Apparently radioactive material isn’t as dangerous as the EPA has made it out to be.

From the [old] video notes:

Galen Winsor is a nuclear physicist of renown who worked at, and helped design, nuclear power plants in Hanford, WA; Oak Ridge, TN; Morris, IL, San Jose, CA; Wimington, NJ. Among his positions of expertise he was in charge of measuring and controlling the nuclear fuel inventory and storage. Galen Winsor has traveled and lectured all over America, spoken on national talk radio, and made several videos exposing the misunderstood issues of nuclear radiation. He shows that fear of radiation has been exaggerated to scare people … so a few powerful people can maintain total control of the world’s most valuable power resource. Filmed by Ben Williams in 1986.

In the video, you can watch Galen lick a pile of highly radioactive uranium off the palm of his hand and ignite a chunk of plutonium into a shower of flaming dust. The guy also drank reactor cooling pool water for fun and liked to go swimming in the pool to relax. He also spiked the basement flooring of his own home with enough radioactive material to send any Geiger counter reading off the scale to disprove the fear mongering surrounding radon at the time.

Galen surmises the regulations and fear mongering that surround radioactive materials are in place to prevent the widespread adoption of nuclear power in local small scale neighborhood/home based reactors. Galen also points out that hot nuclear “waste” can be effectively turned into a safe power source through thermionic conversion, which is how the U.S. submarine navigation network was powered. The heat it gives off can also be used to safely heat homes.

He points out that nuclear “waste” is worth roughly $10 million (in 1986 dollars) a ton if it were to be reprocessed to collect its useful isotopes, so all of this talk about trying to bury it is a sham. He says the power companies are holding all the waste with the intent of playing the plutonium futures market. The “waste” could be stored above ground in already constructed buildings meeting all the regulatory requirements without the need to have these outrageous basalt mines dug into mountains. The only reason he can think of for these underground vaults is to hide bodies/evidence that the state doesn’t want uncovered.

At its core, he says federal controls over nuclear material is about maintaining power and control over the masses through the denial of self-sufficient power sources. Obviously if one had a personal sized power source that was cheap and efficient, they wouldn’t need to be connected to the “grid” for anything. The power grid is the control grid our rulers use to keep us under their thumbs.

He also says Three Mile Island was an intentionally created disaster, and that a core meltdown could not melt its way deep into the Earth.

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Update 2/2/2013:

This morning I noticed a large volume of hits coming from maxkeiser.com related to this article. I shall respond to Ms. Herbert’s article here.

First off, I’m a libertarian and I’m not an Ayn Rand disciple. Rand believed in the concept of the coercively funded state, while people like myself do not. It is impossible for a civilized society to exist whose government is predicated on mass theft and mob rule. The very foundation of our modern state depends upon the use of violence to take resources from its own subjects, for the gain of bureaucrats and special interest groups. The state does not and cannot create wealth. The state can only redistribute resources that are already owned and produced by the people it rules over.

Because of the state’s threats of violence, you do not have a choice about paying for the war in Afghanistan. You do not have a choice about paying for the wars in Libya, Iraq, Panama, Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Somalia, Bosnia, etc.. etc.. You do not have a choice about paying for nuclear weapons. You do not have a choice about paying for NSA wiretapping programs that monitor your own communications. You do not have a choice about paying for bureaucratic stripper parties. You do not have a choice about paying for bank bailouts worth tens of trillions of dollars. You do not have a choice about ANYTHING. As the author Robert Heinlein once said, “There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him. ”

Further, I reject the notion that ideas can be “property.” Rand was big advocate of copyright and patents, and a lot of her work actually revolves around those concepts. Most academic libertarians like myself reject this view. The Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom has some good academic articles on the subject for those who are interested.

Additionally, this video gives a good brief overview of how a stateless society would operate. For a more in depth analysis of the stateless society that addresses things like the police and military, the essay Chaos Theory by Robert Murphy is a good place to have your questions answered.

So, with those myths dispelled, let’s move on to the article itself. You’ll notice that when I make a point, I use the term “he says”. While I find Galen’s arguments to be compelling, I haven’t looked very deeply into the research on the subject. And I’m certainly not advocating for people to go out and consume uranium for kicks. No where do I suggest that. I’m simply offering up information that others may care to dig into more deeply.

And contrary to Herbert’s unsubstantiated claim, Galen did not die an early death from leukemia. He died from age related complications at the age of 82.

If the author of this article wasn’t such a reactionary, she may have actually bothered to look up some research on the subject to see just how accurate Galen’s claims were before deriding them. This chapter from The Nuclear Energy Option, written by Bernard L. Cohen from the University of Pittsburgh, pretty much backs up the claims made by Galen in the video.

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter5.html

“We now turn to the question of why the public became so irrationally fearful of radiation. Probably the most important reason is the gross overcoverage of radiation stories by television, magazines, and newspapers. Constantly hearing stories about radiation as a hazard gave people the subconscious impression that it was something to worry about. In attempting to document this overcoverage, I obtained the number of entries in the New York Times Information Bank on various types of accidents and compared them with the number of fatalities per year caused by these accidents in the United States. I did this for the years 1974-1978 so as not to include the Three Mile Island accident, which generated more stories than usual. On an average, there were 120 entries per year on motor vehicle accidents, which kill 50,000 Americans each year; 50 entries per year on industrial accidents, which kill 12,000; and 20 entries per year on asphyxiation accidents, which kill 4,500; note that for these the number of entries, which represents roughly the amount of newspaper coverage, is approximately proportional to the death toll they cause. But for accidents involving radiation, there were something like 200 entries per year, in spite of there not having been a single fatality from a radiation accident for over a decade.

From all of the hundred or so highly publicized incidents discussed earlier in this chapter (with the exception of the Three Mile Island accident), the total radiation received by all people involved was not more than 10,000 mrem. Since we expect only one cancer death from every 4 million mrem, there is much less than a 1% chance that there will ever be even a single fatality from all of those incidents taken together. On an average, each of these highly publicized incidents involved less than 1 chance in 10,000 of a single fatality, but for some reason they got more attention than other accidents that were killing an average of 300 Americans every day and seriously injuring 10 times that number. Surely, then, the amount of coverage of radiation incidents was grossly out of proportion to the true hazard.”