Ecuador ends deal with Germany on environmental issues
Press TV – December 20, 2014
Ecuador has terminated its environmental cooperation with Germany after German legislators tried to visit an Amazon rainforest recently opened for oil exploitation, the country’s foreign minister says.
“Ecuador unilaterally ends all cooperation with Germany on environmental issues,” Ricardo Patino said on Friday.
In 2012, Germany and Ecuador inked a cooperation deal worth 36 million euros ($44 million) to protect the environmentally sensitive rainforest known as Yasuni. They also signed another deal worth 7 million euros ($9 million) in other environment projects.
“If they think they had the right to doubt the word of Ecuador’s government on the issue of Yasuni because they were providing funds, we’ll give them their money back with interest,” Patino added.
He also noted that the Latin American country has not received the funds for the rainforest, and the money allocated for the other projects will be returned soon.
In 2007, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa asked rich countries to donate $3.6 billion to help protect the Yasuni in exchange for pledges not to drill for the oil beneath it.
However, Correa allowed the national oil company to do drilling after his proposal was not welcomed by the other countries.
Earlier this month, Correa did not permit the German lawmakers to visit the Yasuni to observe oil production and talk to activists opposing the measure.
The Ecuador government assured that it will take every measure possible to protect the sensitive Amazon environment during the extraction process. However, the Correa government was not pleased that the German delegation wanted to meet with opposition groups first.
“We either have relations based on equality, or none at all,” Correa said in a statement to the German delegation, asking if Germany would likewise accept a delegation from Ecuador coming to their country to inspect their nuclear projects, for instance. Correa added that his country “stopped being a colony 200 years ago.”
UN General Assembly votes for Israel to compensate Lebanon for 2006 oil spill
Al-Akhbar | December 20, 2014
Israel was asked by the UN General Assembly on Friday to compensate Lebanon for $856.4 million in oil spill damages it caused during the July 2006 war.
The non-binding vote, which passed 170-6 with three abstentions, asks Israel to offer “prompt and adequate compensation” to Lebanon and other countries affected by the oil spill’s pollution.
While General Assembly votes are non-binding, they reflect broader international opinion without the possibility of veto by world powers like in the Security Council.
The resolution indicated that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon “expressed grave concern at the lack of any acknowledgment on the part of the government of Israel of its responsibilities vis-a-vis reparations and compensation” for the oil spill.
Lebanon’s permanent representative to the UN Nawaf Salam hailed the resolution, the Lebanese National News Agency reported.
“Lebanon considers this to be a major progress,” Salam said. “This resolution also paves the way for further compensation into other areas of damage (health, ecosystem services as habitat, potential groundwater contamination, and marine diversity), that were not considered in the current calculated amount.”
“Furthermore, its adoption asserts the will of the overwhelming majority of the international community to hold countries responsible for their internationally wrongful acts,” he added.
“We affirm that Lebanon will continue to mobilize all resources and resort to all legal means to see that this resolution is fully implemented, and that the specified compensation is paid promptly.”
In a statement, Israel condemned the resolution as “[serving] no purpose other than to contribute to institutionalizing an anti-Israel agenda at the UN,” Israeli media reported.
The oil spill was caused by Israel’s air force when it bombed oil tanks near a coastal Lebanese power plant during its fierce month-long war with Hezbollah resistance fighters.
The attack flooded the Mediterranean coastline with 15,000 tons of oil, according to the United Nations.
The adopted resolution cited $856.4 million (700 million euros) in damages caused by the oil spill, accounting for inflation of a October 2007 estimate by the United Nations Secretary General that reported the spill caused $729 million in damage.
Lebanon bore the brunt of the spill, but the Syrian coast and other Mediterranean countries have suffered as well, the UN said.
The oil slick made by the spill “has had serious implications for livelihoods and the economy of Lebanon,” the resolution said.
The UN asked Lebanon to continue clean-up efforts and the international community to increase funding for its environmental restoration.
The US, Australia, Canada and Israel were among the six states that voted against the UN text.
(AFP, Al-Akhbar)
Feds say cleaning up most contaminated nuclear weapons site in US is too costly
RT | December 9, 2014
The United States government recently argued in court filings that the state of Washington’s request of $18 billion over 14 years to address the nation’s most polluted nuclear weapons production site should be rejected based on expense.
