NucNews - November 23, 2005
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- australia
Australia's Northern Territory continues fight against nuclear dump
Australian Broadcasting 23/11/2005, 14:52:47
http://www.abc.net.au/ra/news/stories/s1514866.htm
In Australia, the Northern Territory government has accused the Commonwealth of ignoring scientific research in its deliberations on where to put a national nuclear waste dump.
Our reporter, Sarah Hawke, says a senate committee is examining laws that would allow the dump to be built in the Northern Territory.
Northern Territory Chief Minister Clare Martin has told the committee, sitting in the capital Canberra, the Commonwealth has based its selection process for the site on politics and has abandoned previous scientific studies showing the Territory is not the best location.
"The current proposal would have to be the worst possible way to select a site," she said.
The Country Liberal Party senator, Nigel Scullion, didn't attend the hearing but says resistance from the states meant the Federal government had no choice but to target the Territory.
"[It] certainly could have been done better, but let's face it, it wasn't the Federal government ambushing it, the Federal government doesn't believe it should be in the Northern Territory," he said.
-------- britain
UK's Blair says Tough Nuclear Power Decision Looms
Story by Mike Peacock
REUTERS UK: November 23, 2005
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/33614/newsDate/23-Nov-2005/story.htm
LONDON - The British government must make tough decisions over whether to invest in a new generation of nuclear power, Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Tuesday as he prepared to launch a new review of Britain's energy needs.
Government advisers and industry groups are urging new investment in nuclear power, not least because Britain will probably miss its greenhouse gas reduction goals without it.
Government officials say Blair will announce shortly a full-scale review to report back in 2006 and only then will a final decision be taken on whether to build new power stations.
"With some of the issues to do with climate change, and you can see it with the debate about nuclear power, there are going to be difficult and controversial decisions the government has got to take," Blair told a committee of senior parliamentarians.
"In the end it has got to do what it believes to be right in the long-term interests of the country," said Blair, who is believed to be in favour, in principle, of new nuclear build.
The government's chief scientific adviser, David King, urged Blair on Sunday to give the go-ahead for an expansion of nuclear power generation to help stem climate change.
The Confederation of British Industry has also pressed for a decision within a year to end uncertainty about energy supply.
Blair previously signalled a willingness to consider sanctioning new nuclear reactors to cut carbon dioxide emissions in his party conference speech two months ago.
All but one of the UK's nuclear power stations are due to close by 2023. Without new investment, nuclear power will contribute four percent of Britain's energy needs by 2010, down from 21 percent now.
Britain has become a net importer of gas and the government is more concerned about the security of its energy supply, which will increasingly come from abroad.
"The reason why we are coming back to that in the context of the energy review that we will announce shortly is that the facts have changed over the past couple of years," Blair said.
Trade and Industry Secretary Alan Johnson -- the lead cabinet minister on the issue -- may shed light on future plans when he testifies to a parliamentary committee on Britain's energy needs on Wednesday.
Johnson is expected to address the potential cost of new nuclear power stations and the industry's ability to deal with waste, while insisting that final decisions will depend on the outcome of the review.
Blair acknowledged he faced stiff opposition from environmentalists and parts of his Labour Party.
"About energy security and supply that will mean issues that are bound to be extremely controversial," he said.
His spokesman said all options remained on the table but he also highlighted reports questioning the effectiveness of some renewable energy sources
-------- europe
Greenpeace activists break into grounds of Dutch nuclear power plant
11/23/2005 11:35 (AFP)
http://channels.netscape.com/tech/story.jsp?floc=ne-sci-8-l6&flok=FF-AFP-shscience&idq=/ff/story/7000%2F20051123%2F1140000001.htm&sc=shscience
THE HAGUE - Two dozen Greenpeace activists broke into the grounds of a Dutch nuclear power plant to demonstrate that the facility is nott secure and protest against plans to keep it open another quarter of a century.
"Greenpeace warns that a nuclear power plant is an easy target for terrorist attacks," the environmental organisation said in a statement after its activists broke into the grounds of the facility in Borssele on Wednesday.
"Nuclear energy is never safe."
The group's activists, dressed as Romans, unfurled a banner saying "if the Romans had nuclear power plants we would still be guarding their nuclear waste."
The Dutch security services arrested 11 protesters.
In the coming weeks the Dutch government is set to decide on proposals to keep Borssele open until 2033.
