Under Oroville Dam’s Deep Dark Secret: Cold War Gold

AGENDA 21 RADIO

BY PAUL PRESTON

UPDATED MAY 23, 2017 1:00 AM PST

Part 1 in a Series

The world first heard of the Oroville Dam in the early days of the cold war in which the Soviet Union and the United States were competing to be the world dominators in nuclear weapons and ways to send these weapons thousands of miles away from their shores. Key to the ability of creating both for the Soviets and the United States  was an understanding of sub atomic particles which would give each an advantage over the other in a race that if it got to the finish line would destroy the world.  These were the days before the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, duck and cover drills, Francis Gary Powers and scientific research that knew no bounds.

Original Caption: Open books are left on desks of the children of class 42-Junior High Elementary, as they dive under their desks during an “A” bomb drill. Top view of children under their desks.

Francis Gary Powers and his U-2 Spy Plane

MAD Mutually Assured Destruction

At the heart of the scientific research was the University of California at Berkley with it’s rich history of research and collaboration with the military industrial complex that was enhanced during World War II with the birth of nuclear weapons two of which were used to end the war with Japan in the 1945 detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the 1950’s there was a new ‘cold’ war and the scientists at Berkley were once again being task to discover the inside of atoms and the behavior of sub atomic particle by the military industrial complex give America the answers from dark matter that would yield the data to build a better bom

Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a UC Berkeley physicist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator that opened the door to high-energy physics.

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Since 2011, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley, Calif., has provided the Department of Energy, Office of High Energy Physics, management and oversight for operations at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (Sanford Lab).

The Berkeley Operations Office is led by Kevin Lesko. Gil Gilchriese serves as the Deputy Head. The Operations Office pays particular attention to environment, health and safety and to integrating science into the facility operations.

Management and staff draw on approximately 30 years of experience in design, installation and operation of underground experiments and facilities. These include the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, KamLAND, CUORICINO, CUORE, the Majorana Demonstrator experiment, the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter detector, Oroville Low Background Counting Facility and the National Science Foundation’s Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory.

N-waste safely through Feather River Canyon

1998-07-22 04:00:00 PDT SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA; IDAHO — With small groups of anti-nuclear protesters dogging the route, a train hauling flatbed cars carrying spent nuclear fuel rods passed safely through the Feather River Canyon Wednesday morning and headed toward a federal laboratory in Idaho.

Anti-nuclear activists had considered passage through the the mountainous region, where washouts and rock slides are common, to be one of the most dangerous parts of the trip.

The train stopped briefly in Portola, where a fresh crew took over and a brief inspection was made of the dangerous cargo.

Feather River train derailment raises new concerns

Spilled corn covers a hillside in the Feather River canyon where a derailment left Union Pacific freight cars piled like fallen dominoes. Jake Miille Special to The Bee
DECEMBER 06, 2014 11:00 AM

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