Be Sus with Sustainability and a Pro with Prosperity

I’ve learned from the new generation who like to say “sus” when something is suspicious. When I see the word sus-tainable, I like to look more closely at the author’s viewpoint.

For close to ten years of blogging on this website Conserve-Prosper.com, I’ve been seeking and sharing ways to sustainably conserve precious resources that ultimately will lead to our individual and collective prosperity. However, I’ve also noticed many versions of the word sustainability. Here are two examples:

One group based in London, UK called Sustainable Times: “is a media platform and community that delivers essential resources and timely news…bridging the gap between visionary sustainable founders and impact-driven investors, it fosters a dynamic community committed to building a sustainable business future.” One article is titled Water Efficiency: Driving Profits and Sustainability in Today’s Business which states:

“The writing is on the wall: water costs are rising, shortages are looming, and climate change is escalating. But there’s hope — water efficiency offers a practical, cost-effective solution to each of these challenges. By understanding and reducing water consumption, businesses can cut costs and make significant strides in their environmental sustainability efforts.” Overall, I’m finding the articles to be interesting that meet the definition of business sustainability.

Another group called Sustainability-Times:“is your online destination for trusted news, insightful analysis, and lively debate on every aspect of sustainability. From clean tech and climate action to health, ecology, education, and innovation, we explore the key transformations shaping a better future.” Guess where it’s published and the content of most of their posts? They are based in Tel Aviv, Israel with many of the news reports relating to Chinese and American militaries! Here are three recent reports China Hits the Moon With a Laser, China Stunned by US Jet, China Unveils Its Military Mega-Project. So perhaps these articles are useful from the point-of-view for Israel to sustain their existence but I’m not finding news promoting environmental sustainability.

On another topic, in response to increasing stock market volatility around the world, personal finance expert Suze Orman says,

“I need you to be conservative right now.”

She’s not talking about being politically conservative. She says we need to ‘tighten our belts’ by reducing expenses and making sound decisions on saving and spending money as discussed in her YouTube video. I became a fan of her CNBC show over 20 years ago and read several of her New York Times bestselling books.

How many times have we eaten out at a restaurant, only to feel indigestion with the food and the bill? At a recent Red Robin lunch for two, the $20 burger was undercooked, the fries too salty and the salad bland - so much food and money wasted! Conservatively contrasting eating out, we always enjoy meals at home, knowing the higher quality and value of food provided when and how we want to eat.

We try to combine trips with one car to be as fuel and time efficient as possible. Road trips give us time to relax and talk.

We can all make better choices for buying sustainable products, such as these recommended by the UCLA housing office.

Would you agree that prosperity is our total wealth, not just financial security but also our mental and physical health and spiritual abundance?

“Live long and prosper,” said Mr. Spock from Star Trek, the futuristic TV show that continues to sustain audiences for over 60 years!

Should America's Only Nuclear Waste Repository Stay Open?

On Monday this week, I interviewed for a consulting position to work as a geochemical modeler on the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, called the WIPP site, located in Carlsbad, New Mexico. Although I may still be in contention for the remote-worker position, I would rather share some of the incredible publicly-available news I learned so far. I will briefly share a few interview reflections, some site history, including an underground fire, release of radionuclides and whistleblower lawsuit, and current events leading up to decisions to continue allowing disposal of nuclear waste.

Making nuclear weapons and laboratory experiments generate radioactive waste materials contaminated mostly with highly toxic plutonium and americium. The nuclear weapons complex, including at national laboratories, generated nuclear waste from 22 sites across the country; significant quantities of waste were created during and after the Manhattan Project of the 1940’s. I’ve worked at or toured many of these locations including Los Alamos, NM, Hanford, WA, Oak Ridge, TN and the Nevada Test Site.

The WIPP site began construction in 1981 and completed to receive radioactive waste shipments in 1999. Drums of waste were sent by truck shipments to WIPP then disposed in salt mines. But of course Murphy’s Law ("Anything that can go wrong will go wrong") prevailed; two tragic events occurred in February 2014: an underground salt haul truck caught on fire; then a week later in a different part of the repository, on Valentine’s Day 2014, a drum breech vented radioactivity underground and escaped to above ground. As reported by NPR, an investigation tracked the drum’s origin back to Los Alamos National Labs that incorrectly switched from an inorganic to organic type of absorbent cat litter. The official DOE investigation report states that trace amounts of radioactivity were also vented to the surface onsite and offsite. HEPA air filters were not designed to handle the unplanned release and now DOE is spending about $500 million on a new ventilation system to be completed by next year. WIPP shut down for three years and restarted receiving shipments in April 2017.

I told the non-technical recruiter, who admitted not knowing anything about my profession but needed to screen my application, that even though I’ve not previously worked directly on WIPP, my related experiences included attending a 1980 geology summer field camp to the area, getting an underground tour of WIPP when I worked for Department of Energy in 2010, and conducting investigations at several sites that created nuclear waste being sent for disposal. So I understand generally the site geology, hydrology, and geochemistry as well as what’s inside the drums and the salt-mine repository. Specific to the geochemistry position, I mentioned several jobs I previously held including on the Yucca Mountain project, which was previously proposed as an underground repository for disposing high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants.

Transuranic (TRU) waste remains radioactive for thousands of years so you might ask how are decisions made to allow for continued disposal? The EPA requires computer modeling of all the features, events, and processes known as performance assessments (PA) to calculate the anticipated radionuclide activity at the site boundary after 10,000 years. EPA initially certified the site in 1998 and requires recertification every five years with the next one due in November 2026. Here’s an example of Title 40 CFR Part 191 Subparts B and C Compliance Recertification Application from 2014.

An EPA report describes the importance of understanding the site and waste geochemical interactions that are modeled in the PA which states:

“The PA incorporates multiple different models and concepts, ranging from the rock mechanics of the surrounding salt matrix to the geochemistry of the actinides’ interacting with brine pockets. This document provides an overview of the various geochemical concepts in the PA used to estimate actinide releases and relates them to the specific conditions at the WIPP and the PA methods.”

Actinides encompass the 14 metallic chemical elements in the 5f series, with atomic numbers from 89 to 102, actinium through nobelium. Here’s an interesting historical letter describing the discovery of plutonium by Glenn Seaborg. The quote above also mentions “brine pockets” which are isolated small quantities of trapped seawater contained in salt deposits along with interbedded clay and anhydrite (calcium sulfate).

Geochemical computer codes, including EQ3/6 and PHREEQC, combine chemical analyses of water or brine with thermodynamic data to calculate the solubilities and activities or concentrations of elements which are then included in the PA. There are many assumptions and constrains on geochemical modeling, such as that chemical reactions have instantaneously achieved an equilibrium state, so tremendous expertise is needed to make sense of the data. Here’s an interesting article from 2022 by some geochemists that I previously worked with explaining how different thermodynamic datasets can influence the results.

My preparation for the interview led to learning about a geochemistry expert who became a whistleblower stating that he discovered fraud. Dr. Charles Oakes worked for Sandia National Laboratory which oversees the WIPP PA and was not able to resolve technical disagreements so after losing his job he went to court. KOB-4 News from Albuquerque reported on the case in 2022:

"“This is a case where they weren’t, not only were they not doing their job, they were claiming they were doing their job but falsifying all the evidence that went into the claims that they were doing the job," Dr. Charles Oakes said.

"The most common feared way that the radiation will get to the surface is through the flow of water," said Dr. Oakes. "There are some aquifers in the rock of the repository. One of the fears is that a well will be drilled through the repository or near to this repository and water may flow through the repository and intersect with a well bore."

Dr. Oakes said his job was to look at how much of that radioactive material would make it to the surface.

"If you do have radioactive material dissolved in the water, will it react with rocks, minerals along the way, and be removed from the water, in which you removed the threat, or will it carry on its merry way dissolved and get to the surface where it can potentially hurt people and the environment," he said.

During his time at Sandia National Labs, Dr. Oakes said he discovered inaccuracies that called into question WIPP’s long-term safety, what he believed to data errors.

Oakes said he brought it up to his bosses, the Department of Energy and even the EPA.

After he spoke up, Oakes said Sandia labeled him a problem employee and showed him the door.”

I haven’t seen the results of the lawsuit but found this recent journal article by Dr. Oakes on the differing views related to WIPP thermodynamic data and geochemical modeling. He continues to develop new models to compare with existing models used in the WIPP PA.

In addition to EPA and state of New Mexico permitting the WIPP site, additional oversight is provided by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. They provided technical reviews on the new ventilation system and chemical contents of waste in drums.

Some of the anti-nuclear groups fighting WIPP include Stop Forever WIPP and Southwest Research and Information Center providing updates on radiation leaks from 2014 and public commenting for recertification.

A total of 14,000 shipments have been sent to WIPP as of June 2024. Originally, DOE stated WIPP would operate for 25 years and close in 2024 but with new expansion the operational date may be extended to 2083.

Overall, I believe removing nuclear waste from sites around the country is significantly important and justified if it can be done safely. Continuing to improve nuclear quality assurance must allow for differing professional opinions by improving all aspects of performance assessments and model validations.

Update on May 6, 2025

I received notice today that the geochemistry modeler position will be filled within Sandia National Laboratory. I’m ‘relieved of duty’ before needing to accept getting into a very difficult position.

One email comment I received regarding the blog came from a former colleague at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission:

“Can you share how serious the two accidents were in your mind as far as keeping the site open? Your conclusion about better QA and performance assessment modeling didn’t feel connected to the two accidents. Did their severity, repercussions, or infrequency of occurrence factor into your final conclusion?”

While we all realize accidents can happen, what matters most is being able to establish and maintain trust. The federal government created WIPP as a pilot project. Promises were made to limit the site to 25 years and now the site may continue to stay open possibly for another 50+ years. The two accidents that occurred in 2014 were very serious impacting health of workers and further damaging the reputation of the federal government. A breakdown in quality assurance (QA) and the lack of including these potential events in the original performance assessment (PA) indicates not all features, events and processes were considered. Further shortfalls in the process have been recognized by at least one whistleblower who had direct involvement in the PA. These concerns have not been transparently resolved to build confidence in WIPP or the people working on the project.

The well-respected scientific journal Nature wrote an editorial about the 2014 accident:

The release of radioactive material at a US nuclear-waste repository reveals an all-too-common picture of complacency over safety and a gradual downgrading of regulations.

On St Valentine’s Day, the United States’ flagship geological repository for nuclear waste dodged a bullet. Deep below the New Mexico desert, something went wrong. One or more drums of nuclear waste ruptured, probably because of a chemical reaction or explosion. Thousands of drums are held in the 655-metre deep underground repository, designed to safely contain for thousands of years the low- and medium-level radioactive remnants of US military programmes. Just 15 years after it opened, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad has been hurriedly closed down while officials seek answers.

Parts of the repository were contaminated with long-lived transuranic radioactive elements, including americium and plutonium. The extent of the contamination is still being established, but the amounts released were not small, and last week officials announced that the repository will remain closed for at least 18 months and possibly much longer. A small amount of radioactivity was also vented to the surface, and 21 workers were exposed to what seem to have been low levels.

It took an accident to uncover glaring safety weaknesses and the lack of a strong safety culture.

