on the future of the West Lake Landfill — a decision that could free the St. Louis area of the seven-decade environmental burden it has borne in America’s quest for nuclear superiority.
For Pruitt, the right decision would be costly and complicated. The wrong decision, though far cheaper and most expedient, would leave in place a radioactive nightmare that would haunt the region for generations to come. The right decision is the only decision.
At issue are thousands of tons of radioactive waste left over from secret uranium refinement carried out in St. Louis during the Manhattan Project, the 1940s effort to produce America’s first nuclear bomb. Although officials at the time were well aware of the radioactive dangers, they paid little heed to where they dumped the wastes from years of uranium processing. An uncovered, unlined pit at the West Lake landfill became the dumpsite of choice, two miles northwest of St. Louis Lambert International Airport.
The landfill, uphill and less than two miles from the Missouri River, was never designed for radioactive waste and never would have met today’s federal safety guidelines. Various radioactive hot zones have been discovered in downstream watersheds, as have large cancer clusters among residents. For years, a slow-moving underground fire at an adjacent landfill is believed to be advancing toward the buried nuclear waste.
In tests conducted from 2012 to 2014, groundwater at West Lake contained unsafe levels of radioactive uranium, radium and thorium-230, along with arsenic, manganese, barium and benzene.
An exhaustive, 814-page EPA study, updated on Jan. 10, outlines the dangers and costs associated with six options Pruitt can choose from for West Lake. One option, doing nothing, is laughable. Three cheaper proposals call for partial excavation of the site at varying depths and capping the site but leaving many toxins behind. The two best options involve full excavation — one would store the waste on-site in a modern, secure containment cell, and the other would transport it offsite to a remote, federally approved storage facility.
Full excavation and removal would keep the region safest over the long term. But it’s also the most expensive option at $695 million. Capping the site would cost about $75 million but also would pose the greatest future cancer risks to farmers and residents downstream.
Pruitt has the comfort of making this decision from Washington, D.C., far from the exposure zone. We urge him to consider all who have suffered so far because of the irresponsible, lazy solutions imposed on St. Louis decades ago. If Pruitt would regard it as unacceptable for his own family to be exposed to such risks, then he must conclude that St. Louisans deserve the same consideration. This radioactive time bomb must go.
Radiation levels near this Siberian village were 1,000 times above normal last fall. But no one worried much, LA Times, By SABRA AYRES, FEB 16, 2018 sabra.ayres@latimes.com, KHUDAIBERDYNSK, RUSSIA “…. this Siberian landscape on the edge of the Ural Mountains bore the brunt of one of the world’s worst nuclear accidents. On Sept. 29, 1957, decades before Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima entered the lexicon of landmark nuclear disasters, a buried cache of liquid radioactive waste from Mayak exploded. More than a quarter-million people were exposed to radiation, and nearly two dozen villages, home to more than 10,000 people, had to be vacated forever.
“The agreement is very assuring, as we will be able to receive support for efforts on the safety and security of the region,” Gov. Masao Uchibori said during the signing ceremony at the prefecture’s office on the same day.
It is the 15th time the unit of Japan Post Holdings Co. has concluded an agreement with a prefectural government.
Under the plan, Japan Post’s delivery minivehicles will be equipped with radiation gauges. Data will be collected automatically and wirelessly transmitted to the prefectural government. The prefecture’s coast was heavily damaged by the March 2011 mega-quake and tsunami, while much larger parts of it were contaminated by radiation by the subsequent core meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, run by Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.
In addition, the two parties agreed that posters to promote Fukushima goods will be put up at post offices in areas around Tokyo, in Fukushima and five other prefectures in the Tohoku region.
Japan Post’s delivery staff will also alert the prefectural government and others when several days’ worth of newspapers are seen accumulating outside of the homes of elderly people, and when damage to roads is observed.
“We will provide maximum assistance for Fukushima Prefecture’s revitalization,” said Kunio Yokoyama, president of Japan Post.
For 2 weeks in September and October last year, traces of the humanmade isotope ruthenium-106 wafted across Europe, triggering detectors from Norway to Greece and Ukraine to Switzerland. The radioactive cloud was too thin to be dangerous, containing no more than a few grams of material, but its origin posed an outsize mystery.
Now, scientists at the French Institute of Radioprotection and Nuclear Security (IRSN) in Paris say the isotope may have been released from the Mayak nuclear facility near Ozyorsk in southern Russia. IRSN argues that the leak could have taken place when Mayak technicians botched the fabrication of a highly radioactive component for a physics experiment at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in L’Aquila, Italy.
