Trump’s E.P.A. Pledges to Clean Up NYC’s ‘Most Radioactive Site’ – But Funding Is in Question WNYC News, Nov 6, 2017, By Sarah Stein Kerr and Annie Nova
The Trump administration is taking on its first Superfund cleanup in New York City – that is, assuming it has the money.
Last month, a $40 million plan to remediate a radioactive site in Queens where highly toxic materials were once poured into city sewers was unveiled by local officials of the Environmental Protection Agency. Known as Wolff-Alport for the chemical firm that was once located there, the site sits on an industrial stretch in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens. About three-quarters of an acre in size, the site currently houses a deli, an auto-shop and four other businesses. The E.P.A. counts a public school, a bar and some 300 residences within the site’s immediate vicinity.
Wolff-Alport, the newest of the city’s three designated Superfunds, was added to the E.P.A.’s Superfund priority list in 2014. The move came after surveys identified radioactivity throughout the property, including below public sidewalks and streets and in nearby sewers.
Going after such sites has been declared a priority for new E.P.A. administrator Scott Pruitt, a former attorney general of Oklahoma whose views on the environment make him one of the President’s most controversial appointees. Before assuming the post, Pruitt sued the agency repeatedly and still maintains that climate change is not the result of human activity.
But if he’s a climate change doubter, Pruitt has proclaimed himself a Superfund believer. In a memo this summer, Pruitt wrote: “My goal as Administrator is to restore the Superfund program to its rightful place at the center of the agency’s core mission.”
Judith Enck, former regional E.P.A. administrator for New York who pushed to get Wolff-Alport on the Superfund list, said she remains skeptical of Pruitt’s public declarations in support of cleaning up these hazardous waste sites.
“You can’t be the E.P.A. administrator and not stand for anything,” Enck said. “So he’s latched on to Superfunds. But at the same time, he’s cutting the budget, so it kind of rings hollow.”
President Donald J. Trump has proposed cutting $327 million – or around a third – of the nation’s annual Superfund budget. At the same time, Pruitt is also seeking to end the E.P.A.’s financial support to the Department of Justice, which holds the polluters of these hazardous waste sites accountable.
Regardless, spokeswoman for the E.P.A Tayler Covington, said that the agency is committed to cleaning up Wolff-Alport.
“There are no plans to change any of the cleanups for the three New York City Superfund sites,” said Covington. “We are in the budgetary process and final funding levels will not be settled until Congress acts.”
But experts on the Superfund program contend that even the current funding levels are still well below what is needed to clean up the nation’s many contaminated sites.
The E.P.A. announced the cleanup plan for Wolff-Alport in late September. The site’s remediation calls for all tenants to be permanently relocated, all buildings to be demolished and sewers to be replaced. The contaminated soil will be transported to a waste landfill.
All told, the cleanup will cost $39.9 million. But exactly where those funds will come from remains a question.
The E.P.A. maintains an account for each Superfund site in which money allocated for the cleanup is held. The Wolff-Alport-designated bank account currently holds just a little over $650,000, Thomas Mongelli, E.P.A. project manager of the site, told WNYC.
Usually, it’s the original polluters who are responsible for picking up the tab for cleanups. At Newtown Creek, a heavily polluted waterway that borders Brooklyn and Queens, six potentially responsible polluters have been identified. The Gowanus Canal in southern Brooklyn has more than 30 known polluters. Wolff-Alport, on the other hand, is considered in E.P.A. terminology an “orphan,” which means that the original polluter is defunct and can’t be relied upon for payment.
“There is a good chance that most of this money is going to need to come from the federal Superfund program and federal Superfund is running on fumes,” Enck said.
Beginning in the 1980s, a tax on Superfund polluters amassed funds for cleanup in a trust account. But that provision expired around 1995, and the account has since languished. Although there are no official estimates of the cost to clean up all of the country’s polluted sites, Kate Probst, author of a report to Congress, “Superfund’s Future: What Will It Cost?,” said the $280 million account balance is woefully insufficient.
Although annual congressional appropriations for Superfunds were meant to compensate for the trust account’s decline, these appropriations have also steadily dwindled. Federal contributions for Superfund cleanup have fallen from $2.1 billion in 1999, to an annual budget of $1.2 billion by 2013, according to the Office of Government Accountability.
