The press has been going nuts the past few hours with stories of “weapons grade uranium” or “highly enriched uranium” being for sale on the black market in Moldova.   A group of men have apparently been arrested for selling what they claim was enriched uranium, with some reports indicating that they were selling it as nuclear bomb material.

The reported amounts were relatively small, not nearly enough to actually build a nuclear weapon.  Even if they had been highly enriched uranium of a quantity necessary, it would still have taken knowledge and facilities beyond those of any non-state terror group to build a functional nuclear weapon.   Still, if this was highly enriched uranium, it’s still a very big deal.  For one thing, HEU is pretty damn valuable stuff, which is generally guarded quite closely if only for it’s value.  It’s used for many research and military nuclear reactors, but becomes too radioactive to easily transport after it has been in the reactor for even a short period of time.

While HEU is not easily fabricated into a weapon by most groups, even a small amount of it could really help a country like Iran or North Korea jump several months ahead in a nuclear weapons program, as production of HEU requires a great deal of enrichment. Even a small amount of highly enriched uranium could also be quite dangerous, as criticality accidents can easily occur with such material.

Here’s what the New York Times Says about the incident:

Arrests in Moldova Over Possible Uranium Smuggling
MOSCOW — The police in Moldova said Wednesday that they had arrested six people involved with a criminal group that said it was dealing in smuggled nuclear materials and was active in the former Soviet Union and in Arab countries.

The group had been negotiating the sale of uranium, police officials said in a statement and in remarks reported by news agencies, and the authorities suggested that the material had come from Russia.

Some of the suspects were arrested while they were carrying a lead canister, the authorities said. In a video released to the news media, police officers wearing gloves showed how a Geiger counter clicked rapidly when brought near the dull gray metal tube. The police said the contents of the tube would be sent for analysis.

Though associated with the chaos of the immediate years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, reports of nuclear smuggling in the former Eastern bloc continue to this day, and are no less ominous for the number of false alarms that are raised from time to time. Last year, for example, the Moldovan authorities arrested members of a group that was selling what turned out to be only slightly radioactive uranium.

The prevalence of these cases, including frauds and other scams, illustrates the difficulties associated with the legacy of the loosely guarded Soviet weapons program.

The Moldovan authorities said that the suspects, who included four Moldovans, one Russian and one resident of the Russian-backed separatist region of Transnistria in eastern Moldova, had sought a buyer for what the suspects said was bomb-grade uranium, Western and Russian news agencies reported.

The gang thought it was negotiating with a North African buyer who turned out to be an undercover security agent, according to the police and the news agency reports. They gang’s members had sought to sell uranium that they said was enriched to an unspecified refinement of the isotope 235 for between $29 million and $144 million per kilogram, the police statement said.

Other press outlets are even less restrained, coming right out and saying that this was indeed weapons grade uranium intended for construction of a nuclear bomb.

But is this actually highly enriched, even weapons-grade uranium?

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The Environmental Working Group has really gotten under my skin before, but this time they’ve crossed the line and erased it when it comes to deceptive, dishonest tactics for attention. Their fear-mongering seems to know no bounds and their carefully cultivated image as a pro-consumer group is a thin veil for a group that is all about money. Their top executive takes in nearly a quarter million dollars a year from a group that only nets a few million. Sound like an honest non-profit to you? Of course, they are working to get more attention and more money, no doubt for more highly paid staff.

The EWG is good at one thing: Pandering to the press. They’ve turned it into a damn art. They know what to go for: topics like dangerous products and foods mixed with claims of corruption by the “big corporations.” Trendy buzzwords and hot topics like subsidies and the safety of the food supply and of course “the children!”

There are other things the press likes: They love things like lists, because lists are simple and to the point. They make good bullet points and they don’t take much thought to get the message across. So a list combining something like perceived dangerous foods is sure to get a lot of attention and coverage, which it has.

Thus the group has released their list of the “dirty dozen” most “pesticide-contaminated” foods. It has gotten a lot of attention and a lot of people are shocked to find out their favorite foods are on the list.

There is, however, a very dirty little secret here: The “dirty dozen” foods do not actually have to test high for pesticide residue, by any standard to make the list. In fact, in all cases, the actual levels found on these items are well bellow all regulatory guidelines.

