FairWarning » Environmental Safety and Health

Springtime for Toxics

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 20:38:02 +0000

Here’s what I wanted for Christmas: something that would make us both healthier and richer. And since I was just making a wish, why not ask that Americans get smarter, too?

Surprise: I got my wish, in the form of new Environmental Protection Agency standards on mercury and air toxics for power plants. These rules are long overdue: we were supposed to start regulating mercury more than 20 years ago. But the rules are finally here, and will deliver huge benefits at only modest cost.

Read the rest of the commentary here.

New Rule Aims to Curb Mercury Emissions From Coal-Fired Power Plants

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:24:34 +0000

The Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of proposing a new rule limiting emissions of mercury, arsenic and other toxics emitted by the nation’s coal-burning power plants.

As the Los Angeles Times reports, the new clean air regulatory proposal is expected to be completed by the agency today and officially announced on Monday. It has been more than 20 years in the making, fighting long-running opposition from coal-burning utilities over the cost of installing pollution control equipment.

The new rule, based on a draft version that came out in March, would give companies three years to reduce emissions of mercury and about 70 other toxic substances, although utilities could stretch out the process with appeals. Much of industry has argued that the deadline is too tight and could lead to power blackouts.

Air pollution politics figures to be a major challenge for President Obama in his 2012 re-election campaign. As Bloomberg reports, the coal industry already has launched a huge lobbying and advertising campaign to thwart his administration’s efforts to reduce mercury emissions from coal.

At the same time, the president and the EPA will have supporters. The American Lung Association — with the backing of Chesapeake Energy Corp., a big natural gas drilling company and coal competitor — is bringing out ads in favor of the new air-quality proposal.

Also, as Politico reports, the EPA will enlist former pro football great Jerome Bettis to knock down the opposition. The one-time Pittsburgh Steelers running back, known as “the Bus,” was in Washington on Thursday to meet with EPA head Lisa Jackson and to film a public service announcement pointing out power plant pollution hazards. Politico said Bettis, who was diagnosed with asthma at age 15, has long championed improved air quality.

The EPA estimates that its new air quality requirements for power plants would prevent up to 11,000 heart attacks, 17,000 premature deaths and 120,000 cases of childhood asthma annually.

STUART SILVERSTEIN

Problems Mushroom for Hanford Nuclear Waste Plant

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:00:22 +0000

To clean up the enormous nuclear mess at the Hanford site in southeastern Washington, government officials and their contractors for years have worked on a unique solution.

They are constructing a plant that, using a process called vitrification, will convert radioactive wastes into glasslike logs that can be permanently disposed underground.

But, as The Associated Press reports, that operation also is producing a one-of-a-kind headache. Its cost keeps skyrocketing and its projected completion date keeps getting extended.

The price tag already has grown from the $4.3 billion projected in 2000 to $12.3 billion. The U.S. Department of Energy, which is managing the cleanup, recently announced that additional costs of $800 million or more are likely. And the long-awaited removal of the most dangerous wastes won’t get into full gear anytime soon, as the plant isn’t scheduled to even begin testing until 2019.

The problems have raised fears that a frustrated Congress will rein in a project long considered the cornerstone of the Hanford cleanup. The risk of the nuclear wastes “is simply too great” to curtail the work, Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire said in a recent interview with the AP. “Here, we thought we were making such progress, and now to learn that, for reasons I don’t know, we’re at serious risk of missing more milestones is disappointing.”

The Hanford site, on the banks of the Columbia River, once produced most of the plutonium used in America’s nuclear weapons, including the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagaski, Japan in 1945. The operation, which included nine nuclear reactors, ran from 1944 through 1987.

But the plutonium production left behind a slew of waste and debris in trenches, buildings and underground tanks, making Hanford one of the world’s most challenging cleanup projects.

Along with the recent news about the likelihood of higher costs and delays, fresh controversy has been fueled by whistleblower lawsuits filed by two Hanford workers.

As Bloomberg reported last month, one of the whistleblowers, Walt Tamosaitis, a research manager at the treatment plant, was demoted after alerting Energy Department contractors in 2010 about his concerns. He complained that improper treatment of high-level waste might cause plutonium to settle and hydrogen-gas bubbles to form, leading to an explosion.

U.S. Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., cited the complaints by the two workers as evidence that the Energy Department “seems to be more interested in paying contractor fees than in paying attention to safety concerns or to those who are disciplined for raising them.”

ROBERT T. NELSON

EPA for First Time Blames Fracking for Polluting Water Supply

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:34:19 +0000

The energy industry’s longstanding claim that the controversial drilling technique known as fracking has never been definitively linked to polluted drinking water is looking all wet.

For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency has scientifically tied underground water pollution to fracking. As the investigative news organization ProPublica reports, an EPA draft report released Thursday concluded that contaminants found in the water supply near the central Wyoming town of Pavillion had most likely seeped up from gas wells.

The water contained at least 10 compounds known to be used in fracking. The drilling technique, more formally known as hydraulic fracturing, involves injecting chemicals, water and sand at high pressures in deep underground rock to open up cracks that release natural gas. It has enabled energy companies to tap gas reserves once beyond its reach, triggering a drilling boom in states around the country.

Industry officials, however, have discounted the environmental damage that, critics say, has come with the boom. As a recent New Yorker magazine story noted, Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of ExxonMobil, told a congressional hearing last year, “There have been over a million wells hydraulically fractured in the history of the industry, and there is not one—not one—reported case of a freshwater aquifer having ever been contaminated.”

