Environmental bills up for votes in NJ Senate on June 7
These bills are scheduled for votes when the NJ S879 |
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Guatemala volcano kills at least 69; Many are missing
El Vocan de Fuego erupted on Sunday, spewing lava and ash 15,000 feet into the air. The eruption has been Guatemala’s most deadly in more than a century.
For details, click on NBC Nightly News video above and read BBC News account videos below.
Soldiers are helping firefighters search for missing people after Sunday’s horrific volcanic eruption in Guatemala, when torrents of superheated rock, ash and mud destroyed villages.
The official death toll from the destruction at the Fuego volcano has risen to 69, the authorities say.
Thousands of people are being housed in temporary shelters.
Volcanologists report the eruption, which sent ash up to 10km (33,000ft) into the sky, is now over.
The eruption also generated pyroclastic flows – fast-moving mixtures of very hot gas and volcanic matter – descending down the slopes, engulfing communities such as El Rodeo and San Miguel Los Lotes.
REUTERSEufemia Garcia (centre) escaped but is searching for her children
Eufemia Garcia, from Los Lotes, described how she narrowly escaped the volcanic matter as she walked through an alley to go to the shops. Though she had found two of her children alive she was still searching for two daughters and a son and a grandson, as well as her extended family.
“I do not want to leave, but go back, and there is nothing I can do to save my family,” she said.
Efrain Gonzalez, who fled El Rodeo with his wife and one-year-old daughter, said he had had to leave behind his two older children, aged four and ten, trapped in the family home.
Local resident Ricardo Reyes was also forced to abandon his home: “The only thing we could do was run with my family and we left our possessions in the house. Now that all the danger has passed, I came to see how our house was – everything is a disaster.”
Firefighter Rudy Chavez descried how he was searching affected areas for survivors and also for those who had died.
“We were about to evacuate the area when we found an entire family inside a home,” he said.
” We worked to remove their bodies from the house. Someone raised the alarm that the area was very dangerous and we evacuated but thank God we met with our objective of recovering the bodies of those people.”
‘Day turned to night’
Jorge Luis Altuve, part of Guatemala’s mountain rescue brigade, told the BBC how he and his colleagues had been up on the mountain searching for a missing person when they realised that the volcano’s activity had suddenly increased.
He heard something hitting his safety helmet and realised that it was not rain that was falling but stones.
“We’d already started our descent… when the ash cloud reached us and day turned into night. From daylight it went to being as dark as at 10pm,” he said.
REUTERSFirefighters are searching for survivors and bodies
AFPSoldiers were brought in to help emergency workers
Volcanologist Dr Janine Krippner told the BBC that people should not underestimate the risk from pyroclastic flows and volcanic mudflows, known as lahars.
“Fuego is a very active volcano. It has deposited quite a bit of loose volcanic material and it is also in a rain-heavy area, so when heavy rains hit the volcano that is going to be washing the deposits away into these mudflows which carry a lot of debris and rock.
“They are extremely dangerous and deadly as well.”
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What costs $1.4 billion and takes 60 years?
Decommissioning report to Nuclear Regulatory Comission indicates Exelon will start lengthy closure procedure at Oyster Creek in September
Tom Johnson reports for NJ Spotlight:
Exelon is projecting it will cost $1.4 billion and take 60 years to formally shut down its Oyster Creek, the nation’s oldest commercial nuclear power plant scheduled to cease operations by the end of October.
In a post-shutdown decommissioning report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the company will begin the shut down and defueling of the 645-megawatt plant in Lacey Township on September 17.
Once that process is completed, the facility will be place in so-called Safe and Storage (SAFSTOR) condition, one of three options nuclear owners have to choose for decommissioning a licensed facility. Essentially, it allows the owner to store spent fuel initially for five years in a wet pool, and then in a dry cask, and eventually in a facility approved by the federal government.
“Under SAFSTOR methodology, the facility is placed in a safe and stable condition and maintained in that state allowing levels of radioactivity to decrease through radioactive decay followed by decontamination and dismantlement,’’ according to the closure plan submitted to the NRC.
Initially, preparation for a period of safe storage (also referred to as dormancy) entails defueling the reactor and transferring the fuel to a spent fuel pool. Besides safe storage, the owner of a plant could choose immediate dismantlement or entombment.
Indian Point in New York also chose the safe storage option. That plant permanently shut down in 1997.
