By Yoichi Shimatsu
Exclusive to Rense
3-2-16

Waste management is about noise pollution from garbage trucks in the predawn darkness, dumpster stench, kickbacks from fat contracts for big-city bosses, and Jimmy Hoffa compacted under landfill. Trash removal doesn’t make the news but it does generate piles of cash for men with a bad odor, not just the haulers and gangsters but also some of the world’s richest tycoons.
 
Nuclear waste management can be more profitable than any mound of household waste since it requires wide tracts of remote desolate land and vast expanses of ocean. The trappings for a nuclear clean-up are costly, requiring theatrical props like bulky steel equipment and data charts to impress the media, ally public fears and keep regulators at bay. Appearances are deceiving so taking our cue from Toto the terrier in The Wizard of Oz, let’s peek behind the curtain of nuclear-industry disinformation.
 
Pulling the levels at the Fukushima cleansing operation is a small Irvine-based waste treatment company recently sold by venture capitalists (led by a former CIA chief) to a French water company (notorious enough to be in a James Bond movie) whose most influential board member is the godfather of the Italian nuclear-waste industry and adviser to a publicity-shy Anglo-French Jewish banking dynasty. What about the wicked witch? She’s called Veolia.
 
 The Curious Case of Kurion
 
Warning: this cast of characters is immondizia radioattiva. Everything sounds better in Italian, even radioactive garbage.
 
- Kurion is a nuclear waste-handling company founded by former Department of Energy (DOE) officials in Irvine, southern California, to provide nuclear-cleanup services developed at the Hanford site, a former nuclear-bomb assembly plant in Washington State now used as a graveyard for decommissioned reactors. Although it has only 300 employees, mostly new hires, Kurion is famous as the only U.S.-based contractor for water-decontamination at the TEPCO-owned Fukushima No.1 nuclear plant.
 
Launched in 2008 by John Raymont, Kurion is a legacy company. Raymont is a former manager with NUKEM, a perfect name for the corporation that produces parts for nuclear-fuel assemblies. NUKEM was founded by Rio Tinto, a Rothschild-controlled uranium-mining company, and Mallinckrodt chemicals. Mallinckrodt purified uranium for the bombs that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Its radioactive waste was illegally dumped around St. Louis, Missouri, including at the West Lake landfill, which is now burning out of control.

The von Mallinckrodt family were partners of the Rothschilds in Schroder Bank and the I.G. Farben pharmaceutical combine in Germany during the rise of Nazism. NUKEM has since been taken over by the Canadian mining giant CAMECO, which sold one of its divisions to EnergySolutions, a rival in nuclear-cleanup sector that has filed a trade-secret infringement case against Kurion. Even with this raging feud, it’s all in la famiglia.
 
- From its 2008 start-up until the sale, Kurion was financed by venture partners Lux Capital, led by ex-CIA director James Woolsey, Zionist opponent of the Iran nuclear deal; the Acadia Woods fund of pro-Israeli financier Arthur Samberg; and Firelake Capital run by Martin Lagod, a crony of former Energy Secretary Stephen Chu and lobbyist for energy start-ups requesting grants from the military’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-e). Their combined investment in Kurion was a measly $5 million.
 
- Since February 3, the new owner of Kurion is Veolia (formerly Vivendi), a French water company that ran a failed radioactive water-filtration project at Fukushima in partnership with nuclear giant AREVA. Veolia, which operates water-treatment systems in dozens of U.S. cities, has provoked the wrath of consumer groups with exorbitant rates for undrinkable tap water. Veolia paid an astonishing $350 million plus fees for the 7-year-old company with 300 employees, two-thirds of them from a recent takeover of Vista Engineering Techologies.
 