The Russian government and state nuclear operator Rosatom have vehemently denied that an accident took place, however. Meanwhile, an international committee set up by the Russian Academy of Sciences’s Nuclear Safety Institute (IBRAE) in Moscow that met on 31 January is divided over the origins of the pollution.
Based on a computer model that used the air-sampling data and weather patterns, IRSN concluded in early October 2017 that the ruthenium most likely originated in the southern Urals; its German counterpart agreed. The French team went on to rule out a number of potential sources, including a mishap at a nuclear reactor. Such an incident would have spewed many other radioactive pollutants besides ruthenium.
The southern Urals are home to the secretive Mayak facility, the scene of one of the world’s worst nuclear accidents 60 years ago, and speculation soon turned to a possible accident at its reprocessing plant, which extracts isotopes from spent nuclear fuel. The IRSN report, made public on 6 February, says Mayak’s attempt to manufacture a capsule of cerium-144 destined for Gran Sasso “should be investigated” as a possible cause. Scientists at Gran Sasso needed the cerium for a search—now called off—for hypothetical particles called sterile neutrinos.
The estimated amount of radioactive ruthenium released could only have come from processing several tons of spent nuclear fuel, IRSN says. What’s more, the ratio of ruthenium-106 to the faster-decaying isotope ruthenium-103, detected in smaller amounts last autumn, reveals that the fuel must have been removed from its reactor only a year or two earlier. Spent fuel is normally cooled for up to a decade before it is reprocessed, so it seems the plant was preparing material for an application requiring high levels of radioactivity, IRSN says.
That fits the description of the sterile neutrino experiment at Gran Sasso, known as SOX and supported by Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission. It required a source that was both extremely radioactive and very small, says SOX spokesperson Marco Pallavicini, a particle physicist at the University of Genoa in Italy. He says Mayak Production Association, the only company able to supply it, signed a contract in fall 2016 to produce a cerium capsule, expected to arrive in early 2018.
But in December 2017 the company stated it could not reach the desired radioactivity level. (“The Russians said absolutely nothing” about a radiation leak, Pallavicini says.) That meant SOX would lack the required sensitivity, and on 1 February, INFN announced it had axed the experiment, in what Pallavicini described as “a big blow” for scientists.
Jean-Christophe Gariel, IRSN’s director of health, says an uncontrolled temperature rise during the separation of cerium from the spent fuel at Mayak might have converted some of the ruthenium in the waste to gaseous ruthenium oxide. That gas would have escaped through the facility’s filters and solidified in the cool outside air, he says, turning into small solid oxide particles that could have wafted across Europe.
IBRAE Director Leonid Bolshov calls IRSN’s scenario “a good hypothesis,” but says it’s incorrect. For one thing, he says, the separation process never reached “the hot phase.” And in any case, he adds, “major operations” on the spent fuel at Mayak were done in late October 2017, after the ruthenium release. Bolshov says that a “rather rare meteorological event” might have transported the ruthenium from an as-yet-unidentified place to the southern Urals, from which it then appeared to spread.
Non-Russian members of IBRAE’s international panel, which is due to meet again in April, support IRSN’s conclusion that the southern Urals is the likely source of the leak, says IRSN physicist Jean-Luc Lachaume, a panel member, although some argue that the region is too large to pinpoint an exact location. Russian members claim the leak could have arisen “in the eastern part of the Russian federation,” Lachaume says. He says a representative of the Russian nuclear regulator Rostechnadzor who inspected Mayak in November 2017 told the panel that he saw no anomalies from a month earlier, but didn’t supply data to support that statement.
Princeton University physicist Frank von Hippel, a nonproliferation expert, says he doesn’t see “anything wrong with the IRSN analysis.” He notes that the amount of ruthenium-106 that the French team estimates was emitted—between 1 gram and 4 grams—matches the 30 grams of cerium-144 required for SOX, given that spent fuel contains the two isotopes in a ratio of about one to 14. And although the cloud over Europe was harmless, an accident at Mayak could mean that people living close by took in “potentially significant lung doses,” Von Hippel says.
Trump’s environmental good news, Religion News, ByMark Silk | The good news out of Washington is that the White House has withdrawn the nomination of Kathleen Hartnett White to head the President’s Council of Environmental Quality. A leading shill for the carbon industry, the one-time chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality would have joined Energy Secretary Rick Perry and EPA Administrator Greg Pruitt in a troika of climate change deniers driving the Trump Administration’s environmental policies.
