Tag: hazard

Burying Radioactive Waste (Part 1)

  • Waiting for new waste solutions, power plants across the country are still stacking spent fuel in concrete casks like this one at the Yucca Mountain site. (Photo courtesy of the US DOE)

Hazardous radioactive waste is building up at nuclear power plants across the country. For decades, the U-S government’s only plan was to stick that waste out of sight and out of mind … far below Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Recently, President Barack Obama scrapped that plan. Shawn Allee looks at where the President wants to go now:

Transcript

Hazardous radioactive waste is building up at nuclear power plants across the country.

For decades, the U-S government’s only plan was to stick that waste out of sight and out of mind … far below Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

Recently, President Barack Obama scrapped that plan.

Shawn Allee looks at where the President wants to go now.

The old nuclear waste plan was simple: take spent fuel leftover from nuclear reactors and bury it under Yucca Mountain.

That would have moved the problem away from nuclear power plants and people who live nearby.

The Obama Administration cut the program but only said, the program “has not proven effective.”

Energy Secretary Steven Chu tried explaining that to the U-S Senate.

“I don’t believe one can say, scientists are willing to say Yucca Mountain is the ideal site, given what we know today and given what we believe can be developed in the next 50 years.”

So … Obama’s administration is switching gears, and government scientists have to adjust.

“I worked at Yucca Mountain for ten years.”

Mark Peters is a deputy director at Argonne National Laboratory west of Chicago.

“I ran the testing program, so I got intimate involvement in Yucca Mountain. The license application has pieces of me all through it.”

Peters says he’s disappointed Yucca Mountain was killed.

But he says that’s a personal opinion – he’s on board with the new policy.

In fact … he’s helping it along.

Obama created a blue-ribbon commissison.

Commissioners will come up with new solutions for nuclear waste within two years.

Peters will tell them about new technology.

“There are advanced reactor concepts that could in fact do more effective burning of the fuel, so the spent fuel’s not so toxic when the fuel comes out.”

Peters says these “fast breeder reactors” might not just produce less nuclear waste.

They might use the old stuff that was supposed to head to Yucca.

“You extract the usable content, make a new fuel and burn it in a reactor, so you actually get to the point where you’re recycling the uranium and plutonium and other elements people’ve heard about.”

But Obama’s blue – ribbon nuclear waste commission could find problems with fast-breeder technology.

In the 1970s, we ran a commercial prototype, but it didn’t work very long.

Peters says new versions might be decades away.

There’s another problem, too.

“One important point is that there’s still waste from that process. So we have to go back to ultimately, some kind of geologic repository for part of the system.”

In other words … we’d have less waste, but we’d still have to bury it … somewhere.

History suggests there’s gonna be a squabble over any location.

After all, Yucca Mountain wasn’t the government’s first stab at an underground nuclear waste site.

“It had an embarassing failure in Lyons, Kansas between 1970 and 1972.”

That’s Sam Walker, a historian at the U-S Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

He’s talking about the old Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC.

The AEC pushed hard to bury nuclear waste in a salt mine, even though scientists in Kansas had doubts.

“And then it turned out that the salt mine they had planned to place the waste in was not technically suitable either. So, what the AEC did was to lose its battle on both political and technical grounds.”

Walker says for 15 years, the government scouted for another location to dump hazardous nuclear waste.

“There was lots of vocal public opposition to even investigating sites.”

Eventually, the debate got too hot.

Congress settled on Yucca Mountain, Nevada, even though scientists debated whether it’d work.

Congress kept Yucca Mountain going because it promised to keep nuclear waste out of everyone’s back yards … except for Nevada’s.

Now with Yucca Mountain out of the picture, it could take years for Obama’s administration to settle on a way to handle nuclear waste.

In the mean time, power plants across the country are stacking spent fuel in pools of water or in concrete casks.

For decades the federal government said this local storage is both safe and temporary.

