The Hanford Nuclear Problem

The Hanford Nuclear Problem

            By Josh Davison

   As you all may know, the Hanford Nuclear site was established in eastern Washington along the Columbia River as part of the Manhattan Project.  It is home to the B-Reactor, the first full scale plutonium reactor in the world and was created for the purpose of building nuclear bombs.  It was very successful.  A lot of the bombs tested at the Trinity Site, where the Manhattan Project tested its bombs and an area that is now close to many Native American reservations, were created at Hanford.  However, it is most famous for created the plutonium for the bomb “Fat Man” that devastated the Japanese city of Nagasaki and marked the end of WWII. 

            After the war ended the Hanford site expanded to nine large nuclear reactors and five plutonium processing complexes.  During the Cold War, these reactors and this site were responsible for the plutonium in some 60,000 nuclear weapons. As you can imagine this large expansion, close proximity to the town of Hanford, the Tri-City area, and the Columbia River has caused extreme environmental degradation coupled with health concerns.

            Numerous environmental hazards have plagued the Hanford site.  Some of these problems have been covered up by the government in the past and some other problems continue to this very day.  From 1941 to 1971 the cover-up entailed the pumping of the Columbia River into the reactors to cool them, subsequently storing that water for a short period of six hours to be treated, and then releasing it back into the Columbia River.  Anyone with half a brain knows the half live of plutonium to be thousands of years so this could not have gotten rid of all the harmful radiation being pumping back into the Columbia.  This has hurt fish and high radiation levels have been found up and down the Washington and Oregon coast around the Columbia’s mouth because of this.  Many Native Americans cannot fish there anymore for fear of contracting radiation poisoning.

            The plutonium separation process also results in isotopes being let into the air.  As a result of this, the areas around Hanford and the Tri-Cities have had potentially harmful levels of radionuclides in the air possibly causing things like cancer.  Radiation levels have been found to be high in the southeastern Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and even British Columbia area because of the Hanford problem.  Having been a resident of the area for over 20 years the resounding joke is that the deer along the Hanford site “glow green” as a result of eating contaminated grass and breathing the air.  Once you think about it, it is not as funny as it sounds because this is going into people as well.

            Around 53 million gallons of toxic waste are stored underground at Hanford as well.  Almost as soon as this waste was stored it began to leak.  There are 177 tanks about 12 miles from the river and to date about 70 of the tanks have had leaking problems resulting in 1 million gallons of toxic waste leaching into the soil.  It is estimated that it takes 7 to 20 years for this waste to reach the groundwater and the river.  It not only hurts us now, but it hurts future generations as well.

            What should we do about it? It is an expensive, but necessary problem to fix. I would love feedback…

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site#Environmental_concerns

http://www.hanfordwatch.org/introduction.htm

Being a former Marine who served four years to defend this county freedom, I am saddened by what is happening in Camp Lejeune. Camp Lejeune is the second largest Marine Corps base and it is located in North Carolina. The drink water is full of dangerous chemicals that are casing physicals and psychological defects in children and adults. This is effect people of all racial and ethnic background. Its water wells were tainted with cancer-causing industrial compounds for 30 years, ending in 1987. The government has estimated that 500,000 to 1 million people who live on the base and around that been using contaminated water to drank, bathed and cooked with.  Camp Lejeune's population is believed the largest ever exposed to the solvents at such high levels. The Environmental Protection Agency is overseeing cleanups at more than 150 military installations polluted by the same chemicals. Drinking water usually was unaffected, but underground contamination migrated to surrounding neighborhoods and wells at some sites. This is terrible because we can see that the Department of Defends does care about the safety of Marines and their family. This has been going on for over 30 years.

 http://tucsoncitizen.com/veteranveritas/2011/01/13/water-contamination-at-marine-corps-base-camp-lejuene-nc-answers-to-disability-claimsmcclatchy-news/

Mien-Quoc Ly

Food Is Power

One of the areas we need to work on in our communities is the current food system in the United States; it has led to people of color in low-income communities having higher rates of obesity and diabetes. This form of environmental racism poses a serious threat to the health of future generations, but inequitable food distribution can be remedied if policy makers and communities work together. Residents in lower income communities and communities of color lack easy access to fresh fruits and vegetables. If we were to survey the access to healthy foods in both high income and low-income neighborhoods, we would reveal that higher income areas have more than twice as many large super markets per capita as lower income areas. In contrast lower income communities have nearly twice as many liquor stores and 50 percent more markets that sell an abundance of meat products, neither of these types of stores offer a variety of healthy food options, especially fresh fruits and vegetables. Because communities of color and lower-income communities have about half the number of large supermarkets as their higher-income counterparts, for example, they have much less access to fruits and vegetables. As a result, consumers shopping for food in lower-income neighborhoods rely more on liquor stores and other retail businesses that don’t necessarily offer healthy options. With all of the wealth in our environments, it is unacceptable that certain communities do not have access to fruits, vegetables, and other healthy food alternatives. Such a food injustice can lead to a host of health problems, including type-2 diabetes and obesity. That this can happen in our own backyard is inexcusable; it’s really a form of environmental racism. Policymakers and communities combining their efforts can fix this problem. Some recommendations would be to include prices on produce and clarify the federal North American Industy Classification System, which currently counts small retail outlets as grocery stores, even if they sell mostly alcohol and junk food. Our goal should be to work with the communities suffering the biggest food inequities; a more just food system in the U.S. is possible if everyone works together.

