Friday, 09 May 2003

Tidal Wave of the Future

The San Francisco Bay could soon become more than just a beautiful backdrop to Fog Town: It could become the engine that powers the city itself. This week, San Francisco became the first major U.S. city to investigate commercial tidal power, when it signed on to a $2 million pilot project to generate electricity using the tides in the bay. Every day, almost 400 billion gallons of water rush through the mouth of the San Francisco Bay -- more than enough to power the entire city, if the energy from the tidal movement could be captured. The pilot project, however, will generate just one megawatt of electricity, produced when water flowing through underwater concrete passageways creates suction, thereby pulling air from pipes connected to onshore turbines and causing them to turn. The lack of moving underwater parts means the project would be easy to maintain and, hopefully, have limited impact on marine life.

Sheep Trick

Angering environmentalists, Aboriginals, and regional government officials alike, the Australian government has announced that it will build a controversial nuclear waste dump at a sheep station in South Australia. Located near the desert town of Woomera, the dump will house low-level radioactive waste from medical, university, industrial, and research facilities around the country. In what was meant to be a conciliatory gesture, the federal government simultaneously announced that it would not consider South Australia for an even more controversial above-ground storage facility for medium-level nuclear waste. But that was cold comfort to opponents of the low-level dump, who want the waste to be stored near where it is created rather than transported to central repositories. "If the government believes there is no risk of contamination, why is it going to such an effort to transport the waste from a Sydney suburb to the middle of the desert?" asked Kerry Nettle, an Australian Greens senator.

Radio-inactivity

The Pentagon dramatically underestimated the amount of radioactivity to which U.S. Armed Forces members were exposed during Cold War-era atomic testing and explosions, a National Academy of Sciences panel announced yesterday. However, the panel found that the "ionizing radiation" to which the majority of the veterans was exposed -- either during testing or in the vicinity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- is not a serious carcinogen, so the revised exposure estimates will not significantly affect government compensation for veterans suffering from cancer. The government recognizes 21 kinds of cancer as "presumptively" caused by radiation exposure; of the roughly 4,000 former service members with other forms of cancer or other diseases who applied for compensation, all but 50 were turned down. Despite the new findings, their cases are unlikely to be reviewed again.

Have a Cow, Man

The state of South Dakota is leading the nation in the Partners for Fish and Wildlife project, a federal conservation program designed to help farmers and ranchers reduce their negative impact on native prairie ecosystems. Conversion of wild grasslands to croplands is a major environmental problem in South Dakota and other prairies states. Under the U.S. Fish and Wildlife program, farmers and ranchers work to preserve habitat on their lands by planting native grasses and creating grazing rotations that minimize ecosystem damage; in exchange, the federal government pays them for fences and grass seed. Last year, some 160 South Dakota ranchers signed up for the project, giving the state the most large-acreage projects in the country, according to the USFS's Kurt Foreman, who summarized the program as "cows for conservation."

For Never Wild

A coalition of environmentalists has sued the U.S. Department of the Interior over its recent decision to prevent the Bureau of Land Management from considering any more Western land for wilderness designation. Areas set aside for protection under the 1964 Wilderness Act are protected from motorized recreation and most forms of development. In 1996, however, the state of Utah challenged the Clinton administration's wilderness designation of more than 3 million acres, claiming that under the terms of a separate law, the Federal Land Policy Management Act of 1976, the Interior Department only had until 1991 to choose areas for wilderness status. Interior Secretary Gale Norton agreed with Utah and said no new lands in the West would be eligible for consideration as wilderness -- a move that would affect almost 2 million acres identified as potential wilderness areas in Arizona alone.