It still says it’s safe, but now, no one’s sure what temporary really means.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Corn Ethanol: Study Says More Smog

New research out of Stanford University says ethanol-based fuels might
not be any better for the environment than gasoline. But as Dustin
Dwyer reports, that’s not expected to stop the drive to increase
ethanol use:

Transcript

New research out of Stanford University says ethanol-based fuels might
not be any better for the environment than gasoline. But as Dustin
Dwyer reports, that’s not expected to stop the drive to increase
ethanol use:


Researchers at Stanford University found that even while ethanol based
E85 fuel can reduce some harmful vehicle emissions, it increases
others.


The study shows that E85 can lead to higher ozone emissions, which
contribute to smog. And the study says that could cause up to 185 more
ozone-related deaths in the U.S. every year.


This isn’t the first study showing the possible hazards of ethanol.
Others have raised concerns about the impact corn-based ethanol could
have on the food supply, and how it could affect land use, but ethanol
supporters say it’s still the best available option to cut down on
foreign oil.


Ethanol remains politically popular, and Detroit automakers have
committed to making up to half of their annual vehicle fleets ethanol-
capable by 2012.


For the Environment Report, I’m Dustin Dwyer.

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Senator Stalls Emission Controls for Small Engines

  • A catalytic converter may be on its way to a lawn mower near you. (Photo by Karen Trilford)

Small gasoline engines—including those on lawnmowers and weed trimmers— are a major source of air pollution. But one Republican lawmaker says more testing is needed to ensure that proposed emission controls for the engines are safe. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Matt Sepic reports:

Transcript

Small gasoline engines, including those on lawnmowers and weed trimmers, are a
major source of air pollution. But one Republican lawmaker says more testing
is needed to ensure that proposed emission controls for the engines are
safe. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Matt Sepic reports:


Air quality advocates want the federal government to require catalytic
converters be put on all new small engines.


However, Missouri Republican Senator Kit Bond wants a safety study first. He
says extra heat from the devices could be a fire hazard. But William Becker, who heads a group of local and regional air quality officials, says that’s just a stalling tactic.


“Both California and the Environmental Protection Agency have done a lot of testing. And they show that engines with catalysts are no hotter than engines without catalysts. The issue of safety is really bogus.”


Becker says Senator Bond is just trying to protect Briggs & Stratton. The
engine maker has two plants in Missouri.


In 2003, Bond also pushed for a measure that blocks all states but
California from imposing small engine pollution regulations that are
stronger than federal rules.


For the GLRC, I’m Matt Sepic in St. Louis.

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Consumers Stocking Up on Banned Pesticide

  • The pesticide diazinon is being phazed out by the EPA for being hazardous. Some gardeners are still buying it despite health warnings. (Photo by Scott Schopieray)

A powerful pesticide that’s popular with gardeners
and homeowners will no longer be sold starting in January, but that
hasn’t stopped people from stocking up on the chemical before it’s
pulled from shelves. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chris Lehman reports:

Transcript

A powerful pesticide that’s popular with gardners and homeowners will no longer be
sold starting in January. But that hasn’t stopped people from stocking up on the
chemical before it’s pulled from the shelves. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Chris Lehman reports:


Diazinon, at one time, was the most widely used pesticide on lawns. It can
still be sold through the end of the year. But there’s no deadline for homeowners
to use up their supplies. So that’s led some people to stockpile the product. The
decision to ban diazinon was made during the final weeks of the Clinton Administration.
But the Environmental Protection Agency gave diazinon producers four years to phase it out.


Jay Feldman is director of the environmental group Beyond Pesticides. He says the EPA
should have banned diazinon outright instead of phasing it out gradually.


“When the agency identifies a hazard such as this, one that is particularly problematic
to children, it ought to institute a recall, get the product out of commerce, make sure
that people do not continue to use the product unwittngly.”


Officials at the EPA say over-exposure to diazinon can affect the nervous system. They
also say it poses a risk to birds.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Chris Lehman.

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Homeland Security to Remove Hazmat Placards?

