TL: GREENPEACE MAGAZINE May-June 1988 SO: Greenpeace USA (GP) DT: May 1988 Keywords: greenpeace periodicals pre90 us digests gp / RISING FROM THE ASHES by Judy Christrup Our cities are drowning in garbage, and burning it only creates a different kind of problem. THE DEATH OF ELLENTON by Andre Carothers When DuPont's bomb plant moved in, South Carolinians were as hospitable as ever. But now DuPont is moving on, leaving the state older, wiser, and contaminated with toxic and radioactive waste. ECONOTES: Mixed feelings at McMurdo--The problem with plastics-- Chemlawn's fertile imagination--Activism in Court--Speaking the truth to toxics. ACTION ACCESS: Save the MMPA--Nix the Antarctic minerals treaty- -Greenpeace goes into Action--Students networking--World Park Base open for work. 20 CAMPAIGNS: Philadelphia's trash policy adrift--Boycotts and trade sanctions for the whales--Bus meets BFI--TEDS save turtles. 22 BRIEFINGS: Europe's nuclear business runs amok--Secret video exposes dolphin slaughter. ECONOTES: WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE At 9:00 a.m. on February 3rd, Vicki Getz, senior materials person for Antarctic Services at McMurdo Base, was told that her job was completed and that she would be leaving Antarctica on the 4:00 p.m. "bag drag" plane. Her crime: befriending the Greenpeace overwintering team from the World Park Base. The National Science Foundation, which runs the U.S. Antarctic program, has a policy discouraging any non emergency contact between private and government personnel. Getz says the policy is not well publicized and, in view of her release, very selectively enforced. While other private expeditions have been received cordially by McMurdo, she says, Greenpeace's presence is viewed with "paranoid ignorance" by many staff members. But apparently not by all. When the MV Greenpeace docked near McMurdo after resupplying the World Park Base, more than 100 McMurdo personnel visited the ship, talked to the crew and passed the hat, collecting a donation of about $1,500. The 1988 World Park Base team--leader Keith Swenson (U.S.A.), meteorologist Wojtek Moskal (Poland), radio technician Sjoerd Jongens (Netherlands) and geologist Sabine Schmidt (W. Germany)- - is now getting acclimatized to conditions on Cape Evans in preparation for the coming winter. FRONTIER JUSTICE When four Greenpeace activists and Earth First! cofounder Mike Roselle converged on South Dakota's Mt. Rushmore to hang a banner last October, they wanted to call attention to the problem of acid rain. While the U.S. Congress fiddles, acid rain is eating away at public buildings, the tender shoots of New England's evergreens and the organs of fish, animals and human beings. They came away with a lesson in the selective application of the law. Declaring that the protesters had "violated a shrine of democracy," Rapid City's Federal District Court Judge Richard Battey sentenced the team to 90 days in jail, two years probation and a total of nearly $3,000 in fines. It was the toughest sentence ever meted out for climbing the monument; all but 2 of 19 similar offenses that occurred in 1987 resulted in a $50 fine. In addition to taking issue with Battey's choice of national icons (carving this particular "shrine of democracy" required stealing the sacred Black Hills from the Lakota Indian Nation), Mike Roselle also refused to agree to the terms of probation. Turning in monthly reports and subjecting himself to arbitrary search and seizure for two years would have severely cramped the lifestyle of a veteran environmentalist like Rosette. Before going back to jail to serve an extra 80 days for his stand, the long-time Earth First! and Greenpeace campaigner composed a four-page statement. "Yes I will abide by the law to the best of my ability," he concluded, "But if the terms of this probation require me to be silent, or inactive, while the crimes of the government and some of the nation's largest corporations go unpunished, I cannot, and will not, accept them." GARDENING TIPS Fans of those antiseptic, pea green, suburban lawns are advised to take with a grain of salt the recent claims of national lawn care conglomerate ChemLawn Services Corporation. "A person would have to ingest over 40 cupfuls of lawn clippings treated with ChemLawn to equal the toxicity of a single cup of coffee," one ad says. The company further claims, "A child would have to ingest almost 10 cupfuls of treated lawn clippings to equal the toxicity of one baby aspirin." New York attorney general Robert Abrams qualifies as chief skeptic of the moment. He filed suit in the state Supreme Court against ChemLawn, charging them with writing "fraudulent, deceptive, and illegal" advertisements. ChemLawn currently claims that the company's products have been scientifically proven safe, citing the fact that the chemicals are registered