The US Department of Justice said in a court filing on Friday that the cost of the state’s proposal for a hastened cleanup of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation would cast into doubt other nuclear projects funded by the Department of Energy.
According to The Tri-City Herald, the filings in US District Court by the DOJ and the state of Washington were part of the state’s lawsuit that seeks a more pressing timeline for Hanford’s cleanup.
Friday was the deadline for the parties to comment on new cleanup timelines, as the DOE said many of the existing timelines were at risk of being missed.
Hanford, located along the Columbia River in south-central Washington, is the site of 177 massive underground nuclear waste storage tanks, making it the largest collection of nuclear waste in the US. For four decades, the site was home to plutonium development for use in the production of nuclear weapons.
As RT previously reported, a deal was recently struck between the DOE and Washington state to allow a leaky radioactive storage tank at Hanford to remain as is for more than a year before its contents are removed.
In its court filing, Washington state again criticized federal management at Hanford and asked for an intensified oversight plan to address its leak-prone waste tanks and the construction of a $13 billion vitrification plant to treat waste for future burial.
The state said in its filing that the DOE wants to establish future cleanup deadlines at the expense of hard deadlines already agreed to by the parties in a 2010 consent decree, which sprang from a 2008 lawsuit following the department’s failure to meet an earlier set of deadlines for the plant and its waste tanks.
The construction project “should be matched with the best project management plans in the country,” the state contended. “Energy, however, implies that such planning is impossible.”
The state asked for more than 100 new deadlines to keep the Department of Energy’s cleanup process on track, yet the Department of Justice argued the plan was out of reach.
“The state’s proposal would require a dramatic and unrealistic increase in funding that, if mandated, would jeopardize DOE’s ability to carry out ongoing cleanup operations on other parts of the Hanford site and at other sites across the country,”documents filed by the Justice Department stated.
Hanford’s construction and waste management get $1.2 billion annually from the federal government, more than one-fifth of the Department of Energy’s annual budget for national environmental cleaning projects.
The state’s plan requires $4 billion over the next five years, on top of the current level of annual funding, the Justice Department said.
The Justice Department also said the state’s plan would violate the 2010 consent decree for cleanup, as the proposal would demand new storage tanks and treatment facilities.
The federal government has claimed construction work at Hanford has fallen behind because of technical issues.
Hanford contains”53 million gallons of High Level Radioactive hazardous waste, equivalent to 2,650 rail cars full of waste,”according to the Washington State Dept. of Ecology, making it the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States. Or, as Heart of America Northwest called it,”the most contaminated site in the Western Hemisphere.”
In 1943, construction began on Hanford as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project.
“Hanford was the producer of the plutonium that fueled the 1st test explosion in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945. The same plutonium also powered Fat Man, the five-ton atomic bomb that exploded over Nagasaki on August 9, 1945,” according to Heart of America Northwest.
Letter from scientists prompts Suez Canal conspiracy theories
Mada Masr | October 8, 2014
A letter published in an international scientific journal about the ecological risks of expanding the Suez Canal has raised cries of conspiracy theories in local media.
The letter to the editor was signed by 18 scientists from around the world, including lead author Bella Galil of Israel’s National Institute of Oceanography. It was published in Biological Invasions, a peer-reviewed scientific journal which is ranked among the top 25 percent of scholarly publications in the fields of plant and animal sciences.
In keeping with the theme of the journal, the letter raises concerns that Egypt’s plans to widen the Suez Canal will speed the invasion of non-native species into the Mediterranean Sea.
It points out that half of the 700 multicellular non-native species found in the Mediterranean Sea were introduced via the Suez Canal, which it describes as “one of the most potent mechanisms and corridors for invasions by marine species known in the world.” Thus, the authors say, plans to expand the canal come as “ominous news.”
The migration of non-native sea creatures, many of whom have few natural predators in the Mediterranean, has led to “profound environmental, economic and human-health issues,” the authors say.
Among the examples cited are the annual swarms of jellyfish that harm tourism, fisheries and coastal installations such as desalination and power plants, the spread of poisonous pufferfish throughout the Levant and to Italy and Tunisia, and the invasion of several species of fish and prawns and oysters that have displaced local species that have traditionally been harvested by local fisherman.
