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Plan risks catastrophic failure of cooling systems, says head of Ukraine’s atomic energy company
World leaders have called for the Zaporizhzhia site to be demilitarised after footage emerged of Russian army vehicles inside the plant, and have previously warned Russia against cutting it off from the Ukrainian grid and connecting it up to the Russian power network.
But Petro Kotin, the head of Ukraine’s atomic energy company, told the Guardian in an interview that Russian engineers had already drawn up a blueprint for a switch on the grounds of emergency planning should fighting sever remaining power connections.
“They presented [the plan] to [workers at] the plant, and the plant [workers] presented it to us. The precondition for this plan was heavy damage of all lines which connect Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to the Ukrainian system,” Kotin said in an interview on Ukraine’s independence day on Wednesday, with the country mostly locked down because of the threat of Russian attacks.
He fears that Russia’s military is now targeting those connections to make the emergency scenario a reality. Both Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of shelling the site.
“They just started doing that, they starting all the shelling, just to take out these lines,” Kotin said.
Ukraine nuclear chief warns over Russian activity at Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant
Other threats to nuclear security at the plant include vehicles packed so tightly into turbine halls that firefighters would struggle to access them if a fire broke out, and a campaign of terror against workers who have chosen to stay at the frontline plant.
One was beaten to death, and another so severely injured that he needed three months to recover. More than 200 have been detained, Kotin said.
The plant’s electricity connections are already in a critical situation, with three of the four main lines connecting it to Ukraine’s grid broken during the war, and two of the three back-up lines connecting it to a conventional power plant also down, he said.
The Russian plan to disconnect it entirely would raise the risk of a catastrophic failure by leaving it dependent on a single source of electricity to cool the reactors. “You cannot just switch from one system to another immediately, you have to … shut down everything on one side, and then you start to switch on another side,” he said.
During a shift between grid systems, the plant would be reliant only on a back-up diesel-powered generator, with no further options should that fail. After only 90 minutes without power the reactors would reach a dangerous temperature.
“During this disconnection, the plant won’t be connected to any power supply and that is the reason for the danger,” he said. “If you fail to provide cooling … for one hour and a half, then you will have melting already.”
Russia seized control of the Zaporizhzhia plant in March but it is still run by Ukrainian workers. There has been increasing alarm about Russian management of the site in recent weeks, and pressure on Moscow to allow UN inspectors to visit.
Kotin said inspectors from the UN’s nuclear watchdog could be at the plant within one or two weeks to check on security, after progress in negotiations with Russia about a visit by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Kotin is also concerned about the fire risk from vehicles packed into the turbine halls, which sit next to the two reactors still in operation. There are 14 trucks in one hall, and at least six in another, sources at the plant have told him.
“In case there is a fire in the turbine hall you don’t even have a possibility to put it out or mitigate the consequences of this fire, because your fire brigades cannot get in, because any entry is blocked by the trucks, which are just packed in there,” he said.
Any blaze could then potentially spread towards the reactor buildings, where a fire would have disastrous implications far beyond the immediate region.
“This situation is very dangerous not only for the plant, for Ukraine, but also for the whole world because you never can say what the weather would be like and what the wind direction [would be].”
Many other military vehicles are lined up under overpasses, built to house pipes and walkways between reactor and turbine complexes, Kotin said, perhaps to provide protection from drones.
He praised about 9,000 workers who are still on duty at the plant, from a prewar workforce of about 11,000. Many evacuated their families but stayed at their posts because of the need for a skilled team to operate it.
Modernisations to Ukraine’s nuclear plants in the wake of the Chornobyl disaster means that although the plant was built to Soviet specifications, Russian engineers don’t have the skills to operate it.
“Actually, for us they are heroes, just doing their job in such unbelievable conditions,” said Kotin, who knows the plant, and its workers well because he spent most of his career there. He arrived as a young graduate and rose to become general manager.
Rockets have also landed within two dozen metres of 174 spent fuel containers housed at the plant, which would be more vulnerable to weapons than the reactors, which are built to withstand the impact of a passenger jet.
“It will probably withstand two explosions of maybe two missiles on one container and after that, it will be broken,” he said. “Actually we had a rocket came in just 10, 20 metres just from the site [where the containers are stored].”
However, Kotin said that he hoped nuclear inspectors would be able to visit the Zaporizhzhia plant within “one, maybe two weeks”.
“There is progress in negotiations … there is only modalities of the mission to finally agree between parties, and after that they will go. And actually I’ve seen some plans that they are to go at the end of the month.”
He said he also had confidence that Ukrainian workers who have sacrificed so much for the plant would be able to keep it safe.
“In any case, we won’t allow Russians to bring the world to the nuclear catastrophe and we will do everything just to return the plant to under our full control and operate it safely reliably, like it always been.”
Howard Zinn (left) and Daniel Berrigan (right) in Hanoi, Vietnam, in February 1968. (photo: AP)
Today would have been Howard Zinn’s hundredth birthday. He is rightly remembered for works like A People’s History of the United States. But he was also an antiwar activist who went to North Vietnam in 1968 to accompany three captured US pilots back home.
The exchange was largely symbolic but was an extension of his radical internationalism and opposition to foreign wars. Reexamining his provocative trips behind enemy lines during the Vietnam War — on what would have been his hundredth birthday today — serves as a reminder that Zinn was both an incredibly productive progressive historian and a persistent critic of US empire.
Zinn was the rare left historian who infiltrated American popular culture. But he is still mostly known for debunking myths related to European colonialism and the nation’s founding.
After selling more than two million copies of A People History of the United States, his work appeared in film and TV productions like Good Will Hunting and The Sopranos. The latter included a teenage A. J. Soprano holding a copy of A People’s History while telling his parents that Christopher Columbus was a slave trader. More recently, Timothée Chalamet’s character in Lady Bird reads Zinn while smoking a cigarette.
For the last several decades, Zinn’s work has become a symbol of teenage rebellion, a source for young people who are beginning to question mainstream history.
