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 The Department of Defense has decided to walk away from an unprecedented medical registry of nearly 70,000 American service members, civilian workers, and their families caught in the radioactive clouds blowing from the destroyed nuclear power plants at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan. The decision to cease updating the registry means there will be no way to determine if patterns of health problems emerge among the members of the

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article The roaring winds, at times approaching 100 miles per hour, were relentless as Hurricane Sandy pushed the Atlantic Ocean towards the eastern seaboard. The sheer breadth of the Superstorm, with hurricane-force winds radiating some 250 miles from Sandy’s eye, meant 34 nuclear power plants from North Carolina to Vermont would experience extreme weather. While the winds themselves posed little danger to the primary physical struc

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article In a stunning change of position, federal regulators have downgraded by a factor of 1,000 the 31-year-old data assessing the fish killed annually by the Indian Point nuclear power plant. In addition, the regulators assert the plants’ thermal plume causes minimal damage to the Hudson River environment and may fit state requirements for a hot water discharge permit. The direct impact of the change by the Nuclear Regulatory Comm