This level of contamination is currently being discovered throughout Japan. At the US NRC Regulatory Information Conference in Washington, DC March 13 to March 15, the NRC’s Chairman, Dr. Gregory Jaczko emphasized his concern that the NRC and the nuclear industry presently do not consider the costs of mass evacuations and radioactive contamination in their cost benefit analysis used to license nuclear power plants.

Furthermore, Fairewinds believes that evacuation costs near a US nuclear plant could easily exceed one trillion dollars and contaminated land would be uninhabitable for generations.

We noted in August that some parts of Tokyo have more radiation than existed in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zones.

There are indications that radiation levels are increasing in Tokyo.

Indeed, shortly after the earthquake, U.S. government officials notes widespread contamination throughout northern Japan, including Tokyo, and said: Entire region would be required to be posted as radiological area.

No wonder the potential evacuation of Tokyo has been quietly discussed by Japanese officials ever since the earthquake hit.

Provided by: MastersDegree.net

The US government has for the first time signed off on a large-scale experiment involving genetically modified crops, which will lead to biotech big shot Monsanto introducing an engineered corn seed across America from South Dakota to Texas.

The Monsanto Corporation has been given the go-ahead to test out a man-made corn variant that they claim can thrive in dry, unfavorable conditions. With much of the American south and southwest experiencing abnormally arid conditions, the freak-seed could revitalize a chunk of the nation’s agriculture.

More likely, however, is that a success will mean revitalization in terms of Monsanto’s profits and not much more.

The government has agreed to let Monsanto test out the biotech crop on farms owned by the company from the state of South Dakota down through Texas to see if the seed stands to be commercially viable; if so, it is expected to be made available for purchase in 2013. With America’s small-time agriculturists in danger — and already largely threatened by industry giant Monsanto — a success for the seed could see yet more farmers finding themselves unable to compete and forced to throw in the towel.

Monsanto has in recent years attracted criticism for questionable legal practices after it has introduced lawsuits against small-time farmers for the unauthorized use of genetically-modified crops patented by the corporation. In many instances, it is believed that the smaller farms in question only ended up with Monsanto seeds due to wind, rodents and other forces of nature bringing the crops across corporate farms and onto their own terrain. Unable to compete against Monsanto in court, however, the company has time-and-time-again bought out its competition and, as a result, made great strides as of late in terms of monopolizing the seed biz.

Last month Jim Gerritsen, president of the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association, issued a statement saying he and others were serious about saving farms from being forced to close due to corporate muscling. “Monsanto’s threats and abuse of family farmers stops here,” said Gerritsen. “Monsanto’s genetic contamination of organic seed and organic crops ends now. Americans have the right to choice in the marketplace — to decide what kind of food they will feed their families — and we are taking this action on their behalf to protect that right to choose.”

Around 300,000 organic farmers are currently awaiting a court decision to see if a US District Court will hear a lawsuit against Monsanto that, if successful, will keep the company from continuing to sue small-time agriculturists. Between 1997 and 2010, Monsanto tackled 144 organic farms with lawsuits and investigated roughly 500 plantations annually during that span with their so-called “seed police.” Gerritsen and others want to see to it that Monsanto can’t do that anymore, but if they are denied a day in court and the new corn crop prevails, it could soon be the final curtain call for many of America’s independent farmers.

Governmental approval of the modified crop marks the first time that the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has okayed a product that has been genetically engineered to resist a weather condition such as a drought, rather than a pest or herbicide. Acting on concerns that Washington has been overly encouraging to Monsanto as they force farms into foreclosure, US-based non-profit group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility went after the White House recently for ignoring Freedom of Information Act requests. Members of PEER suspect that if they can come into possession of certain correspondence, they can link the Obama administration to key lobbyists for Monsanto.

Protesters with the Occupy Wall Street movement in the region Monsanto plans to test its new seed are holding a conference this weekend in St. Louis, dubbed Occupy Midwest. Members of the group say they intend on waging a demonstration against Monsanto, which has offices in the area.

Oil exploration in Nigeria’s south for several decades has had a debilitating effect on the environment of the region.

Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil company, has been accused of serious failures in its handling of the pollution in the Niger Delta and shirking its responsibility.