By Mary Navarro

sources: http://www.foodispower.org/

"There are fears that hundreds, if not thousands of Black men and women have been captured and thrown in jail without being charged for any crimes or being Gaddafi loyalist, just because of the colour of their skin."


This incident happened a while back but I thought it would be a wake up call upon the Environmental Racism and be relevant to this discussion. The sentence above was from the article which identifies the social issues of racism around the world. Relating this back to what was said in lecture, racism is  the inherent of different trait justifying human discrimination. This correlates to poverty and the lack of resources to the people of color. The two words in this article, "ethnic cleansing" stood out the most and brings to the discussion of how the people of Lydia were being get rid of because of their skin color.The unfair treatment for these people are unacceptable and unreasonable because even though they are a different, they shouldn't be chased out of their own home and being thrown into jail for doing absolutely nothing. I feel that the leaders there and around the world have lost their voice and this is why tragic issues like this are happening, but it's not too late to raise the voice of equality once again. 


http://www.obv.org.uk/news-blogs/black-genocide-libya-why-silence 


By: Thu-Hieu Ngo

The Toxicity of the Office Environment

The Office Environment

By Josh Davison

 

Polyfluorinated Compounds, or PFCs, are commonly exposed in newly renovated offices. These compounds are potentially harmful and can make you radically sick.  PFCs are released from new furniture, carpet stain removers, paint, basically everything you can find in an office and have been manufactured for over 50 years. They are linked to cancers, thyroid hormone imbalance, and even infertility.

A recent study of 31 offices in Boston compared to people in the home showed that blood tests of people in these newly furnished offices were 3-5 times higher in PFCs than people who worked from home or did not have much office time.  Therefore, the study found that workers in newly renovated building are more at risk for contamination than workers who are in older buildings.

Now you may be asking why exactly they use PFCs.  Well, PFCs are chemicals that are mainly used in water repellent coatings that are hoped to make furniture, appliances, and carpets last longer.  In case you were wondering, this is that new building and new office smell that may sometimes give you a headache. And yes, it is toxic.

Building managers have been known to try to “bake” this smell out of offices by turning up the heat and ventilation systems in a building before anyone is allowed in to work.  While this may get rid of the PFC smell, the PFCs are not that easy to get rid of.  They take a very long time to dissipate quickly because they were designed to repel water for long periods of time.

Eventually, somehow, researchers are not quite sure; these PFCs get into the environment as well.  There have been surprisingly high concentrations of these chemicals in fish, seals, birds, and even polar bears way up in the arctic.  Somehow, these chemicals are breaching even the most remote parts of the world.  This is scary, because they do not occur naturally and are a definite man made compound.

So, the next time you are in a building with that new office smell, you should think twice before spending an awful lot of time inside of the area.  There just might be toxic chemicals that you are touching and breathing in.  However, the bigger problem might be just how these toxic compounds are breaching the environment in the first place. 

 And to end...

Sources: http://www.hindustantimes.com/Entertainment/Luxury/Your-slick-new-office-could-be-making-you-sick/Article1-801992.aspx

http://www.coastalwiki.org/coastalwiki/Polyfluorinated_compounds_-_a_new_class_of_global_pollutants_in_the_coastal_environment

http://electrocorpairpurification.wordpress.com/tag/polyfluorinated-compounds/

Food Justice Is Environmental Justice

"Kimmy is a single mom living in extreme poverty with her three small children on the west side of Buffalo. She works two jobs just to pay for the basics and to keep her family afloat.Everyday after school her three children play outside until she gets home; she quickly cooks dinner for them and the next door neighbor's two kids in exchange for her kids' evening care while she goes to her night job.  Each week she tries to go to the grocery store but must take two buses and her small children with her as well as a small cart for her groceries.  The trip usually takes about four hours and she can only get what she can carry in her cart.  Most weeks, because of her busy work schedule, she must get food from the corner store, which is mainly Mac-n-Cheese, microwave dinners, packaged noodles or canned foods. Otherwise her choices are one of the five fast food restaurants in her neighborhood.  She knows the options aren't good but they allow her to get by, given her hectic schedule. Her kids usually come home from school hungry and go to the corner store for chips and soda since they are cheap and readily available."