In fact, they seem to have decided to come up with a list like this every year, showing the twelve “worst” and twelve “best” foods in terms of pesticide residue.   Since its a foregone conclusion before the analysis actually is done that there will be twelve selected as “worst” it does not matter how low the concentrations are – as long as they can find at least twelve foods that meet their criteria for pesticides, they will have no problem coming up with the “dirty dozen” regardless of how low the actual numbers are or how few of the samples tested have any detectible residue at all.

So the deck is stacked: as long as there is any pesticide residue anywhere they just have to rank the “most contaminated” and they have a list which can outrage everyone.

Also, their methodology is a big steaming pile of crap

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I recently came across the television show “Filthy Cities.” It’s originally broadcast on BBC-2, although in the US it can be found on The Discovery Channel. (and amazingly, they redid the entire show in a shot-per-shot retake with an American host for the US version.)

As far as historical documentaries go, it’s not the most scholarly.   That said, I was happy to see such a show exists, because it touches on an all too underreported aspect of history:  the past was pretty damn miserable.   The great cities of the world, whether London, Paris or New York spend centuries stewing in human and animal waste, garbage, thick smoke and a variety of chemicals discharged from tanneries and factories.   Human waste was disposed of in the streets and litter collection was nearly non-existent.   Horses and other animals contributed to the problem.   Without modern sanitary mortuaries and refrigeration, even dead corpses could rot in summer and could be hastily burred in shallow graves.

The word “filthy” does not even do justice to how miserable it was.

Things began to get better with the Industrial Revolution.  While sewers of some type date back to the Roman empire, the first modern city-wide sanitary sewer system took shape in Paris in the mid 1800’s.   It was an enormous step forward.  Other cities followed.   Still, other problems persisted.   Regular collection of refuse and carting away of rotting material was not universal for large cities until well into the 20th century.   The disposal of horse manure (and horse carcases) was a problem that was never really rectified until diesel and gasoline vehicles overtook horses for street transportation.

Not all the major improvements occurred in such a distant past. As late as the 1950’s, the use of coal for heating in the heart of cities could make the air almost unbreathable. Many large cities continued to dump huge amounts of raw sewage into local bodies of water until fairly recently. Boston Harbor frequently contained dangerous levels of fecal bacteria until the opening of the Deer Island Waste Water Treatment Plant in 1995.

Of course, things were not necessarily much better in rural areas either.   Latrines and outhouse pits stunk in the summer and the lack of hot or running water meant people could go months without bathing.  The thatched roofs of cottages may look quaint in pictures, but they began to rot after only a few years, becoming infested with insects and leaking.   During periods of heavy rain, roads became a stew of mud and animal feces, and those who had to travel them didn’t have the luxury of modern rubberized boots.

Here are two episodes of the series, viewable in full:

(Warning – They’re a bit graphic at times)
Filthy Cities: Revolutionary Paris
Filthy Cities: Medieval London

Of course, the filthiest conditions were generally those of the poor and working class, while the wealthy had at least somewhat better living conditions. Given the circumstances, it’s not surprising that so many died from infectious disease. If anything, it’s amazing people actually could survive in such filth.

Most today just have no idea how good we have it.

At least no more so than any other rabbit. Yes, it is made up of atoms, which include a nucleus. Yes, it does get its energy indirectly from the sun, which is nuclear. Yes, the elements that compose it were created in nuclear reactions in ancient stars. Yes, it is radioactive, due to potassium-40 and carbon-14.

But other than that, there’s nothing “nuclear” about this rabbit.

A media frenzy followed the posting of the above video which was accompanied with the following description (translated to English):

After the incident, while the government was reporting there were no immediate health effects and evacuation was unnecessary, those of us in Namie weren’t being given any information about what was going on.

I thought I was going to be silenced in some cover-up between the national and prefectural governments. I was working outside at home when the #3 reactor exploded and my face and throat were scalded. I thought I was going to die at any moment.

I continued to feed my rabbits the grass from outside of my house, and sometime after the rabbit with no ears was born. It was the first deformity I have ever seen with my rabbits. Rabbits reproduce faster than humans, and so perhaps this is a vision of the children that will be born after this incident.

