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Nuclear waste mismanagement would
create high-level radioactive dump
in Savannah River watershed
Washington, DC, Mar. 11— Current waste management practices
at the Savannah River Site (SRS) nuclear weapons plant, near Aiken,
South Carolina, threaten to make the watershed of one of the most important
rivers in the southeastern United States into a high-level nuclear waste
dump, according to a report issued Mar. 11 by the Institute for Energy
and Environmental Research (IEER).
The new report, “Nuclear Dumps by the Riverside: Threats to the
Savannah River from Radioactive Contamination at the Savannah River
Site (SRS)”, also details tritium contamination of the Savannah
River and the environmental injustice caused by SRS-related contamination
to those who subsist on fish from its waters.
The Savannah River Site in South Carolina produced more than one-third
of the plutonium for US nuclear bombs, almost all of the tritium, and
other nuclear materials for the US weapons program. Past waste dumping
and mismanagement and a failure to implement a sound cleanup plan have
created extensive water pollution beneath SRS as well as serious risks
for water resources in the region.
“Current cleanup policies at SRS will very likely leave a million
or more curies of radioactivity in high-level waste on the Savannah
River Site,” said Dr. Arjun Makhijani, IEER president and principal
author of the report. “The DOE is turning SRS into a de facto high-level
radioactive waste dump.”
“We are going to work in a bi-partisan way in the State of Georgia
to hold the federal government’s feet to the fire,” said State
Representative Nan Orrock, Majority Whip (D) of the Georgia House of
Representatives. “The Department of Energy simply must not be allowed
to put our most precious natural resource – water – at risk
in this appalling way.”
“All that we want is a bi-partisan measure to put back into funding
the testing for tritium and other radioactive products in the river,”
said state Rep. Ron Stephens (R-GA). “My constituents drink this
water.”
“There are serious problems that need to be dealt with in an expeditious
manner, properly and correctly,” said State Senator Regina Thomas
(D-GA). “There are contaminants in our water supply and the Department
of Energy should create a cleanup plan so as to eliminate pollution
of our water.”
Tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, is the most common water
pollutant at SRS. “While it is well within federal safe drinking
water standards, recent research indicates that tritium standards may
not be adequate to protect pregnant women and developing fetuses from
adverse health effects,” explained Dr. Makhijani. “Tritium
can produce multigenerational risks. The federal government needs to
recover the buried wastes dumped decades ago that are still polluting
the Savannah River, and to tighten tritium standards to protect those
most at risk.”
The IEER report finds that African Americans who rely on the Savannah
River as a primary source of protein – that is, subsistence fishermen
– are disproportionately affected by the consumption of radioactively-contaminated
fish downstream of SRS. They consume about four times more fish than
the maximum limit set by the South Carolina Department of Health and
Environmental Control.
“We know that people are eating more fish than what is safe -
people of color in particular,” said Rev. Charles Utley, Central
Savannah River Area campaign director for Blue Ridge Environmental Defense
League in Augusta, Georgia. “People whose diets depend on river
fish caught downstream of SRS need to be told about the risks of fish
consumption. And DOE needs to act to reduce the pollution of the river.”
Despite the radioactive threats, the Energy Department has denied a
request from the state of Georgia to continue funding radiation monitoring
along the Savannah River, calling the state’s program “redundant”
because South Carolina also has a monitoring program. Unfunded, Georgia’s
program is set to end Apr. 30, 2004.
“It’s simply unacceptable that DOE has cut off environmental
monitoring funds for the State of Georgia,” said Sara Barczak,
Safe Energy Director of Southern Alliance for Clean Energy in Savannah,
Georgia. “The DOE has created risks for the people of Georgia and
put a burden on the state and it should step up to the plate and assume
its responsibilities by restoring the funds rather than tossing the
problem into the laps of communities and state taxpayers.”
The IEER report focuses on the daunting problem of managing and implementing
a clean-up program for Cold War-era wastes; it does not examine the
contamination that will result from new and proposed nuclear weapons
or nuclear fuel production programs at SRS, including a tritium separation
facility being built there, a proposed plant to make plutonium fuel
for reactors, and a proposed plant to mass-manufacture plutonium bomb
cores.
“It is unconscionable that this administration is pursuing unneeded,
provocative nuclear weapons programs at SRS even before it has cleaned
up the mess it created during the Cold War,” said Bobbie Paul,
Executive Director of Atlanta Women’s Action for New Directions
and board member of Georgia Center for Law in the Public Interest. “Worse,
the DOE is taking actions that are making the site into a huge, essentially
permanent, radioactive waste dump. It should clean up its act and not
even think about new bomb plants that would add to the burdens it has
already created.”
Source: Institute for Energy and Environmental
Research
Climate change lays waste to global treaty
By Jim Lobe
Washington, DC, Mar. 15 (IPS)— Retreating glaciers and
more forest fires, floods, and other severe weather events are arriving
as predicted, 10 years after the world community agreed to limit the
greenhouse gas emissions believed to cause global warming, says a new
report.
