Plutonium contamination at Rocky Flats
How Colorado’s nuclear past is affecting its future, Colorado Springs INDY, GONE FISSION, by Heidi Beedle 25 Mar 20, IT WAS FEB. 25 AND BROOMFIELD City Council was done. It unanimously voted last month to withdraw from the Jefferson Parkway Public Highway Authority (JPPHA), a proposed north-south toll road that would ostensibly help mitigate traffic congestion in the Northwest Metro Denver area. The route would have taken the road through the eastern edge of the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge, just south of the Boulder County line, bordering Arvada and Broomfield. The council vote was influenced by preliminary soil samples taken by the JPPHA in July 2019, specifically one sample that showed plutonium levels more than five times higher than the acceptable standard (the rest of the samples taken at that time were within acceptable standards). Before its current existence as a wildlife refuge, Rocky Flats was the site of a nuclear weapons plant, which has caused concern about plutonium contamination in the area. Forty-eight subsequent samples taken by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the refuge, showed levels well below cleanup standards of 50 picocuries per gram.
The city council vote is the latest installment in the ongoing conflict between concerned residents and public officials, and Rocky Flats and Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE). For decades, residents and at least two directors of Jefferson County Public Health, have claimed that plutonium released from the plant is responsible for the high rate of cancers in the area. These claims have been consistently disputed by CDPHE and the Department of Energy (DOE). ……..
Johnson was concerned about the instances of cancers in Jefferson County and questioned the official measurements of plutonium in the soils around Rocky Flats, finding in his own testing that plutonium levels in the soil were 44 times higher than reported by the Department of Public Health. Johnson grew increasingly concerned about an increase in cancer deaths in Jefferson County, and in a paper published in 1981, noted that a rise in certain kinds of cancers Johnson was seeing in Jefferson County, such as leukemia, “supports the hypothesis that exposure of general populations to small concentrations of plutonium and other radionuclides may have an effect on cancer incidence.” Johnson noted that “plutonium concentrations in the air at the Rocky Flats plant are consistently the highest (1970-1977) in the US DOE monitoring network,” based on his studies of the DOE’s own data. He also asserted that the DOE’s measurements were likely an underestimation.
Almost 40 years later, and the current head of the Jefferson County Public Health Department, Dr. Mark Johnson (no relation) has come to the same conclusion. In 2018 he spoke outagainst opening the wildlife refuge to the public, and he thinks the recent discovery of plutonium near the proposed parkway site should give people reason to reconsider. “
“There are clear studies that have shown there is an increased risk or rate of plutonium in the dirt there,” agrees Mark Johnson. “I have concerns already about the digging around with the subdivisions and the commercial enterprises that have gone into that area that were basically kicking up a lot of stuff — and we don’t know what is there.”
Carl Johnson was fired in 1981 for his persistent, outspoken criticism of the plant, but won a subsequent whistleblower lawsuit. Partly due to Johnson’s criticism, the FBI and the EPA began looking into operations at the Rocky Flats Plant starting in 1987. The investigation was aided by Jim Stone, an employee at the plant who also became a whistleblower over what he saw as grave safety violations……..
THOUGH EXHAUSTIVE DOCUMENTATION of waste sites and deposits exists, questions remain as to the effectiveness of the now-completed cleanup. Jon Lipsky, a former FBI agent who led the raid on Rocky Flats in 1989, criticized the decision to open the refuge to the public in 2016, and has claimed there is still work to be done. Originally, the DOE estimated it would take 65 years and $37 billion to clean up the site. It was completed in 2005 for $7 billion.
During the process, there were still surprises to be found. ……..
The questions of the lasting effects from the operations at Rocky Flats may never be answered to the satisfaction of residents like Hansen, who are dealing with serious health issues. Jeff Gipe, the artist behind the Cold War Horse memorial that was erected in 2015, is currently working on a documentary about the plant, Half-Life of Memory, which may draw more attention to the issue.
President Donald Trump, who has a good shot at re-election, has reduced the effectiveness of agencies like the EPA while also advocating for an increase in nuclear arms development.
In 2019, the federal government proposed a new plutonium pit production facility near Aiken, South Carolina. But that is presumably not our problem. https://www.csindy.com/coloradosprings/how-colorados-nuclear-past-is-affecting-its-future/Content?oid=21526239
The lingering horror of the nuclear bomb tests at Maralinga, South Australia
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Maralinga is 54 kilometres north-west of Ooldea, in South Australia’s remote Great Victoria Desert. Between 1956 and 1963 the British detonated seven atomic bombs at the site; one was twice the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. There were also the so-called “minor trials” where officials deliberately set fire to or blew up plutonium with TNT — just to see what would happen. One location called “Kuli” is still off-limits today, because it’s been impossible to clean up. I went out to the old bomb sites with a group of Maralinga Tjarutja people, who refer to the land around ground zero as “Mamu Pulka”, Pitjantjatjara for “Big Evil”. “My dad passed away with leukaemia. We don’t know if it was from here, but a lot of the time he worked around here,” says Jeremy Lebois, chairperson of the Maralinga Tjarutja council. Thirty per cent of the British and Australian servicemen exposed to the blasts also died of cancer — though the McClelland royal commission of 1984 was unable to conclude that each case was specifically caused by the tests. It’s not until you stand at ground zero that you fully realise the hideous power of these bombs. Even after more than 60 years, the vegetation is cleared in a perfect circle with a one kilometre radius. “The ground underneath is still sterile, so when the plants get down a certain distance, they die,” explains Robin Matthews, who guided me around the site. The steel and concrete towers used to explode the bombs were instantly vaporised. The red desert sand was melted into green glass that still litters the site. Years ago it would have been dangerous to visit the area, but now the radiation is only three times normal — no more than what you get flying in a plane. The Line of FireAustralia was not the first choice for the British, but they were knocked back by both the US and Canada. Robert Menzies, Australia’s prime minister at the time, said yes to the tests without even taking the decision to cabinet first. David