-------- iran
U.S. and Europe Put Off Referral of Iran Case to Security Council
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
November 23, 2005 NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/23/international/middleeast/23diplo.html?pagewanted=print
WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 - The United States and Europe will not seek a referral this week of their case against Iran to the United Nations Security Council, American and European diplomats said Tuesday. Instead, the diplomats said, they will allow more time for China, Russia, India and other countries to persuade Iran to stop its nuclear activities.
The diplomats said they were convinced that Iran was becoming more isolated from other countries as a result of recent statements and actions, including threats to kick out inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and to resume enrichment of uranium.
Administration officials say the main achievement of the past few weeks in pressuring Iran was to enlist Russia as a partner to Germany, France and Britain, leaders of the negotiations with Iran known as the European Union Three. Russia has joined with an offer to enrich uranium on its own soil to provide for Iran's nuclear energy needs; enrichment is needed to create nuclear fuel, but can also be a precursor to making a weapon.
"The point right now of our diplomatic activities in support of the EU-3, as well as Russia, is not referral," said Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman. He said the efforts of Russia and the others, in making the uranium enrichment offer, was "to get Iran back to the negotiating table," a process it has boycotted since the summer.
The United States has long favored getting the 35-member board of governors of the I.A.E.A., the United Nations nuclear monitoring body, to refer Iran's recent actions to the Security Council. The Bush administration says it has the votes to do so.
But European countries have argued that a vote that does not reflect a broad consensus on the board will send a signal of division in the West and not persuade Iran to cooperate. Without support from Russia and China, they also say, the Council would be unable to act on a recommendation from the atomic agency.
----
Weighing compromise on Iran's nukes
UN's watchdog agency meets Thursday to review Iran's case. Iran says its program is peaceful.
November 23, 2005 edition
By Scott Peterson
Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1123/p07s03-wome.html
BAGHDAD – The diplomatic tussle over Iran's controversial atomic program has heated up in advance of a meeting Thursday of the UN's nuclear watchdog.
Iran's parliament passed a bill Monday that would oblige the government to "stop voluntary and nonlegally binding measures," such as intrusive snap UN weapons inspections, and to resume uranium enrichment if Iran is referred to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions.
Diplomats at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna say there is little chance that Iran will be sent to the Council this time, despite a September IAEA resolution that found Iran in noncompliance.
But despite tough rhetoric about its right to enrich uranium for nuclear power - and Iranian resumption last week of uranium conversion, contrary to IAEA requests - Iran has taken several recent cooperative steps, including granting full access to several suspect sites that include a military high-explosives facility at Parchin.
"Everyone expects there will be some great flash of blinding light on the road to Damascus, when everything will be clear, but it is hugely complex," says a Western diplomat in Vienna. The case is "like water on rock - it does wear down, [but] it requires a lot of patience and sensitivity."
Two compromise solutions are now in play, a Moscow one backed by President Bush, and a broader one from the IAEA to create internationally monitored nuclear fuel facilities.
The Russian plan recognizes Iran's right to nuclear fuel technology, but denies it the ability to enrich uranium to levels suitable for bombs. Iran would process the uranium ore into gas, then send it to Russia for enrichment; spent fuel from the reactor would be returned to Russia.
Though Tehran has not dismissed the proposals outright, it says it should fully control its own nuclear fuel cycle. Last week, Iran took out a full-page ad in The New York Times, explaining its program and calling for a negotiated solution. Russia has significant clout, because it is building Iran's first nuclear-power plant at Bushehr. Moscow has been involved for years in negotiating terms to provide Iran with nuclear fuel, and have Iran return the spent fuel to Russia, with no chance of leakage.
The vote to suspend voluntary steps easily passed in Iran's conservative-controlled parliament, with 183 of 197 votes in favor. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who recently declared that Israel should be "wiped off the map," vows that Iran will not compromise on nuclear know-how - a popular stance in the Islamic Republic.
The latest report by the IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, issued last Friday, notes that Iran had been "more forthcoming," adding however that Tehran's "full transparency is indispensable and overdue."
Perhaps more significant is the discovery - in a trove of documentation that Iran gave the IAEA - of a design experts say could only be used for a nuclear weapon. Critics say it is proof of Iran's ambition to acquire a nuclear weapon, a goal that the US and many Europeans believe Iran is determined to achieve.
