Groups sue over Arizona uranium exploration

PHOENIX –

By AMANDA LEE MYERSThree environmental groups filed a lawsuit against U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne for authorizing uranium exploration on one million acres of public land near the Grand Canyon.

The Center for Biological Diversity, the Grand Canyon Trust and the Western Mining Action Project filed the suit in U.S. District Court on Monday. Also named as defendants are the Department of Interior and U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Department of Interior spokesman Chris Paolino said it’s department policy to not comment on pending litigation.

The environmental groups say Kempthorne defied a House committee resolution protecting one million acres near the Grand Canyon from new uranium mining by continuing to authorize uranium exploration.

The House Natural Resources Committee in June passed a measure 20-2 after Republicans walked out of the hearing in protest. The measure required Kempthorne to stop issuing new mining claims, but an Interior official argued in a letter sent to the committee chairman that the resolution couldn’t stand because the committee lacked a quorum.

The Interior Department letter from congressional and legislative affairs Director Matt Eames said the committee needed 25 members present to act on the measure and fell three votes shy.

As a result, he wrote, “we do not believe that the resolution constitutes a notification of the committee, as required under the statute.”

Since the resolution passed, four new mining claims were filed and four notices for uranium exploration were accepted along the Arizona strip, the part of the state north of the Colorado River, said Scott Florence, director of the Bureau of Land Management’s Arizona strip district.

He said most if not all the claims and notices were on the land specified in the resolution.

Everglades in Peril as Restoration Languishes

October 1, 2008

By Brian Skoloff of the Associated Press

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — A multibillion-dollar effort to restore Florida’s Everglades has made little progress amid funding shortfalls, bureaucratic red tape and disagreements, according to a congressionally mandated report that warns the vast wetland is in peril.

The National Research Council, in findings Monday, warned that degradation of the Everglades could become irreversible if action isn’t taken quickly.

“The Everglades ecosystem is continuing to decline. It’s our estimate that we’re losing the battle to save this thing,” said William Graf, the report’s committee chairman and head of the department of geography at the University of South Carolina at Columbia.

Dexter Lehtinen, an attorney who represents the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians living in the Everglades, has long fought for restoration. He said the effort has been mired in plan changes, talk and not enough action.

High hopes for land purchase waned

Many environmentalists lauded a potential buyout of U.S. Sugar, announced by Gov. Charlie Crist in June, as a boon for Everglades restoration. At the time, Crist proclaimed the planned buyout as the savior of the wetlands — “as monumental as the creation of our nation’s first national park.”

But as details of the plan emerge, officials now say only about half the 300 square miles the state would acquire from the company would actually go toward environmental restoration. The rest likely will remain in agriculture.

Lehtinen said that deal just adds another delay to the monumental, undone task of rescuing the Everglades while officials negotiate the sale with U.S. Sugar and rework restoration plans.

“We’re biting off more than we can chew rather than chewing what we’ve got,” Lehtinen said. “And that’s going to kill the Everglades.”

State authority blames lack of federal funding, red tape

The South Florida Water Management District, which oversees restoration for the state, said in a statement that it agrees with the report’s findings “that restoration progress is hampered by limited federal funding and a complex and lengthy federal planning process.”

Approved by Congress in 2000, the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, or CREP, was originally estimated to cost about $7.8 billion and take 30 years to complete — a price tag that has since ballooned due to rising costs.

The intent is to help restore some natural water flow after decades of diversions for development and agriculture, which have shrunk the Everglades to half its historical 4 million acres.

The 2000 plan made the federal government and Florida 50-50 partners. To date, the state has committed more than $2 billion and pushed ahead alone with a few projects. Congress has only appropriated several hundred million dollars.

Heart of the system is heavily polluted

Lake Okeechobee, the liquid heart of the Everglades, remains heavily polluted with phosphorous mostly from fertilizer runoff. Wildlife habitat is disappearing and at least 67 threatened or endangered species face extreme peril. About a million acres are contaminated with mercury, the report noted.

