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CBS-TV 60 MINUTES SUNDAY AUGUST 15, 7PM: Coal Ash
Lesley Stahl investigates a substance that contains the toxic metals mercury, arsenic and lead but has yet to be regulated by the EPA. It's coal ash, the waste byproduct created in the burning of coal for electricity and it's often recycled as land fill and sometimes even ends up in products like carpeting and countertops. But if coal ash is safe to spread under a golf course or put in carpets, why are the residents of Kingston, Tenn., being told to stay out of a river where it was spilled? Stahl begins there, where a town was inundated with a billion of gallons of muck containing coal ash in a spill 100 times larger than the Exxon Valdez.
Watch a preview.
MOSCOW — As if things in Russia were not looking sufficiently apocalyptic already, with 100-degree temperatures and noxious fumes rolling in from burning peat bogs and forests, there is growing alarm here that fires in regions coated with fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 24 years ago could now be emitting plumes of radioactive smoke.
Several fires have been documented in the contaminated areas of western Russia, including three heavily irradiated sites in the Bryansk region, the environmental group Greenpeace Russia said in a statement released Tuesday. Bryansk borders Belarus and Ukraine.
“Fires on these territories will without a doubt lead to an increase in radiation,” said Vladimir Chuprov, head of the energy program at Greenpeace Russia. “The smoke will spread and the radioactive traces will spread. The amount depends upon the force of the wind.”
A recently organized citizens group, called Protect Our Islands Now for Tomorrow, is holding a conference today in Chilmark to discuss a state ocean-management study that identifies two sites west of Martha’s Vineyard as potential locations for future wind farms.
The group has invited all of this year’s gubernatorial candidates to speak, though Republican Charlie Baker is the only one expected to attend. POINT has been running radio ads on the island, touting the conference and warning in ominous tones about the potential proliferation of wind projects off the coasts of Martha’s Vineyard.
“As a group, we’re not anti-wind farms,” said Andy Goldman, a full-year resident of Chilmark. “We are anti-turbines in the wrong place when the detriments outweigh the positives.”
August 8, 2010 A Closer Look -Bisphenol A and its potential health risks
The chemical is found in plastic bottles, food can liners and on receipts. But the risks from exposure are unclear.
Concerns about the chemical bisphenol A and its potential health risks have led many consumers to be more careful about the containers they use to carry drinking water and feed their babies. The market has responded with water bottles labeled "BPA-free."
And then, in late July, the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization, reported that high amounts of BPA are present in everyday cash register receipts, as much as 3% of the total weight of the receipt.
Certainly, there would be real concerns if the bisphenol A on receipts readily sloughs off onto the fingers of cashiers and buyers, penetrates several layers of skin and enters the bloodstream at potentially toxic levels, says Kristina Thayer, a scientist at the National Toxicology Program, an interagency group charged with evaluating toxic chemicals. However, she added, no scientific study has even looked for such a pathway.
"It's a very fair question to ask whether we've got a good grasp on all the potential sources of exposure to BPA," Thayer says. "It's certainly worthy of more investigation." Federal agencies are funding such work.
Here's a closer look at what we know about the likelihood that BPA would enter our bodies without actually swallowing it. Some background: Bisphenol A can mimic actions of estrogen, a reproductive hormone. Most health risk studies have been done in animals and have found breast- and prostate-like cancers and altered growth of these and other reproductive organs during development. The tricky part is figuring out whether the doses tested in rodents are relevant to the types of exposures that people get.
The science about cancer and cell phones is even murkier than you think. What you should know before you dial.
To get a sense of the total, complete, and utter mess that is research on the health effects of cell phones, look no further than a study of whether the ubiquitous gadgets raise the risk of brain tumors. “Interphone,” organized by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, was the largest (10,751 subjects, ages 30 to 59, in 13 countries), longest (10 years), most expensive (as much as $30 million), and most labor-intensive (48 scientists) study of its kind.
That boded well for producing credible conclusions. Instead, Interphone found that using a cell phone decreased the risk of glioma (primary brain cancer) by 19 percent. Even in people who had used cell phones for more than 10 years there was no increased risk of brain tumors, with the exception of those who said they had yakked away for more than 1,640 hours. And the 40 percent increased risk of glioma in this group came with a caveat that is emblematic of this field: this elevated risk, the scientists warned, may be an artifact of “biases and error,” not real.
Things got so acrimonious among Interphone scientists that they delayed announcing the results, finally released in May, for four years.
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