Plutonium pride on the Mid-Columbia

[stextbox id="custom" color="000000" bcolor="000000" bgcolor="ffffff" image="null"]This update originally appeared April 15 on the blog for the Spot.us story I'm working on about seismic risks at Eastern Washington's nuclear power facilities. Later updates -- including news of a petition by environmental groups to stop the NRC from nuclear plant licensing and other proceedings until it completes a review of the Fukushima disaster -- are available here. Expect the final story May 2.[/stextbox]

"We're proud of the cloud."

That's what Dave Acton - the general manager and brewmaster at Atomic Ale & Eatery in Richland, WA - told me last night. Acton grew up in Richland, part of Eastern Washington's Tri-Cities area. The town's biggest claim to fame, though, is the nearby Hanford Site, the site used by the U.S. government for decades to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. It's also the place where, for more than 30 years, the Columbia Generating Station has produced electricity on land leased from the federal government from the only commercial nuclear reactor still operating in the Northwest.

Acton chatted with me over of "Plutonium Porter" last night. He explained to me how safe he felt growing up in Richland -- and how happy he is to raise kids here. For Acton, concerns about safety at the Columbia Generating Station and the Hanford site are the result of fear-mongering and panic. Though the conversation happened spontaneously (the way the best journalism often does), it reminds me just how much more complex any story is. Of course, one person's opinion shouldn't be seen as representative of an entire community, but it's worth remembering that as I consider the seismic hazards of Eastern Washington - and what it means for the Columbia Generating Station and the Hanford Site - there's a real value in understanding how those most directly impacted by these facilities feel about them. I'm looking forward to sharing what Acton had to say in my final piece.

I'll also have details from my enlightening conversation with Steve Reidel (without whom, coincidentally, I wouldn't have found Atomic Ale after bumping into him long after our interview). Reidel, a geologist and adjunct professor at Washington State University, Tri-Cities, recently retired from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Recently retired after decades working on the Hanford Site, Reidel reminded me how little we still know about earthquakes in this part of Washington - a point he also made in a column in last Sunday's Tri-City Herald (you'll have to pay to see the story in the paper's archives). More concerned about the risk such quakes might pose to aging buildings on the Hanford Site than at the Columbia Generating Station, Reidel reminded me just how much of a struggle it is to get scientific studies done consistently and thoroughly. There was much more to our conversation, but you'll hae to wait until May to learn the full story.

When you read it (and I hope you'll support it by clicking "fund this story"  or, if funds are tight, by taking surveys to earn free credits to apply to this piece), you'll also learn about my next destination: a newly trenched fault outside of Yakima that I'll be visiting with Brian Sherrod later today. Sherrod, a paleoseismologist, works with the U.S. Geological Survey and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network to map and identify active faults. Thanks to LIDARdata that has become available over the past decade Sherrod and the PNSN have been able to identify one new fault a year in Washington. Their only limitation: having enough resources to collect and process data from around the state. Sherrod is also preparing to publish research that will provide a new understanding of the relationship between fault systems east of the Cascades, and those in the more heavily populated areas west of the mountains. I'm looking forward to seeing in person how Sherrod works and literally getting my hands dirty as I see his work first hand.

I'm happy to be out in the Tri-Cities and to have the opportunity to see what I'm writing about first hand (theres no reason why any journalists shouldn't go in the field, but that's a blog for another time). Disappointingly, I've yet to get Energy Northwest - the operators of the Columbia Generating Station - to talk with me about the basis for their safety claims. As i try, I'll continue analyzing some of the other materials and interviews I've had - including a discussion with an emergency management expert, congressional research service reports on seismic safety near nuclear power plants, and more.

I can't do any of this without your continued support. Please click "fund this story" or "free credits" if you want to help me tell this story.