Lowe, chair of contemporary history at Deakin University, thinks Australia was hoping to become a nuclear power itself by sharing British technology, or at least to station British nuclear weapons on Australian soil. “In that period many leaders in the Western world genuinely thought there was a real risk of a third world war, which would be nuclear,” he says. The bombs were tested on the Montebello Islands, at Emu Field and at Maralinga. At Woomera in the South Australian desert, they tested the missiles that could carry them. The Blue Streak rocket was developed and test-fired right across the middle of Australia, from Woomera all the way to the Indian Ocean, just south of Broome. This is known as “The Line of Fire” The Line of Fire from Woomera to Broome is, funnily enough, the same distance from London to Moscow,” Mr Matthews says. Just as the Maralinga Tjarutja people were pushed off their land for the bomb tests, the Yulparitja people were removed from their country in the landing zone south of Broome. Not all the Blue Streak rockets reached the sea. Some crashed into the West Australian desert. The McClelland royal commission showed that the British were cavalier about the weather conditions during the bomb tests and that fallout was carried much further than the 100-mile radius agreed to, reaching Townsville, Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide. “The cavalier attitude towards Australia’s Indigenous populations was appalling and you’d have to say to some extent that extended towards both British and Australian service people,” Professor Lowe says. There are also questions over whether people at the test sites were deliberately exposed to radiation. “You can’t help but wonder the extent to which there was a deliberate interest in the medical results of radioactive materials entering the body,” Professor Lowe says. “Some of this stuff is still restricted; you can’t get your hands on all materials concerning the testing and it’s quite likely both [British and Australian] governments will try very hard to ensure that never happens.” Project SunshineWe do know that there was a concerted effort to examine the bones of deceased infants to test for levels of Strontium 90 (Sr-90), an isotope that is one of the by-products of nuclear bombs. These tests were part of Project Sunshine, a series of studies initiated in the US in 1953 by the Atomic Energy Commission. They sought to measure how Sr-90 had dispersed around the world by measuring its concentration in the bones of the dead. Young bones were chosen because they were particularly susceptible to accumulating the Sr-90 isotope. Around 1,500 exhumations took place, in both Britain and Australia — often without the knowledge or permission of the parents of the dead. Again, it was hard to prove conclusively that spikes in the levels of Strontium 90 during the test period caused bone cancers around the world. The Maralinga tests occurred during a period that Professor Lowe describes as “atomic utopian thinking”. “Remember at that time Australians were uncovering pretty significant discoveries of uranium and they hoped that this would unleash a vast new capacity for development through the power of the atom,” he says. Some of the schemes were absurdly optimistic. Project Ploughshare grew out of a US program which proposed using atomic explosions for industrial purposes such as canal-building. In 1969 Australia and the US signed a joint feasibility study to create an instant port at Cape Keraudren in the Kimberley using nuclear explosions. The plan was dropped, but it was for economic not environmental or social reasons. The dream (or was it a nightmare?) of sharing nuclear weapons technology with the British was never realised. All Australia got out of the deal was help building the Lucas Heights reactor. The British did two ineffectual clean-ups of Maralinga in the 1960s. The proper clean-up between 1995 and 2000 cost more than $100 million, of which Australia paid $75 million. It has left an artificial mesa in the desert containing 400,000 cubic metres of plutonium contaminated soil. The Maralinga Tjarutja people received only $13 million in compensation for loss of their land, which was finally returned to them in 1984. As we were leaving the radiation zone, the Maralinga Tjarutja people spotted some kangaroos in the distance. Over the years some of the wildlife has started to return. Mr Lebois takes it as a good sign. “Hopefully, hopefully everything will come back,” he says. |
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The Sizewell C project would tear through preciously fragile nature preserve
Nuclear lessons from the corona virus, No place for atomic power amidst climate chaos and pandemics By Linda Pentz Gunter March 22, 2020 by beyondnuclearinternational……….I recently sat in a room of 75 people — just before you couldn’t anymore — in Suffolk, England, listening to a series of eloquent presentations advocating for a halt to the proposed Sizewell C nuclear power plant there. The occasion was an event hosted by the Nuclear Free Local Authorities. The Sizewell C project, which would add two EPRs to the still operating Sizewell B reactor site, would tear through one of the richest, most preciously fragile and most diverse nature preserves in the country — Minsmere. And be built on a beach.
The first three speakers reminded us of the breathtaking beauty of Minsmere and the animals, insects, birds, and reptiles whose lives would be disrupted, if not ended, by the construction activities alone (my talk and the two others addressed the radiological and climate risks if Sizewell C ever became operational.) We saw slides not only of these animals, but of an exotic array of spectacular plant life that would also be lost. Site construction would dissect and disconnect habitats and frighten species away, with 24-hour lights, noise, heavy machinery, traffic and the bulldozing of their landscape. Wildness, already disappearing fast enough, would be lost.
After listening to the eloquent opening presentations from nature and sports journalist, Simon Barnes, Ben McFarland, head of conservation at Suffolk Wildlife Trust, and Rachel Fulcher of Suffolk Coastal Friends of the Earth, there was only one question to be asked: Why on earth would anyone allow this to happen? But so far, Suffolk County Council has gone alone with the plan, albeit with some caveats and ongoing questions for EDF. They may yet be dissuaded.
A video from Suffolk Coastal Friends of the Earth, narrated by Fulcher, is a quietly passionate reminder, somewhat in the style of her namesake, Rachel Carson, not to pave paradise, as Joni Mitchell once warned.
The first thing that is likely to happen is that EDF will raze Coronation Wood. It will do this, not because it needs to now. It is not even certain that Sizewell C will go ahead. It will do this for show. The show in question is to prove to the world that the French nuclear industry is alive and well. It is moving forward.
Not content with the ghastly building site which is the Hinkley C two-reactor project in Somerset, EDF must impress upon the world that it is moving forward with Sizewell as well, which, the company boasts, it can complete even cheaper and faster.