Iranian officials say the diagram was unsolicited, and part of a black-market offer made by the nuclear network of Pakistani A. Q. Khan to Iran in 1987. Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi dismissed as "a sheer lie" speculation that the design proves Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.
"Was this a teaser? We don't know," says the Western diplomat. "The fact remains, we have to check out the information."
One source familiar with the document says it is of an "old-fashioned" Chinese design, consistent with blueprints sold to Libya by the A. Q. Khan network in the 1980s. The IAEA report notes it deals with "the casting and machining of enriched, natural and depleted uranium metal into hemispherical forms."
The Western source says it is "not a core of a weapon," as has been described in some media reports, but an element used to increase the yield of a nuclear blast by slowing down the process. There are no dimensions, he says, but it would be large.
"It's obviously not innocuous - any design for a weapon is heavy stuff," says the source, who asked not to be further identified. "But in the big picture, it's not the scary suitcase bomb.... This thing wouldn't fit in a missile, not even in a truck. They would need the Enola Gay [the US plane which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945], and they don't have that."
Still, many questions remain. Mr. ElBaradei's report repeats the call to suspend enrichment-related activities, and notes "no new developments with regard to questions and access" at a site at Lavisan-Shian, which was bulldozed last year, and where a layer of topsoil was removed.
Iran has signed but not ratified the Additional Protocol of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which allows for snap inspections of any suspect site.
The IAEA report came days after details emerged in The New York Times of US briefings for ElBaradei and senior delegates last July. They were based on a computer acquired by US intelligence from a "long time" source in Iran who has since died, the Times reported, and are alleged to show missile-cone designs consistent with a nuclear payload. Saying they must protect the source, US officials have so far refused to specify the provenance of the data, or to show the original data to the IAEA.
European Union foreign-policy chief Javier Solana said the vote in Iran's parliament was "not good news." French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy - whose nation, with Britain and Germany, was in talks with Iran until August - said "negative signals" were coming from Tehran.
But Security Council action is unlikely, as Russia and China oppose such a move. "We do not see such a threat [of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons] at the moment," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday. "Under the current situation, while Iran is not working on enriching uranium, we should continue operating within the IAEA."
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- vermont
Panel: Reject Yankee power boost
November 23, 2005
By DAVID GRAM The Associated Press
http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051123/NEWS/511230393/1003
MONTPELIER — A sharply divided state advisory group recommended Tuesday that the Public Service Board reject or order changes in Vermont Yankee's plan to boost its power output by 20 percent.
The Vermont State Nuclear Advisory Panel's 4-3 vote came after members heard testimony that Entergy Nuclear, owner of the nuclear reactor in Vernon, would make a projected $357 million between now and the end of its current license in 2012 if it is allowed to increase power from 510 to 612 megawatts a year.
The panel, which operates only in an advisory capacity, also was told that Vermont ratepayers could be faced with more than $450 million in higher electric costs if extracting 20 percent more power from the 33-year-old reactor caused a problem that forced the plant to shut down early.
Both Entergy's potential profits and Vermont ratepayers' potential risks are much higher than projected when the Public Service Board gave the power increase conditional approval in March 2004.
Energy prices are up sharply, which means Entergy can make more money selling the extra electricity on the New England market. And it would be much costlier for Central Vermont Public Service Corp. and Green Mountain Power Corp. to replace the relatively cheap power they now get under a contract with Vermont Yankee if the plant were forced to close.
Panel members supporting Tuesday's resolution said there was not enough balance between Entergy's $357 million in potential profits and the $20 million in benefits to the state that the Department of Public Service negotiated for in 2003 in exchange for supporting the company before the Public Service Board.
The state negotiated an additional $18 million in exchange for allowing Vermont Yankee to store highly radioactive wastes in concrete and steel casks at the reactor site.
"Vermont does not get anything like rewards commensurate with the risks it will take" if the power boost is allowed, said board member Timothy Nulty, a panel member representing the public who drafted and offered the resolution.
The other public member, Russell Kulas, was joined by the two legislative members, Sen. Mark MacDonald and Rep. Steve Darrow, in supporting the resolution.
It was opposed by the three Douglas administration appointees to the board: Department of Public Service Commissioner David O'Brien, who chairs the board; John Sayles, representing the Agency of Natural Resources, and Razelle Hoffman-Contois, representing the Agency of Human Services.
