WASHINGTON — Scientists have found radioactive material from the crippled Fukushima nuclear reactor in tiny sea creatures and ocean water some 600 km off the coast of Japan, revealing the extent of the release and the direction pollutants might take in a future environmental disaster.

Using 24 specially equipped drifting buoys, a team led by researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts found radioactive isotopes — slightly different versions of elements — derived from the plant in seawater as well as in various microorganisms and a small sample of fish.

In some places, the WHOI team discovered cesium radiation hundreds to thousands of times higher than would be expected naturally, with ocean eddies and larger currents both guiding the ‘radioactive debris’ and concentrating it.

With these results, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers estimate that it will take at least a year or two for the radioactive material released at Fukushima Daiichi plant to get across the Pacific Ocean.

‘We saw a telephone pole,’ study leader Ken Buesseler, a marine chemist and oceanographer at WHOI, told LiveScience. ‘There were lots of chemical plants. A lot of stuff got washed into the ocean.’

The Fukushima nuclear plant […]

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The world’s most hated corporation is at it again, this time in Vermont.

Despite overwhelming public support and support from a clear majority of Vermont’s Agriculture Committee, Vermont legislators are dragging their feet on a proposed GMO labeling bill. Why? Because Monsanto has threatened to sue the state if the bill passes.

The popular legislative bill requiring mandatory labels on genetically engineered food (H-722) is languishing in the Vermont House Agriculture Committee, with only four weeks left until the legislature adjourns for the year. Despite thousands of emails and calls from constituents who overwhelmingly support mandatory labeling, despite the fact that a majority (6 to 5) of Agriculture Committee members support passage of the measure, Vermont legislators are holding up the labeling bill and refusing to take a vote.

Instead, they’re calling for more public hearings on April 12, in the apparent hope that they can run out the clock until the legislative session ends in early May.

What happened to the formerly staunch legislative champions of Vermont’s ‘right to know

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You’ve heard it before: politicians say they’d love to take action against climate change, but they’re reeling from sticker shock. Today, a new report from the UK’s leading climate change watchdog refutes this oft-cited argument that climate action will herald economic Armageddon.

The Committee on Climate Change report, with the hairy-sounding title ‘Statutory Advice on Inclusion of International Aviation and Shipping,

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A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.

‘Curveball’, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi’s lies used to justify the Iraq war.

He tries to defend his actions: ‘My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime’s oppression.’

The chemical engineer claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological laboratory when he sought political asylum in Germany in 1999. His lies were presented as ‘facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence’ by Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003.

But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him ‘we […]

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Ursula Sladek, a 2011 Goldman Environmental Prize recipient, is the co-founder and president of EWS, one of Europe’s largest cooperatively owned green energy companies. Motivated by the nuclear fallout from Chernobyl in 1986, the schoolteacher and mother of five from the small town of Schönau (population 2,382) in Germany’s Black Forest region – along with her husband Michael and a group of concerned parents – unsuccessfully lobbied her regional power company to adopt conservation measures, to no avail. After over 10 years of citizen activism and two referendums, Sladek and her small-town energy rebels were able to take over the local grid and start a community-run power co-op.

With total sales reaching 67 million euro in 2009, EWS has long outgrown its local market. While Schönau boasts three times the national average in photovoltaics, 20 cogeneration units, two hydroelectric plants, and a windmill, EWS today provides power from over 1,800 solar, hydroelectric, wind, biomass and cogeneration facilities to 115,000 homes and businesses throughout Germany and Europe. With the Merkel government’s recent decision to phase out nuclear energy by 2022 and a targeted switch to 100 percent renewables by 2050, the former rebels suddenly find themselves at the vanguard of a new […]

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