Monday, 12 Apr 2004

Nuclear Proliferasia

Nuclear Power on the Rise in Asia

Nuclear power is booming in Asia, thanks to rapidly escalating energy needs and concerns over widespread air pollution from coal-fired plants. Eighteen of the 31 nuclear plants currently under construction in the world are being built on the continent. The boom is largely being driven by India and China, Asia's two most populous countries, where currently between 1 and 4 percent of energy comes from nuclear, compared to 35 to 40 percent in Japan and South Korea. The billions of dollars swirling around Asian nuclear plants have western suppliers drooling, particularly those in Canada and Europe. Currently, U.S. firms are barred from providing some nuclear technology to certain Asian countries, including China, but that prohibition is expected to be lifted in September. In fact, on a three-day visit to China next week, Vice President Dick Cheney is expected to shill for U.S. nuclear supplier Westinghouse. Some critics, citing China's plans to help Pakistan build two nuclear reactors that could produce plutonium, say Cheney's big-business advocacy flies in the face of U.S. efforts to encourage non-proliferation.

The Last Picture Show

Forest Service Brochure Contains Misleading Pictures

Pictures used by the U.S. Forest Service in a brochure arguing for heavier logging in California's Sierra Nevada forest are deliberately misleading -- and, say critics, validate concerns about the USFS paying a public relations firm $90,000 to help push its perspective. A series of black and white pictures in the brochure, dated from 1909 through to 1989, show a forest increasingly thick with closely spaced trees and underbrush, meant to demonstrate that the now-fire-prone forest needs thinning, unlike the "forests of the past." But the first photo, from 1909, doesn't show a naturally thin forest at all: It was taken right after the forest was logged. And about that forest: It's not in the Sierra Nevada; it's in Montana. In 1998, the USFS "used this same sequence of photos and misrepresented it to make it seem like it came from the forest just above Ashland, Ore.," said Timothy Ingalsbee of the Western Fire Ecology Center. "I can't believe they are still doing this." The USFS defended the use of the photos, saying they represented typical conditions across much of the West. "We needed to be accurate, but not necessarily precise to the 99th degree," said a USFS spokesperson.

Farm Aid

Small Farms Turn Organic to Survive

Battered by volatile markets and relentless corporate consolidation, many family farms are turning to organic cultivation -- and joining organic cooperatives -- to survive. According to farm advocacy group Farm Aid, the number of family farms in the U.S. has declined from 8 million to 2 million in the last 50 years; an average of 330 family farms a week go out of business. Meanwhile, the market for organic food has grown by 20 percent a year for the last four years; organic farms now account for 5 to 7 percent of all agricultural cultivation in the country. Putting two and two together, many family farms are moving to organic and joining organizations like Wisconsin-based Organic Valley, the nation's largest organic farm cooperative. The shift to organic methods can be a substantial effort -- three years with no pesticides on crops, one year with no antibiotics or hormones in livestock, and a great deal of paperwork -- but participating farms enjoy stabilized prices, a growing niche market, and, of course, a bit of moral and environmental satisfaction. Says dairy farmer Theresa Westaby, "It's about being healthy and doing the right thing."

Superfubar

Contaminated Oklahoma Site Highlights Superfund Problems

The Superfund site at the former Tar Creek mine, located near the rural northeast Oklahoma communities of Cardin, Picher, and Hockerville, is a sobering demonstration of the U.S. government's limited ability to clean up industrial pollution. The mine, which produced lead ore to make the bullets fired in two world wars, left behind huge caverns beneath the landscape and mountainous piles of lead waste -- or "chat" -- on top of it. Until 1994, the chat was thought to have some economic value and to be entirely safe: Children sledded down the piles and played in sandboxes full of chat. Extensive tests in 1997 found unsafe levels of lead in paint, soil, dust, and the blood of the communities' children. Though the levels were lower when tested in 2000, for which the U.S. EPA takes credit, they remain high despite millions of dollars funneled into cleanup, leading some residents and political officials to conclude that the only answer is government-funded relocation -- that the site, in effect, cannot be cleaned. Meanwhile, nobody knows what to do with the mine waste, and massive legal battles are breaking out over the relocation, the health problems, ownership of the chat, and the Superfund program itself, which never anticipated, says the EPA's Thomas Dunne, "facing these multi-hundred-million-dollar problems."

Unwiseguys

Italian "Eco-Mafia" Prospers Through Illegal Dumping and Building

In a moribund Italian economy, one business sector is thriving: the "eco-mafia," a network of criminal clans and gangs that engage in illegal construction and illegal disposal of hazardous waste, described in a recent report by Legambiente, Italy's most prominent environmental group. The eco-mafiosi build villas and huge hotels on scenic areas and archeological sites, enabled by bribery of officials; while some of the illegal edifices are torn down, the government retroactively authorizes others by charging a fine per square meter, a practice that enviros say encourages still more unlawful building. Gangsters also cart hazardous waste away from industrial facilities at bargain-basement prices, again facilitated by bribery of civil officials, and bury it in national parks, dump it in abandoned quarries, or, in some cases, fraudulently sell it to farmers as fertilizer. According to Legambiente, the eco-mafia's profits rose by 14 percent last year, to nearly $23 billion.