The purpose of the decommissioning report is to provide the NRC and the public with a general overview of the company’s decommissioning activities, said Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the federal agency. At some point, a public hearing on the plan will be held, he said.
In its post-closure plan, Exelon projected that the bulk of its decommissioning costs — $1.1 billion — will involve dealing with radiological components of the plant. Approximately $290 million will go for spent-fuel management, and another $60 million for site restoration, not expected to be finished until September 2078.
Prior to then, the facility will be left intact with most structures maintained in a stable condition. The overall objective of the decontamination and dismantlement is to ensure that radioactively contaminated or activated materials will be removed from the site to be released for unrestricted use, according the 43-page report.
“Recently, Exelon Generation filed a Post Shutdown Decommissioning Activities Report with the NRC,” the company said in an email, “which lays out our current plan and timing for decommissioning the site. While the NRC allows nuclear operators up to 60 years to return a nuclear facility to previously existing conditions, the timeline could be significantly shorter.”
Oyster Creek announced earlier this year it would shut down by the end of October, earlier than it previously agreed to close the plant under an agreement with former Gov. Chris Christie. That agreement, following years of efforts by environmentalists to close the facility, called for the facility to shut down by the end of 2019.
The plant began operation in 1969, and its license to operate would have expired in 2029. Nuclear plants throughout the nation have been retiring prematurely, largely because they have found it difficult to compete against cheap natural-gas plants.
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Is this urban Philly farmer the future or a fantastic fraud?
Jack Griffin says he can still revolutionize agriculture and build the urban farm of the future.
But first, Griffin needs to survive a war with many of the folks he has worked with. His backers are suing him for fraud, accusing him of diverting over $1 million to his personal accounts. They’ve also outed him as an ex-felon and are publicly calling him a “career criminal” and a “con artist.”
Metropolis Farms, his massive indoor garden spot in South Philadelphia, was locked last month after Griffin fell $16,000 behind on rent and utilities. Experts say his crop projections were never realistic while records show he has exaggerated his educational credentials.
And he has a battle ahead facing accusations made last week that he stole $380,000 from a New Jersey school for autistic children.
Griffin, 56, said he’s “the victim of a plot to steal his patented technology.” He said his investors and his former partner, a one-time illegal marijuana grower, are trying to force him out of the business so they can take it for themselves.
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32,000 acres of forestland purchased by nonprofit in Pa.
A vast swath of Penn’s Woods in Elk and McKean Counties will be conserved, thanks to a Virginia-based nonprofit.
The Conservation Fund, in a news release, said the Clarion Junction Forest consists of 32,598 acres of “sustainable timberland” around the city of Johnsonburg, Elk County, in the “Pennsylvania Wilds,” just under 300 miles northwest of Philadelphia. It may be the largest conservation acquisition by a nonprofit in Pennsylvania history, a spokeswoman said.
In a deal finalized Wednesday, the Conservation Fund said its purchase will bridge Pennsylvania Game Commission lands and the Allegheny National Forest, while also securing the confluence of the East and West Branches of the Clarion River.
“We are in an entirely new era of private forest ownership in America,” Brian Dangler, vice president and director of the Conservation Fund’s Working Forest Fund, said in the news release. “The transfer of large, industrial-size forests is happening so quickly, we only have a very short window to protect these forested landscapes to ensure their ecological benefits and that they can remain the backbone of rural economies and traditional uses nationwide.”
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Action in New Jersey Assembly on Thursday, June 7, 2018
By Frank Brill, Editor, EnviroPolitics
The following environment and energy bills are scheduled for floor votes when the New Jersey Assembly meets at 1 p.m. on Thursday, June 7, at the State House in Trenton:
A1093 (Downey / Pinkin) – Requires DEP to update Shore Protection Master Plan.
A2544 (DeAngelo / Houghtaling) – Requires DCA to provide certain information on low-income home energy assistance program, annually update its low-income home energy assistance program handbook, and provide quarterly training sessions on administering program.
A3798 (Calabrese / Eustace / Murphy) – Revises “New Jersey Smoke-Free Air Act” to prohibit smoking at public beaches and parks.
AR45 (Thomson / Mazzeo / Armato) – Urges President and Congress to enact “Transparent Summer Flounder Quotas Act.”
S1057 / A1046 (Van Drew / Gopal / Houghtaling / Andrzejczak / Mazzeo) – Requires EDA, in consultation with Department of Agriculture, to establish loan program for certain vineyard and winery capital expenses.
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