Environmental pollution from North Korea’s underground nuclear tests a concern for China
China fears NK nuke leaks, Korea Times, By Oh Young-jin, 2017-05-21 China fears environmental contamination and earthquakes that may be triggered by North Korea’s underground nuclear tests, possibly bringing Beijing to the breaking point of its patience with its blood-sealed but increasingly defiant ally, a Chinese scholar said during an interview Friday.
Severe coastal floods set to double in number, as sea levels rise
Rising seas could double the number of severe coastal floods https://www.newscientist.com/article/2131642-rising-seas-could-double-the-number-of-severe-coastal-floods/ By Just 35 years from now, severe coastal flooding could hit twice as often as it does now – if the seas rise by between just 5 and 10 centimetres.
Such a hike would make 50-year weather events happen twice as often, according to work by Sean Vitousek, a coastal scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and his colleagues. A 50-year event is an increase in sea level so large that it’s only likely to happen twice a century.
Sea levels are actually projected to rise by more than this – estimates put it at between 10 and 20 centimetres over the next few decades.
Extremely high water levels are sometimes caused by storm surges and low pressure atmospheric systems, when the easing of pressure on the sea allows water levels to rise. But normal tides and waves also play a part.
Cities under water
Taking those factors into account in his model, Vitousek found that, by 2050, wave-exposed Indian cities like Mumbai and Kochi, and Abidjan in Ivory Coast would see increased frequency of flooding with just a 5-centimetre rise in seas.
If the rise were 10 centimetres, increased flooding would also hit Shanghai, London and New York.
Sea level rise is a global phenomenon that affects regions differently. The ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are so massive that their gravity draws ocean water towards them. As they melt, that water will go elsewhere.
“If you lose Greenland, you’ll have more water in the ocean, which will elevate sea level everywhere. But the effect will be stronger farther away from Greenland,” says Anders Levermann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “In Greenland or Antarctica, the water levels may even drop. The tropics always lose because they’re in the middle.”
Sea levels are currently going up by about 3 to 4 millimetres across the globe somewhat uniformly, Vitousek says, but some areas are more susceptible to sea level rise than others because that makes up a larger percentage of their overall water levels.
n the higher latitudes where the difference between high and low sea level in a given year could be 3 metres, a few centimetres may not be noticeable. But in the tropics, that small increase could account for 10 to 20 per cent of the variation, Vitousek says. “It’s not a trivial percentage of the water level,” he says.
Accept the danger
Aimée Slangen, a climate change scientist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, says regional events like El Niño could keep down some of the sea level rise in the tropics, but not forever.
“I think it would only delay the inevitable: at some point, flooding frequencies are going to increase as long as sea level keeps on rising,” she says. Vitousek says possible responses are to retreat from coastlines or to invest in engineering solutions, like building up natural beaches or creating artificial ones or building sea walls that provide shoreline protection.
But over the next few decades, an increase of 10 to 20 centimetres is inevitable, says Levermann. Even with large reductions in emissions, the die has already been cast for the near future.
“No one has to be afraid of sea level rise, if you’re not stupid,” he says. “It’s low enough that we can respond. It’s nothing to be surprised about, unless you have an administration that says it’s not happening. Then you have to be afraid, because it’s a serious danger,” Levermann says.
Journal reference: Nature Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-01362-7
Read more: Unexpected Antarctic melt could trigger 2-metre sea level rise
A nuclear attack: how would you fare, even if you survived the blast?
Nuclear attack: ‘A third of the world would die’ https://www.byronnews.com.au/news/nuclear-attack-third-world-would-die/3178772/ Cody Cassidy, Paul Doherty | 17th May 2017, DURING the Cold War it was widely understood that both the United States and the USSR had the capability to destroy the world with nuclear weapons. What people didn’t know was how easily they actually could do it.
Today, thanks to sophisticated weather models built to analyse global warming, we know that even a relatively small nuclear skirmish would be extremely bad news.
Simulations of full-scale war between smaller nuclear-armed countries suggest that a hundred multimegaton bombs would be exchanged, and the simultaneous detonation of a hundred nuclear devices would be bad for you even if you were on the other side of the globe.
Your first problem? Radiation.
When the nukes went off they would irradiate the area and transmute innocuous atoms into dangerous ones. One of the worst of these nuclear bastard children is called strontium-90.