It is clear that both the accident and its consequences could have been much worse. Maintenance resulting from a separate and unrelated accident on 5 February — a vehicle fire underground — meant that from 6 to 10 February the ventilation was unfiltered, and real-time continuous radiation monitors were switched off. Had the accident happened then, rather than on 14 February, the release would only have been detected during manual radiation readings that are taken each morning, meaning that workers would unknowingly have been exposed, and higher levels of radioactivity would have reached the environment.

On the evening of the accident, a continuous radiation monitor underground, which sounded the alert to high radiation levels in a waste-storage area at 11.14 p.m., was the only one in service, as all the others were out of order. This resulted in automatic switching of the ventilation to pass by high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filtration to catch radioactive particles. Shortly after the alert, a vigilant shift manager opened large fans to vent the repository contamination through the HEPA filters to the environment; this should have happened automatically with no need for manual intervention — but it had been switched to manual some years ago. The ventilation system also fell short of nuclear-safety norms, as it had gaps that allowed some radiation to reach the environment. Workers plugged these gaps with high-density foam on 6 March.

The mantra for WIPP was to “start clean and stay clean”. Accidents, the government said, would never happen. But as a News article on page 267 details, a Department of Energy (DOE) report on the incident outlines how fanciful that promise was. The report describes an atmosphere of complacency. It lists a litany of failings, from an insidious continual deregulation of safety standards and cutting of corners, to dilapidated safety equipment, and a lax security culture. WIPP’s response to the accident itself was “delayed and ineffective” adds the report.

The consequences of a release of radioactivity at WIPP, a repository for low- and medium-level waste deep underground in a remote region, are much less serious than those at a nuclear power plant. But as with the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, the same characteristic errors were in play: hubris, overconfidence in safety assumptions, dilution or non-respect of safety standards, a weak security culture and, crucially, lack of tough, independent scientific and technical oversight.

And, as at Fukushima, it took an accident to uncover glaring safety weaknesses and the lack of a strong safety culture — an essential element in safe nuclear operation. The DOE, which operates WIPP, and the WIPP regulators — including the Environmental Protection Agency — seem to have been asleep at the wheel. The uncovering of these safety deficiencies is all the more disconcerting given that the authorities have been proposing to expand WIPP from a site for low- and medium-level waste to one that would also hold both high-level surplus weapons-grade plutonium and much hotter spent nuclear fuel.

In the past, WIPP was a model of how to integrate science into the planning and design of a nuclear-waste repository, and how to gain public confidence in that science. Its recent shortcomings are a further blow to the pressing need to find ways to deal safely with the vast quantities of accumulated defence and civilian wastes. WIPP and planned repositories elsewhere would do well to heed the lessons of WIPP’s troubles, and strive to ensure that transparent independent scientific oversight of projects is made a top priority and maintained.

Environmental Legacy of Pope Francis

Shocking news to learn that Pope Francis passed away this morning, the day after Easter, at age 88. In 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina, became the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas and the Southern Hemisphere, and the first to take the name of Saint Francis of Assisi.

My son attended Holy Family Catholic School in 2015 when Pope Francis published the Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on Care for our Common Home. I recall ten years ago finding a newspaper article describing his letter and placing it near our home alter to contemplate. Pope Francis described the importance of caring for all life on Earth, efforts made by his predecessors as Bishop of Rome, his namesake St. Francis and faith in Jesus. He cited many reasons for our economic-environmental-social crisis including consumerism and offered many ideas to help us veer away from the current path of degradation and suffering to promote human rights and the welfare of all beings living on Mother Earth.

It took me some time this morning to slow down in my rush of busyness to read this beautifully-written letter. Pope Francis did not deny climate change, rather he embraced the scientific consensus stating, “Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods.”

Pope Francis wrote an introduction including four paragraphs below along with excerpts from several chapters (I’ve added bold text to some key points):

“Now, faced as we are with global environmental deterioration, I wish to address every person living on this planet. The urgent challenge to protect our common home includes a concern to bring the whole human family together to seek a sustainable and integral development, for we know that things can change. The Creator does not abandon us; he never forsakes his loving plan or repents of having created us. Humanity still has the ability to work together in building our common home. Here I want to recognize, encourage and thank all those striving in countless ways to guarantee the protection of the home which we share. Particular appreciation is owed to those who tirelessly seek to resolve the tragic effects of environmental degradation on the lives of the world’s poorest. Young people demand change. They wonder how anyone can claim to be building a better future without thinking of the environmental crisis and the sufferings of the excluded.

I urgently appeal, then, for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all. The worldwide ecological movement has already made considerable progress and led to the establishment of numerous organizations committed to raising awareness of these challenges. Regrettably, many efforts to seek concrete solutions to the environmental crisis have proved ineffective, not only because of powerful opposition but also because of a more general lack of interest. Obstructionist attitudes, even on the part of believers, can range from denial of the problem to indifference, nonchalant resignation or blind confidence in technical solutions. We require a new and universal solidarity. As the bishops of Southern Africa have stated: “Everyone’s talents and involvement are needed to redress the damage caused by human abuse of God’s creation”. […] All of us can cooperate as instruments of God for the care of creation, each according to his or her own culture, experience, involvements and talents.

It is my hope that this Encyclical Letter, which is now added to the body of the Church’s social teaching, can help us to acknowledge the appeal, immensity and urgency of the challenge we face. I will begin by briefly reviewing several aspects of the present ecological crisis, with the aim of drawing on the results of the best scientific research available today, letting them touch us deeply and provide a concrete foundation for the ethical and spiritual itinerary that follows. I will then consider some principles drawn from the Judaeo-Christian tradition which can render our commitment to the environment more coherent. I will then attempt to get to the roots of the present situation, so as to consider not only its symptoms but also its deepest causes. This will help to provide an approach to ecology which respects our unique place as human beings in this world and our relationship to our surroundings. In light of this reflection, I will advance some broader proposals for dialogue and action which would involve each of us as individuals, and also affect international policy. Finally, convinced as I am that change is impossible without motivation and a process of education, I will offer some inspired guidelines for human development to be found in the treasure of Christian spiritual experience.

Although each chapter will have its own subject and specific approach, it will also take up and re-examine important questions previously dealt with. This is particularly the case with a number of themes which will reappear as the Encyclical unfolds. As examples, I will point to the intimate relationship between the poor and the fragility of the planet, the conviction that everything in the world is connected, the critique of new paradigms and forms of power derived from technology, the call to seek other ways of understanding the economy and progress, the value proper to each creature, the human meaning of ecology, the need for forthright and honest debate, the serious responsibility of international and local policy, the throwaway culture and the proposal of a new lifestyle. These questions will not be dealt with once and for all, but reframed and enriched again and again.

(Paragraph 82) Yet it would also be mistaken to view other living beings as mere objects subjected to arbitrary human domination. When nature is viewed solely as a source of profit and gain, this has serious consequences for society. This vision of “might is right” has engendered immense inequality, injustice and acts of violence against the majority of humanity, since resources end up in the hands of the first comer or the most powerful: the winner takes all. Completely at odds with this model are the ideals of harmony, justice, fraternity and peace as proposed by Jesus. As he said of the powers of his own age: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant” (Mt 20:25-26).

(Paragraph 117) Neglecting to monitor the harm done to nature and the environmental impact of our decisions is only the most striking sign of a disregard for the message contained in the structures of nature itself. When we fail to acknowledge as part of reality the worth of a poor person, a human embryo, a person with disabilities – to offer just a few examples – it becomes difficult to hear the cry of nature itself; everything is connected.

(Paragraph 160) What kind of world do we want to leave to those who come after us, to children who are now growing up? This question not only concerns the environment in isolation; the issue cannot be approached piecemeal. When we ask ourselves what kind of world we want to leave behind, we think in the first place of its general direction, its meaning and its values. Unless we struggle with these deeper issues, I do not believe that our concern for ecology will produce significant results. But if these issues are courageously faced, we are led inexorably to ask other pointed questions: What is the purpose of our life in this world? Why are we here? What is the goal of our work and all our efforts? What need does the earth have of us? It is no longer enough, then, simply to state that we should be concerned for future generations. We need to see that what is at stake is our own dignity. Leaving an inhabitable planet to future generations is, first and foremost, up to us. The issue is one which dramatically affects us, for it has to do with the ultimate meaning of our earthly sojourn.

(Paragraph 180) There are no uniform recipes, because each country or region has its own problems and limitations. It is also true that political realism may call for transitional measures and technologies, so long as these are accompanied by the gradual framing and acceptance of binding commitments. At the same time, on the national and local levels, much still needs to be done, such as promoting ways of conserving energy. These would include favouring forms of industrial production with maximum energy efficiency and diminished use of raw materials, removing from the market products which are less energy efficient or more polluting, improving transport systems, and encouraging the construction and repair of buildings aimed at reducing their energy consumption and levels of pollution. Political activity on the local level could also be directed to modifying consumption, developing an economy of waste disposal and recycling, protecting certain species and planning a diversified agriculture and the rotation of crops. Agriculture in poorer regions can be improved through investment in rural infrastructures, a better organization of local or national markets, systems of irrigation, and the development of techniques of sustainable agriculture. New forms of cooperation and community organization can be encouraged in order to defend the interests of small producers and preserve local ecosystems from destruction. Truly, much can be done!

(Paragraph 190) The principle of the maximization of profits, frequently isolated from other considerations, reflects a misunderstanding of the very concept of the economy. As long as production is increased, little concern is given to whether it is at the cost of future resources or the health of the environment; as long as the clearing of a forest increases production, no one calculates the losses entailed in the desertification of the land, the harm done to biodiversity or the increased pollution. In a word, businesses profit by calculating and paying only a fraction of the costs involved. Yet only when “the economic and social costs of using up shared environmental resources are recognized with transparency and fully borne by those who incur them, not by other peoples or future generations”,[138] can those actions be considered ethical. An instrumental way of reasoning, which provides a purely static analysis of realities in the service of present needs, is at work whether resources are allocated by the market or by state central planning.

(Paragraph 202) Many things have to change course, but it is we human beings above all who need to change. We lack an awareness of our common origin, of our mutual belonging, and of a future to be shared with everyone. This basic awareness would enable the development of new convictions, attitudes and forms of life. A great cultural, spiritual and educational challenge stands before us, and it will demand that we set out on the long path of renewal.

(Paragraph 203) Since the market tends to promote extreme consumerism in an effort to sell its products, people can easily get caught up in a whirlwind of needless buying and spending. Compulsive consumerism is one example of how the techno-economic paradigm affects individuals. Romano Guardini had already foreseen this: “The gadgets and technics forced upon him by the patterns of machine production and of abstract planning mass man accepts quite simply; they are the forms of life itself. To either a greater or lesser degree mass man is convinced that his conformity is both reasonable and just”.[144] This paradigm leads people to believe that they are free as long as they have the supposed freedom to consume. But those really free are the minority who wield economic and financial power. Amid this confusion, postmodern humanity has not yet achieved a new self-awareness capable of offering guidance and direction, and this lack of identity is a source of anxiety. We have too many means and only a few insubstantial ends.