This shortfall has stunted the cleanup work at the nation’s most contaminated sites, Probst said. “If they had more money, they probably would have cleaned up more sites, or gotten construction completed on more sites. We know the number of cleanups are slowing,” she said, adding that she expects there will be more disruptions due to the funding shortages. “That is the tip of the iceberg,” Probst said.
City officials are also worried that the feds may be low-balling the costs of cleaning up Wolff-Alport. In an August letter to the E.P.A., Haley Stein, a lawyer with the city’s law department, stated that the city “believes that E.P.A. significantly underestimates the cost and feasibility of implementing its preferred alternative.”
City officials declined to detail the reasons for their skepticism.
At an E.P.A. meeting about the site in Queens this summer, a handful of residents also expressed concerns about the Trump administration’s plan to cut the Superfund budget and how that would affect Wolff-Alport’s cleanup.
Walter Mugdan, acting deputy regional administrator for E.P.A. region 2, was frank in his response.
“Do I know how this site will rank against others? I don’t,” Mugdan told residents, according to a transcript of the meeting. “But I do know radioactive materials are [a] serious concern and what we do know is that people are actually being exposed.”
Indeed, The New Yorker, citing government findings, dubbed Wolff-Alport, “The most radioactive place in New York City,” in a 2014 video story, which recounts the site’s fascinating history.
In the 1920s, business partners Harry Wolff and Max Alport founded the Wolff-Alport Chemical Company. At the factory, workers processed monazite sand to extract rare earth metals – a highly toxic procedure. By the 1940s, the Atomic Energy Commission, the successor of the Manhattan Project, started buying radioactive thorium from the site. In the 1950s, the factory shuttered.
Norman Kleiman, director of the Eye Radiation and Environmental Research Laboratory at Columbia University, said the E.P.A. had an obligation to clean up the site. Radiation there is “well above the average terrestrial exposure even in New York City,” Kleinman told WNYC.
“People are especially concerned about exposure,” Kleinman added, “and from a public policy and public health point of view, it’s important to allay fear.”
He said risks to passersby and casual visitors to the site are likely minimal, however. “We get radiation from the sun, from the stars, so we live and are bathed in a radioactive world,”Kleinman said.
I’ve always wondered: do nuclear tests affect tectonic plates and cause earthquakes or volcanic eruptions? The Conversation, Jane Cunneen Do underground nuclear tests affect Earth’s tectonic plates, and cause earthquakes or volcanic eruptions? – Anne Carroll, Victoria
Apart from escalating global fears about conflict, North Korea’s recent nuclear tests have raised questions about geological events caused by underground explosions.
Some media reports suggest the tests triggered earthquakes in South Korea. Others report the explosions may trigger a volcanic eruption at Paektu Mountain, about 100km from the test site.
So can an underground test cause an earthquake? The short answer is yes: a nuclear explosion can cause small earthquakes. But it is unlikely to affect the earth’s tectonic plates or cause a volcanic eruption.
Although a nuclear explosion releases a lot of energy in the immediate region, the amount of energy is small compared to other stresses on tectonic plates………
Earthquakes from nuclear testing
The 3 September 2017 North Korean nuclear test generated shock waves equivalent to a magnitude 6.3 earthquake. Eight minutes later, a magnitude 4.1 event was detected at the same site. This may have been linked to a collapse of a tunnel related to the blast.
Several small earthquakes measured since the event may have been induced by the nuclear test, but the largest is only a magnitude 3.6. An earthquake of this size would not be felt outside of the immediate area.
The largest induced earthquake ever measured from nuclear testing was a magnitude 4.9 in the Soviet Union. An earthquake of this size can cause damage locally but does not affect the full thickness of the earth’s crust. This means it would not have any effect on the movement of tectonic plates.
Historical data from nuclear testing (mostly in the USA) shows that earthquakes associated with nuclear testing typically occur when the explosion itself measures greater than magnitude 5, 10–70 days after the tests, at depths of less than 5km, and closer than around 15km to the explosion site. More recent studies have concluded that nuclear tests are unlikely to induce earthquakes more than about 50km from the test site……..
Monitoring nuclear tests
The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO) has a global monitoring system to detect nuclear tests, including seismometers to measure the shock waves from the blast and other technologies.
