Fossil Fuels’ Hidden Cost Is in Billions, Study Says

Reposted from the Washington Post

By MATTHEW L. WALD


WASHINGTON — Burning fossil fuels costs the United States about $120 billion a year in health costs, mostly because of thousands of premature deaths from air pollution, the National Academy of Sciences reported in a study issued Monday.

The damages are caused almost equally by coal and oil, according to the study, which was ordered by Congress. The study set out to measure the costs not incorporated into the price of a kilowatt-hour or a gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel.

The estimates by the academy do not include damages from global warming, which has been linked to the gases produced by burning fossil fuels. The authors said the extent of such damage, and the timing, were too uncertain to estimate.

Nor did the study measure damage from burning oil for trains, ships and planes. And it did not include the environmental damage from coal mining or the pollution of rivers with chemicals that were filtered from coal plant smokestacks to keep the air clean.

“The largest portion of this is excess mortality — increased human deaths as a result of criteria air pollutants emitted by power plants and vehicles,” said Jared L. Cohon, president of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who led the study committee.

Nearly 20,000 people die prematurely each year from such causes, according to the study’s authors, who valued each life at $6 million based on the dollar in 2000. Those pollutants include small soot particles, which cause lung damage; nitrogen oxides, which contribute to smog; and sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain.

The study lends support to arguments that society should pay extra for energy from sources like the wind and the sun, because their indirect costs are extremely small. But it also found that renewable motor fuel, in the form of ethanol from corn, was slightly worse than gasoline in its environmental impact.

Coal burning was the biggest single source of such external costs . The damages averaged 3.2 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with 0.16 cents for gas. But the variation among coal plants was enormous.

The worst plants, generally the oldest and burning coal with the highest sulfur content, were 3.6 times worse than the average, with a cost of nearly 12 cents per kilowatt-hour (which is more than the average retail price of that amount of electricity).

The best plants carried a cost of less than a quarter of a penny. Natural gas plants also showed a large variation, but both the best and the worst costs were far smaller than for coal.

Such variation suggests that existing technology could be applied to make the electric system a lot cleaner, experts said. One of the study’s authors, Maureen L. Cropper, an economist at the University of Maryland, said the findings should be used not to raise the price of electricity based on an average of indirect costs but to measure the cost of cleanup on a plant-by-plant basis.

The study did not measure damage from pollution-control devices. “If you’re taking the output of a scrubber and dumping it in the Monongahela River, that’s not in our study, Professor Cropper said.

The study found that operating nuclear plants did not impose significant environmental costs, although uranium mining and processing did. But 95 percent of uranium mining takes place in other countries, the study said. Canada and Australia together account for 44 percent of world production.

The committee did not put a dollar value on the risk of a nuclear accident that would produce environmental damage. It also noted the uncertainty of the cost of long-term disposal of high-level wastes.

The committee said environmental damage from gasoline and diesel fuel cost 1.2 cents to 1.7 cents per mile. A co-author of the study, Daniel S. Greenbaum, president of the Health Effects Institute, said that would come to 23 cents to 38 cents per gallon. Still, Mr. Greenbaum said, “we were hesitant to make that a central part of our findings,” because pollution also results from manufacturing cars.

The study did not calculate the military cost of protecting fuel imports.

As for wind energy, the study said it killed birds but not enough to seriously affect populations. A possible exception was raptors, birds of prey that ordinarily eat species whose numbers are being reduced by spinning turbine blades.

The study was not kind to ethanol. A mixture of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent unleaded gasoline, or E85, showed slightly higher damages to environment and health than ordinary gasoline, because of the energy required to raise the corn and make ethanol from it.

Electric vehicles and vehicles using synthetic diesel fuel, also ranked poorly. The electric vehicles might do better if emissions of heat-trapping gases had been factored in, because they have lower carbon dioxide emissions per mile than gasoline-powered cars. But the cars running on artificial diesel would look slightly worse in that analysis, the study said.

Mercury poisoning is a growing global menace we have to address

REPOSTED

Next week, diplomats from around the world will gather in Geneva to negotiate a treaty on global emissions of mercury – a lethal neurotoxin that includes, among an inventory of grim effects, brain damage and the loss of IQ points in unborn children, injuries to kidneys and heart, and results in tens of billions of dollars in healthcare costs every year in the US alone. The Geneva conference is the final of five meetings, with a treaty expected soon thereafter.

While global mercury emissions are on the rise, negotiators, unfortunately, appear to be leaning towards a treaty with soft measures unlikely to prevent continued catastrophic impacts from this deadly and debilitating poison. Ironically, signatories propose to ink their treaty in Minamata, Japan, a town that famously suffered widespread mercury poisoning.

Health experts first described mercury poisoning, then called "Minamata disease", in Minamata city, in Japan, in 1956. Mercury discharges from the Chisso chemical plant contaminated finfish and shellfish, devastating the community's human and animal population for decades. Many of the region's citizens died and tens of thousands of people suffered mercury-related illnesses.

A former Japanese prime minister proposed naming the treaty the "Minamata Convention" to inspire delegates to reach an agreement that would prevent future mercury poisoning. Sadly, the treaty does not require identification or remediation of contaminated sites, does not require polluters to pay for health damages or environmental clean-up, or provide for protection from similar disasters occurring anywhere in the world. In fact, the treaty is not expected to reduce global levels of mercury in fish and seafood at all.

Poisonous mercury raining down from coal-fired power plants has contaminated fish in every US state. Now, a new report from the Biodiversity Research Institute (BRI) in Maine and IPEN, a network of 700 public interest organizations in 116 countries, shows the devastating global impacts of mercury pollution from coal-burning power plants and other mercury sources. The IPEN-BRI Global Hotspots report finds that coal-fired power plants, artisanal small-scale gold mining, chlor-alkali plants, and other industrial sources contaminate humans and fish around the world with mercury levels that exceed health advisory levels.