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security are considering removing hazardous material placards from freight trains. They say doing so will help protect people from terrorists. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush has more:

Transcript

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security are considering removing
hazardous material placards from freight trains. They say doing so would help
protect people from terrorists. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush has more:


Because of the September 11th terrorist attacks, officials see the potential for a
lot of things to be used as weapons. One of their latest fears is that shipments of
hazardous materials could be used by terrorists. In order to protect people from this
threat, the Department of Homeland Security says it might require the removal of the
diamond shaped placards from rail cars. Emergency workers use the placards to quickly
identify a hazard after an accident.


Richard Powell is the Executive Director of the Michigan Association of Fire Chiefs.
He says while the Department of Homeland Security is well-intentioned, removal of the
placards would put more people at risk:


“We need to protect our citizens. We need to keep that system in place. If we don’t know something is there, our people could not evacuate perhaps, as quick as we normally would.”


Homeland Security officials say they’ll consider other options that would help disguise the rail cars, but would still allow emergency workers to know what’s inside.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mark Brush.

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Anglers Competing With Cormorants

  • The cormorant population is booming in the region, and some anglers say they're competing too hard with the birds for fish. (Photo courtesy of Steve Mortensen, Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe)

Anglers around the Great Lakes are eager for a summer of fishing. Everyone wants to catch the big one. But they’re getting some competition. It comes in the form of the double-crested cormorant. The big black birds with long necks are fish eaters. Cormorants were nearly wiped out by the now-banned pesticide, DDT, in the 1970’s. But now cormorants are back in big numbers. Some anglers feel there are too many cormorants now. And they say the birds are eating too many fish. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports on one experimental effort to control cormorants:

Transcript

Anglers around the Great Lakes are eager for a summer of fishing. Everyone wants to
catch the big one, but they’re getting some competition. It comes in the form of the
double-crested cormorant. The big black birds with long necks are fish eaters.
Cormorants were nearly wiped out by the now-banned pesticide, DDT, in the 1970’s. But
now cormorants are back in big numbers. Some anglers feel there are too many
cormorants now, and they say the birds are eating too many fish. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports on one experimental effort to control
cormorants:


(sound of waves)


Robin Whaley often fishes here on Knife River. It’s the biggest spawning ground for
rainbow trout on the north shore of Lake Superior. But today she’s watching the
cormorants on Knife Island, a quarter-mile offshore.


The cormorant population is booming. About a hundred cormorants lived on the island
last year.


“I guess they’re just coming up into this area in the last few years and becoming a
problem, for degrading habitat and for eating little fish.”


Cormorants are native to this area, but they haven’t been around much in the last few
decades, because of poisoning from the pesticide DDT.


The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources stocks rainbow trout here. This year
they put 40,000 young fish into the river. Anglers like Robin Whaley hope the little fish
will grow big enough for them to catch someday.


The little fish face a lot of predators and hazards and the cormorants are one more threat.
Some people would like to reduce that threat. It’s illegal to kill cormorants. They’re
protected by law because they’re a migratory bird.


But a new federal rule says if they’re threatening a resource, people can fight back in a
different way.


Bill Paul runs the Agriculture Department’s Wildlife Services Program in Minnesota. He
sent workers onto Knife Island to try to keep the cormorants from nesting. Their methods
are experimental – but they’re pretty basic.


“We put up some flapping tarps in wind, a couple of yellow raincoat scarecrows, we also
put up ten flashing highway barricade lights, we also have a light siren device out there
that goes during the night.”


The workers also used special firecrackers shot by guns at passing birds to scare them
away.


They did this for two weeks during the cormorants’ nesting season. Bill Paul says even
with all that noise and commotion it wasn’t easy to scare them away.


“They seem to be fairly smart birds and real persistent at coming back to Knife Island.
So we’re uncertain yet whether our activities are actually going to keep them off there
long-term.”


As part of their study, researchers had permission to kill 25 cormorants to find out what
they’d been eating. They wanted to see how much of a threat the birds were to game fish
like the rainbow trout.


They found fish in the cormorants’ stomachs all right. But not the kind most people like
to catch and eat.


Don Schreiner supervises the Lake Superior fishery for the Minnesota DNR. He says
he’d need more than just a few samples to really know what the birds are eating.