Seismologists can analyse the seismic data to determine if the shock waves were from a naturally occurring earthquake or a nuclear blast. Shock waves from nuclear blasts have different properties to those from naturally occurring earthquakes.
Testing was much more common before the CTBTO was formed: between 1945 and 1996 more than 2,000 nuclear tests were conducted worldwide, including 1,032 by the USA and 715 by the Soviet Union.
Forbes 30th Oct 2017, Fukushima City is 50 miles northeast of the Fukushima-Daiichi Power Plant, so the radiation levels have been lower there than in the restricted areas, now reopening, that are closer to the plant. Hayama was unable to test monkeys in the most-contaminated areas, but even 50 miles from the plant,he has documented effects in monkeys that are associated with radiation.
He compared his findings to monkeys in the same area before 2011 and to a control population of monkeys in Shimokita Peninsula, 500 miles to the north. Hayama’s findings have been published in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports, published by Nature.
Among his findings: Smaller Bodies — Japanese monkeys born in the path of fallout from the Fukushima meltdown weigh less for their height than monkeys born in the same area before the March, 2011 disaster, Hayama said. “We can see that the monkeys born from mothers who were exposed are showing low body weight in relation to their height, so they are smaller,” he said.
Smaller Heads And Brains — The exposed monkeys have smaller bodies overall, and their heads and
brains are smaller still. “We know from the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that embryos and fetuses exposed in utero resulted in low birth weight and also in microcephaly, where the brain failed to develop adequately and head size was small, so we are trying to confirm whether this also is happening with the monkeys in Fukushima,” Hayama said.
By Itai Vardi • Tuesday, October 31, 2017Kathleen Hartnett White, President Trump’s nominee to head the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), has recently made money from both leases on oil drilling and speaking fees at conferences sponsored by the fossil fuel industry. These new details come from Hartnett White’s financial disclosure, obtained by DeSmog.
If her nomination is confirmed, Hartnett White will be charged with interagency coordination of science, energy, and environmental policy and with overseeing crucial environmental review processes for new energy and infrastructure projects. The CEQ, a division of the Executive Office of the President, was established in 1969 as part of the landmark National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
Hartnett White also enjoyed income from an interest in four oil leases — two in Texas and two in Kansas. These rigs were operated by Central Crude, Linn Operating, CHS Operating, and CVR Refining. Hartnett White indicated in her disclosure that she recently gifted these interests to her nephew.
Additionally, she reported royalties from her co-authored book Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy, a text that copiously celebrates fossil fuels as the “lifeblood of the modern world.”
Other sources of reported income include a dog breeding business, co-owned with her husband, Beau Brite White.
Derek Seidman, a research analyst at the Public Accountability Initiative, a nonpartisan watchdog research group focused on corporate and government accountability, says that Hartnett-White’s recent earnings from fossil fuel interests is cause for concern.
“It’s unsettling to learn about the close ties that White has to the very interests and entities that she’s been tasked to oversee at the CEQ,” says Seidman, who has reviewed the financial disclosure. “Her cozy relationship with the oil and gas drilling industry is particularly troubling. These types of conflicts undermine public trust in regulatory institutions and open the door to all kinds of potential problems and abuses.”
Kathleen Hartnett-White did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Texas Public Policy Foundation said that she is not available for interviews.
Independent 26th Oct 2017, Global warming might be far worse than we thought, according to a new
study. The research challenges the ways that researchers have worked out
sea temperatures until now, meaning that they may be increasing quicker
than previously suggested. The methodology widely used to understand sea
temperatures in the scientific community may be based on a mistake, the new
study suggests, and so our understanding of climate change might be
fundamentally flawed.
Wales Online 26th Oct 2017, Nearly 60,000 people sign petitions to stop radioactive mud being dumped
off Cardiff. Campaigners say not enough research has been done on the
dangers of the mud from the decommissioned Hinkley A nuclear reactor.
Somerset Live 25th Oct 2017, Concerns have been raised after more than 200,000 tonnes of ‘radioactive’
mud from Hinkley Point power station will be dumped in the Bristol Channel.
