EcocentricUncategorized
Though some of you have expressed a desire to see Ecocentric move past the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan, we’re not quite there yet. The good news is that crews have begun to restore power to the reactors, which should help accelerate the efforts to restore cooling to the still hot—and radioactive—nuclear fuel. Elevated …
EcocentricUncategorized
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 the …
EcocentricEcocentric
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 …
EcocentricUncategorized
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 amount …
EcocentricUncategorized
Update 3/16/11 3:03 PM: The news doesn’t get better. At an afternoon Congressional hearing, Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman Gregory Jaczko said that the all the water in the spent fuel pod in the number 4 reactor at Fukushima Daiichi has almost certainly boiled away:
We believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which
…
EcocentricEcocentric
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 thinking about the country I lived …
EcocentricOil
A guest post from TIME’s Tara Kelly:
With the one-year anniversary of BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil disaster nearly upon us, that can only mean one thing for filmmakers. The time is ripe for a Hollywood adaptation.
But forget corporate negligence or severe environmental damage. (Those don’t sell movies, they just grab headlines.) No, …
EcocentricEcocentric
Climate modeling is the inverse of weather prediction. The further away from the present a weather event is going to occur, the harder it usually is for meterologists to predict—as anyone who has ever tried to rely on a 10-day extended forecast should know. But in climate change, modelers can have meaningful confidence in how increased …
EcocentricPolitics
For my weekly Going Green column on the Time.com mainpage, I have a piece examining why belief in climate science—especially among conservatives—has waned so much in America lately. Tuesday’s climate science hearings in the House of Representatives—which featured significantly more politics than science—seemed to show that facts …
EcocentricEcocentric
Right now the Energy and Power Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee is holding hearings into climate science. You can watch them here, if you’re really masochistic, or you can follow expert live blogging from Science magazine’s Eli Kintisch and others over here. I’m at a hydraulic fracturing expert panel for the …