In Wyoming, however, the EPA said, “The presence of synthetic compounds such as glycol ethers … and the assortment of other organic components is explained as the result of direct mixing of hydraulic fracturing fluids with ground water in the Pavillion gas field.”

ProPublica said some of the EPA’s findings also directly contradicted arguments by the drilling industry for why fracking is safe: that hydrological pressure would naturally force fluids down, away from ground water; that deep geologic layers provide a watertight barrier preventing the movement of chemicals toward the surface; and that the problems with the cement and steel barriers around gas wells aren’t connected to fracking.

Environmental advocates seized the opportunity to argue for stronger federal regulation, while representatives of the energy industry and its allies questioned the accuracy of the EPA’s findings.

A spokesman for Encana, a Canadian company that has 169 producing wells in Pavillion, told the Los Angeles Times that EPA officials “don’t have a conclusion here, they have a probability — and we would argue that it is a very poor probability.”

“Encana didn’t put methane and benzene there in the water, nature did,” the spokesman added. “And the synthetics they have found in the water, we would argue that they were likely introduced by EPA’s own testing procedures.”

Residents have complained of fouled water near Pavillion since the mid-1990s. Several residents complained that their well water turned brown shortly after gas wells were fracked nearby, and, for a time, gas companies supplied replacement drinking water to residents. Last year, the EPA cautioned residents not to drink their water and to ventilate their homes when they bathed because the methane in the water could spark an explosion.

The agency also previously found carcinogens, such as benzene, in underground water near Pavillion. But not until Thursday did it attribute the pollution to fracking. The EPA continues to work on a separate study to determine whether fracking presents a risk to water resources around the country.

STUART SILVERSTEIN

Settlement Forces U.S. to Decide Whether BPA Should Be Banned

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:24:57 +0000

The controversial chemical BPA — commonly found in the linings of food cans and plastics — faces a day of decision.

As The Washington Post reports, the Food and Drug Administration must rule by March 31 on whether to ban the chemical, according to a court settlement reached between the agency and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The environmental group petitioned the FDA in 2008 to prohibit BPA, or bisphenol A, citing research that suggests exposure to the chemical might pose serious health risks. When the FDA failed to respond, the group sued.

BPA has been linked to health problems including breast and prostate cancer, along with infertility, obesity and childhood development issues. Yet debates about its risks continue to rage between environmental and industry groups as well as among scientists. On Wednesday, a report was released by the Institute of Medicine on the potential environmental causes of breast cancer, but produced conclusions on both BPA and phthalates that a Forbes blogger called “wishy-washy.”

In the meantime, as Consumer Reports said in early October, at least 11 states, including California, have passed bans on using BPA in baby bottles and sippy cups. On the national level, U.S. Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., is pushing legislation to ban BPA from all food and beverage containers.

The settlement between the FDA and the Natural Resources Defense Council forces regulators to take a position on a chemical used for more than four decades in everything from the cans for liquid infant formula to the coating on grocery store receipts.

Tthe government long discounted the risks of low doses of BPA. In January, however, an FDA official acknowledged “some concern” about the chemical and said the government would spend $30 million over two years to examine its health effects.

STUART SILVERSTEIN

Japan Nuclear Disaster Exposes Unskilled Contractors to Extra Hazards

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:19:43 +0000

Nine months after Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was devastated by an earthquake and tsunami, creating a widespread environmental disaster, cleanup work continues at the coastal site.

That effort is exposing a fault line within the Japanese workforce. As the Los Angeles Times reports, the most dangerous and thankless jobs mostly are in the hands of unskilled contractors who are subjected to high doses of radioactivity, often not fully aware of the hazard.

“This job is a death sentence, performed by workers who aren’t being given information about the dangers they face,” said Hiroaki Koide, an assistant professor at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute and author of the book “The Lie of Nuclear Power.”

Activists are calling for better government protection for these workers. For decades, the activists say, nuclear plants have maintained a two-tiered workforce. One is made up of highly paid and well-trained utility employees, and the other consists of the itinerant contractors commonly known as “jumpers” or “nuclear gypsies,” who receive less training and fewer health benefits.

The Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, a Tokyo-based watchdog group, says that contractors last year accounted for 96% of the harmful radiation absorbed by workers at the nation’s nuclear plants. What’s more, according to the government’s industrial safety agency, temporary workers at the Fukushima plant in 2010 faced radiation levels 16 times higher than did employees of the plant’s owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco.

Meanwhile, the environmental damage continues. As the Times reports in a separate story, Tepco disclosed that more than 45 tons of highly radioactive water leaked this weekend from the site, with some of the water possibly reaching the nearby Pacific Ocean. The plant is about 220 miles northeast of Tokyo.

The leak defies assurances that the company has largely controlled damage at the nuclear operation, which it plans to shut down by year’s end.

Workers found highly radioactive water leaking from cracks in the concrete wall of a runoff container to a gutter that leads to the ocean. Employees later stemmed the leak with sandbags.

The ongoing Japanese crisis has raised fears about nuclear safety that figure in environmental debates in this country. As The Associated Press reports, questions are being raised about whether a $5.8 billion nuclear lab being planned at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico would be vulnerable to an earthquake.

The project, whose shorthand name is CMRR, is moving into the final design phase. Project director Herman LeDoux says that officials have “gone to great extremes” to ensure that the planned building could withstand an earthquake of up to 7.3 magnitude. But local activists worry that the lessons of the Japanese disaster are being ignored.

STUART SILVERSTEIN