At the Suffolk meeting, Theberton & Eastbridge Action Group on Sizewell screened a particularly brilliant piece of video, shot from a drone, showing the spectacular Suffolk countryside today and what the hapless Somerset countryside at the Hinkley site now looks like. You can view it below.
The French government is on record as saying that without Hinkley and Sizewell, the French nuclear brand will be finished. It sees the UK projects as an essential redemptive step, given the EPR, its supposed flagship, has so far been a financial and technical shipwreck.
As the Financial Times pointed out in May 2018, “Avoiding delays in the UK will be crucial if EDF is to persuade international buyers — and its own shareholders, not least the French government — that the EPR’s teething problems are over.”
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which owns the Minsmere reserve, has said it has concerns that “EDF energy may not be able to keep its environmental promises.”
But the organization should instead be 100 per cent certain that EDF will not keep its environmental promises or any other kind for that matter. You just have to look at the company’s track record, along with the systemic disregard by all nuclear companies anywhere in the world, for the well-being and survival of animals and their habitats, both wild and domestic. (This latter is all documented in our newest booklet — Nuclear power and harm to animals, wild and domestic.)
There is particular reason to mistrust EDF because the company has experienced an endless series of technical, safety and transparency problems at the EPR construction sites still plodding their way to incompletion at Flamanville 3 in France and Olkiluoto 3 in Finland. Even such fundamentals as the concrete pour of the reactor foundation at Flamanville 3 had to be redone. The Flamanville 3 containment came from a forge which falsified quality control data and installed counterfeit parts; the vessel head is defective. And, amidst the corona virus, part of the workforce at Flamanville 1 and 2, both fortunately offline for maintenance, has now been called home. (An outbreak of covid-19 among its staff has also now forced the closure of the reprocessing plant at Sellafield in the UK.)
One can only hope that the decision-makers of Suffolk will wake up and smell the marsh-marigolds (I am no botanist so I can’t vouch for their actual aroma.) Or maybe amidst the silence of their now corona-forced sequestration, they will listen to the song of reed buntings, or sedge warblers and decide they are worth saving. Perhaps they will marvel at the aerobatics of the marsh harrier, or wander out at night and glimpse a rare barbastelle bat, “serrated wings against the sky, Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,” as D.H. Lawrence so vividly described the animals in his poem, Bats (although Lawrence did not care for bats.)…….https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2020/03/22/nuclear-lessons-from-the-corona-virus/
Coronavirus and the growthmania that drives environmental destruction.
Paul R. Ehrlich: A pandemic, planetary reckoning, and a path 
forward, Environmental Health News, Mar 20, 2020 Bolster basic medical care
“………..It is convenient for progressives to blame the COVID-19 disaster in the United States on the spectacular incompetence and corruption of the current Republican national leadership. Yes, it has turned away from science, and worked hard to speed the demise of civilization.
One of the Republicans’ many steps in that direction was to destroy the global health security and biodefense directorate that the Obama Administration created to help prepare for emergent diseases. Americans are now likely paying with their lives for Trump’s move there.
But the basic problem dates much further back and is bipartisan. After all both parties have been supportive and remain supportive of the growthmania that has been the basic driver of environmental destruction.
Rather than dwell on the past, however, let’s look at what the U.S. should be doing about the epidemiological environment starting right now. The U.S. has long stood alone in failing to supply all its citizens with health care, an error COVID-19 has highlighted. Changing that, however it is done, should be top priority.
Besides the obvious ethics and justice reasons, people without basic medical care exacerbate public health problems, especially pandemics, in ways that threaten even senators and presidents.
A comprehensive national health program should also remove incentives for infected people to go to work sick and for keeping businesses and other entities that provide essential services functioning.
Plans and equipment should be put in place to greatly increase the capacity of the medical system to deal with large surges of victims of epidemics.
Programs are needed to keep both the plans and essential supplies up to date. A provision for quickly establishing unified leadership in disasters is essential.
Climate change and biodiversity
U.S. security in a globalized world demands leadership in dealing with all aspects of the world’s epidemiological environment.
In addition to rejoining the Paris agreement, America should demand greatly increased ambition in replacing fossil fuels in energy systems so it will have a better chance of ameliorating the building climatic catastrophe and reduce the likely huge refugee flows that will transform the entire global epidemiological environment.
The U.S. should aid China to reduce that nation’s huge pig-duck-pond-wildlife market, which is a lethal virus manufacturing machine. Putting pigs and ducks together with ponds is bad in itself, but adding wildlife markets to the mix makes it worse – and it’s an important factor in the global epidemiological environment.
America and China could lead a civilization-wide program to halt the destruction of biodiversity – another factor which negatively impacts that environment.
What I’m basically saying is that the U.S. should fix the epidemiological environment by taking the obvious steps to solve the human predicament – to avoid the collapse of civilization now entrained…….. https://www.ehn.org/pandemic-population-covid-19-2645518249.html
Paul Ehrlich on the pandemic and the challenge to civilisation
Paul R. Ehrlich: A pandemic, planetary reckoning, and a path forward, Environmental Health News, Mar 20, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic is bringing environmental destruction and the deterioration of social and cultural systems into sharp focus. But we can learn from this.
For more than half a century, scientists have been expressing concern over the deterioration of what I like to call the “epidemiological environment.” That environment consists of the constellation of circumstances that influence patterns of disease and factors related to health.
It includes such things as population sizes and densities, diets, speed and type of transportation systems, toxics, climate disruption, frequency of human-animal contacts, availability of medical isolation facilities, stockpiles of medicines, vaccines, and medical equipment.
The epidemiological environment also includes cultural norms: levels of education, equity in societies, competence of leadership. Few aspects of the human predicament do not impinge on our epidemiological environment.
My own interest in one part of that environment, transmissible diseases, started as a grad student working on the evolution of DDT resistance in fruit flies. The results of that research had obvious implications for the evolution of antibiotic resistance, a key element in the epidemiological environment.