Mercury levels in fish from sites in Japan and Uruguay were so high that no consumption is recommended, according to US EPA guidelines, and 95% of the human hair samples taken from individuals tested in Tokyo, Japan exceeded the US EPA reference dose. The report demonstrates the need for a treaty that effectively addresses mercury releases.

The US is only now starting to see progress in reducing mercury emissions. In America, citizen action forced EPA to adopt the first ever mercury and air toxics rule in 2012. This rule will prevent 90% of the mercury in coal burned at power plants from being emitted into the air. Experts estimate the rule will, among other things, prevent annually up to 6,000 heart attacks, 130,000 asthma attacks, 3,000 cases of chronic bronchitis, and 4,000-11,000 premature deaths.

Moreover, experts predict the rule will save $40-70bn in healthcare costs annually. Imagine the benefits if these reductions were implemented globally.

Coal barons and mining magnates are profiting from poisoning the rest of us. As coal consumption dwindles in the US, these companies are exporting their deadly product to the rest of world. A recent report from World Resources Institute (WRI) estimates that almost 1,200 additional coal-fired plants are planned for development around the world.

But the mercury treaty is likely to call simply for reductions on a per facility basis, rather than an overall reduction in mercury emissions to air and water. As a result, the treaty could legitimize increased mercury pollution as the number of coal-fired power plants increases globally. Moreover, there is no agreement that the treaty should even require existing facilities to apply the best available techniques to reduce mercury releases.

We need a mercury treaty that actually reduces global mercury pollution. A treaty that fails to include mandatory mercury reductions overall will dishonor the victims of Minamata disease and accelerate mercury poisoning across the globe.

Those of us who care about public health and clean water, must stand strong and shame the spineless diplomats in Geneva into crafting a treaty that truly prevents the devastating environmental and public health impacts of mercury.

The Foul Legacy of the Tar Sands: Lakes Turned Into Cancer Sites

Original can be found here



Back in 2010, residents near the shores of Canada’s Lake Athabasca called on the government to commission an independent study about the impact of the tar sands development in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan on the environment. Lake Athabasca is located downstream from one of the major tar sands developments and residents, who had found more and more fish with deformities (including huge tumors), demanded that a system of environmental monitoring be put in place and an investigation be carried out.

On Monday, the study resulting from these concerns was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and the verdict is clear: tar sands are bad for our health and for the environment.

In the study, Canadian researchers found that, since the 1960s when the tar sands development was started, the level of pollutants — specifically, of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which have been shown to adversely affect birds and aquatic organisms — has risen in six freshwater lakes. By examining sediment from five lakes within a 22-mile radius of the tar sands and one remote lake about 60 miles north, scientists found that PAH levels are now 2.5-23 times greater than than had been around 1960.

In the past decades, there has been a huge increase in developing the tar sands, as these are viewed as an increasingly important part of the world’s oil reserves at a time of rising energy prices and insatiable demand.

The tar sands in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan are the third largest reserve in the world and contain 97 percent of Canada’s reserves. Some speculate that Canada has been drawing heavily on the tar sands, and overlooking the environmental impact, as a way to “cushion the Canadian economy from shocks in global energy prices.”

Tar Sands Development Has Made Wildlife Ponds As Polluted As Urban Ones

The title of the study is “Legacy of a half century of Athabasca oil sands development recorded by lake ecosystems.” Based on the dirty evidence in once pristine lakes, that “legacy” is one we don’t want.

Indeed, the scientists’ long-term findings are all the more crucial as the tar sands industry has contended that pollution is “natural.” PAHs can be found in coal, crude oil, petroleum and in products made from fossil fuels, such as creosote and asphalt; they can also be released into the air when fossil fuels and organic matter are burned and are produced by volcanoes and forest fires.

But the researchers found, since 1978 (when large-scale production of tar sands got underway), that the levels of PAH deposits have been “steadily rising” from what they had been at for centuries. As the study simply states,

Because of the striking increase in PAHs, elevated primary production, and zooplankton changes, these oil sands lake ecosystems have entered new ecological states completely distinct from those of previous centuries.

“We’re not saying these are poisonous ponds. But it’s going to get worse. It’s not too late but the trend is not looking good,” as the study’s lead author, John P. Smol, a professor of biology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, said in the New York Times. The wildlife ponds have become as contaminated as those in urban areas, he also noted.

The results of the Canadian scientists’ study make it even more clear why we need to stop the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline which is to transport oil down through the western U.S. to refineries along the Gulf Coast. Who knows what damage the pipeline could do to so many lakes, ponds and other freshwater sources; to our flora and fauna, to us?

All Plastic Bags Banned in Delhi

by Kristina Chew


Plastic bags were banned in the Indian capital of Delhi in 2009. As of this past month, the government has imposed a far more extensive ban, with new rules outlawing plastic wrappers on magazines and greeting cards. The ban covers “all use, sale and manufacture of plastic bags in the city” and “no exceptions will be made,” as an anonymous official said to AFP (via the Telegraph). Plastic bags can also not be used for garbage collecting in the city and the bags cannot be imported, notes The Hindu.

Delhi’s population of 17 million generates 1.2 million pounds of trash, plenty of it plastic, per day. As the anonymous official comments, citing the health hazards to humans and animals:

Plastic is an environmental disaster. These bags clog the city’s drains, they are non-biodegradable. It might take time, but we have to ensure that this ruling is enforced throughout Delhi.

Unfortunately, the 2009 ban turned out to be mostly toothless, with fruit and vegetable vendors, small stores and restaurants offering take-out food still using cheap bags made of thin plastic.

Now those who violate the law could face a fine of 100,000 rupees ($1,807) or up to five years in jail, says the BBC. But how to actually carry out the ban remains an issue. The Hindu says that government officials “appeared at a loss on how to implement the stringent provisions.”

The new law has already been challenged. As in the U.S. and Canada, manufacturers of plastic are none too pleased about it. The All India Plastic Industries Association (AIPIA) has filed a lawsuit against the Delhi government and claims that the ban will mean the end of jobs for thousands of people who make plastic bags and sell them. The case is being heard by the Delhi High Court.