“Unless near-term progress is achieved on major restoration initiatives, the Everglades will likely face further loss of species and habitat deterioration, which could be difficult or impossible to reverse,” the report said.

Meanwhile, the NRC committee commended Florida for its ambitious land acquisition, including a $1.75 billion proposal to buy some 300 square miles of farmland from U.S. Sugar Corp. that has long been a hindrance to water flow. However, much of that land may remain in agriculture, and the committee noted effects of such a deal may be more than a decade away.

David Guest, an attorney for Earthjustice who has spent decades fighting for Everglades restoration, agreed that the U.S. Sugar deal may cause more delays. But he thinks it will eventually provide a much-needed shortcut.

“The CERP was premised on the need to deal with water quality issues” around farms, Guest said, noting that much of that land will now be taken out of agriculture, removing a major obstacle over time.

More information:

National Research Council report, Progress Toward Restoring the Everglades: The Second Biennial Review, 2008.

Brian Skoloff is an Associated Press staff writer.

Revealed: Oil-Funded Research in Palin’s Campaign Against Protection For Polar Bear

Paper authored by known climate change sceptics • Governor suing over threatened species ruling

by Ed Pilkington

The Republican Sarah Palin and her officials in the Alaskan state government drew on the work of at least six scientists known to be sceptical about the dangers and causes of global warming, to back efforts to stop polar bears being protected as an endangered species, the Guardian can disclose. Some of the scientists were funded by the oil industry.

U.S. Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain (R-AZ) (L) listens as he is introduced by U.S. Republican vice-presidential nominee Alaska Governor Sarah Palin at a campaign rally in Columbus, Ohio September 29, 2008. Palin and her officials in the Alaskan state government drew on the work of at least six scientists known to be sceptical about the dangers and causes of global warming, to back efforts to stop polar bears being protected as an endangered species. (REUTERS/Brian Snyder)

In official submissions to the US government’s consultation on the status of the polar bear, Palin and her team referred to at least six scientists who have questioned either the existence of warming as a largely man-made phenomenon or its severity. One paper was partly funded by the US oil company ExxonMobil.The status of the polar bear has become a battleground in the debate on global warming. In May the US department of the interior rejected Palin’s objections and listed the bear as a threatened species, saying that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears were likely to be extinct by 2050 due to the rapid melting of the sea ice. Palin, governor of Alaska and the Republican nominee for US vice-president, responded last month by suing the federal government, to try to overturn the ruling. The case will be heard in January.

Though the state of Alaska has no polar bear specialists on its staff, the governor’s stance has pitted it against the combined scientific fire-power of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Geological Survey, and world experts on the mammal.

In its lawsuit, Alaska said it opposed the endangered label partly because the listing would “deter activities such as … oil and gas exploration and development”. Oil companies recently bid $2.7bn (£1.5bn) for rights to explore the Chuckchi sea, an established polar bear habitat.

The threatened species status might also impede the building of an Alaskan natural gas pipeline, which Palin has called the “will of God”. In a letter last year to the US interior secretary, Dirk Kempthorne, she said she believed the polar bear population was “abundant, stable and unthreatened by direct human activity”. She opposed the call for the listing because it “did not use the best available scientific and commercial information”.

Her own Alaskan review of the science drew on a joint paper by seven authors, four of whom were well-known climate- change contrarians. Her paper argued that it was “certainly premature, if not impossible” to link temperature rise in Alaska with human CO2 emissions.

The paper, entitled Polar Bears of Western Hudson Bay and Climate Change, has been criticised for relying on old research and ignoring evidence that Arctic sea-ice is melting at a quickening pace. Walt Meier, a world authority on sea ice, based at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, said: “The paper doesn’t measure up scientifically.”

One co-author of the paper, Willie Soon, completed the study with funding from ExxonMobil – which has oil operations in Alaska’s North Slope – as well as from the American Petroleum Institute. Soon was a former senior scientist with the George C Marshall Institute, which acts as an incubator for climate-change scepticism. The institute has received $715,000 in funding from ExxonMobil since 1998.

