TennesseeCitizenScienceWatch

Tennessee Awaits Tons Of German Nuclear Waste : NPR

Latest articles I've found on German nuke waste issue:

The city of Oak Ridge, Tenn., is anticipating the arrival of nearly 1,000 tons of nuclear waste from Germany. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a plan in June for an American company to import and burn low-level nuclear waste from Germany.

Radioactive residue left over from the process will be sent back to Germany for disposal, but opponents have voiced concerns that the U.S. will become the world's radioactive waste processor.

But, very little of that opposition is coming from Oak Ridge.

via www.npr.org

See also this one and others at Frank Munger's Atomic City Underground blog:

In early June, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved export/import licenses necessary for EnergySolutions to bring up to 1,000 tons of low-level radioactive waste from Germany to Oak Ridge for incineration and treatment. Before the end of June, the NRC issued those licenses to the Utah-based waste company.

However, EnergySolutions still isn't saying when the waste shipments could begin arriving at the company's Bear Creek waste-processing operation in Oak Ridge.

 

Coal ash taints groundwater at TVA sites, report finds | The Tennessean

A new report says groundwater contamination from coal ash has been found at Gallatin and eight of the nine other Tennessee Valley Authority fossil power plant sites where testing is being done.

Levels of toxic substances found at the Gallatin plant site in Sumner County and at the Cumberland site, 50 miles northwest of Nashville, are high enough that they could create a health hazard, the report says. Beryllium, cadmium and nickel levels are above drinking water standards at Gallatin, as are arsenic, selenium and vanadium at Cumberland.

One major surprise also showed up in the review by TVA’s Office of Inspector General: For more than a decade, the TVA had been finding substances in groundwater at its Allen coal-fired plant in Memphis that indicated toxic metals could be leaking from a coal ash pond there.

via www.tennessean.com

NRDC: Tennessee ranks 15th on Top 20 list of toxic states

Yesterday the Natural Resources Defense Council and Physicians for Social Responsibility issued a press release listing the 20 states in the US most impacted by toxins from coal-fired power plants. The groups did a study using publicly-available data in EPA's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). You can access these same tools in the sidebar of this blog.

The analysis, Toxic Power: How Power Plants Contaminate Our Air and States, found that:

• Nearly half of all the toxic air pollution reported from industrial sources in the United States comes from coal- and oil-fired power plants, and

• Power plants are the single largest industrial source of toxic air pollution in 28 states and the District of Columbia.

Pete Altman wrote about the study on the NRDC Switchboard blog yesterday. His post has some good graphics.

SkyTruth launches pollution incident alert system

SkyTruth has launched a new service called SkyTruth Alerts, where you can receive real-time information about environmental incidents by email.

The service will start  today with reports collected from three sources that focus heavily on oil and gas drilling and related activities in the US. These sources will include reported oil and hazardous materials spills from the National Response Center, pollution response and investigation reports from NOAA's Incident News, and incident analyses published on their own SkyTruth blog.

Over the coming weeks they plan to add more sources, and extend their focus to include gas drilling and fracking in the Marcellus Shale.

Once you get to the alert page, you can enter your email address and then select the area from which you want the event notices by zooming in or out on the Google Earth map.

Here's what the area I chose looked like in the Google Earth map window:

The red spots are incident locations. When you click on a spot, the incident summary pops up. Here's the text from the pop-up box on the incident closest to where I live:

2011-07-18 NRC Report: Toluene near Breenbrier, TN

NRC Report: Toluene near Breenbrier, TN
NRC Report ID: 982998
Incident Time: 2011-07-18 02:53:00
Nearest City: Breenbrier, TN
Incident Type: FIXED
Material: TOLUENE
Medium Affected: NON-RELEASE (N/A)
Suspected Responsible Party: ALUMINUM RACING PRODUCTS
Skytruth Analysis
Reported Spill Volume: 55 gallons
CALLER IS REPORTING A POTENTIAL RELEASE OF 55 GALLONS OF TOLUENE DUE TO A FACILITY THAT IS ON FIRE. CALLER STATED THAT THE FIRE IS UNDER CONTROL.

This is an awesome resource, though I hope I don't get very many alerts! On the alert page, you can also click on a Google Earth icon to download a plug-in so you can view incidents on your desktop version of the software.

You can access the alert page and signup for the service through the announcement post at the SkyTruth blog.

 

 

John DeCock: The Great Global Poisoning Experiment

Great article at Huffington Post by John DeCock, former President and CEO of Clean Water Action. In this article he summarizes some of the directions from which we are at risk for toxic chemical exposure, and advocates continued citizen action despite ongoing corporate efforts to weaken the rules:

For generations, environmentalists, health advocates and people with common sense have been fighting corporate interests to keep toxins out of our environment. Have we been successful? Well, we have managed to ban and regulate some of the worst poisons. In some cases we have only shifted the manufacturing and distribution channels off shore so that we primarily poison other people with those particular toxins. However, it's difficult to demonstrate any real big picture success against the tsunami of chemicals that we swim in every day.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

LG&E Report Confirms Residents’ Concerns About Coal Ash -- WFPL News

Next to LG&E’s Cane Run Power Station there’s a coal ash landfill. It holds the fly ash that’s leftover after coal is burned. The residents of Cane Run Road say the ash routinely blows off the landfill and travels onto their property, coating siding and windows. Now, this new report commissioned by the power company is the latest study to lend credence to those concerns.

