Category Archives: public health

Plastics in Seas as New Tiny Ecosystems

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The malign effect of floating plastic debris on seabirds, turtles and other sea creatures is well known. But, as Dr Mincer and Dr Amaral-Zettler have discovered, plastic debris also provides a new habitat for organisms small enough to take advantage of it.  The two researchers collected pieces of plastic from various sites in the North Atlantic. They then examined each using DNA analysis, and also an electron microscope, to see what was living on it. Lots of things were. Altogether, they discovered about 50 species of single-celled plant, animal and bacterial life. Each bit of debris was, in effect, a tiny ecosystem….Plastics are energy-rich substances, which is why many of them burn so readily. Any organism that could unlock and use that energy would do well….Less encouragingly, Dr Mincer and Dr Amaral-Zettler also found cholera-like bacteria in their tiny floating ecosystems. Both fish and seabirds act as vectors for cholera (the former bring it into human settlements when caught by fishermen, the latter when resting ashore or nesting), so anywhere that such creatures might pick up cholera bugs is something worth keeping an eye on.

The researchers paint an intriguing picture of the adaptability of nature, and provide another piece of the jigsaw that is the Anthropocene. Conservationists intent on preserving charismatic megafauna have reason to lament the spread of plastics through the ocean. But those interested in smaller critters have been given a whole, new sphere—the plastisphere—to study.

Marine ecology: Welcome to the plastisphere, Economist, July 20, 2013, at 7

How to Kill One Million Fish: Murray-Darling

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But it took a viral video posted on 8 January 2019 to drive home the ecological catastrophe that was unfolding in the Murray-Darling river system in Australia. In the footage, Rob McBride and Dick Arnold, identified as local residents, stand knee-deep among floating fish carcasses in the Darling River, near the town of Menindee. They scoff at authorities’ claims that the fish die-off is a result of the drought. Holding up an enormous, dead Murray cod, a freshwater predator he says is 100 years old, McBride says: “This has nothing to do with drought, this is a manmade disaster.” Arnold, sputtering with rage, adds: “You have to be bloody disgusted with yourselves, you politicians and cotton growers.”

Scientists say McBride probably overestimated the age of the fish. But they agree that the massive die-off was not the result of drought. “It’s about taking too much water upstream [to irrigate farms] so there is not enough for downstream users and the fish,” says Quentin Grafton, an economist specializing in water issues at Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. The Australia Institute, a Canberra-based think tank, blamed “policy failure and mismanagement” in a 19 January 2019 report, but called drought a catalyst.

Excessive water use has left river flows too low to flush nutrients from farm runoff through the system, leading to large algal blooms, researchers say. A cold snap then killed the blooms, and bacteria feeding on the dead algae sucked oxygen out of the water,   This wasn’t supposed to happen. In 2012, the national government adopted the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, touted as a “historic” deal to ensure that enough water remained in the rivers to keep the ecosystem healthy even after farmers and households took their share.

In 2008, the federal government created the Murray-Darling Basin Authority to wrestle with the problem. In 2010, a study commissioned by the authority concluded that farmers and consumers would have to cut their use of river water by at least 3000 but preferably by 7600 gigaliters annually to ensure the health of the ecosystem. Farmers, who saw their livelihoods threatened, tossed the report into bonfires.  The final plan, adopted as national law in 2012, called for returning just 2750 gigaliters to the rivers, in part by buying water rights back from users. “It was a political compromise that has never been scientifically reviewed,” Williams says, adding that “climate change was never considered in the plan, which was a dreadful oversight.”..

Grafton says there are also suspicions of widespread water theft; up to 75% of the water taken by irrigators in the northern part of the system is not metered. Farmers are also now recapturing the runoff from irrigated fields that used to flow back into streams, and are increasing their use of ground water, leaving even less water in the system, says Mike Young, an environmental policy specialist at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

In February 2018, such issues prompted a group of 12 academics, including scientists and policy experts, to issue the Murray-Darling Declaration. It called for independent economic and scientific audits of completed and planned water recovery schemes to determine their effects on stream flows. The group, which included Williams and Grafton, also urged the creation of an independent, expert body to provide advice on basin water management. Young, who wasn’t on the declaration, wants to go further and give that body the power to manage the basin’s water, the way central banks manage a country’s money supply, using stream levels to determine weekly irrigation allocations and to set minimum flow levels for every river.

Excerpts from Dennis Normile, Massive fish die-off sparks outcry in Australia, Science, Jan. 22, 2019.

Caring for the Third Pole

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The Tibetan Plateau and its surrounding mountains [the Himalayas], often termed the Third Pole, contain more ice than anywhere outside the Arctic and Antarctic. This region is also the source of the nine largest rivers in Asia, providing fresh water, food, and other ecosystem services to more than 1.5 billion people…In recent decades, air temperature at the Third Pole has warmed significantly faster than the global average…Meanwhile, intensive anthropogenic activities, such as overgrazing, deforestation, urbanization, and expansion of infrastructure projects such as construction of roads, dams, and electrical grids, are causing widespread landcover changes within the region.

Together, these changes are altering the Third Pole’s biogeochemical cycles and pushing the fragile ecosystem toward degradation and possible collapse, which would cause irreversible harm on a regional and global scale. To avoid this, all nations must meet the standards laid out in the Paris Agreement. At the regional level, we strongly urge the relevant nations (including Afghanistan, Bhutan, China, India, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, and Tajikistan) to cooperate in addressing these impending threats through systematic changes to management policies. Rapid and unprecedented coordination will be necessary, including a regional cooperation treaty and formation of a cross-border biodiversity conservation plan for the Third Pole region. Meanwhile, any infrastructure projects undertaken must be environmentally sustainable, and a practicable grazing management policy should be adopted.

Excerpts from Jie Liu, Protect Third Pole’s Fragile Ecosystem, Science,  Dec. 21, 2018

Planting Electronics in Brains

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 An implantable brain device that literally melts away at a pre-determined rate minimizes injury to tissue normally associated with standard electrode implantation, according to research led by a team from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. …Thin, flexible neural electrode arrays with fully bioresorbable construction based on patterned silicon nanomembranes (Si NMs) as the conducting component.

“Dissolvable silicon electronics offer an unprecedented opportunity to implant advanced monitoring systems that eliminate the risks, cost, and discomfort associated with surgery to extract current devices used for post-operative monitoring,” said senior co-author Brian Litt, MD,….“This study tested the usefulness of temporary, dissolvable monitoring systems capable of providing continuous streams of data for guiding medical care over predetermined periods of time — from days to months — before dissolving.”

The device is made of layers of silicon and molybdenum that can measure physiological characteristics and dissolve at a known rate, as determined by its thickness. For example, the team used the device to record brain waves in rats under anesthesia, as well as voltage fluctuations between neurons (EEGs), and induced epileptic spikes in intact live tissue. A separate experiment demonstrated a complex, multiplexed array made from these materials that could map rat-whisker sensing capabilities at high resolution.

These electrophysiological signals were recorded from devices placed at the surface of the brain cortex (the outer layer of tissue) and the inner space between the scalp and skull. Chronic measurements were made over a 30-day period, while acute experiments demonstrated device operations over three to four hours.

The type of neurophysiologic features measured by the new device are commonly used for diagnosing and treating such disorders as epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, depression, chronic pain, and conditions of the peripheral nervous system. “….

This work was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Penn Medicine Neuroscience Center,  and others.

See Next-Gen Electrodes: Proof-of-Concept Animal Study Shows that Flexible, Dissolvable Silicon Electronic Device Holds Promise for Brain Monitoring , Press Release, May 5, 2016

See also Nature Materials

The US Military and the Peripheral Nervous System

How to Stop the Chemical Wars of the Future

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Stark illustrations of the dangers from chemical weapons can be seen in attacks using toxic industrial chemicals and sarin against civilians and combatants in Syria and toxic industrial chemicals in Iraq, as well as more targeted assassination operations in Malaysia and the United Kingdom, employing VX and novichok nerve agents, respectively. . With the parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) convening a Review Conference to address such issues beginning 21 November 2018, we highlight important scientific aspects .

The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) is a multilateral treaty in effect since 1997 that proscribes the development, production, stockpiling, transfer, and use of chemical weapons “under any circumstances” and requires their destruction within a specified time period. The CWC allows the use of toxic chemicals for a range of industrial, agricultural, research, medical, pharmaceutical, or other peaceful purposes, including law enforcement, as long as the “types and quantities” of chemicals employed are “consistent with such purposes.” …The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which is the implementing body of the CWC, comprises the 193 State Parties and a Technical Secretariat that provides technical assistance to States, routinely inspects relevant State and commercial industrial facilities, and monitors activities to ensure compliance. It was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013 for overseeing and facilitating the verified destruction of most of the declared chemical weapons stocks produced in the last century—to date totaling more than 96% (69,750 metric tons) of the declared stockpiles of chemical agents.

Although the CWC includes three schedules of toxic chemicals for the application of verification measures, the scope of the CWC is not constrained to these schedules but by its General Purpose Criterion (GPC), which prohibits misuse of toxic chemicals based on intent rather than on this limited list of chemicals.  [This GPC makes it possible to widen the authority of the OPCW. More, specifically issues to consider include]:

1) Riot control agents (RCAs). The CWC defines RCAs—such as tear gas and pepper spray—as “any chemical not listed” in one of its three schedules that can produce “rapidly in humans sensory irritation or disabling physical effects which disappear within a short time following termination of exposure.”…However, a recurring concern documented by the medical community and human rights monitors has been the widespread misuse of RCAs by police and security forces in excessive quantities, including in hospitals, prisons, homes, and automobiles, where targeted individuals cannot disperse. In such situations, serious injury or death can result from toxic properties of chemicals or from asphyxiation… [It is important to clarify] the nature and scope of “law enforcement” activities and develop guidance as to “types and quantities” of RCAs that can legitimately be used in such circumstances

2) Delivery systems… capable of delivering far greater amounts of RCAs (and potentially other toxic chemicals) over wider areas or more extended distances than current standard law enforcement delivery mechanisms, such as handheld sprays, grenades, and single launched projectiles. Such new systems include large-capacity spraying devices, automatic grenade launchers, multibarrel projectile launchers, large-caliber RCA projectiles, and unmanned ground or aerial vehicles capable of carrying spraying devices or projectile launchers. ..

3) Incapacitating chemical agent (ICA) weapons. Although the CWC permits use of appropriate types and quantities of RCAs for law enforcement, certain countries have conducted research into weapons employing other distinct toxic chemicals, so-called ICAs. Not separately defined under the CWC, ICAs can be considered as a range of toxic chemicals—only one of which [3-quinuclidinyl benzilate (BZ) and two of its immediate precursors] is currently scheduled—including anesthetics and other pharmaceutical chemicals that are purportedly intended to act on the body’s core biochemical and physiological systems, notably the central nervous system (CNS), to cause prolonged but nonpermanent disability. Such CNS-acting chemicals can produce unconsciousness, sedation, hallucination, incoherence, disorientation, or paralysis…An aerosolized mixture of two anesthetics—carfentanil and remifentanil—employed by Russian security forces to end the Moscow theatre siege of October 2002 caused the deaths of 125 of the 900 hostages…

Other chemical production facilities (OCPFs) are chemical plants that do not currently produce, but are capable of manufacturing, chemical warfare agents or precursors. At present, a small fraction of declared OCPFs are selected for verification by the OPCW; the Review Conference should consider authorizing a substantial increase in OCPF inspections per year. …Biological and biologically mediated processes for production of discrete organic chemicals  Some products and processes used by the biomanufacturing industry are as relevant to the CWC as those used by other OCPF facilities  The OPCW should  build on the considerable progress made toward developing a network of designated laboratories for the analysis of biomedical and biological samples. Advances in other fields could also facilitate more effective evidence collection, for example, exploring the potential of unmanned aerial vehicles to support reconnaissance, detection, and chain of custody.

Excerpts from  Michael Crowley at al., Preventing Chemical Weapons as Sciences Converge, Science, Nov. 16, 2018

Eradicate Mosquitoes Forever: Gene Drives

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The mosquitoes are being fitted with a piece of dna called a gene drive. Unlike the genes introduced into run-of-the-mill genetically modified organisms, gene drives do not just sit still once inserted into a chromosome. They actively spread themselves, thereby reaching more and more of the population with each generation. If their effect is damaging, they could in principle wipe out whole species.. If gene drives were to condemn to a similar fate the mosquitoes that spread malaria, a second of humankind’s great scourges might be consigned to history.

Gene drives can in principle be used against any creatures which reproduce sexually with short generations and aren’t too rooted to a single spot. The insects that spread leishmaniasis, Chagas disease, dengue fever, chikungunya, trypanosomiasis and Zika could all be potential targets. So could creatures which harm only humankind’s dominion, not people themselves. Biologists at the University of California, San Diego, have developed a gene-drive system for Drosophila suzukii, an Asian fruitfly which, as an invasive species, damages berry and fruit crops in America and Europe. Island Conservation, an international environmental ngo, thinks gene drives could offer a humane and effective way of reversing the damage done by invasive species such as rats and stoats to native ecosystems in New Zealand and Hawaii.

Such critics fear that the laudable aim of vastly reducing deaths from malaria—which the World Health Organisation puts at 445,000 a year, most of them children—will open the door to the use of gene drives for far less clear-cut benefits in ways that will entrench some interests, such as those of industrial farmers, at the expense of others. They also point to possible military applications: gene drives could in principle make creatures that used not to spread disease more dangerous… The ability to remove species by fiat—in effect, to get them to remove themselves—is, like the prospect of making new species from scratch, a power that goes beyond the past ambit of humankind.

Gene drives based on crispr-Cas9 could easily be engineered to target specific bits of the chromosome and insert themselves seamlessly into the gap, thus ensuring that every gamete gets a copy . By 2016, gene drives had been created in yeast, fruitflies and two species of mosquito. In work published in the journal Nature Biotechnology in September, Andrea Crisanti, Mr Burt and colleagues at Imperial showed that one of their gene drives could drive a small, caged population of the mosquito Anopheles gambiae to extinction—the first time a gene drive had shown itself capable of doing this. The next step is to try this in a larger caged population.

There are also worries about how gene drives might be used to create a weapon. …The need to find ways to guard against such attacks is one of the reasons that the Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (darpa) gives for its work on gene drives. Renee Wegrzyn, programme manager for darpa’s “Safe Genes” project, says the work is to prevent “technological surprise”, whether in the form of an unintended consequence or nefarious use. One of the academic teams she funds has made progress in developing anti-crispr enzyme systems that one day might be able to inhibit a drive’s operation.

Oversight needs not just to bring together a range of government agencies; it requires co-operation between governments, too. The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which entered into force under the un Convention on Biological Diversity (cbd) in 2003, provides controls on the transfer of genetically modified organisms. But how it applies to gene drives is unclear—and besides, America has never ratified the convention. An attempt to ban gene-drive research through the cbd, which was backed by the etc Group and other ngos, failed at the convention’s biennial meeting in Cancún in 2016…Like the reintroduction of vanished species advocated by the rewilding movement, gene-drive technology will provide new arenas for the fight between those who wish to defend nature and those who wish to tame it.

Excerpts from Gene Drives: Extinction on Demand, Economist, Nov. 10, 2018, at 24

Meddling with Nature: Is it Right? Is it Fair?

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Many envisioned environmental applications of newly developed gene-editing techniques such as CRISPR might provide profound benefits for ecosystems and society. But depending on the type and scale of the edit, gene-edited organisms intentionally released into the environment could also deliver off-target mutations, evolutionary resistance, ecological disturbance, and extinctions. Hence, there are ongoing conversations about the responsible application of CRISPR, especially relative to the limitations of current global governance structures to safeguard its use,   Largely missing from these conversations is attention to local communities in decision-making. Most policy discussions are instead occurring at the national or international level even though local communities will be the first to feel the context-dependent impacts of any release. ..

CRISPR gene editing and other related genetic technologies are groundbreaking in their ability to precisely and inexpensively alter the genome of any species. CRISPR-based gene drives hold particular import because they are designed to rapidly spread genetic changes—including detrimental traits such as infertility—through populations of sexually reproducing organisms, to potentially reach every member of a species. Villages in Burkina Faso are weighing the release of gene drive–bearing mosquitoes that could suppress malaria. Nantucket Island residents in the United States are considering the release of genetically engineered white-footed mice to deplete Lyme disease reservoirs. New Zealand communities are discussing the possibility of using genetic methods to eliminate exotic predators.

But what if a gene drive designed to suppress an invasive species escaped its release site and spread to a native population? Or if a coral species gene edited to better adapt to environmental stressors dominated reef ecosystems at the expense of a diversity of naturally evolving coral species and the fish that depend on them ? The gravity of these potential outcomes begs the question: Should humans even be meddling with the DNA of wild organisms? The absence of generally agreed on answers can be used to support calls for moratoria on developing and releasing genetically altered organisms, especially those with gene drives (6).

However, the promising benefits of environmental gene editing cannot be dismissed. Gene drives may provide a long-sought-after tool to control vectors of infectious disease and save millions of human lives. Projects to conserve ecosystems or promote species resilience are often intended to repair human-inflicted environmental damage. Put simply, either using this technology irresponsibly or not using it at all could prove damaging to humans, our welfare, and our planet.

At the international level, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has enlisted an expert technical panel to, in part, update its Cartagena Protocol (of which the United States is not a party) that oversees transboundary transport of living modified organisms to accommodate gene drive–bearing organisms. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is also developing policy to address the release of gene-edited organisms. Although the CBD and the IUCN offer fora to engage diverse public feedback, a role largely fulfilled by civil society groups, none of these agencies currently use the broad and open deliberative process we advocate….

Different societal views about the human relationship to nature will therefore shape decision-making. Local community knowledge and perspectives must therefore be engaged to address these context-dependent, value-based considerations.  A special emphasis on local communities is also a matter of justice because the first and most closely affected individuals deserve a strong voice in the decision-making process…Compounding this challenge is that these decisions cannot be made in isolation. Organisms released into local environments may cross regional and even international borders. Hence, respect for and consideration of local knowledge and value systems are necessary, but insufficient, to anticipate the potentially ramifying global implications of environmental release of gene-edited organisms. What is needed is an approach that places great weight on local perspectives within a larger global vision…

The needs of ecosystems could also be given voice to inform deliberative outcomes through custodial human proxies. Inspired by legislative precedent set by New Zealand, in which the Whanganui River was granted legal “personhood,” human representatives, nominated by both an international body like the IUCN and the local community, would be responsible for upholding the health and interests of the ecosystems in question. Proposed gene-editing strategies would be placed in the larger context of alternative approaches to address the public health or environmental issue in question…

An online registry for all projects intending to release genetically engineered organisms into the environment must be created. Currently, no central database exists for environmental gene-editing applications or for decision-making outcomes associated with their deployment, and this potentially puts the global community at risk…A global coordination task force would be charged with coordinating multiple communities, nations, and regions to ensure successful deliberative outcomes. As a hypothetical example, genetic strategies to eliminate invasive possums from New Zealand must include representatives from Australia, the country likely to be affected should animals be transported outside the intended range. Similarly, the African Union is currently deliberating appropriate governance of gene drive–bearing mosquitoes to combat malaria on a regional scale. 

Excerpts from Natalie Kofl et al.,  Editing nature: Local roots of global governance, Science Magazine, Nov. 2, 2018

Crabs in Radioactive Seas: Kara Sea

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The Soviet Union during the 1960s and 70s dumped several hundred containers with solid radioactive waste in the Blagopoluchie Bay in Novaya Zemlya. Back then, these waters were covered with ice overwhelming parts of the year.  Today, that is quickly changing. The bay located in the northern part of the Russian Arctic archipelago is now ice-free increasing parts of the year. With the retreating ice follow new species.

Researchers from the Russian Shirshov Institute of Oceanology have comprehensively studied the eco system of the bay for several years. Among their key findings is a quickly growing number of snow crabs. In this year’s research expedition to the remote waters, the researchers were overwhelmed by the numbers. According to the institute, the crab invasion can be described «as avalanche».

The number of crabs in the area is now estimated to almost 14,000 per hectare, the institute informs. With the help of underwater photo and video footage, the researchers have studied how the crab expansion is leading to a other reduction in other marine life on the sea bottom.    A further spread in the other parts of the Kara Sea is imminent, and the Russian Fisheries Agency (Rosrybolovstvo) believe that the Kara Sea will ultimately become an area with commercial crab fishing.

But Kara seas is a major nuclear waste dump…No major leakage from the radioactive materials have so far been registered.  Soviet authorities are believed to have dumped about 17,000 containers with solid radioactive wastes in Arctic waters and primarily in the Kara Sea. More than 900 containers are located on the bottom of the Blagopoluchie Bay. Also a number of reactor compartments were dumped, as well as three nuclear subs and other nuclear materials.

Exceprts from Atle Staalesen, Arctic crab invasion comes to nuclear waste graveyard, the Barents Observer, Nov. 26, 2018

Future of Green Life Depends on a Toilet

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Innovator Cranfield University, U.K.: Putting down the toilet lid activates a dry flush. The motion turns a set of gears that drop feces and urine into a pan, where they are separated and either combusted into ash that can be thrown away or filtered into clean water that could be used to water plants, for instance, though not drinking. It was one of the few completely standalone toilets at the expo, able to function without links to water, sewer or electric lines.

The Innovator: Helbling Group, Switzerland: Helbling’s self-contained toilet system
Similar to other models, this toilet is a mostly self-contained system that transforms waste into clean water and a form of charcoal. But its makers, who were contracted by the Gates Foundation to develop this model, also had modern design in mind: A sleek, black-and-white prototype includes a touchpad for the flush and a container that can be detached to dump out excess water. While it doesn’t have to connect to water or sewer lines, one limit is that the model still needs electricity from an outside source

Sedron Technologies makes the Janicki Omni Processor, a small-scale waste-treatment plant that can filter wet fecal matter so thoroughly that the resulting water is not only free of bacteria and viruses but also safe for drinking. At its highest capacity the plant can manage waste for up to 500,000 people, the same range as two other plants featured at the expo. A trial has been running in Dakar, Senegal, over the past three years to identify and fix technical problems.

Excerpts  from Flush With Ideas: Bill Gates Pursues the Toilet of the Future, WSJ, Nov. 9, 2018

 

The 500 Cases of Marine Pollution

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An international law enforcement operation against maritime pollution has revealed hundreds of violations and exposed serious cases of contamination worldwide.  Codenamed 30 Days at Sea, the month-long (1-31 October) operation saw some 276 law enforcement and environmental agencies across 58 countries detect more than 500 offences, including illegal discharges of oil and garbage from vessels, shipbreaking, breaches of ship emissions regulations, and pollution on rivers and land-based runoff to the sea.  More than 5200 inspections have resulted in at least 185 investigations, with arrests and prosecutions anticipated.

“Criminals believe marine pollution is a low-risk crime with no real victims.  This is a mistake and one which INTERPOL and our partners are addressing as demonstrated by this operation,” said INTERPOL Secretary General Jürgen Stock.  Cases of serious contamination included the dumping of animal farm waste in Philippine coastal waters where local communities collect shellfish and children play.  In Germany, a vessel discharged 600 litres of palm oil into the sea. Ghana uncovered gallons of waste oil in large bottles thought to be illegally dumped at sea.  Authorities prevented an environmental disaster in Albania by securing waters around a sinking vessel containing some 500 litres of oil. Similarly, the pollution threat resulting from the collision of two ships in French waters was contained thanks to preventive action during the operation.

Innovative technologies permitted authorities to detect offences, including the use of satellite images (in Argentina and Sweden), aerial surveillance (Canada and Italy), drones (Nigeria, Indonesia and Pakistan) and night vision cameras.

Excerpt from Marine pollution crime: first global multi-agency operation, Interpol Press Release, Nov. 13, 2018

 

Ozone Layer Recovery Success

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The study, “Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion: 2018”, is the latest in a series of reports, released every four years, which monitor the recovery of ozone in the stratosphere, a layer that protects life on Earth from harmful layers of ultraviolet rays from the sun.  It shows that the concentration of ozone-depleting substances continues to decrease, leading to an improvement in the layer since the previous assessment carried out in 2014.

Ozone in parts of the stratosphere has recovered at a rate of 1-3 percent since 2000 and, at projected rates, Northern Hemisphere and mid-latitude ozone is scheduled to heal completely by the 2030s, followed by the Southern Hemisphere in the 2050s and polar regions by 2060.

This is due to internationally agreed actions carried out under the historic Montreal Protocol, which came into being over 30 years ago in response to the revelation that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other ozone-depleting substances – used in aerosols, cooling and refrigeration systems, and many other items – were tearing a hole in the ozone layer and allowing dangerous ultraviolet radiation to flood through.

Next year, the Protocol is set to be strengthened with the ratification of the Kigali Amendment, which calls for the future use of powerful climate-warming gases in refrigerators, air conditioners and related products to be slashed…The writers of the report found that, if the Kigali Amendment is fully implemented, the world can avoid up to 0.4 percent of global warming this century, meaning that it will play a major role in keeping the global temperature rise below 2°C.

Excerpts from Healing of ozone layer gives hope for climate action: UN report, UN News, Nov. 5, 2018

Peruvian Amazon: Oil Pollution & Human Rights

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On September 15, 2018 indigenous federations from the Amazonian Loreto region of northern Peru scored a small victory in the fight for community rights. Representatives from four federations signed an agreement with the Peruvian government and the state-owned enterprise PetroPerú that acknowledges prior consultation as part of the new contracting process for petroleum Block 192. Under the new agreement, Block 192 will undergo a community consultation process before PetroPerú awards a new contract for operating the oil field…

Under the formal resolution with Prime Minister César Villanueva, the Ministry of Energy and Mining, and PetroPerú, the government will complete the community consultation for Block 192 between December 2018 and March 2019.

Extending across the Tigre, Corrientes, Pastaza and Marañón river basins in Peru’s remote Loreto province, Block 192 is the largest-yielding oil field in Peru, accounting for 17 percent of the country’s production. The government plans to continue production of oil at the block for another 30 years, adding to the almost 50 years of oil activity in the region. The oil field is currently operated by Canadian-based Frontera Energy, whose contract with PetroPerú is set to expire in September 2019.

American-based Occidental Petroleum discovered oil in the region in 1972 and a succession of companies, including the Dutch-Argentinian conglomerate Pluspetrol, left Block 192 (previously Block 1-AB) heavily polluted. While Peru’s Agency for Environmental Assessment and Enforcement fined Pluspetrol for violations, the Peruvian government remains in a protracted legal fight with the oil giant. A majority of the fines are outstanding and Pluspetrol denies any wrongdoing, despite settling with a local community in 2015.

For over 40 years, the indigenous Kichwa, Quechua, Achuar, and Urarina peoples who live near the oil field have been exposed to salts, heavy metals and hydrocarbons. According to a 2018 toxicology study by Peru’s National Center for Occupational Health and Environmental Protection for Health, over half of the indigenous residents in the region’s four basins have blood lead levels that surpass international recommended limits. A third have levels of arsenic and mercury above the levels recommended by Peru’s Ministry of Health…

The actual cost of cleaning up Block 192, along with neighboring Block 8, would approach $1 billion. To make matters more challenging, the $15 million fund of Peruvian government is almost exhausted..”

Excepts from Andrew Bogrand, Righting the many wrongs at Peru’s polluted oil Block 192, Nov. 2, 2018

What to Do with Radioactive Pools

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More than 60,000 tons of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel is stored on the shores of four of the five Great Lakes at the Border between United States and Canada — in some cases, mere yards from the waterline — in still-growing stockpiles…It remains on the shorelines because there’s still nowhere else to put it…

The nuclear power industry and its federal regulator, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, point to spent nuclear fuel’s safe on-site storage over decades. But the remote possibility of a worst-case scenario release — from a natural disaster, a major accident, or an act of terrorism — could cause unthinkable consequences for the Great Lakes region.   Scientific research has shown a radioactive cloud from a spent fuel pool fire would span hundreds of miles, and force the evacuation of millions of residents in Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Toronto or other population centers, depending on where the accident occurred and wind patterns.

For five years, Michigan residents, lawmakers, environmental groups and others around the Midwest have, loudly and nearly unanimously, opposed a planned Canadian underground repository for low-to-medium radioactive waste at Kincardine, Ontario, near the shores of Lake Huron. Meanwhile, spent nuclear fuel, vastly more radioactive, sits not far from the shores of  four Great Lakes — Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario — at 15 currently operating or former nuclear power plant sites on the U.S. side. In Michigan, that includes Fermi 2; the Donald C. Cook nuclear plant in Berrien County; the Palisades nuclear plant in Van Buren County, and the former Big Rock Point nuclear plant in Charlevoix County, which ceased operation in 1997 and where now only casks of spent nuclear fuel remain.

Neither the U.S. nor the Canadian government has constructed a central collection site for the spent nuclear fuel. It’s not just a problem in the Great Lakes region — more than 88,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel, an amount that is rising, is stored at 121 U.S. locations across 39 states.

Spent nuclear fuel isn’t only radioactive, it continues to generate heat. It requires storage in pools with circulating water for typically five years before it can be moved into so-called dry-cask storage — concrete-and-steel obelisks where spent fuel rods receive continued cooling by circulating air.In practice, however, because of the high costs associated with transferring waste from wet pools to dry casks, nuclear plants have kept decades worth of spent fuel in wet storage. Plant officials instead “re-rack” the pools, reconfiguring them to add more and more spent fuel, well beyond the capacities for which the pools were originally designed.

Only in recent years have nuclear plants stepped up the transition to dry cask storage because there’s no room left in the wet pools. Still, about two-thirds of on-site spent nuclear fuel remains in wet pools in the U.S….That’s a safety concern, critics contend. A catastrophe or act of terrorism that drains a spent fuel pool could cause rising temperatures that could eventually cause zirconium cladding — special brackets that hold the spent fuel rods in bundles — to catch fire.  Such a disaster could be worse than a meltdown in a nuclear reactor, as spent nuclear fuel is typically stored with nowhere near the fortified containment of a reactor core.

At Fukushima…what almost happened — at the plant’s Unit 4 spent-fuel pool that gives nuclear watchdogs nightmares.  A hydrogen explosion four days into the disaster left the building housing the Unit 4 spent-fuel pool in ruins. The pool was seven stories up in a crumbling, inaccessible building.  It “was so radioactive, you couldn’t put people up there,” von Hippel said. “For about a month after Fukushima, people didn’t know how much water was in the pool. They were shooting water up there haphazardly with a hose, trying to drop it by helicopter.”  Two weeks after the earthquake and tsunami, the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission secretly conducted a worst-case scenario study of the ongoing disaster. The biggest fear that emerged: that a self-sustaining fire would start in the Unit 4 spent fuel pool, spreading to the nearby, damaged reactors. That, they found, would release radiation requiring evacuations as far away as 150 miles, to the outskirts of Tokyo and its more than 13.4 million residents. “That was the devil’s scenario that was on my mind,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said during a special commission’s 2014 investigation of the accident.“Common sense dictated that, if that came to pass, then it was the end of Tokyo.”   What kept the spent fuel rods covered with water in Unit 4 was a miraculous twist of fate: The explosion had jarred open a gate that typically separated the Unit 4 spent fuel pool from an adjacent reactor pool.  “Leakage through the gate seals was essential for keeping the fuel in the Unit 4 pool covered with water,” a 2016 report on the Fukushima accident by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine concluded. “Had there been no water in the reactor well, there could well have been severe damage to the stored fuel and substantial releases of radioactive material to the environment.”

The U.S. nuclear industry sees Fukushima differently — in some ways as a success story.  “At Fukushima, you not only had a tsunami, you blew up the buildings … and you still did not drain the pool,” said Rod McCullum, senior director for fuel and decommissioning at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the trade association for nuclear utilities in the U.S.  “Those pools and those casks withstood explosions and earthquakes and tsunamis, all on the same day.”  A scenario where a fire can occur by the draining of water from a spent-fuel pool “has never been demonstrated,” McCullum said. He noted safety measures added in the U.S. since Fukushima include the ability to provide extra pumps and water supplies, in minutes or hours, should a spent fuel pool become breached and lose water — even if the disaster required that the resources be brought in by air from farther away….

Because nuclear power is much more widely used in Canada — the province of Ontario alone has 20 nuclear reactors at three plants — it also generates much more nuclear waste.  In Ontario, nearly 52,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel is stored on-site at nuclear plants along Lakes Huron and Ontario.“There’s a huge amount of high-level, radioactive waste stored right along the water,” said Edwards, the president of the nonprofit Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility  Like the U.S., Canada is seeking a long-term storage solution that will involve a central underground repository. Unlike the U.S., the Canadian government is seeking willing hosts, promising jobs and economic activity. …Even if a central repository is one day approved, another complication arises — how to get two generations of the most dangerous industrial waste man has ever created from sites all over the country to one point….

Germany, in the 1980s, tried using an abandoned salt and potash mine to store barrels of nuclear waste over 30 years, the Asse II mine.  It’s now prompting a cleanup that may take 30 years and cost nearly $12 billion U.S. dollars. The government has disputed the contention of workers at the mine that they were exposed to excessive levels of radiation, causing an unusual number of cancers….Nuclear power is projected to drop as a percentage of the world’s power generation mix from 10 percent in 2017 to just 5.6 percent by 2050, a report issued by the International Atomic Energy Agency this summer found…

If central repository solutions aren’t found, within years, the re-licensing of some early dry-cask storage facilities will come into play, as they meet a lifespan they were never expected to reach. “The age of nuclear power is winding down, but the age of nuclear waste is just beginning,” Edwards said.

Excerpts from Keith Matheny, 60,000 tons of dangerous radioactive waste sits on Great Lakes shores, Detroit Free Press, Oct. 19, 2018

Dismantling Nuclear Reactors at Fukushima

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In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, Naraha decided to oppose nuclear energy and call for the closure of the Fukushima No. 2 nuclear power plant that it co-hosts on the coast of the prefecture.  Since the 1970s, the town has been home to the No. 2 plant, which first went into service in 1982.  For decades, Naraha has received central government grants and subsidies for hosting the No. 2 plant, as well as tax revenues from TEPCO and its affiliates operating in the town.The plant also employed 860 people, many of them from Naraha and its surrounding communities.

Naraha had a population of about 8,000 before the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami caused the triple meltdown at TEPCO’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant in March 2011. The crippled plant is located within 20 kilometers from Nahara.  The quake and tsunami also created a scare at the No. 2 plant by leaving the facility with only a limited power supply from external sources and emergency diesel generators to cool the reactors. But the plant brought the situation under control.

After long remaining silent about the fate of the No. 2 plant, TEPCO decided to retire all of its four reactors, which were approaching their legal operating limit of 40 years. If the power company wanted to continue operations at the plant, it would have to spend hundreds of billions of yen on upgrades to meet the more stringent safety standards that were set after the accident at the No. 1 plant…

Although Naraha and Tomioka officials share concerns about their municipalities’ financial futures, they see a silver lining in the situation at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant.  Both towns have served as front-line bases for workers involved in decommissioning of the stricken plant.  About 5,000 workers a day who are involved in the decommissioning effort provide steady business for convenience stores and other shops in the two towns. Business hotels, dorms and apartment buildings have been built in the towns and neighboring communities to accommodate the workers. Work to dismantle the No. 1 plant is expected to take decades to complete. Local officials said the closure of the No. 2 plant could bring about a similar economic boon. “Decommissioning can become a major industry,” Naraha Mayor Matsumoto said.

Excerpts from  Nuclear plant closure brings hope, despair to Fukushima town
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN, October 18, 2018

Underwater Nuclear Wrecks

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Russian scientists have said that radioactive waste sunk in the Arctic by the Soviet Navy has not leaked any contamination….  Data on the scuttled cargoes –– which includes several thousand containers of radioactive waste, as well as an entire nuclear submarine –– come from a month-and-a-half-long expedition in the Kara Sea conducted by the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Oceanology.  Mikhail Flint, the institute’s head, told reporters last week that scientists on the expedition had managed to significantly improve their maps of where the sunken waste lies, especially in the area of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, a former Soviet nuclear bomb testing site.  From Novaya Zemlya’s craggy coast, the expedition conducted additional research mapping radioactive hazards in the White Sea, and then progressed to the Laptev Sea some 2000 nautical miles to the east.

Since the first decades of the 2000s, these mapping and measuring expeditions have taken place on an annual basis. Environmentalists fear the waste could eventually rupture and spoil thousands of square kilometers of fertile Arctic fishing grounds.

Beginning in 1955 and continuing until the early 1990s, the Russian Navy dumped enormous amounts of irradiated debris — and it one case an entire nuclear submarine — into the waters of the Arctic. It was not, however, until 2011 that the Russian government admitted this on an international level.  That year, Moscow shared with Norwegian nuclear officials the full scope of the problem. The list of sunken objects was far more than had initially been thought, and included 17,000 containers of radioactive waste; 19 ships containing radioactive waste; 14 nuclear reactors, including five that still contain spent nuclear fuel; the K-27 nuclear submarine with its two reactors loaded with nuclear fuel, and 735 other pieces of radioactively contaminated heavy machinery.

Exceprts from  Charles Digges ussian officials update maps of radioactive debris sunk in Arctic, Bellona, Oct. 15, 2018.

How Rivers Die

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Kapuas, Indonesia’s longest river support somes 3m people…One reason that the water is so murky is deforestation. Since the 1970s logging has enriched locals while stripping away the vegetation that held the soil in place. The Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) found that between 1973 and 2010 over 100,000 square kilometres of forest was lost on Kalimantan, or a third of the original coverage. A national moratorium that began in 2011 has done little to still the axes. As a result, torrential tropical rains wash lots of loose earth into the Kapuas.

Illegal gold-mining compounds the problem. Locals tear up the riverbed with diggers or blast the banks with high-pressure hoses, then sieve the mud for gold. Mercury, which the miners use to separate gold from sediment, but which is poisonous to humans and fish alike, leaks into the river.

The riverbank is punctuated with corrugated-iron towers, which emit birdsong from loudspeakers. These are designed to lure swiftlets, who make their nests with saliva. The nests of swiftlets  are considered a delicacy and aphrodisiac by many Chinese.* Deane, a shop owner, built his tower last December after seeing others do the same. He sells the nests to a wholesaler for about 15m rupiah ($1,025) a kilogram…

In Kapuas Hulu, an upstream district, half the population rely on the river for drinking water. A quarter have no toilet. Even where bathrooms do exist along the river, they are often floating cubicles with a hole in the floorboards. Cows and goats, living in wooden riverside cages, also defecate straight into the Kapuas…

The Kapuas passes through seven districts. Midstream ones, such as Sintang and Sanggau, earn hefty tax revenues by encouraging palm-oil plantations. But downstream districts suffer from the resulting silt, traffic and run-off without receiving any of the benefits. The same problem occurs at a village level. Mr Hadi says that fishing by sprinkling poisonous leaves on the water (the stricken fish float to the surface) is forbidden but other village heads do not enforce the rules…

A study by CIFOR on the income of villagers living near the Kapuas river found that the best-paid palm-plantation workers earned 50% more than the most successful fishermen. (Gold miners made three times as much—and spent more on education.)…But the environmental damage is plain to see. The river here is brown, clouded by silt. A study published in 2016 found that levels of phosphates in the water, from fertilisers and villagers washing themselves with soap, are highest near urban areas and palm plantations.

Down in Pontianak, the river water is darker still, occasionally brightened by oil slicks. Water bottles and instant-noodle packets cling together to form plastic islands.

Excerpts from  Indonesia’s Longest River,  Economist, Aug. 25, 2018

*According to Wikipedia: Authentic bird’s-nest soup is made from nests of some species of swiftlet.  Instead of twigs, feathers and straw, these swiftlets make their nest only from strands of their gummy saliva, which hardens when exposed to air. Once the nests are harvested, they are cleaned and sold to restaurants. Eating swiftlet nest material is believed to help maintain skin tone, balance qi (“life energy”) and reinforce the immune system… (Dictionary of Traditional Chinese Medicine, The History of Chinese Medicine and the Nutrition Table).

A Gasfield and the Cows Next to it

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High levels of a radioactive material and other contaminants have been found in water from a West Australian fracking site* but operators say it could be diluted and fed to beef cattle.  The revelations illustrate the potential risks associated with the contentious gas extraction process known as fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, as the Turnbull government pressures states to ease restrictions on the industry and develop their gas reserves.

The findings were contained in a report by oil and gas company Buru Energy that has not been made public. It shows the company also plans to reinject wastewater underground – a practice that has brought on seismic events when used in the United States.

Buru Energy has been exploring the potentially vast “tight gas” resources of the Kimberly region’s Canning Basin. The work was suspended when the WA government last year introduced a fracking moratorium, subject to the findings of a scientific inquiry.

In a submission to the inquiry obtained by the Lock the Gate Alliance, Buru Energy said a “relatively high concentration” of Radium-228…The samples exceeded drinking water guidelines for radionuclides. However Buru Energy said samples collected from retention ponds were below guideline levels and the water posed “no risk to humans or animals”.  Water monitoring also detected elevated levels of the chemical elements barium, boron and chloride….Buru Energy said while the water was not suitable for human consumption, the “reuse of flowback water for beef cattle may also be considered”.  The water did not meet stockwater guidelines but this could be addressed “through dilution with bore water”.