It’s light, so it doesn’t take many explosions for it to coat the globe and get deep into the food supply. Once ingested it’s so similar to calcium that your body absorbs it into your bones.
Children born after the open-air nuclear tests of the 1950s have fifty times the natural level of strontium-90 in their teeth. Fortunately, that’s still below the threshold for serious danger.
Unfortunately, unlike a test, a nuclear battle will blow past that threshold. Once strontium-90 is in your bones its radioactive decay breaks up the DNA of your cells, leading to bone cancers and leukaemia.
So if you survived the initial nuclear exchange, you would have bone cancer to look forward to, but that’s only if you could also survive the more serious smoke, ash, and soot problem.
The second issue, after the dust has cleared from the initial detonations, is that the dust wouldn’t clear.
After a hundred multimegaton bombs exploded in the air, not only would they directly distribute carbon into the upper atmosphere but they would start enormous forest and urban fires that would release massive amounts of smoke.
On top of that, the explosions would lift tons of fine dust – all of which would be heated by the sun to rise and collect in the stratosphere.
The smoke from your typical campfire stays below the clouds where it can be wicked away by rain. In the case of nuclear fallout, smoke and ash would be lifted above the clouds where it wouldn’t be wicked away by rain, so it would stay parked for years and block sunlight.
Even conservative environmental simulations show that a hundred nuclear detonations would block enough sunlight to drop the average global temperature by a few degrees.
A sudden global drop in temperature of even a couple of degrees would be devastating for the world’s food supply, because a single frost kills rice.
A serious disturbance in rice production would kill as many as 2 billion people around the globe.*
In a hundred-bomb nuclear war nearly a third of the world’s population would die from the explosions, starvation, or cancer, but our species would carry on.
In larger, multithousand exchanges of thermonuclear weapons, like the one that almost occurred in November 1983 between the United States and the USSR, however, we probably wouldn’t.
HOW CLOSE THE WORLD CAME TO ENDING
On November 7, 1983, the United States led NATO in a massive training exercise called Able Archer that mimicked a nuclear first strike against the USSR. Unfortunately for nearly everybody, the USSR believed the exercise was a cover for an actual first strike.
So in response the Soviets helicoptered missiles to their silos and mobilised their air force, actions that should have alarmed the U.S. military to respond in kind.
Luckily, Lt. Gen. Leonard Perroots of the U.S. Air Force mistook Russia’s actions for a simple training exercise and took no action. That lack of response convinced the USSR to stand down.
Lt. Gen. Perroots made a “fortuitous, if ill-informed” decision, according to declassified analysis of the scare. It might be the most fortuitous mistake in human history.
If the alarm had been raised and the misunderstanding escalated into full-scale nuclear war, a few thousand multi-megaton bombs would have crisscrossed the globe and detonated over their targets.
Even if you didn’t live in a large city (basically every city with a population of more than 100,000 in the United States and the USSR was targeted) and therefore weren’t killed by the initial blasts, you couldn’t expect to live long.
Within two weeks of something like this happening, 180 million tons of smoke, soot, and dust would coat our globe like black paint, and there it would stay.
Light levels would be reduced to a few per cent of what they are today, so high noon would look like predawn. Midsummer highs in North America would be below zero.
The good news is there would be plenty of dead trees to burn for warmth. The bad news: You would starve. Crops would be wiped out, and those that weren’t would suffer from another problem: Bugs.
Cockroaches and their ilk are quite durable when it comes to radiation, but their predators are not. Without any birds to keep them in check, crop-eating pests would prosper.
Pests would decimate any crops that made it through the freeze.
But there is an upside (sort of). Cockroaches are actually more efficient than cows at turning grain into protein, and even in the new apocalyptic world there would be plenty for them to eat.
They’re also a healthy snack. Cockroaches are high in vitamin C, protein, and fat, so as long as you’re not a picky eater, you may survive a little longer than expected.
You would just need to eat a lot of cockroaches, around 144 per day, to survive. Gross.
This is an extract from And Then You’re Dead: A scientific exploration of the world’s most interesting ways to die by Cody Cassidy and Paul Doherty, published by Allen and Unwin and available now.
Paul Doherty is co-director and senior staff scientist at the San Francisco Exploratorium Museum. He received his PHD in solid state physics from MIT. Cody Cassidy is a writer and editor.
