In 1967 seventeen Nobel Laureates and 5000 other scientists signed a petition asking for the immediate end to the use of herbicides in Vietnam. Press coverage of the controversial use of herbicides in Vietnam increased in the late 1960s. In 1970 AAAS sent a team of scientists to conduct field tests of the ecological impacts of the herbicide program in Vietnam. In 1969 a report authored by K. Diane Courtney and others found that 2,4,5-T could cause birth defects and still births in mice. This, and follow-up studies, led the US government to restrict the use of 2,4,5-T in the US in April 1970.
The government has spent 10 billion dollars on the Yucca Mountain project already so it would be a waste to not use it, don’t we want our tax dollars to be well spent? We should use Yucca Mountain to dispose of our nuclear waste. If we do not dispose of the waste soon then perhaps, a leak could occur in a nuclear waste container and it would do damage to our country. We would not want that. With the design of the steel barriers that would contain the repository, which is similar to a big steel box, the site would be good for thousands of years to come.
The Buffalo Creek Flood killed many people in the February of 1972. After the flood, Pittston not only didn’t admit the responsibility, but also claimed it as a natural disaster, called it “an act of god,” and later on claimed and blamed that the Buffalo Mining Company was a separate division altogether and that Pittston couldn’t be responsible for its actions. Furthermore, since Pittston rushed to settle the survivors with only 4000 dollars for the survivors from the flood, the survivors are angry with that. So it triggered the survivors to look for a law firm that is Arnold & Porter, and to represent them and seek for justice. After the flood, many people lose everything, and they had no choice but to accept these offers because they couldn’t wait until the lawsuit to follow through, not even guarantee that they will be compensated or win lawsuits.
Residents went to emergency shelters because of the radiation. Equipment failure, human error, and bad luck would conspire to create America’s worst nuclear accident. The impact of Three Mile Island was terrible, there was a massive cleanup. The cleanup started in August of 1979 and officially ended in December of 1993. The cleanup cost about 975 million dollars.
West Virginia Chemical Spill Effecting Our Environment Industrialization has greatly impacted our Earth. In the article Federal Grand Jury Investigates West Virginia Chemical Spill, the authors, Drew Griffin and David Fitzpatrick, emphasize the damage the chemical spill did to our planet. Many people were left with no water to use and the environment was greatly damaged by the spill. Chemical plants allow our society to develop some service such as water, electricity or disposal services. Conversely, Chemical plants can contaminate the pure water or create harmful diseases to humans and the Earth.
Fracking is inherently risky, there is extensive evidence to suggest that fracking can contaminate groundwater and that it causes significant air pollution. For the first time in history, smog has become a major issue in many rural communities in the US, with some villages in Wyoming experiencing worse smog than downtown Los Angeles and an increase in lung cancer cases of over 500%. Since 2005, 1.2 trillion litres has been wasted in the fracking process creating toxic waste which cannot be recycled and must be disposed of very carefully to avoid danger to humans and the environment. In addition, one in six deep injection wells examined have an integrity violation leading to the leaking of toxic waste into the environment – more than 17,000 violations in the US alone. Such is the desperation for energy in the US, fracking has had to be made exempt from parts of at least seven major national statutes, including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act in order for it to be made legal.
In 1966 Congress were considering the construction of two dams on the Colorado River. The construction of these dams would flood a portion of the Grand Canyon, turning it into a 500 foot lake. The Sierra Club strongly disagreed and the day before a vote was to be taken, they ran numerous ads in papers “excoriating Congress for this environmental blasphemy” (Berry 76). Though The Sierra Club only spent around $10,000 out of their approximately $1.5 million dollar budget for that year, the IRS suspended their tax deductibility while they investigated the case. Eventually their 501c3 status was revoked.
Shrimp eaters must have gone through a phase where they are reluctant to buy shrimp “after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers and triggering the spill that eventually spewed 206 million gallons (780 million liters) of oil from BP’s blown-out well” (Bureau and Mcgill 2010 Pg: 3). Even though only “7% of all shrimp consumed in the U.S. is caught in the Gulf of Mexico.” People still questioned the safety of eating Gulf coast Shrimp (Boyle 2010: 1). The oil spill brought a lot of fear in what is going to happened to the environment , to wildlife, to seafood industry, and to the very livelihood of those people in Louisiana’s and Mississippi’s coasts. The domestic shrimp, in particular, “has been subject to a seemingly continuous stream of bad luck with the 2005 and 2008
How was this disaster a failure of regulation? What should be done to make regulations more effective, especially when they are politically unpopular with the business community? It was on April 20, 2010 that an explosion killing 11 workers on the platform, caused by a methane gas leak that eventually would sink an oil drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico and set into motion the largest oil spill in the U.S.A. and two days later an oil slick would start to spread at the former site of the oil drilling platform. Weeks after the explosion British Petroleum (BP) did attempted to plug the leak under water but ever attempt failed, they then tried to put a dome like fitting over the valves that were leaking but failed due to the interference of the methane that was coming out, a third plan was enacted to try and pump mud into the well which they called “top kill” but this also
Mt. Vesuvius had been dormant for 1,500 years, so people weren’t prepared in case there was an eruption. The volcano gave warnings to the people. Magma was building up inside the volcano so pressure was created, and there were little earthquakes due to the extreme pressure. There was a smell like rotten eggs, and people thought that it was the gods getting