The company’s development in the Yulleroo area of the basin could lead to 80 wells operating over 20 years….The company insists its fracking fluids are non-toxic and to illustrate its safety, executive chairman Eric Streitberg drank the fluid at the company’s 2016 annual general meeting.

Excerpt from  Nicole Hasham Radioactive water reignites concerns over fracking for gas, Sydney Morning Herald, June 24, 2018

*Fracking, which involves injecting water mixed with chemicals and sand deep underground in order to fracture rock and release oil and gas, generates large amounts of wastewater. … In some cases, improper handling of this waste water has resulted in the release of radioactive fracking waste that has contaminated streams and rivers, Science Magazine, Apr 9, 2015

For Voices against Fracking in WA, Dont Frack WA

Lead and Mercury in the Seas

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The levels of lead and mercury in the sea reduce noticeably following concrete actions to limit their release, recent research at the IAEA using nuclear techniques has shown. The banning of leaded petrol and the closure of a mercury discharging plant have led to decreases in pollution levels over 10-15 years.

This is the case for lead, which when consumed by fish which is in turn eaten by people, can cause damage to the human nervous system and internal organs. Many different activities such as mining or smelting in metallurgy and the burning of coal as well as lead’s use in batteries, paint, ceramics and other everyday items can release it into the environment. The biggest source of lead pollution in the last century was related to the use of leaded petrol.

As part of efforts to develop new methods to determine the source and levels of lead pollution, researchers at the IAEA Environment Laboratories analysed sediments from the Baltic Sea and the Caribbean Sea. In mapping the pollution history in a sediment core from the Baltic coast of Germany, researchers could clearly observe that within 10 to 15 years of phasing out lead in petrol by 1996, lead pollution levels in the sea had decreased..

In addition, IAEA researchers have successfully developed methods to use lead isotope ratios to determine the source of lead pollution and assess whether it is naturally present or the result of anthropogenic activities, since natural and anthropogenic lead sources will show different isotopic fingerprints and isotope compositions….

IAEA scientists’ analysis of a dated sediment core in a Caribbean bay shows total mercury (Hg) levels rapidly decreased after the closure of a discharging plant…Mercury was used in an alkali plant there as a catalyser, and in the 1970s, high concentrations were found in water, sediments and marine organisms as a result of discharges from the plant.  Years later, after the plant had been closed, IAEA researchers showed, by analysing sediment core taken from the bay, that levels of total mercury had started to decrease.  While remnants of this pollution are still buried in the sediment, acute toxicity has been greatly reduced.

Excerpts from World Oceans Day 2018: Regulating Lead and Mercury Releases has Decreased Marine Pollution, IAEA Press Release, June 8, 2018

An Unforgettable Type of Pollution

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May 2018: The environmental damage around the site of two Royal Dutch Shell oil spills in Nigeria a decade ago has worsened significantly after years of delay to cleanup efforts, according to a report that the oil giant has been accused of trying to shield from public view.  The spills from a ruptured Shell pipeline spewed thousands of barrels of oil over parts of the Bodo fishing community in the crude-rich Niger Delta. Although the company in 2015 reached an out-of-court settlement with the local community, admitting to liability and agreeing to pay £55 million, or around $80 million at the time, in compensation, controversy around the case has remained.

A United Nations body, in a 2011 report, found extensive environmental damage around Bodo. Four years later, an assessment to prepare the cleanup found soil contamination had worsened while cleanup efforts languished and illegal refining and oil theft added to pollution in the area, according to an academic paper published last month. That has left the community facing potentially toxic pollution and “catastrophic” damage to the environment, the paper said.  The 2015 analysis was commissioned by the Bodo Mediation Initiative, a consortium established to oversee the cleanup in the area. Shell is a member of the group along with local stakeholders.

At least one of the authors urged the findings to be widely distributed because they pointed to significant health risks to the local community. Kay Holtzmann, the cleanup project’s former director, said in a letter reviewed by the Journal that Shell had denied him permission to publish the study’s results in a scientific journal.

But the academic paper* said the site survey contained new facts. The average surface soil contamination in Bodo had tripled since the original U.N. probe,the paper said. Out of 32 samples taken from the top two inches of soil in the area around Bodo, only one was within Nigeria’s legally acceptable limit for oil contamination, the paper added.

Excerpts from Pollution Worsens Around Shell Oil Spills in Nigeria, Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2018.

*Sediment Hydrocarbons in Former Mangrove Areas, Southern Ogoniland, Eastern Niger Delta, Nigeria, Apr. 2018

The Unquenchable Thirst: water mismanagement

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Most of the drinking water consumed in Beijing has travelled 1,432km (895 miles), roughly the distance from New York to Orlando, Florida. Its journey begins in a remote and hilly part of central China at the Danjiangkou reservoir, on the bottom of which lies the drowned city of Junzhou. The water gushes north by canal and pipeline, crosses the Yellow river by burrowing under it, and arrives, 15 days later, in the water-treatment plants of Beijing. Two-thirds of the city’s tap water and a third of its total supply now comes from Danjiangkou.

This winter and spring, the reservoir was the capital’s lifeline. No rain or snow fell in Beijing between October 23rd 2017 and March 17th 2018—by far the longest drought on record. Yet the city suffered no supply disruptions, unlike Shanxi province to the west, where local governments rationed water. The central government is exultant, since the project which irrigates Beijing was built at vast cost and against some opposition.

The South-to-North Water Diversion Project—to give the structure its proper name—is the most expensive infrastructure enterprise in the world. It is the largest transfer of water between river basins in history, and China’s main response to its worst environmental threat, which is (despite all the pollution) lack of water.

The route between Beijing and Danjiangkou, which lies on a tributary of the Yangzi, opened in 2014. An eastern route opened in 2013 using the ancient Grand Canal between Hangzhou and the capital. (Jaw-dropping hydrological achievements are a feature of Chinese history.) A third link is planned on the Tibetan plateau, but since that area is prone to earthquakes and landslides, it has been postponed indefinitely…

Downstream from Danjiangkou, pollution has proved intractable. By diverting water from the Yangzi, the project has made the river more sluggish. It has become less able to wash away contaminants and unable to sustain wetlands, which act as sponges and reduce flooding. To compensate for water taken from their rivers, local governments are also building dams wherever they can to divert it back again. Shaanxi province, for example, is damming the Han river to transfer water to its depleted river Wei….Worst of all, the project diverts not only water but money and attention from China’s real water problem: waste and pollution.

Excerpts from Water: Massive Diversion, Economist, Apr. 7, 2018

A Slow-Burning Tragedy

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Charcoal is one of the biggest informal businesses in Africa. It is the fuel of choice for the continent’s fast-growing urban poor, who, in the absence of electricity or gas, use it to cook and heat water. According to the UN, Africa accounted for three-fifths of the world’s production in 2012—and this is the only region where the business is growing. It is, however, a slow-burning environmental disaster.

In Nyakweri forest, Kenya, the trees are ancient and rare. Samwel Naikada, a local activist, points at a blackened stump in a clearing cut by burners. It is perhaps 400 years old, he says. The effect of burning trees spreads far. During the dry season, the forest is a refuge for amorous elephants who come in from the plains nearby to breed. The trees store water, which is useful in such a parched region. It not only keeps the Mara river flowing—a draw for the tourists who provide most of the county government’s revenue. It also allows the Masai people to graze their cows and grow crops. “You cannot separate the Masai Mara and this forest,” says Mr Naikada….

Nyakweri is hardly the only forest at risk. The Mau forest, Kenya’s largest, which lies farther north in the Rift Valley, has also been hit by illegal logging. Protests against charcoal traders (!) broke out earlier this year, after rivers that usually flow throughout the dry season started to run dry. In late February a trader’s car was reportedly burned in Mwingi, in central Kenya, by a group of youngsters who demanded to see the trader’s permits. At the end of February 2018 the government announced an emergency 90-day ban on all logging, driving up retail prices of charcoal by 500%, to as much as 5,000 shillings a bag in some cities.

The problems caused by the charcoal trade have spread beyond Kenya. In southern Somalia, al-Shabab, a jihadist group, funds itself partly through the taxes it levies on the sale of charcoal (sometimes with the help of Kenyan soldiers, who take bribes for allowing the shipments out of a Somali port that Kenya controls). The logging also adds to desertification, which, in turn, causes conflict across the Sahel, an arid belt below the Sahara. It forces nomadic herders to range farther south with their animals, where they often clash with farmers over the most fertile land.

In the power vacuum of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, rampant charcoal logging has destroyed huge swathes of Virunga National Park. That threatens the rare gorillas which tourists currently pay as much as $400 a day to view, even as it fuels the conflict.

In theory, charcoal burning need not be so destructive. In Kenya the burners are meant to get a licence. To do so, they have to show they are replacing the trees they are cutting down and that they are using modern kilns that convert the trees efficiently into fuel. But, admits Clement Ngoriareng, an official at the Kenya Forest Service (KFS), the rules are laxly enforced. Some suspect that powerful politicians stymie efforts to police burners.

Excerpts from A Very Black Market: Illegal Charcoal, Economist, Mar. 31, 2018

A Nuclear Titanic? the First Floating Nuclear Plant

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A massive floating nuclear power plant is now making its way toward its final destination at an Arctic port (April 30, 2018)… It’s the first nuclear power plant of its kind, Russian officials say.  Called the Akademik Lomonosov, the floating power plant is being towed at a creeping pace out of St. Petersburg, where it was built over the last nine years. It will eventually be brought northward, to Murmansk – where its two nuclear reactors will be loaded with nuclear fuel and started up in the fall of 2018.

From there, the power plant will be pulled to a mooring berth in the Arctic port of Pevek, in far northeast Russia. There, it will be wired into the infrastructure so it can replace an existing nuclear power installment on land.  Critics of the plan include Greenpeace, which recently warned of a “Chernobyl on ice“ if Russia’s plans to create a fleet of floating nuclear power stations result in a catastrophe.

Russian officials say the mandate of the Akademik Lomonoso is to supply energy to remote industrial plants and port cities, and to offshore gas and oil platforms.  “The nuclear power plant has two KLT-40S reactor units that can generate up to 70 MW of electric energy and 50 Gcal/hr of heat energy during its normal operation,” Rosatom said. “This is enough to keep the activity of the town populated with 100,000 people.”

It will take more than a year for the power plant to reach its new home port. The original plan had called for fueling the floating plant before it began that journey, at the shipyard in central St. Petersburg – but that was scuttled in the summer of 2017, after concerns were raised both in Russia and in countries along the power plant’s route through the Baltic Sea and north to the Arctic. Rosatom says it hopes the floating nuclear power plant will be online in 2019.

Excerpts from Russia Launches Floating Nuclear Power Plant; It’s Headed To The Arctic, NPR, Apr. 30, 2018

Breathing in Plutonium Dust: Hanford

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The Energy Department project to tear down the Plutonium Finish Plant at the Hanford Site was halted in mid-December 2017 after radioactive dust was discovered far off the plant site. T As crews demolished a shuttered nuclear weapons plant during 2017 in central Washington, specks of plutonium were swept up in high gusts and blown miles across a desert plateau above the Columbia River.  The releases at the Department of Energy cleanup site spewed unknown amounts of plutonium dust into the environment, coated private automobiles with the toxic heavy metal and dispensed lifetime internal radioactive doses to 42 work

The contamination events went on for nearly 12 months, getting progressively worse before the project was halted in mid-December. Now, state health and environmental regulators, Energy Department officials and federal safety investigators are trying to figure out what went wrong and who is responsible.

The events at the Hanford Site, near the Tri-Cities area of Richland, Pasco and Kennewick, vividly demonstrate the consequences when a radioactive cleanup project spirals out of control.

The mishap occurred at one of the nation’s most radioactively contaminated buildings, known as the Plutonium Finishing Plant. The factory, which opened in 1949 a few miles from the Columbia River, supplied plutonium for thousands of U.S. nuclear weapons before it was shut down in 1989.
The exposures from the plutonium releases in 2017 were minuscule bestimated to be a small fraction of the background radiation that every human gets from nature. But unlike cosmic radiation or radon gas, plutonium can lodge itself inside the body and deliver tissue damaging alpha particles over a lifetime…. As workers removed equipment to prepare for walls to be torn down, air monitoring alarms sounded almost every day, he said. Workers were subjected to repeated nasal smears to determine if they had breathed plutonium dust, he said….Seven employee automobiles were contaminated at the plant site, according to a Jan. 9, 2018 letter from the state Department of Ecology to Doug Shoop, the federal site chief at Hanford… The demolition, costing $57 million, was being conducted by one of the nation’s largest engineering firms, CH2M, a unit of Texas-based Jacobs Engineering. CH2M is now under federal investigation for the releases, according to a letter sent by the Energy Department’s enforcement office in late March 2018…

In March 2018, the company released a preliminary analysis [pdf] of the contamination and blamed it on a half dozen factors, including a “fixative” that was supposed to bind the dust but was too diluted to work properly and a decision to accelerate demolition when the contamination seemed to be stable.  The Energy Department plan for the demolition originally required the contractor to remove debris as it accumulated. But in January 2017, just before the first releases, officials authorized CH2M to allow the debris to pile up, according to a monthly site report by an inspector for the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, an independent agency.  In fact, workers at the plant said the demolition site was ringed by 8-foot-tall piles of radioactive debris with little to prevent dust from blowing off…

The problems at the Plutonium Finishing Plant were not an isolated event at Hanford, which has struggled with its cleanup for more than a decade.
Work was stopped five years ago on key parts of a $16.8-billion waste treatment plant that is supposed to turn 56 million gallons of radioactive sludge into glass. Technical deficiencies in its design are still being studied, while delays mount. Several years ago, the Energy Department pushed back the full startup by 17 years to 2039, though it hopes to begin treating some less radioactive waste by 2022….In 2017, a tunnel that stored railroad cars full of contaminated equipment collapsed. The Energy Department pumped the 358-foot long tunnel full of a concrete mixture. A decision is pending about what to do with a second storage tunnel 1,688 feet long.

The state attorney general, along with Hanford Challenge and a union, is suing the Energy Department for venting noxious gases from underground waste tanks over recent years, sickening workers.

Smith, the Ecology manager, said a lot of cleanup progress has been made at Hanford. Hundreds of buildings have been torn down. Much of the soil along the banks of the Columbia River has been cleaned up enough for any future use. And the site’s nine nuclear reactors have been put in stable condition…

One of those facilities, known as 324 Building,[Chemical Materials Engineering Laboratory] was used to extract plutonium from spent fuel, said Robert Alvarez, a former assistant secretary of Energy and a longtime critic of the cleanup. The facility has civilian waste from Germany, sent as part of a research project, as well as large amounts of radioactive waste that was placed in unlined burial pits, he said. Records of what lies in the pits were destroyed in 1988, he said.

Excerpts from RALPH VARTABEDIAN, Contamination from a nuclear cleanup forced a shutdown. Investigators want to know who is responsible, LA Times, Apr. 16, 2018

Well blowouts and Pipeline breakdowns: Who Profits?

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The global oil spill management market size is projected to grow beyond USD 125.62 billion by 2024. Growing incidents of oil spilling in the past along with severe safety and environmental policies are likely to propel the market over the forecast phase (2016-2024). Also, escalating pipeline and seaborne shipping of crude oil and chemicals could positively impact the market further.  The market is fragmented by technologies, techniques, applications, and regions. Technologies are Pre-oil spill and Post-oil spill. Pre-oil spill segment is divided into double-hull, pipeline, leak detection, blow-out preventers, and others. Double-hulling was the dominant segment in 2015 with highest shares.

Marine trade registers for a majority of petroleum products and natural gas transportation. Mounting demand for crude and petroleum products oil in Europe and Asia Pacific will boost the maritime trade growth further. Post-oil spill segments are mechanical, chemical, biological, and physical. Chemical and mechanical containment and recovery are the techniques used in the industry….In 2015, onshore post-oil spill sector was valued close to 60% of the total market demand. Regions such as Norway, U.S, Mexico, Canada, U.S., China, and Nigeria have observed well blowouts and occurrences of pipeline breakdowns. This could be accredited to huge market diffusion in past

Main regions in the market encompass North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa (MEA), and Central & South America. North America was the leading market for pre-oil spill management. It was estimated at 40.1% of total demand in 2015. This region will potentially face lucrative demand due to production activities and increasing oil & gas discovery. Pre-oil spill management shares in Asia Pacific will gain over USD 21,540 million by 2024…  Top companies in the global oil spill management market include OMI Environmental Solutions, Skim Oil Inc., American Green Ventures Inc., and Spill Response Services.

Excerpts from Global Oil Spill Management Market Size is Projected to Grow Beyond USD 125.62 Billion by 2024, Hexa Research Press Release, Mar. 17, 2018

Islands of Paradise, Sewage and Garbage

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Cesspools—holes in the ground where untreated human waste is deposited—have become a crisis in Hawaii, threatening the state’s drinking water, its coral reefs and the famous beaches that are the lifeblood of its tourist economy.  Sewage from cesspools is seeping into some of Hawaii’s ocean waters, where it has been blamed for infections suffered by surfers and snorkelers. It is also entering the drinking water in part of the state, pushing nitrate levels close to the legal limit.

Hawaii has 88,000 cesspools across its eight major islands, more than any other state. Collectively, they deposit 53 million gallons of raw sewage into the ground every day, according to the state health department. More than 90% of the state’s drinking water comes from groundwater wells…

Replacing all of the state’s cesspools with alternate sewage systems would cost at least $1.75 billion, according to the health department…At one groundwater well, nitrate levels are already at 8.7 milligrams a liter; the legal limit is 10, and the Department of Health estimated that some parts of the aquifer are already over that limit. Environmentalists say they are worried about the potential effect of the water on infants, who can be killed by high levels on nitrates, which are chemicals found in fertilizer and sewage.

Many bathrooms in homes outside Honolulu still pump sewage into nearby holes in the ground.  Yet, some residents resist plans to replace cesspools, worried about expense. In January 2018, Upcountry Maui residents overwhelmed a Department of Public Health meeting, complaining about potential costs.

Excerpt from Hawaii’s Big Headache: Cesspools, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 12, 2018

The Maritime Environment Protection Authority’s (MEPA) of Sri Lanka spent millions of rupees on coastal cleanups last year — a reflection of “spending public money for public waste,” as the MEPA’s General Manager and CEO, Dr. Terney Pradeep Kumara, puts it.

A large proportion of the problem is attributable to inland waste, he notes. “It is not merely what is dumped directly on the beaches, but all that flows through canals and rivers,” he says, pointing out that other triggers, including the fisheries and the tourism sector, are only secondary to inland waste which ends up on the coast. Added to the burden is the garbage which flows from India, Indonesia and Thailand, he says. The MEPA’s role in controlling pollution covers Sri Lanka’s 1640 km coastal belt and extends up to 200 nautical miles to the deep sea, the area, which, according to Dr. Pradeep Kumara, is eight times the size of Sri Lanka’s land area.

The garbage dumped in the coastal vegetation is contributing to the dengue problem…especially the fishing craft, both in use and abandoned, in which water is stagnated.”   Mitigating inland pollution is seen by MEPA authorities as the first step in realising cleaner beaches. They moot a site-specific garbage disposal system, as opposed to a ‘blanket system’. “What works for Colombo will not work for other areas,” says Dr. Pradeep Kumara.

Excerpt Sea of trash: Inland and overseas garbage washes up on Lanka’s beaches, Sunday Times (Sri Lanka), Feb. 11, 2018

How to Relocate an Open Wound: Rubbish Dumps

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One of the biggest rubbish dumps in South America was closed in January 2018 in Brazil after almost 60 years.The Estructural dump in the country’s capital, Brasilia, had processed more than 1,000 tonnes of rubbish every day. But its closure is likely to have an impact on a nearby favela as many of the residents rely on scavenging.  The regional governor, Rodrigo Rollemberg, says the rubbish scavengers will be paid to work in a recycling centre in cleaner conditions.

“We cannot live with this open wound in the midst of our nation’s capital, a dump where human beings put their lives at risk seeking a livelihood in an undignified way,” he said at the opening of the new landfill which is further out from the city centre.  “Rollemberg hasn’t offered us a real alternative. We cannot survive on that pay,” Valdir Dutra, who has scavenged for 16 years, told Reuters news agency.

Excerpt from Huge Brazil rubbish dump closes after six decades, Reuters, Jan. 20, 2018

The Right to Drinkable Water and Uranium Mining in the USA

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[T]he uranium mining industry in the United States is renewing a push into the areas adjacent to Navajo Nation, Utah: the Grand Canyon watershed to the west, where a new uranium mine is preparing to open, and the Bears Ears National Monument to the north.

The Trump administration is set to shrink Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent in February 2018, potentially opening more than a million acres to mining, drilling and other industrial activity….[T]here were more than 300 uranium mining claims inside the monument, according to data from Utah’s Bureau of Land Management (B.L.M.) office that was reviewed by The New York Times.  The vast majority of those claims fall neatly outside the new boundaries of Bears Ears set by the [Trump] administration. And an examination of local B.L.M. records, including those not yet entered into the agency’s land and mineral use authorizations database, shows that about a third of the claims are linked to Energy Fuels, a Canadian uranium producer. Energy Fuels also owns the Grand Canyon mine, where groundwater has already flooded the main shaft.

Energy Fuels, together with other mining groups, lobbied extensively for a reduction of Bears Ears, preparing maps that marked the areas it wanted removed from the monument and distributing them during a visit to the monument by Mr. Zinke, Energy Secretary,  in May 2017.

The Uranium Producers of America, an industry group, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw regulations proposed by the Obama administration to strengthen groundwater protections at uranium mines. Mining groups have also waged a six-year legal battle against a moratorium on new uranium mining on more than a million acres of land adjacent to the Grand Canyon…

Supporters of the mining say that a revival of domestic uranium production, which has declined by 90 percent since 1980 amid slumping prices and foreign competition, will make the United States a larger player in the global uranium market.  It would expand the country’s energy independence, they say, and give a lift to nuclear power, still a pillar of carbon-free power generation. Canada, Kazakhstan, Australia, Russia and a few other countries now supply most of America’s nuclear fuel.

The dwindling domestic market was thrust into the spotlight by the contentious 2010 decision under the Obama administrationthat allowed Russia’s nuclear agency to buy Uranium One, a company that has amassed production facilities in the United States. The Justice Department is examining allegations that donations to the Clinton Foundation were tied to that decision.

“If we consider nuclear a clean energy, if people are serious about that, domestic uranium has to be in the equation,” said Jon J. Indall, a lawyer for Uranium Producers of America. “But the proposed regulations would have had a devastating impact on our industry.” “Countries like Kazakhstan, they’re not under the same environmental standards. We want a level playing field.”…

In Sanders, Arizona, hundreds of people were exposed to potentially dangerous levels of uranium in their drinking water for years, until testing by a doctoral researcher at Northern Arizona University named Tommy Rock exposed the contamination.  “I was shocked,” Mr. Rock said. “I wasn’t expecting that reading at all.”

Mr. Rock and other scientists say they suspect a link to the 1979 breach of a wastewater pond at a uranium mill in Church Rock, N.M., now a Superfund site. That accident is considered the single largest release of radioactive material in American history, surpassing the crisis at Three Mile Island.

It wasn’t until 2003, however, that testing by state regulators picked up uranium levels in Sanders’s tap water. Still, the community was not told. Erin Jordan, a spokeswoman for the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, said the department had urged the now-defunct local water company for years to address the contamination, but it had been up to that company to notify its customers….The town’s school district, whose wells were also contaminated with uranium, received little state or federal assistance. It shut off its water fountains and handed out bottled water to its 800 elementary and middle-school students.  “I still don’t trust the water,” said Shanon Sangster, who still sends her 10-year-old daughter, Shania, to school with bottled water. “It’s like we are all scarred by it, by the uranium.”

Excerpts from HIROKO TABUCHIJAN,  Uranium Miners Pushed Hard for a Comeback. They Got Their Wish,  NY Times, Jan. 13, 2018

Air, Water, Waste and Death

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The UN Environment and WHO have agreed a new, wide-ranging collaboration to accelerate action to curb environmental health risks that cause an estimated 12.6 million deaths a year.

On January 10, 2018 in Nairobi, Mr Erik Solheim, head of UN Environment, and Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO, signed an agreement to step up joint actions to combat air pollution, climate change and antimicrobial resistance, as well as improve coordination on waste and chemicals management, water quality, and food and nutrition issues. The collaboration also includes joint management of the BreatheLife advocacy campaign to reduce air pollution for multiple climate, environment and health benefits

“Our health is directly related to the health of the environment we live in. Together, air, water and chemical hazards kill more than 12.6 million people a year. This must not continue,” said WHO’s Tedros.  He added: “Most of these deaths occur in developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America where environmental pollution takes its biggest health toll.”

Excerpts from, UN Environment and WHO agree to major collaboration on environmental health risks, Press Release, Jan. 10, 2017

Coercive Greening: debt-for-sea

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The Seychelles is an archipelago of 115 mostly tiny islands, whose collective area, at 460 sq km, is only about a third of London’s. But the country’s granite islands and coral atolls sit within an exclusive economic zone of 1.4m sq km. It is here, in the ocean, that conservationists are working on a new way for small countries to protect their marine environment.

The Seychelles’ economy relies on tourism and tuna. These depend on healthy seas. But paying for conservation is a challenge, says Didier Dogley, the environment minister. So last year the country struck a deal with The Nature Conservancy (TNC), an American NGO. It promised to protect 30% of its waters by 2020—half of this area will be off-limits to fishing. In return, TNC bought up $21.6m of debt owed by the Seychelles to the Paris Club of international creditors. It will allow the country to pay it back at a lower interest rate over a longer period.

The complex deal took four years to thrash out. Still, not everyone is happy. Some fishermen worry that their favourite spots will become no-go zones….The blue economy is a new idea, but like the green economy it is catching on. The World Bank is backing a planned $15m “blue bond” for the Seychelles, which will fund sustainable fisheries. TNC is planning its own blue bonds, which would underpin deals similar to the one it agreed with the Seychelles. “I can see doing a billion dollars of these deals in a decade,” says Rob Weary, TNC’s financial guru…Already Mauritius is looking to copy parts of the Seychelles deal. Madagascar, Mozambique, Tanzania and the Comoro Islands have also shown interest.

Excerpts from The Seychelles: Debt Relief for Dolphins, Economist, Sept. 9, 2017

The Luxury of Swimmable Waters

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Data published in 2013 suggested that it was not safe for people to submerge themselves in 60% of New Zealand’s waterways. “We used to swim in these rivers,” says Sam Mahon, the artist. “Now they’ve turned to crap… [T]he real villains behind New Zealand’s deteriorating water quality are still at large…intensive dairy farms…

The first concern is bovine urine, which is rich in nitrogen. Nitrogen can cause toxic algae to grow when it leaches into water. Nitrogen fertiliser, used to increase fodder yields so that more cows can be raised on less land, exacerbates the problem….

At many of the sites where the government tests the groundwater it contains too much nitrate to be safe to drink—a particular problem in New Zealand, since water in much of the country has long been considered clean enough that it is used as drinking water with only minimal treatment. In Canterbury, one of the most polluted areas, expectant mothers are told to test tap water to avoid “blue baby syndrome”, a potentially fatal ailment thought to be caused by nitrates. The poisonous blooms have killed dogs.

An even greater concern for human health comes from cow dung, which contains nasty bacteria such as E.coli….And then there is the damage to native flora and fauna. The algal blooms suck the oxygen from rivers. Sediment washed from farmland can also choke the life out of streams. Almost three-quarters of native species of freshwater fish are under threat.

…One recent tally suggested that just 2,000 of the thirstiest dairies suck up as much water as 60m people would—equivalent to the population of London, New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro combined. …

Dairies are trying to clean up their act. Farmers have fenced off thousands of kilometres of rivers to prevent livestock from wading in. Some have planted trees along waterways to curb erosion; others remove animals from muddy fields during winter. Some parts of the country are using more sophisticated techniques: around Lake Taupo, the country’s biggest lake, farmers can buy and sell nitrogen allowances in a cap-and-trade scheme. A technique called “precision irrigation” may curb both water consumption and the leaching of nitrogen.

Earlier this year the National Party launched a plan to make 90% of rivers “swimmable” by 2040. Yet it ignored several recommendations of a forum of scientists and agrarians established to thrash out water policy….Environmentalists argue that the national dairy herd should be cut to prevent further damage…And pollutants moving through groundwater can take decades to emerge in lakes. The worst may still be to come.

Excerpts from New Zealand’s Water, Economist, Nov. 18, 2017

Cash or CleanUp? life in the oil polluted swampland

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Nearly a decade after two catastrophic oil spills in the Niger Delta, a comprehensive clean-up has been launched in 2017 in the southern Nigerian region.

Earlier this month, crews of young men equipped with high pressure hoses began to attack the crude oil blighting the creeks and mangrove swamps where they live.  Workers from Bodo in Rivers State are beginning a three-year project that claims to mark a new approach to cleaning up the delta, the vast polluted swampland pumping the oil vital to Africa’s largest economy.

Four hundred workers will clear dead foliage and spilled oil before planting new mangroves. Where they are working is small but organisers hope the anti-pollution drive can be repeated elsewhere in the delta.

Unlike clean-up operations run routinely by oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, this one is backed by local communities and teams of scientists who will take samples of water, mud and soil in each area to measure progress and determine the best cleaning method.  Funded by Shell and its joint venture partners, the clean-up is the culmination of years of legal wrangling and international pressure to overcome animosity and mutual suspicion that have divided locals, government and oil companies.

Shell declined to say how much it was spending, while leaders see it as a glimmer of hope in a benighted land where many wells are not safe to drink from and fishing and farming are devastated.

“The Niger Delta is at a crossroads,” said Inemo Samiama, chairman of the Bodo Mediation Initiative (BMI), managing the clean-up. “We have a lot of polluted sites. We need something we can refer to, some shining example.”

The work of BMI covers 10 sq km, a fraction of the 70,000 sq km Delta.  As workers walk through gnarled, dead mangrove roots in protective gear and masks, oil seeps into their footprints – remnants of spills for which Royal Dutch Shell admitted responsibility. Despite the optimism, environmentalists point out at BMI’s work rate, it will take 21,000 years to clean the entire delta and that’s not including the 10 years of legal battles it took to make it happen.  Communities in eight other Delta states are unhappy they have no clean-up plan, fuelling the resentment underpinning militant movements that hit production last year and helped tip Nigeria into its first recession in 25 years.  One group, the Niger Delta Avengers, has threatened a return to violence. They say government is not keeping its promises to clean up the delta and provide more jobs, money and infrastructure.

Bodo received support from British law firm Leigh Day, which negotiated a 55 million pound pollution settlement with Shell in 2015. Leigh Day said it agreed to freeze a separate case to force a clean-up via British courts in order to give the BMI a chance.  Ogoni, the wider area in which Bodo sits, was the subject of a 2011 UN Environment Programme report warning of catastrophic pollution in the soil and water.

King Emere Godwin Bebe Okpabi of the Ogale community is on the board of a wider Ogoni clean-up effort and is optimistic its own clean-up, due to start next year, will work. But he fears it will not be replicated elsewhere without another marathon battle in the London courts.“The only place you get legal success is the international courts,” he said.

Under Nigerian law, oil companies must begin cleaning up any spill within 24 hours. But the remoteness of spills and lax enforcement mean this rarely happens.  Ferdinand Giadom, a lecturer at the University of Port Harcourt and technical advisor to the Bodo cleanup, said communities often block clean-ups in the hopes of cash settlements. Even in Bodo, works were delayed by two years due to local infighting.

Shell said most oil spilled last year was due to sabotage or theft for illegal refining. It also said communities block access to sites, making cleaning more difficult.

Excerpts from Anger on the margins of historic clean-up in Nigeria’s Delta, Reuters, Nov. 9,  2017

The Class Actions of Fukushima Fefugees

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Negligence by the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Co. caused the triple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, a court ruled on October 10, 2017 in the biggest class-action suit related to the March 2011 accident.

The Fukushima District Court ordered the government and Tepco to pay a total of Yen 498 million ($4.4 million) plus delinquency charges to 2,907 people who fled the radiation that was released into the air and water after a tsunami flooded the power plant, knocking out the power to the vital cooling system. It was the second time a court found the government responsible for failing to prepare adequately for the likelihood of a large tsunami wave hitting the plant.

If Japan’s government had ordered Tepco to make sure the plant was ready to withstand a tsunami wave of 15.7 meters (51.5 feet), Tepco would have made sure critical instruments were waterproof, Tuesday’s ruling said.”The accident, triggered by total loss of power, could have been avoided, ” Judge Hideki Kanazawa said.

The compensation represents a small fraction of the damages the residents had sought. They also wanted compensation for every month that radiation levels stay above normal, but the court rejected that claim. Still, with some 30 class-action lawsuits so far brought by more than 10,000 affected residents. The October 11, 2017 ruling is a sign additional compensation costs could weigh on both the government and Tepco for years to come.  Tepco has so far paid more than Yen7.6 trillion ($67 billion) in compensation to residents affected by the accident, and has been struggling to clean up the reactors — a daunting technological task that could take decades.

As of September 2017, nearly 55,000 Fukushima residents are registered as evacuees, meaning they can’t return home and haven’t settled permanently elsewhere.

The plaintiffs argued the government and Tepco failed to give adequate attention to studies that said a major tsunami could occur in the area of the plant. One 2002 study by the government’s Earthquake Research Promotion Unit said there was a 20% chance of a magnitude 8 tsunami-triggering earthquake in the area off Fukushima within 30 years. Another study by Tepco’s senior safety engineer in 2007 found there was about a 10% chance that a tsunami could breach Fukushima Daiichi’s defenses within 50 years.

The defendants said the scientific basis for such predictions was unclear, and even if the calculations were correct, the chance was too low to require immediate steps in response. The government said it wasn’t until after the accident that it gained the ability to force Tepco to take anti-flooding measures. Both argued the compensation already being paid to displaced people was adequate.

On March 11, 2011, a tsunami triggered by an earthquake flooded the Fukushima Daiichi plant, knocking out auxiliary power sources that were supposed to keep the reactors’ cooling systems running. Three reactors melted down.

Excerpts from Redress Ordered In Fukushima Case, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 11, 2017

Saving Iconic Rivers: Ganges

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The Ganges, arguably the lifeline of India, has its origin in the Himalayas. Once it crosses Gangotri, it flows through Haridwar collecting industrial, agricultural and human waste on its way. Before it culminates in the Bay of Bengal, it passes through various towns and villages lacking sanitation. The Government of India is rolling up its sleeves to clean the 2525 KM long-Ganga and facilitate its flow as it is the source of water for more than 40 per cent of India’s population.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) is non-profit engineering organisation founded 145 years ago, the IET is one of the world’s leading professional societies for the engineering and technology community. The IET has more than 167,000 members across 150 countries. In India, the IET has over 13,000 members, eight Local Networks and focuses on Energy, Transport, Information & Communications, IoT and Education sectors.

In March 2017, a panel formed by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) on IoT (Internet of Things) were invited to consult the Government of India’s National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG) to discuss the ways to clean the river. According to IET, the leaders discussed and tried to identify ways to improve the water flow in Ganga, better treatment of pollutants via sewage and effluent treatment plants, need for controlling unregulated sewage, open defecation,  and handling chemical runoff from agricultural lands (fertilisers and pesticides).

The IoT technology could be used in providing real-time information of pollution status and enabling the industries and societies to find alternate means of disposal of waste.   Other technologies being used to clean up the river Unmanned robotic water surface vehicle with drones: The vehicle can be programmed to collect all the pollutant waste through its arms and offload the same. It works 24X7 and under all weather conditions. More, it can actually submerge to clean up pollutants on even the riverbed. A set of drones is used with it to collect videos of the pollutants.

Gumps- Detectors for pipeline leaks: The Guided Ultrasonic Monitoring of Pipe Systems (GUMPS) can detect oil leakages from oil pipelines that are laid across the river bed of the Ganga River. They continuously monitor pipelines and alert any impending leaks, thus preventing loss of marine life and pollution due to oil leakages.

Excerpts, Alekhya Hanumanthu ,Using technology for clean Ganga, Telangana Today, Oct. 10, 2017

Radioactive Beaches: Fukushima at 2017

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Six years after the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster in Japan, radioactive material is leaching into the Pacific Ocean from an unexpected place. Some of the highest levels of radioactive cesium-137, a major by-product of nuclear power generation, are now found in the somewhat salty groundwater beneath sand beaches tens of kilometers away, a new study shows.

Scientists tested for radioactivity at eight different beaches within 100 kilometers of the plant, which experienced three reactor meltdowns when an earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, knocked out its power. Oceans, rivers and fresh groundwater sources are typically monitored for radioactivity following a nuclear accident, but several years following the disaster, those weren’t the most contaminated water sources. Instead, brackish groundwater underneath the beaches has accumulated the second highest levels of the radioactive element (surpassed only by the groundwater directly beneath the reactor).

In the wake of the 2011 accident, seawater tainted with high levels of cesium-137 probably traveled along the coast and lapped against these beaches, proposes study coauthor Virginie Sanial, who did the work while at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Some cesium stuck to the sand and, over time, percolated down to the brackish groundwater beneath. Now, the radioactive material is steadily making its way back into the ocean. The groundwater is releasing the cesium into the coastal ocean at a rate that’s on par with the leakage of cesium into the ocean from the reactor site itself, Sanial’s team estimates.

Excerpts from Radioactive material from Fukushima disaster turns up in a surprising place, Science News, Oct. 2, 2017

See also Unexpected source of Fukushima-derived radiocesium to the coastal ocean of Japan

Disused, Dangerous and Nuclear

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Most of radioactive waste arising from nuclear applications consists of disused sealed radioactive sources (DSRS). Radioactive sources are used in different devices in medical, industrial and agricultural facilities. They have to be accounted for and when they are no longer usable, they have to be recovered, dismantled, stored and, as the case may be, prepared for transportation. Therefore, countries with or without nuclear power programmes have to make sure they have the ability to properly manage them. The IAEA is supporting capacity building in both regulatory framework and operation and can support removal operations. The IAEA is also developing tools (mobile tool kits, mobile hot cells, transport packages) and supporting the strengthening of regional capabilities.

In an effort to scale up the safe and secure management of disused sealed radioactive sources (DSRS), the IAEA on September 19, 2017 introduced a new concept of Qualified Technical Centres.

“At the IAEA we receive a large number of requests for assistance in characterization, conditioning and removal of all categories of DSRS,” said Christophe Xerri, Director of the IAEA Division of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology, Xerri, Director, IAEA Division of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology  “The idea behind this initiative is to increase the worldwide capability to manage DSRS by encouraging countries with well-equipped centres and trained personnel to provide technical services for the management of DSRS, within their countries and regionally.”…

The IAEA regularly dispatches expert missions to Member States to provide advice and guidance for the recovery and conditioning of DSRS. The most recent missions include recovery and conditioning of DSRS in Honduras in July, in Ghana in August and in Malaysia in September 2017…

During the event, experts from several Member States highlighted recent projects and activities related to DSRS management. Participants learned details of a South American Source Removal Project, with 29 sources to be removed from five countries. The event also included presentations on national regulatory infrastructure for inventories of radioactive sources and progress made on the integration of mobile hot cell with borehole disposal system.

Excerpts from IAEA Announces Concept of Qualified Technical Centres for the Management of Disused Sealed Radioactive Sources, IAEA Department of Nuclear Energy, Sept. 19, 2017

Unsafe Genes: DARPA

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DARPA created the Safe Genes program to gain a fundamental understanding of how gene editing technologies function; devise means to safely, responsibly, and predictably harness them for beneficial ends; and address potential health and security concerns related to their accidental or intentional misuse. Today, DARPA announced awards to seven teams that will pursue that mission, led by: The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Harvard Medical School; Massachusetts General Hospital; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; North Carolina State University; University of California, Berkeley; and University of California, Riverside. DARPA plans to invest $65 million in Safe Genes over the next four years as these teams work to collect empirical data and develop a suite of versatile tools that can be applied independently or in combination to support bio-innovation and combat bio-threats.

Gene editing technologies …[can] selectively disable cancerous cells in the body, control populations of disease-spreading mosquitos, and defend native flora and fauna against invasive species, among other uses. The potential national security applications and implications of these technologies are equally profound, including protection of troops against infectious disease, mitigation of threats posed by irresponsible or nefarious use of biological technologies, and enhanced development of new resources derived from synthetic biology, such as novel chemicals, materials, and coatings with useful, unique properties.

Achieving such ambitious goals, however, will require more complete knowledge about how gene editors, and derivative technologies including gene drives, function at various physical and temporal scales under different environmental conditions, across multiple generations of an organism. In parallel, demonstrating the ability to precisely control gene edits, turning them on and off under certain conditions or even reversing their effects entirely, will be paramount to translation of these tools to practical applications…

Each of the seven teams will pursue one or more of three technical objectives: develop genetic constructs—biomolecular “instructions”—that provide spatial, temporal, and reversible control of genome editors in living systems; devise new drug-based countermeasures that provide prophylactic and treatment options to limit genome editing in organisms and protect genome integrity in populations of organisms; and create a capability to eliminate unwanted engineered genes from systems and restore them to genetic baseline states. Safe Genes research will not involve any releases of organisms into the environment; however, the research—performed in contained facilities—could inform potential future applications, including safe, predictable, and reversible gene drives….

