Pax Americana

Gaza goes green

In light of NTodd's upcoming trip, it's a good time to highlight some not-so-bad news from Gaza for a change.

With Israel maintaining its longstanding ban on allowing construction materials into the Hamas-controlled Mediterranean strip, everyone from the UN and Red Cross to the Hamas-led government and frustrated families are taking matters into their own hands.

Faced with an unending river of raw sewage flowing into the Mediterranean and the Israeli cement restrictions, the Red Cross decided to scavenge the 25-foot-tall cement slabs from the Gaza-Egypt border fence that had been toppled by Hamas militants in January, 2008.

The Red Cross engineers worked with officials in Rafah to scavenge 2,800 of the concrete slabs to build two new football field-sized sewage treatment pools near the Gaza-Egypt border.

That has created a surreal scene as sewage flows into the new ponds whose borders are made of the concrete walls that once separated Egypt and Gaza.

"We are pioneers," said Marek Komarzynski, a Red Cross engineer who worked on the project.

From McClatchy's Checkpoint Jerusalem blog

There's more in the article about how Gazans are also building mudbrick homes, to circumvent the concrete shortage.

Teach Ben Stein's Followers

Teach-ins are a nonviolent way to effect change, and I'm happy to see my college does such things and is participating in today's National Teach-in on Global Warming:

[A]t the beginning of the first 100 days of the new administration, the National Teach-In on Global Warming will engage over a million Americans in solutions-driven dialogue. As educators, students and citizens, we owe our nation a focused conversation about the critical decisions that will determine if our descendants will inherit a prosperous or an impoverished planet.

I told my InfoSec class about it and am going to let my TCP/IP class out a little early so they can attend the 430 webcast and event if they want.  I wish I could, but I just found out about today--hopefully I can see an archive.

ntodd

PS--Appropriately, Question by the Moody Blues is playing at the cafe on campus where I'm hanging out between classes.

Geothermal In Vermont?

Driving along Rt 114 after getting my boots in St J we saw a sign for a heating company that had a newly-added "geothermal" and we wondered where the heck the geisers and such were in Vermont.  There ain't any, but that doesn't mean you can't tap that energy source:

The first phase of a geothermal project that will help heat and cool the Vermont Veterans Home in Bennington is finished and the second phase is due to get under way early next year.

The $2.3 million first phase involved the installation of geothermal equipment that will bring ground water in and out of the home and the installation of individual heating control units in hallways and main offices. The next phase will install individual heating and cooling control units into patient rooms.

The project works by taking ground water that is at a constant 50 degrees, which is used to heat or cool the building depending on need. Officials say the system will significantly reduce oil consumption.

It doesn't come cheap so some towns and villages can't afford to pursue it right now, but maybe the Obama administration's plans for a Green WPA will make funding and trained labor available...

ntodd

Nuke The Gay Whales

Sigh:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday lifted restrictions on the Navy's use of sonar in training exercises off the California coast, a defeat for environmental groups who say the sonar can harm whales.

The court, in its first decision of the term, voted 5-4 that the Navy needs to conduct realistic training exercises to respond to potential threats by enemy submarines.

Environmental groups had persuaded lower federal courts in California to impose restrictions on sonar use in submarine-hunting exercises to protect whales and other marine mammals.

The Bush administration argued that there is little evidence of harm to marine life in more than 40 years of exercises off the California coast.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, which was joined by Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

The court did not deal with the merits of the claims put forward by the environmental groups. It said, rather, that federal courts abused their discretion by ordering the Navy to limit sonar use in some cases and to turn it off altogether in others.

Roberts pointed out that the federal appeals court decision restricting the Navy's sonar training acknowledged that the record contained no evidence marine mammals had been harmed.

The overall public interest tips "strongly in favor of the Navy," Roberts wrote.

We already have fragmented whale communities with our oceanic noise pollution, so hey, what's a little more harmful sonar activity?

One hopes that #44 can multitask and find a way to consider environmental issues in the context of reducing the influence of our military industrial complex.  Maybe flipping that 5-4 conservative advantage on the SCOTUS will help...

ntodd

First Contact

This is pretty amazing:

Members of one of the world’s last uncontacted tribes have been spotted and photographed from the air near the Brazil-Peru border. The photos were taken during several flights over one of the remotest parts of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil’s Acre state.

