VoteKansas.org

MAPUTO, Mozambique (AP) -- Police say they have stormed a camp of about 300 armed opposition supporters in northern Mozambique, arresting 20 and wounding two....

STANLEY, Falkland Islands (AP) -- Falkland Islanders are still bristling over the invasion by Argentina 30 years ago, but they're not complaining about its aftermath....

BEIJING (AP) -- China's authoritarian government is restricting the police's power to secretly detain people, at least on paper, announcing stricter revisions to a key criminal law Thursday after a wave of public complaints....

BEIJING (AP) -- China's authoritarian government is restricting the police's power to secretly detain people, at least on paper, announcing stricter revisions to a key criminal law Thursday after a wave of public complaints....

ISLAMABAD (AP) -- Pakistan is advertising for companies to install an Internet filtering system that could block up to 50 million Web addresses, alarming free speech activists who fear current censorship could become much more widespread....

SYDNEY (AP) -- An Australian investment banker pleaded guilty Thursday to chaining a fake bomb to a young woman's neck in a bizarre extortion attempt last year....

SYDNEY (AP) -- An Australian investment banker pleaded guilty Thursday to chaining a fake bomb to a young woman's neck in a bizarre extortion attempt last year....

SYDNEY (AP) -- An Australian investment banker pleaded guilty Thursday to chaining a fake bomb to a young woman's neck in a bizarre extortion attempt last year....

"Completely and Utterly Fail in an Earthquake"

by Greg Palast
for FreePress.org

I've seen a lot of sick stuff in my career, but this was sick on a new level.

Here was the handwritten log kept by a senior engineer at the nuclear power plant:

Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. . . . In fact, the plant was riddled with problems that, no way on earth, could stand an earth- quake. The team of engineers sent in to inspect found that most of these components could "completely and utterly fail" during an earthquake.

"Utterly fail during an earthquake." And here in Japan was the quake and here is the utter failure.

The warning was in what the investigations team called The Notebook, which I'm not supposed to have.  Good thing I've kept a copy anyway, because the file cabinets went down with my office building ....

WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER 1, FIFTY-SECOND FLOOR
NEW YORK, 1986

[This is an excerpt in FreePress.org from Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Fraudsters, to be released this Monday.  Click here to get the videos and the book.]

Two senior nuclear plant engineers were spilling out their souls and files on our huge conference table, blowing away my government investigations team with the inside stuff about the construction of the Shoreham, New York, power station.

The meeting was secret. Very secret. Their courage could destroy their careers: No engineering firm wants to hire a snitch, even one who has saved thousands of lives. They could lose their jobs; they could lose everything. They did. That’s what happens. Have a nice day.

On March 12 this year, as I watched Fukushima melt, I knew:  the "SQ" had been faked.  Anderson Cooper said it would all be OK.  He'd flown to Japan, to suck up the radiation and official company bullshit.  The horror show was not the fault of Tokyo Electric, he said, because the plant was built to withstand only an 8.0 earthquake on the Richter scale, and this was 9.0.  Anderson must have been in the gym when they handed out the facts.  The 9.0 shake was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 90 miles away.  It was barely a tenth of that power at Fukushima.

I was ready to vomit.  Because I knew who had designed the plant, who had built it and whom Tokyo Electric Power was having rebuild it:  Shaw Construction.  The latest alias of Stone & Webster, the designated builder for every one of the four new nuclear plants that the Obama Administration has approved for billions in federal studies.

But I had The Notebook, the diaries of the earthquake inspector for the company.  I'd squirreled it out sometime before the Trade Center went down.  I shouldn't have done that.  Too bad.

All field engineers keep a diary. Gordon Dick, a supervisor, wasn’t sup- posed to show his to us. I asked him to show it to us and, reluctantly, he directed me to these notes about the “SQ” tests.

SQ is nuclear-speak for “Seismic Qualification.” A seismically qualified nuclear plant won’t melt down if you shake it. A “seismic event” can be an earthquake or a Christmas present from Al Qaeda. You can’t run a nuclear reactor in the USA or Europe or Japan without certified SQ.

This much is clear from his notebook: This nuclear plant will melt down in an earthquake. The plant dismally failed to meet the Seismic I (shaking) standards required by U.S. and international rules.