A Harvard Medical School team led by Dr. George Church seeks to develop systems to safeguard genomes by detecting, preventing, and ultimately reversing mutations that may arise from exposure to radiation. This work will involve creation of novel computational and molecular tools to enable the development of precise editors that can distinguish between highly similar genetic sequences. The team also plans to screen the effectiveness of natural and synthetic drugs to inhibit gene editing activity.

A North Carolina State University (NCSU) team led by Dr. John Godwin aims to develop and test a mammalian gene drive system in rodents. The team’s genetic technique targets population-specific genetic variants found only in particular invasive communities of animals. If successful, the work will expand the tools available to manage invasive species that threaten biodiversity and human food security, and that serve as potential reservoirs of infectious diseases affecting native animal and human populations….

A University of California, Berkeley team led by Dr. Jennifer Doudna will investigate the development of novel, safe gene editing tools for use as antiviral agents in animal models, targeting the Zika and Ebola viruses. The team will also aim to identify anti-CRISPR proteins capable of inhibiting unwanted genome-editing activity, while developing novel strategies for delivery of genome editors and inhibitors….

A University of California, Riverside team led by Dr. Omar Akbari seeks to develop robust and reversible gene drive systems for control of Aedes aegypti mosquito populations.

Excerpts from Building the Safe Genes Toolkit, DARPA Press Release, July 19, 2017

Coke as a Scapegoat

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A potent blend of pride, economic nationalism and mounting concern over water security have the world’s two biggest cola brands in a bind in southern India.  Shopkeepers in drought-hit Kerala state decided on March 15, 2017 to promote local brands over Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo Inc. beverages after counterparts in neighboring Tamil Nadu boycotted the multinational drinks. While retail groups claim the companies are siphoning off groundwater and selling products tainted with pesticides, academics and analysts say the soda giants have become scapegoats for a water crisis that’s become mired in politics and patriotism.

India is one of the most water-challenged nations, and fights over water have erupted between users periodically for decades. Failed monsoon rains over as many as the past three years in some states have parched rivers and dams, forcing farmers, manufacturers and municipal water suppliers to rely more on wells to meet their needs. Problem is, those too are drying up, and that’s hurting farmers, India’s economic mainstay.

“The root cause for the boycott isn’t the multinational companies, but the enduring fight between industrial users and farmers, especially in several drought-hit states,” said P.L. Beena, an associate professor with the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.  On top of that, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call to companies to “make in India” has given rise to a pro-India push — and, in some cases, an anti-foreigner backlash — that’s supporting local brands….

The latest action means drinks from Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, which together have a 96 percent hold on India’s $4.9 billion soda market, will be kept off the shelves of more than 1 million shops.  Vendors would rather lose business than sell the products, said A. M. Vikrama Raja, president of a retailers’ association in Tamil Nadu with about 1.5 million members. The boycott started March 1, 2017 a day before the Madras High Court dismissed a petition seeking a ban on the American soda-makers drawing water from the local Thamirabarani river.

“Instead of foreign sodas, we will promote local beverages,” said T. Naseeruddin, president of a retailers’ group that says it has more than 700,000 retailers in Kerala, which is facing its worst drought in 115 years.

The group stopped short of joining the boycott in Tamil Nadu after a meeting Wednesday with Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, a spokesman said. Instead, retailers will pursue “sensitization against multinational products” via a state-level conference, and seek a policy response from the state government.  India has at least 50 local drink brands, which are typically 20 percent cheaper than the global cola brands, brokerage Kotak Securities Ltd. said in a Feb. 23 report.  Manpasand Beverages Ltd., based in Vadodara, Gujarat state’s cultural capital, is “aggressively expanding its reach in Tamil Nadu to take advantage of the ongoing cola ban,”….

Excerpts from PepsiCo, Coca-Cola Fight Patriotism in Parched Indian State, Bloomberg Business Week, Mar. 15, 2017

Illegal Refineries in Nigeria

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Nigeria’s military said on April 13, 2017 that it had destroyed 13 illegal refineries in the restive Niger Delta oil hub, in an operation in which two soldiers died in clashes with “sea robbers”.  Military authorities say there are hundreds of illegal refineries in the region, which process stolen crude from oil company pipelines.  The Nigerian government said last week that it plans to legalise illicit refineries as part of an attempt to bring peace to the production heartland of crude oil, but it is unclear when it will put the plan into action.  Major Abubakar Abdullahi, a military spokesman, said troops “discovered and destroyed 13 illegal refineries” on April 12, 2017 while on patrol in the Iyalama Adama axis of Rivers state. The two soldiers were killed in the Ijawkiri general area, in Rivers state, he said.Makeshift refineries, usually hidden in oil-soaked clearings, support tens of thousands of people locally.

Nigeria’s navy chief has said that 181 illegal refineries were destroyed in 2016, 748 suspects were arrested, and crude oil and diesel worth 420 billion naira ($1.3 billion) was confiscated. The military shut down around 50 bush refineries in the first few weeks of 2017.

Nigeria’s military destroys 13 illegal oil refineries, Reuters, Apr. 13, 2017

Rivers as Legal Persons

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The new law that declares the Whanganui river, New Zealand’s third-longest, a legal person, in the sense that it can own property, incur debts and petition the courts, is not unprecedented. Te Urewera, an area of forested hills in the north-east that used to be a national park, became a person for legal purposes in 2014….

The law, which was approved on March 15th, 2017 stems from disputes over the Treaty of Waitangi, by which New Zealand’s indigenous Maori ceded sovereignty to British colonialists in 1840. The treaty was supposed to have protected Maori rights and property; it was observed mainly in the breach. In recent years the government has tried to negotiate settlements for breaches of the treaty with different Maori iwi, or tribes. For the Whanganui iwi, the idea of the river as a person is nothing new. The iwi professes a deep spiritual connection to the Whanganui: as a local proverb has it, “I am the river and the river is me.” The law acknowledges the river as a “living whole”, rather than trying to carve it up, putting to rest an ownership dispute that has dragged on for 140 years. When it was passed, members of the iwi in the gallery of parliament broke into a ten-minute song of celebration.

In practice, two guardians will act for the river, one appointed by the government and one by the iwi. Mr Finlayson, the minister in charge of negotiations tied to the Treaty of Waitangi, hopes the change will help bring those who do environmental damage to the river to book. Under the settlement the government will also pay the iwi NZ$80m ($56m) as compensation for past abuses and set up a fund of NZ$30m to enhance the “health and well-being” of the river. It is one of 82 deals that aim to remedy breaches of the treaty, including one with the Tuhoe iwi that made Te Urewera into a person.

Days after the law passed, an Indian court declared two of the biggest and most sacred rivers in India, the Ganges and Yamuna, to be people too. Making explicit reference to the Whanganui settlement, the court assigned legal “parents” to protect and conserve their waters. Local lawyers think the ruling might help fight severe pollution: the rivers’ defenders will no longer have to prove that discharges into them harm anyone, since any sullying of the waters will now be a crime against the river itself. There is no doubt that of the 1.3bn-odd people in India, the Ganges and the Yamuna are among the most downtrodden.

Excerpts from Hydrological Jurisprudence: Try me River, Economist, Mar. 25, 2017

See also Do Trees have Standing? by Christopher Stone

Immobilizing Nuclear Waste

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Several options are available to immobilise waste resulting from nuclear fuel reprocessing. One of these is vitrification – a mature technology which has been used for high-level nuclear waste immobilization for over 50 years…Argentina is considering vitrification as a viable option for dealing with its high-level nuclear waste. The Argentine National Programme for Radioactive Waste Management aims to build capacities to implement vitrification processes for radioactive waste….
The vitrified radioactive waste is extremely durable, and ensures a high degree of environmental protection. Although the process of vitrification requires a high initial investment and then operational costs, waste vitrification has important advantages: it significantly reduces the volume of waste, and allows simple and cheap disposal possibilities. The overall cost of vitrified radioactive waste is usually lower than alternative options when transportation and disposal expenses are taken into account. For this reason, the process is very attractive for sates seeking effective and reliable immobilisation solutions for their radioactive waste stocks.

Excerpts from Taking a Closer Look at Vitrification: How the IAEA Helps Countries Utilise Advanced Immobilisation Technologies, IAEA Press Release, Mar. 24, 2017

Taxing Carbon Emissions: EU

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The European Union wants to slash greenhouse-gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. It is on course to cut just half that amount. To get back on track, on February 15th, 2017 the European Parliament voted for a plan to raise the cost for firms to produce carbon. It has prompted growing calls for the bloc to tax the carbon emissions embodied in the EU’s imports. At best, such a levy will barely curb emissions. At worst, it could cause a trade war.

The EU’s latest reforms try to put up the price of carbon by cutting the emissions allowances firms are granted. They include the EU’s first border tax on carbon, levied on cement imports.

Under the EU’s reforms, steelmakers in Europe would pay up to €30 ($32) to emit a tonne of carbon, but foreign producers selling in the EU would not have to pay a cent. Putting an equivalent tax on these imports is a neat solution to this problem. “It’s wonderful in theory,” says Jean Chateau, an economist at the OECD, a club of rich countries. But “in reality it’s very problematic.”

One big problem is how to calculate the carbon in imports. This is not easy even for simple steel sheets; for items made of several bits of metal from different sources, it is hellishly complex. Some countries might even refuse to provide the information. And any method brought in for foreign firms, if not applied to local ones, could fall foul of WTO rules,..

A global carbon price would produce far greater economic benefits than border taxes, but would require closer international co-operation. A trade war is not the way to get there.

Excerpts from Steely defences: Carbon tariffs and the EU’s steel industry, Economist,  Feb. 18, at 62

Debt and Coal: China-Mongolia friendship

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Mongolia recently reached a new deal to sell coal to China, helping it boost its faltering economy and start repaying billions of dollars it owes Wall Street lenders.  Under the landmark agreement completed late 2016, Mongolia’s state-owned mining company will sell coal to China at roughly double the previously agreed-upon rate.  The deal follows a devastating four-year period when Mongolian miners exported coal to China at deeply-discounted prices, sometimes for as little as 11% of the global benchmark price, undercutting Mongolia’s economic growth. Mongolia agreed to those punitive terms to get the loan from China and has been struggling to repay it.

The new export agreement will help Mongolia pay its mounting debt, including bonds held by BlackRock Inc., Fidelity Investments, UBS Global Asset Management and other global investors that bought the debt for its double-digit yields, according to bond investors.

But the export deal has a downside for Mongolia: It effectively transfers much coal production from China, which is bent on cleaning up its environment, to its poorer neighbor…  Trucks carrying coal are backed up for nearly 40 miles at Mongolia’s southern border with China, in what some analysts call the world’s largest traffic jam…Yet Mongolia seems willing to make that trade-off, with coal prices soaring since China has begun cutting production, analysts say. Market prices for the type of coal produced in Mongolia, which is used in steel- and iron-making operations, skyrocketed 200% in 2016 to $225 a ton.

Mongolia is also in talks with some Asian firms to develop its Tavan Tolgoi coal reserves, analysts say. The Gobi desert site is one of the world’s largest untapped coal mines, with more than six billion tons of coal deposits.

Excerpts from the New China-Mongolia Mining Deal: Economic Windfall or Environmental Threat?, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 21, 2017

Ogoni versus Royal Dutch Shell

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The widow of a Nigerian activist is planning to sue Royal Dutch Shell in the Dutch courts alleging the oil company was complicit in the execution of her husband by the Nigerian military in 1995, court documents filed in the United States/Esther Kiobel has filed an application in New York to secure documents from Shell’s US lawyers, which she could use in the Dutch action.

The filings with the US District Court for the Southern District Court of New York said she planned to begin the action before the end of the year.“Ms. Kiobel will demonstrate that Shell encouraged, facilitated, and conspired with the Nigerian government to commit human rights violations against the Ogoni people,” a memorandum in the application filed last week said.
Kiobel previously took her lawsuit to the United States but the US Supreme Court ruled in 2013 the case could not be heard because the alleged activities took place outside the country.

In 2009 prior to that ruling Shell had agreed in the United States to pay $15.5 million to settle lawsuits related to other activists executed at the same time as Barinem Kiobel, including author and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.    [three separate lawsuits were brought by the family of Ken Saro-Wiwa].

The Nigerian military cracked down heavily on local opposition to oil production by a Shell joint venture in the Niger Delta in the early 1990s. Kiobel alleges that Shell provided support to the military in its crackdown.  A Dutch court ruled in December that Shell may be sued in the Netherlands for oil spills at its subsidiary in Nigeria, although it did not say Shell was responsible..

Excerpts from Shell faces possible Dutch lawsuit over Nigerian activist’s execution, Reuters, Oct. 18, 2016

Tin, Tantalum and Tungsten: Congo

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Congo’s tin, tantalum and tungsten are used in electronics around the world. Although some of these minerals come from big industrial copper mines in Katanga, Congo’s south, and a gold mine in South Kivu, there is not yet a single modern mine in North Kivu.

Until now the province’s metal has been dug out almost entirely by hand. Yet Alphamin hopes to show that it can run a modern industrial mine in a part of the world that scares other modern miners away.

Alphamin says that the investment is attractive—even at a time of low commodity prices—because the ore that it plans to extract is richer than that found anywhere else in the world. Behind the company’s camp on the hill are stacks of carefully ordered cylinders of rock drilled out to map the riches beneath the mountain. (Like almost everything else in the camp, the drill rig had to be lifted in by helicopter.) The ore they contain is 4.5% grade. That means that for every 100 tonnes of ore extracted, the firm will be able to sell 3.25 tonnes of tin (not all the tin can be extracted from the rock). Most other mines would be happy to produce 0.7 tonnes…..

If the gamble pays off Alphamin’s investors will make juicy returns. But to do so they may have to convince locals that the project is in their interest. If not, they risk protests and sabotage  .In 2007 some 18,000 people lived at Bisie, working the site with pickaxes and shovels. They produced some 14,000 tonnes of tin that year—or perhaps 5% of world production. To get it to market people carried concentrated ore on their heads through the jungle to an airstrip where small planes could land to carry it out. It was back-breaking work but lucrative for many Congolese. That era began to come to an end in 2011, thanks in part to an American law.

Under the Dodd-Frank act, a law aimed mainly at tightening bank regulation, firms operating in the United States must be able to show where the minerals used in their products came from. The idea was to stop rebels in poor countries from selling gold and diamonds to fund wars. The law all but shut down artisanal mining in much of eastern Congo.

Elsewhere in eastern Congo artisanal mines have gradually reopened thanks to a verification scheme under which the UN and the government check mines and allow certified ones to “tag and bag” minerals. The site at Bisie has, however, never been certified. And although Alphamin will provide some well-paid jobs to locals, as well as pay taxes to the central government, its mechanised operations will never employ anything like the thousands of people who once toiled there with pick and shovel. Alphamin has promised to fund local projects, such as a new school, that are intended to benefit 44 villages.

Excerpts from Mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo: The richest, riskiest tin mine on Earth, Economist, Aug. 27, 2016

Lethal Trash

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An explosion at a waste dump in Benin killed eight people, local mayor Robert Tolegbon said on on September 11, 2016. The blast occurred late onat a giant trash heap in Tori, a town about 40 km north-west of the capital Cotonou, as locals were sifting for food. Previously, the health ministry said two people had died.  Safety standards for waste management are poor in much of West Africa and debris is rarely filtered to eliminate toxic or flammable materials.

Eight killed in Benin waste blast, Reuters, Sept. 12, 2016

The Nuts and Bolts of Oil Spills

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US regulators warned subsea oil drillers and equipment makers that bolt failures in the Gulf of Mexico could result in an oil spill on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

“Fortunately, as of today we’ve had no major catastrophes from bolt failures,” said Brian Salerno, director of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement  (BSEE) at the Department of the Interior, which oversees the offshore oil industry. “We believe it may only be a matter of time before our luck runs out….. The agency’s working group and a parallel task force set up by an oil industry trade group are trying to determine why critical metal fasteners have corroded and failed in recent years.

Regulators and makers of oil production equipment, including General Electric Co., Schlumberger Ltd. and National Oilwell Varco Inc., are trying to determine what is causing the failures, which have included premature corroding, stripping of threads or snapping outright. The problems have been found over the past four years on safety equipment in underwater oil production, including on blowout preventers, which are designed as a last defense against a major oil spill like the Deepwater Horizon incident in the Gulf of Mexico….

In 2013, GE recalled more than 10,000 bolts after a failure on one of its components, a blowout preventer connector, which led to a spill of more than 400 barrels of drilling fluid in the Gulf of Mexico…. Troy Trosclair, a BSEE supervisor for the Gulf of Mexico region, said Brazilian officials reported that 56 rigs working for Petróleo Brasileiro SA, or Petrobras, that country’s biggest oil producer, were affected by the 2013 GE recall

Excerpts from Ted Mann,U.S. Regulators Warn Drillers to Find Solution to Subsea Bolt Failures, Wall Street Journal,  Aug. 30, 2016

Forest Fires and Haze

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In 2015 a dry spell caused by the El Niño weather pattern made Indonesia’s forest fires especially severe. Smoke settled over Singapore for months and even reached Cambodia, Vietnam and the Philippines. At least 2m hectares of forest were burned. Dozens of people were killed and hundreds of thousands sickened. For much of October 2015 greenhouse gases released by those fires exceeded the emissions of the entire American economy. The losses over five months of fires amounted to around 2% of the country’s GDP…[The event has labeled  the 2015 Southeast Asian haze]

Between 2001 and 2014, Indonesia lost 18.5m hectares of tree cover—an area more than twice the size of Ireland. In 2014 Indonesia overtook Brazil to become the world’s biggest deforester.

One of the reasons for those forest fires is economic. The country produces well over half the world’s palm oil, a commodity used in cooking and cosmetics, as a food additive and as a biofuel. It accounts for around 4.5% of Indonesia’s GDP, and demand is still rising. To meet it, Indonesian farmers set fires to clear forest and make way for new plantations. Often these forests grow on peatlands, which store carbon from decayed organic matter; in tropical regions these hold up to ten times as much carbon as surface soil. Draining peatlands releases all of that carbon. The peat also becomes a fuel, so it is not just felled trees that are burning but the ground itself.

But politics also plays a part. … The president declared a moratorium on peatland-development licences and called for peat forests to be restored, even as his agriculture minister pointed out that burned peatland can be used for corn and soyabean planting….

Civil-society groups have had some success. At least 188 Indonesian palm-oil companies have made some sort of sustainability pledge, including five large multinational firms that in 2014 signed the Indonesian Palm Oil Pledge (IPOP), which commits them to avoiding deforestation and planting oil palms on peatland. Together those five firms account for 80% of Indonesia’s palm-oil exports.All the same, deforestation continues. Perversely, it may even have increased temporarily, as companies cleared as much land as they could before the agreement took effect. Besides, opaque supply chains allow companies to buy palm oil from suppliers not bound by IPOP.

Forests: A world on fire, Economist Special Report on Indonesia, Feb. 27, 2016

Bio-Materials: DARPA

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Consider the benefits to be gained from a chimney that heals after damage, a roof that breathes to control airflow, surfaces that don’t flake or fade, and a driveway that eats oil to clean up after spills.–From the DARPA website

The structural materials that are currently used to construct homes, buildings, and infrastructure are expensive to produce and transport, wear out due to age and damage, and have limited ability to respond to changes in their immediate surroundings. Living biological materials—bone, skin, bark, and coral, for example—have attributes that provide advantages over the non-living materials people build with, in that they can be grown where needed, self-repair when damaged, and respond to changes in their surroundings. The inclusion of living materials in human-built environments could offer significant benefits; however, today scientists and engineers are unable to easily control the size and shape of living materials in ways that would make them useful for construction.

DARPA is launching the Engineered Living Materials (ELM) program with a goal of creating a new class of materials that combines the structural properties of traditional building materials with attributes of living systems. Living materials represent a new opportunity to leverage engineered biology to solve existing problems associated with the construction and maintenance of built environments, and to create new capabilities to craft smart infrastructure that dynamically responds to its surroundings.

“The vision of the ELM program is to grow materials on demand where they are needed,” said ELM program manager Justin Gallivan. “Imagine that instead of shipping finished materials, we can ship precursors and rapidly grow them on site using local resources. And, since the materials will be alive, they will be able to respond to changes in their environment and heal themselves in response to damage.”…

Scientists are making progress with three-dimensional printing of living tissues and organs, using scaffolding materials that sustain the long-term viability of the living cells. These cells are derived from existing natural tissues, however, and are not engineered to perform synthetic functions. And current cell-printing methods are too expensive to produce building materials at necessary scales.

ELM looks to merge the best features of these existing technologies and build on them to create hybrid materials composed of non-living scaffolds that give structure to and support the long-term viability of engineered living cells. DARPA intends to develop platform technologies that are scalable and generalizable to facilitate a quick transition from laboratory to commercial applications.

The long-term objective of the ELM program is to develop an ability to engineer structural properties directly into the genomes of biological systems so that neither scaffolds nor external development cues are needed for an organism to realize the desired shape and properties. ….

Work on ELM will be fundamental research carried out in controlled laboratory settings. DARPA does not anticipate environmental release during the program.

Excerpts from Living Structural Materials  Could Open New Horizons for Engineers and Architects, DARPA seeks to develop design tools and methods for creating programmable, self-healing, living building materials, OUTREACH@DARPA.MIL, Aug. 5, 2016

See also FBO.org

A Schoolyard at Fukushima

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Highly radioactive soil that should by law be removed by the central government has been left dumped in the corner of a schoolyard here because the construction of a local storage site for waste has been stalled.  Students at the school were not given an official warning that the radioactive soil was potentially hazardous to their health.

When a teacher scooped up soil samples at the site and had their radiation levels measured by two nonprofit monitoring entities–one in Fukushima and another in Tokyo–the results showed 27,000-33,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogram. The law stipulates that the central government is responsible for disposing of waste measuring more than 8,000 becquerels per kilogram. But as a central government project to build an interim storage site for highly radioactive waste near the nuclear power plant has been stalled, the school appears to have no alternative to indefinitely keeping it in the schoolyard…

Radioactive soil turns up at Fukushima high school,The Asahi Shimbun, June 15, 2016

3000 Trash Banks: Indonesia

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Customers, in a poor corner of eastern Indonesia, borrow cash — and pay back trash.
“The program originated from the people, it is managed by the people, and the rewards are for the people,” said bank manager Suryana, who wears a black jilbab headscarf and lives with her family above the Mutiara Trash Bank in the fast-growing city of Makassar on the island of Sulawesi. “From an economic point of view, this gets results.”… Not just neighborhoods in Indonesia, but elsewhere across emerging Asia and Africa, locales are embracing “trash banking” as a way of reducing pressure on ever-growing landfill sites and allowing some of their poorest citizens access to savings and credit.
The scale of the problem facing Makassar and other Asian cities is clear from a trip to the landfill on the edge of town. Each day the city of 2.5 million people produces 800 tons of rubbish, most of which ends up at the five-story high tip, which sprawls over the area the size of two soccer pitches. Scavengers, many of them children, work alongside cows foraging for food.

Against this backdrop, trash banking is taking off. Residents bring recyclable trash such as plastic bottles, paper and packaging to the collection points, known as banks, where the rubbish is weighed and given a monetary value. Like a regular bank, customers are able to open accounts, make deposits — of trash, converted to its rupiah value — and periodically withdraw funds.

The city government commits to purchasing the rubbish at set prices displayed at the bank, ensuring price stability for those bringing trash in. It then sells it on to waste merchants who ship it to plastic and paper mills on the main island of Java….The city administration sends trucks to collect the waste from the Mutiara Trash Bank several times a week and brings it to a Central Trash Bank, where it is sorted for sale…

Indonesia produces 64 million tons of trash a year, of which 70 percent is dumped in open …Indonesia as a whole last year had 2,800 trash banks operating in 129 cities, with 175,000 account holders, according to the environment ministry….[IO]ther similar practices are carried out in African countries including Ghana and South Africa, in India’s cities of Pune and Bengaluru, and in Manila, Bogota and Brazil.

Excerpts from This Asian Bank Lets You Borrow Cash and Pay in Trash, Bloomberg News
May 15, 2016

Justice 4 Fish

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Hundreds of people have held a rare protest in Vietnam against the unexplained mass death of fish on the country’s central coast. Vast numbers of dead fish have appeared across some 200km (125 miles) of coastline since early April. A government investigation has so far found no links to a steel plant owned by Taiwanese firm Formosa Plastics.But many of the demonstrators in Hanoi blamed the company, and carried placards saying “Formosa Out”. Other signs read “Formosa destroying the environment is a crime” and “Who poisoned the central region’s waters?”

Environment Minister Tran Hong Ha said the die-off was “a very huge and serious environment disaster” and admitted that the government had been slow to react.He said Formosa Plastics had been ordered to dig up an illegal waste pipe at its plant.  Fishermen along the affected coastline are banned from selling their stocks, but seafood industry officials said exports, that bring in $6.6b a year, would not be affected.

Excerpt from Vietnam protest over mystery fish deaths, BBC, May 1, 2016

Hacking German Nuclear Plants

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A computer virus has been found in a nuclear power plant in Bavaria…The virus was found in Block B of the nuclear reactor at Gundremmingen in western Bavaria, a statement released by the power plant said.  The malware is well known to IT specialists and it attempts to create a connection to the internet without the user of the computer choosing to do so, the statement added…[T]he virus posed no danger to the public as all the computers which are responsible for controlling the plant are disconnected from one another and not connected to the internet. The virus is also not capable of manipulating the functions of the power plant, the statement claims. State authorities have been informed about the issues and specialists from the energy firm RWE are examining the computer system to asses how it became infected with the virus..

Germans are very sensitive to the dangers of nuclear technology… As recent as 2010, officials found traces of radioactivity connected to the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe in German wildlife, like wild boar…Shortly after the Fukushima meltdown in 2011, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that the country would phase out nuclear power by 2021…

Several newspapers reported that the terrorists behind the Paris attacks had the plans for a German nuclear facility, a claim later denied by German intelligence. Then, days later, it was found that inspectors responsible for carrying out safety checks at two nuclear plants had submitted fake reports.

Excerpts from Computer Virus in Bavarian Nuclear Plant, http://www.thelocal.de/, Apr. 26, 2016

Chernobyl Nuclear Accident: 1986 to 2016

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A workforce of around 2,500 people is finishing a massive steel enclosure that will cover Chernobyl’s reactor 4, where the radioactive innards of the nuclear plant are encased in a concrete sarcophagus hastily built after the disaster.  If all goes to plan, the new structure—an arch more than 350 feet high and 500 feet long—will be slid into place late next year over the damaged reactor and its nuclear fuel, creating a leak-tight barrier designed to contain radioactive substances for at least the next 100 years.

The project, known as the New Safe Confinement,  is a feat of engineering.  [see also the Chernobyl Gallery] It will take two or three days to slide the 36,000-ton structure into place. The arch, which looks something like a dirigible hangar, is large enough to cover a dozen football fields. “You could put Wembley Stadium underneath here, with all the car parks,” said David Driscoll, the chief safety officer for the French consortium running the construction site.

Three decades ago, an army of workers scrambled to build a concrete sarcophagus around Chernobyl Reactor 4, which released a radioactive plume after a reactor fire and explosion on April 26, 1986.  At least 30 people died as an immediate result of the accident, which contaminated parts of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia and sent radioactive dust and debris over Europe. Pripyat, the company town of 50,000, was completely evacuated.

Emergency workers and evacuees received doses of radiation significantly above natural background levels, according to the World Health Organization. Researchers acknowledge high levels of thyroid cancer among people who were children at the time of the accident, from exposure to radioactive iodine…

Nicolas Caille, project director for Novarka, the consortium of Vinci SA and Bouygues SA, the French contractors running the project, said about 1,000 people work on a typical shift at the construction site, keeping to a schedule of 15 days in and 15 out….

A new facility to safely and securely store spent nuclear rods is being built at the nuclear power complex. The Interim Spent Fuel Storage Facility, or ISF2, is intended to store spent fuel rods for a minium of 100 years…..The Liquid Radioactive Waste Treatment Plant in Chernobyl…retrieves highly active liquids from their current tanks, processes them into a solid state and moves them to containers for long-term storage. …

Wildlife has flourished in the forest [surrounding Chernobyl], which is largely off limits to humans. Officials say species such as lynx, wild boar, wolves, elk, bear and European bison have rebounded.

Excerpts from Nathan Hodge, 30 Years After Chernobyl Disaster, an Arch Rises to Seal Melted Reactor, Wall Street Journal, Apr. 25, 2016

Water: the White Gold

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Considered as the “white gold” –as opposed to the “black gold”—oil, water scarcity has become one of the major concerns of Bahrain in spite of the fact that it has a high Human Development Index and was recognized by the World Bank as a high-income economy.  It’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita amounts to 29,140 US Dollars. And it is home to the headquarters for the United States Naval Forces Central Command/United States Fifth Fleet.

All the above does not suffice to make Bahrainis happy. In fact, their country leads the list of 14 out of the 33 countries most likely to be water-stressed in 2040 –all of them situated in the Middle East– including nine considered extremely highly stressed according to the World Resources Institute (WRI).  After Bahrain comes Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestine, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.  Other Middle East Arab countries more or less share with Bahrain this front line position of water-stressed states. These are Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen. All of them hold a very close second position in the region’ s water-stress ranking. The total represents two thirds of the 22 Arab countries. Not that the remaining Arab states are water-safe. Not at all: Mauritania, in the far Maghreb West, and Egypt, at the opposite end, are already under heavy threat as well.

The whole region, already arguably the least water-secure in the world, draws heavily on groundwater and desalinated sea water, and faces exceptional water-related challenges for the foreseeable future, says the WRI’s report: Ranking the World’s Most Water-Stressed Countries in 2040. The report’s authors Andrew Maddocks, Robert Samuel Young and Paul Reig foresee that world’s demand for water, including of course the Middle East, is likely to surge in the next few decades…This comes at a time when the Arab region has not taken advantage of its water resources of about 340 billion cubic meters, using only 50 per cent. The rest is lost and wasted.

Regarding the North of Africa, the Egyptian Ministry for Environment has recently admitted that large extensions of the country’s Northern area of the Nile Delta, which represents the most important and extensive agricultural region in Egypt, is already heavily exposed to two dangerous effects: salinasation and flooding. This is due to the rise of the Mediterranean Sea water levels and the land depression.

The impact of global warming and growing heat waves is particularly worrying the Egyptian authorities as it might reduce the flow of the Nile water in up to 80 per cent according to latest estimates

Excerpts from Baher Kamal, Climate Change and the Middle East (II), No Water in the Kingdom of the Two Seas—Nor Elsewhere, IPS, Apr. 18, 2016

Deep Horizon Oil Spill: final settlement

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U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans gave his final approval April 4, 2016 to an estimated $20 billion settlement over BP’s massive 2010 oil spill. On July 2015, BP reached the $20 billion settlement with the federal government and five gulf states. The Justice Department has called it the largest environmental settlement in U.S. history as well as the largest-ever civil settlement with a single entity.  Barbier presided over a multiphase trial for the spill litigation before last summer’s settlement agreement resolved the bulk of the remaining civil claims against BP. The judge heard testimony from rig workers who survived the blast and from company executives who worked on the ill-fated drilling project off Louisiana’s coast. Barbier set the stage for the settlement when he ruled BP acted with “gross negligence” in the disaster….

In addition BP pleaded guilty in 2013 to manslaughter for the rig workers’ deaths and agreed to pay a record $4 billion in criminal fines and penalties.

In BP reached a multibillion-dollar settlement agreement with businesses and residents who claim the spill cost them money. That deal didn’t have a cap***, and a court-supervised claims administrator is still processing many of the claims.

***There is no limit on the total dollar amount of the Settlement, but BP will pay no more than $2.3 billion to compensate qualified claimants who are in the Seafood Compensation Program.

While BP has estimated that the total costs of the Settlement will be approximately $7.8 billion, there is no limit on the total amount of the Settlement (with the exception of the Seafood Compensation Program). The actual total amount paid out will depend on the number of qualified claims made, and could be higher or lower than BP’s estimate.***

Excerpts from Judge approves $20 billion settlement in gulf oil spill, Associated Press, April 4, 2016

Miners v. Indigenous Peoples: Canada

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In 1849 the First Nation of Ojibways, a Canadian indigenous group, fired a cannon into a copper mine that had gone ahead without their approval.These days Canada’s aboriginal groups use public pressure, backed by legal action, to protect their lands against exploitation by outsiders. In February 2016 the government of British Columbia reached agreement with forest companies, environmental groups and 26 First Nations communities to protect from logging an area on the Pacific coast larger than Belgium—newly dubbed the Great Bear Rainforest. The deal, which allows logging and mining in areas aboriginals have agreed to, is the culmination of a long public-relations campaign (choosing the Kermode bear as its mascot was a masterstroke). It would have got nowhere without centuries of treaty-making and decades of case law to back it up….

The federal aboriginal affairs agency is party to 554 proceedings involving such rights (not all of which concern resource firms). That does not include disputes between aboriginal groups and firms. Projects as diverse as seismic testing for mineral deposits in Arctic waters and fracking in the west face challenges. Until 1951 such lawsuits were barred. They are expensive and can drag on for years; the outcome is never assured. The Tsilhqot’in, who filed suit in 1998 against logging on their ancestral lands in British Columbia, finally won in 2014 and now have title to 1,750 square km (1,100 square miles). But the Innu of Ekuanitshit in Quebec last year lost their bid to stop the Muskrat Falls hydropower project, which they say will affect caribou herds.

Some big projects are caught in legal limbo. The Northern Gateway pipeline, which is to bring crude oil from Alberta to Canada’s west coast, has been stalled for more than a decade, largely because of opposition from First Nations groups along its route, some of them parties to the Great Bear agreement. The Pacific Northwest liquefied natural gas project, backed by Petronas, a Malaysian state-owned firm, has offered C$1 billion ($726m) in benefits over 40 years to the Lax Kw’alaams nation of northern British Columbia. That has not allayed fears that the project would destroy salmon fisheries.

When such disputes are unresolved, the price can be high. The Northern Gateway pipeline would add C$300 billion to Canada’s GDP over 30 years.

Miners and aboriginals in Canada: I’ll see you in court, Economist, Feb. 6, 2016 at 33

Herbicides: safer than table salt

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It’s been a tough year for glyphosate, the world’s most popular weedkiller. In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an arm of the World Health Organization, declared that glyphosate—the key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup products—was probably carcinogenic to humans. In the months since, multiple lawsuits have been filed blaming the chemical for causing cancer and birth defects. In February, testing found traces of glyphosate in German beer and organic panty liners sold in France. Other tests have found chemical residue in British bread, as well as in the urine of people across Europe. In early March, the European Union put off a vote to renew a 15-year license for glyphosate after several member states balked.

Monsanto famously advertised Roundup, which was introduced in 1974, as safer than table salt. In 1996 the company stopped making the table salt claim after complaints from New York state….. In September 2016 state officials in California proposed adding the herbicide to a list of known carcinogens. The FDA said in February 2016 that it would begin testing for glyphosate residue in food in the U.S. The results aren’t yet available. The Environmental Protection Agency has been reviewing its use since 2009. The agency, which in 1985 temporarily classified glyphosate as “possibly carcinogenic,” was supposed to wrap up sometime last year; it now says a draft of its decision should be available for public comment sometime this year.

The herbicide industry has mounted an aggressive campaign to discredit the cancer finding and to convince regulators—and the public—that the herbicide should remain in use. …

Glyphosate works by blocking the production of certain amino acids that a plant needs to grow, and it’s nonselective, meaning it kills most plants. It began to dominate the herbicide market only after Monsanto genetically engineered crops to survive it, marketing them under its Roundup Ready brand. Global sales of glyphosate were about $7.8 billion in 2014, 30 percent of the herbicide market, according to Cropnosis, a market-research firm. Monsanto’s dominance of the glyphosate market has declined since the chemical went off patent in 2000. Some weeds have become resistant to glyphosate, triggering the need for other weedkillers. Nonetheless, Roundup remains the primary money-maker for Monsanto’s agricultural productivity segment, which brought in 32 percent of its revenue in fiscal 2015.

A rejection of glyphosate by either the U.S. or Europe would have “massive” ramifications on farming and food production, says Jason Miner, an analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. “You could quickly take us two decades back in terms of farm yields,” he says. “The world doesn’t have capacity to produce all the alternatives.”

Monsanto’s Roundup Could Get Whacked by European Regulators, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Mar. 10, 2016

Nothing Outlasts the Fukushima Disaster

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As Prime Minister Shinzo Abe moves to reopen Japanese nuclear plants that were all shut after the disaster on March 11, 2011, a distrustful public is pushing back. A court on March 9, 2016ordered Kansai Electric Power Co. to halt two of the four reactors that have been restarted, saying the utility had failed to show the public they were safe. The utility called the ruling “unacceptable” and said it would appeal….However, near the ruined Fukushima reactors……Growing swaths of land are covered with black bags full of slightly radioactive soil.

The hardest parts of the cleanup haven’t even begun. Tepco, as Tokyo Electric is known, has yet to draw up plans for removing highly radioactive nuclear fuel that melted through steel containment vessels and now sits at the bottom of three Fukushima reactors.The company estimates that the nearly $20 billion job of decommissioning the plant could take another three or four decades. That is not counting damages and cleanup costs expected to reach some $100 billion or more, including about $50 billion paid to evacuees. Legal wrangling over the disaster continues. In February 2016, three former Tepco executives were charged with professional negligence.

Tepco also is working to reduce a total 400 tons of rain and groundwater that breach the plant’s defenses daily, becoming contaminated and requiring treatment and storage. But a wall of frozen earth meant to reduce the flow has run into resistance from regulators.On large parts of the site, workers can now walk around without full-face shields or hazmat suits, using simple surgical masks for protection.Fukushima was once a prized post for elite engineers and technicians in Japan’s nuclear heyday. Now, unskilled laborers make up the bulk of a workforce of about 6,000 workers, down from a peak of 7,450 in 2014. “There’s a constant stream of people who can’t find work elsewhere,” said Hiroyuki Watanabe, a Communist city councilman in Iwaki, about 30 miles away. “They drift and collect in Fukushima.”…

Looking ahead, the biggest issue remains the reactors. No one knows exactly where the molten nuclear debris sits or how to clean it. Humans couldn’t survive a journey inside the containment vessels, so Tepco hopes to use robots guided by computer simulations and video images. But two attempts had to be abandoned after the robots got tripped up on rubble.“The nature of debris may depend on when the nuclear fuel and concrete reacted,” said Pascal Piluso, an official of France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission. “We are talking about extremely varied and complex debris.”….A government panel recently questioned Tepco’s ability to tackle the daunting task of decommissioning while seeking profit for its shareholders. The disaster nearly pushed the company to bankruptcy, prompting the government to buoy it with ¥1 trillion ($9 billion  (really????) in public money and pledge government grants and guarantees to help Tepco compensate victims.”…

Excerpts  from Fukushima Still Rattles Japan, Five Years After Nuclear Disaster, Wall Street Journal, Mar. 8, 2016

Fishermen + Farmers Against Shell

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Tens of thousands of Nigerian fishermen and farmers are suing multinational oil giant Shell in two new lawsuits filed on March 2, 2016 in a British High Court, alleging that decades of uncleaned oil spills have destroyed their lives.  London law firm Leigh Day & Co. is representing them after winning an unprecedented $83.5 million in damages from Shell in a landmark ruling by the same court last year. Shell originally offered villagers $50,000.

In a statement on March 2, 2016 before the trial opened, Shell blamed sabotage and oil theft for the ongoing pollution and noted it had halted oil production in 1993 in Ogoniland, the area where the two communities are located in Nigeria’s oil-rich southern Niger Delta.  Shell said it will challenge the jurisdiction of the British court.

The Ogoni are among the most traumatized of millions of Nigerians suffering oil pollution since the late 1950s….

Excerpts from  MICHELLE FAUL, Nigerians sue Shell in UK court for oil spills contamination, Associated Press, Mar. 2, 2016

Eating Plastics

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The importance of multi-million dollar industries to Australia’s economy is hampering efforts to protect threatened species of marine life from plastics, a problem that has been described as on par with global warming, a government inquiry has heard.  An Australian federal parliament inquiry, sitting in Sydney on is investigating the threat of marine plastic pollution on animals and ecosystems, fisheries, small business and human health in Australia and its waters.…The inquiry heard evidence from scientists and ecologists that micro-plastics, or micro-beads such as those commonly found in common scrubs, face washes, soaps and toothpastes, can affect human health and health of marine animals.  Dr Jennifer Lavers from the University of Tasmania said the scale of marine pollution is on par with major environmental challenges such as global warming and sea level rise, however research was chronically underfunded.  “This is a very, very significant, ubiquitous threat that is rapidly increasing in pace, showing absolutely no signs of stopping,” Lavers told the public inquiry.  “Our understanding of the complex issues, including things like chemical pollution, is so incredibly poor, we’re really just starting at the basic level,” she added….Lavers suspected efforts to protect the threatened species will be continually hampered if they come up against industries worth millions of dollars to the Australian economy….”(Plastic) is a fantastic product … but it is a horrific waste material,” Clean Up Australia executive chairman Ian Kiernan told the inquiry.  “It is so durable, it is so cumulative. We have got to change our behaviour to address these problems.”