(Paragraph 204) The current global situation engenders a feeling of instability and uncertainty, which in turn becomes “a seedbed for collective selfishness”.[145] When people become self-centred and self-enclosed, their greed increases. The emptier a person’s heart is, the more he or she needs things to buy, own and consume. It becomes almost impossible to accept the limits imposed by reality. In this horizon, a genuine sense of the common good also disappears. As these attitudes become more widespread, social norms are respected only to the extent that they do not clash with personal needs. So our concern cannot be limited merely to the threat of extreme weather events, but must also extend to the catastrophic consequences of social unrest. Obsession with a consumerist lifestyle, above all when few people are capable of maintaining it, can only lead to violence and mutual destruction.

(Paragraph 206) A change in lifestyle could bring healthy pressure to bear on those who wield political, economic and social power. This is what consumer movements accomplish by boycotting certain products. They prove successful in changing the way businesses operate, forcing them to consider their environmental footprint and their patterns of production. When social pressure affects their earnings, businesses clearly have to find ways to produce differently. This shows us the great need for a sense of social responsibility on the part of consumers. “Purchasing is always a moral – and not simply economic – act”.[146] Today, in a word, “the issue of environmental degradation challenges us to examine our lifestyle”.[147]

Pope Francis presented a total of 246 paragraphs with suggestions for environmental education, religion and concluded with two prayers:

A prayer for our earth

All-powerful God, you are present in the whole universe
and in the smallest of your creatures.
You embrace with your tenderness all that exists.
Pour out upon us the power of your love,
that we may protect life and beauty.
Fill us with peace, that we may live
as brothers and sisters, harming no one.
O God of the poor,
help us to rescue the abandoned and forgotten of this earth,
so precious in your eyes.
Bring healing to our lives,
that we may protect the world and not prey on it,
that we may sow beauty, not pollution and destruction.
Touch the hearts
of those who look only for gain
at the expense of the poor and the earth.
Teach us to discover the worth of each thing,
to be filled with awe and contemplation,
to recognize that we are profoundly united
with every creature
as we journey towards your infinite light.
We thank you for being with us each day.
Encourage us, we pray, in our struggle
for justice, love and peace.

A Christian prayer in union with creation

Father, we praise you with all your creatures.
They came forth from your all-powerful hand;
they are yours, filled with your presence and your tender love.
Praise be to you!

Son of God, Jesus,
through you all things were made.
You were formed in the womb of Mary our Mother,
you became part of this earth,
and you gazed upon this world with human eyes.
Today you are alive in every creature
in your risen glory.
Praise be to you!

Holy Spirit, by your light
you guide this world towards the Father’s love
and accompany creation as it groans in travail.
You also dwell in our hearts
and you inspire us to do what is good.
Praise be to you!

Triune Lord, wondrous community of infinite love,
teach us to contemplate you
in the beauty of the universe,
for all things speak of you.
Awaken our praise and thankfulness
for every being that you have made.
Give us the grace to feel profoundly joined
to everything that is.

God of love, show us our place in this world
as channels of your love
for all the creatures of this earth,
for not one of them is forgotten in your sight.
Enlighten those who possess power and money
that they may avoid the sin of indifference,
that they may love the common good, advance the weak,
and care for this world in which we live.
The poor and the earth are crying out.
O Lord, seize us with your power and light,
help us to protect all life,
to prepare for a better future,
for the coming of your Kingdom
of justice, peace, love and beauty.
Praise be to you!
Amen.

Given in Rome at Saint Peter’s on 24 May, the Solemnity of Pentecost, in the year 2015, the third of my Pontificate.”

(Source: Official Website)

Piracy: Dumping Radioactive Regulations

In the MAGA rush to cut treaties, laws, regulations, taxes, federal employees, grants, humanitarian aid worldwide, etc., who will be making sure no one dumps toxic radioactive wastes?

According to the EPA, “more than 55,000 containers of radioactive wastes were dumped at three ocean sites in the Pacific Ocean between 1946 and 1970. Almost 34,000 containers of radioactive wastes were dumped at three ocean sites off the East Coast of the United States from 1951 to 1962.”

By the 1970s, the United States and other countries became increasingly concerned about the environmental impacts of human activities on the marine environment, including the uncontrolled disposal of wastes into the ocean. The Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter of 1972, known as the London Convention, is one of the first international agreements for the protection of the marine environment from human activities.

Currently, some very influential, powerful people see regulations as ‘red-tape’ and bureaucratic roadblocks. According to an article in the New York Times:

The regulatory process is often criticized as onerous and time-consuming and the idea of letting all government regulations expire periodically has been promoted in conservative circles for years. The idea may have gotten a recent boost from Elon Musk, the billionaire adviser to Mr. Trump. “Regulations, basically, should be default gone…And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”

Wow. So little respect and understanding for how regulations are created to protect our lives and environment- usually after a major disaster occurs. So the “thinking” is to remove existing regulations until the next avoidable calamity occurs? Think again: it will be too little too late to reintroduce regulatory requirements after the next event. Maybe the MAGA people hope no one is watching or even cares about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; maybe they only want individual freedom - as in nothing left to lose?

Previously, I wrote a 10 part blog on the nuclear fuel cycle to share my experiences including working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on the importance of regulations that help to mitigate hazards and keep us all safe. By the way, independent Commissions are created by Congress and are not located in the Executive Branch.

On another blog, I share news from my interview with ProPublica on how uranium mills have impacted groundwater including polluting drinking water for several Native American tribes.

Yesterday, I joined a public meeting held by NRC on Duke Power’s process for siting a new nuclear power plant in northwestern North Carolina. Without any regulatory requirements and oversight, the company could do whatever they want. Check out all the fines imposed by NRC even with a vigilant regulator according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. The $5.4 million fine to the owner of Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in Cleveland initiated a larger corruption settlement for $230 million due to fraud. For information on accidents and this ‘near miss’ meltdown, see my blog.

MSNBC’s Ari Melber on this week’s broadcast reported on efforts by Trump and Musk to cut federal regulations that agencies use to enforce numerous laws. He shows examples of how lax regulations led to the 2008 housing crisis, the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and industry polluting drinking water. CLICK TO SEE BROADCAST!

Also this week I checked Facebook and noticed my grad school geologist friend Janet reposted the following information from Curtis Mahon who’s a wildlife researcher and photographer and might not be aware of how the administration is cutting regulations for the nuclear industry as well:

“To my many friends who thought it wouldn't happen, guess what, it has happened! Donald Trump has dropped the environmental destruction nuke of an EO, planning to sunset ALL environmental regulations made in the last 100 years. And I mean ALL. https://www.whitehouse.gov/.../zero-based-regulatory.../

The Endangered Species Act. Gone. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Gone. The Marine Mammal Protection Act. Gone. The Anadromous Fish Conservation Act. Gone. The Bald Eagle Protection Act. Gone! You name it, it's gone.

To remind those friends why we have these laws, I'm going to try to put them into terms which anyone can understand, money.

The Endangered Species Act is literally the founding, central pillar of modern conservation globally. It's hard to list the accomplishments of this act as it is so vast. It directly protects and calls for plans to raise the populations of rare species. It's directly responsible for the comeback of many iconic species, such as the Bald Eagle, the Peregrine Falcon, the California Condor, and a host of others. Talk about return on investment, the amount of money spent vs the amount gained from people wishing to just see iconic rare species is in the billions of dollars. For what would a visit to the grand canyon be without seeing a conder soar over or a visit to Yellowstone without seeing wolves and bison. People do whole drives across the country just for these experiences and that's what the ESA is about. Lots of revenue there.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act was one of the first environmental laws every made, and bans the harm or collection of all non-game birds in America. It was implemented in a time when hunters we shooting everything to turn them into hats, from songbirds to puffins to herons to albatross. The banning of this and subsequent restoration efforts lead to dramatic increases in bird populations and continue to protect them from harm. In just one example, consider a puffin. In Maine, every tourist I talk to wants to see two things, lobster and puffins. They were once hunted to near extinction in the US and are now a central pillar to the economy of an ENTIRE STATE. Thousands of people a DAY take expensive boat trips for puffins and that's at risk without these regulations, not to mention cuts to NOAA.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act protects whales from being killed or harmed and lead to the global war on whaling. Now because of it, America watches whales! You can go on a whale watch in nearly every coastal city in America and it generates HUNDREDS of millions of dollars in tourism and employs thousands of people. We hurt whales, we hurt our pockets and jobs.

The Anadromous Fish Conservation Act allows the government to enter agreements with states and plan and fund ways to increase the populations of migratory fish. It has direct benefits to anglers across the country, funding 50% of initiatives for things like stocking and habitat restoration in major fisheries such as both Atlantic and Pacific Salmon, Trout, Striped Bass, American Shad, and Sturgeon.

And removing the Bald Eagle Protection Act! I thought we loved eagle guys? What's more American than a Bald Eagle, and they want to remove protections for them? Many older Americans can probably remember a time when they never saw Bald Eagles. Now you can see them commonly in nearly every state! That's a direct result of the Endangered Species Act and Bald Eagle Protection Act.

These are just a few of the laws the Republican party wishes to remove. All have proven track records of benefiting Americans, both monetarily through supporting major American industries worth billions of dollars and employing hundreds of thousands of Americans and spiritually as corner stones of the country's wilderness. The removal of these protections is peak short term gains over long term profits.

If you don't like it, there's a lot you can do. Call your representatives. It feels like yelling to void but we've seen a handful of senators pushed to action by your voices. This matters regardless of the political party of your representatives. Also, get out and protest if you can. The next big one is April 19th. Search for your local 50501 group to see where the protests were at. It's incredibly empowering to get out and be a part of a movement with thousands of people in your town, and millions nationwide. See you in the streets.”

One correction that I found in the comments section:

“Yes, but it's actually the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. https://www.fws.gov/law/bald-and-golden-eagle-protection-act.”

Please also see my SOS blog from February 5th featuring the bald eagle before I could imagine all regs would be cut. We cannot allow pirates to steal everything away from us and the US!

Update: May 11, 2025

On Friday, NPR reported that Trump tightens control of independent agency overseeing nuclear safety:

“Going forward, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) must send new rules regarding reactor safety to the White House, where they will be reviewed and possibly edited. That is a radical departure for the watchdog agency, which historically has been among the most independent in the government. The new procedures for White House review have been in the works for months, but they were just recently finalized and are now in full effect.”

One of my Facebook groups includes former NRC employees who are responding to this very alarming news:

Here are some of the comments posted so far:

JW wrote: “I'm sure many folks in this group have seen reports regarding the order that all rules will now be reviewed and approved by the White House. I am curious what people here think of that plan. I was not a rulemaking expert, by any means, but questions like "how does the Administrative Procedures Act apply?" occur to me.”

GW replied: “Surely the public understands that rules for complex technologies requre expertise and extensive technical review and approval. Simple words like "should" and "shall" in a rule or regulation can mean the difference between a safe operating nuclear power plant and one that releases radioactive matterial to the environment. Relegating final review and approval of the kind or regulations promulgated by NRC, to a loyal Trump supporter or Trump himself would greatly reduce the confidence the public deserves when they agree to permit nuclear power plant in their jurisdiction.”

DP replied: “RIF the staff and issue licenses faster. Right. Today it’s rules, later it will be SERs. It’s a slippery slope. So much for independence. Staff will be afraid of filing a DPO concerning anything that comes from the WH for fear of losing their job. That is of course, if there remains a meaningful DPO process. I just hope that no matter what happens, that safety isn’t affected.”

