In fact it WAS a much more limited sacrifice. But that was then, that was mining, and that was materials handling. The material was uranium ore, fabricated into nuclear fuel at Portsmouth, Hanford, Savannah River, Paducah, Mound, and other sites.

Now on to the safe deposit box.

Not diminishing any rightful claim that workers may have been injured under cold war conditions at some nuclear materials handling plant, the conditions at a modern generation station are totally different, more akin to my safe deposit box. Unlike at Portsmouth uranium factory, inside any generating station, the high energy materials are never handled. As a matter of fact they are religiously isolated by both physical, and procedural means. Nobody gets sick. The minerals are never even touched. They are locked in a vessel, inside a protective shield, inside a protective dome, which is sealed to the outside, and just like my house deed and my financial documents, they grant power cleanly and silently simply by being in there. If you claim an unpaid environmental justice debt attaches to that clean, hidden power, then I challenge you to differentiate that debt from the environmental debt owed to all the miners, oil drillers, concrete handlers, with their black lung, their silicosis, their frequent deaths and sicknesses, and even the workmen who built your house 100 years ago, sick from handling creosote, asphalt, lead paint, openly used asbestos, lead plumbing pipes and their carelessly inhaled lead solder fumes, sulphuric acid solder flux, etc., etc.

Indian Point is a huge safe deposit box, containing New York State's power to prosper. You don't have to visit that power in order to use it. Clever, caring people, your own neighbors, manage your wealth for you without ever needing to bother you. Your fingernails gather no concrete, no lead, no solder flux. The safe deposit box stays locked. Only wealth comes out of it, on half a dozen high tension lines, powering every hospital, every political party office, every antinuclear activist's PC , and every single secure home in our flourishing Hudson Valley region.

There is no need to put the bank out of operation, or shred your own house deed, to make a point about mistreated materials workers 50 years ago. We are all innocent of that crime. Accept your own wellbeing, do not feel guilt over your own survival, those who suffered to bring it to you would have suffered, even if you threw off your clothes like Francis of Assisi, and sat naked in the street to wear their hurt, as if it were yours.

Alert!... Alert!... Fish are in the River !

Magnet on the Hudson

Sited as it is 100 yards south of the Buchanan town sewage outlet, half a mile south of the Annsville sewage treatment plant, and two miles south of Anthony's nose, site of a partially exposed uraninite vein, & 1950's-era uranium mine tailings, directly across the river from the coal burning Lovett plant (coal contains 1% uranium, 3% thorium) Indian Point has sat for all its history in a raging stream of pollution not of its own making.

It came to the river in an era when Anaconda was turning the river green with copper sulfate, and the upstream dye factories turned it any color that commerce demanded, some weeks orange, others purple, and in the face of common industrial culture at the time, Indian Point funded Riverkeeper with its founding $12 million grant, and independently began the fish farm that repopulated the Hudson bass to its current bumper crop levels.

Strontium from U.S. Navy experimental reactors near Troy, fallout from Chernobyl, a downed Russian satellite, and above ground bomb tests had historically salted Hudson fish with a miniscule strontium dose common in the northern hemisphere, not unique to the Hudson, and certainly not stemming from Indian Point. General Electric's PCB's had always made Hudson fish unpalatable, and still lie there in wait today on the Hudson's floor for remediation. The PCB's resulted in a legal prohibition on eating Hudson fish in the 1970's, even the new hatchlings spawned for us by the Indian Point fish farm in the 1980's & 1990's. Entergy's new re-test finds the same old strontium levels 30 miles upstream, in a place any effluent from Peekskill would never reach, more or less confirming that the Hudson is still dirty, but proving nothing at all about Indian Point, except that Indian Point independently tests, and publicizes its results.

However, after being stripped of everything, in readiness for its new role as Ginsburg Development's gated 300-mile-long Luxury Condo Corridor, The Hudson River no longer has any viable whipping boy, target, or supposed evildoer on its shores to act as modern-day lightning rod for an entire 200 years of Hudson use & misuse, (and a geriatric generation of aging activists). None, that is, except Indian Point, probably the cleanest installation ever to be built along the old industrial corridor. Far from being the target of foreign terrorists, Indian Point now serves as media magnet for dozens of local wannabe issue makers (and issue mongers), and all the while keeps pumping nearly a billion dollars a year into local coffers, and billions of kilowatt hours of life, safety, enjoyment and security into all of its neighboring (and very lucky) communities.

Fish will come, and fish will go. The African American anglers at China Bay will keep on eating the Indian-Point-hatched river bass descendants, and media opponents will keep sensationalizing every last crumb of info about routine tests. Meanwhile life goes on, unchanged.