Why this doesn’t actually mean anything:
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NOTE: NO BODIES WERE ACTUALLY FOUND

Numerous media reports indicated that a mass grave containing children “may have been found” (just like cell phones may cause cancer.) It has since been confirmed that no bodies were found. No grave was found. There was no evidence that a violent crime had been committed on the property

Here’s basically what happened:

Police in Texas were contacted by a self-proclaimed psychic who indicated that they had information, presumably from a psychic vision, which indicated that a mass grave containing thirty or more dismembered bodies could be found at a home in Hardin, Texas, about 70 miles from Houston.  The caller never gave their name but called at least twice.   It’s worth noting that there are no reports of 30 missing persons in the area or of ongoing kidnappings or anything else which might lead authorities to believe they were looking for a mass murderer.   None the less, the tip was apparently taken seriously.   It has been reported that the called seemed to know details of the property and the interior of the house.

The local sheriff’s office investigated and found that nobody was home at the house and the occupants had not been seen in about two or three days.  This is by no means sinister.  The couple who owned the home are long haul truckers and are often away for several days.  Their 16 year old daughter had also lived in the home until recently.   Background checks of the home owners came up clean and neighbors said that they never saw anything suspicious.   The owner was eventually tracked down – he was in Georgia on a trucking route and expected to be back in a few more days.

Police checked out the property and noticed an unpleasant smell in the back yard.   As it turns out, this was just uncollected garbage.   They also noted what appeared to be blood on the back porch.  The blood apparently was left from an incident that occurred about two weeks prior.   The ex-fiance of the couple’s daughter had apparently had some kind of domestic dispute in which he got drunk and slit his wrist in a suicide attempt (or possibly not a real suicide attempt so much as a dramatic act).  He didn’t die, but left quite a bit of blood which the home owners had tried to clean up, although it seems traces were left.   Of course, police were able to verify this as the incident had been reported and an ambulance called.

None the less, police were able to get a search warrant for the property.   At least 15 police vehicles were on the scene.  They searched it, brought in cadaver dogs and found…. nothing.   Surprise?   No, not really.

Thankfully, the daughter of the owners was located and able to get to the scene with the keys to allow investigators in, thus avoiding a broken down door.

And to make matters worse:

Despite the fact that no bodies were found, it seems that there was some confusion over whether there was a tip about bodies or whether they were actually found.  A number of news outlets jumped the gun and reported that 30 bodies had been found in a mass grave.

Such as this press outlet, which is a fairly typical example of how this was reported in the US and around the world today:

Mass Grave Full Of Childrens bodies
There’s been a gruesome discovery in the United States.

A possible mass grave has been uncovered in Texas with up to 30 bodies reportedly found at the rural property east of Houston.

Many of the bodies are reportedly those of children who have been dismembered.

It’s believed US federal agents received a tip off from the public.

They want to search the home on the property but so far , the FBI says the residents have been “unco-operative’.

CNN Initially reported (before retracting the story):

At least 20 bodies, including those of children, have been found at a home in Hardin, Texas, a federal official told CNN. Officers are securing the scene, the official said.

Now, why this really really really bothers me:
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Cell Phones don’t cause cancer. RF radiation does not cause cancer. Those statements I am willing to stand behind. If you don’t believe me, please use the search function on this site. I can assure you I have plenty of posts with citations of both the theoretical reasons why non-ionizing radiation does not cause cancer and the studies that have shown no link.

There’s a lot of pressure to say that they do, however. Claiming cell phones cause cancer sells books and magazines. Some dishonest people have made a whole career out of telling these lies. They become media darlings because everyone loves to hate the “big companies” and to talk about how some poor little guy is being kept down by those evil powers that be. Groups make a lot of money too. Especially when the emotion-charged issue of children is dragged into the mix, dishonest charities can grab headlines and donations. Groups that contribute nothing useful to the world are treated as charities while paying their top executives hundreds of thousands of dollars a year or more.

Oh, and by the way, I’m not afraid to name names when it comes to these dishonest people and groups: Lennart Hardell, George Carlo, Devra Davis, The Environmental Health Trust, Bioinitiative, EMF-Health, Microwave News. (there, so sue me. I’d love to see you in court about this)

Thankfully the WHO has been one organization that has been steadfast about the fact that there is no evidence to indicate a relationship between RF radiation and cancer. There are lots of claims, a few very poorly controlled experiments but no evidence, and this is despite some enormous studies and decades of trying.