Activists have demanded that Shell’s licence be revoked for the environmental disaster.

But with 90 per cent of the government’s revenue coming from petroleum exports, oil companies seem to have clear political leverage over the issue.

Tokyo (CNN) — While saying there are no indications yet of dangerously high radiation levels in the atmosphere, a Japanese government official said Sunday that there is a “possibility of a meltdown” at two of the country’s nuclear reactors.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters that officials still do not know if there have been meltdowns in the No. 1 and No. 3 reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi’s nuclear facility in northeast Japan. But as they attempt to cool down radioactive material and release pressure inside the reactors, he said authorities were working under the presumption that such meltdowns have taken place.

“We do believe that there is a possibility that meltdown has occurred. It is inside the reactor. We can’t see. However, we are assuming that a meltdown has occurred,” he said of the No. 1 reactor. “And with reactor No. 3, we are also assuming that the possibility of a meltdown as we carry out measures.”

A meltdown is a catastrophic failure of the reactor core, with a potential for widespread radiation release.

Edano’s comments confirmed an earlier report from an official with Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, who had told CNN, “we see the possibility of a meltdown.”

Though Toshihiro Bannai, director of the agency’s international affairs office, said engineers have been unable to get close enough to the core to know what’s going on, he based his conclusion on the fact that they measured radioactive isotopes in the air Saturday night.

“What we have seen is only the slight indication from a monitoring post of cesium and iodine,” he said.

But Bannai added that he didn’t believe a disaster was looming.

“We actually have very good confidence that we will resolve this,” he said.

Edano, too, raised few alarms during his press conference Sunday. He based his optimism in large part on measurements of radiation outside the nuclear plant, conceding fluctuations may occur while stating that levels have generally decreased.

“We are continuing to monitor the radiation, but it is (under) control,” he said.

Edano said that nine people have tested positive for high radiation levels on their skin and clothing, with doctors now trying to determine if they were impacted internally. Medical care, including radiation screening, will be offered to those who are being evacuated from the nuclear zone, the secretary added.

The Japanese government was preparing to distribute iodine tablets to residents, the IAEA said. Iodine is commonly recommended to block the uptake by the thyroid gland of radioactive iodine.

The problems at the Daiichi plant began Friday, when the 8.9-magnitude quake struck off the eastern shore of Miyagi Prefecture. The quake forced the automatic shutdown of the plant’s nuclear reactors and knocked out the main cooling system, according to the country’s nuclear agency.

A tsunami resulting from the quake then washed over the site, knocking out backup generators that pumped water into the reactor containment unit to keep the nuclear fuel cool.

Edano said that there have not been any leaks of radioactive material at either of the affected plants. Authorities deliberately have let out radioactive steam in order to alleviate growing pressure inside both of the affected reactors.

Pressure had been mounting inside the reactors as steam built up inside, because water meant to cool the fuel rods was boiling.

As of Sunday morning, winds in northeast Japan were blowing out to sea at 5-15 mph, said CNN Meteorologist Taylor Ward. But they were expected to reverse direction by Monday night, he said. The Daiichi plant is located about 160 miles (260 kilometers) north of Tokyo.

Plant officials are also injecting sea water and boron into the plant in an effort to cool its nuclear fuel and stop any reactions.

Boron, a chemical element, was being added to the water “to sort of stymie other potential nuclear reactions,” according to Robert Alvarez, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and a former senior policy adviser to the U.S. secretary of energy. He described the plan to use salt water as “an act of desparation” by Japanese authorities, who seemed unable to deliver fresh water or plain water to cool the reactor and stabilize it.

Earlier, Edano had pointed out another potential challenge — saying, without elaboration, that “some of the readings in the measurement equipment were not accurate.”

The detection of a cesium isotope — as noted by Bannai — indicates that the reactors’ nuclear fuel cladding has failed, said Ken Bergeron, a physicist and former scientist at Sandia National Laboratories.

“Now we have to hope that the containment building will succeed in preventing major amounts of radioactivity” from escaping, he said. Fukushima Daiichi facility has such a building — something that Chernobyl, the Soviet nuclear plant that famously melted down in 1986, did not have.

Cesium 137 can remain dangerous for 600 years and is associated with a number of cancers, said Dr. Ira Helfand, a member of the board of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Some experts said the flow of information from the agency has not been fast enough.

But IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano defended the Japanese response. “I know the Japanese authorities are working their hardest to gather the necessary details and ensure safety under difficult and constantly evolving circumstances,” he said in a statement.

If the effort to cool the nuclear fuel inside the reactor fails completely — a scenario experts who have spoken to CNN say is unlikely — the resulting release of radiation could cause enormous damage to the plant or release radiation into the atmosphere or water. That could lead to widespread cancer and other health problems, experts say.

Authorities have downplayerd such a scenario, insisting the situation appears under control and that radiation levels in the air are dangerous. Still, as what they described as “a precuation,” more than 200,000 people who live within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the plant have been ordered to leave the area. A similar evacuation order has been issued for those with 10 kilometers of the Fukashima Daini nuclear facility, a separate plant also in Fukashima prefecture.

Even absent this, nuclear materials expert Joseph Cirincione — president of the U.S.-based Ploughshares Fund, a firm involved in security and peace funding — ranks this scenario third, behind Chernobyl and the 1979 partial meltdown of a reactor core at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, among history’s worst nuclear power crises.

Japan is heavily dependent on nuclear power, with 54 plants and another eight slated for construction, said Aileen Mioko Smith of Green Action, an environmental group. All are located in “very seismic” areas, she said.

While experts acknowledged that Japan’s nuclear program is very well respected, physicist Ken Bergeron saying that now “we’re in uncharted territory.”

“The bottom line is that we just don’t know what’s going to happen in the next couple of days and, frankly, neither do the people who run the system,” added Dr. Ira Helfand, a member of the board of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

What we do know, he added, is that Japan’s nuclear facilities are “way out of whack.”

The country’s total installed wind power capacity reached 41.8 GW at the end of last year, the report said, citing Li Junfeng, secretary general of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association.

Installed wind capacity in the United States increased by about 5 GW to 40.2 GW at the end of 2010, the report said, citing data from the Global Wind Energy Council.
The report did not say how much of Chinese capacity was able to access power transmission and distribution networks.

Wind power capacity connected to grid networks totaled 22.94 GW at the end of August last year, according to the China Electricity Council.
Some Chinese wind farms have been working far below capacity as local grid capacity was unable to accommodate the rising number of intermittent energy sources. Some wind turbines have stood idle from day one because of a lack of grid access.

China is considering ways to ensure grid connections for output generated from planned wind power capacity of 90 GW by 2015, China’s National Energy Administration has said.

China would start building the second-phase of the 5 GW Jiuquan wind power project in Gansu province, the 2 GW Hami wind power project in Xinjiang, a 2 GW Kailu project in Inner Mongolia and the 1.5 GW Tongyu project in Jilin province this year, the Xinhua report said.

It would also kick off construction of a 1 GW offshore wind-power project in Jiangsu province and speed up the second phase of the East Sea Bridge offshore wind farm in Shanghai, the report added.

Beijing – Another pollution scandal in China, and in this case the victims are children: 24 children aged between nine months and 16 years were hospitalized for lead poisoning. About 200 children in the town of Gaohe in the eastern province of Anhui suffer from an excessive concentration of lead in their blood. This is the latest in a long series of incidents of pollution, often with heavy metals, which have affected the provinces of Shandong, Hunan, Shaanxi, Jiangsu and Guangdong in the past two years.

The county government accuses Gahoe Boru battery factory for the pollution. The factory has been operating illegally since 2007 in the immediate vicinity of a residential area. The authorities said that the plant was closed last month, when the first case of pollution was discovered. But residents say that the factory was still active until January 5. And complain that the authorities have not closed another battery factory nearby, which they consider to be another major source of pollution. Both plants are a few dozen meters away from the houses, and residents say they have lived for years in fear of being poisoned.

Environmentalists China last year said that other cases of poisoning are destined to emerge as a result of the increasing dispersal of toxic metals including mercury, arsenic, lead, chromium and cadmium, particularly in rivers and lakes.

The issue of pollution in China came to international prominence when Zhao Lianhai denounced the scandal of melamine-tainted milk, a substance added to the milk powder milk to make it appear richer in protein. Zhao Lianhai is the father of one of the 300 thousand children suffering from kidney stones due to melamine, which has killed at least six of them.