Here’s what we learned: Dick’s subordinate at the nuclear plant, Robert Wiesel, conducted the standard seismic review. Wiesel flunked his company. No good. Dick then ordered Wiesel to change his report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, change it from failed to passed. Dick didn’t want to make Wiesel do it, but Dick was under the gun himself, acting on direct command from corporate chiefs. From The Notebook:

Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. [He said,] “I believe these are bad results and I believe it’s reportable,” and then he took the volume of federal regulations from the shelf and went to section 50.55(e), which describes reportable deficiencies at a nuclear plant and [they] read the section together, with Wiesel pointing to the appropriate paragraphs that federal law clearly required [them and the company] to report the Category II, Seismic I deficiencies.

Wiesel then expressed his concern that he was afraid that if he [Wiesel] reported the deficiencies, he would be fired, but that if he didn’t report the deficiencies, he would be breaking a federal law. . . .

The law is clear. It is a crime not to report a safety failure. I could imagine Wiesel standing there with that big, thick rule book in his hands, The Law. It must have been heavy. So was his paycheck. He weighed the choices: Break the law, possibly a jail-time crime, or keep his job.

What did Wiesel do? What would you do?

Why the hell would his company make this man walk the line? Why did they put the gun to his head, to make him conceal mortal danger? It was the money. It’s always the money. Fixing the seismic problem would have cost the plant’s owner half a billion dollars easy. A guy from corporate told Dick, “Bob is a good man. He’ll do what’s right. Don’t worry about Bob.”

That is, they thought Bob would save his job and career rather than rat out the company to the feds.

But I think we should all worry about Bob. The company he worked for, Stone & Webster Engineering, built or designed about a third of the nuclear plants in the United States.

From the fifty-second floor we could look at the Statue of Liberty. She didn’t look back.

***

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores.

Get it now!

Download Chapter 1 of the book:

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

GregPalast.com

********

5 years ago, we published out first report on the Vultures with BBC TV and Democracy Now! - in the UK it set London MP's to action - the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown called them "morally outrageous” and pledged to make them illegal in that country.

In the US it was two Congressman, Donald Payne and John Conyers that stormed the White House with our report and told the President that he must act.

Congressmen Donald Payne, tirelessly fought against Vulture Funds in this country, calling hearings, pushing the Washington beltway to take notice of this practice. He died this week, he will be missed. State Senator Richard Codey said it best "He was bigger than life but never conducted himself that way, If you were violating somebody’s rights, you better get out of the way.”

ShareThis

BEIJING (AP) -- China's authoritarian government is restricting the police's power to secretly detain people, at least on paper, announcing stricter revisions to a key criminal law Thursday after a wave of public complaints....

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) -- Two Catholics have been convicted of spreading anti-government propaganda and sentenced to prison in Vietnam, where local church officials and the ruling Communist Party have had an uneasy relationship for years....

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) -- Two Catholics have been convicted of spreading anti-government propaganda and sentenced to prison in Vietnam, where local church officials and the ruling Communist Party have had an uneasy relationship for years....

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) -- Two Catholics have been convicted of spreading anti-government propaganda and sentenced to prison in Vietnam, where local church officials and the ruling Communist Party have had an uneasy relationship for years....

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- French President Francois Hollande for the first time provided details of his plan to pull France's combat troops out of Afghanistan by the end of the year, saying Friday he would leave around 1,400 soldiers behind to help with training and logistics....

SYDNEY (AP) -- An Australian investment banker pleaded guilty Thursday to chaining a fake bomb to a young woman's neck in a bizarre extortion attempt last year....

VIENNA (AP) -- Satellite images of an Iranian military facility appear to show trucks and earth-moving vehicles at the site, indicating an attempted cleanup of radioactive traces possibly left by tests of a nuclear-weapon trigger, diplomats told The Associated Press on Wednesday....

VIENNA (AP) -- Inspectors have located radioactive traces at an Iranian underground bunker, the U.N. atomic agency said Friday in a finding that could mean Iran has moved closer to reaching the uranium threshold needed to arm nuclear missiles....

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan (AP) -- Osama bin Laden spent his last weeks in a house divided, amid wives riven by suspicions. On the top floor, sharing his bedroom, was his youngest wife and favorite. The trouble came when his eldest wife showed up and moved into the bedroom on the floor below....

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan (AP) -- Osama bin Laden spent his last weeks in a house divided, amid wives riven by suspicions. On the top floor, sharing his bedroom, was his youngest wife and favorite. The trouble came when his eldest wife showed up and moved into the bedroom on the floor below....

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan (AP) -- Osama bin Laden spent his last weeks in a house divided, amid wives riven by suspicions. On the top floor, sharing his bedroom, was his youngest wife and favorite. The trouble came when his eldest wife showed up and moved into the bedroom on the floor below....