Canadian and U.S. cities including Toronto, Los Angeles and Dana Point have banned plastic bags. Toronto is facing not one but two lawsuits from manufacturers over the ban.

Of course the Delhi ban will cause difficulties in the short term. There are few alternatives available; AFP (via the Telegraph) notes that bags from jute are popular but not widely available. Plastic bags can still be used for biomedical waste products and for packaging food (cooking oil, milk, flour) and plastic cups are still allowed.

The Delhi government has said that unspecified “efforts would be made to create awareness about the issue.” One effort ought to involve informing the public about alternatives to plastic bags and incentives to create, make and use them.

But the uproar over the law and the degree of reliance people are expressing about plastic bags make it all the more clear why a ban is needed. Plastic bags are just too convenient and too readily available and, human nature being what it is, people are highly unlikely to stop using them unless they are not there for the taking — something for us all to keep in mind, whether we’re in India or the U.S.



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Stephen Colbert - Wind Turbine Syndrome.

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How Germany Is Getting to 100 Percent Renewable Energy

by Thomas Hedges
There is no debate on climate change in Germany. The temperature for the past 10 months has been three degrees above average and we’re again on course for the warmest year on record. There’s no dispute among Germans as to whether this change is man-made, or that we contribute to it and need to stop accelerating the process.

Since 2000, Germany has converted 25 percent of its power grid to renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and biomass. The architects of the clean energy movement Energiewende, which translates to “energy transformation,” estimate that from 80 percent to 100 percent of Germany’s electricity will come from renewable sources by 2050.

Germans are baffled that the United States has not taken the same path. Not only is the U.S. the wealthiest nation in the world, but it’s also credited with jump-starting Germany’s green movement 40 years ago.

“This is a very American idea,” Arne Jungjohann, a director at the Heinrich Boll Stiftung Foundation (HBSF), said at a press conference Tuesday morning in Washington, D.C. “We got this from Jimmy Carter.”

Germany adopted and continued Carter’s push for energy conservation while the U.S. abandoned further efforts. The death of an American Energiewende solidified when President Ronald Reagan ripped down the solar panels atop the White House that Carter had installed.

Since then, Germany has created strong incentives for the public to invest in renewable energy. It pays people to generate electricity from solar panels on their houses. The effort to turn more consumers into producers is accelerated through feed-in tariffs, which are 20-year contracts that ensure a fixed price the government will pay. Germany lowers the price every year, so there’s good reason to sign one as soon as possible, before compensation falls further.

The money the government uses to pay producers comes from a monthly surcharge on utility bills that everyone pays, similar to a rebate. Ratepayers pay an additional cost for the renewable energy fund and then get that money back from the government, at a profit, if they are producing their own energy.

In the end, ratepayers control the program, not the government. This adds consistency, Davidson says. If the government itself paid, it would be easy for a new finance minister to cut the program upon taking office. Funding is not at the whim of politicians as it is in the U.S.

“Everyone has skin in the game,” says writer Osha Gray Davidson. “The movement is decentralized and democratized, and that’s why it works. Anybody in Germany can be a utility.”

The press conference the foundation organized with InsideClimate News comes two weeks after one of the biggest storms in U.S. history and sits in the shadow of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would unlock the world’s second-largest oil reserve in Canada. The event also comes one day after a report that says that the U.S. is on track to become the leading oil and gas producer by 2020, which suggests that the U.S. has the capability to match Germany’s green movement, but is instead using its resources to deepen its dependency on fossil fuels.

Many community organizers have given up on government and are moving to spark a green movement in the U.S. through energy cooperatives.

Anya Schoolman is a D.C. organizer who has started many co-ops in the district although she began with no experience. She says that converting to renewable energy one person at a time would not work in the U.S. because of legal complexities and tax laws that discourage people from investing in clean energy.

Grid managers in the U.S., she explains, often require households to turn off wind turbines at night, a practice called “curtailment.”

“It’s a favor to the utility companies,” she says, which don’t hold as much power in Germany as they do in the United States.

Individuals and cooperatives own 65 percent of Germany’s renewable energy capacity. In the U.S. they own 2 percent. The rest is privately controlled.

The largest difference, panelists said, between Germany and the U.S. is how reactive the government is to its citizens. Democracy in Germany has meant keeping and strengthening regulatory agencies while forming policies that put public ownership ahead of private ownership.

“In the end,” says Davidson, who spent a month in Germany studying the Energiewende, “it isn’t about making money. It’s about quality of life.”

Thomas Hedges works for the Center for Responsive Law in Washington, DC

Excellent Article on US Coal Extraction

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World in Serious Trouble on Food Front

Lester R. Brown

In the early spring of 2012, U.S. farmers were on their way to planting some 96 million acres in corn, the most in 75 years. A warm early spring got the crop off to a great start. Analysts were predicting the largest corn harvest on record.

The United States is the leading producer and exporter of corn, the world's feedgrain. At home, corn accounts for four-fifths of the U.S. grain harvest. Internationally, the U.S. corn crop exceeds China's rice and wheat harvests combined. Among the big three grains – corn, wheat, and rice – corn is now the leader, with production well above that of wheat and nearly double that of rice.

The corn plant is as sensitive as it is productive. Thirsty and fast-growing, it is vulnerable to both extreme heat and drought. At elevated temperatures, the corn plant, which is normally so productive, goes into thermal shock.

As spring turned into summer, the thermometer began to rise across the Corn Belt. In St. Louis, Missouri, in the southern Corn Belt, the temperature in late June and early July climbed to 100 degrees Fahrenheit or higher 10 days in a row. For the past several weeks, the Corn Belt has been blanketed with dehydrating heat.

Weekly drought maps published by the University of Nebraska show the drought-stricken area spreading across more and more of the country until, by mid-July, it engulfed virtually the entire Corn Belt. Soil moisture readings in the Corn Belt are now among the lowest ever recorded.