Hartnett White’s confirmation hearing in November did not go well, and although President Trump resubmitted her nomination last month, it can be presumed that he reversed course in the face of threats from at least a couple of Senate Republicans to vote her down……….
while the cause of climate change is hardly restricted to religious folks, it is perhaps the most religiously motivated of all progressive social causes today. Leading the way has been Pope Francis, with his great 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’. But it is a cause that has enlisted the full spectrum of the religious community — Jews and Muslims, Eastern Orthodox and Mainline Protestant, Hindu and Buddhist.
Except for white evangelicals. Outliers, they are now in thrall to a political party that over the past decade has increasingly opposed all efforts to address climate change. Their religious rationalization is that they are standing with a God who promised no more floods against pagan “Earth worshippers.”
“Slavery degrades the Religious Activity of the People,” preached Boston’s leading abolitionist minister Theodore Parker on July 4, 1858. Today it is climate change denial that is degrading the religious activity of the evangelical people. https://religionnews.com/2018/02/06/trumps-environmental-good-news/
Albuquerque Journal 5th Feb 2018, Researchers hope to measure the effects of mixed metals and uranium waste
exposure on Native American populations living in close proximity to
abandoned mines, and better understand how these toxins spread through the
environment.
That’s the objective of the newly created Superfund Research
Center at the University of New Mexico, which is funded by $1.2 million a
year for five years from the National Institute of Environmental Health
Sciences.
EPA orders cleanup at St. Louis nuclear waste site. What does it mean for the nation’s other toxic messes? WP, By Brady DennisFebruary 1 18, The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday ordered a long-awaited cleanup of a Superfund site northwest of St. Louis, saying residents living near the landfill contaminated with World War II-era nuclear waste deserve action after waiting 27 years for federal regulators to issue a decision.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s decision to partially excavate tons of radioactive material from the West Lake Landfill over the next five years — at an expected cost of $236 million to the liable companies — goes beyond a 2008 solution proposed by the George W. Bush administration to cover and monitor the waste…….
Thursday’s announcement also was intended to be Exhibit A in demonstrating Pruitt’s commitment to revitalizing the agency’s Superfund program, which includes the nation’s most polluted sites, by streamlining and accelerating cleanups. But it underscored how few Superfund sites have simple answers, though nearly all of them generate intense emotions.
“We were hoping for full, 100 percent excavation. But we know that would be difficult to accomplish,” said Dawn Chapman, a founder of Just Moms STL, an activist group that has long pushed for an extensive excavation with relocation of families near the landfill.
Chapman said her group views the outcome as a hard-fought victory but one that is far from guaranteed, given the public comment and cleanup process likely to unfold over years. “We have to stay here and watch it and see it through,” she said. “I look ahead, and I see these other big battles coming. We’re not going to blink, because you can’t. … We will continue to fight to get even more [radioactive waste] removed.”
……..While the $236 million price tag of the EPA plan is significantly higher than what the firms hoped to spend, it is well below the cost, projected at nearly $700 million, of a full excavation.In a statement, Republic Services said it was “pleased that the EPA has finally ended decades of study and again is issuing a proposed plan for the site.” But the company cautioned that a final decision could take years.
What remains to be seen is whether the decision on West Lake represents how Pruitt is likely to approach other Superfund sites. In recent months, Pruitt has promised aggressive Superfund cleanups and made a public show of butting heads with corporate interests — something he has rarely done on other issues during his first year at the EPA. Yet aside from creating a list of 21 targets needing “immediate and intense” attention, as well as forming a special task force to recommend ways to expedite cleanups and “reduce the burden” on companies involved, Pruitt has explained very little about how he intends to deal with the hundreds of other toxic waste sites around the country……….
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has proposed cutting the Superfund program’s budget by 30 percent, or about $330 million annually. And while there are responsible companies that the EPA can legally force to pay for cleanups at many of the locations Pruitt has mentioned, many others are “orphan” sites where the polluters have gone bankrupt or are no longer legally liable for remedying the problem. At those, the federal government still shoulders most of the tab — and the pot of available dollars keeps shrinking. ………
on the future of the West Lake Landfill — a decision that could free the St. Louis area of the seven-decade environmental burden it has borne in America’s quest for nuclear superiority.