However until then, the conservative estimate of 56,000 tons of plastic entering Australia’s environment annually will continue.  And with 30 percent of marine fish in the world’s oceans considered to have plastic in their gut, Lavers said there is “no doubt we are eating residual plastic contamination.”

Excerpts from Industry interests hampering efforts to reduce marine plastics: Australian inquiry, Xinhua, Feb. 18, 2016

Hot Nuclear Waste Deep in the Earth

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The federal government plans to spend $80 million ( assessing whether its hottest nuclear waste can be stored in 3-mile-deep holes, a project that could provide an alternative strategy to a Nevada repository plan that was halted in 2010.  The five-year borehole project was tentatively slated to start later this year on state-owned land in rural North Dakota, but it has already been met with opposition from state and local leaders who want more time to review whether the plan poses any public danger…The Department of Energy wants to conduct its work just south of the Canadian border on 20 acres near Rugby, North Dakota — in part because it’s in a rural area not prone to earthquakes — but is prepared to look elsewhere if a deal can’t be reached. Some sites in West Texas and New Mexico have expressed interest in becoming interim sites for above-ground nuclear waste storage, but it’s not clear if they would be considered for borehole technology.

Project leaders say the research will require months of drilling deep into the earth but will not involve any nuclear waste. Instead, dummy canisters without radioactive material would be used in the project’s third and final phase.  The research team will look at deep rock to check its water permeability, stability, geothermal characteristics and seismic activity — a central concern with burying the hot radioactive waste deep underground….

If the technology proves successful and the government moves forward with deep borehole disposal, there must be no fracking-related injection wells in the vicinity…which some research has linked to seismic activity.

Currently, high-level radioactive waste — both from government sources and utilities’ nuclear power plants — is without a final burial site. The waste at power plants is stored on site in pools of water or in heavily fortified casks, while the government’s waste remains at its research labs.

But the 16,000-foot-deep boreholes could be used for high-level radioactive waste from the department’s decades of nuclear work originally slated to go to Yucca, including nearly 2,000 canisters of cesium and strontium now being stored in water at the department’s Hanford Site in Washington state.

Excerpts from , Feds seek borehole test for potential hot nuke waste burial, Associated Press, Feb. 14, 2016

The Hunger for Rare Metals

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Indium, part of an iPhone’s screen, is an “invisible link…between the phone and your finger”. Just a pinch of niobium, a soft, granite-grey metal mined mostly in Brazil, greatly strengthens a tonne of steel used in bridges and pipelines. Lithium is so light that it has become essential for rechargeable car-batteries. Dysprosium, as well as making an electric toothbrush whirr, helps power wind turbines. Military technology depends on numerous rare metals. Tungsten, for instance, is crucial for armour-piercing bullets. America’s forthcoming F-35 fighter planes are “flying periodic tables”, Mr Abraham writes….[T]he “long tailpipe” of pollution left in the wake of mining and refining, rare metals..

Supplies are also a worry. In 2010 a Chinese trawler rammed Japanese coastguard vessels in waters near islands called the Senkakus in Japanese and the Diaoyu in Chinese (their ownership is disputed by both countries). After the Chinese captain was detained, supplies of rare metals from the mainland to Japan suspiciously dried up. Though China never acknowledged an export ban, the incident caused rare-metal prices to spike, and unsettled manufacturers around the world. …

[The business of rare metals] generates $4 billion of revenues a year and also plays a critical role in systems worth about $4 trillion. China, which develops more rare metals than any other country, understands the calculus. The West, his book suggests, does not.

Excerpts from Rare metals: Unobtainiums, Economist, Jan. 16,  2016 (Book Review of ‘The Elements of Power by  D. Abraham]

The Scramble for Lithium

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SQM, Chile’s biggest lithium producer [has]Its headquarters in the military district of Santiago bears no name. The man who for years ran the business, Julio Ponce, is the former son-in-law of the late dictator, Augusto Pinochet. He quit as chairman in 2015, during an investigation into SQM for alleged tax evasion. (The company is co-operating with the inquiry.) Last month it emerged that CITIC, a Chinese state-controlled firm, may bid for part of Mr Ponce’s controlling stake in SQM, as part of China’s bid to secure supplies of a vital raw material…

SQM is part of a global scramble to secure supplies of lithium by the world’s largest battery producers, and by end-users such as carmakers. That has made it the world’s hottest commodity. The price of 99%-pure lithium carbonate imported to China more than doubled in the two months to the end of December, to $13,000 a tonne…

The industry is fairly concentrated, which adds to the worry. Last year Albermarle, the world’s biggest lithium producer, bought Rockwood, owner of Chile’s second-biggest lithium deposit. It and three other companies—SQM, FMC of America and Tianqi—account for most of the world supply of lithium salts, according to Citigroup, a bank. What is more, a big lithium-brine project in Argentina, run by a joint venture of Orocobre, an Australian miner, and Toyota, Japan’s largest carmaker, is behind schedule. Though the Earth contains plenty of lithium, extracting it can be costly and time-consuming, so higher prices may not automatically stimulate a surge in supply.

Demand is also on the up. At the moment, the main lithium-ion battery-makers are Samsung and LG of South Korea, Panasonic and Sony of Japan, and ATL of Hong Kong. But China also has many battery-makers…Tesla Motors, an American maker of electric cars founded by Elon Musk, a tech tycoon, is also on the prowl. It is preparing this year to start production at its “Gigafactory” in Nevada, which it hopes will supply lithium-ion batteries for 500,000 cars a year within five years….[I]n August Bacanora, a Canadian firm, said it had signed a conditional agreement to supply Tesla with lithium hydroxide from a mine that it plans to develop in northern Mexico. Bacanora’s shares jumped on the news—though analysts noted that shipping fine white powder across the United States border would need careful handling.Bigger carmakers also have a growing appetite for lithium…

Another big source of demand may be for electricity storage. The holy grail of renewable electricity is batteries cheap and capacious enough to overcome the intermittency of solar and wind power—for example, to store enough power from solar panels to keep the lights on all night.

Excerpts from  An increasingly precious metal, Economist, January 16, 2016

Lawsuits Against Shell, Nigeria

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A Dutch appeals court ruled on December 18, 2015 that Royal Dutch Shell can be held liable for oil spills at its subsidiary in Nigeria, potentially opening the way for other compensation claims against the multinational. Judges in The Hague ordered Shell to make available to the court documents that might shed light on the cause of the oil spills and whether leading managers were aware of them.  This ruling overturned a 2013 finding by a lower Dutch court that Shell’s Dutch-based parent company could not be held liable for spills at its Nigerian subsidiary.

The legal dispute dates back to 2008, when four Nigerian farmers and the campaign group Friends of the Earth filed a suit against the oil company in the Netherlands, where its global headquarters is based.  “Shell can be taken to court in the Netherlands for the effects of the oil spills,” the court ruling stated on Friday. “Shell is also ordered to provide access to documents that could shed more light on the cause of the leaks.”  The case will continue to be heard in March 2016.  Judge Hans van der Klooster said the court had found that it “has jurisdiction in the case against Shell and its subsidiary in Nigeria”….

“There are 6,000km of Shell pipelines and thousands of people living along them in the Niger Delta,” he said. “Other people in Nigeria can bring cases and that could be tens of billions of euros in damages.”  In a separate case, Shell agreed in January to pay out £55m ($82 million) in out-of-court compensation for two oil spills in Nigeria in 2008, after agreeing a settlement with the affected community in the Delta.

Excerpt from Dutch appeals court says Shell may be held liable for oil spills in Nigeria, Guardian, Dec. 18, 2015.

 

Migrating Nuclear Waste: West Lake Landfill

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The West Lake Landfill is an unlined mixed-waste landfill located in Bridgeton, Missouri, near St. Louis and the Mississippi River, whose contents have been shown to include radioactive waste; it is thus also an EPA Superfund cleanup. It is operated by Bridgeton Landfill, LLC; Rock Road Industries, Inc.; and CotterCorporation …Contamination from this landfill containing nuclear-weapons-related waste likely has migrated off-site, according to a study published in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity...The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, have said their radiation sampling hasn’t shown evidence of the site posing a threat to the public.

The study’s authors, who include Robert Alvarez, a former senior Energy Department official in the Clinton administration, said they gathered more than 200 samples of soil and sediments from a roughly 75-square-mile area around the landfill. Dozens of the samples contained levels of radioactive lead that exceeded a cleanup standard used in the past by the federal government, the study said.  With West Lake being the largest known nearby repository of radioactive material, the findings are “strong evidence” of the landfill being the primary source, the study concluded. Radon gas is likely escaping from the site and decaying into radioactive lead, said the study.  Some of the highest levels were found in dust samples from several homes, said Mr. Alvarez. Those locations ” deserve further attention,” he said.  Mr. Alvarez, who has been critical of many federal nuclear policies, said some of the contamination, particularly in the homes, could be residue from old above-ground weapons-waste storage sites that were in the area until the early 1970s, when what was left was buried at West Lake.

For instance, as previously reported, federal surveys have found yards of some homes near a tainted creek that runs through the area to be contaminated with low levels of radioactive material, mainly thorium…..

Excerpt from John R. Emshwiller Study Finds Radioactive Waste at St. Louis-Area Landfill Has Migrated Off-Site, Nasdaq, Jan. 2, 2016

Nuclear Waste in the Seabed, Sweden

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Sweden keeps its radioactive operational waste SKB’s Final Repository for Short-Lived Radioactive Waste is located at Forsmark in the municipality of Östhammar. The facility started operating in 1988 and was then the first of its kind in the world.  The radioactive waste deposited in the SFR is low and medium level waste. This means that unlike spent nuclear fuel it does not have to be cooled and is relatively short-lived.  The SFR is situated 50 metres below the bottom of the Baltic and comprises four 160-metre long rock vaults and a chamber in the bedrock with a 50-metre high concrete silo for the most radioactive waste.  Two parallel kilometre-long access tunnels link the facility to the surface.

Except from http://www.skb.com/our-operations/sfr/

Population Resettlement at Fukushima: who dares?

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By the time Fukushima prefecture finishes the task of decontaminating houses and farmland around the Dai-ichi plant, it will have spent an estimated $50 billion on the work.  Some argue it would have been wiser to have spent the money on resettling former residents elsewhere. Already many of the 80,000 or so people displaced from the areas around the plant have begun new lives. Those moving back are mainly elderly. Local officials expect that half of the evacuees, especially those with children who are more vulnerable to radiation, may never return.

Fear of radiation, and distrust of data from the government and from the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the Dai-ichi operator, on the risk it poses, are the biggest reasons. On October 20th, 2015 it was announced that a worker who had helped to contain the accident had developed cancer linked to the meltdown. It was the first such diagnosis, but a recent medical study found a huge leap in cases of thyroid cancer among children and adolescents in Fukushima prefecture since the catastrophe.

Public faith in Japan’s institutions suffered a severe blow as a result of the government’s bungled response to the accident in 2011. So when officials of Tamura city wanted to open the Miyakoji district in 2013, residents resisted and demanded more decontamination work.

A year after the lifting of the evacuation order on his village, Yuko Endo, the mayor of Kawauchi, says distrust is so widespread that he doubts his community will return even near to its former size. But he has visited the area around Chernobyl in Ukraine, the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster 29 years ago. He says the sight there of abandoned villages resembling graveyards has stiffened his resolve to rebuild. Those who have now returned are still deeply sceptical about the assurances they receive. Many ask why, for instance, if the soil is safe, they must take their locally grown produce to be checked for radiation.

There is a particular ray of hope in Naraha—more of one than is evident in Miyakoji and Kawauchi. The town will benefit from jobs related to the decommissioning of the nearby nuclear plants, including Dai-ni, which got through the earthquake and tsunami relatively unscathed. Another of Naraha’s immediate projects is to erect new streetlights. It will be helped by dollops of government aid. Mr Matsumoto, the mayor, talks of luring people back by making his town much more attractive than it was before. But for now, many streetlights do not even work. It is dark at night and the atmosphere is eerie.

Nuclear Power in Japan: Back to the Nuclear Zone, Economist, Oct. 24, 2015, at 39

Nuclear Waste-Idaho National Laboratory

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The U.S. Energy Department has canceled  in October 2015 a plan to ship to the Idaho National Laboratory spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors out of state, a controversial proposal that drew protests from two former governors and a lawsuit from one of them. Incumbent Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter and state Attorney General Lawrence Wasden in January 2015 expressed conditional support for two proposed deliveries of the high-level radioactive waste, saying it would raise the lab’s profile and boost the local economy around Idaho Falls, where the facility is located.

But talks between the Department of Energy (DOE) and Idaho broke down amid mounting opposition to the plan by two of Idaho’s former governors, one of whom filed a lawsuit last month seeking information he said the federal agency was concealing about the proposal.

Cecil Andrus, a Democrat who served four terms as governor, said at the time that he suspected DOE’s intent was to turn the sprawling research facility along the Snake River into a de facto nuclear dump in the absence of a permanent repository for high-level radioactive waste elsewhere in the United States.  Earlier this year, Andrus and former Governor Phil Batt, a Republican, accused DOE of violating a 1995 agreement that banned such shipments to Idaho.Specifically, they said the Energy Department had not yet complied with a provision of the accord requiring removal of nuclear waste already stored at the lab to reduce impacts on an aquifer that supplies drinking water to tens of thousands of Idaho residents.

In a statement sent Friday to Idaho National Lab workers, the director, Mark Peters, said he had been informed that the state and DOE “were unable to reach an understanding that would have enabled the first of two recently discussed shipments of research quantities of spent nuclear fuel to come to INL.” [see also 2011 Memorandum of Agreement on Storage of Research Quantities of Commercial Spent Fuel at the Idaho National Laboratory]  Peters said in his statement that the spent nuclear fuel in question would be delivered instead to “another DOE facility,” though it was not made clear where the materials were now destined.

Energy Department cancels plan to ship nuclear waste to Idaho, Reuters, Oct. 23, 2015

Mining in Peru: China

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Finance Minister Alonso Segura said in an interview in 2015 that Peru is in good shape to weather the biggest flight of capital from emerging markets in a quarter century. It has foreign exchange reserves of more than $60 billion, or about 30 percent of gross domestic product.  With 2.4 percent growth forecast this year, the Peruvian economy will still easily outperform Latin America, whose overall output the IMF expects to shrink by 0.3 percent… What Peru lacks is both strong innovation and public institutions. The World Economic Forum ranks Peru in the bottom fifth globally in both.And so it remains heavily dependent on wooing mining investment with incentives including comparatively lax regulation.  In June 2014, Peru enacted a law further easing environmental rules.

Carlos Monge, Latin America director for the New York-based nonprofit Natural Resource Governance Institute, blames that law for triggering a protest last month in which four people were killed by police bullets at a $7.4 billion Chinese-owned copper mining project.  Protest leaders complained that Las Bambas’ mine owner, China Minmetals Corp., altered the project’s plans without local consent, eliminating plans for a mineral pipeline. Instead, instead crushed ore was to be trucked through communities, increasing contamination.  In May, 2015 five people were killed as farmers in a rice-growing valley mobilized against another copper-mining project, this one Mexican-owned.  In both disputes, the government declared states of emergency and suspended civil liberties locally.  Said Monge: “More conflicts is a very possible scenario, as the government is seeking mining projects at all costs.”

Excerpts from Celebration of Peru’s economic boom comes late, Associated Press, Oct. 9, 2015

Climate Change 2015

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Global carbon emissions were 58% higher in 2012 than they were in 1990. The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has risen from just under 340 parts per million in 1980 to 400 in 2015.  To stand a fair chance of keeping warming to just 2°C by the end of the century—the goal of global climate policy—cumulative carbon emissions caused by humans must be kept under 1 trillion tonnes. Estimates vary but, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the total had hit 515 billion tonnes by 2011. Climate Interactive, a research outfit, reckons that if emissions continue on their present course around 140 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases will be released each year and temperatures could rise by 4.5°C by 2100. And even if countries fully honour their recent pledges, temperatures may still increase by 3.5°C by then.

The world is already 0.75°C warmer than before the Industrial Revolution….

Melting glacier ice, and the fact that warmer water has a larger volume, mean higher sea levels: they have already risen by roughly 20cm since 1880 and could rise another metre by 2100. That is perilous for low-lying islands and flat countries: the government of Kiribati, a cluster of tropical islands, has bought land in Fiji to move residents to in case of flooding. Giza Gaspar Martins, a diplomat from Angola who leads the world’s poorest countries in the climate talks, points out that they are particularly vulnerable to the effects of a warming planet. Money alone, he argues, will not fix their problems. Without steps to reduce emissions, he predicts, “there will be nothing left to adapt for.”…

For every 0.6°C rise in temperature, the atmosphere’s capacity to hold water grows by 4%, meaning storms will pour forth with greater abandon. The rains of the Indian monsoon could therefore intensify, cutting yields of cereals and pulses.

Climate change seems also to be making dry places drier, killing crops and turning forests into kindling. Forest fires in Indonesia, more likely thanks to the current El Niño weather phenomenon, could release 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, about 5% of annual emissions due to human activity, says Simon Lewis of University College London. In recent months fires have swallowed more than 2.4m hectares of American forests. Alaska suffered 80% of the damage—a particular problem because the soot released in these blazes darkens the ice, making it less able to reflect solar radiation away from the Earth.

Developments in the Arctic are worrying for other reasons, too. The region is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, a trend that could start a vicious cycle. Around 1,700 gigatonnes of carbon are held in permafrost soils as frozen organic matter. If they thaw, vast amounts of methane, which is 25 times more powerful as a global-warming gas than carbon dioxide when measured over a century, will be released. One hypothesis suggests that self-reinforcing feedback between permafrost emissions and Arctic warming caused disaster before: 55m years ago temperatures jumped by 5°C in a few thousand years…

And on September 29th Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, warned that though measures to avoid catastrophic climate change are essential, not least for long-term financial stability, in the shorter term they could cause investors huge losses by making reserves of oil, coal and gas “literally unburnable”.

Excerpts from Climate Change: It’s Getting Hotter, Economst, Oct. 3, 2015, at 63

 

Nuclear Waste: play for time

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The problem now, however, is civilian waste from power plants that came online in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Nuclear power generates a fifth of America’s electricity; its 99 reactors account for almost a third of all nuclear power generated worldwide. Five more are under construction—the first to be approved since the 1970s—partly thanks to federal loan guarantees intended to boost clean energy production. The waste they generate has been stored safely, but it will stay dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years. That requires a longer-term plan than leaving it outside, however well encased in concrete.

Under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the federal government pledged to dispose of nuclear waste—both civilian and military—permanently. Several possible plans were drawn up, many involving burying the waste in salt deposits deep under ground. To pay for this eventual cost, a levy was added to the bills of consumers of nuclear power.

But politics got in the way. In 1987 Congress determined that only one place, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, would be considered. This, says Richard Stewart of New York University Law School, was the result of a stich-up between two congressmen who did not want their states to host waste dumps. Tom Foley, the then House majority leader, and Jim Wright, the Speaker, blocked proposals for sites in their home states of Washington and Texas.

Nevadans nickname the 1987 amendment the “screw Nevada” bill, and they have fiercely resisted implementation. Some $15 billion has been spent on building the repository at Yucca Mountain, but no waste has been moved there. Nevadans are quick to point to the damage done to their state by nuclear-weapons tests. Since 2010, the Department of Energy has formally ruled the facility out. In a lawsuit in 2013, the government was forced to stop collecting the levy on nuclear power until a plan exists for a permanent site. It has also been forced to pay utility companies for the costs of storing waste temporarily, since it did not start collecting waste fuel in 1998, as the original law dictated.

Some hope Yucca Mountain might be reopened by a new president. “The only aspect of used fuel in this country that has been problematic is the politics”, says John Keeley of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry lobby group. In January the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the regulator, concluded that the site is safe for the disposal of waste. But the worries of Nevadans—that moving spent fuel on railways might lead to spills, or that radioactivity could leak into the environment—remain.

Recent experience doesn’t help. America already operates one of the world’s few deep storage sites for radioactive waste—near Carlsbad, in New Mexico. It stores waste mostly from nuclear-weapons production. In February 2014 the facility suffered two crippling accidents. One was apparently caused by workers packaging waste with the wrong sort of cat litter. The plant-based “Swheat Scoop” brand they used, unlike the mineral-based kind they were meant to, did not absorb radioactivity very well. The facility has not accepted any new waste since.

Excerpts from Nuclear Waste: Faff and fallout, Economist, August 29, 2015, at 23

Nuclear and Toxic Waste-Iraq

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Most of the Iraq’s vast deposits of radioactive materials are a legacy of the turbulent regime of former leader Saddam Hussein, and have built up over the last four decades. Other toxic materials can be found in the country’s graveyards of contaminated industrial equipment“The parliament has decided to study the situation again after other provinces [including Dhi Qar] rejected such decision,” said Yahya al-Nasiri, governor of the southern Dhi Qar province.

“The proposals suggest burying the waste outside the country or in the desert…Asked if there are other ways to dispose of the waste, he said “it could possibly be buried in the sea using special containers or be sent to countries willing to take it, in exchange for money.”

While Nasiri said other provinces have rejected a similar request, Dhi Qar’s provincial council voted against the Iraqi parliament’s proposal in early July 2015 to use some of the southern province’s land as a burial site for the radioactive pollutants coming from all other provinces of the country.  Dhi Qar’s health and environment committee head Abdulamir Salim at the time slammed the proposal and said it posed a “real threat to the health and security of the province’s citizens.”..

An official Iraqi study in 2010 found more than 40 sites across the country that were contaminated with high levels or radiation and dioxins.  Iraq “without doubt” suffers from these radioactive pollutants inherited from “continuous wars” starting in the 1980s Iraqi-Iran war to the Gulf War in 1990s till 2003, when the United States used highly advanced weapons – including depleted uranium – in its efforts to topple Hussein’s regime, the governor lamented….However, it is not only war-produced pollutants that harm people’s health in Iraq – in addition, there is a lack of quality controls imposed on imported goods.  Radioactive material is also “the result of imports of car parts from Japan to the province,” he added….Areas around Iraqi cities such as Najaf, Basra and Fallujah accounted for more than 25 percent of the contaminated sites, with the southern city of Basra – the frontline during Iran-Iraq war and the Gulf War – having 11 sites, according to the 2010 study.

The study, carried out by the environment, health and science ministries found that scrap metal yards in and around the capital Baghdad and Basra contain high levels of ionizing radiation, which is thought to come from depleted uranium used in munitions during the first Gulf war and since the 2003 invasion.  “The U.S. army unfortunately caused an increase in these radioactive material by using uranium and its advanced arms that use a lot of harmful radioactive material,” Nasiri said. “But the U.S. army did not help nor support our projects to get rid of these pollutants.”

Excerpts from Dina al-Shibeeb, Iraq studying new plan on where to bury radioactive waste, says official, Al Arabiya News, July 18, 2015

Right to Water and Indigenous People: New Zealand

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The Maori claim a special relationship with New Zealand’s fresh water, based on their historical use of its rivers for drinking water, spiritual beliefs, fishing and shellfish harvest, transport and trade, among other things. Their case goes back to 1840, when the British Crown and most of the Maori tribes signed the Waitangi treaty, which first formalised the colonists’ settling of the islands. Maori rights were enshrined in the treaty. An interim ruling by the Waitangi tribunal, set up in 1975 to deal with Maori grievances about land and related issues, says that the Maori have freshwater rights “for which full ownership was the closest cultural equivalent in 1840.”

Although the government has been willing to discuss water rights with some Maori groups, John Key, the prime minister, says that “full ownership” will not be ceded. In 2012 the government sought to part-privatise Mighty River Power, an electricity company with dams on the longest river, the Waikato, which has particular spiritual value for the Tainui tribe. The Maori Council, with representatives from each Maori district, tried to have the sale stopped or postponed. But in 2013 the high court ruled in the government’s favour….

One proposal is that the Maori get a specified water allocation from regional councils, just as farms do. But Federated Farmers, a lobby group, argues that all available water has already been allocated and that specifying a share for the Maori would mean others losing out. New Zealand’s farms rely heavily on water—especially in the dairy sector, which is now the country’s biggest export earner, worth $10 billion a year.

Growing Chinese demand for milk powder means farmers are increasingly switching from meat production to dairy, thereby increasing their water use. Dairy farming is also polluting freshwater supplies, as phosphates and nitrates seep into groundwater. This has become a political issue, not just for the Maori: many of the rivers and lakes loved by all Kiwis are no longer safe to swim in. The most likely outcome is a fudge that avoids saying anyone owns New Zealand’s fresh water. But the Maori may get more influence over some water, or even an allocation.

Excerpts from Maori rights in New Zealand Water, water everywhere, Economist, May 9, 2015 at 34.

Thyroid Cancer + Nuclear Plants: Korea

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South Korea:  After a medical checkup, Hwang, 67, a resident of Gyeongju, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and had to have immediate surgery to remove the tumor. Several other people from her village, which is the closest human settlement to the Wolseong nuclear power plant, were also diagnosed with thyroid cancer.  Hwang is among an increasing number of South Koreans who live near the country’s four nuclear power plants and are joining civil suits against the operator of the plants, demanding compensation for cancer and other adverse health effects.

The citizen’s legal actions were prompted by a landmark ruling by the Busan[where the Kori Nuclear Plant is located]  district court October 2014, which ordered Korea Electric Power Corp., the government-owned operator of the nuclear plants, to pay 15 million won (1.68 million yen, or $13,500) in damages to a thyroid cancer patient. The number of plaintiffs seeking compensation from KEPCO for health damages incurred by radioactive emissions from the plants has now swelled to more than 2,500.   In demanding compensation from KEPCO, she argues that radioactive emissions from the Wolseong nuclear power plant in Gyeongju, with its five reactors, have caused her thyroid cancer.

Lawyer Kim Yeong-hui, who has encouraged residents living near nuclear plants to join the litigation, said that epidemiological surveys in South Korea have shown that residents living 5 to 30 km from nuclear power plants have 1.8 times a higher incidence of thyroid cancer than people from other areas.

Excerpt from  AKIRA NAKANO, More residents joining lawsuits seeking damages from South Korean nuclear plants, Asahi Shimbum, July 15, 2015

The Runit Nuclear Tomb

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[The debris left by the United States nuclear testing at the Marshall islands  were buried under] a vast structure is known as the Runit Dome. Locals call it The Tomb. Below the 18-inch concrete cap rests the United States’ cold war legacy to this remote corner of the Pacific Ocean: 111,000 cubic yards of radioactive debris left behind after 12 years of nuclear tests.  Brackish water pools around the edge of the dome, where sections of concrete have started to crack away. Underground, radioactive waste has already started to leach out of the crater: according to a 2013 report by the US Department of Energy, soil around the dome is already more contaminated than its contents.  Now locals, scientists and environmental activists fear that a storm surge, typhoon or other cataclysmic event brought on by climate change could tear the concrete mantel wide open, releasing its contents into the Pacific Ocean….

Enewetak Atoll, and the much better-known Bikini Atoll, were the main sites of the United States Pacific Proving Grounds, the setting for dozens of atomic explosions during the early years of the cold war.  The remote islands – roughly halfway between Australia and Hawaii – were deemed sufficiently distant from major population centres and shipping lanes, and in 1948, the local population of Micronesian fishermen and subsistence farmers were evacuated to another atoll 200 km away.  In total, 67 nuclear and atmospheric bombs were detonated on Enewetak and Bikini between 1946 and 1958 – an explosive yield equivalent to 1.6 Hiroshima bombs detonated every day over the course of 12 years.

The detonations blanketed the islands with irradiated debris, including Plutonium-239, the fissile isotope used in nuclear warheads, which has a half-life of 24,000 years.  When the testing came to an end, the US Defence Nuclear Agency carried out an eight-year cleanup, but Congress refused to fund a comprehensive decontamination programme to make the entire atoll fit for human settlement again.

The DNA’s preferred option – deep ocean dumping – was prohibited by international treaties and hazardous waste regulations, and there was little appetite for transporting the irradiated refuse back to the US.  In the end, US servicemen simply scraped off the islands’ contaminated topsoil and mixed it with radioactive debris. The resulting radioactive slurry was then dumped in an unlined 350-foot crater on Runit Island’s northern tip, and sealed under 358 concrete panels.

But the dome was never meant to last. According to the World Health Organization, the $218m plan was designed as temporary fix: a way to store contaminated material until a permanent decontamination plan was devised.  Meanwhile, only three of the atoll’s 40 islands were cleaned up, but not Enjebi, where half of Enewetak’s population had traditionally lived. And as costs spiralled, resettlement efforts of the northern part of the atoll stalled indefinitely.  Nevertheless, in 1980, as the Americans prepared their own departure, the dri-Enewetak (“people of Enewetak”) were allowed to return to the atoll after 33 years.

Three years later, the Marshall Islands signed a compact of free association with the US, granting its people certain privileges, but not full citizenship.  The deal also settled of “all claims, past, present and future” related to the US Nuclear Testing Program – and left the Runit Dome under the responsibility of the Marshallese government.  Today, the US government insists that it has honoured all its obligations, and that the jurisdiction for the dome and its toxic contents lies with the Marshall Islands.  The Marshallese, meanwhile, say that a country with a population of 53,000 people and a GDP of $190m – most of it from US aid programs – is simply incapable of dealing with the potential radioactive catastrophe left behind by the Americans.

Today, Runitis still uninhabited, but it receives regular stream of visitors heading from neighboring islands to its abundant fishing grounds or searching for scrap metal to salvage.…Three decades after the Americans’ departure, abandoned bunkers dot the shoreline, and electric cables encased in black rubber snake across the sand.Nowhere on the beaches or the dome itself is there a warning to stay away – or even an indication of radioactivity.

The US has yet to fully compensate the dri-Enewetak for the irreversible damage to their homeland, a total amounting to roughly $244m as appraised by the Nuclear Claims Tribunal.+++ Many locals are deeply in debt, and dependent on a supplemental food program funded by the US Department of Agriculture, which delivers shipments of process foods such as Spam, flour and canned goods. The destruction a centuries-old lifestyle have lead to both a diabetes epidemic and regular bouts of starvation on the island….

Other – and more worrying – traces of Enewetak’s history have also reached China: according to a 2014 study published in Environmental Science & Technology, plutonium isotopes from the nuclear tests have been found as far a the Pearl River Estuary in Guangdong province.

Many people in Enewetak fear that one day the dome will break open, further spreading highly radioactive debris.  As catastrophic weather events become more frequent, recent studies – including 2013 study of the Runit Dome’s structural integrity carried out by the DoE – have warned that typhoons could destroy or damage the cement panels, or inundate the island. A 2013 report commissioned by the US Department of Energy to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory acknowledged that radioactive materials are already leaching out of the dome, but downplays the possibility of serious environmental damage or health risks….

Independent scientists say that salvaging Runit’s scrap metal may expose locals to much higher risks.“Those guys are digging in the dirt breathing in stuff in hot spots. That has to be hundreds of thousands times higher doses of potential health effects than swimming,” said Ken Buessler, a senior scientist and marine chemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who visited Runit and gathered samples of sediment in the lagoon earlier this year…

“Why Enewetak?” asked Ading, Enewetak’s exiled senator during an interview in the nation’s capital. “Every day, I have that same question. Why not go to some other atoll in the world? Or why not do it in Nevada, their backyard? I know why. Because they don’t want the burden of having nuclear waste in their backyard. They want the nuclear waste hundreds of thousands miles away. That’s why they picked the Marshall Islands.” “The least they could’ve done is correct their mistakes.”

Excerpts from Coleen Jose et al., The radioactive dome on Enewetak atoll, Guardian, July 3, 2015

+++In June 1983, the Agreement Between the Government of the United States and the Government of the Marshall Islands for the Implementation of Section 177 of the Compact of Free Association (referred to as 177 Agreement) established the Claims Tribunal “with jurisdiction to ‘render final determination upon all claims past, present and future, of the Government, citizens and nationals of the Marshall Islands which are based on, arise out of, or are in any way related to the Nuclear Testing Program.”The Tribunal was established in 1988.

See also UN Human Rights report Mission to the Marshall Islands

Nuclear Waste Disposal: Japan

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The Japanese government will select potential areas to host nuclear dump sites instead of waiting for communities to volunteer, according to the revised policy on permanent disposal of high-level radioactive waste that was adopted by the Cabinet on May 22, 2015  The revision, the first in seven years, was prompted after towns, villages and cities throughout Japan snubbed requests to host nuclear waste dumps. The government has been soliciting offers since 2002.

The move is seen as a sign that the government wants to address the matter as it proceeds with its pursuit of reactor restarts. All commercial units have largely sat idle since the triple meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 plant in 2011….Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration is seeking to revive atomic power, although the majority of the public remains opposed in light of the Fukushima disaster, which left tens of thousands homeless. Critics have attacked the government for promoting atomic power without resolving where all the waste will end up.

Permanent disposal of high-level nuclear waste requires that a depository be built more than 300 meters underground, where the materials must lie for up to 100,000 years until radiation levels fall to the point where there is no harm to humans or the environment.  About 17,000 tons of spent fuel is stored on the premises of nuclear plants and elsewhere in Japan, but some would run out of space in three years if all the reactors got back online.  Under the revision, the government said it will allow future generations to retrieve high-level waste from such facilities should policy changes or new technologies emerge.

Worldwide, only Finland and Sweden have been able to pick final depository sites.

Excerpts from METI changes tactics after search for nuclear waste host proves futile,  Japan Times, May 22, 2015

Oil Pollution in Nigeria – Shell

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Farmers impacted by the Shell Petroleum Development Company, SPDC, Kolo Creek oil fields spill in Otuasega, Ogbia Local Government Area of Bayelsa State, have gone to court over the April 15, 2015 spill, which polluted their farms.According to the farmers, they were excluded from a Joint Investigation Visit to probe the impact of the spill despite their attempt to draw the attention of the team to their impacted farms.

A fish farmer, Mr. Aku Asei, whose three ponds were impacted, said the affected farmers numbering over 50 resolved to take legal action over the incident in the wake of the alleged claim of sabotage by Shell.”This is a clear case of the powerful and rich oil firm against the weak and poor farmers. They are claiming that the spill was caused by sabotage and abandoned the polluted environment. The regulations which they relied on to absolve themselves clearly stated that the operator of the field where pollution occurs must clean up the site irrespective of the cause but SPDC officials declined to capture the farms as impacted areas….[T]he spill was as a result of negligence by SPDC surveillance contractors deployed to guard the facility…

The farmers, made up of fish farmers, banana and plantain plantation owners in the area also appealed to Bayelsa State Government to assist them in prevailing on the oil firm to clean up the areas and pay compensation to them.

Nigeria: Farmers Take Shell to Court Over Oil Spill Impact in Bayelsa, AllAfrica.com, May 12, 2015

Nuclear Industry in Siberia

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Professor Leonid Rikhvanov says he has a number of questions about the potential damage to the community from reactors that have been used since the Soviet Era .His plea comes as the Siberian Chemical Combine  (SCC) in Seversk, a secretive city located 15 miles north of Tomsk, prepares for the construction of a new experimental fast reactor  known as BREST-300…

‘I would also like to raise the question of conducting a complex study on how the SCC’s reactors have affected the environment over the past 50 years. Before making a decision on new projects, it’d be worth estimating the outcomes of the old ones’…Siberian Chemical Combine in Seversk, a secretive city located 15 miles north of Tomsk, prepares for the construction of a new experimental fast reactor.

‘And lastly I would ask about warheads [housed at SCC as recently as the 1990s]. Have they been replaced or not? If not, in what conditions are they kept?’He added: ‘I’m not radical and I support the idea of nuclear energy. But the approach to its use, and to estimating risks, should be totally different. Russian nuclear enterprises as they are now are so dangerous that it’d definitely be better if they didn’t exist at all.’

On April 6 2015 it was reported in Seversk that construction was already under way of a pilot plant for the production of fuel for the experimental BREST-300 reactor.The new reactor will work on special ‘pills’ made from the spent nuclear fuel and taken from the old reactors, with officials saying it will allow waste-free production of energy.  It is thought the pilot plant will begin operating in 2017, with the full new BREST-300 reactor up and running from 2020.

Prof Rikhvanov stressed that he is not anti-nuclear but insisted that it has to be used correctly with the proper safety and environmental considerations in place. An accident at a new plant at the Siberian Chemical Combine in February 2015 resulted in an employee receiving burns to his hands.And, of course, a massive explosion at the site in April 1993 resulted in the release of a radioactive gas cloud in an incident listed as one of the world’s worst nuclear accidents.Prof Rikhvanov was one of the experts flown into Seversk following the incident, allowing him a rare glimpse inside the secretive city to analyse the state of the plant.

‘First of all, we got to see what is there,’ he recalled. ‘I visited all the production facilities, I saw the reactors, the well where the waste is put to, and the warehouses where the nuclear warheads were stored with my own eyes.’I saw about 23,000 decommissioned warheads stored there. And I doubt they have been moved elsewhere since then. By the way, at the time, they were stored in terrible conditions and I don’t know what it is like now.’ The professor also found out that a facility for storing liquid radioactive waste in aquifers was located near to where the water supply was sourced on the Tom River.  As far as he is aware, the situation remains the same. He said: ‘We pump water from aquifers on the left side of the river, and store some of the most hazardous elements humanity has ever created in aquifers on the other side of the river…

Another concern he has is that the city is ‘still not prepared’ for a mass evacuation in the event of a major incident.’The road to Maryinsk is terrible, the second branch of the railway hasn’t spring out yet,’ he said. ‘There is also no separate railway to ship the radioactive materials to SCC without going through Tomsk. Such freights are now going through city railway station which creates additional risks.’

Excerpts from Olga Gertcyk & Derek Lambie, Expert raises serious questions over state of the nuclear industry in Siberia,  Siberian Times, May 2, 2015

Kitty Litter and Nuclear Waste: Don’t Mix

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The US energy department is to fund $73m in road and other infrastructure projects in New Mexico as compensation for radiation leaks at a nuclear laboratory and underground dump.The deal struck between the department and New Mexico forgoes fines and instead applies funds to upgrade federal nuclear facilities and surrounding communities in the state, according to settlement documents.  Projects include construction of a $5m emergency operations centre in Carlsbad, near where the nuclear waste dump leaked radiation in February 2014.

The leak at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or Wipp, exposed 22 workers to radiation in amounts not expected to threaten their health and led to the indefinite suspension of key operations at the site, which is the energy department’s only permanent underground disposal facility for certain types of waste from US nuclear labs.The radiation accident was caused by “chemically incompatible” contents, including cat litter, which reacted in a barrel of waste and caused it to rupture, according to a federal probe of the mishap.  The breached drum containing radioisotopes such as plutonium was improperly packaged with the wrong sort of absorbent litter at the Los Alamos National Laboratory near Santa Fe before it arrived at WIPP for disposal, investigators found….

The deal includes $34m to improve roads around the Wipp site, $12m to improve nuclear waste transportation routes in and around Los Alamos, and $9.5m in stormwater management upgrades at the lab’s complex.In addition it provides $10m for improvements to water infrastructure in and around Los Alamos and $2.75m for an independent compliance and operational review. Energy department officials have estimated the cost of the initial recovery of the dump at $240m and that it might be two years or more before it is fully operational.

Excerpts from New Mexico radiation accident: $73m compensation deal struck over leak, Guardian, Apr. 30, 2015

Corruption Begets Corruption: Nigeria Oil

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Dead fish wash up on the once-fertile shores of creeks around Bodo, a town in the Niger delta, that are covered with crude oil more than six years after two massive spills. Locals have only now received compensation from Shell, the oil firm responsible for the leaks. For the first time in half a decade, fishermen have cash to start businesses, repair their houses and send children to school… “Look,” says the chief of a tiny town called B-Dere, just a few miles from Bodo. He gestures to the deathly-black banks still bearing the marks of the slicks. “There is nothing to drink, nowhere to fish. What good has come from it?”

The cash that the oil industry provides has greased Nigerian politics for decades. Gross mismanagement and corruption in the industry are the causes of much of the inequality and discontent with the ruling party in an economy that is not just Africa’s largest but that ought to also be one of its wealthiest…

Nigeria pumps something like 2m barrels of oil a day. These account for most of its exports and about 70% of government revenues. But official figures are as murky as its polluted creeks. Volumes are recorded only at export terminals rather than at the wellhead, says Celestine AkpoBari of the Port Harcourt-based advocacy group, Social Action. Were a proper tally kept, he says, corruption would be exposed on a scale that would shock even the most cynical Nigerian.

It seems likely that more than 100,000 barrels of crude are stolen (or “bunkered” in the local parlance) every day, at a cost to the state and investors of billions of dollars a year. Politicians, oil workers and security forces are said to be behind the complex cartels that steal, illegally refine and sell crude oil. They have amassed almost unimaginable wealth in a country where poverty is still rife.