JL replied: “This is clearly disappointing. Hope the Commissioners exercise their independence and refuse to comply with an illegal executive order recognizing they may be removed. Eventually the Supreme Court will need to address the independence issue and the standards for removing commissioners.”

JW replied: “For my own part, I can’t help but think of a couple times I stuck my neck out on what I believed to be misguided regulatory actions. What fate awaits a staff member who raises an uncomfortable issue in this new scheme? The agency has long had challenges with an “open and collaborative work environment,” or whatever they call it these days, and the intervention of the White House won’t improve that situation. I also wonder how they envision responding to emergent issues, like a late night emergency tech spec or temporary non-compliance.”

Former NRC Commissioner Stephen G Burns stated “I am deeply concerned about this move. Here's my post on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/.../urn:li:activity.../”

AR replied: “How does anyone in the White House, including the top brass there, know anything technical about NRC rules and the basis for them! What a farce having the White House reviewing and approving rules. But it doesn't surprise me, considering the myriad of other inane actions they are taking.”

WL: “There's a Commissioners office, a Staff Organization, 4 regional offices a Navsea Nuclear Reactors 08 Div and a USA Dept of Energy. Is there any duplication? How many times has the Staff been reorganized? Will our Federal Energy Policy permit Small Modular Reactors? Could the White House deal with the Intervenors like we did in the past? I remember the SRP, GDC, Part 50, Tech Specs, Sholly Notices, and the Reg Guides..will they all be reviewed in the Oval Office. Turn it all over to AI.”

JD wrote: “Having spent 20 years at the NRC, I can confidently say that overall NRC does a really good job of balancing reasonable public health and safety with that of efficiency and commercial needs. All of the great people I previously worked with at the NRC are passionate and highly technically competent individuals who try hard to make good decisions for all involved stakeholders.

That said, after having now spent nearly a decade on the industry side, I feel that industry doesn’t get enough credit for self-regulation of safety. Safety is a shared goal. After all, we need safe, reliable plants to deliver our electricity to our customers. It would not make good business sense to operate in an unsafe manner. In addition, the industry has the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO) which continually challenges the industry to achieve higher and higher levels of excellence.

So, if done correctly and with the right technical conscience, there may be something to be gained by looking closely at some efficiency changes with a different set of eyes. In my opinion, if we are going to overhaul the regulations which have proved effective all these years, the DOGE should work with a coalition of NRC, industry, NEI, and INPO experts to carefully weigh the potential gains and/or consequences of such changes.

I worked as a contractor in the commercial nuclear field and at NRC for 31 years and completely agree that both industry and NRC pursue the same goal - safety. However, I think just knowing that there is an independent regulator who will be reviewing industry submittals contributes to the quality of industry safety analyses which leads to the industry having a good safety record.”

LC wrote: “Can you imagine them reading and understanding the complexity of the technical issues and regulatory complications etc. It has not been uncommon for the NRC to come under attack by both parties over the years-too much regulation or not enough regulation-so it goes. The NRC is the leading nuclear regulator in the world!”

CA stated: “Agree. Defense in depth; redundancy for safety's sake is important. It will be awkward to look a foreign regulator in the eye after all the times NRC has stressed the importance of an independent regulator.”

I added: “NRC has been the “gold standard” of nuclear regulators worldwide. We can all recall or revisit cases like Davis-Besse’s near-miss meltdown, corporate fraud and NRC fines. I suggest retired NRC employees compose an open letter to publicly share the essential facts about the “gold standard” as the President loves gold! I also recall our quick actions on increasing protections nationwide of all facilities after 9/11 and creating NSIR!”

DP replied, “you can add NRC’s role in investigating and requiring nation-wide improvements in: 1) fire protection after Browns Ferry fire; 2) maintenance after 1984 loss of feedwater event at Davis -Besse; 3) diesel-generator reliability of Transamerica Delaval diesel generators after crankshaft failure at Shoreham in the mid-1980s; and 4) site specific seismic upgrades at San Onofre 1 and Trojan. And our preemptive work preparing for Y2K in case something unforeseen happened.”

Hard Lessons

I worked as a substitute science teacher several days this month experiencing the full spectrum from hospitable to hostile environments. I went to two public middle schools, let’s call them schools C and F with ratings in GreatSchools.org for school C scoring 7/10 and school F scoring 3/10. These summary ratings are based on “four ratings, each of which is designed to show different facets of school success: the Student Progress Rating or Academic Progress Rating, College Readiness Rating, Equity Rating, and Test Score Rating.”

For background, I've taught as a substitute teacher at several schools including in New Mexico, Colorado and beginning in March 2022 in North Carolina for WCPSS. I've taught approximately 35 school days in the Apex and Cary areas consisting of 27 assignments in middle schools and 8 assignments in high schools with my focus on math and science although I've also worked in other classes including special education.

Substitute teaching at school C, ten days so far, is consistently awesome. The administrators, teachers, and staff are friendly, helpful, supportive, and great educators. Four science classes per day with 25 to 30 students per class; some classes are quiet and some are very noisy. The students are mostly cheerful, making an effort to learn, and respectful. However, the resources are very scarce and are mostly provided by the teachers for their classroom.

When an eighth grade student asked me “How do fossils form?" I described the process but needed props. I didn’t see any rocks or fossils to show; so improvising, I found an old CD-ROM that could represent a fossil (see photo). Imagine the thick, red science textbook as a slab of billion year old granite basement rock. Over time, rocks erode, rivers and lakes form. A green paper plate represents a lake with mud on the bottom. The animal, disguised as a CD-ROM, is roaming around the area and falls into the lake eventually getting buried in mud. Only the hard bony parts survive and calcium gets replaced by silica contained in the groundwater turning the bone into a fossil. Then the lake gets buried in sand, dries up and sedimentary rocks form on top, each page of the book representing a rock layer. Maybe the buried fossil parts are found later in an outcrop, road cut, or in drill rig cuttings. We discussed other ways fossils form and it would be great to show real samples of a preserved insect in amber or a piece of an intact wooly mammoth that fell into an icy lake.

This is one example of creative, spontaneous lessons that keeps substitute teaching fun. We did a class review of landforms and geology before they took a test which the teacher assigned and I later found out the classes did very well; I also learned that I should be very selective as to where I go to substitute teach.

At school F…

To continue reading, please see this and other blogs posted on Substack and consider subscribing to my channel.

NC Standing Up for Science

Last Friday, scientists from around the United States and France participated in the StandUp for Science rally. I wore my Albuquerque Isotopes jersey, celebrating the start of the baseball season and Triple A team for the Colorado Rockies, but mostly as a way to discuss the importance of isotopes and science in our daily lives. I’ve used isotopes in my hydrogeology career as explained in this IAEA fact sheet.

My friend Dave King joined me for the event in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina located on a grassy mall between NC General Assembly and state government education buildings. Abut 500 hundred people attended the peaceful rally with many joining from the big three universities: Duke, UNC, and NC State. Scientists are standing up, speaking out, and coming together from rival athletic programs. The majority of scientists appeared to represent medical students and researchers responding to NIH funding cuts. I met one of the local organizers, Noelle Muzzy, a toxicology fellow with EPA, shown here interviewed by WRAL news.

Some of the signs we saw people create include:

SCIENCE WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE - BUT ONLY IF FEDERAL RESEARCH FUNDING IS RESTORED FOR CANCER, INFECTIOUS DISEASES, ETC. (shown on cover photo)

PROTECT SCIENTIFIC FREEDOM

I’M ALIVE TODAY THANKS TO SCIENCE

THE EARTH IS NOT FLAT, VACCINES WORK, CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL, THOM TILLIS UP FOR REELECTION

REFORM NOT RECKLESSNESS

DISCOVERY NEEDS DOLLARS

NO FUNDING NO RESEARCH

BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE (with a picture of the Earth on fire)

THERE IS SOMETHING YOU CAN DO: MAKE NOISE, TAKE UP SPACE, HELP SOMEONE

SCIENCE MATTERS: Saves Lives, Develops Medicines, Improves Health Care, Reduces Egg Prices, Develops Energy Sources, Keeps Water and Air Clean, Makes Safer Cars, Ensures Healthy Food, Protects National Security, Promotes Strong Economy, Prevents Measles Flu and More, Slows Climate Change, Stimulates Creativity

SCIENCE NOT SILENCE

We spoke to several people who shared how vaccines or other medical treatments saved their lives. One person told me that she needed six surgeries and specialized antibiotics to heal her from gangrene infections. We met Anna Buckalew who recently retired from EPA saying that most of the current or displaced federal government workers could not attend the rally as they would not want to be seen going against the administration in hopes to preserve their federal careers. Here’s a report by WUNC who interviewed Anna and others.

I met a Duke University genetics researcher who said the $200 million cut in federal funding (mentioned in my previous blog) was designated for buildings and salaries and does not cover other incidental costs like lab reagents. Her work on viruses is being shut down!

One familiar voice I previously met was Emily Sutton, Executive Director of the Haw River Assembly, who’s sounding the alarm on toxic pollution in river and drinking water! We all need to do more outreach to address these issues. See more about her speech and others as reported by NC Newsline.

The Raleigh News&Observer recorded Nyssa Tucker, a PhD candidate at UNC-Chapel Hill, speaking at the rally.

After about six speeches, the organizers directed everyone to form a line and march around the buildings chanting:

“Out of Labs and Into the Streets”

“When Science Is Under Attach What Do We Do? We Stand Up and Fight Back.”

“What Do We Want? Peer Review! When Do We Want It? Now!”

I’m grateful to all the participants for their activism and dedication to science which is making the world a better place for us all!

Science Walkout on March 7th

Stand Up For Science 2025 is a national day of action calling for robust, interference-free scientific research and policies that ensure science serves everyone. On Friday, March 7th, 2025, in Washington, DC, state capitals, and cities around the country, people will gather to advocate for continued government support for science, defend against censorship, and push back on attacks against diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in research and education.

Stand Up for Science is officially supporting rallies in Washington DC and 31 other cities around the country. This means that a confirmed site leader—backed by our core team—is actively organizing a public event with SUFS volunteers. 

If your city isn’t listed as a site of an official SUFS rally, you can still make your voice heard by joining the nationwide campus and workplace walkout at 12:00 PM local time on March 7th or adding your local event below.

How to Participate in a Walkout:

🚪 Walk out of your lab, classroom, or office at 12:00 noon.

👥 Gather with others in a visible location—campus quads, courtyards, or administrative buildings can be great options.

📢 Amplify your message. Bring a sign and consider inviting faculty, researchers, or students to briefly speak about why science matters. A megaphone or simple printed statements can make a big impact!

📸 Spread awareness. Post photos, videos, and key messages using #StandUpForScience to show solidarity nationwide.

Where I live, North Carolina will be particularly hard hit by cuts to science, given the large amount of tech and research in the Triangle: Duke University alone is facing a nearly $200 million annual reduction in National Institute of Health funding for research in critical areas including cancer, Alzheimer’s, infectious diseases, and pediatric health.

Here’s news from Nature that states, “As US federal grants remain frozen and budget cuts loom, anxiety and fear grip early-career researchers.”

