GreenWatch

B. McPherson The latest bad news coming from the crippled nuclear power complex in Fukushima is that the underground storage ponds for radioactive waste are leaking into the surrounding ground. Those in charge of trying to clean up the facility issued a statement about the leaks. “We have yet to grasp the cause of the leaks. But we will strengthen monitoring activities so as to prevent the water from flowing into the sea,” he said. “We want to transfer the contaminated water from the underground reservoirs as soon as possible.” JapanToday I don’t know about you, but it’s sounding as if TEPCO president   Naomi Hirose doesn’t really know what he is doing over there. It has been over two years since the power plant was hit with an earthquake and massive tsunami. It seems that the aftermath reads like a litany of coverups and mishaps. Radioactive material has been buried in playgrounds. In the past week, a rat managed to short circuit a switching station shut...

B. McPherson   Bat with white nose syndrome and electron micrograph of fungus on bat hair White nose disease has been detected in the Fern Cave National Refuge in Alabama. It is home to about one million endangered gray bats and is their principal wintering cave. The disease has wiped out whole populations of bats since its introduction to N. America in 2006. It has not been confirmed how the disease spread from Europe to this continent, but suspicions lie with bat researchers or cavers who inadvertently brought spores of the fungus back with them in their clothes or equipment. The fungus Geomyces destructans , attacks the muzzle and wings showing up as white fuzz on the nose of the bats. They break their winter hibernation and fly out of their caves searching for insects which, of course, are not around in the winter. The bats die of starvation. "White-nose syndrome has arrived in the very core of gray bat habitat and it's like a bomb waiting to go off. Desp...

B. McPherson Hold onto your hats. Here Canadians thought the Tar Sands were Oil Sands in Alberta. Some people call the product bitumen. It’s the consistency of peanut butter so won’t flow nicely in the pipelines. It needs to be heated in cold climates and diluted with a witch’s brew of chemicals, including that old favourite – benzene. When the Enbridge Pipeline carrying diluted bitumen or dilbit ruptured in the Kalamazoo River two years ago, they made some effort to clean up the oil, only it wasn’t oil. You know the old saying “If it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck and walks like a duck, it must be a duck.” In the fairy tale land of the US lawmakers, dilbit isn’t oil. It’s something else again. Why is this important? Oil companies are required to pay into an Oil Liability Trust Fund that has the money to clean up the inevitable spills that occur during the transportation of oil products. But if you are transporting dilbit   or oil, not oil they don’t h...