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NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A BP engineer intentionally deleted more than 300 text messages that said the company’s efforts to control the Gulf of Mexico oil spill were failing, and that the amount of oil leaking was far more than what the company reported, the Justice Department said Tuesday. In the first criminal charges related [...]
When Hurricane Irene neared New York at the end of August, the city took the unprecedented step of shutting down the entire transit system—buses, subways and commuter trains in the largest city in America. The danger was that heavy rains from Irene could cause flooding that would swamp tunnels and tracks, causing lasting damage to [...]
Nearly a year after the Japanese tsunami and subsequent meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant, the good news is that the risk from radiation doesn’t seem to be as high as many initially feared. Take the Pacific Ocean, for example, where most of the radioactive fallout from the plant eventually ended up. Nicholas Fisher, a [...]
It’s now eight months since a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit northern Japan, badly damaging the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex. That accident eventually resulted in a meltdown, and the accident as a whole was rated a 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale’s 1 to 7 rating. Explosions in the plant threw large amounts of [...]
Al Gore’s televised, 24-hour PowerPoint extravaganza last month predictably sparked some hot debate – much of it not about the science itself, but about Gore as its mouthpiece (common themes: he’s a hero, he’s become irrelevant, he’s a hypocritical capitalist). But a key message within Gore’s Climate Reality Project was that our recent strange weather [...]
As I’ve written before, the devastating famine in Somalia—which has killed tens of thousands in the Horn of Africa—may have been triggered by the worst drought in the region in 60 years, but it’s ultimately a manmade disaster. The ongoing insurgency in Somalia prevented food aid from reaching those in desperate need, and now the [...]
While the world’s attention has been fixed on the nuclear crisis in Japan, we’re fast coming upon the one-year anniversary of another major environmental disaster: the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Though opinions are still divided on just how much damage the spill has caused—and may continue to cause—the Gulf community is beginning to [...]
From the beginning, the Japanese response to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster has been a constant improvisation. After the double blow of a quake and a tsunami knocked out power to the plant, officials have desperately tried to keep nuclear material at active reactors and spent fuel pools cool, to prevent overheating and more wide-scale [...]
The news from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan just keeps getting worse. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said that at least a “partial meltdown” seemed to be happening, and today the U.S. government advised its citizens to stay at least 50 miles away from the Fukushima plant. The worst-case scenario—a release of a large [...]
I’ve been traveling and reporting for the past few days, out of email and cell phone most of the time, so I haven’t been able to blog on the terrible Japan quake and ongoing nuclear disaster. I know little of what’s going on, though an explosion just occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi 3 reactor. I’m [...]