This week as Texas is reeling from a preventable measles outbreak, the head of Health and Human Services (HHS) doesn’t believe in vaccines. The Texas Tribune reports, “Texas is facing its worst measles outbreak in decades, as cases have jumped from two to 146 in just one month. A child is dead, 20 more are hospitalized and the worst is likely still ahead, public health experts say, as Texas’ decreasing vaccination rates leave swaths of the state exposed to the most contagious virus humans currently face.” At the same time, HHS is shutting down vaccine support including for Covid and the flu according to The New Republic.

I’m capturing messages from distressed scientists posting on LinkedIn from many federal agency, university, and not-for-profit scientists. Prior to Trump 2.0, most of the posts that I read focused on job promoting and never was heard a discouraging word. Now that has drastically changed as scientists are losing their jobs, struggling to speak up, and possibly losing their careers. I’m shocked to hear from a colleague at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) who shared the five stages of grief which everyone in the agency is experiencing! NRC was an independent commission - an arm of Congress - until recently. See this article from a former NRC Chair.

We can look at any agency to see the turmoil being caused to our civil society and civil servants whose primary job is to protect public health, safety, and the environment. So what happens when they totally get rid of or gut Department of Education, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, EPA, NOAA, National Science Foundation, DOI, USAID, etc?

Here’s a blog that I wrote after the first march for science in 2017 showing the motivations by many scientists and positive results coming from that event.

Please share this announcement widely!

Dr. Mahmoud Sherif

Why does the United States attract millions of international students? America offers some of the best educational and research opportunities attracting students from around the world. About half of doctoral degrees are earned by international students according to the Center for Immigration Studies. For high-tech STEM fields the percentages are higher. The most prestigious award is the Nobel Prize - can you guess how many recipients came to America from other countries? The numbers are staggering:

“Immigrants account for approximately 35% of U.S.-affiliated academic Nobel Laureates, reflecting their critical role in driving American excellence in research and innovation. Approximately 44% of immigrant Nobel Laureates in academic disciplines attended U.S. institutions for their highest educational degree.” (Institute for Immigration Research)

Who knows among us today who will be the next Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, or Nikola Tesla? International students coming to study and work in America are essential resources that we must respect and support with the hope that they can stay and continue to support American innovation.

I’m very grateful to be a colleague and friend of Dr. Mahmoud Sherif who now lives and works at the Florida State University (FSU) in Tallahassee. He earned a Ph.D. at the University of Delaware in geochemistry and is originally from Cairo, Egypt. Here’s a link to his LinkedIn profile.

I learned about his exceptional work in 2019 when I supported the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on the occurrence and treatment of naturally-occurring radioactivity in Middle Eastern - Northern African groundwaters. If you’re interested in these efforts, please see my three related blogs describing trips to Jordan in 2018, Saudi Arabia in 2019, and the IAEA headquarters in Austria in 2020. For the Jordan trip, I gave this slide presentation to the 9th International Symposium on Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material.

Specific to the research that Mahmoud performed, here’s a great article from the University of Delaware’s UDaily in 2016 stating: “doctoral student Mahmoud Sherif is studying the origin and distribution of natural radioactivity in the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System in Egypt.”

More recently, Mahmoud and I supported the IAEA with examining geochemical data from Northern Africa to address concerns about radioactive groundwater and he took the lead on preparing the technical report.

Currently at FSU, he’s working for the National MagLab’s Center for Rare Earths, Critical Minerals, and Industrial Byproducts where the largest, high powered magnet in the world is located. Mahmoud is working in the field of gamma spectrometry to measure radiation from natural and engineered materials.

Mahmoud wrote to me this week and said, “I am currently working in the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory as a postdoc. I have established a very good gamma spec laboratory here. I am also helping establish a gamma spec unit in other places in the USA.”

I look forward to staying in contact with Mahmoud on all his vital research and academic adventures!

... ___ ...

Dot Dot Dot, Dash Dash Dash, Dot Dot Dot. Does this sequence ring a bell? Another way to communicate these words is by sound and light. In Morse code, short taps are dots and long taps are dashes. Three dots for the letter S and three dashes for the letter O. The international distress code S.O.S. was developed for ships to mean ‘save our ship’ or ‘save our souls.’ Signals of sounds, flashing lights, and written symbols can bring help to those in need or at least maintain the hope of being rescued.

Another way castaway sailors could seek help was to place a note in a bottle and pray the bottle and note would be found by someone who could find them. Since I began blogging almost ten years ago, each blog has increasingly felt to me like a message in a bottle or more precisely electrons to the ether. I’ve shared ideas for conservation, prosperity, sustainability and alerts during Covid, book reviews, news, concerns and experiences working as an American federal environmental scientist traveling worldwide and then after retiring from the government, some of my observations as a consultant, parent, teacher and tourist.

Gordon Matthew Sumner who calls himself Sting wrote the song Message in a Bottle in 1979 which includes the lyrics: “Walked out this morning, I don’t believe what I saw. Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore. Seems I’m not alone at being alone. Hundred billion castaways, looking for a home. I’ll send an S.O.S. to the world… _ _ _ …” I wonder what distress calls nature is making to us and how many people are listening?

The Bald Eagle, America’s national bird since 1782 symbolizing strength, freedom and courage became endangered and almost went extinct due to deadly pesticide use and now is recovering through legal protections and removed from the Endangered Species list. I photographed this captive eagle at the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro. It’s very rare for us to see eagles - where do they go when there’s a hurricane, tornado or drought, when lead from hunter’s bullets gets into their food supply, when our machines pour out pollutants and raise the temperature to the sky and water? Here’s an interesting article from Inside Climate News on a land developer displacing a nesting pair of eagles near Auburn University.

I wonder if eagles and other wildlife feel more threatened now as protections and the people tasked with stewardship, such as federal employees, are being threatened and sacked? According to Nature, after the hottest temperatures were recorded last year, the U.S. is withdrawing (again) from the 2015 Paris agreement at the same time there’s an “energy emergency” so we’re going to burn more coal and produce/consume more oil with all the related detrimental consequences. Who should we call? Should we all call 911?

“911. What’s your emergency?”

“I’d like issue an S.O.S. to Save our Species.”

“What’s your address?”

“Planet Earth!”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Not really.” 911 hung up, dial tone.

Sting received the 37th Kennedy Center Honors award in 2014 sitting next to the other recipients: Tom Hanks (Actor whose credits include Cast Away), Reverend Al Green (Soul Singer), Patricia McBride (Ballerina) and Lily Tomlin (Comedian) along with so many other dignitaries including President and Michelle Obama. The winners needed to watch as other very famous people shared their admiration and talents. What an incredible display of our American culture, our unity and diversity, the most talented people who achieved fame — not from an inheritance but from sweat equity and meritorious actions.

Now about 10 years later we live in very different times. We all have whiplash with the extreme political gyrations. Each of us humans is one of eight billion people on earth, growing at a rate of about 70 million per year; does it feels like we’re backsliding into oblivion? Innately, we must protect all that we love: our families, communities, environment and nature for our own survival!

For a reminder of good times, I highly recommend watching the entire 1.5 hour of the 37th Kennedy Center awards ceremony. The presentation to Sting is in the final 20 minutes with presentations by Meryl Streep, Lady Gaga, Esperanza Spalding and Herbie Hancock (who play a very powerful rendition of Fragile), Bruce Springsteen, and Bruno Mars singing the final song Message in a Bottle. I plan to go back and watch other past events that bring us pride and joy in being an American. Also, this Super Bowl Sunday it’s the Chiefs vs. Eagles!

I hope that someone gets my, I hope that someone gets my, I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle.

Yesterday and Today

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” That’s an expression I frequently heard while attending Guilford College in the late 1970’s with the goal of keeping in the present moment by letting go of past and future concerns which is a quote made popular by Charles Dederich. Yesterday, I visited my great friend Dave at Guilford for a stroll around campus which I planned to share in the blog today on this auspicious and arduous day. Auspicious for celebrating the birth and life of Martin Luther King, Jr. and arduous for the many changes occurring on this Inauguration Day.

I left home early yesterday morning with dense fog and misty rain in relatively warm 46 degree temperatures as an Arctic air cold front approached. The 1.5 hour drive from the North Carolina Triangle to the Triad required intense focus looking ahead with only about 500 feet of visibility in front of a wall of misty white fog. Eventually, I relaxed into a more peaceful mood while driving the empty road amazingly wondering if entering heaven would look like this.

Along the way on Highway 421 I reached 60,000 miles on our Rav4 Prime passing Liberty, NC where Toyota is building a multi-billion dollar battery factory with plans to begin production this year. Driving north to higher elevations going past Greensboro, the outside air temperature dropped down to 41 degrees with heavier rain and patches of unmelted snow remaining from the week before. First I visited the Belews Creek area to see the current coal-fired power plant where Duke Energy is proposing to upgrade to a nuclear power plant. The project would take about 10 years and currently the company is conducting surveys and preparing an early site (environmental) permit to submit to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. One contingency I heard last month during a public meeting with NRC and Duke Energy is that to convert the coal plant to nuclear they will needed the tax benefits proposed in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 for nuclear power production. These incentives will be uncertain after today as the new administration favors expanding oil, gas and perhaps coal sources/subsides for heating and energy production.

Located only about 20 miles north of Guilford College in Stokes County, I noticed the area around the steam plant is mostly rural agricultural farms growing tobacco, hay, and livestock. Piney Bluff Boat Ramp allows access to Duke Energy’s Belews Lake reservoir which is used as cooling water and part of the Dan River watershed. The kind lady at White’s Grocery (in Forsyth County) on Belews Creek Road, which is the closest store and gas station in the area (with an old Pur sign) to Duke Power only four miles away along Pine Haul Road, didn’t know about their plans and didn’t sell any local newspapers. She said I’d have to go to Stokesdale six miles away for a local paper. I noticed the coal smoke stack emitting steam and various pollutants is barely visible through the dense white clouds. I saw homes beginning just 0.4 miles away from the plant entrance and the Wither’s Chapel filled for the Sunday services. The closest home contains at least a dozen junk cars around the property but it did not seem to be a junk yard. Mountains of coal fly ash are buried around the power plant and Heidelberg Materials is involved with removal operations.

My friend Dave lives close by and we attended Guilford together with him two years ahead of me. We met through his roommate Tom who dated my high school friend and fellow geology major Becca. Meeting on campus at Founders Hall brought back fond memories of my youthful STUDent life where we could ponder our philosophical values and aspirations. We could joke occasionally using grand, highfalutin words like truculent and recall great professors and classes so long ago. The original buildings like Founders Hall, various classrooms and dorms all hold memories of yesterday’s trials and tribulations. I served on a concert committee and operated the spotlights for musicians including Bonnie Raitt, just 30 years old at the time, and annual serendipity celebrations to exchanging macroeconomics information with Professor Robert Williams about four years ago, to more recently hearing the Native American biology professor Robin Wall Kimmerer speak at Dana Auditorium, construction of the Paul and Evelyn Zopf Gazebo and adjacent coffee shop. Paul taught my sociology class so I donated to his project about two years ago and he, at 90 years old, wrote me a hand written thank you card. Learning for life and adapting to change is essential for our sustainability and I thank Guilford College and my friends and professors to instilling in me the curiosity to explore the world.