“My guess is that cormorants are opportunists and if there’s a small silver fish out there
and he’s just hanging out and the cormorant has that available to eat, he’ll eat it. The
question becomes, is this a significant part of the population that they’re consuming, or
isn’t it?”


Despite the concerns of some anglers, researchers have been studying cormorants for
years, and so far they haven’t been able to prove the birds are harming wild fish
populations.


John Pastor is an ecologist at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He says the study at
Knife River won’t prove anything useful either.


He says it ignores the bigger picture. Pastor says you can’t just look at one predator and
come to any firm conclusions. There could be lots of reasons why there aren’t many
steelhead, or rainbow trout.


“Changes in land use. All the adult steelhead out there eating the young of the year
steelhead. Maybe it’s some pollutant in the lake. You never know. But it’s easy to fix on
the predator as the problem, because people see a cormorant dive down and come up with
a fish, and they say to themselves, I could have caught that fish.”


Pastor says even if the cormorants are eating lots of young rainbow trout, it doesn’t
necessarily mean the birds are hurting the overall trout population.


And even for an angler like Robin Whaley, the concern about the trout is mixed with a
feeling of respect for the cormorant.


“I admire the bird very much, but human beings, we’re in the business of controlling
habitats and populations, and this is just another case of that.”


For many anglers, the ultimate question in this competition between predators is simple.
It’s about who gets the trout – cormorants or humans.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

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Unique Industrial Land Seen in New Light

  • Marian Byrnes has been called the "environmental conscience of the Calumet." She has been a key leader in getting the city of Chicago, and the state of Illinois, to see the value of Calumet's natural areas. Photo by Mark Brush.

In an area in south Chicago you can see the remnants of a steel industry that has had better days – silent smokestacks looming on the horizon, empty parking lots, and for sale signs in front yards. The Calumet region was once a haven for big industry… and because of that it is also home to a list of seemingly endless environmental problems. Many people thought the problems were too great to overcome, but as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush reports… that attitude is changing:

Transcript

In an area in south Chicago you can see the remnants of a steel industry that has had better days – silent smokestacks looming on the horizon, empty parking lots, and for sale signs in front yards. The Calumet region was once a haven for big industry… and because of that it is also home to a list of seemingly endless environmental problems. Many people thought the problems were too great to overcome, but as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush reports…that attitude is changing:

If you’ve ever driven by Chicago’s south side, you’ve likely seen the smokestacks and factories that dot this old industrial area.

But when you get off the main highway and drive down the back roads of Calumet, you see something you wouldn’t expect – remnants of unique wetlands and prairies. It’s an area where thousands of migrating birds come each spring. Herons, egrets, and cranes carefully pluck their food from these marshes – marshes that are right next to chemical factories and toxic city dumps.

(Bring up sound of sparrows and outdoors)

The sun is setting in this part of the Calumet – some sparrows nearby are settling down for the night – and Marian Byrnes is showing me around the places she’s come to know from living and working here for more than 20 years.

“This land is mostly slag on the banks of Indian Creek, but it’s not considered hazardous.”

“How would the slag get here?”

“Oh, it was waste from Steel Mills – mostly Republic Steel which was north of here.”

(Fade her under + continue outdoor sound)

Marian Byrnes is a retired public school teacher. And at age 76, she volunteers her time as the executive director of the Southeast Environmental Task Force. She repeatedly meets with businesses, community groups, and city and state advisory boards – patiently delivering her message that the Calumet region is worth protecting.

And over the years Marian, and others like her, have steadily worked against a city that didn’t seem to care about the natural areas in Calumet. For many of them, it began more than twenty years ago, when they got a note from the Chicago Transit Authority in their mailbox. The note outlined the Transit Authority’s plan to build a bus barn on their neighborhood’s prairie:

“It was like having our own little forest preserve right behind our houses. You can walk out there, and when you get out – maybe a block or so – you’re not aware that you’re in the city at all. I mean you can’t even see the houses, so it’s just a wonderful place to be in touch with nature.”