While temperature, rainfall, and drought serve as indirect indicators of crop growing conditions, each week the U.S. Department of Agriculture releases a report on the actual state of the corn crop. This year the early reports were promising. On May 21st, 77 percent of the U.S. corn crop was rated as good to excellent. The following week the share of the crop in this category dropped to 72 percent. Over the next eight weeks, it dropped to 26 percent, one of the lowest ratings on record. The other 74 percent is rated very poor to fair. And the crop is still deteriorating.

Over a span of weeks, we have seen how the more extreme weather events that come with climate change can affect food security. Since the beginning of June, corn prices have increased by nearly one half, reaching an all-time high on July 19th.

Although the world was hoping for a good U.S. harvest to replenish dangerously low grain stocks, this is no longer in the cards. World carryover stocks of grain will fall further at the end of this crop year, making the food situation even more precarious. Food prices, already elevated, will follow the price of corn upward, quite possibly to record highs.

Not only is the current food situation deteriorating, but so is the global food system itself. We saw early signs of the unraveling in 2008 following an abrupt doubling of world grain prices. As world food prices climbed, exporting countries began restricting grain exports to keep their domestic food prices down. In response, governments of importing countries panicked. Some of them turned to buying or leasing land in other countries on which to produce food for themselves.

Welcome to the new geopolitics of food scarcity. As food supplies tighten, we are moving into a new food era, one in which it is every country for itself.

The world is in serious trouble on the food front. But there is little evidence that political leaders have yet grasped the magnitude of what is happening. The progress in reducing hunger in recent decades has been reversed. Unless we move quickly to adopt new population, energy, and water policies, the goal of eradicating hunger will remain just that.

Time is running out. The world may be much closer to an unmanageable food shortage – replete with soaring food prices, spreading food unrest, and ultimately political instability– than most people realize.


Lester R. Brown is President of Earth Policy Institute and author of Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity, due to be published in October 2012.

Copyright © 2012 Earth Policy Institute

From the Brilliant David Roper

About two years ago I created a web page about temperatures in Blacksburg, Roanoke and Richmond: http://www.roperld.com/science/subtropicalva.htm

The conclusions were:
·         Roanoke, Virginia in the Roanoke Valley is well on the way to being a subtropical region.

·         Blacksburg, Virginia is NOT on the verge of being a subtropical region.

·         Richmond, Virginia has been a subtropical region since about 1990.

Today I added the data for 2010 & 2011 and got the following interesting graphs:

The data plotted start at ~1960 as that is when clean-air acts started removing sulfates from the atmosphere, which had been masking (global dimming) global warming. The black lines are linear fits.

The global warming affect on Virginia temperatures is quite evident!

L. David Roper, http://arts.bev.net/RoperLDavid/

Why Should Nuke Guarantees Cost Less Than Home Or Student Loans?

Reposted from Planet Thoughts


The Department of Energy wants to give the Southern Company a nuclear power loan guarantee at better interest rates than you can get on a student loan. And unlike a home mortgage, there may be no down payment.

Why?

The terms DOE is offering the builders of the Vogtle atomic reactors have only become partially public through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

We still may not know all the details.

SACE has challenged the $8.33 billion loan guarantee package announced by President Obama in 2010.

The documents show the DOE has intended to charge the Southern a credit subsidy fee of one to 1.5%, far below the rates you would be required to pay for buying a house or financing an education.

On a package 15 times bigger than what the federal government gave the failed solar company Solyndra, Southern would be required to pay somewhere between $17 million and $52 million. Advocates argue the fee is so low that it fails to adequately take into account the financial risks of the project. Numerous financial experts have estimated the likely fail rate for new nuclear construction to be at 50% or greater.

Furthermore, since a primary lender would be the Federal Financing Bank, the taxpayer is directly on the hook. Guaranteed borrowings are not supposed to exceed 70% of the project's projected costs, but it's unclear what those costs will actually turn out to be, as the public has been given no firm price tag on the project.

There is apparently no cash down payment being required of Southern as it seems the loan is designed to be secured with the value of the reactors themselves, whatever that turns out to be. In the unlikely event they are finished, liability from any catastrophe will revert to the public once a small private fund is exhausted.

Southern wanted the terms of the DOE offer kept secret, and we still don't know everything about it. But in March, a federal circuit court judge ordered that the public had a right to know at least some of the details.

Apparently no final documents have actually been signed between Southern and the DOE. The Office of Management & Budget has reportedly balked at offering the nuke builder such generous terms. Southern has reportedly balked at paying even a tiny credit fee.

Construction at the Vogtle site has already brought on delays focussed on the use of sub-standard concrete and rebar steel. The projected price tag---whatever it may be---has risen as much as $900 million in less than a year.

Southern and its Vogtle partners are in dispute with Westinghouse and the Shaw Company, two of the reactors' primary contractors. Georgia ratepayers have already been stuck with $1.4 billion in advance payments being charged to their electric bills. Far more overruns are on their way.

The Vogtle project is running somewhat parallel with two reactors being built at V.C. Summer in South Carolina, where $1.4 billion was already spent by the end of 2011. Delays are mounting and cost overruns are also apparently in the hundreds of millions.

Southern and Summer's builders both claim they can finance these projects without federal guarantees. But exactly how they would do that remains unclear.

Two older reactors now licensed at the Vogtle site were originally promised to cost $150 million each, but came in at $8.9 billion for the pair. The project's environmental permits are being challenged in court over claims the Nuclear Regulatory Commission failed to account for safety lessons from the Fukushima disaster.

The terms of the guarantees are now apparently being scrutinized by the Office of Management & Budget, which reports to a White House that may be gun-shy over new construction guarantees due to bad publicity from the Solyndra fiasco.

Numerous petitions are circulating in opposition to this package.

The Nuclear Information & Resource Service has already facilitated more than 10,500 e-mails sent directly to DOE Secretary Chu.

You might ask: why should the builders of nuclear power reactors get better terms than students struggling to pay for college or working families trying to buy a home?

At least the home buyers can get private liability insurance, which the nuke builders can't.

If mounting grassroots opposition can stop this package, it's possible no new reactors will ever be built in the US.

So send the OMB and DOE a copy of your mortgage or student loan statement.

