Contrary to how the popular saying goes, what happens [at the outdoor explosion sites] in Vegas - and San Francisco- does not stay in Vegas - or in San Francisco, either.
Livermore Laboratory has been detonating or blasting (actually exploding!) thousands of pounds of the US Military Weapon Of Choice, "Depleted" Uranium, into our air since at least 1961 at its Site 300 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, only about 40 miles west of San Francisco.
But this is not *just* San Francisco's problem – nor even simply California’s problem - since these radionuclides travel in the winds across the US, much like the clouds of radioactive aerosols were carried, courtesy of atomic bomb testing back in the 40's, 50's, and early 60's.
One can understand why the incessant explosions of radioactive materials into America's open air, starting with the Trinity Bomb on July 16, 1945, and extending over the next 62 years might be something Uncle Sam might not exactly want Regis and Kelly yapping about.
When we were all told that atmospheric radioactive testing was stopped [wink, wink] outdoors in the 1960s? The DOE simply took over the job – in amended form - at federal Uranium gas dispersal sites, like Livermore, Los Alamos, and the Nevada Test Site.
In the immediate vicinity of Livermore, CA, both from personal accounts of people who live in and near SF, as well as from perusing CA cancer websites, one discovers there actually are large numbers of very sick people in the Greater San Francisco Bay area. These illnesses include a great many people with strange autoimmune system diseases and inordinately high rates of cancers.
This certainly all makes perfect sense because, after all, if you are blasting both chemically toxic and radioactive gasses into a highly populated area for over 45 years, what could you possibly expect in terms of great health for the residents of that area?
The only thing that has changed with the privatization of LLNL is that a healthy buck can be made for corporate managers - not to mention a decreased liability for Uncle Sam, who doesn't have to worry quite so much anymore about paying the steep bill for "hot," dosed, sick, dead, and dying workers exposed to toxic and radioactively hazardous gasses in the workplace.
So for those activists working hard to stop academia from playing a role at the weapons laboratories, the corporate handover of the Livermore Laboratory may, on the surface, seem like a victory. But let's keep thinking this through.
If you and I are still breathing in the same (and maybe soon-to-be-increased) deadly, radioactive poison gas, what difference does it make if the UC plays a prominent role in managing Livermore - or if the University simply works in the background, behind the scenes, while still assisting in creating and exploding (oh, that's right, they call it "testing") lethal, toxic, radionuclides into our environment, polluting and contaminating our air, our water, our soils, and our food supply?
After all, any way you look at it? Being radioactively poison-gassed still does the same harm to us and to our families, whether at the hands of University psychopath scientists - or privately contracted ones.
If you are unaware of how the Livermore National Weapons Laboratory’s Site 300 quietly, invisibly releases radioactive poison gasses into our air? Just do a Google search, putting in the exact terms, using the quotation marks as follows: "depleted uranium" + "livermore laboratory" Do write and tell me what you think in the comments section below.
Does this bother you, too? I always thought that we pay our taxes in order to be protected from harm so we could enjoy health, happiness, and all that cool sounding jazz – not to be poison gassed! And maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I always thought our public universities were "in business" to ensure a great college education for our kids... not to design and use weapons of massive destruction in order to kill some fabricated foreign “enemy” - and American citizens, too.
Maybe we just never got the memo that informed us that our state universities have a lucrative side-job of great importance to the Empire: the manufacture of wide scale, silent death? It must be a well-kept secret, as how many people do you know realize that US Universities work as a "major player" with private industries to blast toxic and environmentally hazardous contaminants out into our environment?
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