Unfortunately, however, the WHO has recently made some more ambiguous statements on the issue. Bowing to pressure from those with a financial stake and those stupid enough to believe them, the WHO has now stated that mobile phone radiation is “possibly carcinogenic” – in other words, there’s no absolutely certain empirical evidence that shows beyond any shadow of a doubt that there’s no remote possibility that maybe somehow by some unknown mechanism, radio waves might have once in the history of the universe caused a cell to become cancerous. (They also claim to base this in part on largely discredited studies linking glioma, a certain form of brain cancer to mobile phones.)

Still, this is a bad idea.  It’s a horrible message to send out.  The problem is not that it’s entirely scientifically invalid to say that something is very remotely possible, but how politicians, the media and society take such statements.   It sometimes seems that research scientists don’t fully understand just how badly a statement can and will be butchered and taken out of context.

This non-story has already spawned over one thousand media reports.   Here are a few to provide a taste of just how this plays out:

Los Angeles Times: Experts say cellphones are possibly carcinogenic
Financial Times: WHO signals mobile phone cancer fears
Dallas Morning News: World Health Organization says cellphones might cause brain cancer
The Australian: Risk of brain tumour from mobile phone use is similar to pesticide DDT, petrol exhaust and coffee
Bellfast Telegraph: Brain cancer warning over mobiles
Newsday: Panel sees possible cellphone-cancer link
PC Magazine: WHO Finds Tentative Link Between Cell Phones, Cancer
Seattle Post Intelligencer – Experts: Cell phone use raises risk of cancer

Those are, of course, just a few.

A couple comments about this shameful reporting:
What the hell is a “tentative link?”   Does that mean that they don’t have a shred of evidence but are pretty sure they will at some point?

Also, in case you did not know:  DDT has never been conclusively linked to cancer in humans, though there were some conflicting studies about chronic exposure in prepubescent girls and breast cancer later, the link appears very weak.  There’s not even the slightest evidence that DDT is related to brain cancer.

Coffee has never been linked to brain cancer in any way shape or form, though some studies have found a small risk of increased bladder cancer in very heavy coffee drinkers.   The evidence of this is considered inconclusive, in part because the increase was very small and not found by all studies of coffee and bladder cancer.  There may be other confounding factors at play.

Automobile exhaust may be carcinogenic depending on the circumstances, such as the fuel burned, the exposure levels etc.   There’s little evidence that the combustion byproducts of properly and completely burned gasoline are directly carcinogenic.   Of course, these would be mostly carbon dioxide and water.

How can it be that I’m not getting paid a lot of money to write stories for news papers? Is it because I don’t have a degree in journalism? Well, despite that I can write a hell of a lot better than a lot of reporters seem to, and that is without the benefit of having editors to look over and approve what I write. Sometimes I wonder how some of the idiots who write for major media outlets managed to graduate high school, much less get hired.

In fact, one report from the Herald Sun was so horrible, I had no choice but to do something that apparently none of the professors or teachers of the writer did: I got out the red pen, or in this case, red brush in Photoshop.

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What determines why some people are heterosexual and others homosexual?   Is it genetic?   Environmental?   Developmental?  Is it a combination?

To be honest I really don’t know, and I don’t care that much.   However, I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with soy.

Yes, soy, as in the bean and products made from it.

No, there’s no evidence for this in terms of studies or empirical data.  However, one guy with an enormous forehead thinks that the reason there are so many gays out there is a direct result of the consumption of soy.   (Amazingly, in Southeast Asia, where soy has been a staple of centuries, there are actually still a large number of heterosexuals.  No explanation for that one.)

Via WorldNetDaily:
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Dr. Steve Novella is a great skeptic and promoter of science based medicine.  He writes for the appropriately named blog Science Based Medicine.   Dr. Novella and other pro-science doctors have been very critical of Dr. Oz, the cardiologist turned media personality who is a big promoter of alternative medicine.