In 2020, Donald Trump identified Zinn and the New York Times’s 1619 Project as “ideological poison” when he announced an executive to establish a “1776 commission.” Whether it’s Hollywood or a Republican president, Zinn’s work is primarily associated with the origins of the United States. But his opposition to US foreign policy, particularly during the Vietnam War, deserves more attention.
The notes Zinn kept during his first trip to Hanoi are now a part of his archive at the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University. The collection contains several other notebooks from similar trips, including his second visit to Hanoi in 1972, during the final months of the US war in Vietnam. Zinn documents his lengthy conversations with North Vietnamese leaders and American POWs but also bears witness to the destruction wrought by US bombing raids. Taken together, the handwritten notes capture Zinn’s radical internationalism.
Notes on a Radical Internationalism
By 1968, Zinn had already developed a national reputation on the Left for his support of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the South and his 1967 book on the Vietnam War, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. While teaching a seminar at Boston University, Zinn was interrupted by someone who told him that there was an urgent phone call from David Dellinger, a founder of the magazine Liberation and one of the leaders of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.
Dellinger traveled to Hanoi in 1966 and had just received a message from the North Vietnamese government that it had decided to release three American pilots in conjunction with the Tet holiday. The telegram asked Dellinger to send “a responsible representative” to Hanoi to bring the three prisoners back to the United States. Zinn later joked, “Did Berrigan and I, both half-responsible, add up to what was wanted?”
Berrigan and Zinn met in New York with Dellinger and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) leader Tom Hayden, another renowned peace activist who had helped facilitate the release of three US pilots the previous fall. The historian and the priest began their twenty-eight-hour trip from John F. Kennedy Airport to North Vietnam. The two rejected several offers from the State Department to stamp their passports and thereby legalize their visit.
“We didn’t want official approval for our trip from the government we were fiercely opposing for its actions in Vietnam,” Zinn recounted in his memoir.
While they were waiting in Thailand, a reporter asked Berrigan if they planned to push the North Vietnamese to release more Americans. “No, we are going there to make a gesture of mercy against the war, a symbolic gesture for all who are suffering on both sides, not just the Americans,” Berrigan said.
After a weeklong delay caused by the ongoing Tet Offensive, Zinn and Berrigan flew from Vientiane, Laos, to Hanoi on February 9, 1968. Zinn’s notebooks capture the trip’s logistical challenges and notes from their conversations with North Vietnamese leaders, including the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s (DRV) prime minister Pham Van Dong and colonel Ha Van Lau. The prime minister encouraged Zinn to compare the treatment of prisoners in South Vietnam to their treatment of the US pilots and told the two peace activists, “We think alike: patriots, democrats, revolutionaries.”
Zinn described him as a man of “oceanic calm” and jotted down that the premier told them, “You are more American than anyone. We are more Vietnamese than anyone.”
Another page captures a part of their discussion with Colonel Lau: “The honesty” — Zinn underlined the word — “of the DRV is in its det[ermination] to fight US aggressors!” After a few days of relative peace, Zinn and Berrigan were rushed to a bomb shelter while US bombs dropped on Hanoi. Zinn, an Air Force pilot during World War II, was now on the other side of an American war.
Berrigan and Zinn eventually met Major Norris Overly, Captain John Black, and Lieutenant Junior Grade David Metheny in a French villa that the North Vietnamese had turned into a prison. The five men engaged in awkward but pleasant small talk and discussed the details of their plan to return home without the assistance of the US military. The pilots were released and returned to the United States, but the US intercepted them in Laos and transported them to a military plane.
While discussing his trip with American reporters, Zinn condemned the US government’s actions: “And here we must sadly report that the inept and cold-blooded handling of the release by the US government has dangerous implications for the future.” The movement’s efforts at radical diplomacy were at odds with the Lyndon B. Johnson administration’s presentation of the enemy. The historian later targeted the government’s insecurity over its PR strategy: “It was a fear of something as small as three very straight American airmen saying something slightly embarrassing to Washington.”
Zinn was surprised, but not shocked, to find out that Major Overly reported that the North Vietnamese had tortured him. Overly never mentioned torture to the anti-war activists, but Zinn never doubted his stories. Others within the anti-war movement warned Zinn to avoid an idealized view of the DRV. Historian Martin Duberman wrote in his biography Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left that “friends, even some of the radicals among them, cautioned him against sentimentality, insisting that the North Vietnamese must have had some political motive for the release.”
Still, Zinn and Berrigan’s visit to Hanoi helped strengthen the relationship between the US anti-war activists and North Vietnam and a movement pressuring the Johnson administration to end the war.
“LBJ has asked for substantive act on the part of Hanoi to show a willingness to negotiate peace,” wrote Zinn in one of his notebooks. “Here it is. What in the world is he waiting for?”
A Witness to, and Participant in, a Movement to End a War
Zinn returned to Hanoi in the fall of 1972 as part of a delegation of anti-war activists who met with eleven US POWs to report on their living conditions and bring letters to their families. Sponsored by the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice, the group arrived in Hanoi on November 4, three days before the 1972 election. The trip occurred just as President Richard Nixon’s peace negotiations with North Vietnam had reached a stalemate in the fall of 1972.
The trip did not lead to the release of additional prisoners, but the delegation provided reports on recent American bombings on the ground. Zinn and the rest of the group visited the rural community of Thuanh Thanh, thirty miles north of Hanoi. A US bombing raid had destroyed most of the village and killed twenty-two people, including twelve children.
“Visited evacuated hospital. Many people wounded w bombing-some died-some survived,” wrote Zinn. “More+ more night attacks recently.”
Less than three months later, the US war in Vietnam was officially over. Sectarianism weakened the anti-war movement, but a coalition was still able to successfully lobby Congress to cut funds to the South Vietnamese government in 1974. By April 30, 1975, Saigon had fallen to the North Vietnamese Army, ending the war.
Zinn’s notebooks at the Tamiment Library at New York University remind us that anti-war activists were part of an international movement. They were determined to promote on-the-ground reports about the war to pressure the Johnson and Nixon administrations to end the war. As both a witness of the destruction caused by US bombs and a participant in the anti-war movement’s exchanges with the Vietnamese, Zinn offers readers a powerful snapshot of radical diplomacy in the middle of an unjust war.