From 2008 onwards Zhao created an opinion group and a blog to claim compensation for damages. Last November he was sentenced to 2 ½ years in prison for “disturbing public order”. (12/29/2010 see: Activist for children affected by melamine toxic milk released, but “self-confessed”). This week, Zhang Ping, director of the Economic Commission for national development and reform in Chinese provinces warned against aspiring to economic growth at any cost. In 2010 there were nine cases of lead pollution recorded in the country. Other episodes – 300 kg of thallium discharged into a river in the southern province of Guangdong indicates the seriousness of the problem and the difficulty of the authorities in addressing the issue of environmental protection.

(AsiaNews / Agencies)

The pollution from the Jiucailuo Chemical plant became so egregious that in 2007, Qiugang’s residents — working with a fledgling environmental group, Green Anhui — began to try to do something about it. Their efforts soon attracted the attention of Chinese-American filmmaker Ruby Yang, who with cinematographer Guan Xin and longtime collaborator Thomas Lennon, spent the ensuing three years chronicling the struggle of Qiugang’s increasingly emboldened population to curb the pollution that was poisoning them in their homes, schools, and fields.

This exclusive e360 video report, “The Warriors of Qiugang” — co-produced by Yale Environment 360 — tells the story of how the villagers fought to transform their environment, and, in the process, found themselves transformed as well.

The 39-minute video focuses on an unlikely hero — farmer Zhang Gongli, now almost 60, who leads the village’s fight to shut down the chemical plant. Soft-spoken and easy-going, but with a backbone of steel, Zhang — who has only a middle-school education — quickly learns how to use China’s more stringent federal environmental laws to put pressure on the factory owners and their cronies in local and regional government.

“We are sorry to be born in this place,” says Zhang, “but we had no choice. This was forced upon us.”

The camera follows Zhang as he deals with threats from local thugs, rallies his neighbors, and travels to Beijing, where he attends a heady meeting of China’s emerging environmental movement. Zhang — like so many other Chinese — finds himself plunged into a new and wholly unfamiliar world.

“I feel scared — I really don’t want to be a hero,” Zhang says as he rides the train to Beijing. “But the next generation will suffer. We risk our lives for their happiness.”

Watch the video

If you’re a bit of a slob like me, you are wearing jeans to work today, and if, like me, you’re a bit of a slob who doesn’t manage hedge funds, your jeans are fairly run of the mill. My H&M specials today were made in Pakistan. But most of my other jeans are made across Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor in southern China, and may very well have been made in Xintang, the so-called Blue Jeans Capital of the World.

Xintang is one of many industrial towns on the booming Pearl River Delta, and one of 133 textile centers that have sprung up in China in the past decade. The specialty in the villages of Xintang is denim. A lot of denim — the town makes about 260 million pairs of jeans annually, roughly equivalent to 40% of the jeans sold in the U.S. in a year.

Textiles are a dirty business. Many fabric dyes contain hazardous chemicals like mercury, cadmium and lead, and in the Pearl River area, the industry has been criticized for years for dumping its wastewater into waterways. Xintang’s local government, which is responsible for monitoring the environmental impact of its industry, has cracked down on polluting textile factories in recent years. But, as a Greenpeace China report released today reveals, simply moving the factories to new locations has only relocated the problem, not solved it.

The report, which examines the textile industry’s impact on two towns in Guangdong province, found that when the dying and washing plants were shut down and relocated from Dadun, one of the first villages in Xintang to start in the denim trade, to the village of Xizhou, the environmental impact moved with it. As the waters around Dadun have started to lose the stink of dye and factory discharge, the river encircling Xizhou, which flows into a tributary of the Pearl, has become unusable since denim moved to town. “Older people used to drink from the water and drink from it and swim in it,” says Mariah Zhao, a Greenpeace campaigner who helped conduct the report’s field research from April to October. “We talked to a teenager and she couldn’t remember the river being clean.”

Greenpeace submitted water and sediment samples from Xintang and another textile town, Gurao (China’s bra capital), to an independent laboratory for heavy metal analysis. In 17 of the 21 samples submitted, heavy metal traces were found. In one sediment sample from Xintang, cadmium concentrations were 128 times above China’s environmental standards. Cadmium exposure, at its worst, can cause lung disease, kidney disease and other forms of cancer.