             Food security refers to the availability of food and one's access to it. A household is considered food-secure when its occupants do not live in hunger or fear of starvation. This standard can exist only when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life. Unfortunately the story written above is what millions of people in low-income neighborhoods across the nation face on a daily basis. Food security, or the availability of fresh, healthy and culturally appropriate food, is commonly perceived only as an issue in countries overrun with civil war or facing extreme poverty. In 2006 it was reported that globally, the number of people who are overweight has surpassed the number who are undernourished – the world had more than one billion people who were overweight, and an estimated 800 million who were undernourished. Worldwide around 925 million people are chronically hungry due to extreme poverty, while up to 2 billion people lack food security intermittently due to varying degrees of poverty. The Environmental Justice movement has an alternative view that takes a collective approach to achieve food security. It takes note that globally enough food is produced to feed the entire world population at a level adequate to ensure that everyone can be free of hunger and fear of starvation. It believes that no one should live without enough food because of economic constraints or social inequalities is the basic goal. This approach views food security as a basic human right, it advocates fairer distribution of food, particularly grain crops, as a means of ending chronic hunger and malnutrition. The core of the Food Justice movement is the belief that what is lacking is not food, but the political will to fairly distribute food regardless of the recipient’s ability to pay.

source: http://www.greenforall.org/blog/food-justice-is-environmental-justice-is-social-justice/?searchterm=None


Mary Navarro

Seattle's Duwamish River is impacted by contaminated sediments from a century of urban and industrial waste and was listed as a federal Superfund Site in 2001. The river also suffers from ongoing toxic pollution from untreated stormwater and combined sewer overflows. Despite posted fish consumption advisories, many people continue to fish in the Duwamish River in order to put dinner on the table and to maintain their cultural traditions. The majority of Duwamish River seafood consumers are low-income and/or homeless fishermen; tribal members (many from Tribes with treaty rights to harvest fish and seafood from the river); and Asian/Pacific Islander immigrant families for whom fishing and seafood harvesting is deeply rooted in cultural traditions that are important both to subsistence and to family and community cohesion. Many of the river's fishermen fall into more than one of these categories (e.g., low-income/immigrant fishing communities), and report that they are harvesting fish to bring home to their families, including children and women of childbearing age whose health is most at risk from the PCBs, arsenic, dioxins and other toxins present at high levels in the river's fish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFnTOEhurDU

Poverty & Environmental Justice

By Mary Navarro

Poverty in our country is very political, we don't like poor people and we view them as outcasts who only have themselves to blame for their presumed wretchedness, we watch with disdain while poor and homeless people rummage through dumpsters in search of their next meal and think: "See, they are just too dirty and lazy to get a job." 

This racist stereotype flies in the the face of the fact that most of the poor in the USA are the working poor. Let's put some thought into this though, is it really their faults? Honestly, no. It is not the fault of the unfortunate working class, poverty is the resulting condition of a society that assumes everyone is given the same amount of opportunity to become successful, and if they didn't thats their own fault. In reality everyone does not have the same opportunities in the US, in many cases people are born into unfortunate circumstances such as bad neighborhoods that have bad school systems, poor nutritional resources, basically an environment with a recipe for failure. We don't have to look further than our own country to find the worst cases of social stratification, from the time that we are young we grow up with a predetermined mindset that every individual is responsible for their own success and that personal effort results in growth and prosperity, but really who are we kidding? Not everyone in the US gets to grow up in a neighborhood that has a clean environment, a good school, or grocery stores to eat healthy. When you grow up in dismal circumstances such as these, you face failure day after day and in many cases there is no encouragement or even hope to seek higher education to prosper because people do not have the financial resources to attend university. If we allow polluted neighborhoods to persist in our country we will continue to see these patterns of poverty, only when we begin to have a less individualistic mindset and create movements to enable the working class to have a voice on environmental issues will we see change. 

Environmental Racism, Native Americans, and Nuclear Waste

By Josh Davison

The United States is a dominant political, military, and economic forced throughout the world.  While this may be a great thing, this does mean that it has generated waste, pollution, and ecologic destruction.  Even if this is something that cannot be stopped, we must look at the problems the U.S. growth machine has caused in terms of people and ecologic damage.

America, itself, was founded as a free land that was “stolen” from native Mexicans and Native Americans.  While, countries have taken land from the age of Charlemagne to Israel in the late 1940’s (among a legion of other choices), the case of America could be categorized into environmental racism by some.  Racism has shaped the political, economic, and ecologic areas of the U.S. since the signing of the Declaration.  This discrimination forced Native Americans off of their land so that white settlers could have choice land and maybe cultivate that land with their black slaves.  Getting past this “white man first” mantra has been hard over the decades and is still taking place today.