Hidden hand behind Veolia
 
A troubling concern about the purchase of Kurion, which has direct access to the U.S. nuclear-warhead complex and chemical weapons depot, is the barely disguised control of Veolia by the Rothschild Group, a major investor in Israel’s advanced-weapons program. The Rothschild connection was brought to light when Veolia came under criticism from the European BDS (boycott, divest and sanctions against Israel for human-rights abuses) movement over its construction of an Israeli-financed light-rail line through Palestinian East Jerusalem to the terminus on Rothschild Boulevard. A powerful Veolia board member of Veolia named Paolo Scaroni has served as adviser to N.M. Rothschild Bank in London and last year was appointed vice president of the Paris-based Rothschild Group.
 
U.S. national security is at stake with the Rothschild intrusion via Kurion into the. Army chemical-weapons deport in Umatilla, Oregon, along with the DOE Hanford Site and Oak Ridge nuclear laboratory in Tennessee. It is no exaggeration to suggest that, by failing to block the Veolia deal on national-security grounds and in support of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Energy Secretary Ernest Monitz is unwittingly or perhaps knowingly reenacting the treachery of Manhattan Project physicist Klaus Fuchs, who pilfered the A-bomb technology for Zionist-predominant weapons scientists under the Josef Stalin regime in the Soviet Union.
 
That precedent for illegal export of nuclear secrets was soon repeated in the smuggling via France of sensitive U.S. technology and nuclear materials to the newly created State of Israel. Lapses in monitoring aside, the issue is nuclear treason. The DOE notice of sales does not even mention a perfunctory inquiry into the transfer of Kurion to a foreign entity.
 
High Price for Third-Rate Tech
 
The Kurion deal, some $350 million plus unexplained fees of $15 million, means that Lux-Acadia-Firelake realized a return 70 times greater than initial investment. That’s for a mediocre service company that uses second-hand technology, some of it obtained through alleged fraud. Could hundreds of millions of dollars in windfall profit for ex-CIA director Woolsey, a shameless lobbyist for Israeli military interests, be in fact a bribe in exchange for access to classified U.S. nuclear-weapons production technology?
 
A glance at its technology on offer shows that Kurion simply cannot be worth that sum of money. Its much-hyped cesium-removal system captures cesium ions inside the pores of a naturally occurring alumina-silica mineral called zeolite. This is not innovative since zeolite was used as early as the 1990s for the cleanup at Three Mile Island. Zeolite is also found in home water-softener tanks, which are not exactly based on rocket science.
 
The bulky array of cesium filters has hardly made a dent in contaminated groundwater releases out of Fukushima, where radiation levels in ground water have risen significantly after Kurion started operations. The growing pile of cesium-saturated zeolite will also pose a problem of solid-waste disposal. Whatever the merits of Kurion’s zeolite, TEPCO still deals with its ground water and empties its tanks by flushing the radioactive broth into the Pacific.
 
Bizarre Solution to Tritium
 
As outlined below in the postscript to this essay, Kurion’s tritium-removal system with its bizarre use of catalytic pellets instead of a filter panel raises questions of whether its quirky design is a ploy to divert public attention away from ocean-dumping of tritiated wastewater. Two years ago, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), official promoter of nuclear energy in Japan, imposed a delivery date of 2018 for the tritium remover. The long waiting period is absurd when a workable catalytic-separation system for hydrogen and tritium gas can be assembled in a few weeks from commercially available components.
 
The grace period for a tritium separator will have delayed heavy-water filtration by up to four years. One embarrassing cause of delay in delivery is a trade-secrets complaint from rival EnergySolutions, which claims its key researchers who developed the tritium extractor were recruited and induced by Kurion to file a patent claim on the stolen design.
 
Meanwhile tritium levels in seawater outside Fukushima have spiked by billions of becquerels, indicating that TEPCO has been purposely opening the release valves of tritiated-water storage tanks as the quick solution. Indistinguishable from plain water, tritium is a beta-ray emitter harmful to health when ingested through liquids or food. The outflow of tritium from Fukushima is the likely cause of the break-up of the Arctic ice sheet since 2011. Its minus 252 Celsius freezing point means that tritium remains in a liquid state, creating weak pockets that fracture ice crystals. As a result, sea levels are rising worldwide.
 