Uncertainty, seismic risks and nuclear regulation

This is a copy of a blog post I wrote today at spot.us to update supporters about my work on a story exploring the seismic dangers that could face the Columbia Generating Station near Richland, Washington. Click here to read more about that story and how you can help make it happen. In more than a week of uncertainty following Japan's largest recorded earthquake, its ensuing tsunami and the still unfathomable specter of a radiological nightmare, the only thing the world has to be certain about is uncertainty itself. We still don't know the fate of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. We still don't know how many people perished in the original disaster and how many still cling to life. We still don't know how much of the Japanese landscape was contaminated with radioactive material, and we still don't have a clear sense of the sort of recovery Japan faces.

We just don't know.

So, here in the U.S., why are so many officials so quick to express such certainty, and why are journalists so quick to accept government officials' and nuclear industry spokespeople's assurances that yes, we swear, you're really safe here in the U.S.? How can we be assured there really is little chance we will face disasters similar to that Japan now suffers through?.

I'm not referring to concerns about the immediate impacts of a radiation plume. The risk from this specific incident to U.S. citizens seems minimal. Nevertheless, I think we're asking the wrong questions if journalists exploring dangers in the U.S. only consider immediate impacts in our country from the Fukushima Daiichi plant and don't ask how what occurs in Japan to the Japanese people could be instructive for what may happen here. Meanwhile, there's also problematic framing of the discussion.

This morning, for example, NPR's Morning Edition led an interview by Renee Montagne with Georgetown psychologist Robert Dupont,who studies fear. Introducing the piece, Steve Inskeep almost jokingly said "As of now, the death toll from Japan's nuclear emergency stands at zero." Whether there may not have been immediate death, nor lethal doses, it misses the point to only look at the immediate aftermath and not the current risk. Dupont said other than Chernobyl we "don't have bodies piling up." But this isn't just about bodies piling up. It's also about bodies bombarded with radiation, bodies detoriorating over time.

Valerie Brown heartbreakingly reminded us of so much Monday in her  "Pawning the Chernobyl Necklace" on The Phoenix Sun, fusing exquisite prose and detailed research and scientific knowledge to explain exactly how long lasting these impacts can be for an individual, what fear really feels like, and how blind assurances of safety serve no one.

I'm looking at the seismic risks facing the Columbia Generating Station because I just haven't seen people telling the full story. Even if that full story reinforces claims that we are safe, it must be told credibly. I worry a bit that other outlets are exploring this topic, that they'll get to it faster, dispatching salaried, staff reporters to tell it before I can, but then I realize two things: It's a story that can't be told too many times, that must be told in as nuanced a manner as possible; it's also a story that deserves to be told in detail, in depth, and in as explanatory a manner as possible.

Our responsibility as journalists

That question has been rolling around in my brain since I first woke to news last week that officials from Energy Northwest - the company that runs the Columbia Generating Station, the only commercial nuclear plant in the Northwest, had assured the public that the plant is safe from Earthquakes. Officials certainly have to be cautious about panicking the public (especially when an American run on potassium iodide pills could threaten availability for the Japanese most immediately at risk).

So maybe the pressure is on journalists: we need to do a better job - without fear mongering - of asking just what evidence officials are using to justify their claims. How up to date are the seismic studies? What historic data they use? How thoroughly have geologists studied the Columbia Plateau's potential, and how have those studies been integrated into designs at the Columbia Generating Station and the regulations that govern it? It's our job to ask these questions and not to accept "we're safe" as a satisfactory answer, especially when a simple google search - much like the one I performed the day I heard that story - reveals that historic quakes 90 miles away from the plant ahve exceeded its designs in magnitude and that dangers exist.

Simple Google searches, of course, are not enough. That's why I've been poring through significant accident mitigation assessments, emergency management plans, and seismic profiles as I try to identify who I should call first. I always struggle with that when I start working on a story, and I should get over my uncertainty. What I'm finding so far, though, only prompted more questions. For example, the geologic area the plant sits on is one notorious for "bad data" about its seismicity. Again. Uncertainty.