Oil’s taint has seeped into almost all levels of government and business. Yet the central problem is found in the petroleum ministry, which wields vast unaccountable power. The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), a state-owned behemoth, is responsible for all aspects of the industry, from exploration to production and regulation. It is among the most secretive oil groups in the world, and is “accountable to no one”, says Inemo Samiama, country head of the Stakeholder Democracy Network, a non-profit group.

In 2013 the former governor of the central bank, Lamido Sanusi, alleged that $20 billion in oil revenues was missing from state coffers. He was fired for his troubles soon after. …

Even where cash has not been nicked, it has often been squandered. Take the Excess Crude Account (ECA), a sovereign-wealth fund intended to cushion Nigeria’s budget against falling oil prices. Most of it was spent over the past two years, despite oil prices being relatively high for most of that period.

The industry itself is in as sorry a state as the government’s finances. Although oil practically gushes from the ground in parts of the delta, oil output has been stagnant for years and billions of dollars of investment are stalled because of uncertainty over a new law for the industry.  This is holding back Nigeria’s economy almost across the board. Because the industry has failed to build the infrastructure to pipe gas to domestic consumers such as power plants, much of it is simply flared and burned: Britain reckons that some $800m worth of Nigeria’s gas a year goes up in smoke. The country is also chronically short of fuel even though it has four state-owned oil refineries. Because of poor maintenance and ageing equipment they operate at well below capacity, forcing Nigeria to import about 70% of the fuel it needs. There is little incentive for reform since the government pays hefty subsidies to NNPC to keep on importing…

But a starting point should be to halt subsidies for fuel imports. At a stroke that would undercut a major source of corruption and crime (both on land and at sea) that spills into neighbouring countries, the destination for smuggled consignments of cheap Nigerian fuel. It should also take a close look at NNPC, which should not be allowed both to participate in the market and regulate it. Some of its assets could be privatised. The ruling party and opposition are considering both….

For communities in Ogoniland, the most pressing problem is cleaning up. Shell has promised to mop up the mess around Bodo, though the process has yet to start. Compensation is one thing, Bodo residents say, but what they really want is their livelihood back.

Nigeria’s oil: Crude politics, Economist,  Mar. 28, 2015, at 54

Boycotting Coal

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Chinese coal  consumption dipped by 1.6% in 2014, despite economic growth of 7.3%. The country’s voracious appetite for steel is peaking, damping demand for coking coal. Worries about pollution mean that demand for thermal coal, as used in power stations, is slackening too. Water conservation is another concern for policymakers—on current trends coal could account for a quarter of China’s water use by 2020 and coal reserves are mainly in the most parched regions. Its coal-fired plants are running at only 54% of capacity, a 35-year low. In Beijing two big coal-fired plants closed this week; the capital’s last one will shut down next year.

Another prop to demand has been power generation in rich countries. But in America coal now struggles to compete with natural gas, which has fallen by 80% in price since 2008. Domestic coal use there peaked in 2007. European consumption soared after Germany’s hasty decision to close its nuclear-power plants. But gas and renewables are eating into that.

Coalswarm, an environmental think-tank, says in a new report that two-thirds of coal-fired power plants proposed worldwide since 2010 have been stalled or cancelled…. Overall, Europe and America have already cut coal-fired generation capacity by over a fifth in a decade. The output of American coal mines dropped to 1993 levels in 2013.

Political pressure is growing against the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel. Coal provides 40% of the world’s electricity. But of 1,617GW of global capacity, 75% is of the dirtiest kind…. The chimneys of all but the most modern coal plants also emit plenty of other nasties. Mercury emissions stunt young brains. Sulphur and nitrous oxides scald lungs. Overall, coal kills around 800,000 people a year, most of them poor. In China it is responsible for up to a sixth of the particulates most dangerous for human health.

In America the coal and electric-utility industries are fighting the Environmental Protection Agency’s attempts to curb emissions of CO2, mercury and other toxins contained in coal. On March 25th, 2015 the Supreme Court heard arguments by some state governments, backed by the miners and utilities, that the agency has failed duly to consider the cost of its measures against mercury (see article).

Campaigners reckon 80% of the world’s coal reserves must stay in the ground if the planet is to stand a chance of keeping global warming under 2ºC by 2050. A divestment movement akin to the apartheid-era campaign to boycott South Africa is under way in many universities. Stanford may dump its coal investments and Oxford University is under pressure to do likewise. The World Bank no longer invests in coal-fired plants. Last year Norway’s sovereign-wealth fund dumped its holdings in more than 50 coal companies worldwide. South Korea recently introduced a carbon cap-and-trade scheme which punishes coal….

Furthermore, in some emerging markets, India especially, demand for coal is set to continue rising—so overall global demand may not peak until at least the 2030s. This week India’s government predicted a 19% rise in the country’s coal imports in this fiscal year. But thereafter the plan is to bring in private contractors to develop India’s untapped coalfields, and then to phase out all thermal-coal imports. If so, that will be grim news for the Indonesian, Australian and South African mining firms that are supplying India at the moment.

Even though some other developing nations’ coal imports will grow in future, coal companies are having to face up to a crisis now. Some are cutting costs and getting ready for a wave of consolidation. Others are litigating and lobbying against change.

Excerpts from Coal Mining: In the Depths, Economist, Mar. 28, 2015, at 65

Green Dams that Kill

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A planned mega-dam in Guatemala, whose carbon credits will be tradable under the EU’s emissions trading system, has been linked to grave human rights abuses, including the killing of six indigenous people, two of them children.  Several European development banks and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) have provided funds for the $250m (£170m) Santa Rita dam.

But human rights groups back claims from the Mayan community that they were never consulted about the hydro project, which will forcibly displace thousands of people to generate 25MW of energy, mostly for export to neighbouring countries.  The issue has become a focus of indigenous protest in Guatemala – which has led to a march on the capital and severe political repression.

“At the moment our community is living under the same conditions as they did during the war,” Maximo Ba Tiul, a spokesman for the Peoples’ Council of Tezulutlán told the Guardian. “Our civilian population is once again being terrorised by armed thugs.”  Around 200,000 Mayans died or were “disappeared” during the civil war of the early 1980s, leading to the conviction of the country’s former president, Efraín Ríos Montt, in 2013 on genocide charges.

Augusto Sandino Ponce, the son of a local landowner who community leaders allege worked as a contractor to Montt’s junta during the civil war, is at the centre of new accusations of human rights violations. Last April Ponce and his bodyguards allegedly opened fire on a Mayan community ceremony in which families asked the Earth for permission to plant their crops. One local man, Victor Juc, was killed and several were injured. Ponce reportedly claims he was acting in self defence…

In a letter to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) clean development mechanism (CDM) executive board,  the People’s Council of Tezulutlán outlined a litany of human rights abuses in the region, including kidnappings, evictions, house burnings, attacks by men wielding machetes and guns, and the arrest of community leaders.  The council also says that an environmental impact assessment for the dam suggests that it would create a 40ft-high wall, flooding local communities and depriving them of access to water, food, transport and recreation.  In approving projects, the CDM board pursues a narrow remit focused on emissions reductions. The reign of terror in the Alta Verapaz region, falls outside it – as did similar events in Honduras….

Perhaps the most shocking incident took place on 23 August 2013, when two children were killed by an allegedly drunken Santa Rita hydroelectricity company worker looking for David Chen, a community leader in the Monte Olivo region.   Chen was meeting with the rapporteur of the Inter American Commission on Human Rights at the time. When the worker could not find him, he is said to have lined up two of Chen’s nephews, David Stuart Pacay Maaz, 11 and Haggai Isaac Guitz Maaz, 13, and killed them with a single bullet to one child’s head that continued through the throat of the other. The killer has since been killed himself.  The annual report of the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights implicitly blamed the approval of the dam project for the killings….

Eva Filzmoser, the director of Carbon Market Watch said: “We want the CDM board to take responsibility and establish a grievance and redress mechanism for local communities to appeal, ask for problematic decisions to be rescinded and gain redress. We will be pushing for this at the Paris climate summit to apply to all forms of climate finance in the future.”Efforts to reform the CDM were boosted last month, when 18 countries signed a “Geneva declaration” calling for human rights norms to be integrated into UNFCCC climate decisions….Signatory countries to the declaration include France, Sweden, Ireland, Mexico, Uruguay and Peru.

Excerpts Green’ dam linked to killings of six indigenous people in Guatemala, Guardian, Mar. 26, 2015

Land for Nuclear Waste – Fukushima

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The March 11, 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami tore through coastal towns in northern Japan and set off meltdowns at Tokyo Electric Power’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, which sits partly in Okuma.  Japan has since allocated more than $15 billion to an unprecedented project to lower radiation in towns around the plant, such as Okuma. Every day across Fukushima prefecture, teams of workers blast roads with water, scrub down houses, cut branches and scrape contaminated soil off farmland.  That irradiated trash now sits in blue and black plastic sacks across Fukushima, piled up in abandoned rice paddies, parking lots and even residents’ backyards.  Japan plans to build a more permanent storage facility over the coming years in Okuma and Futaba, another now-abandoned town close to the Fukushima nuclear plant – over the opposition of some local residents.

“This land has our blood and sweat running through it and I can’t just let go of it like that,” said Koji Monma, 60, an Okuma resident who heads a local landowners’ group.  Fukushima’s governor agreed to take the waste facility after Tokyo said it would provide $2.5 billion in subsidies, and promised to take the waste out of the prefecture after 30 years. Mayors of Futaba and Okuma have since agreed to host the 16 square km (6.2 square mile) facility – about five times the size of New York’s Central Park – which will wrap around the Fukushima plant and house multiple incinerators.

Some 2,300 residents who own plots of land in Futaba and Okuma which the government needs for the waste plant face what many describe as an impossible choice...Distrust of government promises runs deep among residents here. …

The ministry has hired around 140 real estate representatives to negotiate land sales with individual owners.

Excerpts from BY MARI SAITO, Fukushima residents torn over nuclear waste storage plan, Reuters, Mar. 9, 2014

400 Nuclear Safety Failures: Nuclear Weapons, U.K.

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Britain’s nuclear weapons base has suffered from a dozen serious nuclear safety failures in recent years, according to official records.  Over the last six years HM Naval Base Clyde, where Britain’s Trident nuclear submarine fleet is based, suffered from nearly 400 “widespread” nuclear safety events relating to a “poor safety culture”.

In 12 of these cases the problems involved an “actual or high” risk of unplanned exposure to radiation or contained release of radiation within a building or submarine, according to information released by ministers in the last week.  Last year the number of nuclear safety events involving nuclear propulsion nearly doubled, from 57 in 2013 to 99 in 2014.  In one incident in 2012, contractors working on the base were exposed to radiation while repairing submarine equipment.

The 12 most serious events at the base, classified by the Ministry of Defence as “Category B”, are ones in which there is an “actual or high potential for a contained release [of radiation] within building or submarine or unplanned exposure to radiation”.  According to the Ministry’s own criteria, this classification is used for safety events that involve a “major failure in administrative controls or regulatory compliance”.

Other serious nuclear safety events included the unsafe operation of a crane on a jetty handling explosives, faulty radiation testing, and low-level radioactive contamination around a pipe that dumps supposedly decontaminated waste into the sea.  Despite the problems, the base has not recently suffered from any of the most serious category of safety failures – ‘Category A’ – which would have involved release into the environment in the surrounding area.

Excerpt from JON STONE,Britain’s nuclear weapons base suffers from ‘serious’ nuclear safety incidents and ‘poor safety culture, Independent, Mar. 2, 2015

Spilling Toxic Liquids – Train Accidents

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The US federal government predicts that trains hauling crude oil or ethanol will derail an average of 10 times a year over the next two decades, causing more than $4 billion in damage and possibly killing hundreds of people if an accident happens in a densely populated part of the U.S.  The projection comes from a previously unreported analysis by the Department of Transportation that reviewed the risks of moving vast quantities of both fuels across the nation and through major cities. The study completed last July took on new relevance this week after a train loaded with crude derailed in West Virginia, sparked a spectacular fire and forced the evacuation of hundreds of families .  This  accident was the latest in a spate of fiery derailments, and senior federal officials said it drives home the need for stronger tank cars, more effective braking systems and other safety improvements.

The volume of flammable liquids transported by rail has risen dramatically over the last decade, driven mostly by the oil shale boom in North Dakota and Montana. This year, rails are expected to move nearly 900,000 car loads of oil and ethanol in tankers. Each can hold 30,000 gallons of fuel.  Based on past accident trends, anticipated shipping volumes and known ethanol and crude rail routes, the analysis predicted about 15 derailments in 2015, declining to about five a year by 2034.

The 207 total derailments over the two-decade period would cause $4.5 billion in damage, according to the analysis, which predicts 10 “higher consequence events” causing more extensive damage and potential fatalities.  If just one of those more severe accidents occurred in a high-population area, it could kill more than 200 people and cause roughly $6 billion in damage.

The Association of American Railroads  and the Railway Supply Institute, which represents tank car owners and manufacturers, said federal officials had inflated damage estimates and exaggerated risk….Safety officials are pushing to make the tanker-car fleet even stronger and confronting opposition from energy companies and other tank car owners….Derailments can happen in many ways. A rail can break underneath a train. An axle can fail. A vehicle can block a crossing. Having a better tank car will not change that, but it should reduce the odds of a tank car leaking or rupturing,…

Railroads last year voluntarily agreed to reduce oil train speeds to 40 mph in urban areas. Regulators said they are considering lowering the speed limit to 30 mph for trains not equipped with advanced braking systems. Oil and rail industries say it could cost $21 billion to develop and install the brakes, with minimal benefits.

Derailments of trains hauling fuel could kill hundreds, cost billions, Associated Press, Feb. 22, 2015

How Ships Dump Oily Waste at Sea

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A ship company based in Germany and the chief engineer on one of its vessels have agreed to plead guilty to illegally dumping oily water off Alaska.  The AML Ship Management GMBH and Nicolas Sassin, the chief engineer on the AML-operated ship City of Tokyo, agreed to plead guilty to violating federal clean water law by knowingly dumping 4,500 gallons of oily bilge water south of the Aleutian Islands.  The company and Sassin, 45, face a separate charge of presenting false pollution oversight records to the U.S. Coast Guard when the vessel docked in Portland, Oregon, prosecutors said.  As part of the plea deal, AML agreed to pay $800,000 in fines and community service payments…

Discharge of oily waste from vessels is a worldwide problem, said Kevin Feldis, first assistant U.S. attorney.”This is the first time we have charged Clean Water Act crimes for an actual discharge of oil into the EEZ (exclusive economic zone) off the coast of Alaska,” Feldis said in an email. “As detailed in the court documents, witnesses saw a sheen off the side of the vessel after the chief engineer hooked up a pump to illegally dump oily bilge water overboard.”

Water routinely accumulates in the bilge, or bottom, of vessels. Federal law requires ships to store it until it can be treated on shore, or to run it through an onboard oil-water separator. Water that contains less than 15 parts per million of petroleum can be dumped overboard…On Aug. 29, 2015  as the ship passed 165 miles south of Alaska’s Sanak Island, Sassin used an illegal pump system to dump untreated oily bilge water over the side of the 603-foot ship, bypassing the oil-water separator and other pollution control equipment, prosecutors said.

“Nobody knows exactly how much oily waste is illegally dumped from ships, but as this case demonstrates, a determined engineer with a few pieces of equipment who does not have proper oversight can easily circumvent the pollution prevention equipment onboard vessels,” Feldis said.

Excerpt from DAN JOLING, German company, ship’s chief engineer reach plea agreement in Alaska marine pollution case, Associated Press, Feb. 12, 2015

Demand for Gold Causes Deforestation

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The global gold rush, driven by increasing consumption in developing countries and uncertainty in financial markets, is an increasing threat for tropical ecosystems. Gold mining causes significant alteration to the environment, yet mining is often overlooked in deforestation analyses because it occupies relatively small areas. As a result, we lack a comprehensive assessment of the spatial extent of gold mining impacts on tropical forests.

The study Global demand for gold is another threat for tropical forests published in Environmental Research Letters provides a regional assessment of gold mining deforestation in the tropical moist forest biome of South America. Specifically, we analyzed the patterns of forest change in gold mining sites between 2001 and 2013, and evaluated the proximity of gold mining deforestation to protected areas (PAs)….Approximately 1680 km2 of tropical moist forest was lost in these mining sites between 2001 and 2013. Deforestation was significantly higher during the 2007–2013 period, and this was associated with the increase in global demand for gold after the international financial crisis….In addition, some of the more active zones of gold mining deforestation occurred inside or within 10 km of ~32 PAs. There is an urgent need to understand the ecological and social impacts of gold mining because it is an important cause of deforestation in the most remote forests in South America, and the impacts, particularly in aquatic systems, spread well beyond the actual mining sites.

Excerpt from Abstract, Global demand for gold is another threat for tropical forests

UK Nuclear Tests in Australia: Maralinga

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In the mid-1950s, seven bombs were tested at Maralinga in the south-west Australian outback. The combined force of the weapons doubled that of the bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in World War Two.  In archive video footage, British and Australian soldiers can be seen looking on, wearing short sleeves and shorts and doing little to protect themselves other than turning their backs and covering their eyes with their hands.Some reported the flashes of the blasts being so bright that they could see the bones of their fingers, like x-rays as they pressed against their faces.

A cloud hangs over Australia’s Monte Bello Islands after Britain tested its first atomic bomb
Much has been written about the health problems suffered by the servicemen as a result of radiation poisoning. Far less well-documented is the plight of the Aboriginal people who were living close to Maralinga at the time….”A lot of people got sick and died,” said Mima Smart, an aboriginal community leader.”It was like a cancer on them. People were having lung disease, liver problems, and kidney problems. A lot of them died,” she said, adding that communities around Maralinga have been paid little by way of compensation.  It’s a ten hour drive to the nearest big city, Adelaide. But people here say that the Australian government was wrong to let the tests go ahead and that Britain acted irresponsibly…

“They didn’t want to do it in their own back yard because their back yard wasn’t big enough,” said Robin Matthews, caretaker of the Maralinga Nuclear Test Site.”They thought they’d pick a supposedly uninhabited spot out in the Australian desert. Only they got it wrong. There were people here.”During the 1960s and 70s, there were several large clean-up operations to try and decontaminate the site.  All the test buildings and equipment were destroyed and buried. Large areas of the surface around the blast sites was also scraped up and buried.

But Mr Matthews said the clean-up, as well as the tests themselves, were done very much behind closed doors with a high level of secrecy.“You’ve got to remember that this was during the height of the Cold War. The British were terrified that Russian spies might try and access the site,” he said.  The indigenous communities say many locals involved in the clean-up operation also got sick.  Soil at the nuclear site grow so hot from the blast that it melted and turned to silicon has long been declared safe. There are even plans to open up the site to tourism.

But it was only a few months ago that the last of the land was finally handed back to the Aboriginal people. Most, though, say they have no desire to return there….And even almost 60 years on, the land still hasn’t recovered. Huge concrete plinths mark the spots where each of the bombs was detonate

Excerpt from Jon Donnison, Lingering impact of British nuclear tests in the Australian outback, BBC, Dec. 31, 2014

States Captured by their Energy Companies – Canada

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Few governments have aligned their interests so closely to those of their country’s energy and mining firms as Canada’s Conservative administration. The prime minister, Stephen Harper, has boasted of Canada as an “emerging energy superpower”. Under the banner of “responsible resource development”, his government has done its best to ease the way for minerals firms, at home and abroad, including directing some foreign aid to countries where Canadian firms wanted to drill. Ministers point with pride to the C$174 billion ($169 billion) in export revenues from sales of minerals, oil and gas in 2013 and to the fact that Canada is home to more than half of the world’s publicly listed exploration and mining companies.

But the downside of seeming so cosy with extractive firms is that whenever one of them gets in trouble—an inevitable occurrence with 1,500 firms active in more than 100 countries—the country’s image is tarnished too. So the government has recently begun to reduce that vulnerability by taking a stricter line on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and bribery by Canadian firms operating abroad. Protecting the national brand is “a huge part of it,” says Andrew Bauer of the Natural Resource Governance Institute, a group that monitors the industry and lobbies for openness.

Ed Fast, the international trade minister, admitted as much on November 14th, as he introduced new rules that require Canadian resources firms involved in disputes with local communities to take part in a resolution process. If any firms refuse, the government will withdraw its economic diplomacy on their behalf…[In the meantime there are ] protests against Canadian firms’ projects, from Romania where environmentalists are objecting to plans for an opencast gold mine, to Guatemala, where guards at a nickel mine have been accused of gang rape…

A new Canadian law  was introduced in October 2014 to curb bribery by mining and energy firms by demanding more transparency from them. The law, which still must be fleshed out in detailed regulations, requires them to disclose all payments made to domestic and foreign governments…It helped that the law was backed by an unusual coalition of non-government organisations and mining companies themselves. T  It seems that the miners’ experience in dealing with local communities is making them more sensitive to their concerns about corruption and other ills. In contrast, the oil and gas firms are lobbying for the transparency law to be weakened. They want to be given exemptions in countries whose local laws conveniently prohibit the disclosure of such payments. They also want to avoid having to give a project-by-project breakdown of their payments, without which the information would be of little use.

Excerpt Canada’s natural-resources companies: Reputation management, Economist, Nov. 22, 2014

Keystone XL: 2014 Update

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Keystone XL makes environmentalists livid… Oil extracted from Canada’s tar sands produces about 17% more carbon dioxide than conventionally-pumped supplies do—largely thanks to the energy needed to get it out of the ground. The process uproots forests and leaves toxic lakes behind. A pipeline carrying Canadian oil to Gulf coast refineries would lower the cost of getting such oil to market, so it might encourage energy firms to extract more…

Canadian oil is already getting to market, points out Charles Ebinger of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank—just mostly by barge and train. A new pipeline would ease the strain on Canada’s railways and increase the profitability of extracting the oil. But compared with swings in global oil prices, the effect will be small. Nor will many jobs be created. Most of those 42,000 are temporary posts; just 35 full-time permanent employees will be needed to run the pipeline.  Oddly, the project may not matter much in Louisiana. If completed, Keystone XL will deliver oil to Texas…

Excerpt from: Keystone XL: Back in the Pipeline, Economist, Nov. 22, 2014, at 26

Gross Negligence: Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

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BP wants its money back — hundreds of millions of dollars of it — but a federal judge said Wednesday (Sept 24. 2014) that the oil giant must stand by the agreement it made with the companies it compensated for losses blamed on the 2010 Gulf oil spill.BP argued that a flawed funding formula enabled nearly 800 businesses to overestimate their spill-related claims.

One construction company hundreds of miles from the coast received $13.2 million, but deserved $4.8 million at most, BP said. Another company selling “animals and animal skins” was overpaid about $14 million, and about 50 others shouldn’t have been paid at all, the company said.  About 150 claimants should return a total of $185 million, and overpayments to the rest haven’t been calculated, attorney Kevin Downey argued.

U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier was not persuaded, thwarting BP’s latest attempt to control potential liabilities now approaching $50 billion.  The judge agreed weeks ago to change the compensation formula for any future payments, but ruled that a deal is a deal when it comes to the money BP has already paid out. Under that deal, claimants agreed not to sue, and BP agreed that no future court action could change their payments….

Barbier said he would rule later on the issue of compensation for cleanup workers whose chronic medical problems weren’t diagnosed until after the deal’s cutoff date of April 16, 2012. The settlement entitled cleanup workers with chronic conditions including rashes and breathing problems to receive up to $60,700 if the problems first surfaced within days of their cleanup work…

BP’s closing share price was $50.20 the day of the explosion, and fell to $22.80 in June 2010, before the well was capped. Shareholders returned after BP set aside $42 billion to cover its liabilities, reassured the financial damage was contained.  That’s no longer so clear: The judge’s ruling this month that BP showed gross negligence and willful misconduct added a new level of uncertainty around BP’s spill-related expenses, reducing its market value by $9 billion in a single day.,,BP’s total potential liabilities now include up to $18 billion in fines and penalties that could be imposed for violating federal pollution laws, and more than $27 billion BP says it has already paid to restore the coast and settle damage claims.

JANET MCCONNAUGHEY and JONATHAN FAHEY,Businesses Won’t Have to Return BP Spill, Associated Press, Sept. 24, 2014

 

Nuclear Waste Politics, Secrecy – Canada

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Ontario Power Generation is proposing to build a massive underground nuclear waste site at the Bruce nuclear power plant near Kincardine, Ontario (Canada) near lake Huron,a plan that has drawn opposition from environmentalists, aboriginal groups and legislators in Michigan.  At issue were numerous meetings of the “community consultation” advisory group, comprising the mayors who sit on county council and representatives of the Nuclear Waste Management Organization and Ontario Power Generation, that began in 2005.

The citizen groups alleged the discussions were kept secret because the politicians feared damaging their electoral fortunes and pointed to informal notes from one meeting in February 2010 that showed a mayor fretting about “a negative backlash at the polls.”The probe by Amberley Gavel — a company based in London, Ont., that helps municipalities with closed-meeting procedure investigations — concluded the public never knew about any of the meetings.

It also found the discussions had a marked influence on the mayors’ decisions regarding the radioactive waste project despite their contention the meetings were simply information sessions at which they passed no motions.  The citizen groups said the province should be reviewing the conduct of Ontario Power Generation.  They also said the county response — to ask staff to provide annual reminders about the law requiring open meetings — was “appallingly weak.”  Council members have “thus far show defiance with no hint of remorse,” the statement said.

Save our Saugeen Shores and the Southampton Residents Association  called on Ontario’s ombudsman to review the circumstances that led to a report critical of Bruce County council for meeting nuclear waste representatives without telling anyone or documenting the discussions.  “This was a major error of provincewide importance in light of the evidence of an 8.5-year egregious disregard of the law and the public’s right to open and transparent government,” Rod McLeod, the group’s lawyer, said in a statement.

Colin Perkel,  Nuclear waste opponents call for penalties against ‘secret meetings’, The Canadian Press, Sept. 18, 2014

Weather Modification in India

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State governments, tea estate owners, politicians and even some insurance companies are exploring cloud-seeding options. The process involves seeding clouds with chemicals that will lead them to promote precipitation or rain. (The process is also used to boost snowfall and curb hailstones and fog.)  [Indian] companies involved in cloud seeding such as Myavani, Kyathi Climate Modification Consultants [affiliated  with US based Weather Modification Inc.]and Agni Aero Sports expect business to grow as much as a fourth this year over 2012, when the country last saw weak rains.

Bangalore-based Agni Aero Academy, which has been involved in cloud seeding in India since 2003 and undertook cloud-seeding projects for MCGM [Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai]  in 2009 and the Karnataka government in 2012, expects a pickup in business.

Girish Odugoudar, 33, of Myavani, which has jointly bid for the Mumbai project along with US National Centre for Atmospheric Research, is aiming to establish his business. “We have the infrastructure and capability and success in one project should open many doors,” he said.

Excerpts, Madhvi Sally, Artificial rainfall: Cloud seeding companies may play rainmakers
Madhvi Sally, the Economic Times of India, July 23, 2014,

On-Demand Germs: Bioengineering for the Military

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From the DARPA website:

The development of increasingly sophisticated techniques and tools to sequence, synthesize and manipulate genetic material has led to the rapidly maturing discipline of synthetic biology. …[But] The costs of maintaining required environmental controls and detecting and compensating for genetic alterations are substantial and severely limit the widespread application of synthetic biology to U.S. national security missions.

To help address these challenges, DARPA has created the Biological Robustness in Complex Settings (BRICS)  BRICS seeks to develop the fundamental understanding and component technologies needed to increase the biological robustness and stability of engineered organisms while maintaining or enhancing the safe application of those organisms in complex biological environments. The goal is to create the technical foundation for future engineered biological systems to achieve greater biomedical, industrial and strategic potential.

“By making these systems more robust, stable and safe, BRICS seeks to harness the full range of capabilities at the intersection of engineering and biology,” said Justin Gallivan, DARPA program manager. “These capabilities could include efficient on-demand bio-production of novel drugs, fuels, sensors and coatings; or engineered microbes able to optimize human health by treating or preventing disease.”

Excerpt from BUILDING THE FOUNDATION FOR FUTURE SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY APPLICATIONS WITH BRICS, July 29, 2014

Predator Bacteria for War

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The  Pathogen Predators Program of DARPA would represent a significant departure from conventional antibacterial therapies that rely on small molecule antibiotics. While antibiotics have been remarkably effective in the past, their widespread use has led to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections that are difficult or impossible to treat. In vitro studies have shown that predators such as Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus and Micavibrio aeruginosavorus can prey upon more than one hundred different human pathogens and will also prey on multi-drug resistant bacteria.

The Pathogen Predators program will answer three fundamental questions about bacterial predators:

1) Are predators toxic to recipient (host) organisms?
2) Against what pathogens (prey) are predators effective?
3) Can pathogens develop resistance to predation?

This list [of bacteria that could be killed by predator bacteria] includes NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) Category A and B threats to national security:

NIAID Category A and B
Yersinia pestis (i.e. plague)
Francisella tularensis (i.e. tularemia)
Brucella species
Coxiella burnetii (i.e. Q fever)
Rickettsia prowazekii (i.e.  typhus)
Burkholderia mallei (i.e. glanders)
Burkholderia pseudomallei (i.e. melioidosis)

Source DARRA (pdf)

Oil Shale: Costs and Benefits

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[A] second shale revolution is in prospect, in which cleaner and more efficient ways are being found to squeeze the oil and gas out of the stone. The Jordanian government said on June 12th that it had reached agreement with Enefit, an Estonian company, and its partners on a $2.1 billion contract to build a 540MW shale-fuelled power station. Frustratingly for Jordan, as it eyes its rich, oil-drenched Gulf neighbours, the country sits on the world’s fifth-largest oil-shale reserves but has to import 97% of its energy needs.

In Australia, Queensland Energy Resources, another oil-shale company, has just applied for permission to upgrade its demonstration plant to a commercial scale. Production is expected to start in 2018. Questerre Energy, a Canadian company, also said recently that it would start work on a commercial demonstration project, in Utah in the United States.

In all these projects, the shale is “cooked” cheaply, cleanly and productively in oxygen-free retorts to separate much of the oil and gas. In Enefit’s process the remaining solid is burned to raise steam, which drives a generator. So the process produces electricity, natural gas (a big plus in Estonia, a country otherwise dependent on Russian supplies) and synthetic crude, which can be used to make diesel and aviation fuel. The leftover ash can be used to make cement. Enefit’s chief executive, Sandor Liive, says his plants, the first of which started production in December 2012, should be profitable so long as oil prices stay above $75 a barrel (North Sea Brent oil was around $113 this week).

Although the new methods of exploiting the rock are cleaner than old ones, environmentalists still have plenty to worry about. Oil shale varies hugely in quality. Estonia’s is clean, Jordan’s has a high sulphur content, Utah’s is laden with arsenic. Like opencast coal mining, digging up oil shale scars the landscape. Enefit has solved that in green-minded Estonia, by landscaping and replacing the topsoil. Other countries may be less choosy.

Some of the world’s biggest energy firms have also experimented with mining and processing oil shale, only to give up, after finding that it took so much energy that the sums did not add up. However, Shell says it is making progress with a new method it is trying, also in Jordan, in which the shale is heated underground with an electric current to extract the oil.

These rival technologies have yet to prove their reliability at large scale—and they are far from cheap. Mr Liive reckons it will cost $100m to get a pilot project going in Utah (where his firm has bought a disused oil-shale mine), and another $300m to reach a commercial scale. A fall in the oil price could doom the industry, as happened in the 1980s when a lot of shale mines went out of business…America this week loosened its ban on crude exports. If the second shale revolution succeeds, it will have a lot more oil to sell.

Oil shale: Flaming rocks, Economist, June  28, 2014, at 58

Un-addicted to Coal – United States

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released on June 2, 2014 the Clean Power Plan proposal, which for the first time cuts carbon pollution from existing power plants, the single largest source of carbon pollution in the United States…

Power plants account for roughly one-third of all domestic greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. While there are limits in place for the level of arsenic, mercury, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particle pollution that power plants can emit, there are currently no national limits on carbon pollution levels.

[Goals to be achieved by 2030]

· Cut carbon emission from the power sector by 30 percent nationwide below 2005 levels, which is equal to the emissions from powering more than half the homes in the United States for one year;

· Cut particle pollution, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide by more than 25 percent as a co-benefit;

· Avoid up to 6,600 premature deaths, up to 150,000 asthma attacks in children, and up to 490,000 missed work or school days—providing up to $93 billion in climate and public health benefits; and

· Shrink electricity bills roughly 8 percent by increasing energy efficiency and reducing demand in the electricity system.

The Clean Power Plan will be implemented through a state-federal partnership under which states identify a path forward using either current or new electricity production and pollution control policies to meet the goals of the proposed program. The proposal provides guidelines for states to develop plans to meet state-specific goals to reduce carbon pollution and gives them the flexibility to design a program that makes the most sense for their unique situation. States can choose the right mix of generation using diverse fuels, energy efficiency and demand-side management to meet the goals and their own needs. It allows them to work alone to develop individual plans or to work together with other states to develop multi-state plans.

Also included in today’s proposal is a flexible timeline for states to follow for submitting plans to the agency—with plans due in June 2016, with the option to use a two-step process for submitting final plans if more time is needed. States that have already invested in energy efficiency programs will be able to build on these programs during the compliance period to help make progress toward meeting their goal.

Excerpt, EPA Proposes First Guidelines to Cut Carbon Pollution from Existing Power Plants/Clean Power Plan is flexible proposal to ensure a healthier environment, spur innovation and strengthen the economy, US EPA Press Release, June 2, 2014

The Fate of Nuclear Waste from Oil Drilling

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Scotoil Services Ltd, a company which disposes of radioactive waste from the North Sea oil industry, inadvertently pumped dangerous particles into Aberdeen Harbour over several months.  The pollution included materials such as lead-210, radium-226 and radium-228, which both glow blue in the dark, and polonium-210, which was used to poison the former Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko.  An investigation by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) found one “gross” breach and several “major” breaches of the firm’s operating conditions.

However, the public was never told about the leak, which continued unchecked from November 2011 until April 2012, and it also appears that the Scottish Government was not informed either.   While Scotoil had installed equipment to remove solid material from their liquid effluent, in April 2012, they informed Sepa that a final filter they were using had potentially failed Sepa said in a statement.

Scotoil has long been at the centre of concerns about radioactive particles washing up on the southern end of Aberdeen Beach, known as Foot Dee.  Drilling for oil and gas causes Naturally-Occurring Radioactive Material (NORM) to build up on offshore equipment – an estimated 50 to 100 tonnes each year from the North Sea alone.  For years, Scotoil and other operators could allow small particles of NORM to be discharged into the sea with the water they used to clean the drills and other pieces of essential kit.

However, tighter restrictions brought in from October 2011 mean that all particles must now be screened out and sent to secure landfill sites in sealed drums, along with the bulk of the solid waste.  Following a Freedom of Information request by this newspaper, it emerged that Sepa became aware of the potential Scotoil leak in April, 2012.  The company contacted Sepa to report “that particles of NORM have been discharged in their liquid effluent to the marine environment… Scotoil’s view is that the filters failed allowing the solid material into the environment”.

Excerpt  from, Ben Borland, Scots kept in the dark over radiation leak into harbour at Aberdeen, Scottish Express, Apr. 26, 2014

Dumping Coal in the Sea

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Until recently Colombia was lax in enforcing its environmental laws. So it came as a shock to the country’s mining industry when, in January, the government halted coal exports from a port operated by Drummond, an American miner, in a row over pollution. The suspension has been costly not only for Drummond: its operations generate $66m a month in royalties and taxes for the Colombian treasury.

The mining minister, Amylkar Acosta, confirmed this week that the government would let the company resume its exports later this month, when it completes improvements to the port facility to prevent contamination of nearby beaches. The government has been under pressure to take action since environmentalists photographed an incident last year in which more than 500 tonnes of coal were dumped into the Bay of Santa Marta to stop a barge from sinking. Last month six employees at the port were charged, and face possible jail sentences. Drummond has been fined $3.6m and told to clean up the mess.

The case is an illustration of how the government, having welcomed foreign miners, is now having to contend with public disquiet over both pollution and the way the country’s mineral wealth is shared. In an election in May, President Juan Manuel Santos will seek a second term. So he cannot ignore the “hostile” climate of public opinion on the issue, says Alvaro Ponce, a Colombian mining expert.

Protests by nearby residents have delayed several big projects, including AngloGold Ashanti’s proposed gold mine in Tolima province and Eco Oro’s planned gold and silver mine in Santander province. A study by Colombia’s national audit office, published in January, found that economic and social development in towns next to large mining operations is worse than in places where illegal coca crops are grown for making cocaine.

The environment ministry is seeking new powers to require licences for exploration as well as extraction. Mining firms grumble that the process of getting projects approved is already tortuous enough. This and the recent fall in world prices of some minerals mean that up to $7.3 billion of investments are stalled, they say. Mr Acosta says the miners must accept that besides getting their official permits, they have to convince local communities to accept their presence, earning a “social licence” to operate. “Without that, the projects become unviable,” he says.

The backlash against mining has been building for some years. In the mid-2000s, when commodity prices were booming and Colombia’s internal conflicts were subsiding, the government offered incentives for foreign firms to come in and create mining jobs. It awarded exploration permits for swathes of territory, including in areas hitherto off limits, such as the fragile páramo tundra in the Andes. “The floodgates were opened,” says James Lockhart-Smith of Maplecroft, a risk-analysis firm.

But Colombia’s regulators were ill-prepared. In 2011 the government stopped accepting new applications for licences while it dealt with a backlog of 19,000. It rejected 90% of these, then turned its attention to 10,000 projects that had already been given licences, finding that 92% were failing in some way to comply with their conditions.

Despite all the stumbles and setbacks, Colombia is getting somewhere in its drive to exploit its mineral reserves. In 2013 mining investment was $3.6 billion, 21% more than in 2012. Mining already accounts for 2.3% of GDP and 7% of exports, and foreign companies are still lining up to explore new prospects. By the standards of resource-rich emerging economies, it is a fairly well-run place, so the chances are that it will succeed in coming up with a licensing regime that eases public worries without deterring investment. As in richer countries, mining projects will still be welcomed, but not at any price.

Mining in Colombia: Digging itself out of a hole, Economist, Mar. 15, 2014, at 61

Angry about Pollution: China

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China is now emitting almost twice as much carbon dioxide as the next-biggest polluter, America. At current rates, it will produce 500 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide between 1990 and 2050—as much as the whole world produced between the start of the Industrial Revolution and 1970. Pollutants in the air in Beijing have hit 40 times the level decreed safe by the World Health Organisation. Yet China did not have a ministry devoted to environmental protection until 2008, and the government has done its best to keep information about the levels of filth in the air and water under wraps. Even now, the state is keeping secret a nationwide survey of soil pollution.

The new rules that have just come into effect signal the beginning of a move towards openness. They require 15,000 enterprises, including some of the biggest state-owned ones, to make public in real time details of their air pollution, waste water and heavy-metals discharges…Things are opening up at a local level, too. In 2012 only a few cities, including Beijing, published statistics on air quality. Now 179 do. And more firms are volunteering information about pollution—especially those that need foreign investors.

The impetus behind this new transparency is not a sudden enthusiasm for liberalism. Rather, the government is worried that people are increasingly angry about pollution—a recent Pew survey of the concerns of Chinese citizens found that pollution was fourth, behind inflation, corruption and inequality, but was rising fast—and attempts to clean the country up by central-government fiat are foundering.

China’s environment: A small breath of fresh air, Economist, Feb. 8, 2013, at  14

Madagascar Sells Polluting Rights to Microsoft

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Madagascar’s government has agreed to sell forest-related carbon credits to Microsoft and Zurich’s zoo, which will help protect the Makira National Park, in the first sale of state-owned REDD+ credits in Africa, according to the group that manages the park.  The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), an international charity headquartered in New York City, said the revenues from selling carbon credits generated by avoided deforestation in Makira will finance the conservation of one of Madagascar’s most pristine rainforest ecosystems, while supporting the livelihoods of local people.

The funds will be used by the government for activities under its Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation “plus” conservation (REDD+) programme, and by WCS to manage Makira park. But the largest share – half of the proceeds – will go to support local communities in areas around Makira for education, health and other projects, WCS said.

The Makira forest, which spans nearly 400,000 hectares (over 1,500 square miles), is home to an estimated 1 percent of the world’s biodiversity, including 20 lemur species, hundreds of species of birds, and thousands of plant varieties, some unique to the location. The forests also provide clean water to over 250,000 people in the surrounding landscape.

Jonathan Shopley, managing director of The CarbonNeutral Company, which handled the purchase for Microsoft, said its clients are increasingly looking for opportunities to manage the entire environmental impact of their organisation, driven by the need to make their supply chains more resilient…In Madagascar, burning for agricultural land and extraction of wood for household energy leads to around 36,000 hectares (139 square miles) of natural forest being lost each year, WCS said.