For Pruitt, the right decision would be costly and complicated. The wrong decision, though far cheaper and most expedient, would leave in place a radioactive nightmare that would haunt the region for generations to come. The right decision is the only decision.
At issue are thousands of tons of radioactive waste left over from secret uranium refinement carried out in St. Louis during the Manhattan Project, the 1940s effort to produce America’s first nuclear bomb. Although officials at the time were well aware of the radioactive dangers, they paid little heed to where they dumped the wastes from years of uranium processing. An uncovered, unlined pit at the West Lake landfill became the dumpsite of choice, two miles northwest of St. Louis Lambert International Airport
The landfill, uphill and less than two miles from the Missouri River, was never designed for radioactive waste and never would have met today’s federal safety guidelines. Various radioactive hot zones have been discovered in downstream watersheds, as have large cancer clusters among residents. For years, a slow-moving underground fire at an adjacent landfill is believed to be advancing toward the buried nuclear waste.
In tests conducted from 2012 to 2014, groundwater at West Lake contained unsafe levels of radioactive uranium, radium and thorium-230, along with arsenic, manganese, barium and benzene.
An exhaustive, 814-page EPA study, updated on Jan. 10, outlines the dangers and costs associated with six options Pruitt can choose from for West Lake. One option, doing nothing, is laughable. Three cheaper proposals call for partial excavation of the site at varying depths and capping the site but leaving many toxins behind. The two best options involve full excavation — one would store the waste on-site in a modern, secure containment cell, and the other would transport it offsite to a remote, federally approved storage facility.
Full excavation and removal would keep the region safest over the long term. But it’s also the most expensive option at $695 million. Capping the site would cost about $75 million but also would pose the greatest future cancer risks to farmers and residents downstream.
Pruitt has the comfort of making this decision from Washington, D.C., far from the exposure zone. We urge him to consider all who have suffered so far because of the irresponsible, lazy solutions imposed on St. Louis decades ago. If Pruitt would regard it as unacceptable for his own family to be exposed to such risks, then he must conclude that St. Louisans deserve the same consideration. This radioactive time bomb must go.
Arctic Frontiers forum totes up Russia’s northern nuclear hazards, When Norway assesses potential nuclear risks in Northern Russia, it counts among them not just decades of intentionally scuttled radioactive trash – including two entire nuclear submarines – but also vessels transporting spent nuclear fuel throughout the Arctic, specifically from Andreyeva Bay. Bellona by Charles Digges,
When Norway assesses potential nuclear risks in Northern Russia, it counts among them not just decades of intentionally scuttled radioactive trash – including two entire nuclear submarines – but also vessels transporting spent nuclear fuel throughout the Arctic, specifically from Andreyeva Bay.
These considerations were part of a seminar held at the Arctic Frontiers forum last week in Tromsø, Norway, which tallied up ongoing threats of nuclear environmental contamination in Northwest Russia.
For decades, Norway, along with numerous other donor nations, has invested millions of dollars in improving the safety and security of Northwest Russia’s vast Cold War nuclear legacy sites.
According to Øyvind Selnæs, a senior adviser with the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority, Norway expects to see a spike in the number of ships passing through the Arctic carrying nuclear fuel and materials as Russia seeks to build new nuclear icebreakers to guide traffic along the Northern Sea Route. He also forecasted an increase the number vessels carrying spent nuclear fuel.
Even though it’s over 30 years since the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, radiation levels exceeding 39 706 Bq (becquerel) per kilo have been found in Swedish wild boar meat taken from the Uppland area.
According to the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority, this is the highest ever level measured in wild boar meat in Sweden, way exceeding the 1500 Bq/kg safe limit set by the Swedish Food Agency for meat consumption.
Speaking to The Local, Paul Andersson of the Swedish Radiation Authority explained that “wild boar were practically non-existent outside the southern counties of Skåne and Sörmland, two Swedish counties unaffected by radiation. However, in the years since, the wild boar population has multiplied and migrated to northern areas of Sweden”, which is why the authority is keen to test wild boar meat.
Andersson noted that wild boar may be particularly susceptible to radiation for a number of reasons: ”Wild boar forage for wild mushrooms and have the ability to find truffles in the ground, which may explain why this particular wild hog had such high levels of radiation.”
In contrast, he said elk meat’s radiation levels have consistently gone down since 1986, rarely exceeding the safety limit for meat consumption of 1500 Bq/kg.
The authority is encouraging hunters to send them wild boar meat samples for testing.