Demand that before they finance any more nukes, they drop your own payment to 1%, just like they're offering the reactor pushers. Also demand the right to buy a home without a down payment.

See how far you get, and then make sure Vogtle goes no farther.

Fuke You!

The horrible news from Japan continues to be ignored by the western corporate media. 

Fukushima's radioactive fallout continues to spread throughout the archipelago, deep into the ocean and around the globe---including the US. It will ultimately impact millions, including many here in North America.

The potentially thankful news is that Fukushima's three melting cores may have not have melted deep into the earth, thus barely avoiding an unimaginably worse apocalyptic reality.

But it's a horror that humankind has yet to fully comprehend.

As Fukushima's owners now claim its three melted reactors approach cold shutdown, think of this:

At numerous sites worldwide---including several in the US---three or more reactors could simultaneously melt, side-by-side. At two sites in California---Diablo Canyon and San Onofre---two reactors each sit very close to major earthquake faults, in coastal tsunami zones.
Should one or more such cores melt through their reactor pressure vessels (as happened at Fukushima) and then through the bottoms of the containments (which, thankfully, may not have happened at Fukushima), thousands of tons of molten radioactive lava would burn into the Earth.
The molten mass(es) would be further fed by thousands of tons of intensely radioactive spent fuel rods stored on site that could melt into the molten masses or be otherwise compromised.
All that lava would soon hit groundwater, causing steam and hydrogen explosions of enormous power.
Those explosions would blow untold quantities of radioactive particles into the global environment, causing apocalyptic damage to all living beings and life support systems on this planet. The unmeasurable clouds would do unimaginable, inescapable injury to all human life.
Fukushima is far from over. There is much at the site still fraught with peril, far from the public eye. Among other things, Unit Four's compromised spent fuel pool is perched high in the air. The building is sinking and tilting. Seismic aftershocks could send that whole complex---and much more---tumbling down, with apocalyptic consequences.

Fukushima's three meltowns and at least four explosions have thus far yielded general radioactive fallout at least 25 times greater than what was released at Hiroshima, involving more than 160 times the cesium, an extremely deadly isotope.

Reuters reports that fallout into the oceans is at least triple what Tokyo Electric has claimed. Airborne cesium and other deadly isotopes have been pouring over the United States since a few scant days after the disaster.

Overall the fallout is far in excess of Chernobyl, which has killed more than a million people since its 1986 explosion.

Within Japan, radioactive hotspots and unexpectedly high levels of falloutcontinue to surface throughout the archipelago. The toll there and worldwide through the coming centuries will certainly be in the millions.

And yet....it could have been far worse.

In the US, in the past few months, an earthquake has shaken two Virginia reactors beyond their design specifications. Two reactors in Nebraska have been seriously threatened by flooding. Now a lethal explosion has struck a radioactive waste site in France.

We have also just commemorated a 9/11/2001 terror attack that could easily have caused full melt-downs to reactors in areas so heavily populated that millions could have been killed and trillions of dollars in damage could have permanently destroyed the American economy.

The only thing we now know for certain is that there will be more earthquakes, more tsunamis, more floods, hurricanes and tornadoes....and more terror attacks.

Horrifying as Fukushima may be, we also know for certain that the next reactor catastrophe could make even this one pale by comparison.

Japan will never fully recover from Fukushima. Millions of people will be impacted worldwide from its lethal fallout.

But the next time could be worse---MUCH worse.

The only good news is that Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden and others are dumping atomic power. They are committing to Solartopian technologies---solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, ocean thermal, sustainable bio-fuels, increased efficiency and conservation---that will put their energy supplies in harmony with Mother Earth rather than at war with her.

The rest of humankind must do the same---and fast. Our species can't survive on this planet---ecologically, economically or in terms of our biological realities---without winning this transtion.

The only question is whether we do it before the next Fukushima times ten thousand makes the whole issue moot.

Fuked Again!

(NaturalNews) The mass radioactive contamination of our planet is now under way thanks to the astonishing actions taking place at the Fukushima nuclear facility in Japan. As of last night, TEPCO announced it is releasing 10,000 tons of radioactive water directly into the Pacific Ocean. That 2.4 million gallons of planetary poison being dumped directly into the ocean.

This water is being released because they have run out of places to keep it on land. It's too deadly to transport anywhere else, and all the storage pools around Fukushima are already overflowing. So they're dumping it into the ocean, then calling it "safe" because they claim the ocean will "disperse" all the radiation and make it harmless.

But because there's more radioactive water being produced every day at Fukushima, this process of releasing radioactive water into the ocean could theoretically continue for years, easily making Fukushima the worst nuclear disaster in the history of our world.

Quick, fudge the numbers before anybody notices!

Fukushima, you see, is doing to the Pacific Ocean what BP and the Deepwater Horizon did to the Gulf of Mexico last summer. Except that in the case of Fukushima, that radiation doesn't just disappear with the help of millions of gallons of toxic chemicals. Nope, that radiation sticks around for decades.

So what to do? If you're the United States Environment Protection Agency, there's only one option: Declare radiation to be safe!

Yes indeed, friends, we have reached a moment of comedic insanity at the EPA, where those in charge of protecting the environment are hastily rewriting the definition of "radioactive contamination" in order to make sure that whatever fallout reaches the United States falls under the new limits of "safe" radiation.

The EPA maintains a set of so-called "Protective Action Guides" (PAGs). These PAGs are being quickly revised to radically increase the allowable levels of iodine-131 (a radioactive isotope) to anywhere from 3,000 to 100,000 times the currently allowable levels.

The group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) is all over this issue, having obtained internal emails from a FOIA requests that reveal some truly shocking revelations of the level of back-stabbing betrayal happening inside the EPA. For example, under the newly-revised PAGs, drinking just one glass of water considered "safe" by the EPA could subject you to the lifetime limit of radiation. (http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=1325)

"In addition," PEER goes on to say, "it would allow long-term cleanup limits thousands of times more lax than anything EPA has ever before accepted. These new limits would cause a cancer in as much as every fourth person exposed."