India’s secret radioactive horror story – Jadugoda
The Terrible Things Happening To Children In India’s ‘Nuclear Graveyard’ Will Scar You For Life [PHOTOGRAPHS] scoopwhoop.com, by Era Tangar, 16 May 17 “…….Jadugoda, a town of 19,500 people about 1,370km from New Delhi, is a four-hour drive from Ranchi, Jharkhand. In 1967, this tribal town became the site for India’s first nuclear mine. It is often called India’s best kept secret. The government-owned Uranium Corporation of India (UCIL) mines for uranium in the region. The small township is home to the world’s finest uranium ore, magnesium diuranate,
The crimes of the UCIL have been under-reported in the media. There are articles and documentaries portraying the state of the town and the areas nearby but not much has been done as a follow up while people of Jadugoda continue to suffer for 50 years now. India’s nuclear dream has costed the well-being of Jharkhand’s tribals and made them suffer in silence. …….. Share the word about Jadugoda till it reaches someone who can help these innocent souls.
These photos were featured at the 3rd International Uranium Film Festival, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, World Uranium Symposium in Quebec City, Canada 2015, World Nuclear Victims Forum, 2015 in Hiroshima, Japan and at UCCJ International Youth Conference in Kyoto, Japan 2017. https://www.scoopwhoop.com/the-dark-truth-about-nuclear-graveyard-jadugoda/#T.t2a4psvnq
Climate change could kill off all coral reefs by 2050
Dahr Jamail | Coral Reefs Could All Die Off by 2050, May 15, 2017, By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | Report “…… over the last two years, the Great Barrier Reef, which is so dear to Miller and countless others who revel in the beauty and mysteries of the oceans, has been dying off at an unprecedented rate due primarily to warming ocean waters.
Coral bleaching occurs when corals become stressed by warmer-than-normal water, causing them to expel symbiotic algae that live in their tissues, from which they get their energy. Coral turns completely white when it bleaches. If it remains bleached long enough, it dies.
One scientist has already gone so far as to declare the Great Barrier Reef is now in a “terminal stage.” Most of those studying the reef agree that what is happening is unprecedented. This is because, at a minimum, two-thirds of the 1,400-mile long reef bleached out last year, which led to 22 percent of it dying. Now another bleaching event has resulted in at least two-thirds of the reef bleached again.
“The bleaching this year has moved much farther south and has taken scientists by surprise in its severity and extent,” Miller said. And he fears the state of the reef could be even worse than scientists realize, since only aerial surveys have been conducted to assess the damage and no research vessel is currently active on the reef to provide finer details.
With ocean temperatures rising across the globe as anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) continues to pick up speed, the Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral ecosystem on Earth, may well be an example of what is happening to all of the coral on the planet.
“This Is New for All of Us”……..
Miller is equally stunned by what he is seeing along the Great Barrier Reef, which is eerily similar to what Burdick is seeing on Guam.
“Parts of the reef that didn’t bleach last year are now under immense pressure, and this is totally different because this is back-to-back bleaching,” Miller explained. “The system was already stressed, and this is a new stress event. We are seeing much mortality on reefs in our area…. What didn’t die last year is dying this year.”
In addition to the new bleaching in this year’s event, southern portions of the reef that are typically in cooler waters are now also bleaching out.
“It’s heartbreaking to see,” Miller added. “Seventy thousand direct tourism-related jobs and a $6 billion tourism industry are all at risk, especially on top of the recent damage from Cyclone Debbie.”
A study published this March in the journal Nature found that last year’s bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef was so severe that there was no similar analog in the thousands of years of ancient coral cores scientists use to study past climates.
Another study published in Nature projected that by the year 2050, more than 98 percent of global coral reefs will be afflicted by “bleaching-level thermal stress” every single year.
However, the prognosis could be even worse: The scientists involved in the study from this March speculated that the era of never-ending global coral bleaching may have already arrived, albeit several decades earlier than was predicted even just last year. They explained that the Great Barrier Reef needs 10 to 15 years between bleaching events in order to fully recover, and that recovery time period is “no longer realistic.”
“We Don’t Even Know What We Are Losing”……..
A report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization shows that coral reefs are responsible for producing 17 percent of all globally consumed protein, with that ratio being 70 percent or greater in island and coastal countries like those of Micronesia.