BY MEGAN ROWLIN, Madagascar: Microsoft Buys Carbon Credits From Madagascar Rainforest, AllAfrica.com, Feb. 13, 2014

Bonga Oil Spill: the Nigeria v. Shell

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The Director General, Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) Mr. Patrick Akpobolokemi has slammed Anglo Dutch oil giant, Shell for the way and manner it handles oil spill in the country, especially in the oil and gas rich Niger Delta region.  He said the response of the foremost oil firm to oil spillages in the country fell short of international standards and practices.  The helmsman of Nigeria’s apex maritime regulatory authority spoke against the backdrop of the Bonga oil spill incident which wreaked havoc in many communities in the Niger Delta region in 2011.

The National Assembly had last week through the House of Representatives Committee on Environment, organised a public hearing over the incident.  Recounting NIMASA’s experience during the incident, Akpobolokemi said that the oil giant tried as much as possible to frustrate the agency’s attempts to move to the site of the spill.  As a stop gap measure, he explained that the agency provided some relief material to some of the communities affected by the spill.  Akpobolokemi flayed Shell for it poor response and nonchalant attitude towards spill incidents in the Niger Delta area and called for an immediate stop to this.

Said he: “The kind of impunity Shell and its allies have demonstrated so far in the Niger Delta area in the past must stop if the future of the people of Nigeria and the environment are to be protected,” adding that in other countries when spills like this occur, the first thing is remuneration, attention to the affected communities and finding ways of reducing the sufferings of the people and restoring the ecosystem, which Shell has failed to do. “Shell fell short of all these criteria and of course it is sad that it is only in Nigeria that we can witness this degree of impunity.

“We in NIMASA see this as a serious infraction to our laws, communities and the damage done to the communities and the ecosystem can be seen as genocide. When a similar spill occurred in the gulf of Mexico, Shell was alive to its responsibilities, they were made to pay compensation to the affected communities but today in Nigeria, any spill that occur, a claim of sabotage or third party claims are the order of the day.” He said NIMASA had made presentations before the House Committee on Environment, asking SNEPCO to pay compensation, not an administrative fee, to the communities totalling $6.5 billion.

“The response from Shell was evasive and do not suggest that it is a company that is alive to its responsibility. It believes that the culture of impunity can continue to go on, thereby playing with our legal system. May we use this opportunity to correct the wrong that has been done to the Nigerian environment because of the callousness of this company and we stand by our position that compensation must be paid to the communities.

“What we expect Shell to do is to come to the negotiating table and discuss with the affected communities on the means of payment so that the communities can get back their natural eco-system”.

John Iwori, Bonga Oil Spill: NIMASA Slams Shell, http://www.thisdaylive.com/,  Feb. 14, 2014

 

The Malaria Experiment at Comoros Islands

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What if it were possible to get rid of malaria? Not just bring it under control, but wipe it from the face of the Earth, saving 660,000 lives a year, stopping hitherto endless suffering, and abolishing a barrier to economic development reckoned by the World Bank to cost Africa $12 billion a year in lost production and opportunity? It is an alluring prize, and one that Li Guoqiao, of Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, thinks within reach.

Dr Li is one of the researchers who turned a Chinese herbal treatment for the disease into artemisinin, one of the most effective antimalarial drugs yet invented. Now he is supervising experiments in the Comoros, using a combination drug therapy based on artemisinin, to see if malaria can be eradicated from that island country. If it works, he hopes to move on to somewhere on the African mainland, and attempt to repeat the process there….

Dr Li’s approach is to attack not the mosquito, but the disease-causing parasite itself. This parasite’s life cycle alternates between its insect host (the mosquito) and its vertebrate one (human beings). Crucially, as far as is known, humans are its only vertebrate host. Deny it them and it will, perforce, wither away—an approach that worked for the smallpox virus, which had a similarly picky appetite. In the case of smallpox, a vaccine was used to make humans hostile territory for the pathogen. Since there is no vaccine against malaria, Dr Li is instead using drugs.

To deny the parasites their human hosts long enough to exterminate them in a given area, the researchers administer three doses of Artequick, spaced a month apart. To add extra power, the first dose is accompanied by a third drug, primaquine. Dr Li and his colleagues call this approach Fast Elimination of Malaria through Source Eradication, or FEMSE.

And it works—almost. The Comoros has three islands: Moheli, Anjouan and Grande Comore. Before the experiment started, more than 90% of the inhabitants of some villages on these islands had malaria. Song Jianping, Dr Li’s lieutenant in the Comoros, blitzed Moheli with Artequick in 2007. The number of cases there fell by 95%, though reinfection from other islands caused a small subsequent rebound. In 2012 he did the same thing on Anjouan. There, the number of cases fell by 97%. In October 2013 the campaign moved to Grande Comore, the most populous island. When the process is complete there, nearly all of the 700,000 Comorans will have taken part in FEMSE.

Ninety-five percent, or even 97%, is not eradication. But it is an enormous improvement and creates a position from which eradication can be contemplated. To do that, though, means keeping an effective surveillance programme permanently in being so that those who become infected can be treated quickly, to stop them spreading the parasite…

A more immediate concern is the safety of the drugs. Artemisinin and piperaquine are pretty safe, but primaquine ruptures red blood cells in people with a deficiency of an enzyme called G6PD. That can kill. And a lot of Africans—in particular, 15% of Comorans—are G6PD-deficient….

There is also the question of informed consent to the drugs. Smallpox vaccination permanently protected the person being vaccinated. There was thus an individual as well as a collective benefit to offset any possible side-effects. Prophylactic drug treatment protects only for as long as the drugs stay in the body—which is a few weeks (and explains the need for three rounds of treatment). Dr Song’s results suggest the benefit is real. But it is a collective benefit. That changes the moral calculus. On the one hand, there is the risk of healthy people being harmed by side-effects. On the other, there is the risk of their free-riding, by taking the collective benefits while not taking the drugs themselves.

To avoid such free-riding, a lot of official encouragement to participate has happened—encouragement some people regard as tipping over into pressure and propaganda. In a public meeting in Niumadzaha, a village in the south of Grande Comore, for example, the chief doctor of the local health centre shouted through a megaphone: “This drug is safe and effective. You are not being used as guinea pigs. The WHO would not allow this administration to happen if you were being used as guinea pigs.”

Certainly, there is a lot riding on the project. Dr Mhadji says FEMSE will save the Comoros $11m a year in direct and indirect costs (for comparison, its annual health-care budget is $7.6m), as well as preserving many lives that would otherwise have been lost and saving survivors from the brain damage malaria can cause. The eradication of malaria will also, he hopes, make the Comoros more attractive as a destination for tourists.

Others hope to profit, too. Artepharm has high expectations of Artequick and is using the drug’s success in the Comoros in its marketing campaigns in South America, South-East Asia and Africa. Moreover, the arm of the Chinese government that administers that country’s foreign aid, and is thus helping pay for the project, is the Ministry of Commerce—for Chinese largesse is more explicitly tied to the promotion of the country’s business than is aid from most Western countries.

Not that the West is a disinterested party, for Western firms, too, manufacture artemisinin-based malaria therapies. On that point Dr Mhadji has strong views. He dismisses criticism of the experiment as fuelled by competition between Western and Chinese pharmaceutical companies.

As Nick White, a malaria researcher at Oxford University’s School of Tropical Medicine who has been working for years on eradicating malaria, says, “This research is radical. It is controversial. It is led by a very famous Chinese physician and investigator. There are lots of very serious questions here and a lot of unknowns.” Or, as Oscar Wilde more succinctly put it, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

Malaria eradication: Cure all?, Economist, Jan 25, 2014, at 66

Saving Forests through Forced Evictions

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For decades, the Kenyan government has attempted to evict indigenous people from the forests of Embobut and Cherangany, in the western county of Elgeiyo Marakwet. Past tactics have even included torture and setting fire to homes, those affected say…The government – accused in recent weeks of preparing to carry out yet another forced eviction – maintains that communities living in 12 forest glades must leave so it can rehabilitate the degraded forest and the water services it provides to the surrounding regions and beyond.

“This is a government initiative aimed specifically at conserving the country’s second-largest water tower – nothing else,’’ said Inspector Stephen Chessa, who works for the Kenya Forest Service (KFS) and is in charge of the Embobut eviction…

But one forest warder who preferred to remain anonymous told Thomson Reuters Foundation he and his colleagues had been instructed to evict forcefully anyone who resists the move.  The U.N. special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, James Anaya, expressed deep concern about this prospect, urging the Kenyan government “to ensure that the human rights of the Sengwer indigenous people are fully respected, in strict compliance with international standards protecting the rights of indigenous peoples”.  Most families are asking for more time to assemble their things and harvest crops before leaving the forest.   But Solomon Mibei, head of conservation for the KFS, said families would not be given extra time and the evictions would continue as planned. “They have no reason to continue staying in the forest – they were compensated,’’ he said.

The situation is complex because there are different communities living in Embobut: the Sengwer indigenous people; groups displaced by disasters and political violence; and others who have come to benefit from cultivation opportunities.  “Why should the government treat us equally with the victims of post-election violence and landslides?’’ asked Sengwer spokesperson Yator Kiptum. “The forest is our home – our case is different, it’s not fair at all.”…According to Article 63 of the constitution, community land shall be vested in and held by communities identified on the basis of ethnicity, culture or similar community of interest. Community land consists of ancestral lands and lands traditionally occupied by hunter-gatherers.

Justin Kenrick of the Forest Peoples Programme (FPP), a UK-based rights organisation, said the government’s justification for evicting people is forest conservation, but research has long since shown that forests are best preserved not by evicting ancestral communities but by supporting them to regain secure rights to their land.  Payments to evictees by the government are “intended to distract the public and the communities themselves from addressing the real issues”, Kenrick said. “According to international treaties to which Kenya is a party, the Sengwer should have been consulted, and accepted or rejected the proposal,’’ he added.  Kiptum, however, claims the Sengwer were not consulted, did not sign anything, and have not agreed to hand over their land for the small amount of money that has been paid into some people’s bank accounts.  “You cannot create a humanitarian crisis for the sake of conserving biodiversity while there are other ways of doing it better,” said Stephen Cheboi, coordinator of the North Rift Human Rights Network based in nearby Eldoret town. He also called for an audit of the compensation process.

Excerpts from Caleb Kemboi, Indigenous rights clash with forest protection in Kenya, Reuters, Jan. 17,, 2014

See also Biodiversity and Human Rights

Mining in Africa: who gets the money?

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Most west African governments have signed—or pledged to sign—the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). The EITI tries to ensure that contracts and accounts of taxes and revenue generated by concessions are open to public scrutiny. But that is easier said than done. Last year Liberia’s government asked a British accounting firm, Moore Stephens, to carry out an audit of Liberian mining contracts signed between the middle of 2009 and the end of 2011. The audit, published in May 2013, found that 62 of the 68 concessions ratified by Liberia’s parliament had not complied with laws and regulations. The government has yet to take action after a string of recommendations emerged from an EITI retreat in July 2013.

Regional governments also fret over a practice known as “concession flipping”, whereby foreign mining companies that do not have the capacity to exploit sites sell their concessions to larger companies for windfall profits. “Every flip is essentially a heist on the government exchequer, with anonymous offshore firms as the getaway car,” says Leigh Baldwin of Global Witness, a London-based lobby that fights for fairer deals for local people and their governments from mining and other resources. Concession flipping, he adds, is widespread in Africa. The Africa Progress Panel, headed by Kofi Annan, a Ghanaian who once led the UN, has put out a report called “Equity in Extractives”. This, too, stresses a need for more openness in mining contracts. As people in the region demand more democracy, better deals from mining are a new priority.

Mining in west Africa: Where’s our cut?, Economist, Dec. 7, 2013, at 51

Trapping the Dirty Bomb

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Nuclear and radiological materials slipped out of regulatory control 2,331 times between 1995 and the start of 2013, according to the Incident and  Trafficking Database compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The materials are widely used in industry, agriculture and medicine. They are kept in many poorly guarded X-ray and cancer-treatment clinics. Such places are often not overseen with terrorism in min  d. They have even been bought by crooks as front operations, says Rajiv Nayan, of India’s Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. Raids on abandoned uranium mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo are more frequent, according to that country’s General Atomic-Energy Commission. The problem is most acute in the former Soviet Union: in Ukraine alone, roughly 2,500 organisations use radiological materials.

In Georgia a counter-trafficking unit set up by the interior ministry seven years ago has arrested two or three teams smuggling radiological material every year save 2009. The lure of profits is so strong that some ex-cons get back into the business, says Archil Pavlenishvili, leader of the unit. Interpol has said such trafficking is growing: an acute “real threat to global security”.  It all sounds scary enough. But the reality has been less so. Moreover, by many accounts the most plausible dangers appear to be declining.

For a start, an “overwhelming” number of buyers turn out to be undercover cops, says Mark Hibbs of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank. A sizeable network of informers helps Georgia’s interior ministry to keep a close eye on the four or five cells in the country currently trying to obtain or sell radiological material, says Mr Pavlenishvili. ..Beyond this, intelligence agencies are hunting down traffickers with help from special “link analysis” computer programs. Also known as “network analysis” software, this crunches data from numerous sources to identify people whose travel, purchases, web searches, communications, schooling and so forth may spell trouble—perhaps an employee in radiation therapy who begins frequenting an inconveniently located bar whose owner receives phone calls from a drug-runner with growing operations.

Half a dozen Western governments “pay huge amounts of attention” to this, says an executive at a developer of the software. At least one spy agency in America, Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and an unnamed European country pays more than $1m a month to use it. The counter-trafficking units in both Georgia and Romania note that link-analysis software made by i2, owned by the giant IBM computer company, has helped to nab traffickers. Atsuko Nishigaki, the unit’s boss, says Japan’s economy ministry employs ten analysts to use a competitor’s software to identify traffickers in nuclear or radiological material.

America’s National Nuclear Security Administration has sponsored the installation of radiation-detection kit at ports in 23 countries and counting. The Megaports Initiative, as it is called, aims to have half of the world’s maritime container cargo routinely scanned by 2015. Networked systems are also being developed with detectors small enough to be worn on a police officer’s belt. The idea is to relay data on potentially dangerous radiation through a mobile-phone network to a central computer. Knowing each device’s location and the strength of the radiation it detects, the computer can “triangulate” the source’s approximate location.

Difficult problems remain. False alarms triggered by anything from a pallet of cat litter to radiation-therapy patients and nuclear-power-plant shipments have slowed research and development on one such network at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, says Simon Labov, a co-ordinator there. Even so, the lab’s work continues to be financed by America’s defence, energy and homeland-security departments. In October 2013 the latter’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office asked for proposals for a similar system, dubbed Human Portable Tripwire. Other outfits that have developed technology for such schemes include Smiths Detection in Britain and, in America, Berkeley Nucleonics, General Electric, GENTAG, Passport Systems and Purdue University.

The sheer danger of making a dirty bomb is a factor too. Without the right equipment and expertise, the really nasty stuff can kill the maker of a bomb before it is ready—part of the reason, perhaps, that no spectacular dirty-bomb attack has yet been launched. F

Dirty Bombs: Glowing in the dark, Economist, Dec. 14, 2013, at 67

Genetically Modified Food – China v. US

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Public unease about genetic modification is common around the world. In China, alongside rising concerns about food safety, it has taken on a strongly political hue. Chinese anti-GM activists often describe their cause as patriotic, aimed not just at avoiding what they regard as the potential harm of tinkering with nature, but at resisting control of China’s food supply by America through American-owned biotech companies and their superior technology. Conspiracy theories about supposed American plots to use dodgy GM food to weaken China

They are even believed by some in the government. In October an official video made for army officers was leaked on the internet and widely watched until censors scrubbed it. “America is mobilising its strategic resources to promote GM food vigorously,” its narrator grimly intoned. “This is a means of controlling the world by controlling the world’s food production.”  Peng Guangqian, a retired major-general and prominent think-tanker, echoed these sentiments in an article published by official media in August. He said America might be setting a “trap”. The result, he said, could be “far worse than the Opium War” between Britain and China in the 1840s that Chinese historians regard as the beginning of a “century of humiliation” at the hands of foreign powers.

China already uses plenty of GM products. More than 70% of its cotton is genetically modified. Most of the soyabeans consumed in China are imported, and most of those imports are GM (often from America). The technology is widely used for growing papayas. The government wants to develop home-grown GM varieties and has spent heavily on research, eager to maintain self-sufficiency in food. Officials see GM crops as a way of boosting yields on scarce farmland.

In 2009 China granted safety certificates for two GM varieties of rice and one of maize. This raised expectations that it might become the first country in the world to use GM technology in the production of a main staple. But further approvals needed for commercial growing have yet to be granted. To the consternation of GM supporters, the safety certificates for the rice are due to expire next August.

Public opinion is a big reason for the delay. Environmental groups in China have rarely succeeded in changing government policy. Officials have long treated such NGOs with suspicion and made it hard for them to register or set up offices in more than one place. The only NGO in China that devotes much time to the GM issue is an international one: Greenpeace. But the anti-GM lobby has thrived, thanks not least to the adoption of the cause by conservatives in the establishment as well as by informal groups of diehard Maoists who see America as a threat.

To the Maoists, opposing GM food is an urgent priority. Hardly a speech is made by one of them without mentioning it. “I support Mao Zedong thought,” shouted one of the protesters outside the agriculture ministry. The police usually treat them with kid gloves; unlike others who protest in public, they are ardent supporters of Communist Party rule. And on this issue, at least, the Maoists enjoy much sympathy; public anxiety about food safety has soared in recent years thanks to a series of scares. Of 100,000 respondents to an online poll in November, nearly 80% said they opposed GM technology.

Since a change of China’s leadership a year ago, however, supporters of GM food inside the government and among the public have begun fighting back. In October Chinese media reported that 61 senior academics, in a rare concerted effort, had petitioned the government to speed up the commercialisation of GM crops. The Ministry of Agriculture was also said to be preparing a new public-education campaign on the merits of GM food…One of the recent petitioners, Li Ning of China Agricultural University, laments that the issue remains ensnared by nationalist sentiment.

Excerpts, Genetically Modified Crops, Food Fight, Ecomomist,  Dec. 14, 2013, at 53

Getting Rid of Chemical Weapons: logistics and compromises

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Nobody thought it would be easy to transport several hundred tonnes of highly toxic chemical agents on a road that runs through territory fought over by two sides in a civil war. Speaking in Oslo on December 9th, a day before collecting the Nobel peace prize awarded to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Ahmet Uzumcu, its head, warned that a December 31st deadline for getting the Syrian government’s most lethal substances out of the country would be “quite difficult” to meet.

Yet much has been achieved. A joint team from the UN and The Hague-based OPCW was sent to Syria two months ago as part of a deal to avert an American missile strike in response to President Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons on August 21st. Co-operation from the Syrian government, which has a legal responsibility for implementing the plan, has been all that could have been hoped for, says Sigrid Kaag, a Dutch diplomat who leads the mission. Key milestones for the verification of chemical-weapons stockpiles and the functional destruction of the facilities where they have been produced were met on time (October 27th and November 1st, respectively). Of 23 sites, 22 were visited by inspectors. The one that proved inaccessible because of fighting is believed to have been dismantled and abandoned.

Destruction of unfilled munitions will be completed before the target date of January 31st. At least for now (and assuming there has been no cheating), it is unlikely that Syria has the capacity to make or fill any new weapons. However, by the end of this month, 500 tonnes of nerve agents, such as sarin and mustard gas (known as “priority weapons”), have to be removed for safe destruction. This task is daunting.

First, the weapons must be sealed and packaged in special containers brought across the border from Lebanon by Syrian technicians who have been trained there by OPCW specialists. Then they must be transported by road from multiple sites to Syria’s biggest port, Latakia. Once there, they will be loaded onto ships provided by Norway and Denmark and taken to an American government-owned vessel, the Cape Ray* a 200-metre (650-foot) cargo ship that is part of a reserve fleet used for transporting military hardware. The Cape Ray has been fitted with equipment for breaking down lethal chemical agents into a sludge similar to industrial toxic waste. It will eventually be handled by commercial firms in a number of countries, according to Ms Kaag.

The biggest obstacle is getting the lorries carrying the chemicals through to Latakia, because the highway between Damascus and Homs, which they have to use, remains contested. In recent weeks fighting for control of towns along it, such as Qara, Deir Attiyah and al-Nabak, has been fierce. The first two are in government hands but al-Nabak, some 80km from Damascus, is disputed. A pro-government newspaper, al-Watan, claimed this week that the highway had reopened after 20 days of bloody fighting around al-Nabak, but rebels claimed still to be holding on in parts of the town.

Ms Kaag recently met moderate opposition leaders in Turkey, but despite assurances that they support the safe removal of the regime’s chemical weapons it is questionable whether they have any influence in implementing temporary ceasefires that would ensure safe passage. The OPCW is in the uncomfortable position of relying on the military success of regime forces, supported by local militias led by Hizbullah, the Lebanese party-cum-militia, to meet its timelines. A further 800 tonnes of less lethal industrial chemicals destined for incineration at commercial toxic-waste plants outside Syria must also be transported to Latakia by early February.

Ms Kaag says that although “the situation remains complex and the security situation volatile…we intend to forge ahead.” Mr Uzumcu is equally bullish about meeting the overarching objective of destroying the entire Syrian chemical arsenal by the end of next June. However, the UN’s secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, in a leaked letter to the Security Council last week, expressed his concern both about the “highly dangerous” nature of this stage of the mission and about the vulnerability of the team’s headquarters in Damascus. An alternative base in nearby Cyprus is being considered.

The joint mission has already achieved a lot in a very short time. Ms Kaag describes a week of the current operation as being the equivalent of several months of any other the OPCW has undertaken since its formation in 1997. But there is no guarantee that it can maintain the momentum. The Syrian government has asked the international community to provide armoured vehicles to help it move the chemicals. The request is understandably being treated with suspicion but it might have to be granted if there is no other way of getting the chemicals to Latakia. Russia, an Assad ally, has said it is willing to step in. Working closely with a regime that has done terrible things to its own people has always been morally compromising. It is becoming even more so.

Syria’s war: An inconvenient truth, Economist,  Dec. 14, 2013, at 58

*The 648-foot Cape Ray, built in 1977, is generally used to transport vehicles to war zones from the United States. The ship has been outfitted, by Army civilians, with two portable hydrolysis systems designed to neutralize chemicals weapons in Syria’s arsenal.
Under the United Nations-backed plan, some 700 metric tons of chemicals will be loaded into shipping containers and moved to Latakia, a Syrian city on the Mediterranean Sea, where they will be placed onto cargo ships and eventually transferred to the Cape Ray. Once the chemicals are destroyed aboard the vessel, the waste, some 1.2 million gallons’ worth, will be offloaded at an unspecified commercial treatment facility. See Official Homepage of the United States Army

Scavengers or Waste Pickers?

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New UN guidelines published in 2013 have formalised the work of scavengers, Scavengers collect between half and all the rubbish in developing countries.  Their activities cut costs to cities, help the environment and reduce poverty….Schemes are afoot in the Philippines and Nepal. In March Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, became the latest metropolis to start compensating its 15,000 waste pickers for their services, paying 82,860 pesos ($44) per tonne of garbage collected.  Brazil made scavenging an official occupation more than a decade ago. Its 1m catadores have raised recycling rates for cardboard and paper to 90%. Co-operatives get grants to buy equipment and can short-circuit the municipal-tendering process. In Belo Horizonte, in Brazil’s south-east, workers transform beer cans and other junk into intricate jewellery for the city’s fashion-conscious. Their motto is “your trash is our luxury”. Catadores there can make 1,700 reais ($800) a month from recycling and craft-making, well above the 678 reais minimum wage.

The scavengers face stiff competition from private firms who use more sophisticated technology to make money from waste. Official disdain remains a problem, too. Corruption in municipal-waste projects rewards the highest bribe, not the best bidder. Humble and often illiterate workers struggle to prove their social, environmental and financial advantages.

Sonia Dias, a rubbish expert from WIEGO, a non-profit global network based at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, says better links between the scavengers’ co-operatives are needed. Informal workers were “largely invisible ten years ago” she says. Now they are talking at international meetings. The Global Alliance of Waste Pickers, which unites co-operatives in Asia, Latin America and Africa, sends representatives to shindigs such as the Rio+20 summit last year.

Excerpts, Money from rubbish:Mucking in, Economist,  Nov. 2, 2013, at 65

Fukushima Nuclear Waste: the storage plan

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The Japan’s Environment Ministry officially announced on December 14, 2013 that the government aims to buy 19 sq. km of land around the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear complex to build facilities for the long-term storage of radioactive and other waste churned up in decontamination work…Under the plan, the government will build storage and volume reduction facilities on land bought around the Fukushima No. 1 plant host towns of Futaba and Okuma, as well as a small facility in Naraha, while utilizing an existing disposal site in Tomioka. Those two towns co-host the Fukushima No. 2 power station.

Up to 28 million cu. meters of waste could be stored in the envisaged facilities, whose total cost is estimated at about ¥1 trillion, the officials said.  Providing local consent is secured, the government will take legislative action to ensure that the waste’s final disposal will take place outside the prefecture within 30 years from the start of storage, the ministry said.  With the dim prospects of building interim storage facilities delaying decontamination of areas affected by the March 2011 nuclear disaster, the government hopes to start using the planned facilities in January 2015.  Desperate to begin construction in April, the government will seek ¥100 billion in the fiscal 2014 budget for related expenses, including the cost of acquiring the land, ministry officials said.

Ministry unveils plan to buy 19 sq. km of land around Fukushima No. 1 for waste storage, Japan Times, Dec. 14, 2013

Nuclear Waste Management in Russia Gets Better

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Russia could be moving closer to shutting down its infamous and highly contaminated Mayak Chemical Combine– Russia’s only spent nuclear fuel reprocessing facility – as the government builds a new pilot spent fuel storage and reprocessing facility in the closed city of Zheleznogorsk, near Krasnoyarsk, called RT-2. The Zheleznogorsk facility was once home to one of Russia’s 13 weapons grade plutonium production reactors…The pilot facilities at Zheleznogorsk – known as Krasnoyarsk-26 during the Soviet era – fall under the purview of an industry division called the National Operator, as established by Russia’s 2011 law “On handling spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste.  The law further stipulates that all spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste produced prior to 2011 is the government’s financial responsibility, where beyond 2011, the bills go to individual nuclear power plants.

Alexander Nikitin, Chairman of the Environmental Right’s Center (ERC) Bellona in St. Petersburg, who has visited the Zheleznogorsk site twice this year, said after the AtomEco conference held late last month in Moscow that the facility is designed to hold and reprocess two of Russia’s thorniest types of spent nuclear fuel: that produced by VVER-1000 reactors and the spent fuel that comes from RBMKs [Reaktor Bolshoy Moshchnosti Kanalniy], “High Power Channel-type Reactor” is a class of graphite-moderated nuclear power reactor designed and built by the Soviet Union.]  Russia has neither been able to store or reprocess fuel from the Chernobyl-type RBMK – one of the oldest, and most fatally flawed reactor lines in Russia’s civilian line up.

The Zheleznogorsk facility will also be capable of storing spent fuel from VVER-1000 reactors in wet storage. The spent RMBK fuel will be held at RT-2 in dry storage.  Spent VVER-1000 fuel is already arriving at Zheleznogorsk from reactors at the Balakovo, Kalinin, Novovoronezh and Rostov nuclear power plants. RBMK fuel will come from the Leningrad, Kursk, and Smolensk plants.

In all, RT-2 is designed to hold some 50,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel. Russia currently hosts some 23,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel, the majority of it stored on site at the reactors that produced it.

The reclamation of fuel from Soviet built reactors in former Soviet satellite states, which Russia is obligated to take back and either reprocess or store, is also slowing down… In the case of Hungary, for example, the local government has found it more economical to store the fuel itself than to repatriate it to Russia, easing up somewhat the amount of foreign spent fuel flowing to the country.

But Russia’ state nuclear corporation, Rosatom, has finally – and publically – reached the conclusion that Mayak and its legacy of overwhelming radiological pollution is no longer viable…

Nikitin, was told during his visits to RT-2 that the pilot facilities are slated to push through their first batches of reprocessed VVER 1000 and RBMK fuel – while producing no residual radioactive waste – by 2018.  If the test runs prove successful, RT-2 could move on to industrial scale storage and reprocessing   But Nikitin and Rosatom have their doubts about the rosy predictions of the National Operator. For one, Nikitin is skeptical of the value of reprocessing RMBK fuel..

Charles Digges,New spent nuclear fuel storage and reprocessing site in Siberia could end contamination from Mayak,  Bellona,  Nov. 14, 2013

Buying their Way out of Water Crisis: Gulf States

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Scientists are now warning of “Peak Salt” – the point at which the Gulf becomes so salty that relying on it for fresh water stops being economically feasible.  “The average Arab citizen has eight times less access to renewable water than the average global citizen, and more than two thirds of surface water resources originate from outside the region,” says the U.N.Development Programme (UNDP) in a new study released this week.  Titled “Water Governance in the Arab Region: Managing Scarcity and Securing the Future,” the report warns that water scarcity in the region is fast reaching “alarming levels, with dire consequences to human development”….

A recent satellite study by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) found the region has lost, since 2003 alone, far more groundwater than previously thought – an amount the size of the Dead Sea…Threatened by future scarcities, several Arab countries, including the UAE, have expanded their use of non-conventional water resources including desalination; treated wastewater; rainwater harvesting; cloud seeding; and irrigation drainage water.

Currently, the Arab region leads the world in desalination, with more than half of global capacity.  Desalinated water is expected to expand from 1.8 percent of the region’s water supply to an estimated 8.5 percent by 2025.  Most of the increase is expected to concentrate in high-income, energy-exporting countries, particularly the Gulf countries, because desalination is energy- and capital-intensive…According to the UNDP study.Arab region’s oil wealth has allowed some states to mask their water poverty, giving them the false impression they can buy their way of out of the coming crisis…

Excerpt, By Thalif Deen, Arab World Sinks Deeper into Water Crisis, Warns UNDP, IPS, Nov. 29, 2013

Shell and the Oil Spills in Nigeria

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At Amnesty International and CEHRD’s request, the independent US oil pipeline specialist Accufacts assessed a number of oil spill investigation reports, as well as responses from oil companies operating in the Niger Delta and Nigeria’s national oil spill agency.  The expert found cases where the stated cause of an oil spill appears to be wrongly attributed to sabotage [by the local population]. In many other cases sabotage was listed as the cause when there was little or no data recorded to back up the claim.

Overall, Accufacts concluded that many official investigation reports were “technically incomplete”, and others “appear to be serving another agenda, more driven by politics…than pipeline forensic science”.  Nigeria’s under-resourced regulatory agencies have little oversight or control of the process and are dependent on the oil companies to carry out investigations.

In one incident, a regulator sent a student on work experience as their sole representative to an oil spill investigation.  “This is a system that is wide open to abuse – and abuse happens. There is no one to challenge the oil companies and almost no way to independently verify what they say. In effect it’s ‘trust us – we’re big oil,” said Gaughran.

Shell has made some improvements to its investigation reports since 2011, including the addition of images of oil spills on its corporate website. But serious flaws remain, including weaknesses in the underlying evidence used to attribute spills to sabotage.  Information listed in oil spill investigation reports determines whether oil companies are liable to pay compensation to affected communities.  Despite serious flaws, the reports are cited as evidence in litigation.

Amnesty International and CEHRD found evidence of Shell having changed the officially recorded cause of a spill after an investigation had taken place. In one incident, secretly filmed video of an investigation shows how officials from Shell and the regulator tried to subvert the evidence by persuading community members on the investigation team not to attribute the cause to equipment failure. Video footage of a leak from an oil spill in Bodo from 2008 reviewed by Accufacts shows that Shell seriously under-recorded the volume spilled.  Shell’s official investigation report claims only 1,640 barrels of oil were spilled in total but other evidence points to the amount being at least 60 times higher…

The report argues that companies should be legally liable for failure to take effective action to protect their systems, including from sabotage.

Amnesty International and CEHRD are calling on the oil companies to publish all investigation reports, associated photos and videos. They must provide verifiable evidence of the cause and damage to the impacted area.

Shell’s false claims on Niger Delta oil spills exposed, Amnesty International Press Release, Nov. 7, 2013

Illegal Dumping of Nuclear Waste: Turkey

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A lead factory in the Aegean province of İzmir has been fined for 5.7 million Turkish Liras ($2.9 million) over allegations of burying high levels of radioactive waste in the land.  The penalty imposed on Aslan Avcı Casting Industry lead factory is the highest environment fine imposed in Turkey to date, Environment and Urban Planning official Mehmet Emin Birpınar told Anadolu Agency Oct. 28.

The site was brought to public attention when reports of the burying of radioactive waste under the ground surfaced, with over 10,000 tons of earth being placed on top of the waste.  The radioactivity levels called for proper containment of the waste, however, despite later reports by Turkey’s Atomic Energy Commission (TAEK), assuring normal levels of radioactivity in the area, the controversy continued to generate public debate.  Recently, new reports have emerged saying the color of the land covering the waste was becoming black, suggesting the radioactive wastes’ continuing to spread in environment through wind and rainfall.

Record fine imposed for radioactive waste burial in Turkey’s Aegean district, Hurriyet Daily News, Oct. 28, 2013

How nuclear waste accumulated in the factory? “Prof. Tolga Yarman from Okan University Faculty of Engineering explains the case: “This product is a nucleus called Europium 152 isotope. It is difficult to understand how this element can be found in Turkey. This is the major question. This product cannot be here just by itself; it must have come with other waste materials, especially with nuclear rods. But why and how can nuclear rods be here in Turkey? Who brought them? This is what we need to know. In addition, what did they melt in the factory together with the waste? They say it was unintentional, but it does not seem possible. This means that it is possible to imagine that the factory used radioactive material for its production. In that case, it is necessary to take under surveillance the production process. We are also facing a potential hazard caused by the products distributed from that company. We should immediately test some of the batteries produced in that factory.”

The Toxic Herbicides Case: Ecuador v. Colombia

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The case brought by the Republic of Ecuador against the Republic of Colombia on 31 March 2008 before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in respect of a dispute concerning “Colombia’s aerial spraying of toxic herbicides at locations near, at and across its border with Ecuador” was removed from the Court’s List on 13 September 2013 at the request of Ecuador…

According to the letters received from the Parties, the Agreement of 9 September 2013 [between Colombia and Ecuador] establishes, inter alia, an exclusion zone, in which Colombia will not conduct aerial spraying operations, creates a Joint Commission to ensure that spraying operations outside that zone have not caused herbicides to drift into Ecuador and, so long as they have not, provides a mechanism for the gradual reduction in the width of the said zone; according to the letters, the Agreement sets out operational parameters for Colombia’s spraying programme, records the agreement of the two Governments to ongoing exchanges of information in that regard, and establishes a dispute settlement mechanism.  In consequence, the President of the Court, on 13 September 2013, made an Order recording the discontinuance by Ecuador of the proceedings and directing the removal of the case from the Court’s List.

Aerial Herbicide Spraying (Ecuador v. Colombia), Case removed from the Court’s List at the request of the Republic of Ecuador, Press Release International Court of Justice,  Sept. 17, 2013

 

Mining Gold and Cyanide Pollution

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The $4 billion that two Canadian companies, Barrick Gold and Goldcorp, have poured into developing Pueblo Viejo, a gold mine, since 2009 amounts to the largest single foreign investment in the history of the Dominican Republic. The companies say that the money has turned the polluted ruins of what was the state-owned Rosario mine, abandoned in 1999, into a “truly world-class” operation that should provide the country’s government with $10 billion over its 25-year life.

But the project has been controversial. Just weeks after the mining started in January 2013, President Danilo Medina, who was elected last year, declared: “For every $100 of gold exports, Barrick will receive $97 and the Dominican people $3. That is simply unacceptable.” (In fact, Pueblo Viejo Dominicana Corporation, or PVDC, the company operating the mine, is 60% owned by Barrick and 40% by Goldcorp.) Mr Medina demanded that the contract be renegotiated; otherwise, he said, he would raise taxes on the mine’s profits.

This month the two sides agreed to changes that have front-loaded tax payments and could see the government get an extra $1.3 billion in 2013-16 provided that the gold price rises and stays above $1,600 an ounce (it is now around $1,350). Gustavo Montalvo, Mr Medina’s chief of staff, tweeted: “Together we ensured that words like ‘national sovereignty’, ‘justice’ or ‘transparency’ were transformed into something more concrete.”

Yet that may not calm local unrest over the mine, sited about 100 kilometres (60 miles) north of Santo Domingo, the capital. The investment was presented by both the government and company as including a clean-up of Rosario’s toxic mess and the installation of systems to keep local watercourses clean. But residents are suing PVDC, claiming that the new mine is poisoning rivers, causing illnesses and the death of farm animals. They want the government to release the environmental-impact assessment for Pueblo Viejo, which it has so far refused to do.

One farmer, María de la Cruz Mariano, said that she began to suffer skin allergies and other ailments in 2010, after PVDC began work. Tests on her blood conducted by a private laboratory showed high levels of lead, sulphur, cyanide and zinc. Some of her cattle have died from bovine anaemia, which can be caused by ingesting cyanide. Other residents report that previously clean local rivers have become polluted since PVDC built a dam to collect water containing cyanide, which is used to leach gold from crushed rock.

PVDC has signed the international code of practice for the handling of cyanide. It says it is “in the process of capturing all the surface flows” from the old and the new mines, sending the water to storage ponds where it is treated. PVDC says that, together with local people, it conducts regular, public tests on water and air.

But community leaders say they have no knowledge of such tests. The company has not answered requests to provide the dates on which they were conducted. Tests by the environment ministry, released only after a freedom of information request, found the water in the Margajita river downstream from the mine to be highly acidic, as well as containing sulphides and copper above legal limits. The ministry has made little effort to act on these results.

The old Rosario mine left some streams red with acid. PVDC’s clean-up obligations extend only within the mine perimeter; the rest was for the government. The firm points out that it has paid $75m ($37.5m of it a loan) to finance the government’s share of the work. It has also removed around 130,000 cubic metres (4.6m cubic feet) of contaminated soil. But Demóstenes Martínez, a congressman from the ruling party, argues that PVDC is violating both the constitution and the mining law.

It is not clear whether the pollution is being caused by PVDC’s operations, or is a legacy of the past. The government claims to have lost records of past tests on the rivers. But on its own the new agreement may not be enough to ensure that the mine regains the consent of the community. That will require greater candour.

Mining in the Dominican Republic:  Sickness and wealth, Economist, Sept. 21, 2013

The Curse of Displacement

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Dhinkia, in the eastern Indian state of Odisha (formerly Orissa) (India)  is a hub of protest. The women, one from every village family, are staging… a sit-in. Sisir Mohapatra, a former sarpanch or village head, makes a rousing speech. He seems respected, though his police record would suggest he is a mafia don: he says he faces 35 criminal charges, and of his 60-strong extended family in Dhinkia, 40 are also wanted by the law. They claim that the charges are all trumped up. Their real crime is to oppose the biggest single foreign-investment project India has ever attracted.

Estimated to cost $12 billion, the project, promoted by POSCO, a South Korean firm, is eventually to produce 12m tonnes of steel a year for export. It will have its own power plant, port and, 200 kilometres (125 miles) inland, its own iron-ore mine. Since an agreement on the project was signed in 2005, it has been mired in controversy—a case study in why

Environmentalists worry about air pollution, coastal erosion, the endangered olive ridley turtle and much else. Many, including the Communist Party of India (CPI), which holds the local parliamentary seat, complain that the ore will be sold too cheaply, at a royalty to the government of just 27 rupees (currently about 40 cents) a tonne. Meanwhile, residents of Dhinkia and nearby villages fear for their livelihoods.

So the project has been delayed, probed by countless committees and subjected to repeated litigation. Just this week it faced hearings in Delhi at the National Green Tribunal, an environmental court. But as so often in India, one of the biggest delays has been acquiring the land. In theory, this should be easier for POSCO than for many other investors, since most of the 1,600 hectares (4,000 acres) it needs are designated as forest (even the scrubby sand dunes) and thus government land.

The residents of Dhinkia, however, claim legal rights as people whose families have been making their living from the forest for at least 75 years (which the government disputes). Some, indeed, make a very good living. Devendra Swain, like many villages, maintains betel vines, from which he earns 50,000 rupees a month selling the leaves. Mr Swain also grows rice, mangoes, cashew nuts, bananas and papaya. He claims not to be against industrialisation—except in his fecund backyard.

The villagers’ resistance to the project has seen ugly violence. In 2010 police fired rubber bullets to clear one dharna. In February there was another clash as police entered a neighbouring village, Govindpur, and started dismantling betel vines. In March three people died in a bomb explosion—victims of pro-project goons, say the villagers. The police allege the victims were blown up while making bombs themselves. Involvement in this incident is one of 61 charges facing the CPI’s Abhay Sahoo, the protesters’ leader, who is now in jail for the third time and trying to secure his release on bail. Fearing arrest or an attack by thugs, the 1,400 others in Dhinkia facing criminal charges dare not leave the village.

Of India’s million mutinies, many involve the emotive issue of land. That is one impulse behind a new law covering land acquisition and the resettlement and rehabilitation of those affected. This week it passed through Parliament’s upper house. Few disagree that some new legislation is needed to replace a much-abused British-era law from 1894.