EDF Energy, the company behind Hinkley Point C development in Bridgwater,
has obtained a marine licence to dump up to 200,000 cubic metres of dredged
material in the Bristol Channel – just a mile off Cardiff Bay. The
dredging licence was granted to the French energy giant in 2013 and it
gives them the right to discharge materials at Cardiff Grounds, a sandbank
in the Bristol Channel. http://www.somersetlive.co.uk/news/somerset-news/radioactive-mud-hinkley-point-dumped-672554
Authors, Joanna Burger, K. F. Gaines, J. D. Peles, W. L. Stephens Jr., C. Shane Boring, I. L. Brisbin Jr., J. Snodgrass, A. L. Bryan, Jr., M. H. Smith, M. Gochfeld First published: June 2001
Abstract
This study examined radiocesium (137Cs) levels in fish from the vicinity of the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site (SRS), a former nuclear weapons production facility in South Carolina. Fish from the Savannah River were sampled above (upstream), along, and below (downstream) the SRS, and from Steel Creek, a tributary that runs through the SRS. There was some off-site contamination of 137Cs in the Savannah River watershed due to low-level releases from past nuclear production on the SRS. The null hypotheses tested were that there would be no differences in 137Cs levels as a function of location along the river, and between species collected from the river and from Steel Creek on the SRS. For six of eight species of fish collected from the Savannah River, there were no differences in 137Cs levels in muscle from fish collected above, along, or below the SRS; exceptions were bowfin and shellcracker. Fish collected from Steel Creek had significantly higher levels (by about an order of magnitude) of 137Cs in muscle tissue than fish collected in the Savannah River. However, no fish from either Steel Creek or the Savannah River had 137Cs levels above the European Economic Community limit for fresh meat of 0.6 Bq/g. Lifetime cancer risk was calculated using the cancer slope factor of 3.2 × 10−11/pCi, and various fish consumption scenarios reflecting actual data from Savannah River fishermen. Using mean 137Cs concentrations and median fish consumption for 70 years for Black males—the group with the highest consumption—the excess lifetime risk associated with the eight species of fish in the Savannah River ranged from 9.0 × 10−7 to 1.0 × 10−5. The same calculation for fish from Steel Creek gave risk estimates from 1.4 to 8.0 × 10−5. The 95% level for consumption by Blacks, however, was about 70 kg/year. Black fishermen consuming that amount of bass from Steel Creek would sustain a lifetime risk of 3.1 × 10−4, whereas the same consumption of Savannah River bass would yield a risk estimate of 1.5 × 10−5.
After six tests, the mountain hosting North Korea’s nuclear blasts may be exhausted, SMH, Anna Fifield, 21 Oct 17 Tokyo: Have North Korea’s nuclear tests become so big that they’ve altered the geological structure of the land?
Some analysts now see signs that Mount Mantap, the 2200-metre-high peak under which North Korea detonates its nuclear bombs, is suffering from “tired mountain syndrome”.
The mountain visibly shifted during the last nuclear test, an enormous detonation that was recorded as a 6.3-magnitude earthquake in North Korea’s northeast. Since then, the area, which is not known for natural seismic activity, has had three more quakes.
“What we are seeing from North Korea looks like some kind of stress in the ground,” said Paul G Richards, a seismologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
“In that part of the world, there were stresses in the ground but the explosions have shaken them up.”
North Korea has conducted six nuclear tests since 2006, all of them in tunnels burrowed deep under Mount Mantap at a site known as the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Facility. Intelligence analysts and experts alike use satellite imagery to keep close track on movement at the three entrances to the tunnels for signals that a test might be coming.
After the latest nuclear test, on September 3, Kim Jong Un’s regime claimed that it had set off a hydrogen bomb and that it had been a “perfect success”.
After the latest nuclear test, on September 3, Kim Jong Un’s regime claimed that it had set off a hydrogen bomb and that it had been a “perfect success”.
Images captured by Airbus, a space technology company that makes earth observation satellites, showed the mountain literally moving during the test. An 85-acre area on the peak of Mount Mantap visibly subsided during the explosion, an indication of both the size of the blast and the weakness of the mountain.
Since that day, there have been three much smaller quakes at the site, in the 2 to 3 magnitude range, each of them setting fears that North Korea had conducted another nuclear test that had perhaps gone wrong. But they all turned out to be natural.