A clearly exasperated O'Brien, who at one point in Tuesday's meeting offered to give up his position as chairman of the panel, argued that the advisory group was not in a position to second-guess the PSB.
"This panel in my opinion is not in a position to reach the conclusions in the resolution," O'Brien said.
One of the "Whereas" clauses in the resolution said the state would be harmed if the power boost caused a long-term outage at Vermont Yankee. But O'Brien said other panel members were exaggerating that risk.
He referred to the independent engineering assessment that the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission did at Vermont Yankee, saying, "There was no indication whatsoever anywhere in that report that the plant won't operate for the next six years," until its license expires.
The board made the results of the NRC's review a condition that had to be met before it gave final approval. The NRC review was completed earlier this year, but the board still has not said whether its condition had been met.
Critics of the power increase contend the NRC inspection did not meet the board's terms, and that the board has an opening to deny the power boost request if it wishes to.
Later Tuesday, O'Brien said he believed the panel's resolution would have "very little effect" on the PSB, which has only approved the uprate conditionally.
"I hope it doesn't," he said. "I don't think the resolution is sound."
Rutland Herald reporter Susan Smallheer contributed to this story.
-------- MILITARY
-------- chemical weapons
White Phosphorous Lies
Did the Pentagon use chemical weapons indiscriminately in Fallujah?
By Frida Berrigan
November 23, 2005 In These Times
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2412/
A 21st Tactical Air support squadron OV10 bronco aircraft fires white phosphorus rockets to mark a target for an air strike during tactical air control training.
Just when it seemed the Iraq war couldn’t get worse, the United States admitted on November 16 that forces in Fallujah did use white phosphorus (WP) as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants. However, the Pentagon continues to deny that soldiers used WP—a “spontaneously flammable” and “extremely toxic inorganic substance,” according to the Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventative Medicine—against civilians.
This admission, a reversal of the military’s previous denials that the substance was used as a weapon at all, came after protests at the U.S. embassy in Rome that were sparked by the airing of Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre, a documentary by Sigfrido Ranucci and Maurizio Torrealta, on Italian television.
In the documentary, Torrealta, a news editor at Italian state media company RAI, interviews U.S. soldiers and Iraqi human rights advocates, and shows pictures of the havoc wreaked by white phosphorus. The film set off a firestorm of controversy about interpretations of the Geneva Convention: When is a device that can indiscriminately burn civilians to death a banned weapon and when is it a defensive mechanism for hiding troop movements? An Army fact sheet admits it is both, noting that while WP “is used primarily as a smoke agent,” it can “also function as an anti-personnel flame compound capable of causing serious burns.”
For Jeff Engelhart, a former Marine with the First Infantry Division that fought the Battle of Fallujah in November 2004, these questions of interpretation are moot. “I do know that white phosphorus was used. White phosphorus kills indiscriminately,” he says in the documentary.
On November 8, U.S. Marine Major Tim Keefe told Reuters that “suggestions that U.S. forces targeted civilians with these weapons are simply wrong.” But there is nothing simple about it.
Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons bans the use of incendiary weapons, meaning “any weapon or munition which is primarily designed to set fire to objects or to cause burn injury to persons.” The United States has not signed the protocol. The Pentagon initially denied using WP as a weapon, arguing that while WP could “set fire to objects or cause burn injury to persons,” that is not the task for which the weapon is “primarily designed.” Rather, the military claims that WP—known as “Whiskey Pete,” or “Willy Pete” on the battlefield—is a legitimate tool for obscuring troop actions. Now military sources insist that WP is not a chemical weapon (banned under Geneva Conventions), but a conventional one.
From the military’s own reports, it is clear white phosphorus was used for multiple reasons in Fallujah. In the March/April 2005 issue of Field and Artillery Magazine, Captain James T. Cobb wrote an “after action” review of the November 2004 Battle of Fallujah, a battle he describes as the “most fierce urban fighting for Marines since the Battle of Hue City in Vietnam in 1968.”
Cobb and his co-authors continue, “White phosphorus proved to be an effective and versatile munition,” useful as “a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents … We fired ‘shake and bake’ missions at insurgents, using WP to flush out them out and HE [high explosives] to take them out.”
