For those of you that don’t know in the days before the well blew up, Halliburton were involved with setting a cement plug which would have temporarily sealed BP’s Moncondo exploration well. According to another article as early as February Halliburton knew there were problems with their recipe for the cement. They then kept this information from BP notifying them by email about only one of the tests, leaving out the tests with “unstable” results.

And get this:

Chevron recently carried out independent lab tests of a cement slurry that Halliburton said was the same as that used in the Macondo well. The commission staff said Chevron reported that “its lab personnel were unable to generate stable foam cement in the laboratory using the materials provided by Halliburton.

-Article.

Not only that it seems like Halliburton lied about the unstable tests. Apparently to an inquiry on the explosion, Tomas Roth, Halliburton’s Vice President for Cementing said their results showed the cement mixture was stable, which of course seems to question the unstable results but apparently they didn’t make this issue known to BP, although they claim they shared the data in an email to BP, but apparently they never used the words “unstable” in that email.

Now that is has come out that they have destroyed evidence, I would bet money the lost documents also include these unstable test results in the days preceding the explosion. Which would be tough if they gave them to BP through email.

Now Halliburton is blaming BP because they only used 6 of the 21 centralizers, a device that ensures the drill pipe is properly centered.

And then this:

Robert Bea, a professor and oil industry expert at the University of California at Berkeley, said that drillers will often run one test on a cement mixture, then a second test as a backup. He called four tests “unusual.”
“Given that they are running four, that’s telling me they were having trouble getting to a stable design,” Bea said. “And so they continued to work with this witches’ brew until they got on to something they thought was workable.”

-Article

But I came across another article where Halliburton admits it never performed a test of the mixture, but that BP ordered them to change the mixture last minute meaning it could not perform the needed tests. Either way, sounds like negligence to me.

I have to say from the onset of this disaster Halliburton’s roll didn’t really pass the smell test for me. Due mostly to their close involvement with the CIA and Pentagon during the Iraq war and all the no bid contracts they’ve received because Dick Chaney was on the board of directors, sounds like a CIA front company to me. 

These weren’t a bunch of idiots, they may need to learn a bit about hubris but I don’t think they were incapable of the job they were doing. So it begs the question on whether they knew what they were doing may endanger the well. The US Government always seems eager to embrace disasters it can avoid being seen as the cause of (like Hurricanes, floods and earthquakes), although one could argue the approval process for off shore oil rigs may be in their hands, and it is probably a sure bet that many congresmen and women have made millions off the off shore oil rig deals in one way or another.

Although, I think the elite of this world are hoping most of us wont.

Although, can you really call the Straight mainstream??

They have even mentioned the increased infant mortality rates since the disaster, which I haven’t seen elsewhere, except online of course.

But I think the thing that gets me the most, is the bullshit that there is no risk to the public, but 1 in 3,000 will likely develop cancer. Yeah you read that right, it is safe for 2,999 of 3,000, which considering the population of Vancouver alone, ( 2.1 million according to Wikipedia) that means at least 700 cases of new cancers, hardly no risk, low risk to the 2,099,300 who don’t develop cancer, leukemia, or some other disease.

And of course there is the always amusing comment that levels are within normal background exposure or exposure due to x-rays. This is not only misinformation; it is a complete distortion of the actual facts. The biggest risk of exposure to the fallout from Fukushima is not the radiation from the dust released, it is the dust itself. After inhaling the radioactive particles it will continue to expose a person to radiation every day, for the rest of their natural life. (Assuming of course, that the radiation doesn’t turn us into crime fighting super heroes of some kind)

I’m going to let that sink in. No risk to the public, unless you are one of the few to inhale radioactive dust, and then, well, the Canadian government sees you as expendable. Amazing, the people that claim to regulate us to death in order to save us from ourselves, don’t seem to give two shits about saving us from radiation exposure, or even keeping us informed of the levels of exposure. This is of course because Canadian companies make a killing selling uranium to other countries for, lets call them peaceful purposes, which is of course an argument for another time.

Fukushima Groundwater Contamination Worst in Nuclear History from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

The following video is probably one of the most heartbreaking things I have seen, maybe ever. If you can stomach it, take a look. (not gruesome, just tragic) 

These are the lost children of Chernobyl. Sentenced to live their lives trapped in their defective bodies, made that way because of our mistakes. These children have suffered, and will continue to suffer, likely for the majority of their existence. Who will take responsibility for what has happened to these children, not the Nuclear Industry/Lobby. I could never wish this fate on any child but poetic justice, or Karma may have something in mind for those singing nuclear technologies praises. Although, more likely, as with Chernobyl, the innocent will suffer. After all, these are just innocent children whose parents lived to close to this disaster. I wonder if they could, would they blame us for their suffering.

Is this our future?

I’m not really sure what the odds are on that, but maybe this will finally prove that the age old saying regarding lightning not striking the same place twice is a total myth.

(Some of the comments in youtube are claiming this video is fake (which is almost as common place as “first”), so judge for yourselves)

I wanted to bring some quotes to your attention, but you should catch them if you are going to watch the video.

On the climate change debate:

[They are] “trying to deal with global warming as though the issue was weather the climate ever changes, or weather there is a greenhouse effect or weather man could contribute something to it. None of that is actually in dispute; there is a greenhouse effect, climate always changes, and undoubtedly man can contribute something if the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings could contribute something. The question, as always in science, is how much. If man’s contribution is very little when compared to the normal variability people experience, then there’s not much point in trying to manipulate it because it won’t make much of a difference.”

On the use of Climate models:

“The issue of climate sensitivity is the primary question we are dealing with. […] There are numerous pieces of evidence, some of them quite rigorous, that the current models are greatly exaggerating climate sensitivity, that in reality it’s very modest. And what we are dealing with is the potential effect over the next century or so of ½ a degree, and there is no evidence whatever that this is associated with catastrophe”

“In general, […] using models, especially models that don’t test out very well to predict long into the future beyond the time scale which they function does not seem wise. […] What isn’t realized is, the models are quite similar to each other and their agreement on climate sensitivity within a broad range hardly proves anything. It depends on rather delicate feedbacks and primarily on feedbacks from clouds and even the IPCC acknowledges that we are virtually ignorant of clouds and the models do a very bad job of them. So if you understand how the feedbacks function, that statement is tantamount to the statement that the models cannot be used to predict climate.”

On the idea of a ‘tipping point’:

“It is almost unheard of to have a natural system that when you perturb it, it tries to make the perturbation worse. That would say the earth system was ‘sick’ from the origin, 4.5 billion years ago, and it doesn’t seem like it would have made it this long if that were true.”

On who is keeping the ‘crisis’ alive:

“[F]or a lot of people including the bureaucracy in government [...] the issue is power. It is hard to imagine a better leverage point than C02 to assume control over a society. [...] [I]t is essential to the production of energy, it is essential to breathing. It’s a point, if you demonize it and gain control of it, you so to speak control everything. That’s attractive to people.”

“There are those that are committed to it because they stand to profit from it”

Not sure I could have said it better myself. (video below)