I know I said I have run out yesterday; however, after a long night's sleep (I missed midnight as usual), I needed it to search for the First of the Year Update:
"Feds deny performance pay to nuke dump operator" Associated Press December 31, 2014
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — The contractor that runs the federal government’s underground nuclear waste repository is being denied millions of dollars in performance pay as part of the financial fallout from a radiation leak that forced the closure of the facility.
Federal officials have said it could take years and a half-billion dollars to restart operations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project Plant near Carlsbad because of the February leak.
The U.S. Energy Department said in documents released Tuesday that it is paying Nuclear Waste Partnership LLC just $21,576 of the $8 million of potential performance incentives for the past fiscal year. The partnership manages the plant under a contract that pays more than $140 million annually.
The leak occurred when a container packed with radioactive waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory ruptured in an underground storage area and contaminated more than 20 workers.
The performance award for Nuclear Waste Partnership was announced one day after the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration docked the contractor that runs Los Alamos lab for its failures related to the radiation leak. The lab contractor received $6.25 million in incentives, just a fraction of the more than $63 million that was possible for the last fiscal year.
Both contractors and the DOE are also facing $54 million in penalties levied by the New Mexico Environment Department, and state officials have said more fines are possible as the investigation into the radiation leak continues.
Recovery efforts at the nuclear repository did get a $104 million boost as part of a federal spending package signed by President Barack Obama in December. That was on top of the original request of $220 million for operations.
See: Last Lame Duck Se$$ion
Don Hancock of the watchdog group Southwest Information and Research Center said he’s frustrated that operational funding for the plant will continue even as waste disposal there has stopped.
“The contractors are too big and too important to fail,” Hancock told the Santa Fe New Mexican. “The Department of Energy is so dependent on the contractors that the contractors always get off without really getting penalties. They’re able to underperform and still get rewarded.”
Nothing really new for taxpayers.
Hancock also said he doubts the plant will meet the first two deadlines in its recovery plan - the New Year’s Day target for closure of one of the storage bunkers affected by the radiation leak and March recertification of the repository by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Officials at the repository did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the deadlines.
Print ended.
However, a DOE spokesman said the performance pay announced for the contractor on Tuesday was preliminary, and the contractor could qualify for more incentive payments.
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The web Globe must have missed that follow-up.
This next piece really gave me a lift:
".... *******
Stop thinking mainstream media news is true until proven otherwise
Truth seekers in their quest to be correct about what they are saying or believing, too often tend to hear mainstream media news and only debunk it IF they can somehow "prove" to themselves that the piece of news is not true. At a glance, that may sound like a prudent thing to do, but I would like to challenge this notion.
Yes, it is important to be judicious with the facts of a story. However, if we assume that mainstream media holds the power to lay down the original working narrative, then we are empowering the mainstream media without realizing it. In the real world, if someone lied to us every minute of every day, you would never believe anything they had to say at any time. That would be the logical thing to do with someone like this. Most people would agree to this without offering much of an argument.
However, despite knowing how often mainstream media lies, often for the sake of not wanting to sound like a conspiracy nut, truth seekers will initially accept the mainstream media narrative only until after it is proven untrue later on. We reason in our minds that believing mainstream media until proven otherwise must be the logical and the "normal" thing to do, but actually there is no basis for this argument. Instead we should assume that whatever initial claims mainstream media makes are ALSO an unproven (lying nut case) lie that has not been authenticated yet with hard facts. And, yes, we need to look at the current-day mainstream media standard of "evidence" with a magnifying glass since what passes as "evidence" by the mainstream media today is hardly evidence at all.
I believe it is very important to start your individual research into any story with the working hypothesis that the mainstream media has no interest in telling the truth; and their interest, across the board, as proven by the historical facts is to act as a mouthpiece for the State. We can reasonably and logically defend this assumption based on the history of mainstream media's propensity to tell (State-scripted) lies. Why then do we give any degree of credence to any story they put out??
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That is what I've been saying for quite sometime now regarding everything they cover.
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
States scrambling to meet US standards on renewable energy
I didn't have the energy to read it.