If the mountain collapses and the hole is exposed, it will let out many bad things.
Wang Naiyan, former chairman of the China Nuclear Society
That has analysts Frank V. Pabian and Jack Liu wondering if Mount Mantap is suffering from “tired mountain syndrome”, a diagnosis previously applied to the Soviet Union’s atomic test sites.
“The underground detonation of nuclear explosions considerably alters the properties of the rock mass,” Vitaly V. Adushkin and William Leith wrote in a report on the Soviet tests for the United States Geological Survey in 2001. This leads to fracturing and rocks breaking, and changes along tectonic faults.
Earthquakes also occurred at the US’ nuclear test site in Nevada after detonations there.
“The experience we had from the Nevada test site and decades of monitoring the Soviet Union’s major test sites in Kazakhstan showed that after a very large nuclear explosion, several other significant things can happen,” Richards said. This included cavities collapsing hours or even months later, he said.
Pabian and Liu said the North Korean test site also seemed to be suffering.
“Based on the severity of the initial blast, the post-test tremors, and the extent of observable surface disturbances, we have to assume that there must have been substantial damage to the existing tunnel network under Mount Mantap,” they wrote in a report for the specialist North Korea website 38 North.
But the degradation of the mountain does not necessarily mean that it would be abandoned as a test site – just as the United States did not abandon the Nevada test site after earthquakes there, they said. Instead, the US kept using the site until a nuclear test moratorium took effect in 1992.
For that reason, analysts will continue to keep a close eye on the Punggye-ri test site to see if North Korea starts excavating there again – a sign of possible preparations for another test.
The previous tests took place through the north portal to the underground tunnels, but even if those tunnels had collapsed, North Korea’s nuclear scientists might still use tunnel complexes linked to the south and west portals, Pabian and Liu said.
Chinese scientists have warned that another test under the mountain could lead to an environmental disaster. If the whole mountain caved in on itself, radiation could escape and drift across the region, said Wang Naiyan, the former chairman of the China Nuclear Society and senior researcher on China’s nuclear weapons programme.
World pollution kills more people annually than wars, disasters, hunger, ABC News, 21 Oct 17, Environmental pollution — from filthy air to contaminated water — is killing more people every year than all war and violence in the world. More than smoking, hunger or natural disasters. More than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined.
Key points:
One out of every six premature deaths in 2015, about 9 million, was due to toxic exposure
The financial cost of pollution-related death, sickness and welfare is $5.9 trillion annually
The worst affected countries are in Asia and Africa, with India topping the list
One out of every six premature deaths in the world in 2015 — about 9 million — could be attributed to disease from toxic exposure, according to a major study released on Thursday in The Lancet medical journal.
The financial cost from pollution-related death, sickness and welfare is equally massive, the report said, costing some $5.9 trillion in annual losses, or about 6.2 per cent of the global economy.
“There’s been a lot of study of pollution, but it’s never received the resources or level of attention as, say, AIDS or climate change,” Dean of global health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and the lead author on the report, Philip Landrigan said.
The report marks the first attempt to pull together data on disease and death caused by all forms of pollution combined.
“Pollution is a massive problem that people aren’t seeing because they’re looking at scattered bits of it,” Mr Landrigan said……
Africa, Asia worst affected
Experts say the 9 million premature deaths the study found was just a partial estimate, and the number of people killed by pollution is undoubtedly higher and will be quantified once more research is done and new methods of assessing harmful impacts are developed.
Areas like Sub-Saharan Africa have yet to even set up air pollution monitoring systems. Soil pollution has received scant attention. And there are plenty of potential toxins still being ignored, with less than half of the 5,000 new chemicals widely dispersed throughout the environment since 1950 having been tested for safety or toxicity.
Asia and Africa are the regions putting the most people at risk, the study found, while India tops the list of individual countries.
One out of every four premature deaths in India in 2015, or some 2.5 million, was attributed to pollution, the study found.
China’s environment was the second deadliest, with more than 1.8 million premature deaths, or one in five, blamed on pollution-related illness.
Several other countries such Bangladesh, Pakistan, North Korea, South Sudan and Haiti also saw nearly a fifth of their premature deaths caused by pollution.