A decade after ratification of the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change (UNFCCC), those emissions continue to rise, signaling
a “collective failure” of the industrialized world, according
to the Washington-based World Resources Institute (WRI), one of the
world’s foremost environmental think tanks.
“We are quickly moving to the point where the damage will be irreversible,”
warns Dr. Jonathan Pershing, director of WRI’s climate, energy,
and pollution program.
“In fact, the latest scientific reports indicate that global warming
is worsening. Unless we act now, the world will be locked into temperatures
that would cause irreversible harm,” he adds in a statement.
WRI researchers estimate that greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon
dioxide, rose 11 percent over the last decade, and are expected to grow
another 50 percent worldwide by 2020.
Under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement that provided
specific targets to follow up the UNFCCC, 38 industrialized countries
were called upon to reduce emissions by an average seven percent below
1990 levels by 2012.
While the administration of former US President Bill Clinton signed
the Protocol, Clinton’s successor, President George W. Bush, withdrew
the United States, which currently emits about 25 percent of the world’s
greenhouse gases, from negotiations over Kyoto’s implementation.
Russia, which indicated initially it intended to ratify the Protocol,
remains undecided. As a result, the agreement, which must be ratified
by countries whose greenhouse emissions totaled more than 55 percent
of global output in 1990 in order to take effect, is in limbo.
WRI decided to make a relatively rare public statement now both because
the tenth anniversary of the UNFCCC’s ratification will take place
next weekend and because of growing pessimism over the international
community’s ability and will to deal with the problem.
The UNFCCC, which called for voluntary reductions in greenhouse emissions,
was signed by, among others, then-President George H.W. Bush, at the
Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and took formal effect Mar.
21, 1994. Today, 188 countries are signatories.
The Kyoto Protocol grew out of the UNFCCC when it became clear that
plans for voluntary reductions would not meet initial targets, and as
scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) became
increasingly convinced that the rise in global temperatures of about
one degree Fahrenheit over the last century was due primarily to artificial
emissions, notably the combustion of fossil fuels, including coal, oil,
and gas.
Studies over the past decade have shown the warming trend continues.
“The five warmest years in recorded weather history have taken
place over the last six years,” said WRI President Jonathan Lash.
“The 10 warmest years in recorded weather history have taken place
since 1987. Whether it’s the retreat of glaciers, the melting of
the permafrost in Alaska, or the increase in severe weather events,
the world is experiencing what the global warming models predict,”
he added in the report.
Europe, the main champion of the Kyoto Protocol, suffered its hottest
year on record last year. Some 15,000 people in France alone died due
to heat stress in combination with pollution, while European agriculture
suffered an estimated $12.5 billion in losses.
Britain’s most influential scientist, Sir David King, recently
excoriated the Bush administration for withdrawing from the Protocol
and ignoring the threat posed by climate change. “In my view, climate
change is the most severe problem we are facing today,” he wrote
in Science Magazine, “more serious even than the threat of terrorism.”
Even the Pentagon recently issued a warning that global warming, if
it takes place abruptly, could result in a catastrophic breakdown in
international security.
Wars over access to food, water, and energy would be likely to break
out between states, according to the report. “Disruption and conflict
will be endemic features of life,” it adds. “Once again, warfare
would define human life.”
Even if climate change is more gradual, recent studies have argued that
as many as one million plant and animal species could be rendered extinct
due to the effects of global warming by 2050.
A report by the world’s largest reinsurance company, Swiss Re,
predicted that in 10 years the economic cost of disasters like floods,
frosts, and famines caused by global warming could reach $150 billion
annually.
“Accelerated development of a portfolio of technologies could stabilize
greenhouse gas concentrations, enhance global energy security, and eradicate
energy poverty,” argues David Jhirad, WRI’s vice president
for research. “We urgently need the political will and international
cooperation to make this happen.”
China’s appetite for electricity
eats
into environment
By Antoaneta Bezlova
Beijing, China, Mar. 12 (IPS)-- China’s voracious appetite
for electricity is driving its officials to encroach on the last free-flowing
water sources as far as remote Tibet, creating ripples of discontent
even beyond Chinese borders.
Likewise, plans to dam virgin rivers and lakes in China’s remaining
great wilderness have been spurred by increased squabbling for dwindling
natural resources between newly independent power corporations.
Chinese energy officials have unveiled blueprints to build a new generation
of dams on the Nu River — a waterway that flows through the virgin
forests of Yunnan province and is called the Salween as it flows downstream
into Burma and Thailand.
Plans are afoot also to erect a dam on Mugecuo Lake, known to Tibetans
as the Yeti Lake, in an area that is home to the endangered snow leopard.