It clearly influenced my wife Anne and my scenarios in our 1968 book, The Population Bomb and a section on the epidemiological environment in The Population Explosion, the 1990 sequel book. We were responding not just to our own fears, but the fears of colleagues much more knowledgeable in areas like virology and epidemiology.
Of course, the utter failure of global society to deal appropriately with high probability threats to civilization warned of by the scientific community is hardly limited to pandemics.
Climate disruption is the best recognized of contemporary health threats, but the decay of biodiversity, and “updating” the American nuclear triad as part of the Russian-United States’ “mutually assured imbecility” are among the most critical.
Those, at least, are not obvious to the average citizen or decision-maker, but what about others such as increased flows of plastics and toxics (especially synthetic hormone mimicking compounds) into the global environment?
Everyone knows about volumes of plastics in waste streams and oceans and has personal experience with the thermal paper receipts coated with bisphenol-A (BPA), yet little to no remedies have been undertaken.
Indeed, why are there so few effective responses to the epidemics and the maladies of industrial civilization?……….
Teaching planetary literacyThis seems wildly optimistic in a world that has not even recognized its problems of overpopulation and overconsumption or the impacts on health and well-being of socio-cultural regression: rising xenophobia, racism, religious prejudice, sexism, and, especially, economic inequity. What explains this? There are the causes usually noted, such as the power of money, not just in politics but in global culture as a whole. But a major element is widespread ignorance, partly due to broken educational systems – allowing, for example, mobs of innumerate economists, politicians, and decision-makers in general to believe in perpetual growth in population and consumption. The widespread inability of “educated” people to think is frequently underlined by statements on how “we don’t have a population problem, just a problem of too much consumption.” Can’t they grasp the not-so-difficult idea that a billion people are likely to consume more than a hundred? Case in point on the ignorant “educated”: Donald Trump got a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School of my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. To overwhelm this vast ignorance demands resuscitation of our higher education system. Universities and colleges remain stalled in a 19th century Aristotelian state. They have given up any goal except turning out people who will be financially successful in a deteriorating culture — oiling parts of the engine with never a thought for where the train is heading. And that “education” clearly doesn’t even give its products a grasp of such concepts as exponential growth, as the response of Trump and many others to the COVID-19 epidemic have shown. Educational systems have given up any pretense of supplying leadership to society or informing people about what is coming down the track. Faculty members discuss “sustainability” in major universities that will not even divest from fossil fuel stocks. Can the absence of a draft alone explain the difference between the ferment in universities during the Vietnam War and the quiet today with the situation a million times worse? Once again, population size and growth are major factors in this human dilemma – maybe Homo sapiens shouldn’t have tried to organize itself into groups exceeding the Dunbar number, which anthropologist Robin Dunbar showed was about 150 people, the size of hunter-gatherer groups. He also showed that’s roughly the size of groups in which human beings are comfortable today. Rethinking resourcesWhere could all the money come from to make the changes to preserve civilization? That’s one of the challenges for the economists who today are operating in a perpetual-growth fairyland. Much depends on the course of events and whether the debt pyramid collapses. One obvious step, however, is repurposing the military. When Anne and I were working with them on nuclear winter issues, we were greatly impressed by the intelligence and ethics of some of the field-grade officers with whom we were involved. The military is already way ahead of the present civilian government in addressing existential threats like climate disruption. Various military units have already been deployed to deal with emergencies ranging from pandemics to hurricanes, and there is no reason why they cannot be used to help in tasks ranging from building medical isolation facilities to small-scale affordable housing for the homeless. Allocation of resources is part of the epidemiological environment. The gigantic amounts of money wasted on such nearly useless toys as nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, main battle tanks, and air superiority jet fighters could be redirected toward rebuilding infrastructure such as sewage systems, modernized electric grids and water-handling networks, and on and on. The same can be said for the other funds and activities used for decades to support (often clandestinely) U.S. state terrorism that has cumulatively killed millions since the second World War. Is all this impractical, pie-in-the-sky, never-happen stuff? Sure. But nothing is more impractical than civilization trying to continue business as usual as it circles the drain. The current pandemic disaster may end up damping down consumerism and improving the environment – there are reports of the lethal smog usually blanketing some Chinese cities clearing during pandemic lockdowns. Maybe there’s some chance that people are learning lessons. We can always hope. Paul Ehrlich is the Bing Professor of Population Studies, Emeritus and President of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford. https://www.ehn.org/pandemic-population-covid-19-2645518249.html |
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Destruction of habitats, loss of biodiversity, bring pandemics
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DESTRUCTION OF HABITAT AND LOSS OF BIODIVERSITY ARE CREATING THE PERFECT CONDITIONS FOR DISEASES LIKE COVID-19 TO EMERGE As habitat and biodiversity loss increase globally, the novel coronavirus outbreak may be just the beginning of mass pandemics ENSIA, John Vidal 18 Mar 20, “……… Only a decade or two ago it was widely thought that tropical forests and intact natural environments teeming with exotic wildlife threatened humans by harboring the viruses and pathogens that lead to new diseases in humans like Ebola, HIV and dengue. But a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases like COVID-19, the viral disease that emerged in China in December 2019, to arise — with profound health and economic impacts in rich and poor countries alike. In fact, a new discipline, planetary health, is emerging that focuses on the increasingly visible connections among the well-being of humans, other living things and entire ecosystems.
Is it possible, then, that it was human activity, such as road building, mining, hunting and logging, that triggered the Ebola epidemics in Mayibout 2 and elsewhere in the 1990s and that is unleashing new terrors today? “We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbor so many species of animals and plants — and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses,” David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Pandemic, recently wrote in the New York Times. “We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it.”