Ian Miller, 24, works at Starbucks in Olney, Maryland, on May 20. Miller has been a leader in the effort to unionize the location, following a national trend. (photo: Amanda Voisard/The Washington Post)
ALSO SEE: Starbucks Creating 'Culture of Fear' as It Fires
Dozens Involved in Union Efforts
The coffee chain has been trying to tamp down a national organizing campaign
The complaint arrives during a campaign by the coffee chain and its interim CEO, Howard Schultz, to tamp down unionization efforts at its stores around the United States. More than 230 locations have voted to join the Starbucks Workers United union since late 2021, driving a surge in unionization nationwide.
The NLRB seeks back payments and benefits for unionized workers since May and to require Schultz to read a statement to workers about their union rights. The board, which is tasked with enforcing labor laws that protect union rights, said Starbucks’s denial of benefits and raises to union workers was intended to discourage union organizing
But Starbucks denied that. “We’ve been clear in that we are following NLRB rules when it comes to unilaterally giving benefits,” Reggie Borges, a Starbucks spokesman, wrote in an email.
The company stated in a news release in July that legally it cannot change benefits or wages without bargaining with a union once one is in place. “Partners still have access to all Starbucks benefits already in place when the petition was filed, but any changes to your wages, benefits and working conditions that Starbucks establishes after that time would not apply to you and would have to be bargained,” the statement says.
Union activists were thrilled that the labor board had weighed in. “This is a historic triumph for democracy and the rule of law that a billionaire CEO must apologize to employees for abusing them and violating their rights as well as making them whole,” said Richard Bensinger, a lead organizer of the Starbucks Workers United campaign.
Starbucks has tried to fend off the union effort as organizers have built momentum. Schultz announced in May that the company would raise pay and double training hours at its more than 10,000 corporate-owned stores. But he said those changes would not apply to recently unionized stores or stores in the process of unionizing, where workers had filed for union elections.
“We do not have the same freedom to make these improvements at locations that have a union or where union organizing is underway,” Schultz stated on an earnings call at the time.
In August, nonunion Starbucks workers who had been employed since May 2 saw their wages increase to $15 an hour or by 3 percent, whichever was higher. Employees with between two and five years of experience received a raise of at least 5 percent, or an increase to 5 percent above the starting rate in their market, whichever was greater. Nonunion baristas with more than five years of experience received raises of at least 7 percent or 10 percent above the starting rate in their market, whichever was greater.
This year, Schultz stated that employees who had not sought union benefits would receive access to the chain’s relaunched coffee expertise program, known as “Coffee Masters.” Nonunion stores would see new investments in equipment and technology and enhanced tipping options for customers. Further communications stated that the dress code would be updated to allow more flexibility on piercings and tattoos, but only for only nonunion workers. According to the labor board, these benefits have been withheld from unionized workers since May.
The complaint alleges that the company has also withheld faster sick time accrual benefits, career growth opportunities and expanded credit card tips from workers at unionized stores.
The labor board says that not extending these benefits and wage increases to union workers violated the National Labor Relations Act, which protects workers’ rights to engage in union activity free from interference, coercion and retaliation.
“I’m not surprised by Howard Schultz’s comments, but I’m pleasantly surprised that there’s action being taken by the NLRB,” said Gianna Reeve, a Starbucks barista and union organizer in Buffalo who did not receive a raise in August because she works in a store where the union is trying to organize workers.
The labor board is also requesting that Starbucks provide a copy of all payroll records, time cards and personnel reports so that it can analyze the amount of back pay owed to workers. The remedy outlined by the complaint would require that the company send apology letters to all affected baristas and conduct a training for managers and supervisors on workers’ rights and labor law.
Starbucks can try to settle the case. Otherwise, an administrative law judge will hold a hearing on the matter Oct. 25.
The NLRB has also been challenging the company’s response to the union drive in federal district court. Last week, a federal judge ordered that Starbucks reinstate seven fired baristas involved in union organizing at a store in Memphis. Starbucks Workers United says the coffee chain giant has fired more than 75 union leaders since December.
Uvalde School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo (right) attends a press conference held by the Texas Department of Public Safety on May 26, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. (photo: Eric Thayer/Getty)
After a nearly 90-minute termination hearing held behind closed doors Wednesday evening, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District's board voted unanimously to terminate Arredondo's contract effective immediately. They also found there was good cause for him not to receive pay for the time he was on unpaid administrative leave since July 19.
Arredondo's termination hearing was originally scheduled to take place a month ago, but that hearing was canceled at the request of Arredondo's attorney, who told the district the police chief was entitled to due process.
Arredondo was not present for Wednesday's meeting, saying he was concerned over his safety, but his attorney released a 17-page statement in response to the termination hearing.
"Chief Arredondo will not participate in his own illegal and unconstitutional public lynching and respectfully requests the Board immediately reinstate him, with all backpay and benefits and close the complaint as unfounded," read the statement.
The families of the 21 victims of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary have been demanding Arredondo be fired since news first broke in late May that the police chief was in charge of the law enforcement response during the shooting.
Hundreds of officers waited more than an hour to confront the gunman while children in the 4th grade classroom where he was holed up called 911.
A Texas House report found there were 376 law enforcement officers on the scene, including 150 U.S. Border Patrol Agents, 91 Texas Department of Public Safety troopers, 25 Uvalde police officers, 16 sheriff's deputies, and five Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District officers.
State lawmakers investigating the shooting found law enforcement failures at all levels. But the school district's active shooter plan — co-written by Arredondo — called for Arredondo to take command of all of the officers who responded that day. Yet, Arredondo maintains he did not know he was the incident commander.
Arredondo, a Uvalde native, was hired as the school district's police chief in 2020. Prior to that, he worked at the Webb County Sheriff's office in South Texas. The San Antonio Express News reported that Arredondo was demoted from a high-ranking position in 2014 because he had difficulty getting along with others in the department.