In May, ExxonMobil announced that it was no longer funding Marshall and other groups linked with contrarian views. It said this was to avoid “distraction from the need to provide energy while reducing greenhouse gas emissions” and stressed that the company did not “control the research itself”.

Another co-author of the document was Sallie Baliunas. In 2003 she and Soon were criticised when it was revealed that a joint paper had been partially funded by the American Petroleum Institute. Thirteen scientists whom they cited issued a rebuttal and several editors of the journal Climate Research resigned because of the “flawed peer review”. A third co-author of the polar bear study, David Legates, a professor at Delaware University, is also associated with the Marshall Institute.

The citation by Palin and her officials prompted complaints from Congress. One member, Brad Miller, dubbed the polar bear study phony science.

Palin told Miller: “Attempts to discredit scientists … simply because their analyses do not agree with your views, would be a disservice to this country.” Miller now says that Palin’s use of the paper shows she differs greatly from John McCain, the Republican presidential contender, who has pressed for scientific integrity. “Turning to the cottage industry of scientists who are funded because they spread doubt about global warming is not integrity,” Miller said.

Palin’s submission consulted J Scott Armstrong, a specialist in forecasting, who regards the global warming issue as “public hysteria”.

Two other contrarian scholars were cited. One was Syun-Ichi Akasofu, formerly director of the International Arctic Research Centre, in Alaska, who argues that climate change could be a hangover from the little ice age. He is a founding director of the Heartland Institute, a thinktank that has received $676,500 from ExxonMobil since 1998.

Timothy Ball, a retired professor from Winnipeg, is cited for his climate and polar bear research. He has called human-made global warming “the greatest deception in the history of science”. He has worked with both Friends of Science, and the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, which each had funding from energy firms.

Kert Davies, research director at Greenpeace US, said the state of Alaska under Palin’s leadership had relied on scholars who argue the opposite view to that of the overwhelming consensus in the scientific community. “It shows that she is completely out of touch with the urgency of the climate crisis.”

Last month Palin agreed that the Alaskan climate was changing but added: “I’m not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.” She later tried to retract the statement.

2008 Guardian News and Media Limited

Makah grandmothers plan long walk to demand treaty rights be honored

By Leah Leach, Peninsula Daily News

NEAH BAY — Three Makah grandmothers will leave Wednesday for a 330-mile walk and ride to Portland, Ore., to protest what they say is a continual violation of Native American treaty rights.

Dotti Chamblin, 65, said that she and two other members of the Makah Grandmothers — which is composed of “four of us and a man” — will start the journey of at least two weeks from Neah Bay through Port Angeles, Tacoma and Olympia at about 4 a.m.

Chamblin, the secretary of the group, Gail Adams, 68, president, and Rhonda Markishtum, 50, treasurer, will carry signs, a Makah flag and a U.S. flag.

They also will bring at least 2,000 copies of a four-page letter they have written to hand out to congressional leaders’ representatives, the governor, federal judges and anyone who wants a copy.

The letter demands better health care and talks of encroachments on treaty rights.

“Treaties are the supreme law of the land,” Chamblin said.

It accuses elected officials of violating their oath of office by failing to honor Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution.

“Article 6 states that treaties are the law of the land and that federal judges will adhere to it,” Chamblin said.

“A lot of things haven’t happened that way.

“We ceded land to have a peace treaty, and there’s a lot of atrocities that have happened to us that would not have happened to any other race of people — at least we think so, we grandmothers.”

Long way around
“Two of us will be walking all the time; one will drive,” Chamblin said, except when the road is too dangerous for walking.

Their chosen route is the long way around to the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Portland, Ore., she said.

“It would be shorter for us to go the coast route. But we need to go to [Rep.] Norm Dicks’ office in Port Angeles, and we need to go to the federal building in Tacoma, the governor’s office in Olympia and the Bureau of Indian Affairs” in Portland, Ore, she said.

Last October, Chamblin and Adams took signs supporting Makah tribal whaling rights to the Port Angeles office of the 6th Congressional representative.