The letter concludes with a reminder about international conventions that require signatories, including Egypt, to “prevent the introduction of, control or eradicate those alien species which threaten ecosystems, habitats or species,” and a call for a regionally-supervised environmental impact assessment to mitigate a new wave of invasive species that could migrate through a wider and deeper canal.
Ordinarily, a fairly technical letter-to-the-editor of a scientific journal would draw little notice outside of academia. In this case, however, it hit headlines because the lead signatory is a scientist from Israel’s National Institute of Oceanography, and because it involves the Suez Canal expansion, which is widely regarded as a patriotic national project that will underpin Egypt’s future economic success.
The story was picked up by Haaretz newspaper on October 6, and in turn by Egyptian publications. Although the letter was published September 28 in a journal based in the Netherlands, privately owned Youm7 ran a story on it under the headline: “A Zionist attempt to divert attention from October 6 commemoration. Israel starts war of rumors on new Suez Canal project. Tel Aviv publishes fabricated research claiming that widening the canal will pose environmental threat.”
French Polynesia to demand nearly $1bn from Paris over tests
RT | November 25, 2014
In an unprecedented move, French Polynesia, an overseas territory governed by France, is to ask Paris for nearly $1 billion in compensation for damage caused by nuclear weapons tests carried out by France in the South Pacific between 1966 and 1996.
The Assembly of French Polynesia has prepared a demand for $930 million (754,2 million euros) over “major pollution” caused by the 193 tests carried out by France for 30 years, La Dépêche de Tahiti reported. On top of this, the proposed resolution seeks an additional $132 million for the continued occupation of the Fangataufa and Mururoa atolls, used for nuclear testing.
The conservative Tahoera’a Huiraatira party committee has been acting independently of Polynesian President Edouard Fritch, who said he was “sorry” for the motion “written without consulting him,” local press reported.
Meanwhile, the text of the resolution, set for approval by the Assembly, highlights a “very poor situation of the atolls,” and a clean-up “impossible in the current state of scientific knowledge,” Tahiti Infos reported. They write that French Polynesia has been “too long sidelined” from decisions on “waste conservation and monitoring modes whatever their nature as well as the rehabilitation options of the atolls.”
On 24 August 1968, France conducted its first multi-stage thermonuclear test at Fangataufa atoll in the South Pacific Ocean, the so-called ‘Canopus’ test. With a 2.6 megaton yield, its explosive power was 200 times that of the Hiroshima bomb, according to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO).
France began its last series of nuclear tests in the South Pacific in 1995, breaking a three-year moratorium, provoking international protests and the boycott of French goods. It conducted its final nuclear test in January 1996 and then permanently dismantled its nuclear test sites. Later in that year, France signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT).
In 1996, in the wake of the nuclear testing, a $150 million annual payment was granted to French Polynesia, a territory of over 100 islands and atolls with its own government.
France, together with China, is not party to the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, which bans nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, under water and outer space but not underground.
Last year it came to light that French nuclear tests carried out in the South Pacific had proved to be far more toxic than previously thought. According to declassified documents, seen by Le Parisien, plutonium fallout covered a much broader area than Paris had initially admitted, with Tahiti allegedly exposed to 500 times the maximum accepted levels of radiation.
According to the CTBTO, a study conducted between 2002 and 2005 of thyroid cancer sufferers in Tahiti, who had been diagnosed between 1984 and 2002, established a “significant statistical relationship” between cancer rates and exposure to radioactive fallout from French nuclear tests. Another survey carried out by an official French medical research body, Inserm, in 2006, also detected an increase in thyroid cancer among people who had been living within some 1,300 km of the nuclear tests conducted on the Polynesian atolls between 1969 and 1996.
In 2010, France pledged that veterans and survivors would be elegible for compensation, noting that this process would take time.
US Navy to kill, injure ‘thousands’ of whales, dolphins during drills – activists
RT | November 11, 2014
As the US Navy conducts war games off the coasts of California and Hawaii over the next four years, environmentalists are fighting back with legal action over concerns that hundreds, if not thousands, of marine animals will be injured or killed.
The Conservation Council for Hawaii has recently asked a judge to put an end to the naval exercises in the region on the grounds that they violate the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), the Washington Post reports. The group previously filed a lawsuit against the war games last year before the exercises began, arguing the drills should not have been approved in the first place.
At the center of the controversy are the lives and health of potentially millions of marine mammals, which can suffer hearing loss or damaged lungs from powerful sonar and death from underwater explosions.