Greenpeace did not encounter inordinately high rates of cancer in Xintang or Gurao, as are found in other some other industrial areas throughout the country, but those living and working in close proximity to the denim plants attributed health problems from persistant skin rashes to infertility to the jeans business. Chinese migrant workers who come by the millions to work in the Pearl River Delta’s factories are the worst affected, exposed on a daily basis to the chemicals in their rawest forms in their workplace, and then going home at night to sleep and eat in the closest proximity to the highly polluted waters. As one Xintang worker from the central province of Sichuan told Greenpeace: “Everyone says that people who work in dyeing and washing have reproductive fertility problems. My cousin once worked in a dyeing plant. He died of pleurisy [a lung disease.]”

Zhao of Greenpeace says jeans factories have options, such as using dye subsitutes that do not contain harmful chemicals and upgrading their waste disposal systems. She also says the local government could be doing more to give residents and workers better information. “The local government is responsible to regularly sample and monitor these factories, and from our point of view, they are also responsible to get the information of how much and what kind of chemicals are released in the production process and to disclose the information to the public,” Zhao says. “They are not doing enough. There are thousands of factories in that area. The information out there is quite limited.”

A senior Chinese official said in 2007 that much of the country’s local economic data are unreliable, according to a leaked diplomatic cable published by the WikiLeaks website.

A construction site in Liaoning province, where Vice Premier Li Keqiang was Communist Party secretary in 2007

The official, Li Keqiang, was at the time Communist Party secretary of the northeastern province of Liaoning, and has since been promoted to vice premier. Since landing that position, he has overseen many of the central government’s efforts to improve the quality of its economic statistics, which continue to face many questions over their accuracy and consistency.

Mr. Li is considered the top contender to take over as premier, the top economic policy-making position, when the current head of government, Wen Jiabao, steps down in early 2013. The reported comments provide intriguing context for his current role, which among other tasks include overseeing the ongoing nationwide population census.

China’s Foreign Ministry has said it will not comment on the content of the diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks. The leaked cable reports comments Mr. Li made in a dinner in Beijing with then-U.S. Ambassador Clark Randt on March 12, 2007. His remarks focused on the challenges of administering the province of Liaoning, which because of its legacy of failed state-owned enterprises was burdened with a large number of unemployed workers.

“When evaluating Liaoning’s economy, he focuses on three figures: 1) electricity consumption, which was up 10% in Liaoning last year; 2) volume of rail cargo, which is fairly accurate because fees are charged for each unit of weight; and 3) amount of loans disbursed, which also tends to be accurate given the interest fees charged,” the cable says.

“By looking at these three figures, Li said he can measure with relative accuracy the speed of economic growth. All other figures, especially GDP statistics, are ‘for reference only,’ he said smiling,” the cable reads. “GDP figures are ‘man-made’ and therefore unreliable,” the cable paraphrases Mr. Li as saying.

Analysts have long questioned the reliability of economic figures produced by local governments in China. Because local officials’ careers often depend on how well the economy in their jurisdiction is performing, there is an incentive for them to report positive figures.

Many private-sector analysts also closely track the indicators reportedly favored by Mr. Li, which are thought to reflect real activity and be less subject to political influence.

The nationwide gross domestic product figures published by the National Bureau of Statistics are not directly based on the provincial GDP figures and attempt to correct for some of their biases. Indeed, almost all of China’s provinces consistently report GDP growth rates above the national average.

The NBS, while defending the nationwide figures it produces as fundamentally accurate, has sought more influence over the numbers compiled by local authorities.

In his public comments about economic statistics, Mr. Li also has repeatedly stressed the importance of gathering accurate information.

“Data live and die by their quality,” he said at a government meeting in early 2009, urging accuracy in a count of the nation’s businesses and their economic activities. “Statistical data provide effective support to our efforts to promote stable and relatively fast economic growth over the long term.”

More recently, in a speech last month on the census, Mr Li said:

“We are a large developing country with a population of more than a billion people, so accurately understanding the status of our population and its changes helps us better make and implement economic and social policies.”