CategoryRadiation

The Oil and Gas Industry Produces Radioactive Waste. Lots of It

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A new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council confirms Rolling Stone‘s bombshell investigation into the fossil fuel industry’s waste problem. New Rolling Stone Article by Justin Nobel. Massive amounts of radioactive waste brought to the surface by oil and gas wells have overwhelmed the industry and the state and federal agencies that regulate it, according to a report released...

Radiation fears rock southern Ohio: ‘If you have half a thyroid, you’re doing good’

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First came the shock and the anger that the federal government had known about radioactive pollution at a middle school attended by their children and told no one for two years. But now the residents of Pike County, Ohio, are beginning to take stock of the possible impact that contamination from the government’s Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant has had on the health of their community, and they...

New disclosure lifts lid on government cover-up of radioactive pollution in Ohio

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A surprise admission by a top federal administrator is raising some shocking new questions about how much that kids going to a nearby middle school and neighbors of a southern Ohio uranium-processing plant have been exposed to radioactive pollution during recycling efforts there since the start of the new millennium. Paul Dabbar, undersecretary of science for the U.S, Department of Energy...

Trump’s DOE places a ticking nuclear time bomb at Hanford Site

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Calling the 177 containers at the Hanford Nuclear Site in south-central Washington state that contain high-level radioactive waste “tanks” is not a very good description. Each of these so-called “tanks” — buried in a kind of a farm of well-manicured dirt — is roughly the size of a four-story apartment building. Collectively, the 177 containers hold about 56 million gallons of some of...

A stunning case of kids, radioactivity and government neglect emerges in Ohio

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In 2017, federal regulators from the U.S. Department of Energy testing the neighborhood around a 20th century uranium plant in Pike County, Ohio, made a startling discovery in the air near a middle school attended by hundreds of local children — traces of neptunium-237, an extremely radioactive particle, typically a by-product from nuclear reactors. But what happened next was even more...

Fukushima’s radiation would kill a person in 2 minutes

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Every month or two, I feel that it’s important to check in on the meltdown-ravaged nuclear reactors at Fukushima. It’s been nearly six years since a near “perfect storm” of bad events — a major earthquake, followed by a tsunami making a direct hit on the four-reactor power plant on the Japanese coast — caused the worst nuclear accident of the 21st Century...

A great win for the planet in California

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Even before the tragedy in Fukushima, it’s been clear that America’s aging nuclear power plants are an accident waiting to happen — and desperately need to be taken off line. That’s happened far too slowly, nor has safety been the only issue. When policy makers did decommission some of the nation’s most dangerous plants, such as California’s oceanfront San...

Shocker: The EPA’s plan to let you drink radioactive water

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The world not long ago marked the 5th anniversary of the Fukushima reactor meltdown in Japan — an ongoing nuclear crisis that may not be cleaned up for decades, and even that may be optimistic. Lingering high radiation levels mean that swaths of northern Japan remain uninhabitable — unsafe to eat local food, breathe the air, or drink the water. To many, the 2011 Fukushima tragedy...

Chernobyl: A monument to folly that may outlast human civilization

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In addition to the sixth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon spill, this month marked another grim environmental anniversary — 30 years since the April 24, 1986 nuclear accident at the Chernobyl plant in what was then the Soviet Union and is now the Ukraine. In a strange way, the fact that the accident occurred well behind the Iron Curtain of the 20th Century has left much of the Western...

Five years of Fukushima — a living monument to human folly

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Today marks the 5-year anniversary of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami that triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant. In today’s distracted world — where the worst cases of attention-deficit disorder belong to the mainstream news media — it feels as if these annual anniversaries are the only way to bring attention to any ongoing environmental crisis, from the our...

Stuart H. Smith is an attorney based in New Orleans fighting major oil companies and other polluters.
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