Access to Nuclear Labs
 
Kurion became a diversified nuclear waste management company not by inventing its own methods or equipment but by “borrowing” technical know-how from competitors. That explains its 2013 acquisition of Vista Engineering Technologies based in Richmond, just outside the front gate of the DOE Hanford Site in Washington State.
 
Entering the clean-up business eight years before Kurion, Vista has a contract with Hanford Site for vitrification, the trapping radioactive waste inside glass for storage purposes. Vista operates smaller scrubbing facilities at national nuclear lab in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and at the Army’s chemical weapons depot in Umatilla, Oregon.
 
It is notable that Kurion’s new French managers, after gaining access to these U.S. weapons facilities, packed off former Vista CEO Phil Ols on foreign assignment to the Sellafield nuclear plant in Britain. Obviously, Ols might become suspicious of French and Israeli technicians snooping around America’s top-secret labs, and therefore he would be a risk to Veolia and the Mossad had he remained in the USA. Sellafield, with its free-flowing radioactivity, is an ideal place to get rid of a potential informant for the FBI.
 
Quantum of Solace
 
Veolia (formerly Vivendi Environment) is fictionalized as the Greene Planet eco-business in the James Bond thriller Quantum of Solace. In the film, ecology was exploited in a clever ruse by the cynical financier Dominic Greene, who spouts environmental slogans while pursuing the hidden agenda of a global crime syndicate called Quantum, whose aim is to monopolize the water supply of entire nations.
 
Mr. Greene is a composite of Quantum hedge-fund boss George Soros (“solace”) and “climate hero” David Mayer de Rothschild, son of the British billionaire Sir Evelyn, chairman of N.M. Rothschild Bank and publisher of The Economist magazine. The eco-gadfly heir on his sailboat is an activist against plastic trash in the ocean but somehow failed to notice the rising radioactivity levels in the Pacific, the English Channel and the Mediterranean.
 
As the inspiration for Quantum of Solace, Veolia presents itself as an environmentally conscious enterprise while in fact it is a cutthroat operation notorious for shoddy workmanship, crappy maintenance, tainted water and over-billing of customers. Veolia has positioned itself as a technical provider in countries where governments are corrupt and incompetent at public-works management. Waterworks are a big-ticket item requiring massive loans from the World Bank, enabling Veolia to skim the fat with friendly local dictators. The French corporation is a driving force for the privatization of public water supplies, resulting in the commodification of H20 from an abundant basis of life into a generator of profits under increasing scarcity.
 
The Fukushima crisis opened a new business field for Veolia, the filtering of radioactive contaminants from wastewater pouring out of nuclear-power plants. Around the world, decrepit reactors are pumping radioactive isotopes into lakes and rivers, threatening urban populations with rising cancer rates and wildlife with extinction. What’s been missing is a high-profile environmental company that can sanitize the public image of the nuclear industry with expensive water-filtering equipment while quietly disposing the wastewater in the sea.
 
Don of the Dead
 
Veolia board member Paolo Scaroni is the “go-to guy” in the global nuclear waste enterprise. His credentials include a new posting as deputy chairman of the Rothschild Group and serving as a longtime energy adviser to NM Rothschild Bank. He serves as chair emeritus of the Board of Overseers at his alma mater, the Columbia Business School. His reputable image, however, has not deterred Italian state prosecutors from trying to indict him on bribery charges related to the Italian national oil company’s operations in Algeria.
 
Scaroni’s association with the nuclear industry began with his executive positions in the glass industry, including Saint Gobain whose technology is used to store radioactive waste in glass rods and Pilkington, which produced radiation-reflecting lead glass for atomic power plants. A crony of President Silvio Berlusconi, he was appointed to head the national power company ENI in 2002.
 
