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TEPCO Chair: Nuclear Plant Must Release Contaminated Water

           

Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s new Chairman Takashi Kawamura speaks during an interview at the TEPCO headquarters in Tokyo on Thursday, July 13, 2017. Kawamura said the utility needs to stop dragging its feet on plans to dump massive amounts of treated but contaminated water into the sea and make more money if it’s ever going to succeed in cleaning up the mess left by meltdowns more than six years ago at the tsunami-hit Fukushima nuclear power plant. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

abcnews.go.com - by Mari Yamaguchi - July 13, 2017

. . . Takashi Kawamura, an engineer-turned-business leader who previously headed Hitachi's transformation into a global conglomerate, is in charge of reviving TEPCO and leading the cleanup at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant. In an interview Thursday with selected media including The Associated Press, Kawamura said despite the massive costs of the cleanup and meeting tighter safety requirements, nuclear power is still vital for Japan's national security.

Below are highlights from the interview, where Kawamura spoke in Japanese:

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Coastal Resilience - Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines

coastalresilience.org

Nature holds some of the world’s best and most practical solutions to climate change, solutions that keep nature and people healthy, safe, and secure.

The goal of this project is to work alongside the governments and communities of small island states to enhance their resilience to climate change by protecting, restoring, and managing marine and coastal ecosystems and strengthening local capacity for adaptation.

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President Obama Bans Oil Drilling in Large Areas of Atlantic and Arctic Oceans

           

Hundreds of kayaktivists protest drilling in the Arctic and the Port of Seattle being used as a port for the Shell Oil drilling rig Polar Pioneer (Daniella Beccaria/seattlepi.com via Associated Press)

washingtonpost.com - by Darryl Fears and Juliet Eilperin - December 20, 2016

President Obama moved to solidify his environmental legacy Tuesday by withdrawing hundreds of millions of acres of federally owned land in the Arctic and Atlantic Ocean from new offshore oil and gas drilling.

Obama used a little-known law called the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect large portions of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas in the Arctic and a string of canyons in the Atlantic stretching from Massachusetts to Virginia. In addition to a five-year moratorium already in place in the Atlantic, removing the canyons from drilling puts much of the eastern seaboard off limits to oil exploration even if companies develop plans to operate around them.

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Prepare for 'Surprise' as Global Warming Stokes Arctic Shifts - Scientists

           

The crew of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy, in the midst of their ICESCAPE mission, retrieves supplies in the Arctic Ocean in this July 12, 2011 NASA handout photo. Kathryn Hansen/NASA via REUTERS/File Photo

"Ultimately, realising resilience in the Arctic will depend on empowering the people of the North to self-organise"

CLICK HERE - Stockholm Resilience Centre - Dealing with Arctic tipping points

CLICK HERE - Arctic Resilience Report

Thomson Reuters Foundation - by Megan Rowling - November 25, 2016

Unless the world stops burning fossil fuels that are fuelling global warming, irreversible changes in the Arctic could have disastrous effects for the people that live there and for the rest of the planet, researchers warned on Friday.

The Arctic's ecosystems are fundamentally threatened by climate change and other human activities, such as oil and gas extraction, they said in a report for the Arctic Council, an inter-governmental forum working to protect the region's environment.

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'Super Bacteria' Discovered in Rio's Waters as Olympics Near

          

Super bacteria found on Rio beaches, Olympic venues

cnn.com - by Flora Charner - July 5, 2016

Rio de Janeiro (CNN)A group of Brazilian scientists has detected a drug-resistant bacteria growing off some of Rio de Janeiro's most stunning beaches, in research being published a month before the city hosts the 2016 Olympic Games.

According to lead researcher Renata Picao, the "super bacteria" entered the city's waterways when sewage coming from local hospitals got channeled into the bay.

"We have been looking for 'super bacteria' in coastal waters during a one-year period in five beaches," Picao told CNN during a visit to her lab. "We found that the threats occur in coastal waters in a variety of concentrations and that they are strongly associated with pollution."

The samples were collected between 2013 and 2014. The superbug found was carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE.

Picao said there is no reason to believe the levels have changed because raw sewage continues to flow into many waterways.

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27,000 Abandoned Oil and Gas Wells in Gulf of Mexico Ignored by Government, Industry

An older nearshore wellhead is shown off the coast of California in this undated photo. In state waters, California has resealed scores of its abandoned wells since the 1980s, but in federal waters, the official policy is out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Neither industry nor government checks for leaks at the more than 27,000 oil and gas wells abandoned in the Gulf of Mexico since the late 1940s. Abandoned wells are known sometimes to fail both on land and offshore. It happens so often that a technical term has been coined for the repair job: "re-abandonment."  Photo: California State Lands Commission / The Associated Press

nola.com - Associated Press - July 7, 2010

More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades. No one -- not industry, not government -- is checking to see if they are leaking, an Associated Press investigation shows.

The oldest of these wells were abandoned in the late 1940s, raising the prospect that many deteriorating sealing jobs are already failing.

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Ministry of Fisheries Surprises Critics, Scoops Le40 Billion

 

The Deputy Minister of Fisheries and Marine Resources, Mr. Charles Rogers, has disclosed that despite the devastating effect of the outbreak of the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) on the national economy for sixteen (16) months, the Ministry managed to raise a maximum different from the normal years.

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Australia's Great Barrier Reef hit by 'worst' bleaching

The Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest living structure and can be seen from space.

Image: The Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest living structure and can be seen from space.

bbc.com - March 29th 2016

Evidence that Australia's Great Barrier Reef is experiencing its worst coral bleaching on record has renewed calls for the UN to list it as "in-danger".

The National Coral Bleaching Taskforce says 95% of reefs from Cairns to Papua New Guinea are now severely bleached.

It says only four reefs out of 520 have no evidence of bleaching.

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Study: Oceans Trapping Heat at Accelerating Rate

insidebayarea.com - by Seth Borenstein - January 18, 2016

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Nature Climate Change - Industrial-era global ocean heat uptake doubles in recent decades

WASHINGTON -- The amount of man-made heat energy absorbed by the seas has doubled since 1997, a study released Monday showed.

Scientists have long known that more than 90 percent of the heat energy from man-made global warming goes into the world's oceans instead of the ground.

And they've seen ocean heat content rise in recent years. But the new study, using ocean-observing data that goes back to the British research ship Challenger in the 1870s and including high-tech modern underwater monitors and computer models, tracked how much man-made heat has been buried in the oceans in the past 150 years.

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By 2050, There Will Be More Plastic than Fish in the World’s Oceans, Study Says

           

A September 2008 photo released by the Ocean Conservancy on March 10, 2009, shows a trash-covered beach in Manilla, Philippines. (Tamara Thoreson Pierce/Ocean Conservancy/AP)

CLICK HERE - REPORT - World Economic Forum - The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the future of plastics

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Independent study tallies 'true catch' of global fishing

washingtonpost.com - by Sarah Kaplan - January 20, 2016

There is a lot of plastic in the world’s oceans.

It coagulates into great floating “garbage patches” that cover large swaths of the Pacific. It washes up on urban beaches and remote islands, tossed about in the waves and transported across incredible distances before arriving, unwanted, back on land. It has wound up in the stomachs of more than half the world’s sea turtles and nearly all of its marine birds, studies say . . .

. . . But that quantity pales in comparison with the amount that the World Economic Forum expects will be floating into the oceans by the middle of the century.

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