Angela Bischoff, Outreach Director, 23 Jan 18, Since 2005, demand for electricity in Ontario has been steadily falling. In 2017, it fell a further 3.6%meaning thatdemand has dropped by 16% since 2005. That is the equivalent of taking 2.5 million homes off the grid – like unplugging all the houses and apartments in the City of Toronto twice over.
Ontario is not alone in seeing a sustained drop in demand. This is a trend that has taken hold in many countries and provinces thanks to new technologies such as super-efficient LED lighting and smart controls, cost-effective energy efficiency programs, and economic changes. In fact, reducing the need to generate electricity in the first place has become Ontario’s lowest costway of addressing our energy needs – the province paid on average just 2.2 cents to save a kilowatt-hour of electricity in 2016.
But oddly, the Wynne government shows no signs of recognizing the growing mismatch between its plans to spend billions of dollars on re-building aging nuclear reactors and the ever-decreasing need for the power they would produce. In fact, in order to justify continuing to operate the 47-year-old Pickering Nuclear Station – the highest cost nuclear plant in North America – the province is currently curtailing 26% of the potential annual output of our cleaner and safer wind and solar power plants.
Does it make sense to pay 7 times more to re-build aging nuclear reactors than to enhance energy efficiency? Should we rebuild nuclear reactors that have to run 24/7 when demand is falling and supply patterns are being rapidly changed by the introduction of increasingly low-cost renewable sources? These are questions the government seems determined to ignore.
Instead of simply ignoring the numbers, a far better way to act on these trends is to strike a deal with Quebec to import low-cost, flexible water power; continue to expand our cost-effective conservation programs; and embrace new renewable energy opportunities right here at home.
Denver Post A uranium company that is headquartered in Colorado “lobbied extensively” for President Donald Trump to reduce the size of Bears Ears National Monument, according to an investigation in last Sunday’s New York Times.
The implications of the story written by Hiroko Tabuchi were staggering: an area of long-held federal land only recently protected by President Barack Obama at the end of his administration for its significance to five Native American tribes could one day be pocked with uranium mines.
Tabuchi found that there are more than 300 uranium mining claims inside Obama’s boundaries for the national monument, nearly a third of which are tied to the Lakewood-based Energy Fuels Resources.
“The vast majority of those claims fall neatly outside the new boundaries of Bears Ears,” Tabuchi wrote…….
The valleys, buttes and desert landscape of Bears Ears are largely untouched and full of historical significance to the five Indian nations whose ancestors left their artifacts, ruins and hieroglyphics across the land as evidence that they were there first. Bears Ears deserves protection.
As Trump celebrated shrinking Bears Ears last month at the Utah Capitol, he said: “I’ve come to Utah to take a very historic action to reverse federal overreach and restore the rights of this land to your citizens.”
Trump is wrong. The land is still all federally owned, outside of the control and taxation of local entities. What Trump’s ruling did do was open up the possibility of private interests taking what they want from the land. Until Tabuchi’s reporting, we were all supposed to believe no one wanted this land for private gain. Now we all know the sad truth. https://www.denverpost.com/2018/01/20/uranium-mines-in-bears-ears-shame-on-trump/
Despite the appearance of thawing tensions with North Korea, both Washington and Pyongyang have made several steps that suggest things could escalate soon.
The US has quietly moved heavy firepower, like nuclear bombers and aircraft carriers, to the region.
On the sidelines of important diplomatic meetings, talk of military action has been ever present, if not front and center.
While much of the world has celebrated the progress in talks between North Korea and South Korea before the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang next month, as well as an apparent thaw in tensions with North Korea, the US has taken steps to move heavy firepower to the region.
Though the US will delay its military exercises with South Korea until the end of the Paralympics in March, it has elsewhere trained for scenarios that seem tailor-made for fighting North Korea.
The New York Times reports that 48 Apache gunships and Chinook helicopters last month trained in Fort Bragg in North Carolina to move troops under artillery fire, and that soldiers will train next month to set up mobilization centres designed to quickly send forces overseas.
Surviving artillery fire and mastering the tricky logistics of an overseas deployment would be needed skills if conflict broke out with North Korea, as Pyongyang maintains a massive range of artillery guns pointing at Seoul, South Korea’s capital with 25 million people.
