Environmental Glance
The Energy Department and a contractor building a waste treatment plant at the nation's most contaminated nuclear site procured and installed tanks that did not always meet requirements of a quality assurance program or the contract, a federal audit concluded Monday.
The audit also found that the agency had paid the contractor a $15 million incentive fee for production of a tank that was later determined to be defective and, while it demanded the fee be returned, never followed up to ensure that it was.
In recent months, the $12.3 billion plant under construction at south-central Washington's Hanford nuclear reservation has been the subject of whistleblower complaints about its design and safety. The plant is being built to convert highly radioactive glass into a stable glass form for permanent disposal underground.
The American Legislative Exchange Council, a “stealth business lobbyist” that helps corporations write state and federal legislation supporting their interests, has taken major heat for its backing of controversial laws.
We previously have pointed to earth changes as being valid existential threats, while pointing out that some man-made activities such as fracking and HAARP certainly could further exacerbate some of them.
I wish everything I am reporting on were not true, or at least were less true than it appears. It does seem that Japan is in the process of contaminating the entire Pacific Ocean via continued uncontrolled releases of radioactivity at Fukushima.
A motorcycle that washed up on a Canadian beach could have been floating at sea since the Japanese tsunami in March last year. Debris has been drifting across the Pacific since the disaster struck over a year ago, and much is now beginning to land on North American shores.
Nuclear radiation --which threatens life on planet earth-- is not front page news in comparison to the most insignificant issues of public concern, including the local level crime scene or the tabloid gossip reports on Hollywood celebrities. 
After experiencing the traumatizing death of her daughter to kidney failure just three days after her daughter was born, Sofia Gatica from Argentina became determined to find out what killed her daughter. Her conclusion? Monsanto’s genetically modified soy fields that surrounded her neighborhood, laced with damaging insecticides negatively affecting nearby neighborhood children and adults alike. Gatica began to detail how her small town was plagued with astronomically high birth defect rates, respiratory disease, and even infant mortality. What she didn’t know was that she would later receive an environmental award for her efforts to make change.