The new bill, however, has drawn fierce criticism. Business is predictably aghast at what it sees as a populist law timed ahead of looming elections.. Some businessmen think it is simply “unworkable”.

Even some who support the principles behind the bill think their implementation has been botched. N.C. Saxena, a former senior civil servant who sits on a National Advisory Council [claims]  that it does not even cover government land. In other words, it would have no relevance for projects such as POSCO’s. Even if it did, legislation would not solve the fundamental difficulty, a total distrust of government.

“After 66 years of independence,” says Mr Mohapatra, the former sarpanch, “no one has ever been compensated properly. Whoever gave his land and his home later became a beggar.” He points to what he says is the unhappy lot of those displaced by two other projects in Odisha. One is the Hirakud dam across the Mahanadi river. It is India’s longest dam, for which Jawaharlal Nehru poured the first concrete in 1948. As many as 180,000 people had to move. Another is just down the road from Dhinkia, where a big oil refinery has been under construction since 2000. An empty field outside Dhinkia has drains and electricity, put in when plots were offered as compensation to those forced to shift. People found it so unappealing that the field is still empty. Moreover, 52 families who supported the POSCO project, many forced out of Govindpur in 2008, are still in reportedly miserable conditions in a transit camp. Add in heavy-handed police, and those agitating against the project have plenty of ammunition. Even the best-drafted law would find the going tough

This Land is Whose Land? A new law may do little to break India’s land-acquisition logjam, Economist, Sept 7, 2013, at 44

Why the US Loves GM Food

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Because America was a new country, argues Greg Ibach, head of agriculture in Nebraska’s state government, a primary concern was feeding a growing population and moving food large distances. Europeans fussed about appellations and where food came from. Americans “treated food as commodities”.  Such differences of history and culture have lingering consequences. Almost all the corn and soyabeans grown in America are genetically modified. GM crops are barely tolerated in the European Union. Both America and Europe offer farmers indefensible subsidies, but with different motives. EU taxpayers often pay to keep market forces at bay, preserving practices which may be quaint, green or kindly to animals but which do not turn a profit. American subsidies give farmers an edge in commodity markets, via cheap loans and federally backed crop insurance.

Lexington: Farming as rocket science, Economist, Sept. 7, 2013, at 34

The Global Regulation of Mercury

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The Minamata Convention on Mercury – a global, legally binding treaty which opened for signature today – was agreed to by governments in January (2013) and formally adopted as international law…Countries began the recognition for this new treaty at a special ceremonial opening of the Diplomatic Conference in Minamata, the city where many local people were poisoned in the mid-20th Century after eating mercury-contaminated seafood from Minamata Bay. As a consequence, the neurological syndrome caused by severe mercury poisoning has come to be known as Minamata Disease.

The Minamata Convention provides for controls and reductions across a range of products, processes and industries where mercury is used, released or emitted. The treaty also addresses the direct mining of mercury, export and import of the metal, and safe storage of waste mercury.

“Mercury has some severe effects, both on human health and on the environment. UNEP has been proud to facilitate and support the treaty negotiation over the past four years because almost everyone in the world – be they small-scale gold miners, expectant mothers or waste-handlers in developing countries – will benefit from its provisions,” said Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations….Other potential impacts include impaired thyroid and liver function, irritability, tremors, disturbances to vision, memory loss and cardiovascular problems.

“With the signing of the Minamata Convention on Mercury we will be going a long way in protecting the world forever from the devastating health consequences from mercury,” says WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan. “Mercury is one of the top ten chemicals of major public health concern and is a substance which disperses into and remains in ecosystems for generations, causing severe ill health and intellectual impairment to exposed populations.”

Under the provisions of the Minamata Convention, Governments have agreed on a range of mercury-containing products whose production, import and export will be banned by 2020. These items have non-mercury alternatives that will be further phased in as these are phased out. They include:

•Batteries, except for ‘button cell’ batteries used in implantable medical devices

•Switches and relays

•Some compact fluorescent lamps

•Mercury in cold cathode fluorescent lamps and external electrode fluorescent lamps

•Soaps and cosmetics (mercury is used in skin-whitening products)

•Some mercury-containing medical items such as thermometers and blood pressure devices.

Mercury from small-scale gold-mining and from coal-fired power stations represent the biggest source of mercury pollution worldwide. Miners inhale mercury during smelting, and mercury run-off into rivers and streams contaminates fish, the food chain and people downstream.  Under the Minamata Convention, Governments have agreed that countries will draw up strategies to reduce the amount of mercury used by small-scale miners and that national plans will be drawn up within three years of the treaty entering into force to reduce – and if possible eliminate – mercury.

The Convention will also control mercury emission and releases from large-scale industrial plants such as coal-fired power stations, industrial boilers, waste incinerators and cement clinkers facilities.

New global treaty cuts mercury emissions and releases, sets up controls on products, mines and industrial plant, UNEP Press Release, Oct 10, 2013

Yasuni National Park Oil Drilling: Ecuador, Amazon

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Ecuador’s parliament on Thursday (Oct. 3, 2012) authorized drilling of the nation’s largest oil fields in part of the Amazon rainforest after the failure of President Rafael Correa’s plan to have rich nations pay to avoid its exploitation.  The socialist leader launched the initiative in 2007 to protect the Yasuni jungle area, which boasts some of the planet’s most diverse wildlife, but scrapped it after attracting only a small fraction of the $3.6 billion sought.

The government-dominated National Assembly authorized drilling in blocks 43 and 31, but attached conditions to minimize the impact on both the environment and local tribes. Though Correa says the estimated $22 billion earnings potential will be used to combat poverty in the South American nation, there have been protests from indigenous groups and green campaigners.  About 680,000 people have signed a petition calling for a referendum.  “We want them to respect our territory,” Alicia Cauilla, a representative of the Waorani people who live around the Yasuni area, said in an appeal to the assembly. “Let us live how we want.”  Correa has played down the potential impact of oil drilling in the area, saying it would affect only 0.01 percent of the entire Yasuni basin…

Oil output in OPEC’s smallest member has stagnated since 2010 when the government asked oil investors to sign less-profitable service contracts or leave the country. Since then, oil companies have not invested in exploration.  State oil company Petroamazonas will be in charge of extraction in blocks 43 and 31, which are estimated to hold 800 million barrels of crude and projected to yield 225,000 barrels per day eventually. Ecuador currently produces 540,000 bpd

Excerpt, By Alexandra Valencia, Ecuador congress approves Yasuni basin oil drilling in Amazon, Reuters, Oct. 4, 2013

 

Breaking Up Toxic Ships – Pakistan

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WWF-Pakistan has warned Pakistan against the import of a European ship, which is suspected to have burnt containers and cargo that may contain a substantial amount of hazardous materials such as heavy metals or PCBs.  Moreover, the vessel is suspected to carry dangerous substances in fire fighting water as well as a significant amount of fuels and oil. This container ship caught fire in July (2013) and was later towed to Port-Louis in Mauritius. (MV “HANSA BRANDENBURG”,).MV Hansa Brandenburg is a 2002-built Liberian-flagged container ship operated by the German shipping company Leonhardt & Blumberg.

WWF-Pakistan considers that this ship if imported to Pakistan may cause severe marine pollution in the Gadani area, which is already stressed because of a number of economic and industrial activities. Unplanned construction such as Fish harbour has already had serious environmental impact in the area, which is also designated as energy corridor and construction of power plants may have impact on the marine environment of the area unless proper mitigative measures are taken. According to WWF-Pakistan Technical Adviser (Marine Fisheries) Muhammad Moazzam Khan, the area of the Gadani is a part of Sonmiani, which is considered to have a rich marine biodiversity especially around Churna and Kaio islands. Dumping of toxic waste might seriously harm the fragile ecosystem of the area.

Agencies asked not to import vessel loaded with toxic chemicals, Daily Times (Pakistan) October 4, 2013

 

Cold World Nuclear Experiments in California

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Several environmental groups on Aug. 6, 2013 sued state regulators over the cleanup of a former nuclear research lab, saying low-level radioactive waste was improperly shipped to landfills.  Consumer Watchdog, along with other groups, filed a lawsuit Tuesday in Sacramento County Superior Court against the Department of Public Health and Department of Toxic Substances Control, which oversees the cleanup at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory.  Located about 30 miles northwest of Los Angeles, Santa Susana was once home to nuclear research and rocket engine tests. In 1959, one of the reactors suffered a partial nuclear meltdown. Responsible parties including Boeing Co., NASA and the U.S Energy Department have been working with state officials to meet a 2017 deadline to rid the nearly 2,900-acre site of contaminated soil.

In their complaint, the groups contend that materials from several buildings that were demolished were sent to landfills and metal recycling shops that are not licensed to accept radioactive waste. They also sought a temporary restraining order to stop Boeing from tearing down a plutonium fuel fabrication building on the hilltop complex….Officials at the toxic control agency rejected the allegations, saying that debris sent offsite posed no threat to human health or the environment.

Stewart Black, a deputy director at DTSC, said the state followed the rules in the demolishing and disposal of old buildings.   During the Cold War, workers at the site tested thousands of rockets and experimented with nuclear reactors, which were operational until 1980. And by the time the rest of the lab closed in 2006, a toxic legacy of radioactive and chemical contamination had been left.  Former workers and residents in nearby neighborhoods have blamed the lab for a variety of health problems.

Groups sue to block demolition at ex-nuclear site, Associated Press, Aug. 6, 2013

Price for Clean Drinking Water – Death

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A second Sri Lankan protester died from wounds suffered when troops fired on villagers demonstrating against contaminated water supplies, police said as tensions remained high in the area.  Heavily armed police and Special Task Force commandos were still in the the village of Weliweriya following Thursday’s [Aug. 1, 2013] shooting and locals reported people were fearful of leaving their houses.  Criticism of the army’s use of force has mounted since the shootings.  The independent Lawyers Collective condemned the crackdown against the peaceful protest by villagers who were demanding clean drinking water for thousands of residents of Weliweriya.  One man died from the shooting while another man who was injured died overnight in hospital, police said, raising the death toll to two.  Dozens more protesters were wounded when police opened fire on hundreds of demonstrators. Local television footage showed troops with automatic weapons, some clad in body armour, firing into crowds.

Locals in Weliweriya, 20 kilometres (12 miles) northeast of Colombo, were protesting against runoff from a rubber glove-making plant that they say has polluted their groundwater supply…Dipped Products Ltd, a publicly quoted company that maintains the manufacturing plant, said Friday it was confident the water issue was unrelated to their operations but were cooperating with authorities “for an early settlement of the matter”.

Excerpt, Second protester dies in Sri Lanka water dispute, Agence France Presse, Aug. 4, 2013

Shipbreaking Business or Europe Dumps Hazardous Waste in South Asia

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Hundreds of European vessels are scrapped under hazardous conditions in South Asia every year. European parliamentarians have approved a new regulation to tackle the problem – but critics say it will have very limited impact…“With this, we will have a safer disposal of ships. About 90 percent of the European vessels are scrapped illegally and the Basel Convention has failed to do something about this,” said Swedish Green MEP Carl Schlyter, who negotiated the agreement with the Council and guided the legislation through the European Parliament. “Last year one European ship was sent to a substandard beaching yard in South Asia every day.”

European Union-registered ships will now have to be recycled at EU-approved facilities that meet specific safety and environmental requirements and are certified and regularly inspected. The European Commission would be obliged to act if NGOs report irregularities.  Both EU ships and non-EU ships would also have to carry an inventory of hazardous materials when calling at ports in the EU. The regulation is likely to enter into force in the beginning of 2014.

Patrizia Heidegger from Shipbreaking Platform, a global coalition of organisations working for safe and sustainable ship recycling, is not pleased with the outcome…She says that the regulation will not have a large impact since ship owners can easily flag out and circumvent the regulation if they don’t want to comply. The coalition wants the regulation to apply to all ships calling at European ports, instead of only the EU-flagged vessels.

Schlyter pushed for an EU fund to subsidise safe recycling of the ships. The fund would have been financed by fees on ships docked in EU ports, but the parliament rejected this part of the proposal.  “Without the ship recycling fund the new regulation won’t be effective. A ship recycling fund would put obligations on the ship owners beyond the flag,” Heidegger said.  “The fund was supported by all the political groups, but then the parliament voted it down after strong lobbying from ship owners and EU ports. The ports claimed that the arrangement would result in over 100 percent increase in fees, which is not true,” Schlyter told IPS.  Schlyter says that with a fund in place it would not pay to flag out. He says that the commission might propose creation of a fund later if the new regulation proves insufficient….

European ship owners dumped 365 toxic ships on South Asian beaches last year, according to the Shipbreaking Platform.  Of the top 10 European “global dumpers” in 2012, Greek ship owners were number one, dumping 167 ships on Asian beaches. German ship owners represented the second largest group of toxic ship dumpers with 48 ships, followed by ship owners from the UK with 30 ships, and Norway with 23 ships scrapped on beaches in South Asia.  According to the coalition most of the end-of-life ships sent by European ship owners did not fly an EU flag but flags from Panama, Liberia, the Bahamas or St Kitts-and-Nevis.  Bangladesh tops the list of countries having the greatest number of ships scrapped every year, with India and Pakistan trailing far behind. Unskilled and unprotected workers manually handle poisonous chemicals and are also exposed to the risk of explosion while dismantling old vessels.

Excerpts,By  Ida Karlsson, New EU Rules ‘Fail’ Against Shipbreaking Dangers, IPS, July 17, 2013

 

Air Pollution: the Palm Oil Conglomerates

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Since the mid-1980s, when Indonesia first began to clear its bountiful forests on an industrial scale in favour of lucrative palm-oil plantations, “haze” has become an almost annual occurrence in South-East Asia. The cheapest way to clear logged woodland is to burn it, producing an acrid cloud of foul white smoke that, carried by the wind, can cover hundreds, or even thousands, of square miles.

The intervening decades have seen the passage of numerous national and international regulations to stop the fires, but all, it seems, to no avail. The past two weeks have seen some of the worst smog ever, taking a severe toll not only on peoples’ lungs, throats and tempers, but also on diplomatic relations and Indonesia’s attempts to improve its environmental image. Worse still, despite the outcry, it is hard to see how matters are going to improve over the next few years.

Most of the burning, which starts every dry season, is concentrated this year in Riau province on the east coast of Sumatra. Indonesia is the world’s biggest palm-oil producer and Riau its most productive province. Sadly for Singapore and Malaysia, it lies just across the Strait of Malacca from them. From June 16th Singapore and large parts of Malaysia were smothered in smog from this year’s fires.

In Singapore the pollution was the worst ever, pummelling the previous records set in 1997, when the haze affected six countries and perhaps 70m people. Then, the Pollutants Standard Index (PSI) in Singapore, a measure of air quality, hit a panic-inducing 226, defined as “very unhealthy”. On June 19th, by contrast (the day of the satellite picture above), the PSI climbed to over 300, defined as “hazardous”, before peaking at 401 on June 21st. The government issued face masks and almost everyone took its advice to stay indoors. Malaysia declared a state of emergency in parts of its southern state of Johor when the Air Pollution Index, only slightly different from Singapore’s PSI, exceeded 500; it reached 750 on June 23rd. Kuala Lumpur, the capital, and coastal cities were also badly affected, as was Riau province itself, where hundreds were evacuated.

Fraternal relations within the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the regional political grouping, quickly dissolved into acrimonious finger-pointing. Agung Laksono, the minister in charge of Indonesia’s response to the crisis, said that Singaporeans were behaving “like children, in such a tizzy”. Singaporeans and Malaysians pointed out that Indonesia was the only ASEAN member not to have ratified a 2002 Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution. It was only on June 24th, when the damage was done, that its president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, apologised to his irate neighbours.

At least three laws in Indonesia prohibit the burning and clearance of forests, and in particular Sumatra’s extensive peat wetlands. But environmental campaigners argue that the government has never seriously enforced these laws. Despite the arrest in Sumatra this week of eight farmers, supposedly caught red-handed, hardly anyone has been successfully prosecuted over the years for lighting fires. Palm oil’s economic importance to Indonesia seems to afford the industry protection. Last year exports totalled $17.9 billion, second only to coal. Some 5m people live off the industry. These are big numbers in a relatively poor country.

About half of the vast amount of land on which the fires are burning in Sumatra belongs to big palm-oil conglomerates, many of them Malaysian-owned. They have been accused of setting illegal fires in the past, in order to clear more of their concessions for palm oil. Satellite imagery clearly shows fires burning on the land of some of them, and the Indonesian government has named eight companies that it wants to investigate. Even so, it is going to be very difficult to apportion blame. One company, Singapore-based Asia Pacific Resources International Limited, acknowledges that there have been three fires on its land, but claims these had “originally started outside of its concession area”.

Another perennial problem is corruption. This year’s disaster was preceded on June 14th by the arrest of Rusli Zainal, the governor of Riau since 2003. He was charged, among other crimes, with dishing out illegal logging permits to finance a forthcoming re-election campaign. Under the country’s political decentralisation in 2001, generally considered to be good for democracy, the power to regulate land use passed from Jakarta to regional and often district-level politicians. They have often abused this authority to raise money.

Much of the area now burning in Riau is peat wetland, almost all that’s left after years of rampant deforestation. Peat, which can go down to a depth of 30m in Sumatra, is highly combustible, even many metres down. A fire doused on the surface might smoulder underground long after. It is illegal to burn peat for commercial development. But as the past few weeks have proved, the law is not enough. And, ominously for those hoping for clear skies and clean air, a lot of peat is left.

South-East Asia’s smog: Unspontaneous combustion, Economist, June 29, 2013, at 39

The Renewable Energy Bubble in Japan

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The shining light that was once Japan’s renewable energy industry is beginning to dim as reality sets in and it faces competition from a rejuvenated nuclear power industry…According to a February nationwide survey by the Japan Renewable Energy Foundation, 34 of the 79 solar energy producers who responded said they had given up on at least one solar power project. Roughly 45 percent of those respondents cited difficulties in land procurement, followed by 25 percent who said they had problems joining the power grid.

One such project in Hokkaido, located near the New Chitose Airport, called for a 100-hectare solar power generation facility. The site adjacent to the Abiragawa river remains covered in weeds to this day.  “We call it an April 17 crisis,” said Hiroaki Fujii, the 43-year-old executive vice president at SB Energy Corp., a Tokyo-based company that designed the plans.  On that date this year, Hokkaido Electric Power Co. said it would only purchase a total of 400 megawatts of electricity as part of the feed-in tariff system from the so-called mega-solar power plants, each with a generation capacity of 2 megawatts or more. That amounts to turning down as many as 70 percent of the 87 applications to sell it power, filed through March, with a combined output capacity of 1.568 gigawatts.  One Hokkaido Electric official justified the decision: “Our power grid has a limited capacity. Accepting too much power from solar plants, where output levels fluctuate wildly depending on the weather, compromises a stable supply of electricity.”

One Sapporo-based real estate company lost money speculating. The company purchased two plots of land to host solar power plants that never materialized. “We were taken in by a renewable energy bubble,” the company’s president lamented.

The renewable energy feed-in tariff system was introduced in July 2012. It obligates utilities to purchase electricity generated by solar and wind plants at predetermined prices. The then-ruling Democratic Party of Japan initiated the system in a bid to bolster the nation’s renewable energy production, which accounted for less than 2 percent of the total power generation at the time, to 30 percent.

The regional utility’s decision to limit its purchases of solar power cannot be assigned to grid capacity alone. The decision was taken in large part due to Hokkaido Electric’s expectations that all three idled reactors at its Tomari nuclear power plant will eventually go back online…But if utilities revert to relying on nuclear power to levels before the Fukushima disaster, that could leave very little room for the emerging renewable energy industries to grow.

Enter the savior of Japan’s nuclear energy sector: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s growth strategy. The Abe administration is eager to export Japan’s nuclear technologies and expertise. Not only did his government help secure a contract to build nuclear reactors in Turkey, but Abe himself, acting as the country’s top salesman, visited Saudi Arabia, India and Central Europe to promote Japanese nuclear capabilities.  In late March, a group representing the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum (JAIF) also visited the Sizewell nuclear power plant 160 kilometers northeast of London. The forum’s constituent members include power utilities and manufacturers dealing in nuclear technologies.  There are plans to build two more nuclear reactors on the grounds of the Sizewell site.

“Expanding our nuclear operations overseas has come to play a larger role in our perspective since the Abe administration came to power,” said Akihiro Matsuzaki, an official in the JAIF Department of International Affairs and a member of the mission to Sizewell. Foundation work is already under way there.  Hitachi Ltd., which acquired Britain’s Horizon Nuclear Power Ltd., said it also hopes to boost the annual sales of its nuclear business division from the current 160 billion yen ($1.64 billion) to 360 billion yen by fiscal 2020.  “We will be part of Abenomics (Abe’s economic policy),” Hitachi Senior Vice President Tatsuro Ishizuka told a briefing session for investors on June 13.

MARI FUJISAKI, Japan’s growth in renewable energy dims as nuclear strives for comeback, Asahi Shimbun July 7, 2013

The Risk of Unburnable Carbon

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Several  reports suggest that markets are overlooking the risk of “unburnable carbon”. The share prices of oil, gas and coal companies depend in part on their reserves. The more fossil fuels a firm has underground, the more valuable its shares. But what if some of those reserves can never be dug up and burned?

If governments were determined to implement their climate policies, a lot of that carbon would have to be left in the ground, says Carbon Tracker, a non-profit organisation, and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, part of the London School of Economics. Their analysis starts by estimating the amount of carbon dioxide that could be put into the atmosphere if global temperatures are not to rise by more than 2°C, the most that climate scientists deem prudent. The maximum, says the report, is about 1,000 gigatons (GTCO2) between now and 2050. The report calls this the world’s “carbon budget”.

Existing fossil-fuel reserves already contain far more carbon than that. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), in its “World Energy Outlook”, total proven international reserves contain 2,860GTCO2—almost three times the carbon budget. The report refers to the excess as “unburnable carbon”.

Most of the reserves are owned by governments or state energy firms; they could be left in the ground by public-policy choice (ie, if governments took the 2°C target seriously). But the reserves of listed oil companies are different. These are assets developed using money raised from investors who expect a return. Proven reserves of listed firms contain 762GTCO2—most of what can prudently be burned before 2050. Listed potential reserves have 1,541GTCO2 embedded in them.

So companies and governments already have far more oil, gas and coal than they need (again, assuming temperatures are not to rise by more than 2°C). Logically, the response to this would be for governments to leave their reserves untouched and for companies to run theirs slowly down, returning more of what they earn to shareholders. Neither of these things is happening. State-owned companies are taking an increasing share of total energy output. And in 2012, says Carbon Tracker, the 200 largest listed oil, gas and coal companies spent five times as much—$674 billion—on developing new reserves as they did returning money to shareholders ($126 billion). ExxonMobil alone plans to spend $37 billion a year on exploration in each of the next three years.

Such behaviour, on the face of it, makes no sense. One possible explanation is that companies are betting that government climate policies will fail; they will be able to burn all their reserves, including new ones, after all. This implies that global temperatures would either soar past the 2°C mark, or be restrained by a technological fix, such as carbon capture and storage, or geo-engineering.Recent events make such a bet seem rational. On April 16th the European Parliament voted against attempts to shore up Europe’s emissions trading system against collapse. The system is the EU’s flagship environmental policy and the world’s largest carbon market.  Putting it at risk suggests that Europeans have lost their will to endure short-term pain for long-term environmental gain. Nor is this the only such sign. Several cash-strapped EU countries are cutting subsidies for renewable energy. And governments around the world have failed to make progress towards a new global climate-change treaty. Betting against tough climate policies seems almost prudent.

The markets are [also] mispricing risk by valuing companies as if all their reserves will be burned. Investors treat reserves as an indicator of future revenues. They therefore require companies to replace reserves depleted by production, even though this runs foul of emission-reduction policies. Fossil-fuel firms live and die by a measure called the reserve replacement ratio, which must remain above 100%. Companies see their shares marked down if the ratio falls, even when they pull the plug on dodgy, expensive projects. This happened to Shell, for example, when it suspended drilling in the Arctic in February….

At the moment neither public policies nor markets reflect the risks of a warmer world.

Energy Firms and Climate Change: Unburnable Fuel, Economist, May 4, 2013, at 68

Flooding Vietnam: Climate Change

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Ho Chi Minh City (known locally as HCMC), Vietnam, a city full of rivers and canals,  has so far been spared a devastating flood, and donors have so far been eager to help. The World Bank, for example, has upgraded stormwater and canal infrastructure in a few central districts, and on April 8th, 2013 officials from the Dutch city of Rotterdam were in town to promote a joint Dutch-Vietnamese project designed to help HCMC adapt to climate change.Yet nearly half the city lies less than one metre above sea level, and scientists say groundwater extraction, which causes land subsidence, may be having a huge unseen effect. Nearly 70% of the city is already vulnerable to extreme flooding, according to the Asian Development Bank.

Flood risks are rising in HCMC’s lower-lying districts, in part because the property boom that accompanied Vietnam’s 2007 entry to the World Trade Organisation led many developers to build wherever they could. One potential victim is an Intel factory inside a high-tech park on HCMC’s eastern outskirts. The threat to such a big firm is troubling because the city accounts for more than half of foreign direct investment in Vietnam, and exports have helped offset weak consumer demand. In Vietnam urban floods also pose public health risks in the form of outbreaks of cholera or dysentery…

The government is promoting a plan to build a 172-km (106-mile), $2.6 billion system of ring dykes to protect urban areas west of the Saigon River. But the financing is not yet secure, and the World Bank has said such large flood-control solutions may be unsustainable.

A better option may be a smaller $1.4 billion dyke proposed by Royal HaskoningDHV, a Dutch consultancy that has managed similar projects in New Orleans and other flood-prone places. But officials at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development typically prefer expensive infrastructure projects, which offer opportunities for kickbacks. “They love dykes,” says Ho Long Phi, a professor at Vietnam National University in HCMC.  Mr Phi may be Saigon’s best flood-control asset. Unlike many Vietnamese officials, he understands that bigger flood-protection measures are not necessarily better, and that if the city is to prosper in the long term, it will need to work with, rather than against, nature. Today’s policies will only transfer flooding risks to future generations. In Mr Phi’s view, the only thing that may change the government’s short-sighted approach to flood prevention is a catastrophe,

Up a creek: A low-lying city must take drastic action to prevent flooding, Economist, May 4,  2013, at 41

US Government Lobbying for Biotechnology Industry

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American diplomats lobbied aggressively overseas to promote genetically modified (GM) food crops such as soy beans, an analysis of official cable traffic revealed on Tuesday.  The review of more than 900 diplomatic cables by the campaign group Food and Water Watch showed a carefully crafted campaign to break down resistance to GM products in Europe and other countries, and so help promote the bottom line of big American agricultural businesses.

The cables, which first surfaced with the Wikileaks disclosures two years ago, described a series of separate public relations strategies, unrolled at dozens of press junkets and biotech conferences, aimed at convincing scientists, media, industry, farmers, elected officials and others of the safety and benefits of GM producs…The public relations effort unrolled by the State Department also ventured into legal terrain, accotrding to the report. US officials stationed overseas opposed GM food labelling laws as well as rules blocking the import of GM foods. The report notes that some of the lobbying effort had direct benefits. About 7% of the cables mentioned specific companies, and 6% mentioned Monsanto. “This corporate diplomacy was nearly twice as common as diplomatic efforts on food aid,” the report said….

In some instances, there was little pretence at hiding that resort to pressure – at least within US government circles. In a 2007 cable, released during the earlier Wikileaks disclosures, Craig Stapleton, a friend and former business partner of George Bush, advised Washington to draw up a target list in Europe in response to a move by France to ban a variety of GM Monsanto corn.  “Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits,” Stapleton wrote at the time.”The list should be measured rather than vicious and must be sustainable over the long term, since we should not expect an early victory. Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices,” he wrote.

Excerpts, Suzanne Goldenberg,Diplomatic cables reveal aggressive GM lobbying by US officials, Guardian, May 15, 2013

The Nuclear Village in Japan

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After an earthquake and tsunami created a creeping nuclear catastrophe two years ago the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) said it would get the country out of nuclear energy by 2040. Although it quickly backtracked, almost all of Japan’s 50 commercial reactors are still lying idle.

In February this year (2013), Shinzo Abe, leader of the then incoming Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), said the new government would restart reactors after they passed a forthcoming set of new safety tests. The country’s “nuclear village”, a cosy bunch from industry and government, cheered. But now the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi plant is starting to alarm the public once more. On April 15th, 2013 the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a UN body, flew in to investigate a series of dangerous incidents.

A power outage in March (2013) left four underground pools that store thousands of the plant’s nuclear fuel rods without fresh cooling water for several hours. A rat, it later emerged, had gnawed through a cable. Workmen laying down rat-proof netting caused another outage. Then this month regulators discovered that thousands of gallons of radioactive water had seeped into the ground; the plant’s operator had installed a jerry-rigged system of plastic sheeting, which sprang leaks. The quantity of contaminated water has become a crisis in its own right, the manager has admitted. And now the pipes used to transfer water to safer storage containers are leaking too.

Experts who examined the causes of the 2011 catastrophe reckon the LDP has paid too little attention to what went wrong. Kiyoshi Kurokawa, the chairman of a parliamentary investigation, says the country may be moving “too hastily back towards nuclear power, without fully regaining the trust of the Japanese public and the international community”. Yoichi Funabashi, a former editor of Asahi Shimbun newspaper who headed a private-sector investigation, says it is unfortunate that the 2012 election, which brought the LDP back to office, did not include a proper debate about the future of nuclear energy.

Now the set of policies known as “Abenomics” is making a return to nuclear power ever more pressing. The LDP is expected to push hard to restart plants if it wins a crucial election for the upper house of parliament this summer. Mr Abe’s focus on the economy has given greater say to the voice of business, including the big utilities whose plants are idle. Smaller firms clamour for cheaper power too.

Japan’s broader economic future may be at stake… [the deterioration of  overall current-account balance]  could affect Japan’s ability to keep funding its huge public debt domestically. A big cause is the cost of energy imported to fill the gap left by nuclear power. A weaker yen, the result of the central bank’s radical loosening of monetary policy, is further pushing up the price of imported oil and gas…[T]he public is still afraid of nuclear power. A nationwide poll  in February 2013 found that around 70% of respondents wanted either to phase out all the plants, or to shut them down immediately. Opposition is likely to be strongest at the local level, as regions move to switch their reactors back on. This week an Osaka court ruled on a suit brought by local residents to have Japan’s only two operating reactors, at the Oi plant in Fukui prefecture, shut down. They lost, but their suit looks like only the first of many battles

Japan’s nuclear future: Don’t look now, Economist, Apr. 20, 2013, at 44.

Multinational Corporations in US Courts: Kiobel v. Shell

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The Alien Tort Statute (ATS)… grants American district courts jurisdiction over “any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or of a treaty of the United States”. At the age of 190 it sprang back to life on April 6th 1979, when it was used to allow two Paraguayans to sue a former Paraguayan policeman in an American court for acts of torture committed in Paraguay.Since then, roughly 150 lawsuits have been filed against American and foreign corporations for actions committed around the world. Four local plaintiffs used the ATS to sue Unocal in a federal court in Los Angeles for human-rights violations allegedly committed during the construction of an oil pipeline in Myanmar. A human-rights organisation used it to sue Yahoo on behalf of two Chinese democracy activists for actions committed in China by a subsidiary. ATS suits against DaimlerChrysler and Rio Tinto, among others, are pending. Though most ATS cases have been dismissed or settled, the costs of settlements can be high and the negative publicity damaging.

Multinational companies will therefore cheer the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum (Shell), released on April 17th, 2013. It dramatically limits the ability of plaintiffs to file suit against corporations in American courts for actions committed abroad.  The ruling stems from a case brought in New York by 12 Nigerian plaintiffs living in America. They allege that Shell was complicit in human-rights violations—including murder, rape, theft and destruction of property—committed by Nigeria’s armed forces in the region of Ogoniland. A federal appeals court dismissed their suit, arguing that the ATS provides no grounds for corporate-liability lawsuits. But as the 150 ATS suits show, other courts have disagreed. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in order to settle the question.

In an earlier ruling, in 2004, the court cautiously ruled that the ATS permitted lawsuits for “a modest number of international law violations”, such as piracy and crimes involving ambassadors, which would have been recognised when it was adopted. The court’s Kiobel ruling goes much further. It holds that the ATS does not apply to actions committed by foreign companies, and noted a strong presumption against applying American law outside the United States, “There is no indication,” wrote John Roberts, the chief justice, “that the ATS was passed to make the United States a uniquely hospitable forum for the enforcement of international norms”.  In a separate concurrence, four of the court’s liberals took a slightly softer tack, arguing that the ATS should allow suits that prevent America from becoming “a safe harbour…for a torturer or other common enemy of mankind”. But that reasoning still does not permit foreign nationals to use American courts to sue foreign companies for acts committed on foreign soil.

Extraterritoriality: The Shell game ends, Economist, Apr. 20, 2013, at 34

Foreign Corporate Immunity: Chevron/Canada v. Ecuador

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A Toronto judge halted on May 1, 2013 an effort to enforce a $19 billion Ecuadorean judgment against U.S. oil company Chevron Corp in Canada, finding that his Ontario provincial court was the wrong place for the case.  The action is the latest skirmish in a two-decade conflict between Chevron and residents of Ecuador’s Lago Agrio region over claims that Texaco, which Chevron acquired in 2001, contaminated the area from 1964 to 1992.

Citing Chevron’s promise to fight the plaintiffs until “hell freezes over, and then fight it out on the ice,” Justice David Brown of the Ontario court foresaw a “bitter, protracted” battle that would be costly and time consuming.  “While Ontario enjoys a bountiful supply of ice for part of each year, Ontario is not the place for that fight,” Brown wrote in his ruling on Wednesday. “Ontario courts should be reluctant to dedicate their resources to disputes where, in dollars and cents terms, there is nothing to fight over.”

Alan Lenczner, principal lawyer in Toronto for the Ecuadorean plaintiffs, said they would definitely appeal, arguing that a multinational company could not be immune from enforcement in a country where it earns so much. “Chevron Corp itself earns no money,” he said in a statement. “All its earnings and profits come from subsidiaries including, importantly, Chevron Canada.”  Chevron Canada’s assets are worth more than $12 billion, the plaintiffs had said, and alongside separate actions in Argentina and Brazil, they had sought to persuade the Ontario court to collect the damages awarded to them by the South American court.

Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil company, has steadfastly refused to pay, saying the February 2011 ruling by the court in Lago Agrio was influenced by fraud and bribery. A related fraud case goes to trial in New York in October.  The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that the country’s courts can recognize and enforce foreign judgments in cases where there is a “reasonable and substantial connection” between the cause of the action and the foreign court. Chevron called Brown’s ruling a “significant setback” to the Ecuadoreans’ strategy of seeking enforcement against subsidiaries that were not parties to the Ecuador case.  “The plaintiffs should be seeking enforcement in the United States – where Chevron Corporation resides. In the U.S., however, they would be confronted by the fact that eight federal courts have already found the Ecuador trial tainted by fraud,” Chevron said in a statement. Last month, a consulting firm whose work helped lead to the $19 billion award against Chevron disavowed some environmental claims used to obtain the judgment.

Excerpt, Judge halts Chevron-Ecuador enforcement action in Canada, Reuters, May 1, 2013

Fighting Biopiracy: European Union

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The European Union is debating a biopiracy law requiring industry to compensate indigenous people if it makes commercial use of local knowledge such as plant-based medicines.  Under the law – based on the international convention on access to biodiversity, the Nagoya protocol – the pharmaceuticals industry would need the written consent of local or indigenous people before exploring their region’s genetic resources or making use of their traditional know-how. Relevant authorities would have the power to sanction companies which failed to comply, protecting local interests from the predatory attitude of big European companies.

A German pharmaceutical company’s dealings in South Africa [is an example of biopiracy].  Pelargonium sidoides, a variety of geranium known for its antimicrobial and expectorant qualities, has been used traditionally by indigenous communities in South Africa for centuries to treat bronchitis and other respiratory diseases. It also stimulates the nervous system, so has been used in the treatment of AIDS and tuberculosis.  In 2000, the German company Schwabe made significant profits on Umckaloabo, a product derived from the geranium, without compensating local communities. It then filed patents claiming exclusive rights to the medical use of the plant.

But in 2010 the patents were cancelled following appeals from the African Centre for Biosafety in South Africa and the Bern Declaration in Switzerland, calling the patents “an illegitimate and illegal monopolization of genetic resources derived from traditional knowledge and a stark opposition to the Convention on Biodiversity.”…[The] law would help protect biodiversity and ensure that the people from the region are adequately compensated for their resource and their traditional know-how. …The need to ensure the property rights of indigenous populations becomes more pressing as industry looks more and more to plant and animal-based cures to common diseases.Only 16 countries have ratified the Nagoya protocol. The European Union and its 24 of its 27 member states have signed the convention, but are yet to ratify it. When they do, Nagoya should soon reach the 50 states needed for it to come into force…  “The 16 states are countries in the South…

Excerpts, EU ponders biopiracy law to protect indigeneous people, EurActiv, April 26,  2013

See also EU portal on Biodiversity and Benefits Sharing

See also article on Alice v. Schwabe

Tibet – Mineral Resources, Fragile Ecology

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The ecology of the Tibetan plateau, noted the Ministry of Land and Resources two years ago, is “extremely fragile”. Any damage, it warned, would be difficult or impossible to reverse. But, it went on, the China National Gold Group, a state-owned company, had achieved “astonishing results” in working to protect the environment around its mine near the region’s capital, Lhasa. On March 29th at least 83 of the mine’s workers lay buried under a colossal landslide. Its cause is not yet certain, but critics of Tibet’s mining frenzy feel vindicated.

The disaster at the Jiama copper and gold mine, about 70km (45 miles) north-west of Lhasa, has clearly embarrassed the government in Beijing. According to China Digital Times, a California-based media-monitoring website, the Communist Party ordered newspapers to stick to reports issued by the government and the state-owned news agency, Xinhua.

Foreign reporters are rarely allowed into Tibet, least of all to cover sensitive incidents. The official media have avoided speculation about any possible link between the landslide and mining activities in the area. They say the landslide covered a large area with 2m cubic metres of rubble. By the time The Economist went to press, 66 bodies had been pulled out by teams of rescuers with sniffer dogs. The high altitude and lack of oxygen made rescue work hard. A deputy minister of land and resources, Xu Deming, said preliminary investigations had shown that the landslide was caused by a “natural geological disaster”. Fragments of rock left behind by receding glaciers are being blamed, though officials do not explain why the workers’ camp was set up so close to such an apparent hazard.

The Tibetan government-in-exile based in India says it fears the disaster was caused by work related to the mine, which appears to have grown rapidly since construction began in 2008. It was formally opened two years later, at a ceremony attended by Tibet’s most senior officials. The $520m investment was described at the time as the biggest in Tibet’s mining industry by a firm belonging to the central government. The mine is owned by China Gold International Resources, a company listed in Hong Kong and Toronto. China National Gold Group is the controlling shareholder.

Tibet has been trying hard in recent years to encourage such companies to dig up the plateau’s metals and minerals. It has a lot of them to offer: China’s biggest reserves of copper and chromite (used in steel production), among the world’s biggest of lithium (used to make batteries), as well as abundant reserves of uranium, gold, borax (a component of ceramics and glass) and oil. Extracting these, however, often involves boring into a landscape considered sacred by Tibetans.

The Jiama mine, in a valley known to Tibetans as Gyama and revered as the birthplace of a seventh-century Tibetan king, has been the focus of protests by locals angered by environmental and other issues. Water from the valley flows into the Lhasa river. Woeser, a Tibetan activist based in Beijing, has blogged about locals’ fear that their water supplies will be polluted.

Tibetan resentment has been fuelled by the mining industry’s failure to provide much direct employment.

Excerpts, Mining in Tibet: The price of gold, Economist, April 6, 2013, at 54

HardBall: Chevron and the Oil Pollution in Amazon

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An environmental case that has pitted Chevron against Ecuadorean Amazon villagers for two decades has taken another bizarre twist, with an American consulting firm now recanting research favorable to the villagers’ claims of pollution in remote tracts of jungle.  The consulting firm, Stratus Consulting of Boulder, Colo., announced late Thursday (April 11, 2013) that it had originally been misled by Steven R. Donziger, a lead lawyer for the Ecuadorean villagers, and had decided to disavow its contributions to scientific research about whether there was groundwater contamination that sickened the residents in swaths of rain forest.

The move prompted the plaintiffs to assert that Chevron was coercing parties to the case, citing this as another example of strong tactics employed by the company as it tries to overturn an Ecuadorean judge’s decision two years ago that it pay $18 billion in damages, one of the largest environmental awards ever. In this instance, the plaintiffs claim that Chevron pressured Stratus to retract its assessment in exchange for dismissal of legal claims in a countersuit filed by Chevron made against the firm — claims that could have pushed the consulting business into bankruptcy.  “Stratus deeply regrets its involvement in the Ecuador litigation,” the firm said. It remains unclear whether this development with Stratus will have much impact on Chevron’s appeals, because the judge also based his ruling on other environmental assessments. The judge ruled that back in the 1970s, Texaco had left an environmental mess in oil drilling operations while operating as a partner with the Ecuadorean state oil company, and that Chevron, which bought Texaco in 2001, must apologize for and was liable for the damage.