At the time of this writing, Earth has lost nearly half of its coral, and oceanic warming only continues to accelerate.
“We are finding that reefs living under anthropogenic stresses for many years have already lost their more sensitive coral species, and the ones that are there now are already the tough bastards,” Raymundo said. “And when reefs have lower diversity, there is less ecological redundancy; hence, they are more likely to collapse.”
A Future Without Coral?
A 2012 study revealed that half of the Great Barrier Reef had already vanished in just the previous 27 years. Two years later, the world’s most qualified coral reef experts released a report showing that, without dramatic intervention, the Great Barrier Reef would disappear completely by 2030.
Furthermore, a study published and released by NOAA in 2011 warned that, “unless action is taken now to reduce the threats,” 90 percent of all reefs will be “threatened” by 2030, and all of Earth’s coral reefs could be completely gone by 2050. The study, “Reefs at Risk Revisited,” listed human-caused climate disruption, warmer water temperatures, ocean acidification, shipping, overfishing, coastal development and agricultural runoff as the contributing factors.
While that might sound extreme, Miller told Truthout he thought the report actually didn’t go far enough.
“I think it’s too conservative,” he explained. “Corals need many years to adjust to the warmer ocean waters, and we don’t have that kind of time anymore. The warming we are seeing now is happening far too fast to allow for evolution…. So what we’re seeing now is death. That’s what bleaching is.”……..
Back in Australia, Miller is dismayed by the fact that his government is doing very little, if anything, to mitigate the crisis.
Truthout asked Miller what steps the Australian government is taking to save the Great Barrier Reef.
“From what I can tell, virtually nothing,” he answered. “They are not focussed on this at all, but rather are pushing for the Adani Coal Mine to go ahead. We here in Australia can hardly believe it, to be honest. In fact, the government has had almost no comment on the bleaching at all.”
The coal mine he referred to is looking like it is going to move forward, which will, according to Miller, bring an additional 500 ships carrying coal across the Great Barrier Reef every single year.
Truthout interviewed Miller’s colleague, John Rumney, the managing director of Great Barrier Reef Legacy in February, when this year’s bleaching event began.
“This coral is in big trouble,” Rumney said at the time. Like Miller, Burdick and Raymundo, Rumney warned of the extreme loss of biodiversity that comes with the disappearance of reefs.
“When all that coral goes, all that diversity of fish that depends on it goes,” Rumney told Truthout. “The entire food chain is in big trouble.”
Miller concurred, saying, “We might see ecosystem collapse as we know it.” The need for independent research on the Great Barrier Reef during this second mass-bleaching event is needed more than ever, according to Miller. His and Rumney’s organization is striving to get more scientists out to the reef as quickly as possible.
“The world’s greatest natural icon and largest living structure needs our help more than ever, and unless we act as a concerned global population, nothing will be done,” he concluded. “It is not too late. The reef is worth saving — and our actions now will determine the fate of coral reefs in as little as 5 to 10 years. We must act.” http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40579-coral-reefs-generate-half-of-earth-s-oxygen-and-they-could-all-die-off-by-2050
THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) missile defense (MD) system a major environmental catastrophe waiting to happen
THAAD Rocket Fuel: Likely Ground Water Contamination Coming to Seongju, South Korea http://www.globalresearch.ca/thaad-rocket-fuel-likely-ground-water-contamination-coming-to-seongju-south-korea/5589018, By Bruce Gagnon, May 07, 2017 Space4Peace The unwelcome US deployment of the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) missile defense (MD) system in Seongju, South Korea is not only a significant threat to regional peace but is also a major environmental catastrophe waiting to happen.
Protect our water! Indigenous opposition to uranium mining in South Dakota
Water is rallying cry for opponents at uranium-mine hearing, Rapid City Journal, Seth Tupper Journal staff, May 9, 2017 The spirit of a recent protest against a crude-oil pipeline energized opponents of a proposed southwest South Dakota uranium mine Monday during a public hearing.