Hydropower development on the Nu River is headed by China Huadian Group,
one of China’s biggest five power producers that were created after
the break-up of the communist country’s power monopoly in December
2002.
The dam on Mugecuo Lake will be built by China Huaneng Group, the country’s
largest independent power producer that is run by the son of the former
Prime Minister Li Peng.
Proposals to expand China’s hydropower in the country’s pristine
western regions follow related developments on the Yangtze and Lancang
River, which is called the Mekong as it flows downstream into South-east
Asia.
Alarmed by the country’s insatiable hunger for electricity and
growing dependence on imported oil and gas, Chinese energy officials
are determined to expand their grip over the vast natural resources
of China’s west.
Despite years of internal debate and international opposition, the Three
Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric project, is rising
up on the Yangtze River. By the time the $25 billion dam is completely
finished in 2009, nearly two million people would have been forcibly
relocated from their ancestral land.
Plans to dam the Lancang/Mekong River have already sparked bitter international
disputes between China and its South-east Asian neighbors. Similarly,
blueprints to harness the Nu River and Mugecuo Lake are meeting stiff
resistance from outside Chinese borders — in Thailand and Burma.
A nationwide public campaign of opposition has also been gathering strength.
The Nu River is the last free-flowing international river in the region,
and also South-east Asia’s second longest. It begins in the Tibetan
mountains, crosses Yunnan province, and flows into Burma and Thailand.
China’s plan to build up to 13 hydroelectric dams upstream has
already drawn angry protests from the ethnic communities along the river
in Thailand and Burma.
Late last year, the South-east Asia Rivers Network based in the northern
Thai city of Chiang Mai sponsored a letter to the Chinese ambassador
in Bangkok signed by 83 Thai and Burmese groups, claiming the project
would have devastating effects on the wildlife sanctuary and livelihoods
of people downstream.
A new letter of protest was sent to President Hu Jintao this week, bearing
the signatures of 76 organizations from 33 countries from Greenpeace
to International Rivers Network. “Millions of people of over twenty
ethnicities depend on the Nu/Salween River watershed for their livelihoods,’’
the letter said. “Dam projects risk drastic impacts to all of these
resources.’’
According to the petition, nine of the 13 dams would be located in an
area designated by the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) as a World Heritage Site.
The site, named the Three Parallel Rivers, is recognized as one of the
richest temperate regions of the world. The area contains over 6,000
different plant species and is believed to be home to more than half
of China’s native animal species, including the snow leopard.
If the project goes ahead, at least 50,000 people, mainly members of
the region’s 22 ethnic minorities, would have to be relocated.
The environmental and social impact of the controversial project has
alarmed experts at home who this week submitted a petition to the Chinese
parliament asking for a scientific assessment of the project before
its initiation.
“The Nu River dam project must go through an independent and authoritative
investigation before any decision on its future should be made,”
says He Shaoling, a senior engineer at the China Institute of Water
Resources and Hydropower Research.
She represents a group of environmentalists and scientists, whose opposition
to the project has so far succeeded pushing back the groundbreaking
date by more than six months.
The construction of the first, 180,000-kilowatt hydropower station,
located at Liuku in Yunnan province, was originally scheduled for September
2003. In June 2003, the Yunnan Daily announced the establishment of
Yunnan Huadian Nu River Hydropower Development Co., formed by local
energy companies and the China Huadian Group.
With control of 51 percent of the shares in the project, China Huadian
Group is seen as the main beneficiary among the power companies, vying
to tap water resources in western China.
Speaking at the signing ceremony, Qin Guangrong, vice governor of Yunnan
province, was quoted by the newspaper as saying that hydropower development
in the province is cost saving and would yield high returns. Projected
capacity from the dam cascade is 20,000 megawatts — a sizable amount
for a country plagued by power shortages.
China suffered power failures last year in as many as 19 of its 29 provinces,
and this strained production in industrial powerhouses such as Jiangsu,
Zhejiang, and Guangdong. To reduce consumption, some provinces were
forced to impose higher tariffs in peak hours and make large enterprises
use power on a quota basis.
Power consumption in China rose at the fastest pace since the late 1970s,
as manufacturers raised output to meet growing demand for cars, steel,
and consumer goods. According to the State Power Information Network,
power consumption rose 15 percent in 2003 to a record 1.91 trillion
kilowatt-hours.
As power demand is projected to continue outstripping supply, China’s
power producers have rushed to add capacity through acquisitions and
new construction projects. Thanks to deregulation and privatization,
some of the newly independent power entities have succeeded in securing
new water resources to produce hydropower.
However, accusations about cronyism have also erupted over the dam project
on the Mugecuo Lake — the powerful “princeling” Li Xiaopeng,
son of elderly leader Li Peng, is said to have secured the right to
the project thanks to his family’ s vested interests in the industry.
Details of the dam to be built by China Huaneng Group have been kept
secret and reporting of the project in the media has come to a halt.
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