Increasing Threat Research suggests that outbreaks of animal-borne and other infectious diseases like Ebola, SARS, bird flu and now COVID-19, caused by a novel coronavirus, are on the rise. Pathogens are crossing from animals to humans, and many are now able to spread quickly to new places. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that three-quarters of “new or emerging” diseases that infect humans originate in nonhuman animals. Some, like rabies and plague, crossed from animals centuries ago. Others, like Marburg, which is thought to be transmitted by bats, are still rare. A few, like COVID-19, which emerged last year in Wuhan, China, and MERS, which is linked to camels in the Middle East, are new to humans and spreading globally.
Other diseases that have crossed into humans include Lassa fever, which was first identified in 1969 in Nigeria; Nipah from Malaysia; and SARS from China, which killed more than 700 people and traveled to 30 countries in 2002–03. Some, like Zika and West Nile virus, which emerged in Africa, have mutated and become established on other continents.
Kate Jones, chair of ecology and biodiversity at UCL, calls emerging animal-borne infectious diseases an “increasing and very significant threat to global health, security and economies.” Amplification Effect In 2008, Jones and a team of researchers identified 335 diseases that emerged between 1960 and 2004, at least 60% of which came from non-human animals.
Increasingly, says Jones, these zoonotic diseases are linked to environmental change and human behavior. The disruption of pristine forests driven by logging, mining, road building through remote places, rapid urbanization and population growth is bringing people into closer contact with animal species they may never have been near before, she says. The resulting transmission of disease from wildlife to humans, she says, is now “a hidden cost of human economic development. There are just so many more of us, in every environment. We are going into largely undisturbed places and being exposed more and more. We are creating habitats where viruses are transmitted more easily, and then we are surprised that we have new ones.
Jones studies how land use change contributes to the risk. “We are researching how species in degraded habitats are likely to carry more viruses which can infect humans,” she says. “Simpler systems get an amplification effect. Destroy landscapes, and the species you are left with are the ones humans get the diseases from.”
“There are countless pathogens out there continuing to evolve which at some point could pose a threat to humans,” says Eric Fevre, chair of veterinary infectious diseases at the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Infection and Global Health. “The risk [of pathogens jumping from animals to humans] has always been there.”
The difference between now and a few decades ago, Fevre says, is that diseases are likely to spring up in both urban and natural environments. “We have created densely packed populations where alongside us are bats and rodents and birds, pets and other living things. That creates intense interaction and opportunities for things to move from species to species,” he says. Tip of the Iceberg “Pathogens do not respect species boundaries,” says disease ecologist Thomas Gillespie, an associate professor in Emory University’s Department of Environmental Sciences who studies how shrinking natural habitats and changing behavior add to the risks of diseases spilling over from animals to humans……… https://ensia.com/features/covid-19-coronavirus-biodiversity-planetary-health-zoonoses/
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Moscow: roadworks commence on top of radioactive waste dump: protestors enraged
Protests as Moscow moves to build road on radioactive dump, https://www.france24.com/en/20200318-protests-as-moscow-moves-to-build-road-on-radioactive-dump Moscow (AFP)Moscow authorities on Wednesday began work on building a highway over a Soviet-era dump of radioactive materials, despite months of public protests and warnings from environmental campaigners.
Greenpeace and other activists have long campaigned against the project to build an eight-lane motorway over the top of a tree-lined slope in southern Moscow that contains radioactive waste buried in the Soviet era.
The former top-secret facility produced the radioactive element thorium for nuclear reactors until the 1970s.
Greenpeace and other activists have long campaigned against the project to build an eight-lane motorway over the top of a tree-lined slope in southern Moscow that contains radioactive waste buried in the Soviet era.
The former top-secret facility produced the radioactive element thorium for nuclear reactors until the 1970s.
“We have registered 0.4 microsieverts,” while the permitted level in Moscow is 0.3,” Vlasov told AFP, adding that he expected those levels to increase in the future.
“When large-scale work begins, all this crap will be in the air,” he said.
Galina Rozvadovskaya, who lives near the site, said she came as soon as she learnt of the start of the construction work.
“Our task is to stop this lawlessness,” Rozvadovskaya told AFP. “What do we want? For them to conduct a proper survey of this burial site.”
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin is keen to redevelop post-industrial wasteland and insists there are only “insignificant traces of contamination” on the road’s route.
Activists say, however, dangerous radioactive particles could be spread around and end up in people’s lungs. Citing a state report, Greenpeace says the site contains at least 60,000 tonnes of radioactive waste.
ma-video-as/am/cdw
New research on the global climate impacts of a small nuclear war
How a small nuclear war would transform the entire planet
The planet’s largest ecosystems could collapse faster than we thought
The planet’s largest ecosystems could collapse faster than we thought https://www.ehn.org/ecosystems-collapse-2645447028.html?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1
Massive, vital ecosystems that have existed for thousands of years could breakdown in just a few decades, according to a new study, Brian Bienkowski 11 Mar, 20
If put under the kind of environmental stress increasingly seen on our planet, large ecosystems —such as the Amazon rainforest or the Caribbean coral reefs—could collapse in just a few decades, according to a study released today in Nature Communications.
In the case of Amazon forests, stressors could cause collapse in just 49 years. In Caribbean coral reefs, it could take as little as 15 years.
“The messages here are stark,” said lead researcher John Dearing, a professor in physical geography at the University of Southampton, in a statement.
Those estimates come from Dearing and colleagues who examined data on how 42 natural environments—small and large, and on both land and water—have transformed. They found that larger ecosystems may take longer than small ones to collapse, but the rate of their decline is much more rapid.
Ecosystem stress can come in many forms such as climate change, deforestation, overfishing, pollution and ocean acidification.
Humanity now needs to prepare for changes in ecosystems that are faster than we previously envisaged through our traditional linear view of the world, including across Earth ‘s largest and most iconic ecosystems, and the social–ecological systems that they support,” the authors wrote.
Larger ecosystems are made up of smaller “sub-systems” of species and habitats, which provide some resilience against rapid change. However, once these smaller systems start to collapse, the new study finds the large ecosystems as a whole fall apart much faster than previously expected.
