Full Body Burden

“An intimate and deeply human memoir that shows why we should all be concerned about nuclear safety, and the dangers of ignoring science in the name of national security.”—Rebecca Skloot, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks A shocking account of the government’s attempt to conceal the effects of the toxic waste released by a secret nuclear weapons plant in Colorado and a community’s vain search for justice—soon to be a feature documentary Kristen Iversen grew up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated "the most contaminated site in America." Full Body Burden is the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and--unknown to those who lived there--tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium. It's also a book about the destructive power of secrets--both family and government. Her father's hidden liquor bottles, the strange cancers in children in the neighborhood, the truth about what was made at Rocky Flats--best not to inquire too deeply into any of it. But as Iversen grew older, she began to ask questions and discovered some disturbing realities. Based on extensive interviews, FBI and EPA documents, and class-action testimony, this taut, beautifully written book is both captivating and unnerving.

A narrative report by a woman who grew up near the Rocky Flats nuclear weapon facility describes the dark secrets that dominated her childhood, the strange cancers that afflicted her neighbors, her brief employment at Rocky Flats and the efforts of residents to achieve legal justice. 30,000 first printing

Tucked up against the Rocky Mountains, just west of Denver, sits the remnants of one of the most notorious nuclear weapons sites in North America: Rocky Flats. With a history of environmental catastrophes, political neglect, and community-wide health crises, this site represents both one of the darkest and most controversial chapters in our nation's history, and also a conundrum on repurposing lands once considered lost. As the crush of encroaching residential areas close in on this site and the generation of Rocky Flats workers passes on, the memory of Rocky Flats is receding from the public mind; yet the need to responsibly manage the site, and understand the consequences of forty years of plutonium production and contamination, must be a part of every decision for the land's future.

Draws from letters, journals, court records, newspaper articles, family memoirs, and other authentic documentation to reconstruct the life of Margaret Tobin Brown, the Titanic survivor who inspired the musical "The Unsinkable Molly Brown"; discussing her early years in Hannibal, Missouri, her political work, and her family.

A chilling, fast-moving study of the nuclear weapons plant in the Denver suburbs, told through the experiences of managers, workers, activists, and neighbors who were all so deeply affected by the hazardous plant.

This book describes how the effects of nature's own nuclear reactors have shaped the Earth, the Solar System, the Universe, and the history of life as we know it. It focuses on observed effects that are poorly explained by our standard theories, identifies certain errors in those theories, and shows how these effects are caused by natural nuclear fission reactors. The theory of Plate Tectonics is wrong, and it is shown that expansion of the Earth causes continental drift. A physically reasonable mechanism is proposed for expansion and observational data are presented to show that this occurs. Evolution is explained as punctuated equilibrium, with mutations caused by abrupt surges of radiation, and related life forms that have been interpreted as seperate species are actually the result of radiation injury. This view is particularly effective as applied to humans. The ability of the dinosaurs to live so large is explained by use of Earth Expansion and a more massive atmosphere to provide buoyancy and effective transpiration of oxygen. These effects also explain how pterodactyls and ancient birds could fly. Expansion induced by impacts at the end of the Cretaceous caused the atmosphere to thin and the dinosaurs collapsed. Analysis of geological and biological data supports this. The astronomical distance scale is shown to be wrong, based on the misconception that trigonometric parallax is an absolute measurement. It isn't, and the method is led astray by the overwhelming number of asteroidal fragments masquerading as stars. The measurements of an expanding Universe are shown to be in error, and an expanding Universe is not needed by an alternative interpretation of Einstein's equations. This interpretation is based on the equal creation of matter and antimatter, which is known to occur. Spiral galaxies are not vast Island Universes of stars as we have thought, but are shown to be the strewn fields of debris from the nuclear fission detonation of distant planets.The Universe is not made up of 96% Dark Matter and Dark Energy, but is instead very ordinary. Abundant evidence and references provide support for all these interpretations. This book opens new opportunities for research by correcting several fundamental errors in our concepts of the Earth, Life, and the Universe.

In the early 1990s, Russian President Boris Yeltsin revealed that for the previous thirty years the Soviet Union had dumped vast amounts of dangerous radioactive waste into rivers and seas in blatant violation of international agreements. The disclosure caused outrage throughout the Western world, particularly since officials from the Soviet Union had denounced environmental pollution by the United States and Britain throughout the cold war. Poison in the Well provides a balanced look at the policy decisions, scientific conflicts, public relations strategies, and the myriad mishaps and subsequent cover-ups that were born out of the dilemma of where to house deadly nuclear materials. Why did scientists and politicians choose the sea for waste disposal? How did negotiations about the uses of the sea change the way scientists, government officials, and ultimately the lay public envisioned the oceans? Jacob Darwin Hamblin traces the development of the issue in Western countries from the end of World War II to the blossoming of the environmental movement in the early 1970s. This is an important book for students and scholars in the history of science who want to explore a striking case study of the conflicts that so often occur at the intersection of science, politics, and international diplomacy.

In this update of his classic book, Scaer presents a new theory of the neurophysiology of traumatic stress and dissociation and discusses new concepts that have been developed since the previous edition.