Despite growing calls for action following the shooting, Uvalde Superintendent Hal Harrell waited almost two months to recommend Arredondo's termination.
At a heated school board forum in July, Brett Cross, the uncle and guardian of Uziyah Garcia, even gave the board a deadline. Uziyah is one of the 19 children killed in the shooting.
"I'll tell you this. If he's not fired by noon tomorrow, then I want your resignation and every single one of you board members because y'all do not give a damn about our children or us," Cross said at the time. "Stand with us or against us, because we ain't going nowhere."
Cross said he doesn't buy Arredondo not showing up to his termination hearings out of fear for his safety, saying during Wednesday's public comments that Arredondo was not present "to face the consequences to his actions."
Paxlovid, Pfizer's COVID pill, showed no measurable benefit in adults 40 to 65, according to a new study. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
The results from a 109,000-patient Israeli study are likely to renew questions about the U.S. government's use of Paxlovid, which has become the go-to treatment for COVID-19 due to its at-home convenience. The Biden administration has spent more than $10 billion purchasing the drug and making it available at thousands of pharmacies through its test-and-treat initiative.
The researchers found that Paxlovid reduced hospitalizations among people 65 and older by roughly 75% when given shortly after infection. That's consistent with earlier results used to authorize the drug in the U.S. and other nations.
But people between the ages of 40 and 65 saw no measurable benefit, according to the analysis of medical records.
The study has limitations due to its design, which compiled data from a large Israeli health system rather than enrolling patients in a randomized study with a control group — the gold standard for medical research.
The findings reflect the changing nature of the pandemic, in which the vast majority of people already have some protection against the virus due to vaccination or prior infection. For younger adults, in particular, that greatly reduces their risks of severe COVID-19 complications. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently estimated that 95% of Americans 16 and older have acquired some level of immunity against the virus.
“Paxlovid will remain important for people at the highest risk of severe COVID-19, such as seniors and those with compromised immune systems,” said Dr. David Boulware, a University of Minnesota researcher and physician, who was not involved in the study. “But for the vast majority of Americans who are now eligible, this really doesn’t have a lot of benefit."
A spokesman for Pfizer declined to comment on the results, which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized Paxlovid late last year for adults and children 12 and older who are considered high risk due to conditions like obesity, diabetes and heart disease. More than 42% of U.S. adults are considered obese, representing 138 million Americans, according to the CDC.
At the time of the FDA decision there were no options for treating COVID-19 at home, and Paxlovid was considered critical to curbing hospitalizations and deaths during the pandemic's second winter surge. The drug's results were also far stronger than a competing pill from Merck.
The FDA made its decision based on a Pfizer study in high-risk patients who hadn't been vaccinated or treated for prior COVID-19 infection.
“Those people do exist but they’re relatively rare because most people now have either gotten vaccinated or they’ve gotten infected,” Boulware said.
Pfizer reported earlier this summer that a separate study of Paxlovid in healthy adults — vaccinated and unvaccinated — failed to show a significant benefit. Those results have not yet been published in a medical journal.
More than 3.9 million prescriptions for Paxlovid have been filled since the drug was authorized, according to federal records. A treatment course is three pills twice a day for five days.
A White House spokesman on Wednesday pointed to several recent papers suggesting Paxlovid helps reduce hospitalizations among people 50 and older. The studies have not been published in peer-reviewed journals.
“Risk for severe outcomes from COVID is along a gradient, and the growing body of evidence is showing that individuals between the ages of 50 and 64 can also benefit from Paxlovid,” Kevin Munoz said in an emailed statement.
Administration officials have been working for months to increase use of Paxlovid, opening thousands of sites where patients who test positive can fill a prescription. Last month, U.S. officials further expanded access by allowing pharmacists to prescribe the drug.
The White House recently signaled that it may soon stop purchasing COVID-19 vaccines, drugs and tests, shifting responsibility to the private insurance market. Under that scenario, insurers could set new criteria for when they would pay for patients to receive Paxlovid.
A solitary confinement cell at New York's Riker's Island jail. (photo: Bebeto Matthews/AP)
Study says between 41,000 and 48,000 prisoners subjected to ‘restrictive housing’, which UN considers a form of torture
In a new report spearheaded by Yale Law School, the number of prisoners subjected to “restrictive housing”, as solitary is officially known, stood at between 41,000 and 48,000 in the summer of 2021. They were being held alone in cells the size of parking spaces, for 22 hours a day on average and for at least 15 days.
Within that number, more than 6,000 prisoners have been held in isolation for over a year. They include almost a thousand people who have been held on their own in potentially damaging confined spaces for a decade or longer.
The report, produced by Yale’s Arthur Liman Center together with the Correctional Leaders Association which represents directors of all prison systems, underlines the daunting mountain that the US has yet to climb if it is to combat a form of incarceration widely condemned as a human rights violation.
Studies have shown that even short periods of solitary can bring on severe mental health problems including depression, aggression and suicidal thoughts.
Its destructive harm was highlighted by the death earlier this month of Albert Woodfox who, before his release from Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison in 2016, was the longest-standing solitary confinement inmate in the country. He was cooped up for 43 years almost without break in a 6ft by 9ft cell.
In his 2019 book Solitary, Woodfox described the impact of decades of isolation on him. He had regular terrifying bouts of claustrophobia which forced him to sleep sitting up to avoid the sensation of the walls closing in on him.
The new solitary study, Time-In-Cell: A 2021 Snapshot of Restrictive Housing, extrapolates its findings from the reported figures of 34 states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Though it finds that levels of solitary remain shockingly high, it also stresses that the figures are moving in the right direction.
When the researchers began the series of annual snapshots in 2014 the number of prisoners trapped in isolation was almost twice today’s level, at between 80,000 to 100,000. Since then the graph has steadily declined, with a growing number of states introducing new laws to restrict or even ban the practice.
“In the 1980s people promoted solitary confinement as a way to deal with violence in prisons,” said Judith Resnik, Yale’s Arthur Liman professor of law. “It is now seen as a problem itself that needs to be solved.”
