Beyond Nuclear International
Healing Hózhó in the Nukescape: Hózhó Naasháa Doo
Dismissal of Navajo suffering is a historic trend
By Mahal Miles and Linda Marie Richards
On the eve of the 70thanniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, August 5, 2015, three million gallons of thick-looking mustard yellow water ran through Navajo land, emptying into the San Juan River, then winding to the Utah-Arizona border. EPA mine clean-up workers accidentally breached an abandoned gold debris dam during a remediation of other contaminating mines. By Nagasaki Day 2015, photos of the San Juan River still showed the sickly dense yellow color of the rushing waters.
The Animas River between Silverton and Durango in Colorado, USA, within 24 hours of the 2015 Gold King Mine waste water spill. (Photo: riverhugger/Wikimedia Commons)
The yellow waters of the San Juan triggered memories for Perry H. Charley of the 1979 Church Rock uranium mill and mine tailings break, the largest release of radiation in US history, occurring on the anniversary of the first nuclear weapons use, Trinity Day, July 16, 1945. As reported by Beyond Nuclear International in a July 16, 2018 story, “Ninety million gallons of liquid radioactive waste, and eleven hundred tons of solid mill wastes, burst through a broken dam wall at the Church Rock uranium mill facility, creating a flood of deadly effluents that permanently contaminated the Puerco River.”
Occurring just months after the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in Pennsylvania, the Church Rock disaster, which washed radioactive sludge “into gullies, contaminated fields and the animals that grazed there, and made drinking water deadly,” for the largely Navajo population there, rarely rates a mention.
Africa is also burning
Climate change, economic issues, poverty and survival are the contributing factors to the thousands of fires that are suffocating central Africa
By Angelo Ferrari
The rain forest of the “dark continent” is the second green lung of the planet and is equally at risk. Climate change is only part of the problem. Without the modernization of agriculture, the practice of “cut and burn” cannot be stopped.
Climate change, economic issues, poverty and survival are the contributing factors to the thousands of fires that are suffocating central Africa. Maybe even more numerous than those that are putting the Amazon at risk. Here in Congo and Angola, the savannas are burning, but also part of the rain forest, the second green lung of the planet.
The practice of burning the savannas, known as “cut and burn,” is not new on the African continent. It is found in most African countries, particularly in the less developed ones. It is a practical measure adopted by peasants and shepherds, widespread and with deep roots. An ancestral land management system, as it were. The Ivory Coast is one example. All of the central, forested area, has been destroyed precisely by this practice in order to create cultivatable lands.
NASA’s NPP Suomi satellite shows thousands of fires in Central Africa on July 11, 2016. The fires are represented by the multitude of red dots.
However, climate change has made this practice even more widespread, precisely because of the loss of cultivatable or fertile lands, or of those usable as pasture. This has unleashed and continues to trigger conflicts in the Sahel over the exploitation of what little land remains.
Anche l’Africa brucia
Cambiamenti climatici, questioni economiche, povertà e sopravvivenza sono le concause delle migliaia di incendi che stanno soffocando l’Africa centrale
Di Angelo Ferrari
La foresta pluviale del continente nero è il secondo polmone verde del pianeta ed è altrettanto a rischio. Il cambiamento climatico è solo parte del problema. Senza una modernizzazione dell’agricoltura la pratica del “taglia e brucia” non potrà essere fermata.
Cambiamenti climatici, questioni economiche, povertà e sopravvivenza sono le concause delle migliaia di incendi che stanno soffocando l’Africa centrale. Forse più numerosi di quelli che stanno mettendo a rischio l’Amazzonia. Qui, in Congo e Angola, stando andando a fuoco le savane, ma anche parte della foresta pluviale, il secondo polmone verde del pianeta.
La pratica dell’incendio delle savane, detta “taglia e brucia”, non è nuova per il continente africano. È diffusa nella maggior parte degli stati africani, in particolare in quelli meno sviluppati. Per contadini e pastori è un mezzo pratico, diffuso e che ha radici lontane. Per così dire, un sistema ancestrale di gestione della terra. La Costa d’Avorio ne è un esempio. Tutta la parte centrale, boschiva, è stata distrutta proprio da questa pratica per avere terre coltivabili.
