Mark Lynas
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 The Trans-Siberian Railway suffers extensive subsidence along its track, with changes even endangering a nuclear power plant at Bilibino. All around the Arctic Ocean, increased erosion from storms and rising sea levels destroys shoreline villages and settlements.
Arctic ecosystems find themselves in a state of advanced dislocation. Unexpected fires and insect attacks wipe out forests far to the north of the Arctic Circle. |
Michael Friedman, ND
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 Since 1945 every human has been repeatedly dusted with radioactive fallout from both acknowledged and unacknowledged nuclear explosions, nuclear power plant disasters, and, most insidious of all, the steady release of radioactive Iodine-131 from all nuclear weapons facilities and all nuclear power plants. The government-sponsored nuclear industry has released experimental quantities of radioactive iodine, cesium, and strontium into the atmosphere. Continual exposure to this incidental 1-131 maybe the origin of most current thyroid disorders. |
Dr. Edward F. Group III, DC, ND, DACBN
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| This is potentially the most dangerous technology since nuclear power, yet we have no way of finding out what is being done."5
In 1994, the Flavr Savr* tomato (engineered to resist rotting) was the first genetically modified food reviewed and approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for human consumption. FDA-employed scientists warned that altered products such as the Flavr Savr® could create toxins in food and trigger allergies. Shockingly, the FDA approved the "Frankenstein" tomato anyway with claims, "... |
Bill Sardi
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 A recent international summit on breast cancer and the environment outlined the need for more research to be conducted into the effects of exposure in the vicinity of nuclear power plants or chemical landfill sites and, more generally, into contaminants in food, air, water and soil." [Hormone Research 60 Suppl 3:50, 2003] But none of this makes any sense. As explained earlier in this chapter, the predominant factor in breast cancer is age, not exposure to carcinogens. |
Bottom Line Health
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| Some investigators have attributed the increase to environmental radiation from sources such as nuclear power plants. However, the report suggests that the real reason for the higher rates may be "increased detection of subclinical disease."
"New tests are available to detect abnormalities that we never saw in the past," says the coauthor of the national report, Dr. Louise Davies, an assistant professor of surgery at Dartmouth Medical School.
Ultrasound scans and needle biopsies can detect nodules as small as 2 millimeters (mm), one-quarter of the size of a pencil eraser. |
Mehmet C. Oz., M.D. and Michael F. Roizen, M.D.
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 Now think about your bodily city and picture these mitochondria as your body's nuclear power plants. They give off a lot of energy but also have the potential to cause a lot of damage. As you'll see many times throughout the book, most things that are powerful enough to help you are also powerful enough to hurt you.
If something bombs your power plant, it's not just the physical plant that suffers damage; a whole lot of collateral damage takes place as well. In the case of
Figure fcl Biological Backbone Mitochondria provide the power to our metaphorical city. |
Devra Davis
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 The Atomic Energy Commission had recently declassified a report about a remarkable aerosol filter that removed radioactive particles from the air in nuclear power plants. This extraordinary material was crocidolite—a bluish kind of asbestos. The company making Kent cigarettes, P.J. Lorillard, decided to use this new material in its brand-new cigarettes in 1952. Nearly 12 billion cigarettesabout 585 million packs of these asbestos-filtered cigarettes—were sold in the United States until 1956. Ads assured smokers that these filters provided health protection. |
Mark Lynas
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| Probably the most controversial is nuclear power, which raises dangers of nuclear weapons proliferation and deadly accidents, as well as the still unsolved question of what to do with highly radioactive wastes. Carbon capture and storage is an unproven technology which could result in unexpected releases of C02 from faulty or leaky reservoirs below ground, although the IPCC ranks this risk as very low.29 Pouring investment into quadrupling the numbers of gas-fuelled power stations to achieve a wedge would be unwise if gas supplies are close to peaking. |
| Greens by and large loathe nuclear power, so tend to plump for renewable options like solar and wind. Others express an equal loathing for wind turbines, and mount vociferous campaigns against their development. Some take both or neither side. In Cape Cod, Massachusetts, prominent climate activists like Robert R Kennedy Jr have opposed a large offshore wind farm, despite its potential for clean power generation - because, some suspect, it would spoil their view. |
| An additional 700 one-gigawatt nuclear power stations worldwide could displace enough coal for another power-generation wedge, as could introducing 'carbon capture and storage' (the pumping of C02 captured from chimneys underground into geological reservoirs) at 800 similar-sized coal plants. Remember, we need seven of these wedges just to stabilise global emissions at their current levels.