They convinced the transit authority to build the bus-barn elsewhere. And in the years that followed they fought off other proposals such as plans to build a toxic waste incinerator, and plans to re-open old city dumps.

But despite those successes, big environmental problems still persist. And the list of contamination is intimidating – heavy metals, PCBs, and leaking landfills. The problems are so overwhelming that when planners in Chicago were thinking about spreading miles and miles of concrete for a new airport, Calumet was thought of as an ideal location.

Kathy Dickhut works in the planning department for the city of Chicago:

“The area does have a lot of environmental problems. Ten years ago the thinking was it was all dirty, environmentally dirty, and that was sort of across the board, …so one way to deal with that is, you know to cover the whole thing up.”

But local environmental and community groups became united in their opposition to the plan. And instead of an airport, the local groups asked the National Park Service to designate the area as an ecological park.

And slowly but surely, the city began to look at the area in a new light:

“I think people didn’t realize just how much opposition there would be to paving over this area. I mean the airport proposal was quite dramatic, and because it was quite dramatic, there was quite dramatic outcry about it – so once that played out – we had to look at it again in a different way. And what we’ve done is really look at the resources that we do have here, which are substantial, and how we can improve those.”

Today, the city appears to have a completely different attitude about the Calumet area. Chicago lawmakers recently passed a land use plan that calls for the best of both worlds. They want to protect and clean up the natural prairies and wetlands – while at the same time – attract new businesses to build on old industrial sites.

City planners hope to balance what may be seen as competing goals (attracting new industries AND cleaning up the environment) by prioritizing where to build and where to preserve. And when they do build – planners are encouraging green building practices. Practices that complement the surrounding natural areas rather than cover them.

Those involved with the project paint a pretty nice picture of what’s to come.

Lynn Westphal is a researcher for the U.S. Forest Service, and works closely with the city of Chicago on the Calumet project: “Imagine an industrial area with the buildings roofs are green. Where instead of turf around – you have native grasses and because of that you have more birds and butterflies… you’ve got bicycle access, people fishing on their lunch breaks…. And it’s not far from becoming a reality. This is all very doable. So it’s not totally hypothetical.”

And in fact, movement toward that new vision is already underway. The Ford Motor Company is building a new industrial park for its suppliers. And many of the green building practices Westphal describes will be used. And the Corps of Engineers is spending more than 6 million dollars to clean up an area known as Indian Ridge Marsh.

But those involved with the transition of this area say that leadership from the community will be the key to its eventual success.

Meanwhile, the Southeast Environmental Task Force will have a new executive director by this summer…

“…and that’ll be someone who’ll learn to do what I’ve been doing for past 20 years, cause I can’t keep on doing it indefinitely.”

“Do you have any advice for them?”

“Have a lot of patience…”

The same patience Marian Byrnes has used when riding a city bus to meeting after meeting, listening to the community, and working with city officials – all in an effort to create what she believes will be a better future for the people in Calumet.

For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mark Brush.

Safeguarding Chemical Plants

Some public health experts and government leaders are calling for new efforts to protect people from the risk of a terrorist attack on plants that manufacture or store chemicals. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham has more:

Transcript

Some public health experts and government leaders are calling for new efforts to protect people from the risk of a terrorist attack on plants that manufacture or store chemicals. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Six months after terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., little has been done across most of the nation to reduce the risk of attacks on chemical plants. A new publication called the “Safe Hometowns Guide” outlines ways to better protect neighborhoods. Alan Finkelstein is a firefighter in Cuyahoga County, Ohio where some chemical companies have reduced the number of train cars of chemicals they store, and put the remaining cars in containment buildings.

“It’s not environmental groups versus government versus chemical companies. We can all do something to improve the situation here. We can encourage the companies to decrease or eliminate the chemical hazards in their inventories. The Safe Hometowns guide will give us the ability to go out to the communities and give us a framework for setting up some kind of plan.”

Finkelstein and a number of other experts called on government and industry to work together to reduce chemical quantities and find safer chemical substitutes where possible.

For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.