LA Weekly

The NRC has begun to consider whether depleted uranium, or DU, should continue to be classified as low-level, or Class A waste, even though it's about 35 times more radioactive than any other Class A waste. Seems pretty straightforward to me, but let's explore the issues raised by this weekend's Salt Lake Tribune story, just for kicks:

DU comes out of the country's single uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, Kentucky, by the barrel; it has built up there and at Paducah's "sister" facility, the now nonoperational Portsmouth, Ohio gaseous diffusion plant.

(Gaseous diffusion involves turning the uranium into gas and force it through a series of membranes until its reduced to the appropriate concentration of uranium-235: Four percent for most reactors; 90 percent for weapons.)

At issue is whether DU poses a low-enough risk to workers that Utah's Envirocare dump should be allowed to store it. If Envirocare can't store it, it will lose a plum contract with a proposed New Mexico uranium enrichment facility run by Louisiana Energy Services.

Naturally, the people who want the contract to go through think DU isn't so bad:

Louisiana Energy Services and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff have based their dose estimates on calculations made by the U.S. Energy Department, which says that depleted uranium is well under the 25 millirem considered safe.

Anti-nuclear folks such as Arun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, however, say DU is actually pretty dangerous.

Makhijani says none of them has done the homework and the dose would be many times higher. And he noted that depleted uranium gets even more radioactive over time, because the metals produced when it decays have a more destructive radioactive energy than uranium.

And then there's this guy:

Rod Kirch, the vice president of licensing [for Louisiana Energy Services], said the environmental groups have exaggerated the risks.

"This material is pretty benign," he said. "It has been handled for 50 years without trouble. . . ."

Ah-hem.

Now, I don't pretend to know the answer to this one, but I'm pretty sure benign is the wrong word here. And some Gulf War vets and mothers of babies in Basra might agree with me.

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Everyone knows about the drought in the Amazon by now, but hardly anyone has pinned the cause to any kind of ecological destruction. This story in the Wall Street Journal questions whether the culprit is deforestation -- which has been happening faster than anyone imagined.

[A] study of the top five timber-producing states of the Brazilian Amazon showed that selectively logged areas, which previously had been hard to discern by researchers, ranged from 12,075 to 19,823 square kilometers per year between 1999 and 2002. Those areas were equivalent to an increase of 60% to 123% in deforestation of the Amazon beyond previous estimates. The study was led by researchers at the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

"We think this adds 25% more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere" from the Amazon than had been measured previously, said Michael Keller, an author of the study and an ecologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service.

More in the journal Science on Friday, says WSJ.

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How does this happen?

The researchers . . . carried out tests on two groups of male mice, one housed in a chamber with a filter to ensure they received pollution-free air and the others housed without a filter.

After four months both groups were mated with females not exposed to pollution. Males from the filtered air environment produced 34 per cent more male offspring than female. Those exposed to pollution produced 14 per cent fewer male offspring than female.

By what strange biological process does PM10 kill Y chromosomes?

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I saw Chris Mooney (The Republican War on Science) speak last night at CalTech. A couple of things I noticed on the analytical level, where interesting things happen that aren't necessary what the event's about:

1. Mooney is young, a little nervous, and generally kind to his audience, even his hecklers. (There was one: He wanted Mooney to admit that the Bush administration is the first to have funded stem cell research, so Mooney did, and graciously moved on.) Nevertheless, he seems fairly fed up with the inability, or unwillingness, of scientists to talk to the public about things scientific.

2. When the question-and-answer period came around, Mooney -- unlike so many politicans, pundits, media experts, journalists and scientists I have seen at these kinds of speaking events -- called disproportionately on women.

3. And far from being a knee-jerk ideologue, Mooney stays in the land of acceptable, proven research. "When there's a debate, describe the debate," he tells science journalists. "When there's not a debate, don't report one." (I paraphrase.) There is no debate on, for instance, evolution vs. Discovery Institute-style creations, aka "intelligent design." There is, however, on whether hurricanes have become more intense or frequent due to global warming.

I would have agreed until yesterday -- and not just because the 882-millibar Wilma (which Reuters described as a hurricane that "boasts a very tight eye") briefly became the biggest, baddest hurricane ever recorded. I changed my mind when, on the Weather Channel yesterday, Dr. Heidi Cullen showed a graph of historical hurricanes over the last century. I can't find it online (though I'm still looking), but it looked pretty much like this one.

In other words, it looked like a hockey stick.

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The Corps can build the levees higher and stronger, but New Orleans didn't always rely on engineering bravado to save it from Gulf storms. Until this century, the city counted on a three-tiered defense: barrier islands to break the waves, wetlands to absorb storm surges and inland cypress forests to slow the winds. All have been disappearing.

Time magazine has an excellent story on how wetlands and barrier islands should have protected the Gulf Coast (much like mangroves should have protected Thailand's beaches against last December's tsunami).

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