To reach its figures, the study’s authors used methods outlined by the US Environmental Protection Agency for assessing field data from soil tests, as well as with air and water pollution data from the Global Burden of Disease, an ongoing study run by institutions including the World Health Organisation and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
Even the conservative estimate of 9 million pollution-related deaths is one-and-a-half times higher than the number of people killed by smoking, three times the number killed by AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, more than six times the number killed in road accidents, and 15 times the number killed in war or other forms of violence, according to GBD tallies.
Poorer countries most at risk
It is most often the world’s poorest who suffer. The vast majority of pollution-related deaths — 92 per cent — occur in low or middle-income developing countries, where policy makers are chiefly concerned with developing their economies, lifting people out of poverty and building basic infrastructure, the study found.
Environmental regulations in those countries tend to be weaker, and industries lean on outdated technologies and dirtier fuels.
In wealthier countries where overall pollution is not as rampant, it is still the poorest communities that are more often exposed, the report said.
“What people don’t realise is that pollution does damage to economies. People who are sick or dead cannot contribute to the economy. …..
The World Bank in April declared that reducing pollution, in all forms, would now be a global priority. And in December, the United Nations will host its first-ever conference on the topic of pollution.
“The relationship between pollution and poverty is very clear,” Ernesto Sanchez-Triana, lead environmental specialist at the World Bank, said.
The 1985 Royal Commission report into British Nuclear Tests in Australia discussed many of these issues, but never in relation to the proximity and timing of the 1956 Olympic Games. Sixty years later, are we seeing the same denial of known hazards six years after the reactor explosion at Fukushima?
It brings to mind the British atomic bomb tests in Australia that continued until a month before the opening of the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne – despite the known dangers of fallout travelling from the testing site at Maralinga to cities in the east. And it reminds us of the collusion between scientists and politicians – British and Australian – to cover up the flawed decision-making that led to continued testing until the eve of the Games.
Australia’s prime minister Robert Menzies agreed to atomic testing in December 1949. Ten months earlier, Melbourne had secured the 1956 Olympics even though the equestrian events would have to be held in Stockholm because of Australia’s strict horse quarantine regimes.
The equestrians were well out of it. Large areas of grazing land – and therefore the food supplies of major cities such as Melbourne – were covered with a light layer of radiation fallout from the six atomic bombs detonated by Britain during the six months prior to the November 1956 opening of the Games. Four of these were conducted in the eight weeks running up to the big event, 1,000 miles due west of Melbourne at Maralinga.
Bombs and games
In the 25 years I have been researching the British atomic tests in Australia, I have found only two mentions of the proximity of the Games to the atomic tests. Not even the Royal Commission into the tests in 1985 addressed the known hazards of radioactive fallout for the athletes and spectators or those who lived in the wide corridor of the radioactive plumes travelling east. Continue reading →
by Sam KnightEnvironmental regulators are telling local officials that it’s okay for the public to be exposed to radiation equivalent to “5,000 chest x-rays,” according to critics.
The EPA issued a public guidance in September, advising local officials to respond to a possible nuclear emergency by claiming that 5,000-10,000 millirems exposure “usually result[s] in no harmful health effects.” The watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) said past studies funded by the US government declared that level to be highly carcinogenic.
“National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, and EPA itself, have long estimated that 10,000 millirems could be expected to induce excess cancers in every 86th person exposed,” PEER said on Monday.
The non-profit criticized the agency for failing to cite which “radiation safety experts” it used to justify the declaration.
The EPA also didn’t say how long a human should be safe, when exposed to radiation at the 5,000-10,000 millirem range. It did note, however, that 75,000 millirem exposure “in a short amount of time (usually minutes too hours)” can cause acute radiation sickness.
“Although cancer has been associated with high doses of radiation received over short periods of time, the cancers usually do not appear for many years, even decades,” the guidance noted, ominously.
PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch said the threshold cited by the agency could lead to a dangerous hands-off approach, should catastrophe strike.
“This signals that in the event of a Fukushima-type accident EPA will allow public consumption of radiation-contaminated drinking water for months,” Ruch said.
“Dr. Strangelove is alive and lurking somewhere in the corridors of EPA,” he added.
PEER noted that it is planning on suing the EPA to challenge the legality of the radiation exposure claims. The group said that the guidance violates the Safe Drinking Water Act.