Researchers pointed to the destructive Australian and Amazon rainforest wildfires as recent examples of this dangerous fast rate of collapse.
“These findings are yet another call for halting the current damage being imposed on our natural environments that pushes ecosystems to their limits,” Dearing added.
See the full study in Nature Communications.
Negative reputation for Fukushima fishing industry – recovery is a long way away
Fukushima Fishing Industry Still Far from Recovery https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00664/fukushima-fishing-industry-still-far-from-recovery.html Mar 9, 2020 [excellent graphs] While fishing ports and other infrastructure in Fukushima Prefecture have made progress toward recovery, the area still suffers from a negative reputation.
The coastal area off Ibaraki and Fukushima Prefectures, where the Oyashio and Kuroshio Currents meet in the Pacific Ocean, is an excellent fishing ground. The seafood caught in this area became known as Jōban-mono and was prized by professional chefs and Tsukiji Market connoisseurs. However, the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake had a profound effect on the local fishing industry, when it caused a tsunami that destroyed all the fishing ports and led to an accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant that damaged the reputation of the waters.
According to Fukushima Prefecture sea-fishing industry statistics, the total catch in 2010 stood at 38,600 tons, before plummeting in 2011. While fishing ports and other infrastructure have steadily recovered since, catches remain low. In 2018, 5,900 tons of fish were caught, equivalent to only 15% of the volume prior to the earthquake. This was worth ¥796 million, or only 7.3% of the ¥11.0 billion generated in 2010. (Aggregated data for 2019 is due to be released later in March 2020.)
After the nuclear accident, the fishing industry in Fukushima came to a standstill for approximately one year. Then, in June 2012, trial fishing operations began. Currently, there are still no catches within a 10-kilometer radius of the Daiichi plant and any made outside that area are subject to prefectural inspections for radioactive materials, alongside inspections by the fishing cooperatives themselves, in order to ensure safety. Although there have been zero cases of results for prefectural inspections outside acceptable levels for more than four years, the area’s negative reputation remains, so full recovery in the fishing industry is yet to be seen .
Big Oil Big Soda and plastically polluted Planet Earth.
“They really sold people on the idea that plastics can be recycled because there’s a fraction of them that are,”..“It’s fraudulent. When you drill down into plastics recycling, you realize it’s a myth.” …… “Recycling delays, rather than avoids, final disposal,” the Science authors write. And most plastics persist for centuries. …….
We are all guinea pigs in this experiment, as plastics accumulate in the food web, appearing in seafood, table salt, and ironically even in bottled water. Many plastics are mixed with a toxic brew of colorants, flame retardants, and plasticizers.
PLANET PLASTIC, How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades, Rolling Stone, By TIM DICKINSON, MARCH 3, 2020
Every human on Earth is ingesting nearly 2,000 particles of plastic a week. These tiny pieces enter our unwitting bodies from tap water, food, and even the air, according to an alarming academic study sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, dosing us with five grams of plastics, many cut with chemicals linked to cancers, hormone disruption, and developmental delays. Since the paper’s publication last year, Sen. Tom Udall, a plain-spoken New Mexico Democrat with a fondness for white cowboy hats and turquoise bolo ties, has been trumpeting the risk: “We are consuming a credit card’s worth of plastic each week,” Udall says. At events with constituents, he will brandish a Visa from his wallet and declare, “You’re eating this, folks!”
With new legislation, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act of 2020, Udall is attempting to marshal Washington into a confrontation with the plastics industry, and to force companies that profit from plastics to take accountability for the waste they create. …….
The battle pits Udall and his allies in Congress against some of the most powerful corporate interests on the planet, including the oil majors and chemical giants that produce the building blocks for our modern plastic world — think Exxon, Dow, and Shell — and consumer giants like Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Unilever that package their products in the stuff. Big Plastic isn’t a single entity. It’s more like a corporate supergroup: Big Oil meets Big Soda — with a puff of Big Tobacco, responsible for trillions of plastic cigarette butts in the environment every year. And it combines the lobbying and public-relations might of all three………
Massive quantities of this forever material are spilling into the oceans — the equivalent of a dump-truck load every minute. Plastic is also fouling our mountains, our farmland, and spiraling into an unmitigatable environmental disaster. John Hocevar is a marine biologist who leads the Oceans Campaign for Greenpeace, and spearheaded the group’s response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf. Increasingly, his work has centered on plastics. “This is a much bigger problem than ‘just’ an ocean issue, or even a pollution issue,” he says. “We’ve found plastic everywhere we’ve ever looked. It’s in the Arctic and the Antarctic and in the middle of the Pacific. It’s in the Pyrenees and in the Rockies. It’s settling out of the air. It’s raining down on us.”
More than half the plastic now on Earth has been created since 2002, and plastic pollution is on pace to double by 2030. At its root, the global plastics crisis is a product of our addiction to fossil fuels. The private profit and public harm of the oil industry is well understood: Oil is refined and distributed to consumers, who benefit from gasoline’s short, useful lifespan in a combustion engine, leaving behind atmospheric pollution for generations. But this same pattern — and this same tragedy of the commons — is playing out with another gift of the oil-and-gas giants, whose drilling draws up the petroleum precursors for plastics. These are refined in industrial complexes and manufactured into bottles, bags, containers, textiles, and toys for consumers who benefit from their transient use — before throwing them away. Continue reading
Nuclear testing left a signature of radioactive carbon all around the world
Even after childhood, bomb radiocarbon chronicles the history of our body.
Your Inner H-Bomb Nuclear testing left a signature of radioactive carbon all around the world—in trees and sharks, in oceans and human bodies. Even as that signal disappears, it’s revealing new secrets to scientists. The Atlantic, Story by Carl Zimmer, 2 Mar 20, Nuclear lobby attacks Australia’s Nuclear Prohibition laws
Jim Green, Online Opinion, 27 Feb 2020, https://onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=20758&page=0
Nuclear power in Australia is prohibited under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act 1999. A review of the EPBC Act is underway and there is a strong push from the nuclear industry to remove the bans. However, federal and state laws banning nuclear power have served Australia well and should be retained.
