I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
The Bruce nuclear power complex which sits on the Canadian side of Lake Huron in Kincardine, Ontario is preparing to ship hundreds of tons of nuclear waste over the Great Lakes and through the St. Lawrence Seaway to Sweden for reprocessing, the Owen Sound Times reports.
Bruce Power has signed a contract with the Studsvik company in Sweden for reprocessing of the plant’s 32 old steam generators, and is expected to begin shipments this fall. The Swedish plant will separate the most contaminated pieces of the old generators and return those pieces to Canada for storage — 90 percent of the metal from the retired nuclear equipment is expected to be released onto the global metal market.
This week a coalition of 50 international environmental groups signed on to a resolution opposing Bruce Power’s plan to transport and reprocess the generators.
According to the coalition:
The Studsvik plant in Sweden has signed a contract with Bruce Power that would result in as much as 90% of the radioactive metal being released into the marketplace for use in commercial and everyday household products. The European Commission’s EURATOM Recommendation RP 89 allows measurable amounts of plutonium, cesium-137, cobalt-60, enriched uranium, tritium, and other radioactive contaminants to be present in metals that are “free-released” to the open market,1 but this practice has been largely stopped in the U.S. despite repeated industry and government efforts. US regulations do not allow release of radioactive metal into the free market, but metal that is released in Sweden can make its way into the international metal supply, if not stopped.
Radioactive metals have made their way into U.S. consumer goods. In 2008 a Chinese-made EKCO brand cheese grater set off radiation alarms at a Flint scrap yard — it was emitting the equivalent of a chest X-ray every 36 hours.
The groups opposing Bruce Power’s plan also worry that shipping radioactive waste through the Great Lakes could endanger water quality.
“To allow these shipments to go ahead will set a terrible precedent, whereby more and more radioactive waste will be shipped through the Great Lakes in future, threatening inevitable and irreversible radioactive contamination of the largest fresh water system in the world,” Dr. Gordon Edwards of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, said in a statement, “And for what purpose? To pollute our stock of recycled metals with radioactive wastes from the nuclear industry? This plan must be nipped in the bud.”
The Bruce nuclear complex generates 20 percent of Ontario’s electricity.
This video describes the process of removing Bruce’s steam generators.
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