It is also clear that U.S. Marines fired WP indiscriminately in Fallujah. Darrin Mortenson, a reporter for the San Diego-area North County Times, was embedded with the Camp Pendleton Marines in Fallujah. In an April 11, 2004 article, Mortenson describes a daily pattern that escalated during the Battle of Fallujah. Nicholas Bogert, a 22-year-old mortar team leader, directs his team to fire countless rounds of “shake and bake” into Fallujah neighborhoods, “never knowing what the targets were or what damage the resulting explosions caused.”
In a November 8 interview with “Democracy Now,” Torrealta said that he began his investigation after seeing photographs from the Studies Centre of Human Rights & Democracy in Fallujah, including detailed color images of residents, some dead in their beds, with their clothes largely intact, but their skin melted to the consistency of leather.
In the same program, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Boylan, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq, said that the allegations of WP’s use against civilians was “tantamount to propaganda, falsehood and rumors.”
When asked about the photos of people burned to the bone while their clothing remained untouched, he theorizes that the damage could have been inflicted by a suicide bomber. “That can happen from massive explosions. If you look at the car bombs that the terrorists use today, you have the same effects from car bombs [or] from suicide vests.”
Boylan may assert that the use of WP is legal and worth the price paid by civilians. But James Nachtwey, the award-winning war photographer, wrote in 1985 that if everyone “could see for themselves what white phosphorus does to the face of a child … they would understand that nothing is worth letting things get to the point where that happens to even one person, let alone thousands.”
Frida Berrigan is a senior research associate with the Arms Trade Resource Center, a project of the World Policy Institute.
-------- spies
CIA Told Bush of No Iraq-Al Qaeda Links Ten Days After 9/11
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005
Headlines
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/23/152214
A new article by investigative journalist Murray Waas in the National Journal says President Bush was notified ten days after the 9/11 attacks U.S. intelligence had no evidence linking Iraq to al Qaeda or the attacks. According to several current and former government officials, little evidence has emerged to contradict the assessment. One former high-level official said : "What the President was told on September 21 [2001], was consistent with everything he has been told since -- the evidence was just not there." The Bush administration has so far refused to release the briefing, not even as a redacted document. Administration officials subsequently ignored the intelligence assessments in favor of those that alleged Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons and ties to Al Qaeda. One of the key proponents of this theory was then-undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. In the margin of one of Feith's reports, Vice President Dick Cheney wrote: "This is very good indeed ... Encouraging ... Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of CIA."
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
China City on Alert for Possible Water Contamination
November 23, 2005 — By Reuters
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=9310
BEIJING — Fifteen hospitals are on standby in one of China's biggest and coldest cities to take in contamination victims after water supplies were halted for fear of contamination from a chemical factory blast.
Taps were turned off in Harbin, capital of northeastern Heilongjiang province and known as Ice City for its long cold winters and the ice and snow festival held each January, at midnight on Tuesday.
And a government notice saying supplies would resume in four days have been removed, raising doubts about how long the crisis would last.
"The new notice does not necessarily mean an extension," a Harbin government spokesman told Reuters. "But we will make a decision after four days according to the water quality at that time.
"There is sufficient water. Residents have all stored a lot and we have been rushing in water from other places. We also have safe underground water."
The water pipes were shut after an explosion at a chemical plant on Nov. 13 only a few hundred metres (yards) from the Songhua River, which supplies water to Harbin, a metropolitan area of nine million people. Five people were killed.
The river runs into Russia after several hundred kilometres. A foreign ministry spokesman said on Tuesday he did not know the extent of the pollution, if any, but that China always took care of other countries' cross border water interests.
"A 24-hour inspection of water has been launched 18 km (11 miles) up the Harbin segment of the Songhua River," Xinhua news agency said later on Tuesday.
"The municipal government ... has started up the city's emergency medical caring system, composed of 15 hospitals for the residents due to possible water contamination."
More than 16,000 tons of bottled water was being transported to Harbin from nearby cities and provinces.
"For the emergency use of water, fire engines and watering carts for water transport have been gathered," it said.
"Three to five water supply venues will be set up to provide water in each of the city's districts to avoid some vendors' speculation of water on the market."
All bathhouses and car-wash garages had been shut down and primary and middle schools closed.
"Teachers will communicate with their students via Internet and phones and be on duty in school by turns," Xinhua said.
Harbin, founded as a frontier town in the late 19th century, is famed for old Russian and European-influenced architecture.
Llyn Bryant, a British teacher who has lived in Harbin for six years, said he had been told by a school official that people might have died from drinking contaminated water.