Besides the exercises, the US has for the second time ever positioned both its nuclear-capable bombers in its territory of Guam, just a short flight from North Korea.
While the US military maintains that these exercises are routine and unrelated to North Korea, the increased tensions with Pyongyang bring scrutiny to every move.
Quiet – too quiet
While Secretary of State Rex Tillerson attended a meeting of 20 ministers this week in Vancouver, Canada to discuss sanctions implementation on North Korea, Secretary of Defence Jim Mattis joined and briefed the ministers on the US’s plan for military strikes.
When news of the inter-Korean talks dominated usually bleak headlines about North Korea, Trump’s National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster met with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts and dismissed the talks as “diversions.”
Although few expect the US to initiate conflict with North Korea while civilians from around the world gather in Northern South Korea to watch one of the world’s most important sporting events, a satellite launch provides a suitable target for a “bloody nose” strike, which the US is reportedly considering.
After a year in office, President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has an established history of upsetting norms. After a successful strike on Syria in April 2017, and a handful of unilateral foreign policy decisions going unpunished by supposedly riled actors, Trump’s White House may soon feel emboldened to make a statement.
From the beginning of the Atomic Age, says Ellsberg, the true purpose of our nuclear arsenal, the whole terrifying array of warheads and delivery systems in all their vast numbers and varieties, has not been the “defense” of our country. It has not been, as trumpeted by politicians and generals (and as believed by citizens and schoolchildren), to “deter” an adversary from launching a nuclear attack against the U.S. It is the maintenance of a first-strike nuclear force —not so much for the purpose of launching a deliberate surprise attack on anyone else, but to be ready to respond instantly
DANIEL ELLSBERG is perhaps the premier whistleblower of all time, the man who in 1971 dragged the Pentagon Papers out of top-secret darkness into the light. Yet even as excerpts from the papers’ 7,000 pages were being published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers, Ellsberg was sitting on an entire second set of secrets, having nothing to do with Vietnam: all his material on nuclear policy, such as the operational plans for general nuclear war that he had drafted for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in his job as a RAND Corporation defense analyst.
With the Vietnam War raging, Ellsberg made what he calls a “tactical judgment” to release those papers first, holding off on the nuclear material until the fallout (so to speak) from the Vietnam revelations had settled. As he faced trial, he entrusted the nuclear papers to his brother Harry, who hid the cache in a compost heap and later moved it to the local dump to evade FBI searches. But the papers were irrevocably lost when the dump was later ravaged by a tropical storm.
Ellsberg’s new book, “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,” is his revelation of what was in those lost papers, made possible not only by his prodigious memory and note-keeping but also the declassification and release of much of the material through official channels and Freedom of Information Act requests (many filed by Ellsberg himself). Speaking with the authority of an insider who was intimately involved with nuclear strategy and policymaking at the highest levels, he reveals that practically everything the American public believes about nuclear war and nuclear weapons is, quite simply, a “deliberate deception.” Continue reading →
A federal judge in Columbia on Thursday designated lead lawyers and plaintiffs in two types of shareholder lawsuits against SCANA over its bungled V.C. Summer expansion.
The lawsuits charge SCANA and its top officers with misconduct and breaches of fiduciary duty in their handling of the failed $9 billion construction project.
Cayce-based SCANA, the corporate parent of the SCE&G utility, denies any wrongdoing.
The moves, involving nearly 20 lawyers, were the initial steps in moving the lawsuits forward. U.S. District Judge Margaret Seymour also dealt a mild setback to SCANA, rejecting its plea to give one group of shareholders suing the company only three weeks to amend their lawsuits.
“I would like to make sure that whatever is filed (by the plaintiffs) in this court is complete,” said Seymour, granting lawyers for the shareholders 60 days to amend their lawsuits against SCANA and some of its top executives.
The numerous lawsuits against SCANA in both state and federal courts are expected to take months, if not years, to play out.
On Thursday, Seymour:
▪ Designated the New York firms of Bernstein Litowitz and Labaton Sucharow as the lead attorneys in one class of shareholder lawsuits against Cayce-based SCANA. The Motley Rice law firm of Charleston was named local liaison counsel.
The lawsuits allege shareholders suffered huge losses when SCANA’s stock price plummeted — from almost $75 a share to the just more than $42 Thursday — after the nuclear project failed. They also allege SCANA misled shareholders about the project for years, propping up its share price.
