June 18, 2024 - On June 4th, the Tokyo Electric Power Company completed its sixth round of illegal Ocean dumping of radioactively contaminated wastewater, a controversial activity that it started on August 24, 2023. In TEPCO's latest round of sea abuse, the Japanese utility company released 7,800 tons of water containing strontium-90, cobalt-60, and other substances that the company won't spend money to remove including tritium, which is bioaccumulative and will be lapping up on America's shorelines for decades-- and traveling as tritiated mist for many miles inland. When TEPCO began its public relations push to force nuclear waste into other nations' aquatic food supplies and citizens' bodies in August 2023, no Western NGO was really concerned--Greenpeace, ocean conservancies, and even Greta the climate activist were all quiet; their websites had no dedicated awareness to this monstrous deception by TEPCO to add more poisons to the Pacific after the company's and Japan's massive 2011 failures. By the looks of how America's Congress is treating the diseased and dying downwinders, and the memory of radiation victims who sacrificed for American liberties, nuclear recklessness in America or its nuclear colonies is neither a crime nor punishable.

June 17, 2024 - New Mexicans Respond to Expiration of Radiation Act

"Our government's primary role. Is to take care of us. And what's happened for us here is that they irreparably harmed us and walked away. You and I could not go about our lives recklessly harming people, and then we're, when we're held to account, simply say it's gonna cost too much."

..the Discretionary Function Exception.

June 14, 2024 - Letter: We Won’t Forgive Utah’s Congressional Delegation for its Failure to Expand RECA - It is especially unsettling that they not only didn’t support the expansion, but some have worked against it.

June 11, 2024 - The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act has expired after Speaker Johnson never scheduled a vote for its expansion--and made a U-turn after scheduling a floor vote on a measure that would only extend the 1990 law.

Mansion in the Storm - op-ed

On June 11, 2024, Congress allowed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) to expire. Since 1990, the RECA law has provided a modicum of financial help to a small segment of the worst-affected radiation victims harmed by our nation's nuclear weapons tinkering in the middle of the last century. The recipients of the former RECA law include 'downwinders,' nuclear test site workers and uranium workers--as of today, these Americans who sacrificed for their nation no longer have access to remedies for their radiation-linked diseases from Congress, which failed to extend and expand its 33 year pay-out program for Cold War victims.

Radiation-harmed populations of our nuclear past are now legally forgotten--how long before media and political attention will diminish too, as happened again and again during the long saga of America's forgotten radiation victims? In our previous national 'reflections' of our nuclear past, which were short-lived episodes of American moral clarity, like the present moment, our government initiated various kinds of 'sleuthing' that lacked the hallmarks of traditional riddle-solving. The government repeatedly attempted to shed light on the nuclear past and yet we curiously still have no adequate data on our exposures and no real studies to review our nuclear past. By all cultural appearances, including studies, books, and movies on the topic, the mysteries of America's atomic age have been prematurely ‘solved’ for Americans, but a different reading of the atomic era shows that we aren’t living in the domain of a best-selling narrative.

Imagine, for a moment, if Agatha Christie allowed one of her suspects to conclude the mystery novel for her with a semi-logical assertion as a substitute to the ‘whodonnit.’ Being that semi-logical asserting detective in that alternative Agatha Christie novel ending meant that the challenge was very different. It wasn’t any longer about revelation and arriving at the right answer. It wasn’t about dispelling agonized confusion or pinning blame on the right suspect. It wasn’t about delivering a sense of justice and closure with notes of brilliance and warmth.

America isn't unnerved by the thud of a closing, incomplete tragic nuclear national chapter any more than we are bothered that we are driven by a greater interest that we believe what we want as a nation -- our lesser interest is that our enigmas have lingered.

By not squaring with the realities of our cultural tinkering in atomic alchemy, we remain cognitively stuck in the mansion in the storm. Americans will forever be wondering about the mystery of what we were really exposed to, what the government really knew, and what diseases are lurking in our future, if they hadn’t already sprouted. RECA was a distraction to these legitimate concerns. Neither that law's sunsetting nor the analogy of an Agatha Christie novel can rattle us enough to care that we have become abandoned participants in our own national mysteries.

Postscript: The best that Congressional leaders can do is say, in coded, mostly incoherent tones "We have responsibility, Terry."

On July 16, 1945, the U.S. Army secretly conducted the first atomic explosion in the New Mexico desert at Alamogordo named 'Trinity.' Downwinders of the Trinity test are still fighting for justice for the harms they and their families endured. Although governing organizations barely advocate for human victims of fallout, wherever they may be, it is worth pointing out that perversions of truth in the past, the spun and fragmented victims compensation issues, and apologies for what happened at places like Alamogordo are communicated concepts being brought into the light of public sunshine, if only in artful forms.

PRIMER: Sporadically conducted in Nevada, as in China, Russia, France, and North Korea, SUBCRITICAL NUCLEAR TESTS are [t]he Nuclear Tests in Verbal Camouflage [2012]. '[T]he NNSA has been shifting away from standards of transparency put in place in 1997 regarding notifications and the timing of tests.'(more). Needless to add, no transparency can be expected from the successor to the U.S. A.E.C. President Biden's belated 209-day announcement for a 2021 subcritical nuclear test set a new record for SNEs non-transparency.

May 19, 2024 - North Korea to boost nuclear deterrence after US ‘subcritical’ test: Report / "...it is the world's biggest nuclear weapons state and only nuclear weapon user which conducted nuclear tests more than any other countries in the world." source

May 17, 2024 - Biden Administration Conducts Nuclear Test, Again - U.S. Shames Itself - Interestingly, on May 14th, a self-shaming nuclear-test-friendly Biden administration whose leader visited the Hiroshima Peace Park, talked with victims of the atom bomb dropped by the U.S. and even signed the guest book in Hiroshima's atomic victims' museum has conducted a nuclear test. Subcritical nuclear tests were floated as an idea in 1995 by the Department of Energy cleverly to continue nuclear tests, which supposedly were canceled by a 1992 moratorium--but using Verbal Camouflage the U.S. can say these subcritical tests are not nuclear tests. They are nuclear tests; they release nuclear energy no differently than a 'normal' nuclear test. Therefore, the U.S. has broken its moratorium, for the 34th time. Subcritical tests are unnecessarily provocative, a tool only helpful to chaos-curious policymakers.

May 16, 2024 - the NNSA press release on first test in Nimble series held 2 days earlier.