Too cheap to meter or too expensive to matter? Laws banning nuclear power has saved Australia from the huge costs associated with failed and failing reactor projects in Europe and North America, such as the Westinghouse project in South Carolina that was abandoned after the expenditure of at least A$13.4 billion. The Westinghouse / South Carolina fiasco could so easily have been replicated in any of Australia’s states or territories if not for the legal bans.
There are many other examples of shocking nuclear costs and cost overruns, including:
* The cost of the two reactors under construction in the US state of Georgia has doubled and now stands at A$20.4‒22.6 billion per reactor.
* The cost of the only reactor under construction in France has nearly quadrupled and now stands at A$20.0 billion. It is 10 years behind schedule.
* The cost of the only reactor under construction in Finland has nearly quadrupled and now stands at A$17.7 billion. It is 10 years behind schedule.
* The cost of the four reactors under construction in the United Arab Emirates has increased from A$7.5 billion per reactor to A$10‒12 billion per reactor.
* In the UK, the estimated cost of the only two reactors under construction is A$25.9 billion per reactor. A decade ago, the estimated cost was almost seven times lower. The UK National Audit Office estimates that taxpayer subsidies for the project will amount to A$58 billion, despite earlier government promises that no taxpayer subsidies would be made available.
Nuclear power has clearly priced itself out of the market and will certainly decline over the coming decades. Indeed the nuclear industry is in crisis ‒ as industry insiders and lobbyists freely acknowledge. Westinghouse ‒ the most experienced reactor builder in the world ‒ filed for bankruptcy in 2017 as a result of catastrophic cost overruns on reactor projects. A growing number of countries are phasing out nuclear power, including Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, Taiwan and South Korea.
Rising power bills: Laws banning nuclear power should be retained because nuclear power could not possibly pass any reasonable economic test. Nuclear power clearly fails the two economic tests set by Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Firstly, nuclear power could not possibly be introduced or maintained without huge taxpayer subsidies. Secondly, nuclear power would undoubtedly result in higher electricity prices.
Nuclear waste streams: Laws banning nuclear power should be retained because no solution exists to for the safe, long-term management of streams of low-, intermediate- and high-level nuclear wastes. No country has an operating repository for high-level nuclear waste. The United States has a deep underground repository for long-lived intermediate-level waste ‒ the only operating deep underground repository worldwide ‒ but it was closed from 2014‒17 following a chemical explosion in an underground waste barrel. Safety standards and regulatory oversight fell away sharply within the first decade of operation of the U.S. repository ‒ a sobering reminder of the challenge of safely managing dangerous nuclear wastes for tens of thousands of years.
Too dangerous: The Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters results in the evacuation of over half a million people and economic costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars. In addition to the danger of nuclear reactor meltdowns and fires and chemical explosions, there are other dangers. Doubling nuclear output by the middle of the century would require the construction of 800−900 reactors. These reactors not only become military targets but they would produce over one million tonnes of high-level nuclear waste containing enough plutonium to build over one million nuclear weapons.
Pre-deployed terrorist targets: Nuclear power plants have been described as pre-deployed terrorist targets and pose a major security threat. This in turn would likely see an increase in policing and security operations and costs and a commensurate impact on civil liberties and public access to information. Other nations in our region may view Australian nuclear aspirations with suspicion and concern given that many aspects of the technology and knowledge-base are the same as those required for nuclear weapons.
Former US Vice President Al Gore summarised the proliferation problem: “For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal … then we’d have to put them in so many places we’d run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale.”
Too slow: Expanding nuclear power is impractical as a short-term response to climate change. An analysis by Australian economist Prof. John Quiggin concludes that it would be “virtually impossible” to get a nuclear power reactor operating in Australia before 2040. More time would elapse before nuclear power has generated as much as energy as was expended in the construction of the reactor: a University of Sydney report concluded that the energy payback time for nuclear reactors is 6.5‒7 years. Taking into account planning and approvals, construction, and the energy payback time, it would be a quarter of a century or more before nuclear power could even begin to reduce greenhouse emissions in Australia (and then only assuming that nuclear power displaced fossil fuels).
Too thirsty: Nuclear power is extraordinarily thirsty. A single nuclear power reactor consumes 35‒65 million litres of water per day for cooling.
Water consumption of different energy sources (litres / kWh):
* Nuclear 2.5
* Coal 1.9
* Combined Cycle Gas 0.95
* Solar PV 0.11
* Wind 0.004
Climate change and nuclear hazards: Nuclear power plants are vulnerable to threats which are being exacerbated by climate change. These include dwindling and warming water sources, sea-level rise, storm damage, drought, and jelly-fish swarms. Nuclear engineer David Lochbaum states. “I’ve heard many nuclear proponents say that nuclear power is part of the solution to global warming. It needs to be reversed: You need to solve global warming for nuclear plants to survive.”
In January 2019, the Climate Council, comprising Australia’s leading climate scientists and other policy experts, issued a policy statement concluding that nuclear power plants “are not appropriate for Australia – and probably never will be”.
By contrast, the REN21 Renewables 2015: Global Status Report states that renewable energy systems “have unique qualities that make them suitable both for reinforcing the resilience of the wider energy infrastructure and for ensuring the provision of energy services under changing climatic conditions.”
First Nations: Laws banning nuclear power should be retained because the pursuit of a nuclear power industry would almost certainly worsen patterns of disempowerment and dispossession that Australia’s First Nations have experienced ‒ and continue to experience ‒ as a result of nuclear and uranium projects.