If shareholders prevail, SCANA will have to pay monetary damages to numerous shareholders, including pension funds and individuals.
▪ Designated the Weiser law firm of Philadelphia and Bernstein Liebhard of New York as lead counsel in a second group of lawsuits, called “shareholder derivative” actions. S.C. liaison counsel include Bill Hopkins of Pawleys Island and Eric Bland of Columbia.
In the cases, the plaintiffs allege SCANA and its officers exposed the utility to liability by violating federal securities laws – including laws that require them to be open with regulators and the public – by their handling of the nuclear project.
SCANA and its officers artificially drove up the utility’s stock price by issuing false public statements and using a “strategy of deception and misdirection” about the nuclear project’s progress, cost and completion schedule, the lawsuits allege.
The goals of the shareholder derivative lawsuits include forcing top SCANA officers and board members to give back all “profits, benefits and other compensation,” including annual incentive bonuses.
Another group of lawsuits against SCANA is pending in state court. Those suits, mostly brought by ratepayers who claim they were cheated when SCANA hiked their monthly bills for years to pay for the failed project, were not affected by Thursday’s actions.
Seymour — who has 20 years’ experience as a federal judge, and widely is regarded as fair, low key and methodical — is overseeing one of South Carolina’s most complex, high-stakes legal battles in years.
Although many of the almost 20 lawyers in the Columbia courtroom Thursday came from Atlanta, New York and Philadelphia, S.C. lawyers also were present.
South Carolinians I.S. Leevy Johnson, Stephen Pugh and George Johnson are representing SCANA. The attorneys for the various plaintiffs suing SCANA included South Carolinians Bland, Hopkins and Marlon Kimpson, a Democratic state senator from Charleston.
Last year, months before South Carolina’s V.C. Summer project went belly up, a senior Westinghouse executive reportedly was demoted and sent to Canada after he identified problems with a key contractor, a nuclear industry trade publication says.
Nuclear Intelligence Weekly said in a recent report that Steve Hamilton, a senior vice president with Westinghouse Electric, filed federal whistleblower claims amid what the trade publication described as a high-stakes corporate “soap opera.”
The report adds to a growing body of allegations that Westinghouse ignored or hid early warning signs the nuclear projects were in trouble long before the problems were made public.
This trouble has since morphed into a chain reaction of political and economic uncertainty: Acquisition-hungry monopolies are circling around SCANA and Santee Cooper, and ratepayers are on the hook for billions of dollars for a pair of unfinished reactors.
Hamilton was a key player in Westinghouse’s nuclear team during the construction of new reactors at V.C. Summer — a senior vice president and chief quality officer in the company’s Pennsylvania headquarters, according to a company press release.
But then Toshiba — Westinghouse’s parent company — reportedly directed Hamilton to investigate Westinghouse’s purchase of Stone & Webster, its construction subsidiary working on the V.C. Summer project, the trade publication said. Both the V.C. Summer expansion in Fairfield County and a twin reactor project in Georgia had numerous delays and costly overruns.
Hamilton reportedly brought in a team of independent forensic experts to identify what went wrong with the Stone & Webster purchase and aftermath, but Hamilton’s report and its findings were buried, the publication said. Nuclear Intelligence Weekly did not specify details of Hamilton’s findings.
Hamilton is now on a special assignment to “build the company’s commercial and operational footprint in Canada,” according to another Westinghouse press release last May. Hamilton did not return phone calls and emails from The Post and Courier seeking comment.
Hamilton filed complaints under a federal whistleblower law to both the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Department of Labor, the trade publication said. Both agencies said they don’t comment on whistleblower complaints or the status of any investigations.
The complaint reportedly alleges that Jose Gutierrez, Westinghouse’s chief executive officer, unsuccessfully pressured Hamilton to change the audit team’s findings, the publication reported.
Hamilton also reportedly made allegations about improprieties at the company’s fuel fabrication facility in Columbia, not far from the V.C. Summer site. The plant employs about 1,000 people and makes uranium fuel assemblies for use in nuclear plants.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission temporarily shut down the plant in 2016 after more than 220 pounds of enriched uranium were found in a ventilation scrubber. In noting its concerns, the NRC wrote about “a perceived lack of a questioning attitudemay have resulted in delays” in identifying the uranium build-up problem.