Brothers Sam and Gary Bencheghib have taken matters into their own hands. When they moved to Brooklyn, they were shocked to find several of the country’s most polluted waterways weren’t a country away but, literally, in their own backyards. For the earth-loving duo, it was a call to action.
The brothers — along with millions of residents in Queens and Brooklyn — live within a stone’s throw of three Superfund sites. Those are the places the EPA deems so polluted, toxic, or destroyed by a natural disaster that a fund has to be set up to clean up the area as quickly as possible. Among these, Newtown Creek is considered one of the most polluted spots in all of the United States. This is thanks to over a century of industrial waste being spewed into the river, raw sewage still being pumped into the waterway every day, and a semi-continual oil spill that’s seen 30 million gallons spilled into the water.
Add in the usual plastic waste that’s clogging our waterways and you have an American river that’s bafflingly poisoned.
The Gowan Canal is similarly toxic. The freshwater stream has been used for shipping of waster and toxic materials for so long that if you were to fall into the water, you’d have to be rushed to a hospital for decontamination procedures. Drinking the water would risk dysentery, arsenic poisoning, and, eventually, cancer.
The Bencheghib brothers know they cannot clean this up all by themselves. Their task is to bring awareness to the sites through their work with Make A Change World. The group aims to directly involve the average person is cleaning up the messes we’re making around the world — through an overuse of plastics and the under-regulated waste from industry.
Currently, “the bros” are focusing on their own backyard in Brooklyn, by highlighting the Superfund sites of Newtown Creek and Gowan Canal. These two sites are both earmarked for clean up operations to begin, but the process is slow and faces hurdles. Meanwhile, the current White House leadership plans to cut $327 million out of the EPA’s Superfund budget and has forbidden the EPA from speaking with citizens.
Luckily, the administration’s disinterest in the environment won’t have drastic effects on the clean up of Newtown Creek and Gowan Canal, as those sites have responsible parties who have been tasked with funding the lion’s share of the cleanup costs. WNYC reported back in November that the six major polluters of Newtown Creek were identified along with the 30 polluters of Gowan Canal. This means, hopefully, the cleanups will go forward unhindered.
Just down the street from Newtown and Gowan is a site called Wolff-Alport. This was the site of an earth metals extraction facility that shuttered in the 1950s. One of their extractions was the radioactive element thorium. That process has made the Wolf-Alport site the most radioactive spot in New York City. Since the company responsible for the radioactive pollution went out of business over 70 years ago, there’s no one to fine and, thereby, collect the funds to clean up the site. The whole tab falls on the shoulders of the EPA’s Superfund budget. WNYC talked to the EPA and they have an estimated cost of $39.9 million to clean up this radioactive site. Currently, there’s $650,000 in the account designated for that job. The acting deputy regional administrator for EPA said bluntly of the site that “What we do know is that people are actually being exposed.”
It would seem to reason that radioactive exposure to the citizens of New York would be a little higher on the list of sites the EPA and local, state, and the federal government would be rushing to clean up. That’s where Make A Change World comes in. 75 years is too long to wait for a radioactive, oil-soaked, or just plain toxic site to be cleaned up. Like the Bencheghib brothers, it’s time to take action in our backyards, in the voting booths, and in how we live our lives.
I received an email on Dec. 25 from a high school and college friend informing me that his kidney cancer had spread to his bones and that he was now in hospice.
Since we were mostly a close bunch in high school — just 128 grads in 1963 — I thought it appropriate to share my friend’s sad news with other classmates and ask for their good thoughts and prayers. Just 12 days later, my friend’s sister contacted me and said he had died peacefully at home. I relayed this sorrowful update to the class.
Among the responders was a classmate who told me that he and my now-departed friend, as well as other kids from the neighborhood, were all regular playmates. Their “playground” in this blue-collar city on the Delaware River was a swampy landfill that was once the location of a gas mantle factory from the 1890s through the 1940s. Gas mantles were small mesh socks coated with radium and thorium that covered a lamp’s gas jet. When ignited, they brightly illuminated America’s streets and houses before electrification.
Today the mantle factory’s former setting is a Superfund site, as classified by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1996. The feds have spent more than $350 million ridding the area and adjacent locales of hazardous wastes, including that deadly radium and thorium. As these elements decay, they give off gamma radiation and radon gas, both proven carcinogens.
