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Recent examinations of the health and environmental impacts of mountaintop mining – stripping the tops off of mountains to extract coal – has the practice looking pretty guilty. It apparently spikes birth defects, worsens chronic conditions like heart disease, and ruins land, and it doesn’t look like it will be clearing its name anytime soon. [...]
The news has been relatively good recently out of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), the plant’s operator, last week reported success in sharply reducing radiation levels within the plant, and in stabilizing temperatures in the pools of water need to store used nuclear fuel rods. While radiation is still leaking [...]
My Going Green column this week covers a new study that contains the strongest independent scientific case yet that shale-gas production can contaminate nearby water wells. A team of Duke researchers examined groundwater wells in northeastern Pennsylvania and New York state—the gasland I visited for our recent cover story on shale—and found evidence that methane [...]
FUKUSHIMA — A Geiger counter isn’t something you ever want to know how to use. It’s definitely not something you want to need. Not that it’s an intimidating piece of equipment – the one I used last week in Japan was roughly the size of a mobile phone circa 1998. Our Terra MKS-05, made in [...]
The world is finely attuned to nuclear disaster. In the past two weeks, global monitoring stations designed to detect the detonation of atomic bombs began alerting the world to what it already knew: a disaster was unfolding at Fukushima nuclear power plant, and radioactive particles had escaped. Radioactivity is a devilish thing to track: it’s [...]
It’s worth stating at the outset: while more than 10,000 people have almost certainly died in the March 11 quake and tsunami in northeastern Japan, not a single person has been killed in the ongoing nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. As Abrahm Lustgarten reported in ProPublica yesterday, most experts believe that even in [...]
Food-safety reform advocates won a long-awaited—and rare—victory today in Washington. This morning the Senate passed a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s food-safety system, approving the Food Safety and Modernization Act by an unusually bipartisan vote of 73-25. The bill, which had been languishing in the Senate for more than a year despite support from both [...]