City of Miami Slams FPL’s Plan to Inject Nuclear Waste Below Dade’s Drinking Water
Miami New Times, BY JERRY IANNELLI, 3 May 17, For the past seven years, Florida Power & Light has battled environmentalists over its plans to build two new reactors and inject their radioactive waste 3,000 feet underground, just below the aquifers where South Florida gets its drinking water. Environmentalists have vigorously argued that science shows the dangerous waste could leech upward into Miami’s drinking water. And yesterday, those green activists finally earned a hearing before the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
But it turns out the two environmental groups leading the fight aren’t the only ones opposed to the plan: Lawyers for the City of Miami and the nearby Village of Pinecrest both slammed FPL’s plan and urged the NRC to reconsider the electric monopoly’s proposal. Miami Assistant City Attorney Xavier Albán called FPL’s final “environmental impact statement” for the new reactors at the Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station “deficient” and begged the NRC to force FPL to come up with a waste-storage plan that would not affect Miami’s drinking water.
FPL has failed to adequately demonstrate that the direct effect, indirect effects, and cumulative impact to the natural physical environment are ‘small,'” Albán said. “The environmental impacts will not be ‘small.'”
The risk of possible carcinogens leaking into the city’s source of drinking water “can never be small,” he added.
FPL also spoke in front of the NRC yesterday and argued that the environmentalists and city officials were wrong. Its science was just fine, the company claimed.
“The NRC is not required to look at every potential environmental impact and does not have to consider worst-case scenarios,” an FPL representative said before the NRC board.
In Miami and Pinecrest, FPL has found its two largest opponents to date. The official challenge to the company’s plans was brought by two groups: the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) and National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA). The power company had dismissed groups such as SACE as “anti-nuclear” extremist using the wastewater-storage plan as a cover to try to tank a Turkey Point expansion.
“The City of Miami has serious concerns with respect to FPL’s application for a combined operating license for Turkey Point proposed units six and seven,” Albán said. “With respect to the contention before you, this matter specifically relates to the sanctity and protection of a designated source of drinking water, the Upper Floridan Aquifer.”……….
The NRC will likely take weeks, or perhaps months, to issue a ruling. http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/city-of-miami-slams-fpls-plan-to-inject-radioactive-waste-below-drinking-water-at-turkey-point-9320009
Nuclear weapons should be environmentalists’ top priority
Top environmental priority? Nukes https://www.adn.com/opinions/2017/05/01/top-environmental-priority-nukes/ Rising sea levels, polluted water, air quality deterioration, climate warming: These are the expressed priorities of the environmental movement. They are easy to understand and maybe it’s not too hard to figure out what to do once persuasion prevails. A far superior priority is too easily neglected: the environmental threat posed by nuclear weapon proliferation and growth in risk of use.
As mathematical theorist and songwriter Tom Lehrer once famously sang, “We’ll all go together when we go, every Hottentot and every Eskimo.” Lehrer was describing the Cold War exploding into a hot war. “Mutually assured destruction,” as it was called at the height of the Cold War, is still far from impossible.
A slightly slower chain reaction of violence can lead to the same result as one vengeful hydrogen bomb is lobbed in response to another. Opportunities for accidentally escalating destruction are still around. Remember World War I.
One of the reasons why the nuclear problem doesn’t get much attention is that the chances of the whole thing going to hell in any one year are variable but low. Current probabilities have caused the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move the needle of their Doomsday Clock back to just a couple of minutes to midnight after enjoying a distance of more than a quarter hour after the Nonproliferation Treaty was signed. Odds on any one year may seem low, but low odds over 20 or 30 years add up to a probability.
The world has been conscious of this risk for some time. The Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons came into effect with enough signatures in 1970. Some 191 nations signed the treaty. North Korea tiptoed to the edge before exiting. India, Pakistan, Sudan and Israel never signed. These countries also pose an environmental threat, if not as bombastically declared as North Korea. Even Israel, as rational as its leadership may be, has indicated it will do whatever is required if faced with an “existential threat.”
Under the treaty, countries acknowledging a nuclear arsenal (the Big Boys) agreed that they would reduce their arsenals with the ultimate (if difficult to imagine) goal of completely eliminating weapons of this type, like poisonous gas munitions, to note the 1925 Geneva Protocol as a precedent.
Russia and the United States went through one reduction exercise. That was it. Their bargain was effectively nullified more recently as they “replenished stocks,” not technically an expansion, and invented new, smaller, artillery applications that might make the use of nukes more acceptable in war — say, in the Ukraine.