Meanwhile, I also need to bring myself up to speed on current geology and seismology (why, for example, is horizontal ground shaking a better indicator of a quake's strength than the ricter scale?), nuclear policy (if you thought the alphabet soup of federal agency names was bad, just read a report from the NRC - and hope you have a pot of coffee brewed) and just who would be at risk from a radiological release.

Thank you for your continued support

But I'm ready for the challenge.

We (read journalists) need to do a better job of asking people one simple question "how do you know what you know?" or "how do you justify the claims that you make?" So, if we want to know the risks earthquakes pose to nuclear facilities or any other sensitive area, shouldn't we start with those who have spent their professional lives studying them?

Meanwhile I'm trying to strategize when I'll go to the Tri-Cities to explore the community affected by this. I don't want to do that until I have a better grasp of the issues involved so I can ask better questions, but I want to make sure I spend enough time actually getting to better know the area I'll be reporting on.

It's encouraging to see, however, that even before my first blog post dozens of you indicated you want these kinds of questions to be asked. Thank you so much for making this story a possibility and showing me that I'm asking the kinds of questions you want asked.

However, don't be shy about telling me what more you want to know. What questions about this topic am I missing? what am I being too lazy about? What am I overlooking?

What a Week for Wind

[singlepic id=351 w=320 h=240 float=left]I've begun blogging about environmental justice and the West for High Country News My first post went up July 30 and discussed growth, economics and justice.HCN has been kind enough to allow me to cross-post, so beginning with this week's edition I'll also be putting my posts up here at Lascher at Large.

On Tuesday, July 27, the Los Angeles Times reported the groundbreaking of the immense Alta Wind Energy Center near the Mojave Desert town of Tehachapi. The story described a facility “being called the largest wind power project in the country,” and its potential to generate three gigawatts of electricity for Southern California homes. Though light on opposing voices, the story did quoted the president of the nearby Old West Ranch Property Owners Association, who object to the project. A day later, Tehachapi – and particularly the Old West Ranch – again made national headlines, albeit for quite different reasons. The afternoon of the groundbreaking a fire broke out on the Old West Ranch. NPR carried the story in its morning news update the next day. Firefighters already strained by a blaze in the nearby Sequoia National Forest struggled to keep up with the inferno. Dozens of homes at Old West Ranch were lost. Despite initial worries, wind turbines were left unscathed. The news brought a glimpse of what life was actually like at Old West Ranch, where residents lived off the grid and as self-sufficiently as possible. This fact was barely, if at all, acknowledged by media outlets that seemed to have difficulty reconciling the ultra-modern prospect of a $1.2 billion project that could power 600,000 homes with an inwardly-focused community interested in sustainability on a very small scale. While on one hand the wildfires spared a project that could begin to significantly shift energy usage in California, they ravaged an example of an older, quieter, less shiny approach to environmentalism. It was almost as if the fire itself declared that there are acceptable, and unacceptable, approaches to sustainable living – one best left in the ashes of the past, the other glimmering in the future. Of course, the tradeoffs aren't that simple. Wind power might significantly serve the energy needs of California and the West and it may do so without as significant an impact on the environment as fossil fuel based power sources. Still, should we so urgently embrace wind power without fully studying how turbines impact neighboring populations and the landscape?

