Back to my roots

This week's Grist Magazine has been especially interesting. One of the articles reminded me that someone once asked me (back in the day when this blog was mostly environmentalist rants) what's wrong with nuclear power. I'm afraid my answer was either nonexistant or not all that articulate, so I'm linking their much more clear argument.

They also included an article that discussed the problems of communicating to future civilizations that they should not dig up our buried hazardous waste. Of course it would be best to either not create such waste or to decontaminate it immediately, but our current political situation and technology don't allow for either, so communicating with people 10,000 years from now becomes a real concern.

In my search for the original question that someone asked about nuclear power, I came across a list of many other questions. Interestingly enough, this week's Grist addressed several of them, so here are a few more answers:

Jen: I want to know about landfills.
The recovery effort in New Orleans has brought up a lot of issues of hazardous waste in landfills.

Amanda: I want to know about logging in national forests.
Though this isn't a direct answer, it is interesting how so many of the current (bad) policies interact.

Dorian: I want to know about mercury in my seafood.
Mercury enters the environment from coal fired power plants (among other things). It enters the food chain through microbial processes mostly in the soil that I'm not sure I can explain. It isn't metabolized by most organisms, so it accumulates in an organism's tissues as it consumes mercury over it's lifetime, with highest concentrations showing up in large predators, especially marine and aquatic ones like tuna or orcas because of the higher concentration of bacteria in their environment. The good news is The governor of Idaho says no to coal.

Dorian: I want to know if there's really any safe drinking water anymore.
Most city water systems in the US are actually pretty good. Wells can be more of a problem, but here in the developed world, we really don't have much to worry about. The rest of the world has much bigger problems, but not to worry, Jay-Z's on it.

Amanda: I want to know how other "developed" countries approach environmental policy.
I'm not sure if it qualifies as "developed", but Cuba has some interesting plans.