One thing that I’ve found to be a constant in more than 25 years of working cases around pollution from radiation: A good outside expert will often tell citizens the things that government or big business simply can’t or won’t. In most of my major radiation cases against the world’s largest oil companies, we’ve conducted our own testing to convincingly show that giant firms like Chevron and Exxon...
The recent release and popularity of the HBO series Chernobyl reminded its several million viewers — regular folks — of something that many experts have been worried about for decades: That the nuclear-industrial complex that’s been mining uranium since the middle of the 20th Century to make both atomic bombs and atomic energy is increasingly a hazard to human health. Many people have...
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...
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...
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...
Like most federal regulatory agencies, especially in fields such as energy and the environment, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC, tends to be a toothless tiger. It’s quick to side with the interests of large corporations and against those of the public that it is supposed to serve. But even by the NRC’s historically weak standards, the agency is moving down a very disturbing...
Three years after the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in Japan, evidence is mounting that the United States is covering up a massive case of radiation exposure and sickness among the military men and women who responded to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. This story has been brewing for months, but now journalist Karen Charman is giving us the most detailed account of how hundreds of American...
I noted last week that the news from the site of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan keeps getting worse and worse. Nearly three years after the earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear accident, every week brings new reports of leaks or potential meltdowns at the troubled site. What’s more, experts are also tracking the plume of radiation from the Fukushima site as they slowly make...
A quick word about risk. My work as an environmental attorney has taught me that when it comes to public health risks, we can never be cautious enough. The incident that precipitated the launch of this blog, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, took place because BP and others didn’t fully understand the risks of drilling in such a deep section of the Gulf of Mexico, nor did they prepare...
It was the American Way of humanitarianism when the U.S. Navy dispatched some of its Pacific fleet toward the shores of Japan in March 2011, as news spread that a massive earthquake followed by a devastating tsunami had struck the island nation. But what the crew members of the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan could not have imagined was that the real danger they would face would not be from the quake but...