California, a state with a dark history of abusive solitary confinement, is currently debating new legislation. The California Mandela Act would require every custodial institution in the state to impose strict rules and reporting, and would ban solitary for pregnant women, people under 26 or over 59, and those with mental or physical disabilities.
Last year New York state passed similar legislation, joining a growing list. The Yale study finds that three states – Delaware, North Dakota and Vermont – reported having no inmates in such confinement in 2021, and two other states said they had fewer than 10 people.
Despite such optimistic signs, restrictive housing continues to inflict untold suffering on thousands of men and women. John Thompson, who spent more than a third of his 37 years in prison in solitary for largely minor infractions, described recently in the Philadelphia Inquirer how it “chipped away at my positive attitude, my patience, and my personality”.
He spent sometimes years on end in a tiny cell prohibited from talking to anybody else and “with the fluorescent lightbulbs shining on me at nearly all hours of the day so that I could be surveilled”.
The Yale report highlights several areas of ongoing concern. More than 1,000 people with “serious mental illness” are still being held in isolation.
Black women are also disproportionately targeted. Some 30% of those in restrictive housing in women’s prisons are African American compared with 20% of the overall prison population.
“Isolation is used less frequently in women’s prisons, but the women who suffer the most are Black women,” Resnik said.
Time and again, mining company Homestake and government agencies promised to clean up waste from decades of uranium processing. It didn't happen. (photo: Mauricio RodrÃguez Pons/ProPublica)
Time and again, mining company Homestake and government agencies promised to clean up waste from decades of uranium processing. It didn’t happen.
Neighbors built the map a decade ago after watching relatives and friends fall ill and die. Dominating the top right corner of the map, less than half a mile from the cluster of colorful arrows, sits what residents believe is the cause of their sickness: 22.2 million tons of uranium waste left over from milling ore to supply power plants and nuclear bombs.
“We were sacrificed a long time ago,” said Candace Head-Dylla, who created the death map with her mother after Head-Dylla had her thyroid removed and her mother developed breast cancer. Research has linked both types of illnesses to uranium exposure.
Beginning in 1958, a uranium mill owned by Homestake Mining Company of California processed and refined ore mined nearby. The waste it left behind leaked uranium and selenium into groundwater and released the cancer-causing gas radon into the air. State and federal regulators knew the mill was polluting groundwater almost immediately after it started operating, but years passed before they informed residents and demanded fixes.
The contamination continued to spread even after the mill closed in 1990.
The failures at Homestake are emblematic of the toxic legacy of the American uranium industry, one that has been well-documented from its boom during the Cold War until falling uranium prices and concerns over the dangers of nuclear power decimated the industry in the 1980s. Uranium mining and milling left a trail of contamination and suffering, from miners who died of lung cancer while the federal government kept the risks secret to the largest radioactive spill in the country’s history.
But for four decades, the management of more than 250 million tons of radioactive uranium mill waste has been largely overlooked, continuing to pose a public health threat.
ProPublica found that regulators have failed to hold companies to account when they missed cleanup targets and accepted incorrect forecasts that pollution wouldn’t spread. The federal government will eventually assume responsibility for the more than 50 defunct mills that generated this waste.
At Homestake, which was among the largest mills, the company is bulldozing a community in order to walk away. Interviews with dozens of residents, along with radon testing and thousands of pages of company and government records, reveal a community sacrificed to build the nation’s nuclear arsenal and atomic energy industry.
Time and again, Homestake and government agencies promised to clean up the area. Time and again, they missed their deadlines while further spreading pollution in the communities. In the 1980s, Homestake promised residents groundwater would be cleaned within a decade, locals told the Environmental Protection Agency and ProPublica. After missing that target, the company told regulators it would complete the job around 2006, then by 2013.
In 2014, an EPA report confirmed the site posed an unacceptable cancer risk and identified radon as the greatest threat to residents’ health. Still, the cleanup target date continued shifting, to 2017, then 2022.
Rather than finish the cleanup, Homestake’s current owner, the Toronto-based mining giant Barrick Gold, is now preparing to ask the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the independent federal agency that oversees the cleanup of uranium mills, for permission to demolish its groundwater treatment systems and hand the site and remaining waste over to the U.S. Department of Energy to monitor and maintain forever.
Before it can transfer the site to the Department of Energy, Homestake must prove that the contamination, which exceeds federal safety levels, won’t pose a risk to nearby residents or taint the drinking water of communities downstream.
Part of Homestake’s strategy: buy out nearby residents and demolish their homes. Local real estate agents and residents say the company’s offers do not account for the region’s skyrocketing housing costs, pushing some who accept them back into debt in order to buy a new home. Those who do sell are required to sign agreements to refrain from disparaging Homestake and absolve the company of liability, even though illnesses caused by exposure to radioactive waste can take decades to manifest.
Property records reveal the company had, by the end of 2021, purchased 574 parcels covering 14,425 acres around the mill site. This April, Homestake staff indicated they had 123 properties left to buy. One resident said the area was quickly becoming a “ghost town.”
Even after the community is gone, more than 15,000 people who live nearby, many of them Indigenous, will continue to rely on water threatened by Homestake’s pollution.
The company said it has produced models showing that its waste won’t imperil the region’s water if it walks away. The NRC says it will only grant a groundwater cleanup exemption if that’s the case.
But while Homestake and other mining companies have polluted the region, it’s been the NRC and various other agencies that stood by as it happened. ProPublica found the NRC has issued exemptions from groundwater cleanup standards to uranium mills around the country, only to see pollution continue to spread. This has occurred as climate change hammers the West, making water ever scarcer.
“Groundwater moves. Groundwater doesn’t care about regulations,” said Earle Dixon, a hydrogeologist who reviewed the government’s oversight of uranium cleanup and pollution around Homestake for the New Mexico Environment Department and the EPA. Dixon and other researchers predict contamination at Homestake will likely spread if cleanup ends.
The company has denied that its waste caused residents’ illnesses, and judges ruled in Homestake’s favor in a case residents filed in 2004 alleging the site caused cancer. Doctors testified that the pollution was a substantial factor contributing to residents’ cancers, but tying particular cases to a single source requires communitywide blood, urine and other testing, which hadn’t been done.