These new PAGs would also vastly increase the allowable levels of radiation in soil and food, too. That way, when the radioactive fallout from Fukushima's massive release of raw radioactive water begins to rain down upon the West Coast, the EPA can officially announce that all the radiation is "below accepted limits." That's very comforting to many people, you see.

And why is it below the limits? Because the EPA just raised the limits by as much as 100,000 times!

Quack science is alive and well as the government

Truly, this is science at its most delightful. When the facts don't fit your fairy tale, simply rewrite the fairy tale to discard the facts! That's science for you today, folks: There's nothing that can't be denied, censored, oppressed or ignored if you just fudge the numbers with enough determination and arrogance.

The U.S. government does the exact same thing with vitamin D, of course. By lowering the definition of vitamin D deficiency to mean only those with a blood level below 30, the government magically and instantly transforms a wildly deficient American population into a "sufficiently nourished" population! It's magic, friends. Magic with numbers.

But even the EPA's sleight-of-hand magic isn't fooling very many people this time around. Even the most TV-obsessed, CNN-watching news zombie has by now figured out that too much radiation is bad for you. After all, the media has been screaming at people about the dangers of sunlight radiation for years, insisting that the mere act of sunlight touching your skin could kill you from skin cancer.

And yet, thanks to the EPA's magically-morphing numbers, even though sunlight radiation might kill you, Fukushima radiation is perfectly safe for ya!

You have a front row seat in this entertaining charade

Isn't it amazing? Watching the U.S. government try to fudge its way out of the physical realities of Fukushima probably beats the best stage magic show you'll ever find in Vegas. Sure, in Vegas they can make white tigers disappear right in front of your very eyes, but with the help of the U.S. government, they can cause the world's largest nuclear catastrophe to vanish by simply redefining radiation exposure limits.

You may wonder, dear readers, where the U.S. government learned these amazing and fantastic tricks of fudging the numbers. The answer, as regular NaturalNews know all too well, is that they learned it from the U.S. Treasury, where fudging the numbers is an essential skill to keep things running. After all, if the federal government can pretend that trillions of dollars in toxic debt have no impact on the U.S. economy, it's a no-brainer to also pretend that massive doses of radioactive fallout have no impact on environmental health, either.

That's the new mantra in Washington: We just wish it away! It should be Obama's new campaign slogan, actually: Are you ready to wish it all away? Watch the distraction in my right hand while I steal the money out of your wallet with my left...

British scientists have the solution: Spread it all around!

Getting back to the absolutely glowing situation in Fukushima, if you can't believe the U.S. EPA, then perhaps you can take comfort in the authoritative words of a British newspaper, which assures us that:

"Scientists also confirmed that ocean currents will swiftly dilute the radioactive iodine-131, eliminating risks to human health and the environment." (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8425719/Japan-nu...)

Surely this logic is impeccable, no? Any amount of toxic radiation can simply be declared safe by dumping it into the ocean and watching the waves sweep it all away. By this same logic, you could clean up a toxic chemical spill by swishing it around with wet mops and then declaring the zone to be safe again.

Didn't we try this already with pesticides, herbicides and agricultural runoff? And didn't it create massive ocean dead zones all around the planet? Now we're going to add Chernobyl-sized radiation releases to that equation, too?

Fukushima is a massive dirty bomb

I'm reminded that if an Islamic-looking individual conducted such an act anywhere near a U.S. shoreline, it would be considered an act of terrorism. A dirty bomb, actually. And those individuals would be shipped off the Guantanamo Bay to be interrogated in a facility that President Obama once promised the voters would be closed down if he were elected. He was lying, of course. But that's not even the news here. Everybody already knows he was lying about Gitmo.

So why is unleashing a dirty bomb an act of terrorism if you're Islamic-looking, but if you're Japanese suddenly it's all officially safe? And by what contortions in its twisted agenda of anti-public service does the EPA go to these extraordinary lengths to redefine the very margins of radiation exposure? If Fukushima goes into a total meltdown, will the EPA just add more zeroes to the end of its safety margin numbers until we're all assured our food is U.S. government approved 100% safe even while our hair falls out from eating it?

Will the FDA soon tell us that radioactive milk is safe to drink, but RAW milk is deadly?

Canada tries to out-stupid the USA

Ah, the fascination of watching this tragic comedy of errors unfold in the U.S. government almost cannot be exceeded. But Canada is sure trying. Its own nuclear monitoring network has simply been shut off, and its website now reads "Please note that as of March 25, 2011, the frequency of data collection by NRCan using the mobile surveys has been decreased due to the low levels of radiation being detected."

Seriously, see the bottom of the page: http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/hc-ps/ed-ud/respond/nuclea/_data/nrcan-rncan-e...

Yep, since they're detecting low levels of radiation, this is apparently justification for turning off the monitors altogether, which of course is the kind of brilliant early warning plan that could have only been dreamed up by a brain-dead bureaucrat. It's as if these morons are sitting around a table having a conversation that goes something like this:

Bureaucratic Moron #1: Remember how we spent a hundred million dollars installing a national network of radiation detectors?

Bureaucratic Moron #2: Yeah.

Bureaucratic Moron #1: And remember how we started to detect some of the radioactive fallout from Fukushima as it began raining down upon Canada?

Bureaucratic Moron #2: Yeah.

Bureaucratic Moron #1: Well, I have a great idea. Let's turn OFF all the detectors so that we stop detecting radiation!

Bureaucratic Moron #2: That's brilliant! You're a genius!

Bureaucratic Moron #1: I know I am. And we wouldn't want to waste this expensive equipment, you know.

Bureaucratic Moron #2: Right, we want to save it for a scenario when we might really need it, eh?

Bureaucratic Moron #1: Exactly! And we'll save millions of dollars in operating fees, because the best way to save money on radiation detectors is to not use them.

Bureaucratic Moron #2: You're a genius! You should run for Prime Minister!