Socolow and Pacala's approach is especially useful because it illustrates the importance of scale. |
| In the UK, the scientist James Lovelock is at least consistent; though he fulminates against wind turbines, he is a passionate advocate of nuclear power.
With each side offering its miracle energy cure, the public is left with a false impression - that we simply have to choose one of the touted solutions and the problem will be solved. The reality is that only a combination of serious energy efficiency and a wide variety of new technologies offer any hope of a way out of the crisis. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
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 Electricity, even nuclear power can be turned off. GM is the first irreversible technology in human history. When a GMO is released it is out of our control; we have no means to call it back. We can insert a transgene, but we cannot take the released transgene out. Since GMOs are self-replicating, releasing them might have dire consequences for human and animal health and for the environment and can change evolution. |
Brigitte Mars, A.H.G.
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 In fact, after the disaster at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Russia, sea buckthorn oil was used to treat the burns of people exposed to the leaked radiation. Sea buckthorn can also be used to prevent sunburn and radiation burns; Russian cosmonauts, for example, have used this herb to protect their skin against radiation burns when in outer space.
Sea buckthorn is also sometimes added to hair products to prevent baldness and stimulate hair growth. |
David Winston, RH(AHG), and Steven Maimes
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 There are many sources of ionizing radiation, including the sun, X-rays, radiotherapy, and leaks at nuclear power plants. Radioprotective properties of adaptogens include the ability to protect the DNA of the body from the dangerous, mutating power of various forms of radiation. Free radical scavenging and antioxidant activity is the likely mechanism involved in this radioprotective effect.
By causing oxidative damage in the DNA, free radicals can produce mutations that, over time, can lead to cancer. |
David Steinman
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 Companies receiving more than 2 percent of their revenues from military weapons, or receiving any revenues from the production of tobacco or alcohol, or any revenues from gambling products or services were eliminated, as were companies that own, operate, or design nuclear power.
Once a company has made the Index, Domini reserves the right to remove it if it violates any of their exclusionary standards or fails to meet their qualitative standards.37 www.domini. |
| Interestingly, although nuclear power presents environmental problems due to toxic waste?think spent fuel rods—that stays highly radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, the plants themselves make no contribution to global warming; nonetheless, I have to admit, I don't often take the family to the beach at San Onofre, site of one of SCE's two nuclear facilities, and I put the pedal to the metal a little faster when I am driving through the Buckeye Valley of Arizona and passing by the company's other nuclear generating station, the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, in Wintersburg. |
| Nations seek nuclear power as a hedge against fossil fuels, and nuclear weapons proliferate. These skirmishes place increasing stress upon the world, with less-resilient developing nations reacting most acutely, since their economic systems haven't the capacity to absorb change.