The sensible reaction to this horror story would be to double our efforts to protect the environment so today’s and tomorrow’s kids won’t suffer the same horrible fate as these afflicted adults. But then we don’t live in sensible times.Under EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, the agency is slowly being dismantled. He and President Donald Trump have already canceled or overridden some key environmental regulations on coal waste and vehicle emissions, and the 2018 appropriations bill cuts the EPA’s budget for the Superfund program and climate change research.
Pruitt is on record denying the existence of global warming and, as a result of his staff’s disgust with his beliefs and a federal job freeze and buy-outs, more than 700 employees — 200 or more of them scientists — have left the agency in the last year. According to the union representing EPA staff, Pruitt’s ultimate goal is to cut “at least 3,100 full-time employees.”
Will this make our environment safer? Better yet, do you pack apples in your kids’ lunches? Last February, Pruitt withdrew a proposed ban on pesticides containing chlorpyrifos, used on apples, oranges and cherries across the country. This was despite the EPA’s own scientists, supported by the 66,000-member American Academy of Pediatrics, arguing that even low exposure levels to chlorpyrifos during early childhood increases the risk of learning disabilities, including reduced IQ and developmental delay, and behavioral problems, like ADHD. For expectant and new mothers, the agency’s scientists concluded that even the smallest amounts of the chemical can impact the brain development of fetuses and infants.
Chlorpyrifos are considered so toxic that their use has been banned in homes, schools, day care facilities, parks, hospitals, nursing homes and malls since 2000. But Pruitt says they are OK for your fruit bowl. The pesticide has also proven hazardous to farmworkers and approximately 1,800 critically threatened or endangered species.
A not-so-much fun fact is that Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of Lorsban which contains chlorpyrifos, underwrote President Trump’s inaugural parties to the tune of $1 million. Draw your own conclusions.
As things go, it’s not an especially big leap from a toxic playground in New Jersey in 1955 to an apple orchard in Maryland in 2018. The difference is that today we are supposed to be more discerning because some of us have reaped a sad harvest of family and friends who didn’t know a Superfund from Superman when they were growing up.
So what lessons have we learned? For me it is the undying power of greed — the greed that once caused a company to bury its toxic wastes instead of properly disposing of them, and the greed evinced by the current administration that’s at the beck and call of its corporate benefactors, whether they produce energy or chemicals. This hasn’t changed over the years, even when the guinea pigs are our own sons and daughters.
Frank Batavick writes from Westminster. His column appears Fridays. Email him at fjbatavick@gmail.com.
There are 10 or eleven towns in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexicothat had Uranium mills, right in the middle of town. That means that Uranium dust, polonium, thorium, radium, and radon blew freely, thoughout thewe towns, 24 hours a day for years. Most of the water, drained into the Colorado ariver. Many of these towns were downwinder towns, from open air blasting of nucler bombs in Nevada from 1949 to 1962. Many, of the towns had the misfortune of having underground nuclear bombs detonated close to them as well, to try to track natural gas. Especially in New Mexico and Colorado. In the 60s Hilibutron was also tracking nuclear waste into areas in Nevada, and Wyoming. More recently there has been fracking for oil and gas in UtAh, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona. This means the radioactive burden to their water tables has been increased again substantially , along with 60 years of radioactive burden on the Colorado River. There are also the 1000 or so uranium mines draining into the Colorado River and Green driver from Utah, the western slope, Shiprock New Mexico, Wyoming, The Grand Canyon Area.
I think Helen Caldicotts and Christina Macphersons estimates of a few million tons of radioactive sediment in Lake Mead and even lake Powell is wrong. https://nuclear-news.net/2017/12/22/uranium-tailings-pollution-in-lake-mead-and-lake-powell-colorado/
Consider underground nuclear destinations in Rangely Colorado and Northen New Mexico. I think it is more like a half billion or billions of ons of nuclear waste sediment in Lake Powell and lake mead..
There were Uranium Mills on the Navajo nation by Ship Rock and Halchita which is by the Colorado river. There were Uranium Mills right in the middle of town in Canyon City.Colorado, Moab.Utah, Uravan.Colorado, White Mesa.Utah, Monticello.Utah, by Grand Junction.Colorado. Many in Wyoming.
Uranium mining in Wyoming – Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_Wyoming.
There are dense cancer clusters in these little towns on the Navajo Nation, in Utah, in Nevada, in Colorado, in Wyoming, in New Mexico. There are Genetic mutations that should not exist. Some people, like those in St George or Monticello Utah got the mere pittance of 50,000 dollars, after having lived in downwinder areas and surviving cancer. Generations of families wiped-out in many instances. Clarke county Nevada, by Las Vegas has one of the highest incidences of cancer in the US. Is it any wonder, with all the radiation in their primary drinking water supplies?