Yes there is a plan, but you're not in it

Obama, of course, is trying to best his Canadian counterpart by simply urging the American people to do nothing in the case of radioactive fallout. Don't worry, my little consumer sheeple, you don't need to prepare in any way whatsoever, Obama says from his nuclear fallout shelter that's stocked with 10 years of food, water, emergency medical supplies, government ammunition and military communications equipment. It's okay for the President to prepare for emergencies, I guess. Just not YOU.

There is a plan, you see, for the government to survive every disaster that comes our way. You're just not part of it. The government feels that its own survival is far more important than yours. And just to make sure you don't interfere with its own plans, the government is going to turn off the radiation detectors, raise the official EPA limits of radioactive exposure, urge Americans to avoid preparing for fallout, and then pretend absolutely nothing's wrong. Keep on buying, consuming and paying your bills, all you voters! Punch your time clock at your job if you still have one, and don't ask any questions about radiation, vaccines or the chemical additives they put in hot dogs.

Some food ingredients, you see, are only disclosed on a need-to-know basis. And you don't need to know.

Run for the cure. Vote in the next election. Buy diet sodas and watch lots of sports programs on television with occasional interruptions from the news programs now featuring "info babes" regurgitating scripted mindless propaganda bracketed by flying news network logos. Report suspicious activities at Wal-Mart (http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=5A4B5D4B84344D5D9CBD262A53D8B071). Call 911 on your Arab-looking neighbors just because they look Arab-looking. Watch "Ow, My Balls!" on your television set (http://www.naturalnews.com/021558_Idiocracy_Hollywood.html) and stop thinking about your future.

Your government already has your future planned for you. That's why there's no need for you to expend any effort considering it yourself. Why bother thinking when you can just passively consume everything you're being spoon-fed by the State? And don't worry about the radioactive fallout. It's all safe now. I've been assured of that by the EPA.

Learn more: http://naturalnews.com/031963_radiation_exposure.html#ixzz1wge8TbYa

30 years, same dream

New Video from my Friend Billy Weitzenfeld

THIS IS IMPORTANT READ IT!

Reposted from Planet Thoughts The future of nuclear power now hangs on a single decision by President Obama---and us. His Office of Management and Budget could cave to the unsustainable demands of reactor builders who cannot handle the standard terms of a loan agreement. Or he could defend basic financial procedures and stand up for the future of the American economy. You can help make this decision, which will come soon. It's about a proposed $8.33 billion nuke power loan guarantee package for two reactors being built at Georgia's Vogtle. Obama anointed it last year for the Southern Company, parent to Georgia Power. Two other reactors sporadically operate there. Southern just ravaged the new construction side of the site, stripping virtually all vegetation. It's also stripped Georgia ratepayers of ever-more millions of dollars, soon to become billions. This project is in the Peach State for its law forcing the public to pay for reactor construction in advance. When the project fails, or the reactors melt, the public still must pay. A taste of what's coming has emerged in shocking defects in poured concrete at the site which will cost millions to correct and months of delay on a project whose construction has barely begun ( http://nukefree.org/nc-warn-vogtle-already-hit-major-design-flaw-delay ) . Nonetheless, Southern runs virtually no financial risk. It actually has an interest in never finishing. Florida is now in turmoil, trying to rid itself of a similar Construction Work in Progress law ( http://nukefree.org/florida-legislators-sue-stop-nuke-bailouts-advance ). Worldwide estimated reactor costs have jumped from $3-5 billion each a few short years ago to $10 billion or more, and rising. Uranium prices are set to soar as the supply of Russian weapons-based fuel is about done. And renewables have long since outstripped atomic energy as being cheaper, faster to build, cleaner, safer, more reliable and open to community ownership. There are virtually no private investors willing to back new reactor construction. There are no private insurers willing to take the risk on operating reactors. There is no place to store the radioactive wastes they generate. Operating reactors in Vermont ( http://nukefree.org/vermonters-tell-vermont-yankee-get-out ), New York, California ( http://nukefree.org/nrc-chair-jazcko-says-san-onofre-be-shut-indefinitely ) and elsewhere now face ferocious public uprisings to get them shut. They are being joined by Governors, US Senators and entire legislatures. Peter Shumlin, Governor of Vermont, has appeared at a major public rally to shut Yankee. The legislature long ago voted (26-4) the same way. Shumlin was joined by US Senator Bernie Sanders, who has issued a stunning denunciation of the loan guarantees ( http://nukefree.org/sen-bernie-sanders-ryan-alexander-stop-nuclear-subsidies ) . US Senator Ron Wyden of Orgeon has published a serious warning about the on-going dangers of Fukushima, which he recently visited ( http://nukefree.org/sen-wyden-warns-situation-fukushima-worse-believed ). Once the public kills one of these elderly reactors, a tsunami of shutdowns among the 104 currently licensed in the US will follow. Germany and much of the rest of Europe have abandoned the technology ( http://nukefree.org/europes-war-over-nuclear-financing ). Bulgaria has just scrapped plans for two proposed generators. Major banking institutions have warned potential investors in Britain's planned reactors that if they proceed, they will lose their financial standing. Mexico has also said it won't build new nukes. In Asia, only one of Japan's 54 licensed reactors now operates, and it may soon shut. Huge demonstrations and hunger strikes are raging against a proposed project at Koodankulam, India. The Philippines says it won't build any reactors at all ( http://nukefree.org/philippines-says-no-new-nukes ). China, the last bastion of any apparent large-scale interest in multiple nukes, seems to be wavering, in part because of the rise of a No Nukes movement there. Here, two reactors barely beginning construction in South Carolina are also in deep trouble. Their builders need massive rate hikes in North Carolina to proceed, and the opposition there is fierce ( http://nukefree.org/ncwarn-north-carolina-can-kill-south-carolina-nuke-project ). But the lynchpin is Vogtle. The construction loan guarantee program got $18.5 billion from George W. Bush in 2005. With the industry in deepening chaos, it took until last year for a president to designate less than half that money. For the first time in years, there is no Executive or Congressional request to put more money into the fund. The French National Utility EDF did step forward to get funding for Maryland's proposed Calvert Cliffs project. But haggling over terms contributed to its demise. Now Southern faces the same abyss. It refuses what the mortgage community would consider a normal 20% downpayment on its taxpayer-funded loan. Southern wants to put virtually none of its own money into the project, leaving the radioactive gamble totally to the public. But the Office of Management and Budget is apparently demanding something more reasonable ( http://nukefree.org/vogtle-loan-guarantee-not-yet-done-deal ). Because the OMB is a White House agency, Obama holds the key. It's our job to make him turn it in a green direction. A short while ago, this package was considered a done deal. But the GOP uproar over the failed $535 million loan to the solar company Solyndra changed to context. Initiated by Bush, Republicans have made Solyndra the poster child for bad federal loans. Vogtle involves some 15 times Solyndra's liability. And it's all Obama's. At least three petitions are circulating against the package.( http://nukefree.org/please-do-sign-petition-stop-new-nuke-loan-guarantees ). There are many ways to finally shut down what has been the most expensive technological failure in human history. Fukushima and the killing power of radiation, the unsolved problem of radioactive waste, the campaigns against failing reactors such as Vermont Yankee, Indian Point, San Onofre and Davis-Besse---all are key. This weekend, a conference convened by the Sierra Club in Washington, DC ( http://action.sierraclub.org/site/DocServer/no_Nukes_Flyer2.pdf?docID=9701 ), will weigh the various strategies. But killing this loan guarantee package could finally kill the prospect of new reactors in the US. The astonishing rise of Solartopian green technologies has far outstripped atomic energy in the marketplace. Every delay deeply diminishes the possibility of building more of these profoundly uneconomic anachronisms. In the long run, Vogtle, Summer and any other new nukes that seem to slip through in the short term will almost certainly be stopped by what has become one of the most powerful non-violent social movements in human history. But right now, it's up to Obama---and us. Does he really want an atomic Solyndra on his hands? Will we really let this happen? Let's relieve the President of this radioactive burden. Let's kill these reactors before they kill us, and take the most significant leap of all toward a green-powered Earth.