“We are proud of our work done in remediating the Homestake Uranium Mill site,” Patrick Malone, Homestake’s president, said in a letter responding to questions from ProPublica. He said Homestake was entering the final stages of cleanup because “the site is at a point where it is not technically feasible to provide additional, sustainable improvements to water quality.”
David McIntyre, an NRC spokesperson, attributed cleanup delays to the area’s complex groundwater system. “We understand and share the concern that remediation is taking so long,” McIntyre said, adding that the agency’s priority is to protect public and environmental health rather than meet particular deadlines.
The EPA has oversight of the former mill’s cleanup under its Superfund program that aims to clean the country’s most toxic land. The EPA regional office did not respond to questions.
Larry Carver has implored an endless stream of regulators to take action since his family moved to Murray Acres in 1964, and neighbors defer to him to tell the community’s story. The 83-year-old leaned against his Chevrolet pickup on a blustery spring morning, peering from beneath a baseball cap at Homestake’s 10-story pile of waste. He lamented that the community would be sacrificed so uranium waste could remain.
For Carver, arrows on a map don’t tell the full story of uranium’s impact. His wife’s aunt and uncle owned the home closest to the waste piles. Her aunt died of liver cancer when she was 66 years old, and her son, who grew up playing in unfenced waste ponds, died of colon cancer when he was 55 years old. Now, Carver and his wife both have spots on their lungs, with hers recently requiring radiation treatment.
“All the houses are going to be gone. The wells are being plugged. The septic systems are being torn up,” Carver said. “There will be nothing.”
Saturday, April 26, 1958, was a momentous day in the towns of Grants and Milan, New Mexico.
Full-page newspaper ads announced the opening of Homestake’s new uranium mill. A military flyover kicked off the festivities, a high school band played, and the New Mexico secretary of state unveiled a plaque commemorating the occasion. An estimated 6,000 people, nearly three times Grants’ population at the beginning of that decade, toured the mill, the local newspaper, the Grants Beacon, reported. Grants would be the Carrot Capital of America no more. It was running headlong into the Atomic Age.
But the celebration was short-lived: Less than a year and a half after operations began, state and federal regulators, with the company’s help, began investigating whether contaminants were leaking from Homestake’s waste.
ProPublica found that, as with most uranium mills in the U.S., Homestake built no liner between the earth and the sandy waste left over from milling, known as tailings. This happened even though an engineer with the New Mexico Department of Health warned the company only weeks after the mill opened that it needed to at least compact the soil underneath its waste to prevent leaks. Without a liner, pollution seeped into aquifers that supplied drinking water. In 1961, the same engineer wrote that groundwater samples showed radium 226, a radioactive and cancer-causing element, at levels as much as 31 times higher than naturally occur in the area, indicating “definite pollution of the shallow ground water table by the uranium mill tailings’ ponds.”
A federal report a year later identified even higher levels of radium 226 in groundwater.
Residents drank that water, fed it to livestock and applied it to crops. They weren’t told of the issue or supplied with bottled water until the mid-1970s, neighbors said. “A long time to keep the secret,” Carver said.
The EPA in the 1970s found elevated levels of selenium, which can damage the nervous system at high doses. Homestake disputes what levels of contaminants are attributable to the mill versus other sources, a question regulators are currently studying. The company confirmed in 1976 that its waste had created a plume of contamination in the groundwater but waited another decade to connect residents to an uncontaminated water system, only doing so after pressure from the EPA.
Seventeen years after pollution was first detected, Homestake began a series of ultimately unsuccessful attempts to clean the groundwater. The company pumped contaminated water out of aquifers and evaporated it aboveground, treated it in filtration systems and dumped hundreds of millions of gallons of clean water on the waste to flush uranium out of the pile, collecting the newly contaminated water for disposal.
Homestake was still left with more polluted water than it could process, so the company irrigated crops, applying more than 3.1 billion gallons to farmland in the subdivisions. As a result, the topsoil contained elevated levels of uranium and selenium. The state and the NRC halted the practice, which the NRC said the company had done without its approval.
Much of the now-fallow farmland has turned to dust that’s an incessant headache for residents. Windstorms whip it up, piling it on roadways and pushing it through the slightest cracks in homes. Regulators have issued dozens of violation notices to the company, including for failing to fence off contaminated land and for exposing workers to high uranium levels without alerting them.
At the state level, New Mexico regulators waited until 2009, 49 years after first finding water pollution, to issue a formal warning that groundwater included substances that cause cancer and birth defects. They waited another nine years before barring people from drilling new or replacement wells in aquifers near the cleanup effort, but the order did not require existing wells to be plugged. A spokesperson for the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer said authorities had issued a “relatively small” number of domestic or livestock well permits in the contaminated area. That number, the spokesperson said, is 122.
Uranium exposure is pervasive in this part of the world.
Miners who worked before 1971, when the government was the sole purchaser of uranium, are eligible for compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. In June, President Joe Biden signed a bill postponing its expiration for two years. But miners who worked in the industry after other uranium buyers entered the market, as well as residents of communities that were impacted by uranium extraction and processing, like those next to Homestake, still receive no benefits. Spearheaded by the New Mexican delegation, bills pending before Congress would expand the legislation to include more miners and appropriate funds to study the health impacts of living near these sites.
Linda Evers is waiting on those reforms. She worked in the area’s mines and mills, including Homestake, after the 1971 cutoff. She stayed on the job through two pregnancies, removing trash from the ore until hours before she gave birth to her son. Both her children have birth defects, and she now lives with kidney failure, cysts on her organs and a degenerative bone disease.
“You worked in a never-ending dirt storm,” Evers remembered. “You were supplied a paper mask that was worthless in about 20 minutes.”
She also dealt with contamination at home. For more than 15 years, Evers lived across the street from Homestake. Her well water was so foul it stunted the plants in her garden, she said. Evers eventually accepted the company’s buyout offer and moved to a new home farther from the waste. A half-built greenhouse sits in her former backyard, her once-lively home stripped of its porch and part of the roof.