Westinghouse declined to comment.
The allegations highlight a pattern of stumbles and deception that led to the $9 billion nuclear boondoggle in South Carolina and billions of dollars in overruns at the Vogtle project in Georgia.
Last year, The Post and Courier reported that another Westinghouse official wrote an in-depth analysis in 2011 that identified risky construction strategies and shortcuts, including the use of unlicensed engineers. The analysis predicted massive overruns, a prediction that came true and eventually led to the project’s collapse.
The project’s failure has shaken the state, leading to resignations of top SCANA and Santee Cooper executives and calls for major changes in legislation that shifted construction costs onto ratepayers.
SCANA and Santee Cooper, the utilities that hoped to build two new reactors, are now considered takeover targets. Virginia’s Dominion Energy hopes to pick up SCANA, and NextEra reportedly is eyeing Santee Cooper. Westinghouse remains in bankruptcy.
After safety breaches, new Los Alamos director pushes for accountability at nuclear weapons lab, Science , By April Reese, —The new director of Los Alamos National Laboratory here, Terry Wallace, took the helm earlier this month at a particularly challenging time in the U.S. nuclear weapons lab’s storied 75-year history. Repeated safety violations necessitated a temporary shutdown of much of the lab’s plutonium facility from 2013 to 2015, and further infractions in August 2017— including improper storage of plutonium metal that could have triggered an uncontrolled fission reaction—prompted the U.S. Department of Energy, Los Alamos’s overseer, to put the lab’s management contract out for bid. A consortium will continue to run the national laboratory until the winning bidder takes over the $2.5-billion-a-year operation this fall.
Since it was built in secret in 1943 to house the Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bomb in 1945, Los Alamos has diversified its R&D portfolio. Its research areas now include everything from studying wildfire behavior to developing vaccines. But the lab’s central mission may well be updated in the coming months: President Donald Trump’s administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, leaked to the media earlier this month, signaled interest in developing new low-yield nuclear weapons, even as some of the lab’s most knowledgeable weapons experts are nearing retirement age. …….
We’re the only place [in the United States] that does large-scale work on plutonium. We must meet the expectations to be the safest and most secure site in the country. At the same time, the realization that those expectations are under a magnifying glass, sometimes I think we miss that.
We cannot have any accidents. We do things at times that are simply unacceptable……..
100 Hanford workers moving to new offices after radiation confusion, Tri City Herald, BY ANNETTE CARY, acary@tricityherald.com 19 Jan 18, One hundred workers are being moved out of the trailer village of offices at the Hanford nuclear reservation’s Plutonium Finishing Plant.
As careful surveying for radioactive contamination is continuing after a spread of radioactive particles was discovered in December, the “overwhelming presence of naturally occurring radon” in the trailer village offices is causing a problem, workers were told in a memo.
Any detection of radiation is treated as if it is a potential spread of radioactive particles from the open-air demolition of the plant until further analysis determines whether it is naturally occurring radon or a spread of contamination.
Radon, which is radioactive, is present in almost all rock, soil and water on the Earth’s surface.
The spread of contamination was found after workers finished demolishing most of the plant’s Plutonium Reclamation Facility in mid-December.
The demolition is suspected by Hanford officials as being the source of the airborne spread.
The control zone around the demolition project was broadly expanded on Jan. 7 to tightly regulate access to a wide area around the plant, including closing some roads. Some contamination spread from the plant across a road used by Hanford workers.
This week five more government or government contractor vehicles had possible contamination detected. They are in addition to 16 government and contractor vehicles previously detected with contamination and seven personal vehicles with exterior contamination.
However, the checks of vehicles include some that were used in radiological control areas, zones set up where it was known that radioactive material was likely to be present.
As of Wednesday, 271 workers had requested checks for possible inhalation or ingestion of radioactive particles from the contamination spread. Workers should receive their results in the next few weeks, according to Hanford officials.
The Plutonium Finishing Plant workers were being told to park at the 200 West Pump and Treat a mile away, and were being shuttled to the plant.