But he said he had not seen anybody taken ill.
"Harbin is China's eighth-largest city, and when something like this happens somebody is bound to suffer," he said.
----
EU Destroying Forests of Poor Countries, WWF Says
November 23, 2005 — By Reuters
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=9308
GENEVA — EU countries are helping destroy major forests in poorer countries through massive imports of illegal timber, the conservation group WWF said on Tuesday.
It said Britain was "the biggest importer of illegal timber in Europe" and was responsible for the loss of 600,000 hectares of forest -- more than twice the size of Luxembourg -- each year in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The Swiss-based body said the illegal logging that feeds the trade was depriving local communities of their livelihoods and could lead to the loss of major forests in Africa and Indonesia over the next 10 years.
WWF forest experts produced their report after studying the trade between EU nations and countries in the Amazon Basin, the Congo Basin, East Africa, Indonesia and Russia. They also surveyed Baltic states which are now EU members.
"The EU is probably importing a substantial and increasing quantity of illegal timber from all regions ... indirectly via China," the WWF said in the report timed for a meeting of EU ministers on the issue on Tuesday in Brussels.
Illegal logging involves cutting down trees, often by rogue companies, in violation of national conservation measures and outside the control of governments.
The wood is then smuggled out to another country before going on the world market. Britain was followed by Finland, Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands on the EU list of importers.
The WWF report said it was vital for the EU to introduce a mandatory ban on the import of illegal timber instead of current policy favouring voluntary agreements between its 25 members and producer countries.
"The EU must take much tougher action if it wants to make a difference in both conserving the world's most important forests and in helping alleviate poverty," said Duncan Pollard, head of WWF's European Forest Programme.
Andrew Lee, campaign director for WWF's national organisation in Britain, noted that Britain had made the fight against poverty the central part of its presidency of the EU.
He said Britain's huge consumption of timber was robbing Indonesia and countries in Africa of income while international companies behind the trade reaped the profits.
----
Bioremediation in New Orleans
By Starhawk
11/23/2005 4:50 PM
http://www.starhawk.org/activism/activism-writings/NewOrleans_bioremediation.html
I’m just back from another week in New Orleans. This time three of us, myself, Juniper and Scotty, had a special mission—to set up a small bioremediation demonstration as a beginning seed for a long term project. Over Thanksgiving Week, Common Ground has sponsored the Road Trip for Relief, an effort to bring hundreds of volunteers into the Ninth Ward, one of the areas most devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
“Bioremediation” means cleaning soil and water and restoring it to health using biological allies: beneficial bacteria, plants, and fungi. Restoration on the scale of New Orleans is, of course, a huge and overwhelming project. Nevertheless, there are many techniques that are fairly simple, natural, and applicable on a small scale, and Common Ground has been working on a proposal to fund and train a worker’s cooperative that would be able to put them into practice.
The first stage of this whole process, of course, is finding out what toxins are actually present. For the last two months, Juniper, an environmental engineer, has been taking soil samples from many areas in New Orleans, getting them tested, and collating data from other organizations. What she’s found is that, while there are certainly hot spots of contamination, most of New Orleans is no worse than it was before the flood. Lead and arsenic are fairly common—but they were present before the flood, the result of generations of lead paint on old buildings, auto exhaust, and chemicals applied to lawns to kill dandelions. In some places, anything from oil tanks to household chemicals may have spilled, and residues remain. Water borne disease germs are less of an issue now that most areas have dried out and been exposed to sunlight.
There are two great sources of inspiration for our work this last week. One is Dr. Elaine Ingham, www.soilfoodweb.org , an expert on soil biology and the brewing up of compost teas full of beneficial bacteria that can break down toxins and restore life to the soil. The other is Paul Stametz, www.fungi.com , who does pioneering work on the use of mushrooms and beneficial fungi to clean up toxic soil. Scott Kellogg, who has studied with both of them, works with the Rhizome Collective in Austin, which has transformed an old warehouse into an educational and social center, and is bioremediating a large brownfield (damaged, toxic land) to restore it to health and become an environmental education center. He has studied with both Elaine Ingham and Paul Stametz, and has brought down a pump and barrels to set up a hundred gallon compost tea brewery.