Their visit preceded a federal court arraignment of five Makah men who, on Sept. 7, 2007, killed a gray whale in the Strait of Juan de Fuca in violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Since then, three of the men pled guilty to federal charges and were placed on five years’ probation June 30, while one was sentenced to 90 days in the federal detention facility at Sea-Tac, and another was sentenced to five months there.

The Makah treaty of 1855 grants the tribe whaling rights.

“Those boys did nothing wrong, according to the treaty,” Chamblin said then.

Although Dicks, D-Belfair — who sits on the Appropriation Subcommittee for the Department of the Interior, which oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs — wasn’t there, they told his representative that he should uphold the Constitution, including Article 6.

The three grandmothers plan to tell Dicks’ representative that again, when they arrive in Port Angeles.

They hope to arrive on Wednesday — “although it’s hard to say. We’re grandmothers,” Chamblin said.

Then they plan to tell it to federal judges in Tacoma, Gov. Chris Gregoire in Olympia and Stan Speaks of the BIA in Portland Ore.

“We’re on fixed incomes,” Chamblin said.

“We got a donation of $100. That will take us to Portland.”

The three plan to get showers and hot meals with friends along the way.

“I think that once we get going, the adrenaline flow is going to keep us going.”

http://www.peninsuladailynews.com/article/20080930/NEWS/809300307

The last day of a nuclear-powered icebreaker

2008-10-02

Icebreaker Arktika (Barentsphoto.com)

One of Russia’s most powerful icebreakers, the “Arktika”, is this week officially taken out of service. Tomorrow, the reactor of the 33 year old vessel will be turned off.

The “Arktika” belongs to the most powerful of Russia’s icebreakers. The 148 meter long and 23,000 ton big vessel has since 1975 faithfully served in the Russian Arctic.

Built at the Baltic Yard in Sankt Petersburg, the “Arktika” belongs to the most powerful class of icebreaker, along with the “Sibir”, “Rossiya”, “Sovetskii Soyuz” and “Yamal”. Today only the latter four vessels remain in duty.

From 1959 to 1992, a total of nine civilian nuclear-powered vessels were built in the Soviet Union. Of these, eight were icebreakers and one a container ship (the “Sevmorput”). In the period 1994-2007, the last of the country’s nuclear-powered icebreakers was built, the most powerful of them all – the “50 Years Victory”.

The Russian fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers has for many years been administrated by the Murmansk Shipping Company. This fall however, the state nuclear power company Rosatom took over the management of the vessels.

http://www.barentsobserver.com/the-last-day-of-a-nuclear-powered-icebreaker.4514785-16149.html

U.S. Tries to Stop North Korea Resuming Atomic Work

U.S. Tries to Stop North Korea Resuming Atomic Work (Update1)

By Ed Johnson and Heejin Koo

Oct. 2 (Bloomberg) — U.S. envoy Christopher Hill extended his visit to North Korea today as he tried to persuade the regime not to re-activate its nuclear program.

Hill will remain in Pyongyang for at least a few more hours, Aaron Tarver, a spokesman at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, said by telephone, adding it was unclear whether he would return to South Korea late today or early tomorrow.

Six-party negotiations have been deadlocked since mid- August due to a dispute over how to verify the extent of North Korea’s nuclear weapons development. The government in Pyongyang last week said an international inspection of the country’s nuclear sites would violate its sovereignty and has begun reassembling its Yongbyon reactor.

Hill, who arrived in Pyongyang yesterday, planned to present Kim Jong Il‘s government with a face-saving compromise that would see the regime submitting a verification plan to China, before sharing it with the U.S. and other nations involved in the disarmament talks, the Associated Press reported.

China, which chairs the six-party talks, has played a “special role” in the past and served as a “repository for documents and information,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said yesterday when asked to comment on the U.S. proposal. Hill will discuss “choreography,” said McCormack, or “who hands what, to what person, when.”

Beijing, Tokyo

After returning to Seoul, Hill is scheduled to meet with Chinese officials in Beijing before traveling to Tokyo, the State Department said.