Chevron has refused to apologize. In addition to appealing the decision in the Ecuadorean courts, Chevron also filed a countersuit in federal court in New York against Mr. Donziger and Stratus Consulting, accusing them of racketeering and fraud. Because Stratus has now retracted its statements on the Ecuadorean pollution, Chevron agreed not to pursue claims against the firm anymore. On Friday, Chevron filed witness statements from Douglas Beltman, a Stratus vice president, and Ann Maest, a Stratus scientist, in which they now say they were not aware of scientific evidence of groundwater contamination in the former Texaco concession area or of any adverse health impact to people from the operations.

Mr. Beltman stated that “at Donziger’s direction,” he drafted portions of a report in the first person as if it were written by Richard Cabrera, the supposedly independent expert, that detailed environmental damage for the Ecuadorean court. “Donziger stressed to me and Ann Maest the importance of Stratus ensuring that no one learn of Stratus’ involvement in any aspect of the Cabrera Report or Responses,” he said.  In an interview, Mr. Beltman said, “This settlement was extensively negotiated with Chevron and we think it’s fair and it’s not extortion.”  Mr. Donziger said he could not comment since he was a defendant in the racketeering case filed by Chevron.

It was not immediately clear what impact Stratus’s recantation would have on the case. Chevron’s appeal is before Ecuador’s highest court, the National Court of Justice, and the company is defending itself in courts in Canada, Argentina and Brazil to avoid paying damages in those countries. The plaintiffs are waging an international campaign seeking damages because Chevron has no assets in Ecuador itself…

Kent Robertson, a Chevron spokesman, said the statements should uphold the company’s position in the American racketeering case and in the international enforcement proceedings. “The declarations today show there is no scientific evidence to support the plaintiffs’ lawyers’ allegations,” he said.

Craig Smyser, a lawyer for some of the Ecuadorean plaintiffs, said the statements by the consulting firm “should have almost no effect” because the Ecuadorean judge relied on many expert reports other than the one that Stratus was involved in.  He attributed the decision by Stratus to repudiate its earlier work to the “immense financial strain that threatened the financial extinction of the firm, including a campaign by Chevron to discredit Stratus with various government agencies and businesses with which Stratus worked.”

Chevron has been playing hardball for at least four years. The company produced video recordings from pens and watches wired with bugging devices that suggested a bribery scheme surrounding the proceedings and involving a judge hearing the case. An American behind the secret recordings was a convicted drug trafficker.  But the oil company appeared to gain the upper hand three years ago when it won a legal bid to secure the outtakes from a documentary about the case, “Crude,” in which Mr. Donziger was shown describing the need to pressure a Ecuadorean judge and boasting of meetings with Ecuadorean officials.

In a sworn statement filed in an American court, Alberto Guerra, an Ecuadorean judge who heard the Chevron case in 2003 and 2004, accused Nicolas Zambrano, the judge who issued the $18 billion verdict against Chevron, of taking a $500,000 bribe from the plaintiffs. Mr. Zambrano denied the charge, and in his own affidavit, said that Mr. Guerra had told him that Chevron would offer him $1 million in return for a favorable judgment.  Chevron has denied offering any bribes.

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS, Consultant Recants in Chevron Pollution Case in Ecuador, NY Times, April 12, 2013

 

Greening the Shipping Industry

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The shipping industry faces the cost of complying with a deluge of new rules(issued by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO)). To make matters worse, it is in the middle of a slump caused by too many ships chasing too little trade.  As the deadlines for all these rules approach, shipping bosses are firing off distress flares. Masamichi Morooka, chairman of the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS), a lobby group, lamented on March 19th that the cost could run into “hundreds of billions” of dollars. He begged regulators to take into account the dire state of shipping

One of the first big expenses will be for cleaner fuel. Ships used to burn the cheap, unrefined crud, laden with sulphur and other nasties, that is left over when oil is refined. The fine soot that such fuel gives off can cause premature deaths from asthma and heart attacks. So in 2005 the IMO started to limit the sulphur content of maritime fuel, especially in “emission-control areas” along heavily populated coasts in North America and Europe. These limits are set to be tightened drastically,  Such fuels currently cost about 50% more than unrefined “residual” grades…

Shipping firms are also under pressure to cut their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The IMO reckons that ships cause about 2.7% of total man-made emissions, a bit more than planes but a lot less than cars and trucks. Under a convention it has brought into force this year, ships will have to introduce fuel-economy measures with the aim of reducing their emissions by 20% by 2020 and 50% by 2050….

The IMO is also pressing on with planned new rules on cleaning up ships’ ballast water. These may come into effect this year, once enough national governments have signed up for them. A study last year in the Journal of Marine Engineering and Technology* reckoned that around 60,000 ships worldwide would need refitting with one or more cleansing units, costing up to $1.7m each. In that case, shipping firms could be whacked with a bill of the order of $50 billion…

New proposals to make shipping greener, and push it further into the red, keep popping up. This week the European Parliament’s environment committee backed proposals for recycling levies on vessels calling at EU ports. This would pay for safer scrapping of old ships, which can contain asbestos and other toxic materials….

At a conference in Athens recently John Platsidakis, a Greek shipping boss who chairs an association of bulk-cargo operators, grumbled: “We carry 90% of world trade and we emit only 2.7% of the CO2 but still we are treated as if we are acting with indifference to the environment.”…[A]irlines, for example, have lobbied more shrewdly than shipping firms. But then again, the shipping industry is bigger and more fragmented than aviation, making it harder for it to present a united front. Many small, family-owned shipping firms have publicity-shy bosses and lack the sophisticated public-relations machines that giant firms deploy….[T]he ICS seeks to represent the entire global merchant-shipping fleet with just 20 people. The industry’s sluggish lobbying has meant that rules get passed before it has a chance to object to them. And once they are passed, it is much harder to get them changed.

The shipping industry: Sinking under a big green wave, Economist, Mar. 30, 2013, at 69

It Can Cost Your Life: Shipping Minerals

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A dark underbelly exists in Indonesia’s thriving trade with China. Since late 2010 five ships loaded with Indonesian minerals have sunk when bound for China, with huge loss of life. Little has been done to break the deadly trend. Indeed, plenty of interests have an incentive to hush it up. The latest ship to founder is the Harita Bauxite, a bulk carrier which sank on February 17th near the Philippines. Of its 24 crew, who were all or mainly from Myanmar, ten were rescued, one of whom later died. Fourteen were still missing when the search was called off two weeks later.

The vessel is thought to have been carrying nickel ore, a potentially deadly cargo, loaded on Obi island in the remote Indonesian province of Muluku and destined for China’s steel mills. In terms of the global bulk trade, shipments of nickel ore from Indonesia to China are tiny: just 2m-3m tonnes out of more than 4 billion tonnes of bulk goods carried each year on over 9,000 vessels. Yet this backwater trade accounted for four of the 20 bulk freighters lost worldwide during 2010-11, and for 66 of 82 deaths, according to Intercargo, an association of ship owners.

ll four ships were found to have sunk because the cargo had liquefied. Nickel ore is dangerous because if it gets too wet, the fine, claylike particles that are often present in the ore turn the cargo to a liquid gloop that sloshes about the holds with such momentum that even a giant ship can capsize. The four ships had loaded during Indonesia’s rainy season. The ore is typically stockpiled in the open. Quite how the Harita Bauxite foundered is not yet clear, but if liquefaction was a factor, as many in the shipping industry suspect, it will have been another entirely avoidable tragedy.

Preventing liquefaction should be fairly simple. It involves checking the moisture content of susceptible commodities. If they are too wet, a surveyor will deem the cargo unsafe and not to be loaded. Time and again in Indonesia, checks have been inadequate. With the bulk-shipping business in the doldrums, the profitable nickel trade is a siren call for ship owners and charterers. Indonesia’s ministers and mandarins in Jakarta, the capital, refuse to comment on the tragedies and have done little to tighten policing at faraway ports in Sulawesi, Muluku and Papua.

Ship captains report intimidation by miners and agents if they refuse to accept cargo. A leading marine insurer says the ports’ remoteness makes it hard to sample cargoes reliably. Local officials turn a blind eye to unsafe practices. Peter Lundahl Rasmussen at Bimco, a maritime association, says surveyors trying to do their job have been assaulted or arrested.

With insurance claims mounting, shipping bodies and insurers have issued plenty of instructions about how to load nickel ore safely, especially in Indonesia. The International Maritime Organisation (IMO), the UN agency responsible for shipping safety, is also taking steps to tighten the regulations for commodities that can suffer liquefaction.

But the IMO’s process is a glacial one, and the new rules will not clear its various committees and be promulgated until at least 2015. Even then, the organisation relies on its members to enforce regulations. In Indonesia, in other words, the impact of tighter rules may be minimal. Moreover, existing and planned legislation covers ore depots and the ports, but not the transit between the two, where rain may do its dangerous work. Steve Cameron at RTI, a risk consultancy, argues that it would be more effective if mining companies faced charges of corporate manslaughter for not ensuring that their ore reaches ships in good condition.

Shipping: Deadly Trade, Economist, Mar. 23, 2013, at 46.

 

Anti-Nuclear Protests: Taiwan

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In what organizers called the largest anti-nuclear protest in Taiwan, an estimated 200,000 people took to the streets in several parts of the island on March 9, 2013 to call for the scrapping of nuclear power plants.  The protest was held simultaneously in northern, central, southern and eastern Taiwan just two days before the second anniversary of the meltdown of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant in the wake of the big earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011.

The march participants demanded that the government not allocate any more funding for the construction of Taiwan’s fourth nuclear power plant in New Taipei City. Construction of the plant has stretched over 14 years and has so far costed taxpayers US$10 billion. It is scheduled to be completed later this year.  But there are increasing concerns over safety, especially given several flooding incidents at the plant being built by the state-run Taipower. Protesters urged the government not to allow fuel rod filling at the new power plant.  More than 6.5 million people, including the residents of Taipei, live within just 80 kilometers of the plant.

Protesters also demanded the speedy decommissioning of Taiwan’s first, second and third nuclear power plants now under operation. All three plants are around three decades old.  In addition, protesters called for the removal of stored nuclear waste from Taiwan’s outlying Orchid Island immediately, as well as a review of the government’s policy to eventually phase out the use of nuclear power, and the government’s implementation of “zero growth for electricity demands.”

A spokeswoman for the Presidential Office said President Ma Ying-jeou was willing to have dialogues with anti-nuclear groups and listen to their suggestions on how Taiwan can find alternatives for nuclear power.Garfi Li cited Ma as saying that the government’s nuclear power policy is based on the premises of “no shortage of electricity, reasonable electricity prices, and honoring the promise to cutting carbon emission to the international community.”…

Previously, the economics ministry, which oversees Taiwan’s state-owned Taipower — the operator of the nuclear power plants — has said Taiwan needs nuclear power so as to avoid being overdependent on imported energy raw material and rising international prices for them. The economics minister has also warned of an energy shortage if the fourth plant is not put into operation….Most importantly, protesters argued that safety, rather than carbon emission reduction and cheap energy prices, should be top priority. They argue that Taiwan’s power plants are among the most dangerous in the world — they are located near fault lines and in densely populated areas, much more densely populated than Fukushima.said they were adamantly opposed to the increase of thermal power, adding that Taichung should increase the use of solar and wind power instead….

In Taitung, eastern Taiwan, the protesters called for nuclear waste to be removed from their area. More than 2,000 people took part in that protest, the largest mass movement in years in Taitung.”We have to take to the streets for the good of the next generation,” one organizer said.Following Orchid Island off the Taitung County, Nantien village in the county’s Dajen township has been slected as one of the possible nuclear waste storage site

200,000 TAKE PART IN TAIWAN’S ANTI-NUCLEAR PROTEST. Focus Taiwan News Channel, Mar. 9, 2013

 

Shell Nigeria and the Ogoni People

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On January 30th, 2013 a Dutch court ruled that Shell, Nigeria’s biggest oil producer, must compensate Friday Akpan, a farmer from the Delta region, for the pollution of his farmland and destruction of his livelihood. The ruling could open a flood-gate to legal complaints against oil companies.In 2008, five Nigerians, including Mr Akpan, filed suits in The Hague where Shell has its headquarters. The other four cases were dismissed; the court said Shell could not have prevented the spills involved. Environmental campaigners insist the company was negligent. Amnesty International says the dismissal highlights how difficult it is for Nigerians whose lives have been affected by oil pollution to get justice.

Court orders and regulatory fines are rarely enforced in Nigeria. According to a 2011 United Nations report on the Ogoniland region in the Niger Delta, restoring the area, much of which is covered in thick, black oil, could take up to 30 years. It would cost $1billion just to start the clean up. Little progress has been made since the report was published. Bad laws, lax regulation and corporate exploitation make environmental degradation even worse in Nigeria.

Shell says that nearly 26,000 barrels of its oil was spilt last year in 200 incidents in the Delta. Some 55 were the result of “operational mishaps,” including poor maintenance of facilities but 144 were caused by sabotage or people siphoning oil from pipelines. Oil theft is increasingly a cause of oil spills in the region. The illegal refining of stolen oil is common in the Niger Delta. But in a region with few jobs, poor health care and dire schools, it is little wonder people resort to refining stolen oil. For some, it is the only way left to make a living.

John Donovan, A mixed verdict, Economist, Feb 3rd, 2013

Haunted by Sellafield, nuclear waste storage in the UK

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The government’s long-term hopes of burying nuclear waste in the UK has suffered a major blow after Cumbria county council voted against plans for a £12bn underground site.  Three local authorities – Cumbria county council, Allerdale borough council and Copeland borough council – were set to vote on the search for a site, which would have been the first of its kind in the UK.

Copeland borough councillors voted six-to-one in favour of moving to onto the next stage of the search process. But Cumbria county council took an opposing view, rejecting the proposals by seven votes to three, and in the process ending the county council’s four-year formal involvement in the consultation process.  “As a decision to continue with the process needed the agreement of both the district and county councils, Cumbria county council’s decision has removed both districts from consideration,” councillors said in a statement. The vote triggered huge cheers from environmental campaigners outside the council chamber in Carlisle.

Ed Davey, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, said the decision was “disappointing”….

More than 32,000 people had signed a petition against the £12bn underground storage facility.However, the issue of how to handle nuclear waste remains live in Cumbria.  Sellafield’s nuclear storage facilities remain the largest in the UK, and the ten members of the county council’s cabinet also agreed that the council will encourage the Government to invest in improvements to the existing surface storage facilities at the site while a permanent solution for the country’s higher activity radioactive waste is found.

Campaigners {West Cumbria Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace) argued the underground dump would harm the Lake District national park and its tourism industry. They also claim that studies show Cumbria’s geology is unlikely to be safe for radioactive waste.

Excerpts, Cumbria rejects radioactive waste disposal programme, http://www.channel4.com/news/, Jan. 30, 2012

Water in the Middle East: investment

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Amidst a growing water crisis in the predominantly arid Middle East and North Africa (MENA), some of the world’s most influential water experts will meet Jan. 15-17 at the International Water Summit (IWS) in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE) to look for sustainable solutions.The World Bank has already warned that MENA is the world’s “most water-scarce region, home to 6.3 percent of the world’s population but with just 1.4 percent of renewable fresh water.”

The six countries that comprise the Gulf Cooperation Council – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE – are expected to spend a staggering 725 billion dollars over the next two decades on new water projects, desalination plants, infrastructure-building and high-tech innovations…

At the Abu Dhabi summit, Project Stream will offer a major opportunity for developers and investors to “connect and accelerate the building of sustainable water solutions”.  The summit, which is is part of the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week being hosted by Masdar, described as “a sustainable green energy city of the future”, will also bring together financiers and some of the world’s leading engineering, technology and service providers.

Peter McConnell, show director for IWS, says that GCC countries have been investing heavily in water sustainability over the last few years.  “And Project Stream will in essence become a networking platform that will connect solution providers from around the world to project developers from the region,” he added.  These projects, McConnell, said range from multi-billion-dollar government infrastructure ventures to high-tech innovations in areas such as low-energy desalination, water leakage prevention and water efficiency.  “These will contribute in a significant way to address the worldwide challenges surrounding clear water supply,” he added…

The industry think-tank Global Water Intelligence (GWI), which is collaborating with Project Stream in Abu Dhabi, has reported major planned investments by Gulf countries, amounting as much as 725 billion dollars over the next two decades.  Between 2013 and 2017, Qatar is planning to invest some 1.1 billion dollars in desalination capacity through independent water and power projects (IWPPs).  Kuwait has a combined municipal water/wastewater capital expenditure budget of 4.4 billion dollars from 2013 to 2016, while the UAE’s budget reaches 13.0 billion dollars.  Saudi Arabia is expected to spend about 53.9 billion dollars over the next two decades to build, operate and maintain water projects to meet the growing demand in the Kingdom, according to GWI estimates

Excerpts,  Thalif Deen, Water Summit to Focus on Resolving Scarcities in Mideast, IPS, Jan. 11, 2012

Nuclear Waste from Britain to Japan on the Pacific Grebe

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Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd. said Thursday that 28 canisters of high-level radioactive waste produced through the reprocessing of spent Japanese nuclear fuel in Britain will arrive in Aomori Prefecture in the latter half of February.  The 28 canisters of vitrified radioactive waste include 14 for Kansai Electric Power Co. and seven each for Chubu Electric Power Co. and Chugoku Electric Power Co.

The freighter Pacific Grebe carrying the waste left the port of Barrow on Wednesday Jan, 9, 2013) and will travel to Rokkasho, Aomori Prefecture, via the Panama Canal, Japan Nuclear Fuel said.  It will be the third time that vitrified radioactive waste will be brought to Japan from Britain.

Japan has received 104 canisters of such waste from Britain and plans to receive around 800 more. The 104 canisters have been stored at a facility in the village of Rokkasho.

Reprocessed nuclear waste to arrive in Aomori from Britain in late February, The Japan Times, Jan. 11, 2012

What Transocean Pays for the Gulf Oil Spill

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Transocean Ltd. appeared in federal court in New Orleans after reaching a $1.4 billion settlement with the U.S. over the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill….The company agreed last week to plead guilty to a misdemeanor count of violating the Clean Water Act and to pay $400 million in criminal fines and $1 billion plus interest in civil penalties. Under the agreement, Transocean will undergo five years’ probation and establish a technology innovation group to focus on drilling safety, devoting a minimum of $10 million to this effort…..

The agreement doesn’t cover costs to Transocean for natural-resources damage under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, the company said. That law requires responsible parties to reimburse governments for restoring natural resources to pre- incident conditions.  Transocean said last week that the company’s liability for these damages was limited by a 2012 court ruling that it wouldn’t be liable under the Oil Pollution Act for subsurface discharge from the well.

The blowout and explosion aboard Transocean’s drilling rig sent millions of barrels of crude leaking into the gulf. The accident prompted hundreds of lawsuits against Transocean, London-based BP, the well’s owner, and Houston-based Halliburton Co. (HAL), which provided cementing services. BP previously agreed to pay $4 billion to the Justice Department to resolve charges connected to the spill and $525 million to settle the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s claim that the company misled investors about the rate of oil flowing into the gulf.  BP announced Nov. 15 that it reached a deal with the Justice Department to plead guilty to 14 counts, including 11 for felony seaman’s manslaughter. U.S. District Judge Sarah S. Vance said last month that she would determine at a Jan. 29 hearing whether to accept BP’s plea.

The criminal case is U.S. v. Transocean Deepwater Inc., 13- cr-001, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana (New Orleans). (pdf)

Margaret Cronin Fisk & Allen Johnson Jr, Transocean Appears in Court After $1.4 Billion Spill Pact, Bloomberg, Jan. 9, 2013

Nuclear Protesters and the Establishment: Japan

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Eight million people signed an Internet petition demanding an end to nuclear power and hundreds of thousands joined public protests. Yet Japan handed an election landslide to the most pro-atomic option on offer.  Anti-nuclear activists have been left licking their wounds after the first national poll since the tsunami-sparked disaster at Fukushima saw an apparent melting away of public anger as the country welcomed back the establishment…

The Liberal Democratic Party bagged 294 of the 480 seats in the lower house, crushing their opponents, the biggest of which won only 57 seats.  Where smaller parties offered an end to nuclear power — immediately, over ten years, or within three decades — the LDP pledged only to “decide” on reactor restarts within three years.

Commentators say the pro-business party is likely to give the green light to power companies. Markets agree, with shares in Fukushima operator Tokyo Electric Power (TECPO) surging around 50 percent in two days after the win.  The problem, said the left-leaning Asahi Shimbun newspaper, was that other issues trumped nuclear; voters were frustrated with Japan’s economic malaise, huge public debts, fragile employment and diplomatic friction with China.  The public were looking for a way to punish the ruling Democratic Party of Japan for its policy failures…In fact, says the Asahi, the anti-nuclear vote was almost completely neutralised because of the fragmentation caused by this mushrooming of parties.

Excerpts from Hiroshi Hiyama, Japan anti-nuclear vote melts away, Agence France Presse, Dec. 23, 2012

Nigeria and the Oil Companies: the ECOWAS Judgment

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Amnesty International and Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) have hailed last [Economic Community of West African States] ECOWAS Court of Justice ground-breaking judgment as a “key moment in holding governments and companies to account for pollution.”  In the case, SERAP v. Nigeria, the Court unanimously found the Nigerian government responsible for abuses by oil companies and makes it clear that the government must hold the companies and other perpetrators to account.

The Court also found that Nigeria violated articles 21 (on the right to natural wealth and resources) and 24 (on the right to a general satisfactory environment) of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights by failing to protect the Niger Delta and its people from the operations of oil companies that have for many years devastated the region.  According to the Court, the right to food and social life of the people of Niger Delta was violated by destroying their environment, and thus destroying their opportunity to earn a living and enjoy a healthy and adequate standard of living. The Court also said that both the government and the oil companies violate the human and cultural rights of the people in the region.

The Court ruled that the government’s failure to enact effective laws and establish effective institutions to regulate the activities of the companies coupled with its failure to bring perpetrators of pollution “to book” amount to a breach of Nigeria’s international human rights obligations and commitments.  The Court emphasized that “the quality of life of people is determined by the quality of the environment. But the government has failed in its duty to maintain a general satisfactory environment conducive to the development of the Niger Delta region”.

“This judgment confirms the persistent failure of the Nigerian government to properly and effectively punish oil companies that have caused pollution and perpetrated serious human rights abuses, and is an important step towards accountability for government and oil companies that continue to prioritise profit-making over and above the well-being of the people of the region,” said Femi Falana SAN, and Adetokunbo Mumuni for SERAP.  “This is a crucial precedent that vindicates the human right to a healthy environment and affirms the human right of the Nigerian people to live a life free from pollution. It also makes it clear that the government must hold the oil companies to account,” said Michael Bochenek, Director of Law and Policy at Amnesty International.  “The judgment makes it clear that the Nigerian government has failed to prevent the oil companies causing pollution. It is a major step forward in holding the government and oil companies accountable for years of devastation and deprivation.” said Bochenek.

The court affirmed that the government must now move swiftly to fully implement the judgment and restore the dignity and humanity of the people of the region.

“The judgment has also come at a time when oil is being discovered in the majority of the member states of the ECOWAS. It is vital that other states take heed of this judgement, which has laid down minimum standards of operations for government and oil companies involved in the exploitation of oil and gas in the region,” Falana and Mumuni also said.  “The time has come for the Nigerian government to stand up to powerful oil companies that have abused the human rights of the people of the Niger Delta with impunity for decades,” said Bochenek.  “We commend the ECOWAS Court for standing up for the rights and dignity of the people of the Niger Delta. We also acknowledge the important legal contribution of Dr Kolawole Olaniyan of Amnesty International, to the case,” said Falana and Mumuni.

he case was filed against the Federal Government and six oil companies over alleged violation of human rights and associated oil pollution in the Niger Delta. Specifically, the plaintiff alleged: “Violations of the right to an adequate standard of living, including the right to food, to work, to health, to water, to life and human dignity, to a clean and healthy environment; and to economic and social development – as a consequence of: the impact of oil-related pollution and environmental damage on agriculture and fisheries.”  SERAP also alleged “oil spills and waste materials polluting water used for drinking and other domestic purposes; failure to secure the underlying determinants of health, including a healthy environment, and failure to enforce laws and regulations to protect the environment and prevent pollution.”

The Court dismissed the government’s objections that SERAP had no locus standi to institute the case; that the ECOWAS Court had no jurisdiction to entertain it; and that the case was statute-barred. The Court also rejected efforts by the government to exclude a 2009  Amnesty International report on oil pollution from being considered. The report was based on an in-depth investigation into pollution caused by the international oil companies, in particular Shell, and the failure of the government of Nigeria to prevent pollution or sanction the companies.

The suit number ECW/CCJ/APP/08/09 was argued by SERAP counsel, Femi Falana SAN, Adetokunbo Mumuni and Sola Egbeyinka.  The judgment was delivered by a panel of 6 judges: Justice Awa Nana Daboya, Justice Benefeito Mosso Ramos, Justice Hansine Donli, Justice Alfred Benin, Justice Clotilde Medegan and Justice Eliam Potey.

Article 15(4) of the ECOWAS Treaty makes the Judgment of the Court binding on Member States, including Nigeria. Also, Article 19(2) of the 1991 Protocol provides that the decisions of the Court shall be final and immediately enforceable. Furthermore, non-compliance with the judgment of the Court can be sanctioned under Article 24 of the Supplementary Protocol of the ECOWAS Court of Justice, and Article 77 of the ECOWAS Treaty.

SERAP Press Release, December 2012

See also decision of the ECOWAS Community Court on Jurisdiction

Turning Turkey into an Illegal Nuclear Dump: the evidence

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Amid growing public concern about the discovery of radioactive waste buried at an abandoned factory in Izmir (Turkey), experts have pointed out to the possibility that there could be other sites with nuclear waste imported illegally into Turkey from foreign companies that operate nuclear plants.Public concerns about radioactive and other toxic waste began after a news report appeared in the Radikal daily last week about the discovery of highly radioactive waste buried at a defunct factory on Akçay Street, the main thoroughfare running through Izmir’s Gaziemir district. The Turkish Atomic Energy Agency (TAEK), which was assigned to test the plant on Tuesday, stated that the radioactive level at the site did not constitute a dangerous situation, but they didn’t address concerns about a radioactive material that might have been brought into Turkey illegally.   The factory, situated on more than 70 acres, used old batteries and scrap lead to produce cast lead until just a few years ago.

In relation to the inspection, a former senior manager of the Izmir factory, speaking on condition of anonymity to Radikal on Thursday, confirmed the fact that the toxic waste of the factory was buried on the site in an effort to save money by not sending the waste for proper disposal. However, he didn’t comment on the possibility of nuclear materials being brought in illegally.  It was also reported that locals, particularly children playing in the vicinity, had access to the plant as the wire fencing around the factory had corroded over time.

Radikal reported that TAEK had examined the site of the factory in 2007. A radioactive substance called europium, an illegally imported element used in nuclear reactor control rods, found on the site is thought to be the source of the radioactivity, a report from TAEK showed.  A nuclear engineer at Okan University, Tolga Yarman said the radioactive element could have entered the country along with other nuclear waste, as it was illegal to keep this substance in Turkey. In fact, other sites where nuclear waste was buried have been discovered. A similar case was reported in 1987 by Professor Ahmet Yüksel Özemre, a former general director of TAEK and Turkey’s first nuclear engineer….”The ministry should have ideal staffing levels to work more closely on the detection of nuclear waste cases by complying with European Union standards, and a control mechanism should be part of this improvement,” said Ministry of Environment and Urban Planning Deputy Undersecretary Mustafa Öztürk.  Professor Öztürk warned about tons of toxic waste which is illegally buried at many other plants in different provinces around Turkey.  “Toxic waste can only be kept on site at a plant for six months provided that plant authorities take the necessary environmental precautions, and the waste should be moved to disposal centers at the end of the period stated by law. However, plants keep running while their waste is buried in the soil without taking any precautions. This is the case for many provinces, including Istanbul, Samsun, Hatay, Kayseri and Mersin,” answered Öztürk to a question about the legal regulations regarding the conservation and disposal of toxic waste.

A similar case was reported in 1987 by Professor Özemre, who received an anonymous tip that 1,150 tons of radioactive waste, which were imported from Germany, had been buried on the site of the Göltas cement factory in Isparta, a province in southwest Turkey. Özemre had also asserted, in a written document and on several television news programs, that a flour factory in Konya had burned 800 tons of toxic waste on its site in order to generate energy.  He further noted that he would not have given credit to this anonymous tip about the nuclear waste cases in Isparta and Konya if he himself had not received a similar proposal from a German firm who offered him 40 million Deutsche Mark in return for burying 4,000 tons of radioactive waste while he served as the director of TAEK. Özemre asserted that when he did not accept the German firm’s proposal, stating that he “would not let Turkey turn into a nuclear landfill,” the firm told him that the toxic waste would be buried in Turkey one way or another.

A research commission was assigned by the Turkish Parliament to check into the claim that illegal nuclear waste was buried around Isparta and had been burned in Konya. The conclusion of the commission, published in the form of general meeting minutes in 1997, showed that the factory sites did not include radioactive elements.

Excerpt, Izmir Factory Scandal Causes Concern Over Nuclear Waste Elsewhere, http://www.haberler.com, Dec. 9, 2012

The Arctic Challenger: ready for Arctic oil spills

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Shell Oil has been building and testing equipment designed for the Arctic Ocean in Puget Sound, Seattle, United States.  In September, a key test of underwater oil-spill equipment was a spectacular failure.  It forced the energy giant to postpone drilling into oil-bearing rocks beneath the Arctic Ocean until next summer. Shell and its federal regulators have been tight-lipped about the failed test.  But a freedom-of-information request reveals what happened beneath the surface of Puget Sound.

Before Shell can drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean, it needs to prove to federal officials that it can clean up a massive oil spill there. That proof hinges on a barge being built in Bellingham called the Arctic Challenger.  The barge is only one component of Shell’s plans for handling oil spills off the remote north coast of Alaska. But the Obama Administration won’t let oil drilling get under way until the 36-year-old barge and its brand new oil-spill equipment are in place,  On board the Arctic Challenger is a massive steel “containment dome.” It’s a sort of giant underwater vacuum cleaner. If efforts to cap a blown-out well don’t work, the dome can capture spewing oil and funnel it to a tanker on the surface.

The Arctic Challenger passed several US Coast Guard tests for seaworthiness in September. But it was a different story when its oil-spill containment system was put to the test in 150-foot-deep water near Anacortes, Washington.  The federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement required the test of the oil-spill system.

According to BSEE internal emails obtained by KUOW, the containment dome test was supposed to take about a day. That estimate proved to be wildly optimistic.

•Day 1: The Arctic Challenger’s massive steel dome comes unhooked from some of the winches used to maneuver it underwater. The crew has to recover it and repair it.

•Day 2: A remote-controlled submarine gets tangled in some anchor lines. It takes divers about 24 hours to rescue the submarine.

•Day 5: The test has its worst accident. On that dead-calm Friday night, Mark Fesmire, the head of BSEE’s Alaska office, is on board the Challenger. He’s watching the underwater video feed from the remote-control submarine when, a little after midnight, the video screen suddenly fills with bubbles. The 20-foot-tall containment dome then shoots to the surface. The massive white dome “breached like a whale,” Fesmire e-mails a colleague at BSEE headquarters.

Then the dome sinks more than 120 feet. A safety buoy, basically a giant balloon, catches it before it hits bottom. About 12 hours later, the crew of the Challenger manages to get the dome back to the surface. “As bad as I thought,” Fesmire writes his BSEE colleague. “Basically the top half is crushed like a beer can.”

Representatives of Shell Oil and of BSEE declined to answer questions or allow interviews about the mishaps. In an email, Shell spokeswoman Kelly op de Weegh writes:  Our internal investigation determined the Arctic Challenger’s dome was damaged when it descended too quickly due to a faulty electrical connection, which improperly opened a valve. While safety systems ensured it did not hit the bottom, buoyancy chambers were damaged from the sudden pressure change.

Environmental groups say the Arctic Challenger’s multiple problems show that Shell isn’t prepared for an Arctic oil spill.

Excerpt, By John Ryan, Sea Trial Leaves Shell’s Arctic Oil-Spill Gear “Crushed Like A Beer Can”, Kuow.org. Nov. 30, 2012

Fradulent Quality Certificates for Nuclear Reactors: South Korea

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South Korea’s ambitious nuclear energy program is under intensive scrutiny and criticism after the discovery of microscopic cracks in the structure of a nuclear power plant and forgery of quality certificates vouching for thousands of components in at least two reactors.  Officials in all three major agencies responsible for monitoring the program said Friday there’s no danger to nuclear safety, but the government ordered the shutdown of the two reactors with the uncertified parts. At the same time, the head of the state company overseeing the program, Korea Electric Power Corp. has resigned for what he said were personal reasons.

A sequence of problems at a nuclear power plant on the southwestern coast fueled rising doubts about a program that’s been a centerpiece of the government’s energy policy since the first reactors went on line more than 30 years ago. Korea counts on nuclear energy for 30 percent of its electrical power, but critics are now demanding the government shut down some of the older plants and pull back from plans to build enough reactors to fulfill half the country’s power needs.  “I am worried about safety standards,” says Lee Chang-choon, who served as South Korea’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency during his long diplomatic career. “I do not have confidence and trust in the care of sensitive machinery operations.”

The trouble seemed to begin at the nuclear power plant at Yeonggwang where inspectors this week reported thousands of  “noncore components” were installed on the basis of fraudulent quality certificates. The Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power Corporation, which operates Korea’s four nuclear power plants, including 23 reactors, promised to replace all the parts by the end of the year while asking prosecutors to investigate alleged bribery.

Compounding the difficulties at the Yeonggwang plant, the ministry also reported the discovery of microscopic cracks in passages linking control rods to one of the reactors. An official at the Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power Corporation said the cracks affected warning signals on control panels but not operation of the reactors…

The underlying problem, however, is that South Korea has virtually no oil or natural gas deposits and is running out of coal. Nuclear power has long been seen as the only way to meet the demands of a growing industrial economy. Hong Suk-woon, Korea’s knowledge and economy minister, warned of severe power cuts that might affect industry and individual consumers as a result of shutdown of the two Yeonggwang reactors….

Others are still more critical. Yun Sun-jin, a professor who teaches courses on energy policy at Seoul National University, accuses the Korea Hydro Nuclear Power Corporation of placing higher priority on output with reduced emphasis on safety.  “They are decreasing the time for periodic overhaul of reactors,” she says. “They think a high operation rate means a more competitive strategy.”  She agrees with the view of the nongovernmental Korea Federation for the Environment that the government should shut down older plants and cancel plans to build new ones.  “We cannot believe nuclear power plants are safe,” says Yang-yi Won-young, in charge of the organization’s “nuclear phase-out” campaign. “The government says nuclear energy is the cheapest and cleanest, but they don’t take account of the cost of getting rid of nuclear waste.”…An official at the ministry of knowledge and economy listed 60 forged quality certificates since 2003 including more than 7,600 components, 98.4 percent of which, he says, were for the Yeonggwang plant. “These are noncore parts,” he says, including fuses, switches, and resistors that cannot be used for the core safety-related facility” and therefore “posing no threat of radiation leakage.”  The government, he adds, “will prepare and implement a comprehensive package of measures as soon as possible starting later this month to cope with the possible power shortages during this winte

Excerpts, By Donald Kirk, Cracks at South Korean nuclear plant raise safety concerns, Reuters, Nov. 9, 2012

Tricks of Illegal Waste Dumping

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The US Navy has launched its own investigation into allegations that its contractor has been dumping on Subic Bay hazardous wastes which it siphons from US Navy ships docked here.  In an e-mailed statement on Saturday, Cynthia Cook, deputy press attache of the US Embassy in Manila, said the US Navy had “initiated its own inquiry into allegations of hazardous waste dumping by Glenn Defense Marine Philippines, a contractor for the US Navy in the Philippines.”  Cook said the embassy was aware of the investigation being conducted by the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA), and that it would “take appropriate action depending on the outcome of those processes.”

The SBMA board of directors is meeting on Monday to discuss the results of the initial investigation into the reported dumping by Glenn Defense Marine Philippines, the local operator of the Malaysian-owned Glenn Defense Marine Asia, said SBMA Chair Roberto Garcia.  In a letter to the SBMA earlier, the lawyers of Glenn Defense claimed that the Presidential Commission on the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFACOM) was the only agency authorized to address complaints about toxic dumping at Subic Bay.  Also on Saturday, the Subic Bay Freeport Chamber of Commerce announced it had suspended the membership of Glenn Defense, a registered locator of the Subic Bay Freeport.

Danny Piano, SBFCC president, said the group was aware of the alleged dumping in Subic waters since October. He said the chamber’s environmental committee has been on the lookout for potential environmental problems around the freeport.  Piano recounted: “At around 8 a.m. on Oct. 15, members of the committee spotted a marine [vessel] collecting liquid waste from a US Navy ship at Alava Pier. They became curious [as to] why a [ship], and not a [sewage] truck, would be performing waste collection [for] a naval ship already berthed at a pier…  “Sensing potential hazard, the members reported the situation to the SBMA ecology department for a spot check and to make sure that proper procedures were followed in dumping the waste.”

The vessel, MT Glenn Guardian, had been carrying around 50,000 gallons of domestic waste and around 200 gallons of bilge water (or a combination of water, oil, and grease), which were untreated according to laboratory tests, Piano said.

By Robert Gonzaga, US Navy begins inquiry into toxic waste dumping, Inquirer Central Luzon, Nov. 10, 210

Bankers with Chainsaws – logging companies and their banks

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Some big banks do little more than pay lip service to environmental issues. HSBC likes to think of itself as different. It has signed up to many initiatives, including the Equator Principles, a set of social and environmental standards launched in 2003 for project financiers….

Sarawak (Malaysia) has lost more than 90% of its “primary” forests to logging and has the fastest rate of deforestation in Asia. Sarawak has only 0.5% of the world’s tropical forest but accounted for 25% of tropical-log exports in 2010. As timber stocks have become depleted, the loggers have moved into the palm-oil business, clearing peat-swamp forests to make way for plantations. The deforestation has been accompanied by abuses against indigenous groups, including harassment and illegal evictions. Allegations of corruption and abuse of public office dog Abdul Taib Mahmud, Sarawak’s chief minister, finance minister and planning-and-resources minister, who is believed to have firm control over the granting of logging licences. Mr Taib has long denied being corrupt.

Global Witness, a campaigning group, has analysed the publicly available financial records of seven of Sarawak’s largest logging and plantation companies.  It identified loans and other financial services from HSBC that it estimates have generated at least $116m in interest payments and $13.6m in fees for the bank since 1977. Although lending has declined over the past decade, HSBC continues to list Sarawak loggers among its clients, in apparent violation of its own Forest Land and Forest Products Sector Policy.

On paper HSBC’s forest policy gets high marks, including from BankTrack, a network of NGOs that monitors lenders. When it was drawn up in 2004, the policy required clients to have 70% of their activities certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), or equivalent, by 2009, with evidence that the remainder was legal. (The FSC is a global non-profit body that sets standards and does independent certification for logging and forest products.)

Not only did the seven firms analysed fail to meet that deadline, but none has any FSC-certified operations today. Ta Ann Holdings, for example, listed HSBC as a “principal banker” in its 2011 annual report. Ta Ann does not have FSC certification, and has failed to obtain full verification of the legality of its Sarawak concession under the independent “Verified Legal Origin” scheme. The firm has been accused of clear-felling rainforest that is home to endangered orangutan and of cutting down conservation forest for plantations. Ta Ann told Global Witness it is “collaborating closely with HSBC towards achieving full compliance” with its forest policy.

Another forestry conglomerate that is still banking with HSBC, according to its annual report, is WTK Holdings, whose intensive logging is widely believed by pressure groups to have caused landslides that ended up blocking a 50km (31-mile) stretch of river in 2010. None of WTK’s operations is FSC-certified.

In all, Global Witness identified six loans, totalling $25m, made by HSBC to non-compliant Sarawak loggers since the bank introduced its forest policy. HSBC said in 2004 that it would stop doing business with clients that failed to make a reasonable effort to comply by 2009.  The Economist asked HSBC to comment. The bank declined to discuss its clients because of confidentiality, but said it is “not accurate” to state that its clients are in violation of its forestland and forest-products policy. It said current data show that 99% of its forest-sector clients worldwide (by size of lending) are “compliant” or “near-compliant” with its policy. What precisely it means by “near-compliant” is unclear…..HSBC’s  continued involvement, however modest, allows logging firms to claim credentials they don’t deserve. Ta Ann, for instance, has run adverts saying it holds forest-policy certification from HSBC. That looks like a figleaf.

Deforestation in Sarawak: Log tale, Economist, Nov. 3, 2012, at 75