The Council’s representatives in the lawsuit, including the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), argue that the use of sonar and explosives in the war games will kill too many blue whales, dolphins and seals to justify the training plans.
Environmentalists specifically point to the Navy’s own numbers in making their case. Back in 2013, the Navy projected that 155 marine mammals would be killed between 2014 and 2019 as a result of the war games. Thousands of animals would face permanent injuries, while almost 10 million would suffer temporary hearing loss or have their normal routines and behaviors disrupted.
“The more we look at the Navy’s activities, the more we’re finding the potential for harm,” said NRDC’s Michael Jasny to the Post.
For its part, the Navy has taken exception to the claims of advocates, saying they are misrepresenting the numbers. Navy spokesperson Kenneth Hess reiterated that the figures are not meant to depict one year’s worth of activity and also that they “represent worst-case scenarios.”
“Despite decades of the Navy conducting very similar activities in these same areas, there is no evidence of these types of impacts,” Hess said to the newspaper. He added that permits for these exercises “can only be issued if our activities will have no more than a negligible impact on marine mammal populations.”
Researchers who support the Navy’s position also argue that opponents are trying to gain attention by asserting all these sea-going animals will die.
However, environmental activists note that the Navy’s estimates go beyond the number of deaths permitted under the MMPA. Considering that is the case, they argue there is no evidence suggesting the Navy tried to scale back the potential damage after releasing its projections.
“No one is suggesting the Navy shouldn’t be allowed to do testing and training,” said Eearthjustice attorney David Henkin to the Post. “The question is whether they need every inch of the ocean … particularly biologically significant small refuges.”
So far, the US court system has sided with the Navy. In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that environmental interests took a backseat to the military’s, but animal rights advocates are hoping that the link between sonar and animal health, as well as the Navy’s estimated fatalities, will help influence a different decision.
Inside the UN Resolution on Depleted Uranium
By JOHN LAFORGE | CounterPunch | November 6, 2014
On October 31, a new United Nations General Assembly First Committee resolution on depleted uranium (DU) weapons passed overwhelmingly. There were 143 states in favor, four against, and 26 abstentions. The measure calls for UN member states to provide assistance to countries contaminated by the weapons. The resolution also notes the need for health and environmental research on depleted uranium weapons in conflict situations.
This fifth UN resolution on the subject was fiercely opposed by four depleted uranium-shooting countries — Britain, the United States, France and Israel — who cast the only votes in opposition. The 26 states that abstained reportedly sought to avoid souring lucrative trade relationships with the four major shooters.
Uranium-238 — so-called “depleted” uranium — is waste material left in huge quantities by the nuclear weapons complex. It’s used in large caliber armor-piercing munitions and in armor plate on tanks. Toxic, radioactive dust and debris is dispersed when DU shells burn through targets, and its metallic fumes and dust poison water, soil and the food chain. DU has been linked to deadly health effects like Gulf War Syndrome among U.S. and allied troops, and birth abnormalities among populations in bombed areas. DU waste has caused radioactive contamination of large parts of Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and perhaps Afghanistan.
The measure explains that DU weapons are made of a “chemically and radiologically toxic heavy metal” [uranium-238], that after use “penetrator fragments, and jackets or casings can be found lying on the surface or buried at varying depth, leading to the potential contamination of air, soil, water and vegetation from depleted uranium residue.”
The main thrust of the latest UN resolution, “Encourages Member States in a position to do so to provide assistance to States affected by the use of arms and ammunition containing depleted uranium, in particular in identifying and managing contaminated sites and material.” The request is a veiled reference to the fact that investigators have been stymied in their study of uranium contamination in Iraq, because the Pentagon refuses to disclose maps of all the places it attacked with DU.
In the diplomatic confines of UN resolutions, individual countries are not named. Yet the world knows that up to 700 tons of DU munitions were blasted into Iraq and Kuwait by U.S. forces in 1991, and that U.S. warplanes fired another three tons into Bosnia in 1994 and 1995; ten tons into Kosovo in 1999, and approximately 170 tons into Iraq again in 2003.
