A federal judge last week approved settlement of a public-interest lawsuit that won a significant victory for the people of Flint, Mich. The judge’s decision binds the state and federal governments to replace the city’s 18,000 lead-coated and galvanized water service lines within three years.
Nadia Prupis – Public Cost of Fukushima Cleanup Tops $628 Billion and Is Expected to Climb
The public cost of cleaning up the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster topped ¥4.2 trillion (roughly $628 billion) as of March, and is expected to keep climbing, the Japan Times reported on Sunday. That includes costs for radioactive decontamination and compensation payments. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) will sell off its shares to eventually pay back the cost of decontamination and waste disposal, but …
Is Your Food On Crack? Salmon Test Positive For 81 Different Drugs, Prozac, Birth Control, Cocaine
When stories like the lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan make national news, people sit up and take notice. What people don’t realize is just how contaminated our water is all the time, every day, every where. I’m not talking about heavy metals like lead, although unless regular testing is done the nation over or you test your own water with a …
Arsenic found in many US red wines, but health risks depend on total diet
A new University of Washington study that tested 65 wines from America’s top four wine-producing states — California, Washington, New York and Oregon — found all but one have arsenic levels that exceed what’s allowed in drinking water. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency allows drinking water to contain no more than 10 parts per billion of arsenic. The wine samples …
The Other One Percent – Ralph Nader
As a high school student, I came across an observation by Abraham Lincoln who said that “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.” Today “public sentiment” would be called “public opinion.” Over the years, I have been astonished at how less than one percent of the citizenry, backed by the “public sentiment,” have changed our country …
TEPCO – No Technology Exists To Stop Fukushima Death
Anyone with a brain could have told you back in 2011 at the time of the Fukushima nuclear triple melt down that Tokyo Electric (Tepco) was lying about the true condition of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant No. 1 (“Dai-ichi”). Four years later, Tepco officials have finally admitted that it may not be technologically possible to decommission the plant. The …
Fracking Town’s Desperate Laid-off Workers: ‘They Don’t Tell You It’s All a Lie’
From the looks of it, the nation’s boomtown is still booming. Big rigs, cement mixers and oil tankers still clog streets built for lighter loads. The air still smells like diesel fuel and looks like a dust bowl— all that traffic — and natural gas flares, wasted byproducts of the oil wells, still glare out at the night sky like …
The Failure of Modern Industrial Agriculture
Americans are being subjected to an ongoing multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign designed to “increase confidence and trust in today’s agriculture.” Food Dialogues, just one example of this broader trend, is a campaign sponsored by the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance—an industry organization whose funders and board members include Monsanto, DuPont, and John Deere. The campaign features the “faces of farming and ranching”—articulate, …