Our lives will never the same after today. We’ve enjoyed relative domestic peace and tranquility in our lifetimes with only experienced the civil war and guilded ages through text books, movies and experiences including the Guilford Woods which contain 240 acres of old growth forest where the Quakers, who founded the College in 1837, hid slaves in the “underground railroad” as well as “contentious objectors” against fighting previous wars. The Civil Rights movements led by Dr. King occurred when Dave and I were just young children just starting school and we greatly benefited from integration of races.

Today on the last day of the Biden Administration and first day of the Trump 2.0 Administration we in the American middle class are likely to experience a rollercoaster ride of changing priorities. Just like driving through the dense fog, the new President will blow smoke our way, burn more coal and oil and gas, build more walls and obstacles, help the rich get richer, remove ethical constraints of civil servants along with masses of dedicated employees.

Just as the fog limited my visibility making me much more focused and determined to move forward, perhaps more prayerful, not letting obstacles impede my progress, I couldn’t see far ahead but I wasn’t afraid. We do not need to change our values just as many spiritual and religious leaders have shown us the way. We must hold true to our values and know what we care about most such as: family, friends, peace and love, music and nature. We must continue on our journey. To quote Paul McCartney, “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away…”

Disgusted with Democrats? Repulsed by Republicans? Scared of Socialists? Incensed by Industrialists? Outraged by Oligarchs? What can we do? I suggest we, as the Buddha wisely advised, seek a middle path. No longer taking sides of one political group but to find our own way and identity. What products can we buy that are beneficial to our lives? Can we reduce our consumption of food, energy, water and especially of fake news. Resist temptations and repeat some prayers and mantras. Plan for the best and prepare for the worst. Keep hope alive!

Manatee Float

Floating among huge manatee sea cows feels so exciting and magically surreal. We’re privileged to enter their environment and grateful for decades of legal protections from all the people contributing to their survival. Manatees are quite gentle, curious herbivores so they won’t bite us but being in the open water with a leaky snorkel mask I could only use one arm to move and “no kicking allowed” as I did not want to break the rules much less drown. We were told to float: no swimming, touching, kicking, hugging nor grabbing manatees in the open water. No aquarium glass to safely separate us with nothing to hang on to. The wetsuit provided warmth, after the initial spinal cold shock losing 40 degrees, with buoyancy to float but no psychological protection against the unlikely concern of getting squeezed between an aggregation of manatees or rabid tourists.

We learned the males are rather aggressive to females, or at least persistent, during mating season and groups of males are known to pursue one female. Several manatee moved slowly in the translucent fresh spring water mixing into turbid sea water. They form groups laying and sleeping on the shallow bottom of limestone covered with mud at a depth of about 10 to 20 feet, occasionally coming up to the surface for air. “Don’t block their rise to the surface,” we were also told.

Every winter, thousands of manatees migrate south from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico along western Florida coastal waters. They aggregate where 72 deg. F (22 deg. C) spring water discharges at a constant temperature as well as in steam discharge canals at power plants. Approximately 70 springs in Florida’s west coast flow out of limestone rocks discharging 580 million gallons per day or 400,000 gallons per minute. At the town of Crystal River, 30 natural springs flow into Kings Bay creating headwaters for the seven-mile long Crystal River ultimately merging into the Gulf. Here’s an interesting publication by USGS indicating movement patterns of manatee within Kings Bay as water temperatures change. The highest density of manatee concentrate in the Three Sisters Springs area and next weekend the Manatee Festival is coming to this same area.

We visited the small town Crystal River just two days before Christmas and three months after Hurricane Milton’s (Category 3) storm surge, and Hurricane Helene (Category 4) two weeks before that, brought 5 to 10 feet of muddy water flooding the town so the area continues to recover. We saw rebuilt businesses, homes being renovated, and numerous road signs and sunken ships remaining. The storm damage also affects the manatee food supply. Strong winds, storm surges, and pounding waves can uproot seagrass or bury it in sediments. Manatees thrive on eating seagrass, known as Manatee grass, needing about 100 to 200 pounds per day!

The Paddletail Lodge Best Western Hotel close to the waterfront provided friendly overnight accommodations and meeting location for catching a sunset cruise, joined by a family from Australia, and an early morning float. Arriving at 7 am, the tour guide with Waterfront Adventures showed us this video produced by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on “Manatee Manners” showing beautiful images of the Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge with lots of rules to protect the manatees. A tour boat took three of us and another couple from India moving us within 15 minutes from shore to the refuge where large springs flow into the bay where we began our snorkel adventure.

Our experiences floating with the friendly manatee showed how interested they are in us and they seem to be able to sense when a person is staying calm and willing to get very close looking at us face to face. A male manatee, identified by the boat captain, followed our son back towards the boat making a natural connection.

We can support the region by visiting as tourists as well as contributing donations. Several non-profit organizations help to protect manatees including The Nature Conservancy, National Wildlife Federation and Save the Manatee Club which offers webcam videos.

I’d like to dedicate this blog to my friends King Stablein and David King, whom I thought about while visiting Kings Bay!

HOPE

Hope Jahren is a best selling author and professor of Geobiology at the University of Hawaii in Manoa. I found her book “The Story of More: How We Got To Climate Change And Where To Go From Here” recently at the Salem Middle School library. This young adult version published in 2021 offers a very clear summary of global environmental impacts mostly due to our consumer lifestyles and actions we can take to use less and share more.

For example, America’s exorbitant consumption of 20% world’s resources and historically producing the most carbon dioxide with only 4% of the world’s population indicates we have the largest incentives and levers to change our habits. One of the strongest ways to positively change our story is to consume less such as conserving energy. That’s been my focus for almost 10 years since this blog began! I highly recommend readers of all ages get a chance to consume and act on the advice presented in this hopeful contribution!

Becoming Earth

If you’re an inquisitive, persistently curious, and talented communicator wanting to write a book on how life on Earth began, evolved and is being impacted by human activities, you might synthesize hundreds of science articles, interview many people, and adventure around the world depending on your time and budget. You could obtain grants and fellowships along with publishing a series of articles in popular magazines. Since you're also considering human impacts, you’d want to purchase carbon offsets to mitigate travel emissions. There’s the technical craft as well as the business side of producing a book involving dozens of people to check facts, review, edit, prepare illustrations, and engage in marketing, sales, and distribution in multiple languages.

Ferris Jabr spent 10 years compiling over 300 publications and traveling extensively worldwide to meet famous and obscure scientists to immerse himself in natural science research. He donated a part of his book advance to environmental groups including the Indigenous Environmental Network, Coalition for Rainforest Nations, Clean Air Task Force, and Carbon180.

He explored a mile-deep former gold mine in South Dakota to collect million-year old microbes, including the original one-celled bacterial inhabitants, pioneers in surviving harsh environmental conditions without air and light, capable of carving caverns, concentrating metals, and regulating the global cycling of carbon and nutrients.

On the Arctic’s Wrangel Island, he observed how reintroducing large mammals can restore the ecological balance by consuming grasslands, providing nutrient-rich dung, reducing melting permafrost and ultimately cooling the planet. He saw a graveyard of extinct mammoths and ancestors of bison, lions, elk, and rhinoceros with remains not petrified but frozen after tens of thousands of years.

He collected diverse plankton species in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island to understand how these photosynthetic consumers of carbon dioxide produce oxygen and provide food to larger consumers from the smallest fish larvae to largest whales. Two categories of “free-swimming” plankton evolved, plant-like phytoplankton and animal-like zooplankton with some species possessing characteristics of both. Single-celled algae diatoms contain silica dioxide and coccolithophores use calcium carbonate for structure formed the White Cliffs of Dover, England. Entire ecosystems are dependent on consuming plankton with it’s 16:1 ratio of nitrogen to phosphorous maintains the same ratio in seawater. One drop of seawater may contain tens of thousands of microscopic plankton!

Ferris went scuba diving near Santa Catalina Island, 22 miles off the California coast, to swim in a giant kelp forest that can grow at the rate of 3 feet per day and provide storm-proof habitat to approximately 150 fish species. This experience led him to a kelp-oyster farm operated by Running Tides in Portland, Maine. They are experimenting with growing and floating kelp to remove carbon from the atmosphere and deposit carbon in the seafloor. Sea kelp are more significant photosynthesizers than terrestrial forests due to the size of the oceans.

He nervously climbed the 1066 foot Amazon Tall Tower Observatory in Brazil to observe the rainforest canopy and collect air samples. He learned how trees release substances into the air that seed clouds to generate rain with about half of the rainfall transpired from the rainforest at the rate of 20 billion tons of water per day! This self-generating process must be factored into our concepts of the hydrologic cycle where evaporation typically comes from the oceans to provide rain and snow. Amazon rainforests also contribute precipitation to the western and midwestern United States and Canada.

He met advocates in northern California displaying the benefits of fire to control forest ecology and specifically prescribed burns to remove pests and undergrowth at an acorn-oak orchard. Then in Iceland, he visited the Climeworks direct-air capture plant removing carbon by injecting CO2 into basaltic rocks.

The result of all his travels, discussions, and research reveals the thesis that not only is there Life on Earth but Life is Earth. Everywhere we look we find life so abundantly intertwined in the rocks, soil, water, and air that this makes us question the idea to separate inorganic from organic molecular structures.

Ferris and a collaborator illustrate the evolution of our living planet showing the origins of the planet 4.6 billion years ago with one-celled bacteria evolving into multicellular microbes indicating fossil evidence of stromatolites 3.5 billion years ago. Photosynthesis provided oxygen to create the atmosphere about 2.5 billion years ago (trapping gases in space mostly due to Earth’s gravity), divergence of plant and animal species about 1 billion years ago, and fungi, lichen, and plants spreading on land beginning about 700 million years ago. The more “recent” 500 million years of geologic history is very well documented by fossil evidence but I was not aware of wildfires occurring over 420 million years ago.

Impacts from human activities may have begun with hunting megafauna (e.g. mammoths) to extinction 50,000 to 10,000 years ago. Ferris Jabr documents other impacts including loss of habitats, destruction of the rainforest and devotes an entire chapter to plastics washed up on Kamilo Beach, Hawaii and integrated into sea life. He provides extensive discussion of greenhouse gas emissions drastically changing our climate and the urgency for action.

As challenging it must be to write on this enormous topic as well as to provide a very terse summary in this blog, I would have like to read more about how prescribed burns can contribute to climate change. I agree with the benefits of prescribed burns to prevent bigger wildfires when they can be controlled. Unfortunately, changing the established US Forest Service policy for the past 80+ years to put out small fires (see my blog on Did Smokey the Bear Get the Axe) does not account for climate-induced droughts and numerous uncontrolled burns seems to me can make our situation (from homeowners to all species) much worse.

I highly recommend getting and reading this book and not relying on my summary which I compiled mostly for my own educational purposes to share with middle and high school students. It’s very difficult taking complex, detailed, science information and making it understandable to a general audience. I own any potential mistakes or compressions in logic contained in my summary that do not relate to the excellent book being reviewed. Ferris Jabr’s new Random House book published this year is titled Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life.

Updated: December 3, 2024

Received the following email response from the author:

From: Ferris Jabr <ferris.jabr@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Dec 2, 2024 at 12:30 PM
Subject: Re: My blog on your book Becoming Earth
Dear Bill,

Thank you so much for reading and engaging with my work. I don't have a newsletter at present, but you can find a continually updated list of events and appearances on my website: https://www.ferrisjabr.com/events

Thanks again!