Many little Colorado Plateau towns, in the west are hit with quintuple curses: bomb blasts above ground, bomb blasts below ground-poisoning their head waters, uranium mills and waste in town, their river water radioacively poisoned from inderground nuclear blasts, from uranium mines, from cold war nuclear bomb detonations.
There has recently, been a great deal of cracking in these areas, releasing radioactivity into their desert rivers and water tables.
Americans live in a grand delusion, thinking how clean the western United States, and the rest of the USA is, with a hundred rickety old nuclear plants belching tritium, into the environment. The United State is the most radioactive shithole in the world. How Trump has the gall to call other countries shitholes, is beyond me.
Uranium Miners Pushed Hard for a Comeback. They Got Their Wish. NYT, By HIROKO TABUCHIMONUMENT VALLEY, Utah— Garry Holiday grew up among the abandoned mines that dot the Navajo Nation’s red landscape, remnants of a time when uranium helped cement America’s status as a nuclear superpower and fueled its nuclear energy program.
It left a toxic legacy. All but a few of the 500 abandoned mines still await cleanup. Mining tainted the local groundwater. Mr. Holiday’s father succumbed to respiratory disease after years of hacking the ore from the earth.
But now, emboldened by the Trump administration’s embrace of corporate interests, the uranium mining industry is renewing a push into the areas adjacent to Mr. Holiday’s Navajo Nation home: the Grand Canyon watershed to the west, where a new uranium mine is preparing to open, and the Bears Ears National Monument to the north.
The Trump administration is set to shrink Bears Ears by 85 percent next month, potentially opening more than a million acres to mining, drilling and other industrial activity. But even as Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke declared last month that “there is no mine within Bears Ears,” there were more than 300 uranium mining claims inside the monument, according to data from Utah’s Bureau of Land Management office that was reviewed by The New York Times.
The vast majority of those claims fall neatly outside the new boundaries of Bears Ears set by the administration. And an examination of local B.L.M. records, including those not yet entered into the agency’s land and mineral use authorizations database, shows that about a third of the claims are linked to Energy Fuels, a Canadian uranium producer. Energy Fuels also owns the Grand Canyon mine, where groundwater has already flooded the main shaft.
Energy Fuels, together with other mining groups, lobbied extensively for a reduction of Bears Ears, preparing maps that marked the areas it wanted removed from the monument and distributing them during a visit to the monument by Mr. Zinke in May.
Energy Fuels’ lobbying campaign, elements of which were first reported by The Washington Post, is part of a wider effort by the long-ailing uranium industry to make a comeback.
The Uranium Producers of America, an industry group, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw regulations proposed by the Obama administration to strengthen groundwater protections at uranium mines. Mining groups have also waged a six-year legal battle against a moratorium on new uranium mining on more than a million acres of land adjacent to the Grand Canyon.
For the Navajo, the drive for new mines is a painful flashback.
“Back then, we didn’t know it was dangerous — nobody told us,” Mr. Holiday said, as he pointed to the gashes of discolored rocks that mark where the old uranium mines cut into the region’s mesas. “Now they know. They know.”
Supporters of the mining say that a revival of domestic uranium production, which has declined by 90 percent since 1980 amid slumping prices and foreign competition, will make the United States a larger player in the global uranium market.
It would expand the country’s energy independence, they say, and give a lift to nuclear power, still a pillar of carbon-free power generation. Canada, Kazakhstan, Australia, Russia and a few other countries now supply most of America’s nuclear fuel.
……….President Trump has prioritized scrapping environmental regulations to help revitalize domestic energy production. His executive order instructing Mr. Zinke to review Bears Ears said that improper monument designations could “create barriers to achieving energy independence.”
In theory, even after President Barack Obama established Bears Ears in 2016, mining companies could have developed any of the claims within it, given proper local approvals. But companies say that expanding the sites, or even building roads to access them, would have required special permits, driving up costs.
……….
A bill introduced last month by Representative John Curtis, Republican of Utah, would codify Mr. Trump’s cuts to the monument while banning further drilling or mining within the original boundaries. But environmental groups say the bill has little chance of passing at all, let alone before the monument is scaled back next month.
“Come February, anyone can place a mining claim on the land,” said Greg Zimmerman, deputy director at the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation group.