‘We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist,’ said uncontacted tribes expert José Carlos dos Reis Meirelles Júnior. Meirelles works for FUNAI, the Brazilian government’s Indian affairs department. ‘This is very important because there are some who doubt their existence.’

Meirelles says that the group’s numbers are increasing. But other uncontacted groups in the region, whose homes have been photographed from the air, are in severe danger from illegal logging in Peru. Logging is driving uncontacted tribes over the border and could lead to conflict with the estimated five hundred uncontacted Indians already living on the Brazilian side.

‘What is happening in this region [of Peru] is a monumental crime against the natural world, the tribes, the fauna and is further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the ‘civilised’ ones, treat the world,’ said Meirelles.

There are more than one hundred uncontacted tribes worldwide, with more than half living in either Brazil or Peru. All are in grave danger of being forced off their land, killed and decimated by new diseases. Survival has launched an urgent campaign to get their land protected, and a unique film narrated by actress Julie Christie.

Survival’s director Stephen Corry said today, ‘These pictures are further evidence that uncontacted tribes really do exist. The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they will soon be made extinct.’

I just so happen to be reading 1491 which is about pre-Columbian America.  Not only that, but Hecate and I were at dinner on Monday and had a fascinating discussion with our server, who is Peruvian (he also was very funny, and remarked that each time he came over she and I were talking about something weird and new, from sexism in politics to yak's milk, which is partly why we struck up a conversation with him).  Anyway, with all that as background this story naturally caught my interest.

I find it astonishing that there are any uncontacted societies left and I hope that our modern civilization is mature enough to not destroy their ways of life through our greed and selfishness, let alone our best intentions ala European missionaries.

ntodd

House Of Cards

I've blogged about the collapse of society before, and not only are my students are required by the College to come up with emergency plans in the event of epidemics but I talk about Diamond's book(s) a lot, so this article in New Scientist caught my eye:

FOR years we have been warned that a pandemic is coming. It could be flu, it could be something else. We know that lots of people will die. As terrible as this will be, on an ever more crowded planet, you can't help wondering whether the survivors might be better off in some ways. Wouldn't it be easier to rebuild modern society into something more sustainable if, perish the thought, there were fewer of us.

Yet would life ever return to something resembling normal after a devastating pandemic? Virologists sometimes talk about their nightmare scenarios - a plague like ebola or smallpox - as "civilisation ending". Surely they are exaggerating. Aren't they?

Many people dismiss any talk of collapse as akin to the street-corner prophet warning that the end is nigh. In the past couple of centuries, humanity has innovated its way past so many predicted plagues, famines and wars - from Malthus to Dr Strangelove - that anyone who takes such ideas seriously tends to be labeled a doom-monger.

There is a widespread belief that our society has achieved a scale, complexity and level of innovation that make it immune from collapse. "It's an argument so ingrained both in our subconscious and in public discourse that it has assumed the status of objective reality," writes biologist and geographer Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, author of the 2005 book Collapse. "We think we are different."
Ever more vulnerable

A growing number of researchers, however, are coming to the conclusion that far from becoming ever more resilient, our society is becoming ever more vulnerable (see page 30). In a severe pandemic, the disease might only be the start of our problems.

No scientific study has looked at whether a pandemic with a high mortality could cause social collapse - at least none that has been made public. The vast majority of plans for weathering a pandemic all fail even to acknowledge that crucial systems might collapse, let alone take it into account.

There have been many pandemics before, of course. In 1348, the Black Death killed about a third of Europe's population. Its impact was huge, but European civilisation did not collapse. After the Roman empire was hit by a plague with a similar death rate around AD 170, however, the empire tipped into a downward spiral towards collapse. Why the difference? In a word: complexity.

The Space Shuttle.  Our banking system.  The world's most powerful military.  Anything with a bit of complexity that we accept because in general there won't be the exact cascade of failures to cause a complete collapse.  Can we fail gracefully?

ntodd

Nuclear Waste?: Part 4 (where it gets exciting)

With some background material laid down in the first three segments of this series, we can now turn to some of the more fascinating — and puzzling — aspects of the Patoka Lake and dam story. Aspects that have kept me researching and working on this topic for more than three decades.