As a matching treaty trade-off to Big Boy reductions, those who joined up without having developed nukes agreed never to do so, hence the title “Nonproliferation.” The Big Boys agreed also to share peaceful nuclear technology with those who eschewed bomb development. Nonproliferation worked, taking the heat off many countries that otherwise might have had to show their military manhood by developing nuclear arms. It also served as a precedent for the Iran agreement.
Despite the treaty agreement, nations possessing nuclear arms are estimated still to have arsenals totaling around 22,000 weapons, easily enough explosive and radiation capacity to make life on Earth impossible for mammals.
North Korea’s eager embrace of nuclear arms development and expansion should help international policies to catch up on the total environmental risk. Early presidential talk of a U.S. nationalist response, including “on the table” military response via “preemptive war,” was alarming. Anything like that could not be contained. In stage one, we set the stage for millions of South Koreans to die. China may well follow the example, taking Taiwan. The U.S. responds per its agreements, the Russians move on Ukraine, etc.
Kudos to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for taking the problem to the U.N., and good for U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley for her sharp attention to the issue. North Korea’s nuclear arms development is an international environmental problem, not just a local military-political problem for the U.S., South Korea and Japan.
It would help if the environmental movement prioritized this concern. As with so many issues of our times, economic, military, social and nationalist responses are outdated, “whack-a-mole” solutions. As Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate contesting FDR’s last term, forecast, “The world is small and the world is one.”
John Havelock, a vet, former White House Fellow, public official, UAA professor and ADN columnist, has long been a student of international affairs.
Radioactive elements in drinking water?
Nuclear Reactor Wastewater Will End Up In Your Drinking Water, KNWA: Erika Hall : May 04 FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – – Fayetteville City Council on Wednesday approved dumping wastewater from the site of a former nuclear reactor into the city’s sewer system. The water will eventually flow into Beaver Lake, our area’s main source for drinking water.One city council member thinks it’s a bad idea, but others claim it’s perfectly safe. “We are actually dumping our sewage, what’s left of it into our drinking what source,” said Fayetteville City Council member John La Tour.
Billions of people may face a threat posed by radioactive materials in water.
Nuclear Contamination Reaches Earth’s Deepest Water, Could Affect Billionshttps://www.wateronline.com/doc/nuclear-contamination-reaches-earth-s-deepest-water-could-affect-billions-0001 By Sara Jerome, 2 May 17 @sarmje Billions of people may face a threat posed by radioactive materials in water.
“A shocking new study has revealed that groundwater drunk by billions of people may have been contaminated by decades of nuclear weapons testing. Researchers looked at more than 6,000 wells around the globe, some containing water more than 10,000 years old, found more than half had traces of tritium,” the Daily Mail reported.
“Even at low doses, tritium has been linked with increased risk of mutation and cancer because it goes directly into the tissues of organs of the human body,” the report continued.
The study was led by Scott Jasechko of the University of Calgary in Canada. It was published online in Nature Geoscience on April 25, and the university released a statement about the research.
Tritium was spread during nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s, Science News reported, citing the study.
Professor James Kirchner, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, said, per the Daily Mail: “Roughly half of the wells contained some fraction of recent groundwater less than 50 or 60 years old. It is a bit like going to a giant old people’s home and suddenly realising there are lots of kids running around. That is great, except if the little kids have the flu!”
The upshot is that even groundwater buried so deep in the earth that is it is accessible by only the world’s deepest wells is not immune to modern contamination. Also known as fossil water, this resource began as snow and rain that fell more than 12,000 years ago.
The scientific community previously believed that fossil water was not contaminated. “The unfortunate finding is that even though deep wells pump mostly fossil groundwater, many still contain some recent rain and snow melt, which is vulnerable to modern contamination,” Jasechko said in a statement. “Our results imply that water quality in deep wells can be impacted by the land management decisions we make today.”
For similar stories visit Water Online’s Source Water Contamination Solutions Center.
Moving Away From the Pro-Growth Economy
https://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/moving-away-progrowth/
Gavenus, Erika | May 2, 2017 The current economic system being utilized and internalized relies on perpetual growth. It has long operated counter to the reality that we are confined to a finite planet with finite resources. Yet, this system continues to be practiced and promoted globally. As the environmental and social repercussions of disbelief in limits become increasingly clear, so does our need for a new economic system —one that is not wedded to growth. Neither growth in the number of consumers nor growth in the amount consumed.
