By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article The large black sailor was naked in the middle of a roped-off area below decks, and he was none too happy. “He kept saying ‘Not my boots, too. My wife just bought them for me.’ But they made him take them off anyway, and he was just there, naked. Then they made him scrub,” recalled Maurice Enis, navigator of the USS Ronald Reagan, one of the Navy’s newest aircraft carriers. “They gave him this really abrasive stuff that we us

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article To the US Government, Operation Tomodachi was just another big humanitarian aid and rescue mission in which the nearest Navy fleet and  many land-based personnel rushed to the aid of an ally in need. In this case, the northeast coast of Japan had been flattened by a massive earthquake and tsunami which destroyed infrastructure and killed some 20,000 citizens. Operation Tomodachi – named after the Japanese word for Friend – be

The statistics of nuclear reactor meltdowns are stark. Despite improvements in technology and upgrades in safety, on average one of the world’s 500 or so  nuclear power plants suffers a full or partial meltdown every other year. For the millions of people living within a 50 mile radius of a nuclear installation, their odds are 1/1000 of being affected by spreading radiation from an out of control reactor. Last June, as the world watched the metastasizing radiological disaster

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article Operators of the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant have been granted a year’s delay in their required emergency drill inSouth Jerseybecause their state emergency counterparts are still occupied with the aftermath of a summer hurricane and an early fall snowstorm. Michael Pacilio, president of Exelon Nuclear, which operates the plant, was notified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the exercise originally scheduled for S

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article Killing the chickens was the worst. For a 53-year-old organic farmer like Sachiko Sato, killing a chicken was not a novel event.  “We kill chickens for food. We sell chickens. We raise chickens to eat,” she said. “But this was different. This was too much.” She was sitting in the sparse conference room in the Ossining, NY headquarters of the environmental group Riverkeeper, having lunch and recalling the life-changing events

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article As the Japanese struggle to prevent a widening disaster in its nuclear fleet from adding to the natural disaster facing that country, America’s nuclear proponents are struggling to show that such a calamity could not happen here. One Gannett newspaper trumpeted that the local, Indian Point nuclear power plant was designed to withstand earthquakes and would not suffer the same fate as the Fukushima Daiichi plants. The implicat