During his three-year tenure at the utility, ENI had a lingering problem of media coverage of covert nuclear-waste duping in the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean. Following the Chernobyl meltdown of 1986, the Italian electorate in a 1990 national referendum voted for anonnuclear policy, resulting in shut down of the Caorso and Enrico Fermi nuclear plants. What did ENI do with all its spent fuel rods? When you’ve got load that’s too hot to handle, call in the Calabrese.
 
Somalia Meets the Mob
 
In the wake of the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami that swept across the Indian Ocean, Somali villagers were surprised to discover containers of radioactive waste scattered on their beaches, apparently broken free from a sunken freighter. That discovery led to renewed international interest in how the Calabria-based organized-crime group Ndrangheta sank thousands of tons of nuclear waste aboard some 30 derelict Danish and Swedish freighters.
 
The illegal sea-dumping started in the Mediterranean in the late 1980s and gained momentum after Italy’s nuclear-plant closures. By the mid-1990s, the Italian press pursued leaks about secret deliveries of radioactive waste at the Somali port of Bossaso. After interviewing locals, Italian television-news journalist Ilaria Alpi and her cameraman were shot to death by seven gunmen in an Mogadishu ambush. Che peccato. What a pity.
 
The radioactive dumping was forgotten as soon as shiny new automatic weapons arrived in Somalia for distribution to unemployed fishermen, kick-starting the “Somali pirates” media spectacle, a diversionary opera from the nuclear industry. The Somalia offshore hot spot overheated the Indian Ocean, wiping out marine life and super-heating clouds that since then rise over the Himalayas, bringing unprecedented floods to Kashmir, Pakistan, Sichuan Province and the Gobi Desert, killing hundreds, displacing millions and reducing fertile valleys to wasteland. Disaster surfed the waves and soared upon the wind without cease till now and into the distant future.
 
Washing his hands of the Ndrangeta affair, Scaroni made a rousing speech against Italy’s nonnuclear policy and called for a revival of nuclear power at the 2007 World Energy Council gathering in Rome. That’s chutzpah. Rothschild’s “go-to guy” is a member of the board of Assicurazioni Generali, the Trieste-based insurer that underwrites loans for nuclear-energy development and provides insurance to the shipping industry. All bases covered, the go-to guy was promoted into the inner circle of the Rothschilds.
 
Back to Fukushima
 
With its purchase of Kurion, Veolia is back in the game at Fukushima. How could anyone be so eager to return to that hellish radiation-spewing mess? There’s money to be made but that’s not all. The bigger incentive is inside the water from damaged reactors: tritium.
 
The nuclear plant at Dimona in the Negev Desert has fallen on hard times after decades in service, creating a shortage of fresh tritium for Israel’s nuclear-strike force. Due to steady decay, tritium rapidly loses its potency for generating a fusion blast that can trigger the fission chain reaction in plutonium and enriched ranium.
 
The Kurion tritium separator, which will undoubtedly be more advanced than its current design (limited by the EnergySolutions dispute), will produce hydrogen gas and the“byproduct” of pure tritium. In cryogenic (very cold) storage in metal containers, the much-coveted gas is easily air-freighted to ballistic-missile launchpads in Israel. In event of a red alert, the tritium is pressure-pumped into a hollow pit at the core of a warhead, along with an equal amount of inert deuterium, to arm the nuclear bomb.
 
Israels at Fukushima 311
 
Israeli military experts are no strangers at the greater Fukushima nuclear-weapons complex. In the days and minutes before the March 2011 tsunami, engineers with the Dimona-based security company Magna BSP were busy installing a optical-and-sonic radar detection system to defend Fukushima from ground assault or aerial attacks by terrorists or foreign commandos.
 
Magna is financially controlled by Israel’s leading producer of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones) Aeronautics Defense Systems (ADS). A major investor in ADS is the Edmond de Rothschild Israel Opportunity Fund, funded by the Paris-based Rothschild Group, which also has its fingers in Veolia-Kurion.
 