North Korea, which tested a nuclear device in 2006, signed the six-party disarmament accord in February 2007 with the U.S., China, South Korea, Russia and Japan. The communist state pledged to disable its nuclear program in return for energy aid and normalized diplomatic ties with the U.S. and Japan.

Kim’s regime shut down the Yongbyon reactor, the source of its weapons-grade plutonium, last year and in June blew up a cooling tower at the plant in a symbolic gesture.

North Korea stopped disabling Yongbyon in mid-August to protest delays in being removed from a U.S. terrorism blacklist. The Bush administration has said the regime will remain on the list until a verification system is in place.

Kim’s regime last week expelled International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors from Yongbyon. South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said this week North Korea may be able to restart operations at Yongbyon’s nuclear material reprocessing plant within two to three months.

To contact the reporters on this story:

Ed Johnson in Sydney at ejohnson28@bloomberg.net; Heejin Koo in Seoul at hjkoo@bloomberg.net

Bush signs funding legislation for WIPP

From the Current-Argus
CARLSBAD — An outline to fund the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant was part of a funding package signed by President Bush Tuesday night, according to a news release from the office of Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M.

Article Launched: 10/01/2008 09:05:09 PM MDT

WIPP is a U.S. Department of Energy facility designed to safely isolate defense-related transuranic waste from people and the environment. Waste temporarily stored at sites around the country is shipped to WIPP and permanently disposed of in rooms mined out of an ancient salt formation 2,150 feet below the surface. WIPP, which began waste disposal operations in 1999, is located 26 miles outside of Carlsbad.
The $600 billion package includes a continuing resolution that allows funding to continue past the Oct. 1 start of the new fiscal year. The resolution, which will extend to March 6, covers appropriations bills that Congress failed to complete this year, including the Energy and Water Appropriations Bill that funds WIPP.
According to Domenici’s release, the resolution outlines continued WIPP funding at FY2008 levels $236.7 million until Congress approves the 2009 bill. The FY2008 funding level is slightly higher than the funding levels outlined in either the FY2009 budget request or the Senate’s initial FY2009

bill, which recommended $231.6 million for WIPP.
“We should have already finished our work on the energy and water bill to give WIPP a true one-year budget to plan on,” Domenici said in a prepared statement. “That not being the case, the CR will at least allow WIPP to enjoy its FY2008 funding levels until congress decides to act on FY2009 spending bills. I will work with DOE to see that WIPP and Carlsbad have the resources they need.”
According to the press release, Domenici also secured $3 million within the FY2009 Homeland Security Appropriations Bill to complete construction of a Student Recreational Services Center at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia.

http://www.currentargus.com/ci_10613095

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/oct/02/epa-offers-bit-comfort-cancer-risk/

EPA offers a bit of comfort on cancer risk

New standards for future generations allow for fewer probable cases

Thu, Oct 2, 2008 (2 a.m.)

Reader poll

How much cancer risk should the government expose Nevadans to in its pursuit of a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain?

• Absolutely no risk.
• It’s worth minimal risk in order to promote nuclear energy.
• I’m sure the government wouldn’t let any real risk happen.
• I’ll be dead in 100 years anyway, so I don’t care.

View results

Sun Topics

• Yucca Mountain

Sun Archives

• Editorial: The big pictures (10-1-2008)
• EPA issues final Yucca Mountain radiation rules (9-30-2008)
• Don’t declare Yucca Mountain dump plan dead yet, activist says (9-21-2008)

What is often lost in the debate over Yucca Mountain is that what we’re really talking about is cancer.

How much cancer risk should future Nevadans be exposed to if federal government’s nuclear waste repository is built in the desert 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas?

The answer came this week: 1 in 125.

One in every 125 future residents living near Yucca Mountain’s deadly nuclear waste can expect to be at risk of getting cancer.

One in every 250 can expect to die.

The odds are better for people who would live in the area only a short time.

The new standards, interpreted by watchdog groups, were released by the Bush administration’s Environmental Protection Agency in a surprise move, more than four years after a federal district court tossed out the old ones as not protective enough of Nevadans’ health.

