By John Ballard
"Not in my backyard!" That's the favorite objection to disagreeable problems we don't want to face. I have to admit to being guilty myself a short time ago. NPR seemed to be droning on about the heat, fires and discomfort in Russia and since the story didn't seem to affect me directly I turned it off and went to the computer to check the morning news.
This link by Jotman got my attention.
Seems that Russian smog might become radioactive. I thought about last night's report of premature puberty among little girls in America and this morning's report of shrimp that glow in the dark, and began to wonder how much Corexit might find its way into the local water supply over the next few months of rainfall. We're only a couple hundred miles north of the Gulf of Mexico.
MOSCOW � As if things in Russia were not looking sufficiently apocalyptic already, with 100-degree temperatures and noxious fumes rolling in from burning peat bogs and forests, there is growing alarm here that fires in regions coated with fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 24 years ago could now be emitting plumes of radioactive smoke.
Several fires have been documented in the contaminated areas of western Russia, including three heavily irradiated sites in the Bryansk region, the environmental group Greenpeace Russia said in a statement released Tuesday. Bryansk borders Belarus and Ukraine.
�Fires on these territories will without a doubt lead to an increase in radiation,� said Vladimir Chuprov, head of the energy program at Greenpeace Russia. �The smoke will spread and the radioactive traces will spread. The amount depends upon the force of the wind.�
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Russia has a history of whitewashing potentially embarrassing national disasters, a lingering legacy of the Soviet era. It took days for the Soviet government to inform its people of the Chernobyl explosion, leaving thousands unknowingly exposed to deadly radiation.
No one is saying that the radioactive fallout from the fires could reach the magnitude of the Chernobyl disaster. Scientists have known for years that fires in the contaminated zones have the potential to spread radioactive materials in small amounts.
The forest protection service has identified seven regions where dozens of fires have been burning in contaminated zones, with attention focusing on Bryansk, one of the regions most heavily contaminated by the Chernobyl disaster.
How about that?
Radioactive smoke.
Then I remembered the stories of toxic wastes leeching into water and soil all over the world and the fact that crude oil contamination on the order of Exxon Valdez every year for the last fifty years in the Niger delta area...
And I realized the whole world is my backyard.
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