So, over the last week, we’ve made contact with a number of the really great people in New Orleans who are already doing sustainability work: the New Orleans Farm and Food Network, Parkway Partners, the Laughing Crow nursery, the Laughing Buddha nursery, and others. We’ve done a small training for local people at the home of a woman who has already had lead abatement done in her backyard before the hurricane. We’ve done a training for forty-fifty of the volunteers who have come down for the Roadtrip, and got them all excited and inspired. We’ve started a small amount of oyster mushrooms growing in coffee grounds, created a Powerpoint on bioremediation and several visual displays, sheet mulched a small piece of ground that was covered with garbage, built a compost bin, and brewed up 100 gallons of bioremediation brew. After I had to leave, Juniper and Scotty led a group to apply the brew to our little sheet mulched patch by the warehouse, and to two other sites that had been identified as needing remediation. We also put in a graywater system for the outdoor showers, consulted on the solar hot water heating and its augmentation by a kettle over a wood fire.
The week went fast. Doing projects in New Orleans, I’ve found, can be hellish or easy. The easy part is a result of the grim aftermath of the flood: there are lots of resources around to scavenge. It’s as if everyone in New Orleans opened their door and shoveled out all or most of their belonging onto the street, They are all ruined and moldy, of course, but among them are things that can be salvaged, wood and building materials that can be reused, and almost anything you might think of. So, in driving around looking for 2 x 4s for the shower builders, I found a huge plastic tub with holes in the bottom, perfect for a compost bin, and an equally large stainless steel tub. Taking a wrong turn on my way to the bridge one morning, I passed a stack of giant cardboard boxes, perfect for sheet mulch. The round, bamboo skeleton of a broken swing chair made a perfect cover for the compost.
The hellish aspect is that if you need something specific, a plumbing part or a valve that fits a particular pipe, and you don’t happen to have it, the hardware and plumbing stores that are open are usually far away and suck energy like collapsing dwarf stars. Enter in, and you may never emerge. After frustrating hours in the Home Depot Line, you escape gratefully, and almost always immediately remember something you forgot to buy. If you don’t remember it at that moment, you remember it as soon as you get back to the worksite.
The solar showers, cobbled together out of the innards of discarded water heaters, plywood boxes and pieces of plastic, fed with enormously long hoses, were simple in design but extremely complicated to put together. And at best, they would provide a very inadequate amount of hot water for the number of people who needed to shower. We’re praying for a miracle, like the lamp of sacred oil in the Chanukah story, enough to last only for a day that lasted eight days. I’m telling the Goddess that if she makes that sixty gallons of possibly only lukewarm water provide hot showers for a hundred and fifty people, I’ll declare a new festival in her honor, and every year we’ll make little replicas of solar hot water heaters and give presents to dirty children. But just in case, we build a firepit.
The police in Algiers have continued to harass Common Ground. One morning they arrest Jimmy, a sweet-faced young man who looks as innocent and sunny as an eight year old child, for double parking while he is loading supplies from the depot. This takes time and energy to deal with, just as we are preparing for the arrival of the hordes of willing workers. But in the ninth ward, the police are more chill. New Orleans has a law that police have to live in the districts where they work, so the Ninth Ward cops have all lost their homes, and many have lost friends and family members. They appreciate that people have come down here to help.
The other heavenly part of work down here is that you get to hang out with people at their best—people who have come to do something good for other people, who have volunteered to live in uncomfortable conditions and take on some truly nasty, dirty jobs—cleaning out black mold, for instance—just because they want to help. There’s always a lot of stress in these situations, and people don’t always get along perfectly. There are irritations and frustrations. But overall, it’s just really, really good to be with people who are actively doing something to help a really bad situation.
And their work inspires generosity. Kaysey and Nick from the Covington Farmers’ Market come down and cook our opening meal. She had offered to cook a meal for us but didn’t originally bargain on feeding a hundred and fifty of our friends But she graciously rose to the occasion, producing a fragrant and delicious meal of rice and beans with fresh produce and fresh-baked breads. Meanwhile, a group from the Mission from Minnesota who have been sending truckloads of supplies down to Mississippi for weeks manages to get more donations than they need, and spends the money on eight hundred pounds of turkey for Common Ground’s Thanksgiving feast.
Generosity generates abundance. That’s something the idealogues of greed don’t get. “Solidarity, not charity’ is Common Ground’s motto, and people feel good when they are standing in solidarity with others, giving of themselves, doing something instead of feeling helpless. The tragedy and destruction here have been immense.
But so is the hope.