But what would an alternative to the pro-growth economy look like? There are multiple thinkers and organizations taking on exactly this question. However, these efforts can be disparate and focused on their differences rather than their common agreement that an alternative to pro-growth economics is not only possible but required.
With support and guidance from multiple experts, the MAHB has compiled a list of resources and organizations relevant to the discussions of why a new economic system is needed, what might the system look like, and how do we make the necessary transition. The MAHB was particularly interested in how, or if, these resources incorporated human population numbers and growth into their assessments of the economy. The resources identified so far explore how human population growth factors into economic growth, the limits to growth, the disconnect between economic growth and improved human wellbeing, theories in response to the limits, and proposed policies and practices for moving away from our “obsession” with growth.
You are encouraged to explore the full document. This is a working version and your feedback is very welcome. You can either contact Erika with suggested changes, or make suggestions directly to the online version here. If you are interested in accessing any of the resources listed in the Annotated Bibliography, please contact Erika.
Special thanks to Peter Fiekowsky for connecting with the MAHB to push this project forward and provide financial support for its pursuit.
The MAHB Blog is a venture of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere. Questions should be directed to joan@mahbonline.org
Lakes around the world are affected by heat from climate change
Lakes worldwide feel the heat from climate change, Warming waters are disrupting freshwater fishing and recreation, Science News ,BY ALEXANDRA WITZE MAY 1, 2017 “……..
The radioactive berry harvests of Chernobyl
The harvests of Chernobyl, Aeon, Thirty years after the nuclear disaster, local berry-pickers earn a good living. What’s the hidden cost of their wares?, Kate Brown, is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of Plutopia (2013). Olha Martynyuk is a historian at the National Technical University of Ukraine.
Last summer, we went to Rivnе to talk to people who in the late 1980s wrote petitions begging for resettlement. In the letters, which we had found in state archives in Kiev and Moscow, writers expressed worries about their health and that of their children, while describing a sense of abandonment. Help never arrived; the Chernobyl accident came just as the Soviet state began to topple economically and politically……..
Anyone in Polesia can pick anywhere, as long as they are willing to brave the radioactive isotopes. After Chernobyl, Soviet officials strongly discouraged picking berries in contaminated forest areas, which promised to remain radioactive for decades. As the years passed, fewer and fewer people heeded the warnings. In the past five years, picking has grown into a booming business as new global market connections have enabled the mass sale of berries abroad. A person willing to do the hard work of stooping 10 hours a day and heaving 40-pound boxes of fruit to the road can earn good money. The women and child pickers are revitalising the Polesian economy on a modest, human-powered scale. They are quietly and unceremoniously doing what development agencies and government programmes failed to do: restoring commercial activity to the contaminated territory around the Chernobyl Zone.
We followed the pickers into the woods. …….
Reliance on the forest for a living is an ancestral tradition in Polesia. Because of the mineral-poor soils, traditional farming never thrived here. Instead, Polesians subsisted on game, fish, berries, herbs and mushrooms while making their tools and homes from wood and clay. What is new in the past few years is the industrial-sized scale of berry harvesting. A typical roadside berry-buyer purchases about two tons of berries a day in season, and there are hundreds of buyers. In 2015, Ukraine exported 1,300 tons of fresh berries and 17,251 tons of frozen berries to the European market – more than 30 times as much as in 2014. Ukraine is now one of biggest exporters of blueberries to the EU.
That success is all the more remarkable because Polesian berries are not just any berries. They grow in radioactive soils, which means that they carry some of Chernobyl’s legacy in them. We showed up at a berry wholesaler in the boom town of Rokytne and noticed a radiation monitor who was stationed to meet buyers at the loading dock. The situation there was tense. As the monitor waved a wand over each box of berries, measuring their gamma ray emission, she set aside about half of the boxes. The buyers argued with her, trying to lower the count on their berries: ‘It’s not the berries that are radiating. It’s my trailer. Measure it over there.’
We asked the monitor, a young townswoman, how many berries come up radioactive. ‘All the berries from Polesia are radioactive,’ she replied, ‘but some are really radioactive. We’ve had berries measure over 3,000!’ She could not describe what units she was referring to, microsieverts or microrems; she only knew which numbers were bad. ‘The needle has to be between 10 and 15,’ she said, vaguely pointing to her wand, ‘and then I place it in this machine.’ She gestured toward a small mass spectrometer. ‘If the readout is more than 450, then the berries are over the permissible level.’
