IAEA Boss Says Fukushima Water Leak Urgent

International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Yukiya Amano on Monday characterized the leak of radioactive water at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant as “a matter of high priority that needs to be addressed urgently.” Amano pledged to send a team to Japan this autumn to deal with the increasingly worrisome problem. Meanwhile, plant operator TEPCO announced […]

Peak oil is alive and well, and costing the earth

You might have heard that peak oil s dead. But peak oil is very much alive, and squeezing its hands ever more tightly around the throats of oil-dependent economies. You might have heard that peak oil – the theory that one day crude oil production will stop increasing, even as demand grows – is dead. […]

Tech Talk – of grouting, ground freezing and answers at Fukushima

One of the reasons that I started to write blogs was to help folks to understand some of the technical background that fed into corporate decisions. I was watching the PBS Newshour this past week, and they were discussing the change in philosophy at the Fukushima nuclear plant. After trying to seal the flow of […]

Future offers no guarantee that population will stabilize

Is it true that human overpopulation isn’t such a big issue anymore as numbers are expected to start declining in a few decades? — Melinda Mason, Boone, Iowa Ever since Thomas Malthus published “An Essay on the Principle of Population” in 1798, positing incorrectly that humans’ proclivity for procreation would exhaust the global food supply […]

The Real Population Problem

Sometimes considered a taboo subject, the issue of population runs as an undercurrent in virtually all discussions of modern challenges. Naturally, resource use, environmental pressures, climate change, food and water supply, and the health of the world’s fish and wildlife populations would all be non-issues if Earth enjoyed a human population of 100 million or […]

Africa to lead world in population growth

Africa, the world’s poorest region, will record the largest amount of population growth of any world region between now and 2050. Africa’s population is expected to more than double, rising from 1.1 billion today to at least 2.4 billion by 2050. Nearly all of that growth will be in the 51 countries of sub-Saharan Africa, […]

The Next Ten Billion Years

Earlier this week, I was trying to think of ways to talk about the gap between notions about the future we’ve all absorbed from the last three hundred years of fossil-fueled progress, on the one hand, and the ways of thinking about what’s ahead that might actually help us make sense of our predicament and […]

Fracking Wastewater Cited In Blackside Dace Die-Off

If you’ve never heard of Blackside dace before, now’s your chance. Blackside dace is a federally listed threatened species of minnow found only in the Cumberland Basin part of Tennessee and Kentucky.  We suddenly find them quite interesting because the US Geological Survey has partnered with the Fish and Wildlife Service in a newly released […]

Water Scarcity Could Drive Conflict or Cooperation

When the General Assembly declared 2013 the International Year of Water Cooperation (IYWC) three years ago, the U.N.’s highest policy-making body was conscious of the perennial conflicts triggered by competition over one of the world’s most critical finite resources. Current and past water conflicts and marine disputes have included confrontations between Israel and Jordan, India […]

Japan Radioactive Water Alarm Spurs Government Intervention

Japan may announce measures today to contain the growing volume of radiated water at the Fukushima atomic station, following findings of radioactive hot spots and leaks more than two years after reactors melted at the plant. The Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters may present steps to tackle the leaks today and plans a “complete package” of […]

Fukushima radiation levels spike

he operator of Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant said Saturday it had found new radiation hotspots near tanks storing toxic water, with one reading peaking at 1,800 millisieverts per hour—a potentially lethal dose. Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) detected high radiation readings at four sites around the tanks although none of the containers showed […]

Campfire: Towards Homo Sapiens – A Movie Script

For a few years, on Saturdays, theoildrum.com hosted a “Campfire” discussion – with a focus not on charts and graphs, but more on the social science glue connecting the many subjects revolving around energy, the environment and society. Rather than a place to discover correct answers, the forum was intended to be a sandbox where […]

Neo-Malthusians believe we may still be heading for some kind of population crash

Ever since Thomas Malthus published “An Essay on the Principle of Population” in 1798, positing incorrectly that humans’ proclivity for procreation would exhaust the global food supply within a matter of decades, population growth has been a hot button issue among those contemplating humankind’s future. Indeed our very success going forth and multiplying, paired with […]

Fukushima Radiation Affecting US Tuna

Recent reports have exposed what some people had predicted at the time of the Fukushima nuclear disaster: that radiation would spread. And it has, through fish that migrates between North America and Japan. Reuters recently reported that “low levels of radioactive cesium from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident turned up in fish caught off California […]

Fukushima Daiichi leak raised to level 3 severity

Japan’s nuclear regulators have raised the level of severity of the radioactive water leak from a tank at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. It is now a level-3 serious incident. The revision from level 1 is based on estimates of the volume of radioactive substances leaked. The leak was found earlier this month at one […]