………Fred Tillman, an environmental engineer with the United States Geological Survey, said during a recent visit to the mine that the groundwater flows in the region were too complex to rule out the risk of contamination.
“There are these big unknowns about the potential impacts on cultural resources, on biological resources, on water resources,” Dr. Tillman said.
A senator steps in Even as troubles persist on the ground, the industry pushback has continued.
In court, mining groups led by the National Mining Association have challenged a 20-year moratorium on mining in the Grand Canyon watershed, established in 2012 by the Obama administration. (The Canyon Mine predates the moratorium.)
The Arizona Chamber of Commerce, which represents mining interests, also backed an effort to defeat a separate proposal that would have permanently banned mining on 1.7 million acres surrounding the Grand Canyon. An Energy Fuels executive testified in Congress against the ban.
And with the help of Republican senators like John Barrasso of Wyoming, the industry has pressed the E.P.A. to withdraw an Obama-era proposalthat would strengthen groundwater protections at uranium mines.
The proposal would regulate a mining method called in-situ recovery, which involves injecting a solution into aquifers containing uranium and bringing that solution to the surface for processing — a method criticized by environmentalists as posing wider contamination risks.
The UK Government launched on 11 January – with a media fanfare- its long delayed 150-page national environmental strategy (for England) titled ‘A Green Future: Our 25 Year Plan to Improve the Environment (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/25-year-environment-plan).
Prime Minister May asserted in her foreword: “We hold our natural environment in trust for the next generation. By implementing the measures in this ambitious plan, ours can become the first generation to leave that environment in a better state than we found it and pass on to the next generation a natural environment protected and enhanced for the future.
……. We will use this opportunity to strengthen and enhance the protections our countryside, rivers, coastline and wildlife habitats enjoy, and develop new methods of agricultural and fisheries support which put the environment first.”
In his own foreword, Environment Secretary Michael Gove added:“Environment is – at its roots – another word for nature, for the planet that sustains us, the life on earth that inspires wonder and reverence, the places dear to us we wish to protect and preserve. We value those landscapes and coastlines as goods in themselves, places of beauty which nurture and support all forms of wildlife….We will underpin all this action with a comprehensive set of environmental principles. To ensure strong governance, we will consult on plans to set up a world-leading environmental watchdog, an independent, statutory body, to hold Government to account for upholding environmental standards.”
These warm green words are, however, not backed up with the kind of action that recognizes the real environmental priorities with which ministers need to get a grip.
The most egregious omission for action is anything to halt, reverse and deal with nuclear industry radiological pollution and nuclear waste from power generation, spent irradiate nuclear fuel reprocessing and nuclear warhead production.
Chapter 4 is titled’ Increasing resource efficiency and reducing pollution and waste’ but makes zero mention of nuclear waste or radiological pollution, but does expend time and effort addressing far less ecologically damaging no radiotoxic waste pollution. Here is an extract:
Improving management of residual waste
Since 2000 we have diverted significant quantities of residual waste – i.e. waste that cannot be reused or recycled – from landfill through the development of energy from waste (EfW) facilities. These generally recover energy from the waste to produce electricity. In 2016/17, some 38% of waste collected by Local Authorities went to EfW compared with 16% that went to landfill. More can be done however. We want to make sure that materials ending up in the residual waste stream are managed so that their full value as a resource is maximised and the impact on the environment of treating them is minimised.
We will continue to encourage operators to maximise the amount of energy recovered from residual waste while minimising the environmental impact of managing it, for example by utilising the heat as well as electricity produced. The actions set out in this Plan will help us build on this to ensure that the value of residual waste as a resource is fully realised and that emissions of carbon dioxide during the energy recovery process are kept as low as possible. We must bear in mind that any infrastructure must be able to adapt to future changes in the volume and make-up of residual waste generated and developments in technology. That way, waste is not locked into residual waste treatment processes when it could be reused or recycled. (page 94)
Annex 2 of the two Government reports on Environment 25 titled Government strategies to protect and improve the environment(https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/673160/25-year-environment-plan-annex2.pdf comprises of nearly 50 “strategies and plans for some of the government’s work to protect and conserve the environment,” but contains not one report that addresses environmental protection from radiation or from nuclear industry operations!
However, two days before the 25-year green strategy was issued, the Government quietly released ( to absolutely zero media attention) a 221- page document that explains how it plans to deal with nuclear waste in the UK. Clearly ministers wanted attention on plastic waste policy, but none fon radioactive waste policy.
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