Ferris

Ferris Jabr

Author, Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life (Random House, 2024)
Contributing Writer, The New York Times Magazine and Scientific American

www.ferrisjabr.com

Diverse Neighbors

Neighbors are divided in supporting 2024 Presidential candidates including in this battleground state of North Carolina. The cover photo shows adjacent neighbor’s homes displaying signs for opposing parties in the affluent area across from Green Level High School.

Both Democratic and Republican candidates are calling this the most consequential election of our lifetimes and using civil-unrest rhetoric: one side says we need to ‘fight to win’ and another threatening to use the military against political rivals within the U.S. I hope and pray we can all reside in peace and harmony during and after this election!

This is the first year that I’ve taken an active role in political campaigns although I’ve posted a few earlier blogs shown below discussing the contrast between evolving parties and elected officials.

Canvassing for the Harris-Walz campaign, I’ve knocked on about 130 doors so far focusing on getting out the Democratic vote by making sure people know when and where to cast their ballot and recording responses on the phone app MiniVan.

When people are home and answer their door, which averages about half the time, I identify myself and ask if they have voted or have a plan to vote. Then I try to determine which candidates they support. I’ve heard the full spectrum of views from strongly supporting, strongly opposed, refusing to disclose, as well as one person intentionally not voting. I’m relieved to learn that most people encourage my efforts and over a dozen times I’ve gotten the opportunity to engage in informative, sometimes passionate, conversations lasting 15 minutes or more.

I’ve spoken with a few undecided voters who asked my opinion for which candidate and party would be better for “kitchen-table economics.” I empathize that it’s difficult getting unbiased news and that we need to make decisions based on our personal, moral and ethical views. We’re all concerned with the rise in food and housing prices during the pandemic. I like to mention how the U.S. economy is getting much better with inflation and interest rates coming down. But consumer prices are still too high. One candidate supports billionaires like Elon Musk to provide tax cuts or petrochemical companies wanting cuts in environmental regulations. I mention the contrast with the Biden administration, Federal Reserve, and Harris proposals as cited in the non-partisian Economist magazine (based in London) with articles including from October 17, 2024 titled: “The envy of the world, America’s economy is bigger and better than ever. Will politics bring it back to earth?”

One retired person I spoke with favored Mr. Trump because he wants to cut taxes. I said it might sound good on the surface but the last time he cut taxes in 2017 it favored the wealthiest people and international corporations, it significantly added to the deficit, and increased inflation. According to the Center for American Progress:

“The Center for American Progress is an independent, nonpartisan policy institute that is dedicated to improving the lives of all Americans through bold, progressive ideas, as well as strong leadership and concerted action. An important body of evidence shows that the corporate tax changes in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act failed to produce promised investment or wage increases for the vast majority of U.S. workers. The law did, however, significantly reduce corporate tax collections, diverting resources from public investment to the pockets of wealthy shareholders, executives, and high-paid workers.”

If you dig deeper when Mr. Trump says he wants to cut taxes for overtime pay, social security, or medicare that means getting rid of those benefits or entitlements. The people who are currently working are paying the retiree recipients. October 21st news states Mr. Trump’s plan would eliminate Social Security by 2031 (U.S. News and World Report)! I also remind voters that House Republicans tried unsuccessfully 50 times when Trump was president to replace the Affordable Care Act which is much more popular than Obamacare (which are the same programs).

I’ve shared my personal and professional experiences after retiring as a federal government civil servant in 2019 and since began being able to speak out about politics.

Here are some other related blogs that show the contrast between the two parties:

1/21/2021 Diverse Unity

7/6/2020 Environmental Legacy of the 41st President (George H.W. Bush)

6/12/2020 Vote and Yell If You Can For America To Survive

7/21/2019 Carter Denounces Overconsumption

UPDATE: November 7, 2024

Knocking on about 400 doors and speaking with approximately 100 people in four upper middle class neighborhoods over the past few weeks revealed insights as to the election results for many of the candidates. The list on MiniVan provided by the Democratic Party provided names and addresses of people registered as Democrats with the goal of getting out the vote. We could tell voting status and did not need to ask people if they already voted during the early voting period.

Many voters I spoke with said they planned to vote for Democrats while surprisingly many were unhappy with the Biden-Harris administration and planned to vote for Trump-Vance. Some were not happy that Kamala Harris got the nomination for President after the primary election occurred which nominated Joe Biden without much contest except from Representative Dean Phillips from Minnesota who tried to warn people at that time. I felt that Harris was the likely successor being on the same ticket and there was not time to hold another primary election which would have fractured the party. It’s amazing the broad support across political ideologies that Harris quickly assembled and how many former Trump Administration officials spoke out against him.

Most voters that I spoke with were more concerned about cost of living rising over the past four years and showed frustration that more was not done by the government to help people. Many voters said the Republicans speaking out against Mr. Trump was because he fired them; perhaps his Apprentice show meme “Your fired” stuck with people. I attempted to counter these arguments with my own personal experiences.

When I asked their choice for North Carolina Governor, I did not hear anyone endorse Republican Lt. Governor Robinson but they did support Democrat Josh Stein, the former attorney general, who won election. Also the superintendent of public schools went to Democrat Mo Green who defeated a MAGA supporting Republican. So it was not a complete sweep for Republicans in North Carolina where Trump-Vance won by 51%.

I personally would have been willing to ring anyone’s doorbell that did not have an opposing candidate’s sign displayed. I’ve heard news commentators mention that we all need to engage and listen to differing viewpoints to have healthy conversations but both sides are living in a bubble. This is one reason that most Democrats lost elections with an unpopular, isolated incumbent President who many people feel wasn’t listening all the way down to the lowest levels of the campaign such as myself volunteering to canvas and only talking to those registered as Democrats but many of whom rebelled against the party.

May we hold true to our ideals and values, preserve our first Amendment and other freedoms, improve two-way conversations and courageously speak out against negative forces that try to separate our humanity and hard-fought protections such as for health, safety and the environment!

Efficient Nuke Licensing

In July 2024, President Biden signed the Fire Grants and Safety Act into law. According to DOE, the law is “chalking up a BIG win for our nuclear power industry. Included in the bill is bipartisan legislation known as the ADVANCE Act that will help us build new reactors at a clip that we haven’t seen since the 1970s.”

The ADVANCE Act is short for: ‘‘Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy Act of 2024.”

DOE states, “any of the advanced reactors under development use different coolants than what is currently used in our commercial light-water reactors—making the regulatory process more of a challenge. The ADVANCE Act directs the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to reduce certain licensing application fees and authorizes increased staffing for NRC reviews to expedite the process.”

NRC expediting environmental reviews is discussed in Section 506 of Title V.

TITLE V—IMPROVING COMMISSION EFFICIENCY

Sec. 501. Mission alignment. NRC must update mission statement to include “efficient”
Sec. 502. Strengthening the NRC workforce.
Sec. 503. Commission corporate support funding.
Sec. 504. Performance metrics and milestones.
Sec. 505. Nuclear licensing efficiency.
Sec. 506. Modernization of nuclear reactor environmental reviews.

According to Section 506, NRC must submit a report to Congress within 180 days (due January 2025) with planned efforts to “facilitate efficient, timely, and predictable environmental reviews of nuclear reactor applications for a license…through expanded use of categorical exclusions, environmental assessments, and generic environmental impact statements.”

These new mandates are based on changes made to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in section 321 of the Fiscal Responsibility Act in 2023 as discussed in this blog from the American Action Forum. I previously wrote a blog about the history of NEPA and my submitting public comments to NRC.

According to the ADVANCE Act, NRC must report to Congress and consider:

A)      Using NEPA documents prepared by other Federal agencies

B)      Using previous NEPA documents prepared by NRC

C)      Using mitigated findings of no significant impact to reduce proposed impacts

D)      Relying on other Federal, State, and local government evaluations

E)      Coordinating development of NEPA documents with other Federal agencies

F)      Streamlining consultations with other Federal, State, and local agencies

G)     Streamlining analyses of alternatives including sites and power alternatives

H)     Establishing new categorical exclusions

I)       Amending 10 CFR Section 51.20(b) to determine if an EA can replace an EIS

J)      Authorizing use of applicant’s EIS as the NRCs draft EIS

K)     Adopting online and digital technologies to allow applicant and agency coordination

L)     Making other revisions to 10 CFR 51 that may be needed

Yesterday, I attended a virtual public meeting with NRC staff to take comments on the ADVANCE Act directive to be included in the report to Congress. About 60 people attended including 40 members of the public and 20 NRC staff. Some attendees strongly oppose nuclear energy while others represent the industry or academia which made for diverse and lively comments.

About 20 years ago, I worked for NRC conducting environmental reviews for relicensing operating nuclear power plants. Many of us felt the NEPA schedule of about 18 months was very aggressive and there was more than one Christmas-New Year’s holiday “break” we had to work to get the EIS completed on time! Here’s the basic process: the applicant submits an application then NRC issues the notice of intent (NOI) that gets published in the federal register (FRN) which starts the clock on the application process. NRC staff reviews the industry environmental report and starts the scoping process to conduct the NEPA study, site tours and audits, permit reviews, discussions with agencies/tribes and obtain public comments. This provides input into the draft EIS which involves obtaining and addressing public comments to prepare the final EIS. The NEPA review occurs parallel to the safety evaluation report and the total process to grant a license takes about 2 years.

I commented that for the above item F, NRC must also consult with Native American tribes which are sovereign nations as they are directly affected by uranium mining, mill sites, transportation routes, and more impacts that must be considered in NEPA analyses. I know NRC staff are well aware and are very involved in tribal consultations and the Congressional text must be updated. I could not identify anyone on the public meeting representing Native American tribes and many of the public attendees complained about lack of notification for the meeting. I randomly learned about the meeting by looking at new documents entered into ADAMS. I suggest NRC make more of an effort to engage the general public through social media announcements.

As I reported about 10 months ago, I worked preparing environmental reports to build small modular reactors (SMR) in Idaho. We were very close to submitting the application before the utility shut the project down so the NRC officially did not start the NEPA process. However, NRC became very involved in “pre-application” meetings and reviews of draft documents so there was close coordination between industry and the regulators to make the process very efficient.

Regarding the ADVANCE Act mandate of considerations, NRC will need to determine and justify if other NEPA documents previously prepared by NRC or other Federal, State, or local agencies are relevant, reliable, and adequate to meet all requirements. While NRC consults with Department of Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service and Department of Commerce NOAA, I recommend NRC obtain reviews from the U.S. Geological Survey which is often closely involved in local and tribal resource issues. For example, see the DOE project involving USGS on tribal land related to impacts from uranium mill sites which I coauthored.

I advocate that NEPA documents need to consider alternative siting and sources of power. How did the applicant objectively consider various locations for the project and arrive at the proposed site? For the Idaho SMR project, the Shoshone-Bannock tribe wanted to know the same thing and wondered how the site construction might affect their reservation’s view of the mountains or noise during construction as well many other disruptive concerns.