To give one example (among many), the National Radioactive Waste Management Act dispossesses and disempowers Traditional Owners in many respects: the nomination of a site for a radioactive waste dump is valid even if Aboriginal owners were not consulted and did not give consent; the Act has sections which nullify State or Territory laws that protect archaeological or heritage values, including those which relate to Indigenous traditions; the Act curtails the application of Commonwealth laws including the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 and the Native Title Act 1993 in the important site-selection stage; and the Native Title Act 1993 is expressly overridden in relation to land acquisition for a radioactive waste dump.
No social license: Laws banning nuclear power should be retained because there is no social license to introduce nuclear power to Australia. Opinion polls find that Australians are overwhelmingly opposed to a nuclear power reactor being built in their local vicinity (10‒28% support, 55‒73% opposition); and opinion polls find that support for renewable energy sources far exceeds support for nuclear power (for example a 2015 IPSOS poll found 72‒87% support for solar and wind power but just 26% support for nuclear power). As the Clean Energy Council noted in its submission to the 2019 federal nuclear inquiry, it would require “a minor miracle” to win community support for nuclear power in Australia.
The pursuit of nuclear power would also require bipartisan political consensus at state and federal levels for several decades. Good luck with that. Currently, there is a bipartisan consensus at the federal level to retain the legal ban. The noisy, ultra-conservative rump of the Coalition is lobbying for nuclear power but their push has been rejected by, amongst others, the federal Liberal Party leadership, the Queensland Liberal-National Party, the SA Liberal government, the Tasmanian Liberal government, the NSW Liberal Premier and environment minister, and even ultra-conservatives such as Nationals Senator Matt Canavan.
The future is renewable, not radioactive: Laws banning nuclear power should be retained because the introduction of nuclear power would delay and undermine the development of effective, economic energy and climate policies based on renewable energy sources and energy efficiency. A December 2019 report by CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator finds that construction costs for nuclear reactors are 2‒8 times higher than costs for wind or solar. Levelised costs for nuclear are 2‒3 times greater per unit of energy produced compared to wind or solar including either 2 hours of battery storage or 6 hours of pumped hydro energy storage.
Australia can do better than fuel higher carbon emissions and unnecessary radioactive risk. We need to embrace the fastest growing global energy sector and become a driver of clean energy thinking and technology and a world leader in renewable energy technology. We can grow the jobs of the future here today. This will provide a just transition for energy sector workers, their families and communities and the certainty to ensure vibrant regional economies and secure sustainable and skilled jobs into the future. Renewable energy is affordable, low risk, clean and popular. Nuclear is not. Our shared energy future is renewable, not radioactive.
More Information
* Don’t Nuke the Climate Australia, www.dont-nuke-the-climate.org.au
* Climate Council, 2019, ‘Nuclear Power Stations are Not Appropriate for Australia – and Probably Never Will Be’, https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/nuclear-power-stations-are-not-appropriate-for-australia-and-probably-never-will-be/
* WISE Nuclear Monitor, 25 June 2016, ‘Nuclear power: No solution to climate change’, https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/806/nuclear-power-no-solution-climate-change
Dr. Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia.
Nuclear station Sizewell C will cause environmental damage on an unprecedented scale
Telegraph 23rd Feb 2020 Suffolk Wildlife Trust: We have serious concerns over the effect upon wildlife of Sizewell C and, despite years of working closely with EDF, we are far from convinced that the electricity giant is taking the impacts seriously.
We also believe that it will be impossible wholly to mitigate or
compensate for much of the negative impact on wildlife. The current plans
suggest that we will lose between 20 and 30 acres of nationally important
land that is supposedly protected by its Site of Special Scientific
Interest status. This equates to covering roughly 10 football pitches of
rare fen habitat in concrete. Invariably there will be devastating habitat
loss for birds such as kingfisher and for rare mammals such as water vole
and otters. EDF has made little attempt to minimise these losses.
Suffolk Preservation Society: The proposed nuclear power plant at
Sizewell C will cause environmental damage on an unprecedented scale in a
highly sensitive location, much of which is designated an Area of
Outstanding Natural Beauty. The construction phase will bring massive
disruption to communities in East Suffolk over many years and will
permanently change our landscapes. Suffolk’s environment is remarkably
undeveloped and is characterised by a sense of remote wildness. The
tranquillity provides a high quality of life for residents and is a major
draw for tourists. However, this isolation is fragile and could easily be
lost forever. The impact of a development such as Sizewell C upon heritage
sites – including an abbey, churches, farmhouses and other vernacular
buildings that contribute to the special qualities of Suffolk – will be
considerable. The intrusion of new roads to cope with a massive increase in
HGV traffic, spoil heaps, borrow pits, and accommodation for up to 3,000
workers will be felt across numerous locations. Development of the Sizewell
site cannot be at unlimited cost to the quality and character of our county
and its communities.
Scientists warn on the seriousness of the collapse of many insect species
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Experts call for solutions to be enforced immediately to halt global population collapses, Guardian Damian Carrington Environment editor @dpcarrington, Thu 20 Feb 2020 .The “fates of humans and insects are intertwined”, scientists have said, with the huge declines reported in some places only the “tip of the iceberg”.The warning has been issued by 25 experts from around the world, who acknowledge that little is known about most of the estimated 5.5 million insect species. However, enough was understood to warrant immediate action, they said, because waiting for better data would risk irreversible damage. The researchers said solutions were available and must be implemented immediately. These range from bigger nature reserves and a crackdown on harmful pesticides to individual action such as not mowing the lawn and leaving dead wood in gardens. They also said invertebrates must no longer be neglected by conservation efforts, which tend to focus on mammals and birds…….https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/20/fates-humans-insects-intertwined-scientists-population-collapse |
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1 This Month
petition to oppose the rapid increase of space-military industry threatening Jeju Island and the region.
[Petition by April 19th (KST)] Stop the joint military-Hanwha Systems-Jeju Provincial Government Sea Launch!
World Nuclear Power. Reactors 1951-2026, 75 Years of Nuclear Power.
Interactive Map– https://dv.worldnuclearreport.org/
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
of the week–London Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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