Contrary to our assumption, the berries rejected as too radioactive were not discarded, but were merely placed aside. Then they, too, were weighed and sold, just at lower prices. The wholesalers we spoke to said that the radioactive berries were used for natural dyes. The pickers claimed the hot berries were mixed with cooler berries until the assortment came in under the permissible level. The berries could then legally be sold to Poland to enter the European Union (EU) market, even if some individual berries measured five times higher than the permissible level. Such mixing is legal as long as the overall mix of berries falls within the generous limit of 600 becquerel per kilogram set by the EU after the Chernobyl disaster.
No one, certainly no official, ever envisioned revitalising the economy by exploiting berries and mushrooms. Months after the 1986 accident, Soviet scientists determined that forest products were the most radioactive of all edible crops, and banned their consumption. However, villagers in Polesia never stopped harvesting berries and mushrooms (as well as game and fish) from the forests outside the fenced-off Chernobyl Zone. Women sold their produce surreptitiously at regional markets, deftly avoiding the police who learned to identify Polesians by their homemade baskets……..
AQlthough the Polesian berries meet EU standards, it remains unclear how healthy life is for those living in the Rivne Province. Official publications of the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency assert that radiation levels in Polesia are too low to cause health damage other than a slight rise in the chance of cancer. However, that judgment is based on reference studies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims, not on local research in the Chernobyl zones. Wladimir Wertelecki, a geneticist at the University of California, San Diego, has spent the past 16 years tracking every recorded birth in the Rivne Province. ‘Hiroshima was just one big X-ray. It doesn’t compare to the doses of people in Polesia who ingest radioactive isotopes every day,’ he says. He thinks that the slow-drip exposure of organs to radioactive isotopes over decades makes for a far more damaging exposure than the single, external Hiroshima dose.
Researchers in Wertelecki’s group and those working on small, usually minimally financed medical studies have found that low doses of ingested radiation tend to concentrate in vital organs that keenly impact on important body functions. Yury Bandazhevsky, a pioneer in studying the health impacts of Chernobyl, has recorded a correlation between the incorporation of radioactive cesium in children’s bodies and heart disease in Belarus and Ukraine. Wertelecki and the Ukrainian medical researcher Lyubov Yevtushok discovered that in the six Polesian regions of the Rivne Province, certain birth defects, such as microcephaly, conjoined twins and neural-tube disorders occur three times more frequently than is the European norm. ‘We did not prove with this study that radiation causes birth defects. We just have a concurrence, not proof, of cause and effect,’ Wertelecki says. Nevertheless, he considers the concurrence statistically strong enough to warrant large-scale epidemiological studies that could prove or disprove whether the birth defects were caused by radiation.
Despite the fact that the nuclear disaster presented scientists with a unique living laboratory, few funding agencies have been willing to finance Chernobyl studies on non-cancerous health effects; based on Japanese bomb-survivor research, industry scientists have insisted that there would be no measurable non-malignant impacts. In Chernobyl-contaminated Polesia, however, few people doubt that ingesting radioactive toxins over decades has a biological cost.
Galina, the woman who declared that there was ‘no Chernobyl’, changed her view later when talking about her own health. Trim and fit at the age of 50, she had a stroke followed by two surgeries for ‘women’s cancer’. About her cancers, she said: ‘All of a sudden, they started growing day by day. I asked the doctors if they’d hold up the operation until autumn [after the harvest], but they said I’d be dead by then. Probably, these problems were caused by radiation. It does have an effect, apparently.’ Even less is known about non-cancer health impacts from Chernobyl. Many locals complain of aching and swollen joints, headaches, chronic fatigue and legs that mysteriously stop moving. There have been almost no studies investigating these vague complaints…….
here has been little public discussion and almost no medical research on the long-term, low-dose ingestion of radioactive isotopes. Presumably exporting the berries helps the people of Polesia, but for now there is no hard proof……
The mass marketing of radioactive Polesian forest products is an unexpected outcome of policies aimed at finalising the disaster. It is a development that disputes the focus on Chernobyl as a ‘place’. Rather, Chernobyl is an event, an ongoing occurrence that transpires as long as the radioactive energy released in the accident continues to decay……https://aeon.co/essays/ukraine-s-berry-pickers-are-reaping-a-radioactive-bounty
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