[singlepic id=350 w=320 h=240 float=right]By Thursday, July 29, I had my first chance to ponder the question. That day I joined the Portland, OR-based Dill Pickle Club on its “Where does our energy come from” tour of the Columbia River Gorge. As described in the Portland Mercury by freelancer Rebecca Robinson, the tour visited The Dalles Dam before a lunch with Chief Wilbur Slockish of the Klickitat Tribe of the Yakama Nation. After railing on damages wrought on his people and their land near the site where the Celilo Falls once cascaded, Slockish ended his talk emphasizing his support for wind power and, specifically, his cooperation with SDS Land Company's construction of a wind farm in Washington. After Slockish's talk, we continued on to PGE's Biglow Wind Farm, which currently has 141 turbines installed and another 76 planned. There was nothing subtle about Biglow, which sits among a landscape of golden wheatfields a few miles inland from the decaying town of Rufus, OR. The turbines tower 400 feet into the air, gleaming like props from a big-budget science fiction movie. Like all power plants, wind farms don't always make for the best neighbors. Some are trying to fight that perception problem. As the New York Times's William Yardley reported July 31, New York-based Caithness Energy is paying $5,000 to neighbors of a wind farm in Ione, OR who agree not to complain about noise from Caithness' turbines. An Oregon Department of Environmental Quality spokesman quoted in the story told Yardly his department wasn't monitoring noise regulations and that he wasn't “sure who you'd call out there in the Columbia Gorge” anyhow. If public officials don't even know who's responsible for evaluating a power plant's impact on neighboring populations, can the industry itself be expected to?

[singlepic id=352 w=320 h=240 float=left]

Of course, we're still talking about power plants that will require major transmission lines. That returns my attention to the Old West Ranch. In a sense, by practicing self-sufficiency, the Old West residents were implementing a very small scale version of power by distributed generation. As Peter Newman notes, distributed generation increases control over power production and improves resiliency in times of disaster. Power generation and transmission on a neighborhood scale coupled with efficiency measures and incentives for everyone within a neighborhood -- including residents -- to participate, would ensure less dependence upon large scale industrial power generation from any source.

Extreme Measures

Geomicrobiologists look to harsh environments for organisms “disobeying” traditional chemistry teaching.
(This story was originally written and reported in October, 2008 at the University of Southern California).

Petri dishes might not be replacing AA batteries at Radio Shack any time soon, but a growing body of research shows it may soon be possible to create fuel cells made up of bacteria cultured to digest sewage or other substances.

Such wastewater remediation is but one application of the field of geomicrobiology, which has evolved rapidly since 1966. That year, Tom Brock first shook the field with the discovery of organisms thriving in the cauldron of Yellowstone National Park's geothermal geysers. Before then, general wisdom held nothing could survive in such high temperatures.

“There's nothing more fun than finding something that disobeyed what your chemistry teacher told you 35 years ago,” says Ken Nealson, a geobiologist at the University of Southern California and a teacher of Orianna Bretschger and Yuri Gorby, two microbiologists working at San Diego's J. Craig Venter Institute on projects connected to wastewater remediation and biological fuel cells. Nealson is a Venter Institute board member.

After Brock's discovery, organisms were found all over in environments scientists had insisted life couldn't exist. Life was being discovered in places with high temperatures (more than 60 degrees celsius) or very low ones (zero degrees celsius), extremely acidic or highly alkaline soil, and even in areas devoid of oxygen; all areas lacking nutrients scientists thought organisms needed to survive.

These findings had far-reaching implications. Astrobiologists realized that if life could exist in so many different environments here on Earth, they may have been too narrow-minded in their search for extraterrestrial life.

But it didn't just mean E.T. might not look how we expect. Many microbiologists just thought it was outright wacky to imagine life could exist in such forbidding environments.

One way to understand life's adaptability to different environments is to think about how life is powered.

Think of a NiCad battery. Electrons flow from a positively charged nickel cathode to a negatively charged cadmium anode. That movement creates electricity. Placed in a circuit and switched on, the electrons move from the cathode to the anode, creating electric energy.

In humans, sugars take nickel's place and oxygen replaces cadmium. Oxygen speeds up the process of metabolism in which the sugars are broken down and cells are powered. Every organism has a similar process, but the cathode doesn't have to be sugar, and the anode doesn't need to be oxygen. As long as there's an atom supplying electrons and another receiving them, the process can occur.