The construction of the lake and dam was completed in 1978 and in the weeks shortly thereafter, water began to be impounded to create the lake. The recreation area and the roughly 8,500-acre lake were opened to the public in 1980.  All the while, John Flynn and I were making regular visits to the site with a couple of low-tech geiger counters. 

They were the yellow kind, leftover from old Civil Defense shelters created during the Cold War. We knew they wouldn't detect low level releases of radiation, but we took them along anyway just in case we came across some high-level release area. We took them because during the final months of the dam's construction phase, and during the time when Continental Drilling was pumping tens of thousands of gallons of grout into various drilled holes in the lake bed and dam site, we kept hearing stories of men in radiation suits, men with geiger counters, Naval officers supervising the off-loading of trucks that contained huge cylinders.  And the cylinders appeared to be made of silicon or some other glass-like material.  I never saw any of this myself; John and our farmer friend, Wayne Jordan (remember, not his real name) did.  They saw Naval officers; they saw what appeared to be radiation suits; they saw the "glass" cylinders.

On most of our visits, we walked along the back side of the dam, checking the tops of long tubes that had been driven into the ground some 50 to 100 feet or more.  At the bottom of those tubes were devices to measure any flowing water — pesiotomers I believe they are called. (And I must admit I don't know how to spell them.)

The spillway from the dam reached out it's backside for about 300 yards and at that point emptied into a small stream about six feet wide.  On a visit there in 1982, Flynn and I came across a scene that energized us both, that renewed our interest in getting to the bottom of the Patoka rumors.

Two men dressed in green work clothes — they looked to be Dickies pants, shirts and green jackets, all the same color — were kneeling beside the stream.  They had what looked to be a cooler filled with dry ice, liquid nitrogen or something else very cold because each time they opened the lid a fog would roll off the edges and float down to the ground.  It was like something Holmes and Watson would have seen while searching the moors for the Hounds of the Baskervilles.

The two men had no markings at all on their shirts or jackets, and they had a huge battery of some type. That battery was connected to two electrodes which were in turn connected to a wire mesh-like net that was stretched across the tiny stream.  Water was flowing out of the spillway and we watched these two guys from a distance to see what the heck they were doing.

Everyone once in a while when a small fish would be caught in the metal net, they appeared to turn a switch on their power supply, giving the fish a stunning shock.  Then they would remove the fish from the water, slit open its belly, slide the entrails into what looked to be a plastic jar, cap it, and then place the entrails jar in the cooler with the dry ice or whatever it was.  The rest of the fish, the part most people would consider frying and eating, they simply tossed into the woods.

After a quarter hour or so of this, we decided to approach these guys to see what was going on.  One looked up and said "What are you two doing?"

"We're just walking through the woods," I said.

Then he pulled back his jacket and revealed a holster carrying what looked to me like a 45-caliber automatic, the kind they gave us to train with in Naval Officer School.  He revealed the gun quite intentionally, stared at us both and said, most malevolently, "Then just keep on walking."

So we did.  But when we went into the office the following Monday, we both made calls to the  Corps of Engineers and to the Indiana office of Wildlife and Fisheries.  We described what we'd witnessed, and surprise, no one at either office could imagine what in the world those two guys were doing.  Never heard of such a thing, they said.

It was just one more mystery to be added to a list of questions about the place and the project; a list that seems to keep growing even now.

Glenn

Nuclear Waste?: Part Three

The Manhattan Project is known as one of the largest, best-kept secret in the nation's history — at least that's what a couple of historians have said over the years.  And when John Flynn and I began researching the creation and construction of Patoka Lake years ago, we were surprised to learn of some indirect ties the latter project had to the program that built the first atomic bomb.

Two sources — one at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the other at the Defense Intelligence Agency — told us we should look into a couple of organizations.  One was a company named Continental Drilling, the other was a consortium or collection  of colleges called Associated Universities, Inc.

The sources said Associated Universities was the entity the government used to pay the scientific members of the Manhattan Project team.  Since the program was secret, the scientists were paid through the association of universities, according to the sources.  Officially, its website says Associated Universities was created in 1946 "as an educational institution dedicated to research, development and education in the physical, biological and engineering sciences."

