Spotlight Toxic Events

The Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989, carrying about 53,000,000 gallons of North Slope Crude. A little over 11,000,000 of that spilled and coated 1300 miles of pristine coastline. That's a big spill, but it isn't even in the top 50 in terms of the amount of oil lost.

What was most interesting about this event was how clearly it showed that environmental accidents are anything but accidental. In the aftermath, we learned that oil companies had been spending millions of dollars to defeat legislation that would have required them to use tankers with double hulls. Instead of taking responsibility for their malfeasance, Exxon pinnedthe blame on the captain, Joe Hazelwood, accusing him of drinking on the job. But they couldn’t prove it, so Hazelwood was convicted of negligence, fined $50,000, and forced to do 1000 hours of community service picking up litter along the highway and working in a soup kitchen.

Exxon ended up paying about $1 billion in fines and they claim to have spent $2 billion on the clean-up. But that’s peanuts to them. Their profits alone for 2003 were over $17 billion and their first quarter revenue for 2004 was $66 billion.

So oil spills are bad for the environment and they happen all the time. The risk management people in the big corporate towers call them part of the cost of doing business. So what else is new? Well, it’s not just the lives of seals and seagulls that they’re are willing to take risks with.

Early in the morning on December 3, 1984, 40 tons of cyanide gas leaked from a tank at the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India. The plant’s warning sirens had been turned off, so the cyanide caught half a million people asleep in their beds. At least 8,000 people were killed. About 400,000 were injured, suffering lung and neurological damage resulting in chronic pain and fevers, as well as persistent anxiety and depression. (1) This is just one of the thousands of unplanned toxic chemical spills and releases that happen every year.

Of course, the most powerful toxic substance of all is radioactivity. One of the most spectacular environmental disasters in history was the melt-down of Reactor #4 at Chernobyl in 1986. The reactor overheated and blew its lid, releasing a huge cloud of radioactive material that that settled across much of Europe.

Right after it blew, Mikhail Gorbachev went on TV and said: “There has been an incredible misfortune--an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It has painfully affected the Soviet People and shocked the international community. For the first time we confront the real power of nuclear energy, out of control.”

Out of control is right. But it wasn’t the first time. What about the meltdown of Reactor 2 at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant, near Middletown, Pennsylvania, on March 28, 1979?

It wasn’t the last time either. In April 2002, a technician found a hole several inches across in the reactor containment vessel at the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant, about 30 miles east of Toledo, Ohio. The only thing keeping the pressurized coolant solution in the reactor core was a 3/8-inch thick stainless steel sheath that had begun to bulge. If it had cracked, the coolant would have escaped and the reactor would likely have melted down. (2)

Of course, the most devastating releases of radioactivity have been the explosions of atomic bombs--at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, at the Nevada test site, in the South Pacific, and in lots of other places around the world.

And in the last couple of decades, the Pentagon has invented a new way to irradiate the planet. They coat their bullets and shells with nuclear waste called depleted uranium, or DU. Depleted uranium is everywhere in Iraq. During the two invasions, at least 2500 tons of depleted uranium munitions were fired, with as many as 200 tons being fired on Baghdad alone. (3)

In other words, Iraq is a toxic wasteland. Women as young as 35 are developing breast cancer. Sterility amongst men has increased ten-fold. Birth defects and miscarriages have skyrocketed. The rate of leukemia has increased 600% since 1990.

Depleted uranium has a half-life of 4.7 billion years.

(1) The International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, “The Union Carbide Disaster.”
(2) Union of Concerned Scientists, “Davis-Besse: The Reactor with a Hole in its Head.”
(3) Paul Brown, Uranium hazard prompts cancer check on troops,” The Guardian, Friday April 25, 2003.