The world has been living with the threat of a nuclear apocalypse since the 1950s. Over the past decade, intelligence experts have increasingly warned about the threat of a catastrophic cyber attack. Now the two fears appear to have merged, with the US on the point of revising its defence policy — to allow the use of nuclear weapons, in retaliation for a devastating cyber attack. The Trump administration has not yet released America’s revised, “Nuclear Posture Review”. But the draft document has leaked to the press. According to the New York Times, it would change US policy to allow the first use of nuclear weapons, in response to “attempts to destroy wide-reaching infrastructure, like a country’s power grid or communications, that would be most vulnerable to cyberweapons”.
Developed nations are now almost completely reliant on the internet and functioning computer systems. That, however, increases their vulnerability to cyber warfare. Security experts lose sleep worrying about a range of nightmarish scenarios — including viruses that shut down transport infrastructure, such as air-traffic control; or that disrupt the operations of banks, causing the financial system to seize up. Among the most common horror scenarios are fears for the vulnerability of power generation and distribution.
In recent years, there have been some indications that these scenarios are moving from the pages of science fiction into reality. A computer virus that disrupted Britain’s National Health Service last year, seems to have originated in North Korea. As long ago as 2007, operatives in Russia unleashed a “denial-of-service” attack on Estonia, disrupting the operation of the internet there. A really concerted cyber attack, targeting critical infrastructure, could cause social turmoil and mass casualties. Experts have considered a number of responses to this threat. There are frequent calls for a new international treaty to establish some rules for cyber space. Intelligence agencies have also considered the possibilities for cyber-retaliation — and the balance between offensive and defensive capabilities. Introducing nuclear weapons into the equation is, however, a new departure. It demonstrates how seriously the US is now taking the threat of cyber warfare; and is clearly designed to massively increase America’s deterrence capacity.
At the same time, however, the policy shift carries considerable risks. By lowering the bar to the first use of nuclear weapons, it makes nuclear war more thinkable. The dangers of such a move are increased because concerns about nuclear proliferation are mounting — with North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme making rapid progress, and both Pakistan and Russia incorporating the early use of nuclear weapons into their war-fighting plans. Another danger is that any nation contemplating a cyber attack, may now also have to consider efforts to disable an adversary’s nuclear capability. The US, for example, has almost certainly considered whether, in the event of a war, there are cyber or electronic means of taking out North Korea’s nuclear missiles. Other nations will now have to make similar calculations about the US. gideon.rachman@ft.com
Pentagon Suggests Countering Devastating Cyberattacks With Nuclear Arms, NYT,
查看简体中文版 查看繁體中文版 By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD JAN. 16, 2018 WASHINGTON— A newly drafted United States nuclear strategy that has been sent to President Trump for approval would permit the use of nuclear weapons to respond to a wide range of devastating but non-nuclear attacks on American infrastructure, including what current and former government officials described as the most crippling kind of cyberattacks.
For decades, American presidents have threatened “first use” of nuclear weapons against enemies in only very narrow and limited circumstances, such as in response to the use of biological weapons against the United States. But the new document is the first to expand that to include attempts to destroy wide-reaching infrastructure, like a country’s power grid or communications, that would be most vulnerable to cyberweapons.
The draft document, called the Nuclear Posture Review, was written at the Pentagon and is being reviewed by the White House. Its final release is expected in the coming weeks and represents a new look at the United States’ nuclear strategy. The draft was first published last week by HuffPost.
It called the strategic picture facing the United States quite bleak, citing not only Russian and Chinese nuclear advances but advances made by North Korea and, potentially, Iran.
………the biggest difference lies in new wording about what constitutes “extreme circumstances.”
In the Trump administration’s draft, those “circumstances could include significant non-nuclear strategic attacks.” It said that could include “attacks on the U.S., allied, or partner civilian population or infrastructure, and attacks on U.S. or allied nuclear forces, their command and control, or warning and attack assessment capabilities.”
The draft does not explicitly say that a crippling cyberattack against the United States would be among the extreme circumstances. But experts called a cyberattack one of the most efficient ways to paralyze systems like the power grid, cellphone networks and the backbone of the internet without using nuclear weapons.
……….It is relatively easy for presidents to change the country’s declaratory policy on the use of nuclear arms and quite difficult for them to reshape its nuclear arsenal, which takes not only vast sums of money but many years and sometimes decades of planning and implementation.
The price tag for a 30-year makeover of the United States’ nuclear arsenal was put last year at $1.2 trillion. Analysts said the expanded Trump administration plan would push the bill much higher, noting that firm estimates will have to wait until the proposed federal budget for the 2019 fiscal year is made public.