The International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons (ICBUW.org), based in Manchester, England and representing over 160 civil society organizations worldwide, played a major part in seeing all five resolutions through the UN process and is working for a convention that would see the munitions outlawed. In October, ICBUW reported that the US military will again use DU weapons in Iraq in its assaults against ISIS “if it needs to”. The admission came in spite of Iraq’s summer 2014 recent call for a global ban on the weapons and assistance in clearing up the contamination left from bombardments in 1991 and 2003.
The new resolution relies heavily on the UN Environment Program (UNEP) which conducted radiation surveys of NATO bombing targets in the Balkans and Kosovo. It was a UNEP study in 2001 that forced the Pentagon to admit that its DU is spiked with plutonium. (Associated Press, Capital Times, Feb. 3, 2001: “But now the Pentagon says shells used in the 1999 Kosovo conflict were tainted with traces of plutonium, neptunium and americium — byproducts of nuclear reactors that are much more radioactive than depleted uranium.”)
The resolution’s significant fourth paragraph notes in part: “… major scientific uncertainties persisted regarding the long-term environmental impacts of depleted uranium, particularly with respect to long-term groundwater contamination. Because of these scientific uncertainties, UNEP called for a precautionary approach to the use of depleted uranium, and recommended that action be taken to clean up and decontaminate the polluted sites. It also called for awareness-raising among local populations and future monitoring.”
The “precautionary principle” holds that risky activities or substances should be shunned and discouraged unless they can be proved safe. Of course, instead of adopting precaution, the Pentagon denies that DU can be linked to health problems.
John LaForge works for Nukewatch and lives on the Plowshares Land Trust near Luck, Wisc.
Fukushima dismantling crew removes 400 tons of spent fuel from crippled reactor
RT | November 5, 2014
The first of four sets of spent nuclear fuel rods has been removed from a damaged reactor building at Japan’s Fukushima power plant, scoring a major success in an effort to dismantle the quake and tsunami-wrecked facility.
The 1,331 spent fuel rod assemblies weighting some 400 tons have been recovered from the upper levels of the Reactor 4 building after a year-long operation, a spokeswoman for Fukushima operator TEPCO reported on Wednesday. The last 11 assemblies were removed on Tuesday.
The recovered assemblies were placed in a storage pool at ground level of the plant, the company said.
TEPCO is still to remove 180 rod assemblies that haven’t been used at the reactor and are considered less dangerous because, unlike the spent fuel, they have not been irradiated. Some of the unused rod assemblies are already in the new storage pool. The task is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
Three other reactor buildings are holding almost 1,400 fuel assemblies in storage pools, and they must be recovered too. The operation started with Reactor 4 because it was damaged most in the March 2011 disaster due to a series of hydrogen explosions inside the building and is in danger of collapsing.
The operations at Reactors 1, 2 and 3 would be more difficult, because unlike Reactor 4 they were operational at the time of the disaster and experienced meltdowns, resulting in higher levels of radioactive contamination.
TEPCO plans to start removing fuel from Reactor 1 in 2019, two years later than originally planned. At the moment preparations for the removal are underway, with the operator recently removing the canopy over the building to allow debris removal.
The utility is surveying the interior of the Reactor 2 building and removing debris at the Reactor 3 using remote-controlled robots.
After dealing with the fuel, the most difficult task may be addressed – the recovery of reactor cores. The unprecedented operation may start in 2025, five years after initially planned.
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Woolsey Fire started at Santa Susana Field Lab — where “radioactive materials released were never accurately measured”
By John Laforge | CounterPunch | November 30, 2018
In my Nov. 16 column, I reported on potential radiation risks posed by California’s Woolsey wildfire having burned over parts or all of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory—south of Simi Valley, Calif., 30 miles outside Los Angeles—site of at least four partial or total nuclear reactor meltdowns.
The field laboratory operated 10 experimental reactors and conducted rocket engine tests. In his 2014 book Atomic Accidents, researcher James Mahaffey writes, “The cores in four experimental reactors on site … melted.” Reactor core melts always result in the release of large amounts of radioactive gases and particles. Clean up of the deeply contaminated site has not been conducted in spite of a 2010 agreement.
Los Angeles’s KABC-7 TV reported Nov. 13 that the Santa Susana lab site “appears to be the origin of the Woolsey Fire” which has torched over 96,000 acres. Southern Calif. Public Radio said, “According to Cal Fire, the Woolsey Fire started on the afternoon of Thursday, Nov. 8 … on the Santa Susana site.” … continue
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