Down the road, John Boomer doesn’t know where he’ll go if he sells to Homestake. An artist who paints with a Southwestern palette of sand and soil, he lives in an art studio and home he shares with his partner, Maggie Billiman, a member of the Navajo Nation and fellow artist.
The consequences of uranium production are constantly on the couple’s minds. More than 500 abandoned uranium mines pockmark the Navajo Nation, and Billiman’s father, a Navajo Code Talker in World War II, died of stomach cancer, an illness associated with downwind exposure to nuclear tests. Boomer has written the story of uranium into lyrics, singing about the harm caused by the waste that was left behind.
Those corporate little creeps
Will cause many a widow to cry and weep
While I’m just left on the ground to seep
Homestake is working on requests to both the NRC and the EPA for groundwater cleanup waivers, arguing it’s done all it can to clean up the area.
The company excavated soil from more than 3,500 acres where wind had carried contaminants off-site. Homestake also collected about 1.3 million pounds of uranium and 75,000 pounds of selenium by treating or evaporating more than 10 billion gallons of groundwater, according to company data.
Other uranium mines and mills polluted the area’s main drinking water aquifer upstream of Homestake. Residents worry what will happen to contamination from those sites and from Homestake when the company halts its water treatment.
Homestake says it has built a hydrological model that shows the former mill’s contamination will stay close to the site. (The model won’t be released until the company files its formal application for cleanup exemptions, likely in August.)
But researchers who have studied the hydrology around Homestake said the contamination will head downstream. “Would it keep on moving? Yes, that’s nature,” said Dixon, the hydrogeologist. The real question, he said, one that modeling can’t answer, is how quickly the pollution will migrate.
ProPublica identified sites across the West where regulators approved waivers based on modeling, only to later discover the predictions were flawed.
At a site in Wyoming called Bear Creek, the NRC found concentrations of uranium in groundwater more than 10 times higher than a model had predicted. At a site along the banks of the Colorado River, in Rifle, Colorado, the NRC approved a cleanup plan based on groundwater modeling that predicted uranium would fall to safe levels within 10 years. Monitoring showed concentrations remained dangerously high about a decade later, and new modeling predicted uranium levels wouldn’t reach safe levels for more than a century.
There’s also the cleanup of another Wyoming mill named Split Rock, which Homestake has compared its site to as it seeks a cleanup exemption. Regulators granted a waiver in 2006 after the responsible company presented a model showing contamination wouldn’t reach downstream wells for 1,000 years. “The recent data, however, have shown results that are not consistent with the model predictions,” the NRC wrote seven years later. Nitrates, which are sometimes used in the uranium refining process, were measured in a downstream monitoring well at more than four times approved limits.
McIntyre, the NRC spokesperson, said that in those cases, “NRC staff reviewed groundwater monitoring results and verified that the levels were and remain protective of public health and safety,” adding that the agency requires models used in waiver requests be conservative in their predictions.
Leaders of communities downstream from Homestake, including the Pueblo of Acoma, fear that wishful thinking could allow pollution from the waste to taint their water. The Acoma reservation, about 20 miles from Homestake’s tailings, has been continuously inhabited since before 1200. Its residents use groundwater for drinking and surface water for irrigating alfalfa and corn, but Donna Martinez, program coordinator for the pueblo’s Environment Department, said the pueblo government can’t afford to do as much air and water monitoring as staff would like.
“There are always going to be concerns with the plumes,” Martinez said.
Most days, Billiman contemplates this “poison” and whether she and Boomer might move away from it as she prays to Mother Earth and Father Sky toward Mount Taylor, one of the four sacred Diné peaks, which rises just east of the subdivisions.
“I tell her, gosh, we did this to you. I’m sorry,” Billiman said. “Then, we just say ‘hózho náhásdlii, hózho náhásdlii’ four times.”
“All will be beautiful again,” Boomer roughly translated.
As they prayed one recent morning, the dawn light tumbled over the mountain, illuminating the nearby Haystack Mountain, where a Diné man named Paddy Martinez discovered economically recoverable uranium in 1950 and ignited the region’s mining boom. The light cascaded over Homestake’s tailings piles, across the valley and onto the five subdivisions.
The smell of pizza wafted through a Village of Milan government building down the road from the mill site, as about 20 locals trickled in to meet with Homestake one April evening. They caught up while JoAnne Martinez, a community liaison for Homestake, beseeched them to tuck into the food she had set out. A map taped to the wall showed the location of groundwater contamination, and a stack of glossy booklets celebrated the company’s reclamation project with the slogan: “Doing it right… …Right to the end.”
Tensions rose when residents spoke about the company’s offers to buy their properties. Homestake, whose parent company Barrick had nearly $12 billion in revenue last year, pays market value based on past sales prices of comparable properties, rather than the cost to replace what residents have, which is ballooning rapidly amid the housing crunch. Over the past five years, prices for residential properties around New Mexico have increased about 59%, while they’ve spent about half as long on the market, according to data from real estate companies Zillow and Redfin, respectively.
In the meeting, residents explained what that trend, coupled with Homestake’s offers, has meant for their own housing searches. “It’s like you spit on me,” one resident said of the company’s proposal to buy the property where she has lived for 61 years. Another neighbor told ProPublica she had asked a builder to assess the cost of constructing a nearly identical home and got an estimate $60,000 higher than what Homestake offered. But Homestake didn’t budge.
Neighbors have worried about Homestake’s impact on their property value for decades. They filed a class-action lawsuit against the company in 1983 for alleged property damages, later settling the case for what they deemed to be small payouts. In exchange, those residents agreed to release the company from further liability.
More recently, the company has rejected residents’ requests to move the waste to a lined disposal cell, which could prevent additional groundwater contamination and radon exposure and possibly allow them to stay in their homes. So far, cleanup has cost more than $230 million, including about $103 million that came from taxpayers through the Department of Energy. Homestake estimates it could cost as much as $2 billion more to move the entire pile. Buying out five subdivisions is the cheaper option.