Each of these local disasters could be handled, but the cumulative effect on the global community could plunge the United States into an environmental abyss fueled by declining resources, including oil. According to the Pentagon report, here's what to expect:
First Decade
? |
| Think of what environmental destabilization will precipitate within the global context in terms of warring over oil resources, as well as proliferating nuclear arms fueled by increasing global use of nuclear power; it's easy to see why some preventive health measures now for our future national security should pay off handsomely. |
James Howard Kunstler
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 Russian nuclear power facilities are unspeakably decrepit. Russia also has a roster of other obvious problems related to its difficult transition out of the Potemkin communist economy. It still has a long way to go to establish a society of law, in particular a framework of property and contract law that allows business to be conducted on some basis other than gangsterism. |
Jack Challem
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 In the third study, researchers looked at genetic damage in workers who had helped clean up the radioactive Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Because of their exposure to radiation, these men had genetic damage ten times higher than normal. But after the men took ginkgo supplements, their genetic damage (measured in the subjects' blood cells) declined to almost normal levels. When the men stopped taking the ginkgo supplements, about one-third of them had an increase in genetic damage, indicating that they needed continued supplementation. |
| How B-Vitamin Deficiencies Affect DNA Repair
Many people are fearful of radiation exposure from nuclear power plants and other sources. However, according to Bruce N.Ames, Ph.D., one of the world's leading cell biologists and professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, DNA damage from B-vitamin deficiencies is identical to damage caused by radiation. In both cases strands of DNA break apart. No reasonable person would unnecessarily expose himself to radiation, so why would anyone want to suffer the same damage from low intake of B vitamins? |
James Howard Kunstler
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| China is a nuclear power with a nuclear "umbrella" that it can spread out to shelter client nations. China is geographically closer to the Middle East than America is, and might shield Arabia at least as effectively as America has for half a century. China could enter into a protective relationship with any number of nations from Central Asia to the Middle East, including an Arabia run by a militant Islamic theocracy. |
Lynne Mctaggart
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 But what else is there?' said Bill.
Hal ticked off a litany of current possibilities. There was photovoltaics (using solar cells), or fuel cells, or water batteries (an attempt to convert the hydrogen from water into electricity in the cell). There was wind, or waste products, or even methane. But none of these, even the more exotic among them, were turning out to be robust or realistic.
Bill and Hal agreed that what was really needed was an entirely new source: a cheap, endless, perhaps as yet undiscovered, supply of energy. |
Peter Pringle
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 In short, the practical application of genetic engineering at an early stage was no more predictable than that of any other new technology, from the steam engine to nuclear power. Just as the engineers of nuclear power had downplayed the risks of cooling nuclear reactors, so the biotech companies minimized the scientific realities of making a transgenic plant. In the same breath, companies were stressing the novelty of bioengineering techniques to their investors while assuring the public that these changes in the food supply presented no risks to health or the environment. |
James Howard Kunstler
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| Under the Carter policy, coal and nuclear power plants were encouraged to meet new demand. Then, in March 1979, the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, suffered a partial meltdown, which put any growth in the U.S. nuclear industry on indefinite hold. The environmental legislation of the 1970s made coal increasingly problematic, too, as it was implicated in acid rain.
Meanwhile, by the mid-1980s consumption of natural gas had dropped by 24 percent from the early 1970s levels. The natural gas producers began to go bankrupt. |
Gabriel Cousens, M.D.
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 No one knew that nuclear power would bring us to the brink of annihilation or fill our planet with highly toxic radioactive waste. We are so excited by the power of a new discovery that we leaped ahead blindly, and without caution. Today the situation with genetic engineering is perhaps even more grave because this technology acts on the very blueprint of life itself." When you do not know what you are doing, and you insist on meddling, you have the potential to create a great deal of damage. There is an old saying, "If it's not broken, don't fix it. |
James Howard Kunstler
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| Even our nuclear power plants ultimately depend on cheap oil and gas for all the procedures of construction, maintenance, and extracting and processing nuclear fuels. The blandishments of cheap oil and gas were so seductive, and induced such transports of mesmerizing contentment, that we ceased paying attention to the essential nature of these miraculous gifts from the earth: that they exist in finite, nonrenewable supplies, unevenly distributed around the world. |
| Israel has become the region's sole nuclear power. It operates a fleet of submarines armed with nuclear missiles that roams all over the globe, impervious to threats. Israel is said to possess at least two warheads programmed to strike each of the capital cities of its enemies. Egypt has long ceased to be a military threat to Israel. The Soviet Union no longer exists as anyone's patron. By default, Egypt has become the financial ward of the United States. |
Dr. Cass Ingram
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 This is because of the risks of nuclear power plant accidents, not from some outside military threat. The United States has the largest number of nuclear power plants in the world, over
100, and dozens of these reactors are at a high risk for leaks and/or accidents. Other risks include accidents during the transport of nuclear wastes. Currently, all nuclear power plants leak radiation, negatively affecting at a minimum anyone living within a 20 mile radius of the plant. |
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