Il satellite NPP Suomi della NASA ha rilevato migliaia di incendi nell’Africa centrale l’11 luglio 2016. Gli incendi sono rappresentati da una moltitudine di punti rossi.
I cambiamenti climatici, tuttavia, hanno reso questa pratica ancora più diffusa, proprio per il venir meno delle terre coltivabili e fertili, o utilizzabili per i pascoli. Fattore, questo, che nel Sahel ha scatenato e scatena conflitti per lo sfruttamento della poca terra che rimane.
Standing up and fighting back
Reflections on the September 20 climate strike in Washington, DC
By Linda Pentz Gunter
In 1968, German students were on the march. The 68ers protest movement was in the streets, outraged largely at government authoritarianism, as well as their own economic struggles. What they also spawned was a culture of mistrust in the government, and a willingness to mobilize in huge numbers.
Arguably, it was the 68ers whose actions spawned the German climate movement, one which incorporated the many strands that are siloed elsewhere — pro-renewable energy, anti-war, anti-nuclear power and anti-nuclear weapons.
Student protest in West Berlin, Germany, 1968. (Photo: Stiftung Haus der Geschichte, Wikimedia Commons.)
What the 68ers were also rebelling against, of course, was the complicity of their parents in Nazism. Their protests were fueled by the anger and betrayal they felt. They had inherited a country that was forever stained by the grossest acts of barbarity imaginable. Why hadn’t their parents stopped it? They knew. They must have known. Why didn’t they act?
Some Germans did act of course. But not enough.
Now, some of us are the generation that those culpable German parents were then. And we are being asked the same question, this time about the climate crisis. Surely we knew? The evidence was always there. Why didn’t we act?
Some of us did, of course. But not enough.
Murky politics pollute the Pacific
Radioactive water at Fukushima should be stored not dumped
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Last week, Japan’s then environment minister, Yoshiaki Harada, made news with a pronouncement that wasn’t news. The storage tanks at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear site, filled with radioactive water, were reaching capacity. By 2022 there would be no room for more tanks on the present site. Japan would then have to dump the radioactive water stored in the tanks into the Pacific Ocean, he said.
Although likely unrelated to those remarks, a day later, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe dispatched 19 of his cabinet ministers, including Harada. Harada was replaced as environment minister by rising star, Shinjiro Koizumi, the son of former primer minister, Junichiro Koizumi. Both father and son are opposed to nuclear energy, and on his first day in office, the younger Koizumi told reporters that he believed Japan should end its use of nuclear energy and close its nuclear power plants.
Shinjiro Koizumi, Japan’s new environment minister, says Japan should cease using nuclear power. (Photo: R2d2ki for Wikimedia Commons)
“I would like to study how we scrap them, not how to retain them,” Reuters reported him saying. This is a surprising position from someone inside the fervently pro-nuclear Abe government and it remains to be seen whether he will be allowed to translate his position into policy.
Hanford’s Dirty Secret
And it’s not 56 million gallons of nuclear waste
Reported by ICAN
Building nuclear weapons requires materials and labor, not just from scientists, but also from the men and women living in communities nearby. After the Cold War, many of the United States’ most crucial nuclear weapons production sites ‘closed’ and were forgotten, but not by workers and local communities, who were left to deal with the devastating, toxic legacy of these sites.
This is obvious at Hanford Waste Management Site, Washington. It is sometimes referred to as “the most toxic place in America,” yet most people will never have heard of it. While the workers and activists of Hanford speak out, their stories are dismissed because they demonstrate the real cost of nuclear weapons.
What happened at the Hanford site?
Hanford site was one piece of the Manhattan Project puzzle. It developed plutonium for the Trinity Test, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and Cold War weapons. By 1965, there were nine weapons reactors, five reprocessing plants, hundreds of support and research buildings, and 177 underground waste tanks. Ultimately, Hanford produced 74 tons of plutonium, roughly two-thirds of the US’s stockpile. The production facilities were phased out as the Cold War ended and the Dept. of Energy delegated cleanup to various private companies.
Beyond Nuclear International 