Nealson spends much of his time in a strange landscape north of the San Francisco Bay area characterized by deposits of soil with high pH levels. That means the soil is similar to lye, a substance that destroys many chemical bonds and keeps oxygen away. But Nealson found a lifeform thriving there using excess hydrogen in the soil as an energy source.

“You know, if someone would have told you ten years ago that they had a bug that grew at pH 12, you'd just laugh at them and say 'yeah, you're just crazy. You've got something wrong with your experiments.” Nealson says. “And yet, we see plenty of bugs growing in these samples and we've now got some in culture here [at USC].”

It turned out the organisms used iron to receive electrons from the hydrogen.

“This is my microbiologist fun,” Nealson says. “These bugs disobey all the rules.”

As more and more research about organisms which broke the rules emerged, resistance in the scientific community began to to fade. In the 1980s Japanese scientist Koki Horikoshi discovered how microorganisms could be used to speed up digestion used in industrial processes. Researchers working with Nealson built on that research to study how organisms in a California lake were metabolizing iron and manganese without oxygen. The Air Force took note.

“It's almost the first thing I've ever done that has any application,” Nealson says.

Nealson's team had isolated the genes of the organism responsible for electricity production in that metabolism, and the air force realized it could build on ongoing research into the reactions to design a fuel cell. This is where Bretschger's work at the Venter institute on wastewater remediation comes in.

Already, wastewater treatment facilities use microorganisms which don't need oxygen to digest organic materials in sewage. In these oxygen-free environments bacteria dine on feces and other waste. The bacteria produce methane as a byproduct. That methane is used to power the sewage plants, but the bacteria produce so much there is often excess to burn off. Bretschger says it may be possible to skip that last step.

Lifeforms, whether bacterial or not, digest their energy sources because they've evolved to survive on the resources available in their environment. Bretschger says while she can get the reaction she wants to occur in a cup of water in a lab, it's still too difficult to scale up to an industrially useful process. She and her colleagues need to understand how to make those reactions happen quickly, and they have to happen consistently. For that to occur, they also need to learn how different organisms might react, compete in and adapt to environments changing constantly in terms of what substances, nutrients, and conditions are present in waste streams.

The bacteria she is studying, called shewanella oneidensis, or MR-1, interacts electronically with solid surfaces. It contains a collection of proteins necessary for electrons to move to those surfaces. If a gene controlling that movement is removed the transfer could be stopped. J. Craig Venter, Bretschger's employer's namesake, was the first person to sequence the human genome. His institute is now working on the world's first synthetic organism. The genetic tools developed at the institute might make it possible to engineer a catalyst for a microbial fuel cell or to identify other organisms with similar electrochemical processes.

Bretschger sees other impacts beyond Air Force fuel cells if this process can be properly honed.

“If we can understand the biological reactions well enough to both accelerate the degradation of organic waste and engineer a system that can efficiently harvest the energy released from this degradation, we could provide clean water to areas of the globe that presently have no energy infrastructure to employ conventional water treatment,” she says.

Nealson, meanwhile, cautions against thinking microorganisms can do anything and live absolutely anywhere.

It's one thing to take an organism and imagine how it might be able to live in seemingly harsh environments. You don't violate any scientific laws if, say, you rearrange the basic building blocks of life to withstand extremes, much as one might build different models with the same set of Lego blocks. But those blocks and the bonds holding them together must still be able to withstand the physical forces which govern our universe.

Right now the only known building blocks are proteins formed by carbon-to-carbon bonds. Those bonds can't withstand forces such as extremely high temperatures or very strong kinetic forces (think earthquakes and other geological forces), while there's a possibility life could be based on other substances besides carbon, such as silica, those bonds couldn't be supported in any environment that could support life as we know it.

Still, that doesn't mean there isn't vast opportunity for life on this planet and elsewhere.

“Chemistry is chemistry and physics is physics and you can't violate those laws, but within that range of not violating those laws you can do a whole lot of stuff we didn't think was possible,” Nealson says.