Homestake argues capping the site and walking away is safer, citing reports that conclude moving the pile would lead to at least one workplace traffic-related death and a high likelihood of workers and residents developing cancer. The reports used calculations from the Department of Energy, which is moving 16 million tons of uranium waste off of a site in Moab, Utah. The department’s report found it posed far less risk to workers than later estimates for Homestake. Department of Energy staff said they could not comment on why there are such different risks for the Homestake and Moab sites.
As more neighbors at the meeting demurred about the company’s offers, Orson Tingey, a land manager for Homestake and Barrick, explained that the company has continued to offer the same rates for properties as it did before the COVID-19 pandemic to remain consistent. “We know that doesn’t necessarily work for everybody,” he said.
Jackie Langford set a radon detector on her kitchen table and shooed away her inquisitive 12-year-old, who was more interested in talking uranium policy than finishing his homework. She recalled when her family moved in a decade ago for her husband’s job. No one mentioned the risks posed by Homestake’s tailings pile, which looms less than a mile away.
Now, as a registered nurse tending to former uranium miners, Langford knows too much about the dangers. When it’s inhaled, radon breaks down in the lungs, releasing bursts of radiation that can damage tissue and cause cancer. Her patients have respiratory issues as well as lung cancer. They lose their breath simply lifting themselves out of a chair.
Radon, the radioactive gas formed as uranium decays, poses Homestake’s main cancer threat to residents, according to the EPA’s 2014 study. It is more concentrated in outdoor air near Homestake than in a nearby community with a former uranium mill that has fully covered its waste.
It hasn’t helped that the company has struggled to control radon emanating from its larger waste pile, exceeding federal safety standards each of the last six years, according to company readings reported to the NRC. This year, Homestake requested permission to add a new cover to the pile to reduce radon emissions, which the NRC is now reviewing.
During the pandemic Langford and her family began thinking more about Homestake’s possible impact on their respiratory health, driving them to buy a radon detector. The gas can seep into buildings through cracks in foundations. Indoor radon exposure is the second-leading cause of lung cancer in the United States, behind smoking.
When Langford measured levels in her home, the radon detector registered 4 picocuries per liter and rose as high as 7 pCi/L, she said — levels high enough that the EPA recommends remediation.
She brought her concerns to Homestake, but “for the longest time, they wouldn’t talk to me,” she said. The company eventually connected her with one of their consultants, who told her not to worry because his own home tested above 4 pCi/L and the results did not concern him. He also told Langford, as well as ProPublica, that he is not a radon expert and suggested she complete a longer-term radon test and contact people better versed on the topic.
In 2010, before Langford moved in, EPA contractors placed radon detectors in homes near Homestake and found unsafe radon levels in a dozen homes.
While independent researchers suggested the uranium waste could be a source of indoor radon, the EPA has not determined that is the case, instead identifying naturally occurring gas seeping from the soil. The agency required Homestake to fund radon mitigation in homes but has not done any more radon testing or mitigation since.
“Best practice would be retesting at least every other year to assure things have not gotten worse,” said Michael Murphy, who is retired from the EPA’s indoor air quality team.
ProPublica spoke with eight households the EPA monitored, and all said they were never retested or advised to retest on their own. An EPA staffer told one resident the agency had no plans to conduct follow-up studies.
Because the EPA did not return to test, ProPublica did, placing certified indoor radon kits in nine area households. Three returned readings that exceeded the EPA’s threshold for mitigation, while a fourth registered above the World Health Organization’s lower suggested mitigation level. Langford’s tests averaged 6.95 pCi/L.
She immediately thought about her son. Children are more vulnerable to radon.
Early this spring, Homestake approached Langford and her husband with an offer to purchase their home. They wavered. The family loved the area and knew neighbors who had sold, only to find it impossible to buy a similar property elsewhere.
“I don’t think that’s fair,” Langford said, “but at this point I don’t even know how you fight it.”
With the results from their radon testing front of mind, Langford’s husband signed Homestake’s buyout deal. The family had made a decision. Their health was too important to remain in their home.
How ProPublica reported the story
Methodology: To report on the Homestake uranium mill’s impact on the area, ProPublica worked with residents to crowdsource indoor radon levels, home purchasing contracts and health-related documents.
Radon Testing: Indoor radon levels were collected using Air Chek 3- to 7-day radon test kits placed in nine houses in Milan and Grants, New Mexico. Air Chek’s devices and laboratories are included on the National Radon Proficiency Program’s approved device and analysis provider list.
Radon levels vary day to day and season to season, so ProPublica followed EPA recommendations to conduct two sequential short-term tests. A ProPublica reporter helped install the first test at each house to ensure the testing locations adhered to EPA testing protocols. After about five days, residents took down each test and sent the kits to Air Chek’s laboratory. Residents immediately placed the second Air Chek 3- to 7-day test in the same location. About five days later, residents shipped the second test to the lab. We averaged the results of the two tests to obtain an estimated indoor radon level for each house.
Three households were only able to obtain one result. In one case, this was because a test was not properly sealed and could not be analyzed; in another, a test had a manufacturing defect; due to a shipping delay the third arrived at the laboratory beyond the necessary time frame for testing. For these three households, we relied on the readings from one test. Each of the households that received only one test showed levels below the EPA and World Health Organization thresholds for radon mitigation.
Before placing the tests, we interviewed seven professionals with radon testing expertise and reviewed the EPA and American Association of Radon Scientists and Technologists’ testing guidelines. These independent experts reviewed ProPublica’s methodology and provided feedback. After testing, ProPublica presented the results to the same experts.
We also discussed the results with residents of each household that hosted tests.
Outreach Methodology: To interview as many households living near the mill site as possible, we mirrored community engagement efforts conducted by federal and state authorities during previous environmental health studies. This included:
- Publishing advertisements in the Cibola Citizen and Gallup Independent
- Sending letters to every household in the area
- Following up with phone calls and text messages to numbers associated with every area household
- Door-knocking at households that did not respond to the ads, letters and phone calls
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