The agency advice on radiation exposure–a supplement to a “Protective Action Guide”–was crafted, in its own words, “to help emergency planners prepare public communications prior to and during” radiological and nuclear emergencies.
In January, just before President Obama left office, the EPA issued the initial Protective Action Guide. It set the allowable threshold for the general population at 500 millirems, and the threshold for babies, children, and pregnant and nursing women at 100 millirems.
“Some commenters…believe the proposed PAG was too conservative and that EPA should consider establishing the PAG in the 2,000 to 10,000 [millirem] range,” the agency said in January, in the Federal Register.
PEER was critical of these limits, reacting to them by saying they also violated Safe Drinking Water Act rules.
“For decades, EPA had taken the position that ‘There is no known safe amount of radiation,’” the watchdog said on Monday.
Radioactive wild boars in Sweden are eating nuclear mushrooms, Quartz, 13 Oct 17Radioactive wild boars currently roaming central and northern Sweden are proof positive that nuclear disasters have long-term environmental impacts, both near and far from where they occur.
In 1986, a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine exploded, irradiating the surrounding region, including Belarus, Russia and the rest of the Ukraine, and sending a cloud of radioactive material over northern and central Sweden. At the time, Swedes were warned against eating potentially nuclear berries and mushrooms. But no one told the wild boars about irradiated fruits and fungus, and three decades later these Swedish animals show exceptionally high levels of radioactivity because of mushrooms rooted deep in ground that remains radioactive.
On Oct. 5, the Swedish television channel SVT reported (link in Swedish) that of 30 wild boar carcasses tested for radiation this year by Calluna, a local environmental consultancy, 24 showed high levels of exposure. Calluna’s Ulf Frykman recently alerted local hunters in the Gävle region, about 100 miles north of Stockholm, of “extremely high” radiation levels among local boar,
“This is the highest level we’ve ever measured,” he told the Telegraph, noting one animal in particular. Although flora and fauna in Sweden have been generally deemed safe, Frykman believes deeply-rooted, nuclear mushrooms in the country’s northern territories are to blame for the high traces of radiation in these wild boars.
The creatures root for food in the soil, which exposes them to the iodine and cesium-137 traces that remain in soil long after they’re gone above ground. “Wild boar root around in the earth searching for food, and all the cesium stays in the ground,” Frykman explained. “If you look at deer and elk, they eat up in the bushes and you do not have not so much cesium there.”…….https://qz.com/1099248/radioactive-wild-boars-in-sweden-are-eating-nuclear-mushrooms/
Greed for atomic minerals to leave Tamil Nadu in peril, INDIAN EXPRESS, By Sv Krishna Chaitanya & Sushmitha Ramakrishnan | Express News Service 13th October 2017 CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu has been the biggest victim of illegal beach sand mining in the country. As per the report submitted recently by senior lawyer and rights activist V Suresh, appointed as amicus curiae by Madras High Court in the case relating to illegalities in mining of beach sand minerals in Thoothukudi, Tirunelveli and Kanniyakumari, out of 1.5 crore tonnes of raw sand mined between 2000 and 2017, 57 per cent had been mined illegally.
Now, the latest “horrific” amendment, as activists call it, to Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) Notification, 2011 by Union Ministry of Environment, allowing mining of atomic minerals like uranium, thorium or titanium in ecologically sensitive CRZ areas, irrespective of whether they are available in non-CRZ areas or not, is only going to deliver a telling blow on the already under-stress Tamil Nadu coast.
As per the study titled “Coastal Mineral Mapping” done by researchers in Institute of Ocean Management (IOM) in Anna University, it is revealed that Tamil Nadu arguably has highest concentration of Monazite deposits in the country along its coastline that spans over 1,076 km. Monazite, an atomic mineral, contains 8-10 percent thorium, which is a nuclear fuel. This was India’s first exhaustive attempt to map and record all the natural minerals available, done is tandem with Atomic Mineral Directorate for Exploration and Research (AMD) of Department of Atomic Energy and funded by Environment Ministry. The beach sands of India — especially in Tamil Nadu, Odisha, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh — are rich in several heavy minerals such as ilmenite, rutile, leucoxene, garnet, sillimanite, zircon and monazite.
