EcocentricFood
In March, I wrote about how the European Union had resolved to stop the process of legal dumping of fish in European waters. Fishing quotas set up to protect stocks from over-fishing has led European fishermen to (legally) discard portions of large catches so as to avoid coming to shore with a haul that exceeds their legal limit. The …
EcocentricUncategorized
April 26 will mark the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. I’ll be publishing a story on the day that, with the help of TIME’s Kiev-based stringer James Marson, will show how the effects of the meltdown continue to be felt in the region. Nuclear accidents require the work of generations to clean-up. That’s a troubling …
EcocentricUncategorized
Each day seems to bring more news of the huge challenges facing the emergency workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. As if adding insult to injury, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake hit the region on Thursday. Though Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) reported no serious incidents as a result of the quake, the tremor was a reminder …
EcocentricUncategorized
Emergency workers on Tuesday managed to stem a leak of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean by injecting a mixture of liquid glass and a hardening agent into Reactor No. 2 at the Fukushima power plant. It was a minor victory in what will certainly be a prolonged battle to safely cool fuel and spent fuel at four crippled …
EcocentricUncategorized
In the safe, sanitized world of nuclear industry brochures, this was surely not supposed to happen: As it struggles to keep four reactors from melting down and thousands of spent fuel assemblies from blowing up, Tepco announced today that it has been forced to dump 11,000 tons of low-level radioactive water into the Pacific …
EcocentricUncategorized
Finally, some good news for environmentalists. China has become the second most dominant publisher of scientific research in the world and within a few years will overtake the U.S., according to a new report.
The People’s Republic published 163,000 of the world’s 1.5 million research papers in major peer-reviewed journals in 2008, …
EcocentricUncategorized
On March 23, Dr. Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, a Research Scientist at the Monterey Institute of International Studies saw a report by Kyodo news agency that caught his eye. It reported that Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) had observed a neutron beam about 1.5 km away from the plant. Bursts of neutrons in large quantities can only come …
EcocentricUncategorized
The world is finely attuned to nuclear disaster. In the past two weeks, global monitoring stations designed to detect the detonation of atomic bombs began alerting the world to what it already knew: a disaster was unfolding at Fukushima nuclear power plant, and radioactive particles had escaped. Radioactivity is a devilish thing to …
EcocentricUncategorized
Reports that plutonium had been detected at five locations inside the grounds of the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant set off a flurry of activity on blogs and twitter accounts today. But the truth is that plutonium around the facility was to be expected–and the levels found do not pose a threat to human health.
EcocentricUncategorized
Each day at the stricken Fukushima power plant seems to bring a new piece of troubling news—today, reports surfaced that three workers at the Fukushima plant had been hospitalized after radiation levels reported at the plant spiked to “10,000 times above normal.” There were also reports that the No. 3 reactor vessel had been damaged, …