So what does that have to do with nuclear waste and a lake in Indiana?  The sources also said that Associated Universities was the organization that, following World War II, also helped to marshall the engineering and scientific brains necessary to build the nation's nuclear installations such as Savannah Rivers in South Carolina, Rocky Flats in Colorado and Hanford in Washington state.  And in creating the 13 or so known nuclear (and nuclear waste) facilities, the government often turned to Continental Drilling as one of the various site contractors.

When the possibility of the Patoka Lake and dam as a nuclear waste site emerged, one of the company names that kept coming to our attention was Continental Drilling.  Various sources — local residents, on-site workers, and eventually one of the engineering superintendents on the project — confirmed that Continental Drilling was at Patoka, that they were responsible for drilling as many as 1,200 or so deep cores into what became the lake bed and the dam site.

There were records to indicate that Continental Drilling had been involved in the development of the hydrofracture waste-storage process used at Oak Ridge.  In fact, when a company spokesman was finally located, he said, you bet, we were at Patoka.

"We do a lot of preliminary site preparation work (for nuclear waste sites)," the spokesman — named Gerald Bair — said some 25 years ago.  "We do work through Associated Universties and we've done seven or eight nuclear sites.  We do the drilling; do some grouting when it involves low-level material.

"We did a lot of work at the Hanford, Washington site; did the deep well injection at Oak Ridge," he continued. "We were at Patoka for quite a while. Who did you say you worked for again?"

I said I was with a newspaper and he terminated the conversation.

Oddly enough, the government agencies we contacted said Continental Drilling wasn't at the Indiana site.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Continental Drilling was not a subcontractor at Patoka.  The Department of Energy said no company by that nam worked on the project.  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the same thing; so did the Department of Defense. And in the mountain of financial records that were available to us, we could never find a budget line or accounting of any payment by the Core or anyone else to Continental Drilling. (And by the way, there are a half-dozen or so "Continental Drilling" companies throughout the U.S.  The one we examined had been based in California and when we checked with the Secretary of State's office there, we were told it had closed up shop and left a forwarding address — a post office box number in the Bahamas.)

The Department of Energy,  Corps of Engineers and Nuclear Regulatory Commission also  told us that many of the Patoka records were stored in a document repository at Kansas City, Mo. and unavailable for review.  From the records we were able to examine, Flynn and I determined that about $70 million (in 1980 dollars) of appropriations for the project were not accounted for.

John Albrecht, a spokesman for one the Patoka site's main contractor, a construction company out Wixom, Mich., acknowledged that Continental Drilling was responsible for the project's deep well cores and the grouting.  And a source with the Corps of Engineers contradicted his bosses in D.C. and said "yeah, they were there.  They were supposed to drill the sample cores and ended up drilling a lot of them. They were supposed to pump grout (to seal the lake and the area around the dam) for a week or two and ended up pumping grout for more than a year.

"I never understood why."

Glenn

Nuclear Waste?: Part One

The late John Flynn was a terrific reporter, especially when he was covering something that interested him deeply, such as the environment.  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Flynn was one of the first reporters in the country to frequently write about acid rain at a time when the subject was largely ignored.

Flynn covered the growth and development of coal-fired power plants throughout the Ohio River Valley, then with the help of scientists such as Jim Hansen and Orie Loucks, he documented the rise of carbon dioxide from the plants and its return to earth as acid rain father east in the upper Appalachian Mountains and north through the Hudson and Mohawk River valleys.

The acid rain was killing the mixed mesophytic forest — the nation's oldest growth of trees east of the Mississippi River. It was turning trout streams acidic and killing lots of aquatic life.  The tops of trees were dying from Maine to the Carolinas, and Flynn wrote about it when few other journalists were paying attention.

So what's this have to do with nuclear waste?  Nothing yet. But it sets the stage for how John Flynn came to work in the Ohio River Valley, and as a result, was approached by some Indiana farmers who were worried about what was proposed for their land.