Texas Earthquakes Tied to Extraction in Fracking

A recent wave of small earthquakes in and around the Eagle Ford formation in Texas was probably the result of extracting oil and in some cases water used for hydraulic fracturing, according to a study. Clusters of small-magnitude seismic events between November 2009 and September 2011 were “often associated with fluid extraction,” according to the […]

Fukushima’s legacy is just beginning

The highly radioactive water leaking from the wrecked Fukushima plant is part of a problem that Japan will take decades to resolve and which will blight many thousands of lives. LONDON, 25 August – The discovery at the plant of a leak of radioactive caesium eight times more dangerous than the levels immediately after the […]

Some Credible Scientists Believe Humanity Is Irreparably Close to Destruction

If you were to zoom out and take a comparative look back at our planet during the 1950s from some sort of cosmic time-travelling orbiter cube, you would probably first notice that millions of pieces of space trash had disappeared from orbit. The moon would appear six and a half feet closer to Earth, and […]

Fukushima Update

It’s been over 2 years since the nuclear disaster at Fukushima and it still seems to be making headlines (I’m sure officials were assuring us a few weeks after the disaster occurred that all was well and it couldn’t possibly melt down) so I thought I’d do a little survey of recent news. A few […]

Scientists discover another cause of bee deaths

So what is with all the dying bees? Scientists have been trying to discover this for years. Meanwhile, bees keep dropping like… well, you know. Is it mites? Pesticides? Cell phone towers? What is really at the root? Turns out the real issue really scary, because it is more complex and pervasive than thought. Quartz […]

Fukushima, Climate Change, Near-Term Extinction: Resignation Vs. Surrender

All things die and all things live forever; But our task is to die, To die making roads, Roads over the sea. ~Antonio Machado~ Recently a reader of my website asked me to clarify the difference between resignation and surrender. When faced with catastrophic climate change, near-term extinction, and the worst emission of radiation in […]

Forced Sterilization, Population Control and HIV/AIDS

Last July, a high court sentenced the Namibian state for the forced sterilization of three HIV-positive women. In Uzbekistan, authorities continue to deny reported cases. AWID looks into forced sterilizations in both countries and what it means for women’s reproductive rights. By Ani Colekessian* Though sterilization can be an effective family planning option for many […]

Tritium Measurement In Fukushima Bay Highest Ever As TEPCO Admits 40 Trillion Becquerels Have Spilled Into Pacific

Over the weekend we posted an in-depth narrative of what may happen in a theoretical worst case scenario in Fukushima, one in which the government continues to do nothing and pretends all is well, and where the end casualties are millions of innocent Japanese (and other) citizens, whose only crime is believing their government. Sadly, […]

Fukushima apocalypse: Years of ‘duct tape fixes’ could result in ‘millions of deaths’

Even the tiniest mistake during an operation to extract over 1,300 fuel rods at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan could lead to a series of cascading failures with an apocalyptic outcome, fallout researcher Christina Consolo told RT. Fukushima operator TEPCO wants to extract 400 tons worth of spent fuel rods stored in […]

As global water crisis brews

As the earth’s population booms, the world’s finite water supply has come under scrutiny by the United Nations. Governments across the world are now engaged in water management as the UN predicts that in the next 12 years, two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under the stress of water scarcity.     In […]

Radioactive Water Leaking From Fukushima: Why Millions Of Lives Are At Stake

In lieu of the Japanese government doing the right thing and finally coming clean about the epic environmental catastrophe that is Fukushima, which it hopes to simply dig under the rug even as the inconvenient reality gets worse and thousands of tons of radioactive water make their way into the ocean, one is forced to […]

A world without bees; beekeepers say it could happen

As the worldwide bee population continues to decline from something called Colony Collapse Disorder, Ozarks beekeepers say it could have a serious impact on food prices. A third of US honeybee colonies died or vanished during this past winter but you may be asking yourself, why should I care?  Some passionate Ozarkers say there are […]

More population growth?

Predictions of future population growth are always shaky. And as far as I know the fastest and best way to restrict growth on an already crowded planet is to empower women (education, access to birth control, income). However, these are the predictions of the specialists, from the worldwatch institute: World population reached 7.2 billion in […]

Ecuador to Open Amazon Rainforest to Oil Drilling

OPEC-member Ecuador, where the rights of nature are recognized in the constitution, plans to develop crude deposits in an Amazon area declared a biosphere reserve by the United Nations as existing fields age and economic growth slows. President Rafael Correa will ask the country’s congress to allow drilling in the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini oil fields in eastern […]

Dangerous Operation at Fukushima’s Reactor No. 4 Could Ignite “Atomic Chain Reaction”

Attempt to remove fuel rods from crippled building could cause “unprecedented” disaster Threatening to trigger a new—and possibly more devastating—nuclear disaster than the original or ongoing one at the Fukishima plant in Japan, a risky plan to remove fuel rods from a damaged reactor building could unleash an “unprecedented” level of radiation, according to experts, […]

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