About the 2009 Report: World’s Worst Polluted Places

Comment: This is a great site to refer to and maybe help them out! Also, you can nominate a Polluted Site! Southside Virginia could be a future site if our state leaders allow uranium mining! Demand VA leaders to ban uranium mining!

While the disparities between developed and developing world are relatively stark in most cases, two initiatives with worldwide impact are highlighted here as models of how the international community can work together to make meaningful progress on pollution and health.


• Leaded Gas Phase-Out: a global effort by governments, multilateral agencies and the private sector to eliminate lead in gasoline that causes neurological damage.

• Chemical Weapons Convention: an international treaty to eliminate chemicals used as agents
of warfare.

These poisons represent a shared burden –a threat to the health and safety of the entire planet. Eliminating them represents a shared benefit.

The type of toxic exposures that are described in the following 10 examples are not global issues. Rather they are problems that plague developing countries by orders of magnitude greater than almost anything experienced today in developed ones –thus, our reason for focusing attention there.

These 10 programs, we consider to be examples of successful efforts in developing countries that are reducing the toll of pollution on human health:

• Accra, Ghana: the broad commercialization of innovative cooking stoves to reduce indoor air pollution that causes respiratory illnesses among women and children;

• Candelaria, Chile: comprehensive copper tailings disposal and water conservation treatment system;

• Chernobyl-affected areas, Eastern Europe: medical, psychological and educational interventions to improve the lives and livelihoods of those living in the zone of radiation contamination;

• Delhi, India: broad-based public policies to reduce the vehicle emissions that cause urban air pollution responsible for respiratory illnesses;

• Haina, Dominican Republic: removal of soil contaminated by the improper recycling of used car batteries to reduce lead levels in children’s blood;

• Kalimantan, Indonesia: new techniques to reduce mercury poisoning from artisanal gold mining;

• Old Korogwe, Tanzania: removal of a stockpile of pesticides responsible for contaminating soil and a nearby river, poisoning the local residents;

• Rudnaya Pristan Region, Russia: removal of lead-contaminated soil in children’s playgrounds in order to lower blood lead levels in children;

• Shanghai, China: 12-year program to clean up sewage in an urban waterway that supplies drinking water to millions;

• West Bengal, India: reduction in arsenic poisoning through removal of naturally occurring arsenic in well water.

This report aspires to benchmark the beginning of the end of the toxic legacy devastating the health of millions of people in developing countries. These examples are not a definitive or exclusive list, but rather guidance for the possibilities of the impact of this work on a global scale.

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http://www.worstpolluted.org/

Britain's nuclear strategy threatens destruction of Kalahari (Uranium Mining)

Comment:  No to Nuke Plants, No to Uranium Mining, corporate greed is pushing the Nuke plants, solar and wind can provide clean power!
Namibian environmentalists warn expansion of uranium mining could devastate spectacular natural landscape

John Vidal The Observer
Sunday 8 November 2009

The hidden cost of Britain's new generation of nuclear power could be the destruction of the Kalahari desert in Namibia and millions of tonnes of extra greenhouse gas emissions a year, the Observer has discovered.

The desert, with its towering sand dunes and spectacular lunar-like landscapes, is at the centre of an international uranium rush led by Rössing Uranium, a subsidiary of the British mining giant Rio Tinto, and the French state-owned company, Areva, which part-manages the nuclear complex at Sellafield and wants to build others in Britain.

Tomorrow, Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, will release a batch of plans covering every aspect of Britain's strategy to replace its ageing nuclear power stations.

It is not expected to consider the source of the fuel needed for the new reactors. But Rössing is expanding its existing giant mine – which already provides nearly 8% of the world's uranium – into the Namib-Naukluft national park. Areva has leased hundreds of square kilometres of the desert near Trekkopje, where it plans to build one of the world's largest uranium mines.

At least 20 other mining companies from the UK, Canada, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere have also been given licences to explore thousands of square kilometres of the national park and its surrounds, and six new mines, several of which would be in the park, are at the development stage.

Namibia has some of the planet's richest uranium deposits and expects to become the third largest uranium producer and largest exporter within five years.

The mines are all expected to be in open pits up to 200 metres below the desert sands. With their waste heaps, acid plants and giant slurry ponds, they will extend over hundreds of square kilometres. "Large areas of the desert will be inevitably devastated," says Bertchen Kohrs, director of the Namibian environment group Earthlife. "They will do immense damage. We fear that there will be major contamination of the ground water supplies."

Documents seen by the Observer suggest the mines would initially consume about 53 million cubic metres of water a year, more than 75% of the water presently supplied by the Namibian state water company. The water will need to be pumped more than 56km to the mines from the coast. The proposed expansion of the uranium mining would create mountains of waste radioactive sand.

But an Areva spokesman said: "Our post-mining decommissioning plan will ensure that most of the Trekkopje mining area will return to its former wilderness state. The technical process applied to extract the ore will not cause any pollution to the underground water. The desalination plant will be powered by electricity produced from different sources, including non-CO2-emitting sources such as hydroelectricity."

Rio Tinto said it was addressing the carbon emissions of the mining operations. "Rössing has a greenhouse gas management plan to minimise emissions through improved energy efficiency," said a spokesman.

Additional reporting by Damian Carrington

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/08/nuclear-power-namibia-mining

Udall Hearing Examines 1872 Mining Law; Pites Reid Against Salazar/Obama Admin.

Comment: The article is admitting that Hard Rock Mining ruins watersheds and provides toxic pollution according to EPA! WELL, WELL!

Friday, July 17, 2009
By David O. Williams
The Colorado Independent

Unlike oil and gas extraction, pulling hard-rock minerals like uranium, gold and copper out of the ground is a royalty-free proposition in the United States, despite the often enormous costs of cleaning up public lands after the fact.

The Environmental Protection Agency in a filing on Monday noted that hard-rock mining has impacted 40 percent of all western watersheds and that nationwide 28 percent of the toxic pollution generated in the United States comes from the mining industry –- the most of any sector. The EPA also concluded mining represents a major taxpayer burden because of cleanup costs.

The EPA filing was presented during a hearing Tuesday of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee chaired by Colorado Sen. Mark Udall. Former Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar, now Secretary of the Interior, testified the Obama administration wants to see the 1872 Mining Law reformed in the current Congress.

Mining reform legislation has been introduced in both the House and the Senate, and both versions would set up some sort of royalty structure for hard-rock mining on federal lands. The 137-year-old system of filing for relatively inexpensive and easy-to-acquire “patents” would be scrapped, and a fund would be set up to pay for massive cleanup efforts that for decades have been passed off to taxpayers when mining companies go bankrupt.

The Summitville gold mining disaster in Colorado, for instance, has cost taxpayers more than $200 million in cleanup costs. Reform advocates say the law passed in 1872 by the Grant administration was designed to encourage settlement of the West but is now antiquated and dangerous for the descendants of those settlers....(Rem

http://aliberals-hitlist.blogspot.com/2009/07/udall-hearing-examines-1872-mining-law.html