Today, many people in Nevada and Utah live downwind from former nuclear testing sites.  Tribes, like the Navajo, have borne the brunt of this problem by providing miners and land for nuclear waste sites.  The federal government and the nuclear industry have targeted Native American reserves for nuclear waste sites for many, many years.  In 1987, the Office of the Nuclear Waste Negotiator sent letters to many tribal and reservation areas offering hundreds of thousands of dollars to use their land for nuclear waste sites.  It is plausible to think that Congress offered these people because many of them live in very impoverished areas.

Eventually the tiny Skull Valley Band on the Goshute Indians Reservation was targeted for a nuclear waste dump.  They live in Utah, not far from the testing of the nuclear age.   They accepted the cash and now the nuclear dump is almost their only means of economy.  They now have health concerns.  This seems to be a textbook example of a violation of environmental justice because these people were already living in a poisoned land from the nuclear age, quite possibly were suffering health and economically wise, and now they were targeted for being impoverished.

However, this is not to say that these Native Americans had to accept the money the second time around.  It is still a sad story of the powerful preying on the weak in terms of environmental racism and justice.

Source:http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/pfsejfactsheet.htm

http://www.ejrc.cau.edu/PovpolEj.html

Environmental Injustice : Melting of China

http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2007/08/26/in-china-global-environmental-injustice-kills-millions/

By Thu-Hieu Ngo

One of the many factors that contributes to Environmental injustice comes from the cause of pollution. In this article "In China, Global Environmental Injustice Kills Millions", the issue of pollution was brought upon by the social economic issues. The Injustice displays how China has become a sacrifice zone where we offshore jobs, factories and pollution. Large companies are moving their industry over to China, thus creating a toxic land where health issues and death are significant to the Chinese people. Pollution and the lack of safety in the water access has made cancer China's leading cause of death. The toxic air is killing around 760,000 thousands Chinese a year and this brings up the question: Is China's idea of creating better economical growth beneficial for their people? Those who aren't drawn to their death are associating with an unhealthy lifestyle and illness that are preventing them to do certain things. Thousands of people are being hovered over by this toxic cloud but people often don't think that China's injustice is significant and that is why it's left on the side line. This brings forth another question, is this injustice focused on racism or is it an economical issue that effects the environment, or is it both?

Environmental Racism and Native Americans: A Continued Analysis

Environmental Racism and Native Americans: A Continued Analysis

by Josh Davison

The US army used many tactics in order to get Native Americans off of their land.  Among these, the eradication of the American buffalo stands out in the 1870s.  The army encouraged the hunting of these animals to the point of almost extinction.  These hunts were used to force the Native Americans off their traditional hunting grounds onto reservations further west. 

This is one among many problems involving environmental racism and Native Americans that I will continue to write about throughout this quarter.

Food Deserts

 In 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, American's became aware of just how bad living conditions were in certain areas of our nation, not only that but it became apparent as well that there was a level of discrimination involved with it. New Orleans is ranked #1 as America's worst Urban Food Desert, meaning it's residents have little or no access to healthy food including fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, and dairy products. Millions of Americans, mostly poor African Americans live in these areas. Food deserts can be defined by the lack or absence of large grocery stores and supermarkets that sell fresh produce and healthy food options. They typically also consist of low income populations living on tight budgets. There are also usually high levels of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, which result from residents buying their foods from corner stores that sell processed foods, and fast food restaurants. People living in these conditions face everyday challenges such as having to choose between buying food and paying utility bills, there are so many children exposed to these living circumstances and yet there are American's who will never have to worry about missing a meal a day of their life. There is a serious need to look at the state of our nation, and ask ourselves "why is there such a high level of social stratification in a nation that is supposed to provide equal rights?".

Mary Navarro

Environmental Racism in Long Beach, California

As a person of color in Long Beach, I grew up in Cambodia Town. During this time, I hardly ever noticed the amount of institutional racism geared towards my neighborhood; there were a large amount of oil refineries, toxic waste dumps, and other polluters that increased the risk of developing chronic illnesses such as asthma for residents. Asthma had a negative impact on the community, children were getting sick left and right; since most residents were in economic poverty, nothing could be done about it.The neighborhood I lived in was low-income, and I felt like I literally lived in a toxic wasteland.

When we talked about environmental racism in class, it made me reflect on childhood memories growing up in Cambodia Town. It made me wonder if more affluent residents in areas such as Santa Barbara had to face the same problems. Was my community merely being exploited by the same politicians that promised equal justice for all in their campaigns? Just as political disenfranchisement affects former felons, it indirectly affected my community as well. Most of my neighbors had little to no say in elections due to lack of access or time as a result of their socioeconomic status/situation. They had no say to the toxic materials being dumped near their homes and where their children play after school. The unequal distribution of benefits and rewards was very apparent: corporations saved money while the residents of my community suffered various ailments and had little resources to confront this problem.

Mien-Quoc Ly