Lists of nuclear disasters and radioactive incidents.
Check it out, links to lists of military and civilian accidents, cancelled nuclear plants in the USA, lists anti-nuke protests in the USA, and lists of nuclear and radiation accidents throughout the world.
There are significant privacy issues. A system that knows when people turn down their thermostats can surmise when they have left town, creating a theft risk. A savvy divorce lawyer may discover a wayward spouse recharging her electric car at the home of a man not her husband. …
Now utilities, which are not accustomed to handling data in the way Google and Facebook have, will know a great deal about people’s lives. They might let the information leak. They might package and sell it. They might leave it open to hackers or stalkers.
“Just because I’m getting electricity in my house should not mean everything going on inside my house is going to be exposed,” said Lee Tien, an expert in smart-grid privacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
via Promise and Peril in Chicago Utilities’ Smart Grid – NYTimes.com.
You know what they say, oil and water don’t mix. Who knows, maybe this boom in oil fracking will destroy all the water in South Texas & they can use the newly fracked oil to burn it to a crisp:
But water remains a key issue. In addition to possible contamination of surface and underground water from fracking fluids, the sheer volume of water required poses challenges, especially in South Texas, which faces a severe drought and rapidly diminishing water levels in the local aquifer.
At the rate wells are being drilled, “there’s definitely going to be a problem,” said Bay Laxson, a local water official.
Dave Thompson, regional production superintendent for the oil company SM Energy said the industry knew that water issues were “an Achilles heel.” He said his company was building a system to reuse water in the field.
WASHINGTON – The closest nuclear power plant to tornado-ravaged Joplin, Mo., was singled out weeks before the storm for being vulnerable to twisters.
via ‘Tornado Alley’ reactor not fully twister-proof – Yahoo! News.
Surprise, surprise! How many US nuclear reactors will be in the way of major storms in the next 3 months, 6 months, year?
Of the 65,000 metric tons of highly radioactive spent fuel generated by U.S. reactors, about 75 percent is kept in cooling pools. According to Robert Alvarez, a senior policy advisor in the U.S. Department of Energy in the Clinton administration and co-author of the report, those pools were not designed for the amount of fuel — or the level of radiation — they are holding and are vulnerable to the type of events that crippled the Fukushima plant in Japan in April.
That is to say, the US nuclear establishment – industrialists, businessmen, politicians, and bureaucrats – poses a catastrophic risk to the nation.
via Yale Environment 360: U.S. Spent Nuclear Fuel Pools Pose Catastrophic Risks, Report Claims.
Sounds like weather particles have caucused and are in a conspiracy against us. Or maybe it’s just anthropogenic climate change. We’re conspiring against ourselves.
Because if you asked yourself what it meant that the Amazon has just come through its second hundred-year drought in the past five years, or that the pine forests across the western part of this continent have been obliterated by a beetle in the past decade — well, you might have to ask other questions. Such as: Should President Obama really just have opened a huge swath of Wyoming to new coal mining? Should Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sign a permit this summer allowing a huge new pipeline to carry oil from the tar sands of Alberta? You might also have to ask yourself: Do we have a bigger problem than $4-a-gallon gasoline?
via A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never! – The Washington Post.
Moving Planet is a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis—a single day to move away from fossil fuels. For too long, our leaders have denied and delayed, compromised and caved. That era must come to an end.
Come on bike, on skates, on a board, or just on foot. Come with your neighbors and your friends, your family and your co-workers. Come be part of something huge. It’s time to get moving on the climate crisis.
“Plastic transformed the modern world as powerfully as the atomic bomb,” Freinkel said. “But now, we’re starting to see the fall out — from the massive swirls of plastic debris in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans to the rising rates of chronic illnesses – -diabetes, heart disease, asthma, infertility and other ailments, that researchers are tracking back to chemicals contained in plastics – -and now in us as well.”
via Plastic: 10 things you may not know – chicagotribune.com.
Truth and Traditions 