Supreme Court lawyer Ritwick Dutta, who is also the managing trustee of Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment, said the latest notification will compromise the integrity of the coast. “I can’t make sense of this notification. There is no consultation, there is no fixation on extraction of minerals. This will give a free run for miners to plunder India’s natural treasure. There is a pattern in what the Centre is doing. It is systematically weakening all the laws coming under Environment (Protection) Act, 1972. Firstly, construction projects were exempted from preparing EIA, later Central Wetlands Regulatory Authority was replaced with ‘toothless’ Wetlands (Conservation and Management) Rules, 2016, where state authorities call the shots. Now, this mindless amendment to CRZ Notification, 2011.”………
Environmental activist Nityanand Jayaraman says that Tamil Nadu has already been plundered violating CRZ norms. The intertidal, CRZ-1 areas were not spared even when there were laws. “Now, this is legitimising some of the wrongdoing done in the past and people have also lost their right to question the illegality.”
Environmental dangers
It’s not just the loss of precious minerals that should worry the States. Tampering of fragile coastline would also invite disasters like salt water intrusion, qualitative and quantitative degradation of ground water……..
Health effects
While social and environmental consequences seem inevitable, Konstantine claimed that atomic mining has brought serious health complications to residents around the mines. “Since 1965, mining for radioactive minerals has been prominent in Kanniyakumari, particularly in Manavalakruchi. Studies in the neighbouring mines in Kollam have revealed that the effect of radiation has had a far reaching effect, up to 85 km,” he rued.
He added that no comprehensive study has been brought to public forum about the health effects of these radiations. “The incidences of cancer has been rising over the decades and most victims from Manavalakuruchi and Midalam, approach the Regional Cancer Centre in Thiruvananthapuram or the International Cancer Centre , by CSI Medical Mission at Neyyoor. “These cases are however are not mapped back to radioactivity,” he said claiming that the incidence of the disease is relatively lower the farther one lives from atomic mining areas……..
Alarm bells ringing
Activists say the resources could end up in foreign soil owing to lack of state-run companies’ expertise in handling such rare-earth minerals
Mining for radioactive minerals can contribute to cancer among those in the vicinity of the project
Tampering of fragile coastline would also invite disasters like salt water intrusion, leading to degradation of ground water. They say there are many areas in the State already battling such issues due to unscientific construction
The idea that nuclear pollution can be rendered safe by extreme dilution has been proven wrong
radioactive materials bioaccumulate. A worm can contain 2,000 to 3,000 times higher levels than its environment. The worm is then eaten by another marine animal, which gets eating by another, and so on. At each step, the radioactive level rises. Barbey has identified reproductive defects in sea crabs, caused by radioactive contamination, and these genetic defects are passed on to future generations of crabs.
Are we to believe the same is not happening in humans, who are at the top of the food chain?
The fact of the matter is that a certain number of cancer deaths are considered acceptable in order to keep costs for the nuclear waste industry down. The question no one has the answer to is: At what point do the deaths begin to outweigh the cost-savings of the nuclear industry?
As to where such cost-benefit considerations came from in the first place, the filmmakers identify the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP)
the nuclear industry is hardly operating for the benefit of the many.
For decades, the common method of nuclear disposal was to dump plutonium-filled steel barrels into the ocean. Today, many if not most of these barrels have corroded and disintegrated, releasing radioactive material into the environment
“Versenkt und Vergessen” (Sunk and Forgotten) investigates what happened to the barrels of nuclear waste, and how radioactive material is disposed of today
In 1993, nuclear waste dumping into the ocean was banned worldwide, yet the ocean remains a primary dumping ground for radioactive waste
Instead of ditching barrels overboard, the nuclear waste industry built pipes along the bottom of the sea, through which the radioactive material is discharged directly into the open sea
Cancer deaths are considered acceptable to keep costs for the nuclear waste industry down. According to the International Commission on Radiological Protection, this cost-benefit consideration is part of Epicurus’ utilitarian ethics, which states that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few
By Dr. Mercola
A rarely addressed environmental problem is radioactive pollution from nuclear waste disposal. For decades, the common method of nuclear disposal was to simply dump plutonium-filled steel barrels into the ocean. Continue reading →
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