The report—prepared by a third party—analyzes data from six samples taken off nearby homes. All showed significant amounts of coal ash—fly and the heavier bottom ash composed more than fifty percent of four of the samples.

via www.wfpl.org

Safe Chemicals Act of 2011 would provide much needed updates to toxic chemical control

Here's a great video from Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-New Jersey) made in April when he introduced the Safe Chemicals Act of 2011:

 

 

Following its introduction in the Senate, S 847 was referred to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Currently the bill has nine co-sponsors. At this time, Tennessee Senators Alexander (who is a member of this committee) and Corker, are not among the cosponsors listed.

The Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families coalition blog has a post with many other links to info on this bill. You can also track it at GovTrack or THOMAS.

Senator Lautenberg has published a pdf summary of the Safe Chemical Act. If passed, the Act would substantially update and reform the outdated Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976.

While you are contacting your congressional representives to co-sponsor the Kerry and Moran bills on endocrine disruptors, please add a request to Senators Alexander and Corker for co-sponsorship of S 847. Or let members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works know your concerns about toxic chemicals in our environment. As mentioned, Senator Alexander is a member of this committee; he also serves on its Superfund, Toxics and Environmental Health subcommittee.

Kerry introduces bill to reduce exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals

Yesterday, July 13, 2011, Senator John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) introduced the Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals Exposure Elimination Act of 2011; introduction of this important legislation is pending  in the US House of Representatives by Rep. Jim Moran (D-Virginia).

“It’s scary for any parent to think that products they use at home every day might be unknowingly making their kids sick,” Senator Kerry said. “We have a responsibility not just to inform Americans of the dangers, but to protect them from chemicals with the potential to cause serious illnesses from birth defects to cancer. It’s just common sense.”

According to The Endocrine-Disruption Exchange (TEDX) this bill will bring recent research by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) to bear on regulatory decision making. It facilitates cooperation between the NIEHS, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other regulatory agencies to reduce exposure to chemicals identified as endocrine disruptors.

TEDX says passage of the act would facilitate and strengthen current chemical legislation such as the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act, as well as new legislation such as the Safe Chemicals Act of 2011, the Endocrine Disruptor Screening Enhancement Act of 2010, and others.

The human endocrine system, with its intricate balancing of glands and hormones, regulates life functions such as growth, stress response, sexual development, insulin production, metabolism, and reproduction.

Technological advances over the past six decades have allowed introduction of thousands of synthetic chemicals. These chemicals, none of which have been thoroughly tested for their endocrine disrupting effects, are now present in almost everything we buy. According to TEDX, traditional toxicological testing procedures were not designed to test for endocrine disruption, and do not test for effects of exposure at ambient or low-level exposures.

Concern about impacts of endocrine disruptor exposure on people and wildlife has risen substantially in the past few years, and is reflected by Kerry and Moran.

“When one in every six children has been diagnosed with some type of developmental disability, serious questions arise about whether something is wrong with our environment,” Representative Moran said. “We owe it to future generations to solve this puzzle. The bill introduced today will expedite research on endocrine-disrupting chemicals and allow that science, not politics, to guide policies.”

If you want to know more about endocrine-disruptors, including their relation to fossil fuel extraction and waste disposal, the TEDX site has lots of information to get you started.

TEDX recommends that we all contact our senators and representatives to ask that they co-sponsor the Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals Exposure Elimination Act.

I'll try to post updates with links to articles and other news about endocrine-disruptors as this legislation moves through Congress. I already have some links to related info on the Resources page listed in the sidebar.

Lightning sparks fires near old nuke test sites in Nevada

Wildland firefighters battled more than just the usual Nevada brush blaze this week. They had to contend with the possibility of radiation.

Lightning sparked two fires Tuesday within the Nevada National Security Site, the former nuclear test site 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. By Friday, the fires had consumed more than 6,000 acres, with the smaller blaze fully contained and the larger only 25 percent contained.

Crews have not only been watching winds and weather, but are monitoring radiation levels in the air, making certain the flames don't stir up remnants of decades-old detonations. One of the fires is "several miles" from the location of an above-ground test, a safe distance according to Dante Pistone, a spokesman at the test site's operations center.

via www.lvrj.com

Pastel Injustice: The Corporate Use of Pinkwashing for Profit -- Environmental Justice

An interesting article on "pinkwashing" was recently published in the journal, Environmental Justice. Here's an excerpt from the journal's press release for the article, Pastel Injustice: The Corporate Use of Pinkwashing for Profit:

Amy Lubitow, Portland State University (Oregon), and Mia Davis, Campaign for Safe Cosmetics (Boston, MA), contend that aligning oneself with a cause such as breast cancer, while carrying out research, manufacturing, or other types of policies or processes that involve the use of chemicals with a proven link to cancer crosses a critical line between just and unjust practices. The authors state that “pinkwashing simultaneously increases profits and potentially contributes to increasing cancer rates and obscures an environmental health discourse that recognizes the environmental causes of breast cancer…” They support and expand on this view in the article entitled, “Pastel Injustice: The Corporate Use of Pinkwashing for Profit.”

via www.liebertpub.com

 

I accessed the full article here; it's possible that you may have to complete a free registration process to read the whole thing. Environmental Justice is a subscription journal but many articles online can be read free of charge.