Robert Alvarez
Robert Alvarez, an Institute for Policy Studies senior scholar, served as senior policy adviser to the Energy Department's secretary and deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment from 1993 to 1999.
Articles by this author
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Views Saturday, December 02, 2017 Korea: End the 67-Year War It’s time to find a path to end the 67-year-long Korean war. As the threat of military conflict looms, the American public is largely unaware of the sobering facts about America’s longest unresolved war and one of the world’s bloodiest. The 1953 armistice agreement engineered by President... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, June 26, 2012 Radioactive Conflicts of Interest Last month, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) heralded an Energy Department funded study indicating that evacuation zones around nuclear power stations might not be needed after a major nuclear accident. The study, which exposed mice to radiation levels comparable to those near the Fukushima nuclear disaster, found no evidence of genetic harm. "There are no data that say that's a dangerous level," says Jacquelyn Yanch, a leader of the study. Read more |
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Views Friday, June 01, 2012 Nuclear Tuna and NPR's Trivialization Yesterday, National Public Radio (NPR) ran a story asserting that cesium-137 from the Fukushima nuclear accident found in Bluefish tuna on the west coast of the U.S. is harmless . Read more |
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Views Tuesday, April 24, 2012 Why Fukushima Is a Greater Disaster than Chernobyl and a Warning Sign for the US In the aftermath of the world’s worst nuclear power disaster, the news media is just beginning to grasp that the dangers to Japan and the rest of the world posed by the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site are far from over. After repeated warnings by former senior Japanese officials, nuclear experts, and now a U.S. Read more |
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Views Saturday, March 10, 2012 No Nuclear Nirvana on the Horizon Is the nuclear drought over? When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recently approved two new nuclear reactors near Augusta, Georgia, the first such decision in 32 years, there was plenty of hoopla. Read more |
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Views Tuesday, December 06, 2011 The Human Face of the Nuclear Arms Race The legacy of human suffering from amassing nuclear arsenals remains ignored in the current debate over eliminating these horrific weapons of mass destruction. Read more |
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Views Monday, June 06, 2011 America's Nuclear Spent-Fuel Time Bombs Now that many Americans have stopped paying attention to Japan's nuclear catastrophe, shocking new details about its severity are finally coming to light. Read more |
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Views Friday, April 29, 2011 Japan's Nuclear Catastrophe Leaves Little to Celebrate on Children's Day May 5 is Children’s Day, a Japanese national holiday that celebrates the happiness of childhood. This year, it will fall under a dark, radioactive shadow. Japanese children in the path of radioactive plumes from the crippled nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station are likely to suffer health problems that a recent government action will only exacerbate. Read more |
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Views Saturday, April 02, 2011 The FDA and Fukushima Fallout Recently, a senior scientist with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made this comment to the news media about radioactive fallout being detected in milk in the United States from the nuclear catastrophe in Japan: "Radiation is all around us in our daily lives, and these findings are a miniscule amount compared Fukushima-Daiichi to what people experience every day. For example, a person would be exposed to low levels of radiation on a round trip cross country flight, watching television, and even from construction materials.” Read more |
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Views Monday, March 21, 2011 Safeguarding Spent Fuel Pools in the United States As this photograph shows, the spent fuel pools at Units 3 and 4 at the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex are exposed to the open sky and might be draining. The radioactive dose rates coming off the pools appear to be life-threatening. Lead-shielded helicopters trying to dump water over the pools/reactors could not get close enough to make much difference because of the dangerous levels of radiation. Read more |