The Gulf 2 Years Later - Scientists Alarmed

Stephen Colbert on Coal Comparing Itself to Osama Bin Laden

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Japan - One Year Later

OnlineSchools.org presents Japan One Year Later

if only

From The economist

A FREIGHT train, its dozen cars loaded with coal covered in a light dusting of snow, snaked through the narrow valley, sometimes following the two-lane highway and sometimes crossing it. The valley was silent and snowy, and though it was two days into 2012 it could easily have been 1982, 1942 or 1922: coal has been mined in Appalachia and carried out by rail for well over a century.

And by some measures, coal is still going strong. It provides more of America’s electricity than any other fuel. Production has fallen off since 2008, but it remains high, as do prices, for which thank the developing world’s appetite. In Appalachia, coal remains a source of well-paid jobs in a region that needs them: for the first three quarters of 2011 employment in the Appalachian coal industry was at its highest level since 1997. And the Powder River Basin, which spans Wyoming and Montana, has become America’s major source of coal in the past decade, relieving overmined Kentucky and West Virginia. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) reckons America has enough coal to meet current demand levels for the next 200 years.

But if the raw numbers look good, the trends tell a different story. Regulatory uncertainty and the emergence of alternative fuel sources (natural gas and renewables) will probably make America’s future far less coal-reliant than its past. In 2000 America got 52% of its electricity from coal; in 2010 that number was 45%. Robust as exports are, they account for less than one-tenth of American mined coal; exports cannot pick up the slack if America’s taste for coal declines. Appalachian coal production peaked in the early 1990s; the EIA forecasts a decline for the next three years, followed by two decades of low-level stability. Increased employment and declining productivity suggest that Appalachian coal is getting harder to find.

Toughening regulation has an effect, too. Coal-fired power plants are the source of more than one-third of greenhouse-gas emissions in America. Last July the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a rule that requires 28 states to reduce the amount of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide they emit; in December came another, reducing the amount of mercury and other toxic air pollutants that power plants can puff out.

Many plants have already made the necessary upgrades and retrofits; around 53% of America’s coal-fired capacity comes from units fitted with scrubbers. But others, particularly older plants, will have to decide whether such expensive upgrades are worth doing at all. Most of America’s coal-fired capacity comes from plants at least 30 years old, and as much as 14% of existing coal-fired plants, accounting for 4% of America’s generation capacity, will have to be retired in the next five to eight years. Energy providers face a stark choice. They can fight these regulations in court (outcome uncertain). They can retrofit old plants: plenty have done that, too. Or they can build new plants—in which case, far more are choosing plants that burn natural gas or use renewables rather than coal.

To some, regulations prove the current administration’s hostility to coal. To others, however, they are a long-overdue attempt to gauge a putatively cheap fuel’s true external costs. A National Academy of Sciences report estimated that the external costs unrelated to climate-change costs (to human health, crop and timber yields, building materials and recreation) of coal-fired power plants in 2005 totalled $62 billion. A study of coal’s effects on Kentucky’s budget in 2006 found that it contributed $528m in revenue, but its on-budget costs—training, support, repairs to the roads, R&D for the coal industry—totalled $643m. A study in West Virginia in 2009 also found the coal industry a net cost to the state.


Without alternatives, America might need to resign itself to these costs. But alternatives are there. As coal’s share of America’s electricity-generation market fell between 2000 and 2010, those of natural gas and renewables rose: gas from 16% to 24%, and renewables from 9% to 10%.

The EIA forecasts that America will still obtain 39% of its energy from coal by 2035, but that assumes a consistent regulatory framework. Other sources are less sanguine. Deutsche Bank predicts that coal’s share will fall to 20% by 2030 as regulatory risk grows, with natural gas and renewables rising. That seems more likely. The EPA’s new emissions rules may have been stayed by the courts, but they loom nonetheless, hampering investment in coal.

The switch away from it will be painful for some. But as Robert Byrd, the late senator from West Virginia, once said, coal-dependent regions “can choose to anticipate change and adapt to it, or resist and be overrun by it.”

Great quote - Name that movie

i'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague