An underground waste dump on fire is rapidly approaching the site of a landfill with radioactive waste in a small town in Missouri. Environmental activists say the results could be disastrous. Childhood cancers in the area are already on the rise, so why isn’t anyone doing anything about it?
This week, facts about… trash crime. Fifteen years ago, the New York State Assembly conducted hearings on the state’s garbage hauling industry which had become controlled by organized crime families. Some haulers were found to be illegally dumping toxic wastes into landfills.
The Environmental Defense Fund has established a Website with information collected from Toxic Release Inventory forms that most high-volume facilities use for reporting certain chemicals released into the environment. The site also includes information about health effects. Host Steve Curwood logs on to www.scorecard.org. with David Roe from the Environmental Defense Fund.
Highly radioactive nuclear reactor waste should be securely stored, yet at reactors around the world it is stacking up in open pools. No country has built a permanent disposal site. But now some groups are proposing that international sites be built to take waste from many nations.
The Arctic port city of Murmansk is one of the most dangerous places on the planet. That’s because it hosts what may be the world’s largest collection of nuclear waste stored in precarious conditions. Much of the waste floats in rusting atomic submarines that can leak into the rivers and sea. As Bill Gasperini reports, […]