Another key part of Australia’s Murray-Darling river system is, one of its defenders claims, collapsing:
The mollusc deaths are just the latest in a series of deaths and disappearances that have blighted the Gippsland Lakes since the Thomson and Latrobe rivers flooded in June 2007.
With the floodwaters came the debris of the bushfires that burnt through the lakes’ mountain catchments the previous summer: a swollen slurry of ash and soil laden with the residue of tonnes of fire retardant, forestry pesticides, nutrients, heavy metals and chemicals accumulated from lowland farmland, towns and industrial hubs over a decade of drought.
And the dangers of Britain’s old nuclear industry have been exposed in an unpublished Environment Agency report:
The report says that “tens of thousands” of containers of immensely dangerous waste, bound in concrete, are simply being stored above ground, mainly at Sellafield, while the Government and the nuclear industry decide what to do with them. On present plans it is assumed they will remain there for up to another 150 years before being placed in a repository underground. It will take another 50 years to fill the repository, which will then remain open for another 300 years, while the waste is monitored, before being sealed up and buried.
Officially, containers are designed to last for the full five centuries before the repository is closed. But the Environment Agency report questions whether this is “realistic” and says there is an “absence of robust arguments which demonstrate that this target is achievable in practice”.
It suggests that the containers are not made of the kinds of stainless steel best able to resist corrosion and questions whether the types used are “fit for purpose over an extended time period”.
And a telling figure from the Friends of the Earth: the new VBettle car has exactly the same fuel consumption as the first, built in 1938. That’s part of a campaign to get the European Union to show some backbone in standing up to the car manufacturers…
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