I believe one of the failures of the Idaho SMR project, beyond the proposed rapid inflationary construction cost increases to the project, was the lack of public outreach to engage ratepayers such as in Salt Lake City to counteract the misinformation regarding baseload and alternative energy sources needed for grid stability. As coal plants get retired or replaced with natural gas plants, the only other source of baseload power (where the electricity flows 24/7) is with nuclear power. While wind and solar power alternatives are increasingly popular, without very expensive battery storage — grid stability will be impossible. So the public, especially the anti-nuclear activists need to face the energy and climate change realities. Therefore, I recommend NRC keep the requirement for industry to provide alternative siting and need for power sources in the environmental report which NRC reviews and incorporates in the EIS. I also do not advocate that first of a kind power plants receive an exemption from considering alternatives.

Similarly, for category J, I do not advocate for NRC adopting the industry environmental report as the draft EIS. That will skip the scoping process involving the pubic. For the Idaho SMR project, we almost completed the environmental report and there was no public involvement. How can NRC plagiarize verbatim industry reports then claim it meets their nuclear ASME quality assurance practices (NQA-1)? When I worked for NRC and learned that our consultant took information directly from the industry report without referencing the source of information this became a serious breach of trust. How will the general public perceive any government report written by industry proponents?

With the U.S. not creating a nuclear waste repository and having to pay industry to store nuclear waste, it is not reasonable for NRC to expect industry will resolve these issues in the environmental report as would be needed if category J were adopted.

I suggest NRC prepare a nationwide programmatic or generic EIS that can be tiered to site specific EIS documents. I do not agree that EAs can be substituted for EIS documents (category I) as nuclear power plants are major federal actions and public involvement with meetings is necessary and might be excluded in the EA process.

Plans to conduct another NRC public meeting on the ADVANCE Act is planned for October 16. This blog will serve as my official public comments submitted to Mr. Lance Rakovan: lance.rakovan@nrc.gov.

Update October 16, 2024

Big news today- Amazon Web Services announced plans to partner with a company to build nuclear energy sites. Here’s a report from AP discussing Amazon and Google’s recent announcements.

Today, I attended another NRC meeting on the ADVANCE Act - this time focusing on the big picture as the first public meeting involving the entire organization. Here are my comments that I posted online:

“I attended public meetings today and on September 25th, 2024. So far at both meetings, the NRC requested public "scoping" comments on the ADVANCE Act but has not provided proposed decisions that must soon be provided to Congress. I submitted comments on Section 506 to modernize nuclear reactor environmental reviews on September 26. The report to Congress on Section 506 is due in early January 2025. Will there be an opportunity to review and provide comments to this draft report to Congress or will it be considered a final report? How can the public provide comments in the process to evaluate NRC recommendations?

At the meeting today, the NMSS Director responded to a question that the ADVANCE Act is being considered beyond the Congressional direction for "advanced nuclear reactors" and being considered for all parts of the agency. This increase in scope warrants an increase in public awareness to all programs nationwide and internationally with participation including from IAEA, other federal agencies, state and local governments and sovereign Native American tribal governments. For example, questions were asked at today's meeting about nuclear waste storage and disposal but no one from the Department of Energy responded. However, the Advance Act (Section 506 items D-F) directs NRC to coordinate with other agencies during the NEPA process. Before changes are made to the process, more public meetings are needed to involve these other groups with public engagement to understand what the NRC recommends.

I recommend NRC consider providing the draft report on Section 506 to Congress and offer a public comment period to review and incorporate comments as is typically done in the EIS process: scoping, draft EIS, final EIS. This would enable NRC to meet its obligation for submitting a report on time and for including additional public input. Support for carbon-free nuclear power is increasing and this is a timely opportunity to increase public pressure on Congress for finding a permanent geologic repository for high-level radioactive waste.

The statement that taxpayers will be subsiding about half of the increased mandates resulting from the Act needs to be detailed. What aspects of the pre-application and application process will be paid by the industry or by taxpayers? The public are not generally involved in pre-application meetings so using taxpayer dollars would be inappropriate.

While the current process of 25 tasks presented today is efficient for NRC to accomplish requirements on many different timelines over the next few years, a reasonable person will not be able to put the pieces together. Therefore, I recommend one overarching mission document is needed in responding to the ADVANCE Act.

Another question asked was how will these changes might affect Reg Guides and other documents. No answer was provided. The industry and public need clarity for what will be affected by regulatory changes and the timelines. For example, Reg. Guide 4.2 to prepare environmental reports will need to be updated for changes to the Act Section 506 and 10 CFR Part 51.

With the 50th anniversary of NRC and preparing for the RIC in March 2025, I suggest the EDO recommend to the Commission:

1) that the ADVANCE Act is vital for the nation's civilian nuclear program and necessitates demonstration as an independent regulatory, similar to the Federal Reserve

2) one holistic agency-wide document describing all functions of NRC will be prepared focusing on proposed changes

3) the NRC organize a panel for the RIC involving a wide number of agency experts to describe the changes being made from the Advance Act.”

UPDATE January 16, 2026

The NRC completed the report to Congress directed by Section 506 of the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy Act of 2024 (ADVANCE Act). Here are links to the letter and report. Based on my reading, the report proposes potential changes to the way NRC conducts environmental reviews for new power plants with the overall theme for industry to have a much larger role in the NEPA process. For example, utility consultants may take the lead in several areas including: 1) threatened and endangered species biological reviews and preparing assessments, 2) interactions with tribal governments, and 3) preparing environmental assessments (EA) as the preferred option over full environmental impact statements (EIS). Previously, NRC took the lead in all these areas including having industry submit the environmental report that fed into the expanded EIS. In addition, issues common to all future nuclear plants could be resolved in the Generic EIS for New Reactors in the same way NRC regulates other fuel cycle entities.

The use of “incorporation by reference” will expand where the applicant cites previous public information so the reader must track down information. The NRC focus will be on new and significant information as well as only consider alternative sources of energy as part of the no action alternative as related only to nuclear options. Therefore, NEPA documents will no longer consider various sources of non-nuclear energy which for adoption of future nuclear power and generating additional nuclear waste needs to become part of the national and international conversation. The report is very brief with summary tables provided in Enclosure 1. NRC acknowledged my previously submitting public comments along with eight other commenters as shown in Enclosure 2.

When I worked for NRC preparing EIS documents to relicense nuclear power plants, we needed several staff and about 15 experts from national laboratories to conduct environmental reviews. There are extensive data requirements such as for air and water that must begin several years before the application stage, so there will be much more burden on industry consultants to fully plan and execute the expanding requirements.

Please let me know if you are interested in discussing how these changes could impact your business when interacting with the NRC.

In Woodbury Pond

In Woodbury Pond

by Bill and A.J. Dam

In the Piedmont’s former pristine white pine forest transformed to become the newly constructed housing development of New Hill, North Carolina, an area of about five-square miles and 1,000 McMansions, only one old pond remains. Located in the Woodbury neighborhood across from where we live in Jordan Manors, the small pond is cramped and crowded behind the backyards of a dozen homes. Living in the Woodbury Pond are a few elusive large-mouth bass.

Attaching the seven foot fishing rod to the electric bike makes for quick transport to get the hook in the water. After dozens of trips and hundreds of attempts using different bait and fishing from different spots on the shore, no luck occurred in snagging the prized fish. Then on Friday the 13th of September, on his last attempt after trying for two hours and 30 minutes past sunset in the twilight, knowing the bass must be hiding beneath fallen branches and rigged with a swim bait artificial fish, a huge large-mouth bass jumped onto the lure as soon as it hit the water. The bass tried to swim away dragging the line that spun off the reel to get away but with great effort A.J. reeled in the fish feeling the rod bending close to the breaking point. The bass measured about two feet long and A.J. immediately made a video call to his parents to share the news.

Carefully removing the hook from the large mouth, hoping the bass can live longer, he carefully set the fish free into the old pond and slowly rode the e-bike home feeling elated to share his achievement of the one that didn’t get away.

8th Grade Science Sub

Yesterday, I taught four science classes to approximately 100 eighth grade students at East Cary Magnet Middle School. The mission of the school is to be a Center for Global Studies and World Languages and motto is Unity Through Diversity. As school year just began last week and the teacher needed to attend a training, the students are getting an introduction (or reminders) on topics including laboratory safety, definitions including density and buoyancy, and the scientific method.

I didn’t expect the homeroom and “Global Scholar time” students to continue staying for the core 1 science class lasting a total of two hours! The students didn’t have much independent homework or class work to do so we had lots of time to share stories and compare interests. Many students shared they like sports, dancing, music and computer games. Given the mission of the school, I asked what languages they speak and some of the responses included: English, Spanish, German, Japanese, French, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Mandarin, and Tagalog. Luckily for me, all the students are fluent in English. I said they are also learning to speak Science and to consider it like a foreign language that they need to learn the lingo and start with the definitions.

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Debby Deluge

Tropical storm Debby which hit Florida as a category 1 hurricane is dropping record rainfall across the southeastern U.S. As the eye of the storm circulated around us yesterday afternoon on 8/8/24, the rain stopped briefly allowing time for my son and me to take a bike ride for this photo op showing submerged Richardson Road at Reedy Branch Creek in the Apex Friendship area of North Carolina. We received four inches of rainfall in one day with most of the rain falling in the morning! This is the same road we previously helped to pick up trash. Much of the trash if it get into the stream would be very dangerous to wildlife. With the road block detour diverting traffic around the flooded road, we noticed many homes and farms cut off and wondered how they would be able to come and go.

So for all the people who enjoy or dislike going outdoors, driving cars, fishing, and generally surviving on this planet, can we all agree to do more to reduce trashing the roads, wasting gasoline, emitting carbon, and respect all lives found in nature?

Cicada cuisine

This morning I took a hike around Harris Park to see if I could see birds eating cicadas. The birds were too high in the trees yet I felt luck that one cicada landed close to me so I could get this photo. According to Vox, two broods emerging together has not happened since Thomas Jefferson was President! The birds have lost interest in our seed feeder with the proliferation of these insects — apparently the males make loud noises to attract females. As a result of the cicada feast, birds will produce more offspring. My neighbor who’s an orchestra leader said the cicadas sound like a rolling high pitched snare drum. Hopefully the noise that’s annoying to us will benefit the ecosystem! Here’s a video of my walk in the woods listening to the cicadas and discovering a wildlife creature.

#?

This President’s Day weekend, the annual Great Backyard Bird Count is taking place. People are identifying birds from around the world for fun, scientific research and a chance to win a pair of Zeiss binoculars. Cornell Labs and other sponsors run the event offering free phone apps that can help us to identify birds by pictures or sound calls. I first tried the Merlin Bird ID app and quickly selected birds I saw which then took me to the eBird website to provide more details. Shown in the photo from my backyard seed feeder is a male Northern Cardinal and a chipping sparrow (males and females look the same) based on the field guide book: Birds of the Carolinas by Stan Tekiela.

This is the third bird feeder we’ve tried to use in the past week - the first one provided a mix of sunflower seed to birds and squirrels, which reminded us of Mark Rober’s videos building squirrel mazes. Then we tried an oriole feeder using sliced oranges and jelly. We didn’t observe orioles yet as they apparently migrate in early April but we did get some small Eastern Bluebirds briefly check out the goodies. The seed feeder shown in the picture is called a “Squirrel-X1” made by Classic Brands LLC which is available at many big box retailers.