The farmers lived in the Patoka River watershed in Southern Indiana, just west northwest of Louisville, Ky. Flynn and I worked for the Louisville, Ky., Courier-Journal, then a family-owned newspaper of national stature which had won a Pulitizer Prize in the 1960s for its coverage of the then-new phenomena of strip mining in Eastern Kentucky.  It was a paper with a given instinct to cover the environment in a time before that kind of coverage was in vogue.

So Flynn came to work in Louisville, not as a environmental writer at first, but as a Southern Indiana bureau reporter. I was the paper's Indiana columnist at the time. And we were both in the office when one of the worried Indiana farmers came to see us.

You need to take a look at this Patoka project, he said.  We knew about it. The state, together with the Army Corps of Engineers, was planning to build an 8,800 acre flood-control dam and lake 118.3 miles above the mouth of the Patoka River, a tributary of the Wabash River, in southern Indiana.

It's a beautiful part of the state, because Southern Indiana west of the Interstate 65 dividing line, the highway that runs north and south from Louisville to Indianapolis, looks a great deal like Kentucky.  There are gently rolling hills and lots and forests.  In fact, the Harrison-Crawford State Forest is one of Indiana's most gorgeous outdoor areas.

We thought very little of the farmer's visit to us at first.  Assumed it represented the usual dispute between land owners and a government that wanted to condemn part of their property. Those disagreements had bubbled to the surface in local papers the previous few months. So Flynn and I thought that this was simply another case of a small land-owner with little clout wanting to complain about losing his land for this lake project.

But that wasn't it at all.  The farmer was a guy we'll call Wayne Jordan — that's not his real name, but I'm using a fake moniker here because Wayne is now dead and his widow is very ill and, quite honestly, now is not the time to burden her with a request and then drag all this up again.  So Wayne Jordan came to see us and said you've got to look at this project because there's something bizarre going on.

Bizarre?

Yep, he said.  They're trying to build a lake over ground that's covered with limestone caves and sinkholes. Hundreds of them. There's no way a lake will hold water there, unless they fill all the sinkholes and caves and link them together somehow, Wayne said.  And that would take millions of pounds of grout, or concrete or something. 

So that's one thing, he said.  "But here's something else.  I know it's a government project, but I'm watching them drill the test cores in a little valley just beside my farm.  And there are military guys there all the time; look like Navy uniforms to me.

"And some of them are carrying what looks like geiger counters."

Glenn

Nuclear Waste: A series of stories

Over the next few weeks and months, you'll find posted here some brief stories surrounding nearly four decades of reporting done by the late John Flynn and me.  It began back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when some Indiana farmers were surprised to learn that the state and federal government planned to build a dam and lake over much of their property.

The farmers thought the government boys were fools because the land was pock-marked with sinkholes, limestone caves and underground rivers.  Building a lake over a bunch of karst limestone sinkholes was folly, they all said. It won't hold water.

But they didn't know the reason behind the enterprise.

The story of Patoka Lake and nuclear waste reads like a poorly-scripted Jerry Bruckheimer movie, only without things blowing up all the time.  You're going to hear of news sources within the Defense Intelligence Agency, within the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and within other segments of the nation's intelligence services. You'll hear about office break-ins, threats from alleged government officials, of opened mail and telephone eavesdropping, of FBI break-in teams and stolen notes and records.

You'll hear of conversations with President Clinton's first Secretary of the Department of Energy, Hazel O'Leary; you'll learn about argillaceous shale — the geological formation beneath Patoka Lake and beneath the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, too.  You'll also learn about hydrofracture, the process used at Oak Ridge to pump liquified nuclear waste into shale formations 1,500 to 1,800 feet beneath the ground.

There are similar formations beneath Patoka Lake, and John and I believe — or believed, in his case — that the same hydrofracture process used at Oak Ridge was used at this Southern Indiana lake.

It's a long tale and it has it's share of intrigue and, some would say, implausibility. I'm going to break it up into a dozen or so short entries — it will be a bit of an outline of the book I've written and continue to revise on the subject.

I'll tell you what I know over the next few weeks and let you decide if it's plausible or not.  In cases where I haven't received full release from individuals for the use of their names, I'll keep them to myself.

In the meantime, if you happen to know people who visit Patoka Lake for sport, tell them to catch and release.  Don't eat the fish.

Glenn