Many observers expected the new cancer risk standards would not be released until after the presidential election so as not to inflame an unpopular issue in the battleground state of Nevada. Most Nevadans oppose Yucca Mountain, even if it is not their top issue. John McCain, the Republican candidate, supports developing the dump; Barack Obama, the Democrat, has vowed to halt it.

Yet others believe that by releasing the new standards, the Bush administration hopes to accelerate the project before leaving office. The Energy Department reached a major milestone this summer by submitting the dump’s application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for approval. Had the cancer standards been released before that, Nevada would have likely sued again and potentially delayed the submittal.

Sen. Harry Reid, the majority leader, said, “There is no way this weak standard will breathe life into the Bush-McCain plan to dump nuclear waste in Nevada.” He and Republican Sen. John Ensign vowed to continue fighting it.

A nuclear watchdog group, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, called for an independent investigation into whether the Energy Department can realistically meet the new standards.

The Democratic chairman of a House environmental committee, Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, said the government should withdraw the project’s application and start over once the Energy Department proves it can protect Nevadans’ health.

The Bush administration’s release of the new risk standard “only reinforces how their entire approach to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project has put politics and the financial health of the nuclear industry ahead of science and the health of the public,” Markey said.

The cancer risk wouldn’t start immediately. That’s what makes talking about cancer at Yucca Mountain tricky. The conversation immediately fast-forwards to the never-never land of planning a facility that will be around for 1 million years.

At first, the risk will be much smaller. For the first 10,000 years, just one in every 1,000 people living in the desert around Yucca Mountain would be at risk of getting cancer. That’s about as much danger as the Environmental Protection Agency allows at other sites with nuclear contamination. Some even have a higher risk.

But what has always tripped up Yucca Mountain planners is what happens in the far-off future, the post-10,000-year time frame, as the waste sits in the mountain for the next million years.

Who knows? Maybe there will be a cure for cancer by then.

But those future years are when the biggest potential risk for exposure occurs. If the containers holding the nuclear fuel begin to corrode, waste could spread into ground water used for drinking and irrigation.

The Energy Department says its models show very little waste will escape — just a small fraction of what the new standards allow. Watchdogs are skeptical.

Still, the new cancer risk standard is an improvement, all sides agree. The original would have allowed as many as 1 in 70 future residents to die of cancer. The court said no way.

But putting 1 in 125 residents at risk of cancer in the far-out future is still more than the government allows at its other nuclear-contaminated sites, said Daniel Hirsch, a longtime anti-nuclear activist who teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Hirsch likes to say the EPA’s approach is like falling off the Empire State Building: The first 50 floors are fine. But the last few are the killers.

The Environmental Protection Agency said the new standard “protects public health and safety for one million years.”

The agency assumes less risk by estimating residents live near the site for only 30 years, rather than 70 years, as watchdogs calculate.

“Developing a standard that will apply for 25,000 generations is unprecedented,” the agency said. “In meeting this challenge, we followed international guidance and applied our best scientific judgment.”

The new standards come at a pivotal time as Nevada’s point man fighting the project, Bob Loux, the director of the state agency for nuclear projects, resigned this week after Gov. Jim Gibbons called for his ouster following Loux’s role in a pay-raise scandal.

Some experts say there may be no one else in the country with the expertise and experience to run the office Loux has headed since its inception 25 years ago.

And the pro-Yucca forces see Loux’s departure as a chance to reconsider the potential economic benefits of hosting a waste dump.

Loux, who will remain on the job until his successor is appointed, said Wednesday the state is reviewing whether it will again sue the government for stricter standards.

Hirsch is a believer in the concept of generational ethics — that this generation has a responsibility not to saddle the next with contamination, which he says the Bush administration would allow at Yucca Mountain.

“For purely political reasons, to try to help get an unsafe project approved, they have overridden the science — and the ethics — of creating so many cancers in people not even born yet,” he said.

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/oct/02/epa-offers-bit-comfort-cancer-risk/