Surprisingly he was invited to be on Dr. Oz’s show.   I had hoped that this would be a great opportunity to bring some skeptical and science to a show that badly needs it.  Unfortunately, it turned out to be almost painful to watch.

Well, it seems that the good doctor tried pretty hard to make a point and, in the process hopefully he did get through to a few.   However, it’s pretty hard to win a debate when the other side of it is also the moderator and when you have a hostile audience.   Dr. Novella pretty much is standing along against at least three other “experts” who are looking to promote alternative medicine.

Dr. Oz manages to make a number of statements that really get under my skin.  For one thing there’s the whole claim that acupuncture is rejected because it does not fit into our “western” mindset.   NO!   It doesn’t work.  There’s no “Western” science, but only science.   The scientific method is culturally independent and used everywhere.  In China, they use science and have been doing pretty damn well with it.   Best of all, Eastern, Western Northern and Southern doctors can all agree on what works and does not because the laws of logic and science are universal.

Then the “arrow” versus “ballistic missile”  approach.  God this guy really annoys me!   Science based medicine is not nearly as brute-force based as it is made out to be and there’s not only one type of therapy for each given condition.   The only thing that separates medicine from alternative medicine is that medicine works.

Finally “just let the patient decide what works for them.”   People are VERY BAD at judging the effectiveness of medicine on an individual basis.  That’s why we have placebo-controlled, large-scale clinical studies.  Anecdotes are worthless and the fact that a particular therapy seems like it worked for you is not an objective fact that can be relied on.   Most people don’t understand this and if they did they might be less apt to believe their own intuition when there’s good established data to look at.

We know the approximate dosage that workers at Fukushima have been exposed to is not extremely high.  All but 28 workers have been exposed to less than 100 mSv, while only two workers have been exposed to levels as high as 170 mSv.  Thus far, nobody has been exposed to more than 250 mSv.

This is really not much radiation at all.  It’s more than the average person is exposed to and is more than nuclear plant workers are normally exposed to under normal operating conditions.   Still, 100 mSv is only about 10% of the minimum dose required to cause even minor, temporary radiation sickness.

Despite hazardous conditions, there have been no life-threatening injuries at the Fukushima plant since the quake and tsunami hit on March 11.  The worst case that workers might face is a slightly elevated risk of cancer in the years to come, although even that is not a certainty, and as it stands, even those exposed to the highest doses would have only a tiny increase in total risk.

So why on earth would anyone make a fuss about a worker being exposed to 17.55 mSv?   That level may be bellow the (extremely conservative) standards for exposure under normal operations, but it’s not high at all.  It’s not high enough to cause any detectable health problems.   It’s about the same exposure someone might get from a few CT scan examinations.

The reason everyone is all bothered is that the person in question had two X chromosomes.

Via Fox Business:

TOKYO -(Dow Jones)- Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501.TO) said Wednesday that one of its female employees at the crisis-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was exposed to radiation exceeding three times the legal limit of 5 millisieverts in a three-month period, Kyodo News reported.

The woman, who is in her 50s, has no health problems, but the government’s nuclear safety agency said that two more female workers may also have been exposed to radiation in excess of the limit. The agency called on the utility to investigate the reason and take measures to prevent a recurrence.

Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, told a press conference the situation was “extremely deplorable,” but added that all female employees had left the radiation-leaking plant on March 23.

According to the plant operator and the agency, a total of 19 female Tokyo Electric employees were working at the six-reactor complex following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami hit the plant, and one of them was exposed to a total of 17.55 millisieverts of radiation.

The woman was found to have suffered more internal than external radiation exposure, with the internal exposure reaching 13.6 millisieverts.

Another agency official said that TEPCO needs to explain why the worker suffered so much internal exposure.

TEPCO and the agency said that the woman had been refueling fire trucks and working inside a building on site. She had been wearing a mask, but may have inhaled radioactive material when putting it on or taking it off.

An TEPCO official acknowledged during a press conference that its radiation-dose management should have been more stringent.

Under Japanese law, radiation workers are not permitted to be exposed to more than 100 millisieverts over five years, or more than 50 millisieverts in one year.

For female workers, the limit is 5 millisieverts in a three-month period, considering they may become pregnant. For the general public, the limit is 1 millisievert per year, excluding exposure from medical procedures.

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