Thursday, Nov 06th
Last update08:31:35 AM GMT
Environmental News Archive
The Department of Health said late Monday there appears to be "a very large area" at the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor contaminated with radioactive tritium, and contamination levels continue to rise.
Because the area is so big, according to William Irwin, radiological health chief, there are many potential sources of radioactive water at this particularly high concentration of tritium.
TVNL Comment: Sure Obama, let's build more nuclear power plants! Let's risk ALL life on Earth!
In response to an environmental lawsuit filed against the oil giant, Chevron has fortified its defenses with at least twelve different public relations firms whose purpose is to debunk the claims made against the company by indigenous people living in the Amazon forests of Ecuador. According to them, Chevron dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste in the Amazon between 1964 and 1990, causing damages assessed at more than $27 billion.
Just 19 countries out of 193 have sent letters of intent to the United Nations to be part of a global climate change accord, the UN's climate chief says.
Countries met in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December in pursuit of a legally binding deal to follow the Kyoto protocol on limiting global warming.
Peru's mining, oil and energy association (SNMPE) said Saturday it has expelled US mining company Doe Run from its roster for not cleaning up its pollution problems, which environmentalists say are among the worst in the world.
TVNL Comment: America's wonderful global footprint.
The decade ending in 2009 was the warmest on record, new surface temperature figures released Thursday by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration show.
The agency also found that 2009 was the second warmest year since 1880, when modern temperature measurement began. The warmest year was 2005. The other hottest recorded years have all occurred since 1998, NASA said.
Search warrants served on two Cook Inlet oil facilities last week were based on federal environmental regulators' suspicions that Chevron Corp. had knowingly violated its air pollution permits and made false statements, court filings show.
An Anchorage federal court magistrate on Jan. 7 authorized the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Criminal Investigation Division to seize computers, files, photos and other records at Chevron's Trading Bay Production Facility and Granite Point Tank Farm.
Global alarm over climate change and its effects has risen manifold after the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate. Since then, many of the 2,500-odd IPCC scientists have found climate change is progressing faster than the worst-case scenario they had predicted.
Their studies will be considered for the next IPCC report, but since that will come out only in 2013, the University of New South Wales in Sydney has just put together the main findings in the last three years.
To better safeguard threatened polar bears, the federal government should expand the size of its proposed critical habitat area in Alaska and curb oil and gas development there, the National Wildlife Federation said Wednesday.
The federation criticized the Department of the Interior for promoting expanded oil and gas exploration in the same areas that it wants to designate as the protected area for polar bears.
Under President George W. Bush, the United States withdrew from its decades-long role as a global leader in supporting family planning, driven by a conservative ideology that favored abstinence and shied away from providing contraceptive devices in developing countries, even to married women.
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