“Almost everything about this radical new policy will blur the line between nuclear and conventional,” said Andrew C. Weber, an assistant defense secretary during the Obama administration who directed an interagency panel that oversaw the country’s nuclear arsenal.
If adopted, he added, the new policy “will make nuclear war a lot more likely.”
U.S. tests nuclear power system to sustain astronauts on Mars –#SCIENCE NEWS, JANUARY 19, 2018, Will Dunham, WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Initial tests in Nevada on a compact nuclear power system designed to sustain a long-duration NASA human mission on the inhospitable surface of Mars have been successful and a full-power run is scheduled for March, officials said on Thursday.
Officials from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and U.S. Department of Energy, at a news conference in Las Vegas, detailed the development of the nuclear fission system under NASA’s Kilopower project.
Months-long testing of the system began in November at the energy department’s Nevada National Security Site, with an eye toward providing energy for future human and robotic missions in space and on the surface of Mars, the moon or other solar system destinations………..
“Mars is a very difficult environment for power systems, with less sunlight than Earth or the moon, very cold nighttime temperatures, very interesting dust storms that can last weeks and months that engulf the entire planet,” said Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator of NASA‘s Space Technology Mission Directorate…….
President Donald Trump in December signed a directive intended to pave the way for a return to the moon, with an eye toward an eventual mission to Mars.
Trump said in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday that Russia was helping North Korea evade international sanctions and was probably helping supply Pyongyang with anything that China had stopped giving it. Reporting by Polina Devitt; Editing by Andrew Osborn
Here’s What A Nuclear Bomb Would Do To Your City https://patch.com/washington/bellevue/heres-what-nuclear-bomb-would-do-your-city Would you survive a nuclear attack? A new tool lets you see what a nuclear bomb would do to your city.By Neal McNamara , Patch Staff| BELLEVUE, WA – With the unfortunate nuclear false-alarm in Hawaii still fresh in our minds, aren’t you a little curious to see what would happen if a real nuclear weapon did strike the U.S.? A professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology has created a pretty scary tool that shows you the blast radius and an estimate of deaths in the event of an attack.
For a demonstration, we used the tool to look at what a nuke would do if it landed in downtown Bellevue. According to professor Alex Wellerstein’s “Nuke Map,” a 150 kiloton nuke – about the size most recently tested by North Korea – would kill about 56,000 people and leave 175,000 people injured.
The area in a 1,500-foot radius around the impact site would be incinerated by a fireball, while anyone within a 3-1/2 mile radius would suffer third-degree thermal radiation burns. The thermal radius includes residents of Mercer Island, Kirkland, Redmond, and Medina. And that doesn’t include nuclear fallout, which would affect a significantly larger area.
But take the “Nuke Map” with a grain of salt because it’s just a model. And take heart that nuclear confrontation with a country like North Korea is extremely, highly unlikely.
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.
Michigan dusts off nuclear plans amid war of wordsJustin A. Hinkley, Lansing State Journal Jan. 18, 2018 “……..Michigan’s response to a nuclear attack is spelled out in its 342-page Emergency Management Plan that covers everything from floods to infrastructure failures to riots. The State Police plan for satellites falling out of the sky and meteor strikes, Kelenske said.
The 15 pages covering a nuclear bomb list 24 potential targets in Michigan. Most are in the Detroit region, though a potential target can be found in most every corner of the state, including Lansing, Battle Creek, Berrien County and two locations in the Upper Peninsula.
With Trump and Kim regularly trading trans-Pacific verbal barbs, state officials are reviewing those plans and making sure they’re updated.
“Clearly, when you have a threat on the horizon, we are going to take a look at it, look at our plans, make sure everything is still up to date,” Kelenske said.
Still, “we have to keep this in perspective,” he said. Residents should worry about — and prepare for — the floods, blizzards, thunderstorms, extreme temperatures and other natural disasters they’re far more likely to encounter.
In Lansing, emergency responders are trained in how to respond to nuclear bombs, biological and chemical attacks, and more.
However, “emergency management has not had to plan for a large scale nuclear event for many years,” Merritt and Tobin said in their statement. “It is not being ignored, in Michigan, it is just a very low possibility at this time.”
nuclear-news 