So there we have it. Fukushima was and will again be a nuclear-weapons production facility, this time around specializing in tritium, not only for Japan’s secret arsenal but also for the Israelis. No more need for shoplifted blueprints of atomic-bomb casings from Manhattan Project physicists and their hapless fellow travelers, no more stolen boxes of plutonium flown by El Al out of JFK Airport, and no more Jonathan Pollards in prison. The many tentacles of the Rothschild octopus now clasp the keys to Hanford and Oak Ridge along with their precious tritium in Fukushima.
 
Pearl Harbor 2 will be nuclear
 
The tritium-extractor for Japan follows on other key nuclear-technology transfers, including the George W. Bush administration’s clandestine removal of plutonium warheads from the Amarillo warhead-disassembly facility for shipment by Israeli cargo vessels to Japan and ongoing GE cooperation with Hitachi Electric on a high-speed laser-separation method for plutonium called Global Laser Extraction (GLE).
 
These upgrades to Japan’s clandestine nuclear arsenal stand in violation of Article 1 of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which mandates the five nuclear-states "not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce" a non-nuclear weapon state to acquire nuclear weapons. The nuclear watchdog agency IAEA has been rendered impotent against Japan’s nuclear drive due to obstruction from its general director, Yukiya Amano, an intelligence paymaster from the nuclear desk of Japan’s Foreign Ministry.
 
Historical precedent and the unrepentant revanchism of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe indicate that a nuclear-armed Japan is the highest-level long-term threat to U.S. national security. As for the breaches that led to the loss of nuclear secrets, which accelerate the nuclear armament of Japan and Israel, effective countermeasures will be a major challenge for the incoming President.
 
Following this conclusion of the essay, the technical section below is attached to detail the process of tritium extraction and to advocate safer alternative methods of long-term storage. Author: Yoichi Shimatsu is a science journalist who has conducted radiation research inside the Fukushima exclusion zone since spring 2011.
 
Postscript: Deception in the Details
 
At first glance, the Kurion publicity materials from new chief technology officer Gaetan Bonhomme strikes one as either a bad joke or a serious attempt to get around the U.S. nuclear-export regime. DOE clause 810 imposes curbs on commercial sales of nuclear materials to foreign entities, and so do the State Department’s restrictions on armaments trade.
The Kurion diagram is of a tritium-separation method circa 1973, perhaps earlier. The use of an alkaline electrolyzer, long obsolete, cannot be taken seriously and must be a decoy to throw counter-proliferation agents off the trail. This old-type device, which uses negative (cathode) and positive (anode) electrodes in a saline (ion water) solution to separate out hydrogen and oxygen is beset with two problem: some mixing of the gases that can cause an explosion; and significant energy losses due to heat generation.

Current design for splitting water into hydrogen and water, as understood by the Japanese automotive sector in their quest for the hydrogen fuel for cars, is called PEM, a polymer proton-exchange membrane. This method uses a thin platinum catalyst on the anode (positive charge) to split water into the two types of ionized gas. The protons (H+ ions) pass through the polymer PEM to the cathode (negative charge) where the electron flow converts the ions into hydrogen gas.

Another oddity in the Kurion publicity, as presented for public consumption, is the claimed use of palladium pellets to remove hydrogen gas from heavy water inside a column. The process is based on the ability of catalytic palladium to absorb hydrogen atoms into vacant bonds in its crystal lattice structure. Hydrogen and tritium penetrate the soft metal at different rates, especially within a raised temperature range. To accomplish gas separation, the mixture of hydrogen and tritium is sent in pressurized steam, and the tritium is flushed away with cold water. Called a liquid phase catalytic exchange (LPCE) column, the procedure sounds awful dicey because it is.
 
Kurion-hired scientists Walter Shmayda and Mark Denton, the latter formerly with EnergySolutions, filed a disputed 2013 patent for the catalyitic column. Immediately after filing with the Patent Office, Denton and Kurion founder John Raymont were named as defendants in a trade-secret suit filed in a New York court, accused of stealing proprietary technology and confidential information. Shmayda had worked with a palladium membrane during his fusion energy research at University of Rochester.
 
Various plagiarisms of PEM technology are derived from a fine-pore membrane invented in the 1980s by chemical engineering professor Robert Buxbaum at Michigan State University. His invention was used for separating tritium from moderator water in Canadian-model reactors called CANDU. At the optimal temperature and pressure, hydrogen passes through a laminated membrane to the other side where it is siphoned off to a storage tank, leaving the tritium behind for collection.
 
In its literature, Kurion claims that its pellet method is more efficient than the CANDU tritium-removal system. In January 2014, two months after the filing of EnergySolutions lawsuit, Kurion cobbled together a prototype in the Richland facility of its newly acquired Vista Engineering Technologies. (This sort of corporate maneuvering also typified the strange history of the catalytic converter, used to break down smog in car exhausts, supposedly invented by the Engelhard Corporation with the help of South Africa’s Oppenheimer gold company, although the technology probably originated from the secretive Manhattan Project.)
 
It can be assumed that Japan’s nuclear authority put 1 billion yen ($10 billion) upfront in research funding for state-of-art technology. That’s before future operations fees, a hefty sum for a slapdash design based on intellectual-property infringement.
 
Alternative Storage Method is Better
 
It will take many years for an extraction system to treat the 700,000 tons of highly radioactive water in storage tanks at Fukushima, not to mention the continuous outflow of tritiated ground water. By contrast, Japan’s rock-boring industry, led by IHI and Mitsubishi, can rapidly tunnel into the solid-bedrock Abukuma Plateau immediately behind the Fukushima nuclear plant to create vast storage caverns. Once contained in sealed rock, tritiated water is harmless because its beta rays travel less than a centimeter and cannot penetrate dense matter. The half-life of tritium is only 13 years, and therefore within 20 years the stored water can be safely drained away.
 
A brief note on heavy water:
 
Most of the water on Earth is H2O, depicted as H-O-H, or an oxygen atoms bonded with two hydrogen atoms. This hydrogen is composed of one electron circling around a single proton. In nuclear chemistry, plain water is therefore called protium. Heavy water contains added neutrons along with the proton. Deuterium as one neutron along with its proton; whereas tritium contains two neutrons in addition to the proton.
 
Both types of heavy water are created in water inside nuclear reactors by neutron bombardment from the fission of uranium and/or plutonium.  
 
Tritium is radioactive, decaying with the conversion of a neutron into a proton and a positron, the latter being a high-speed electron (beta particle). Beta particles are in the mid-range of ionizing power, between the weaker alpha ray and the gamma radiation. Beta radiation can be blocked by a thin sheet of most metals. However, if ingested into the body in water or food, beta particles is known to cause cancer.
 
Tritium and deuterium in equal amounts, when subjected to heat and pressure, fuse together in a fusion reaction, which creates a helium atom (He) and releases a neutron and kinetic energy.
 
In a plutonium warhead or “hydrogen bomb”, tritium and deuterium are pumped into a pit or cavity at the center of two concentric spheres of fissionable nuclear material. The detonation of the inner sphere, using conventional explosives and plutonium, creates an implosion, subjecting the tritium-deuterium gases to intense compression and heat, resulting in a fusion reaction.
 
The fusion blast triggers a chain reaction in the larger outer sphere, the main force of the nuclear explosion. The neutrons released from the pit also amplifies blast efficiency by igniting the fast-exiting broken pieces of nuclear fuel that would otherwise fall to the ground intact. The higher the purity of tritium, the bigger the blast force and greater the death toll, which after all is the desired objective in nuclear power.