with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. EPA registration, as any casual student of environmental issues knows, hardly means approval for the dinner table. As Abrams' suit points out, "It is based on a determination that the chemical will not cause 'unreasonable adverse effects on the environment."' Given the dismal state of EPA's regulatory efforts, gardeners would be well-advised to restrict their lawn care to watering and an occasional mow. THE TRUTH HURTS When Corrine Whitehead noticed that "practically every household" in her hometown of Calvert City, Kentucky, included someone who was dying or had died of cancer, she assumed it had something to do with the nine companies that produce, process or burn hazardous materials in the region. A concerned citizen, she founded a group called Coalition for Health Concern and invited Dr. Paul Connett, assistant professor of chemistry at St. Lawrence University, to join their efforts. He began to work on "Requiem for a Dying City," a documentary detailing the connection between local industry and the rising incidence of cancer. On November 22, 1987, Dr. Connett returned to Calvert City to give a speech, during which he referred to Calvert City as "Cancer City." Two days later, the town's mayor sued him on the grounds that he "maliciously and intentionally slandered the environment of Calvert City." Under pressure from the town council, the suit was subsequently dropped. Calling a spade a spade is no safer in Pearland, Texas, where Arden C. Hill, Jr., is suing Irene and Radford Mansfield for allegedly describing his "sanitary landfill" as a "dump." Actually, Radford himself never referred to the landfill at all. His wife did. But Radford is included in the suit for "not controlling his wife." Mr. Hill has applied for a state permit to operate a landfill on the site on five separate occasions since 1973. Twice he withdrew the application, and twice it was denied. On the fifth occasion, the permit was granted, but it is still tied up in the appeals process. If the permit is granted, Mr. Hill has promised to dig up the entire mound of waste in his pit have it classified and rebury it. Irene Mansfield says Mr. Hill is suing her because, "I've been on his tail since 1973. He has said he thinks God put me on this earth to harass him." CURBING PLASTIC Unlike other garbage that finds its way into the ocean durable and strong plastics pose a threat of a different order. Marine animals that eat plastic debris or become entangled in long- lasting nets ropes, six-pack holders and the like are doomed to a slow death. After years of research and lobbying by environmentalists, some progress is being made in efforts to strengthen legal restrictions on plastic dumping and destructive fishing methods. Last November, the U.S. ratified Annex V of MARPOL, the Marine Pollution Convention, banning ocean dumping by the ships of the signers and prohibiting other nations from dumping debris in their waters. U.S. participation in the international treaty is vital, as it comes into force only after countries representing at least 50 percent of the world's merchant fleet tonnage become signatories. The same legislation that implemented Annex V took steps toward regulating the drift net fisheries outside the U.S. 200-mile zone. The fleets of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are suspected of killing tens of thousands of marine mammals and hundreds of thousands of sea birds each year in their non degradable plastic nets. These countries will have to agree to enter into negotiations with the U.S. on the monitoring and assessment of the fleets' impact, with an eye toward fashioning regulations, or face sanctions under the Pelly Amendment. The bill also requires the Secretary of Commerce to prepare a report on drift net fishing within U.S. waters and look at what steps might be taken to lessen incidental kill of marine wildlife. In a separate court decision, Japan has been banned from using drift nets in U.S. waters. RISING FROM THE ASHES Our Trash Shouldn't Burn by Judy Christrup A drab yellow Department of Public Works dump truck pulls into a rusting sheet-metal alcove at the incinerator in northeast Washington, D.C. The driver positions the truck bed under a grimy chute and with a clattering roar, the truck fills with dense dark ash and charred twisted metals. Pausing only a moment, he pulls his truck out, the container full yet uncovered, and heads for the on ramp to 1-295 East. Our Toyota follows, bumping along the pitted interstate. The windshield darkens as the ash blows off the load. A circuitous route leads us to our final destination--a dump site in a ravine off Martin Luther King Avenue, in southeast Washington, behind the mission-style brick buildings belonging to Saint Elizabeth's psychiatric care hospital. The ash-filled canyon creates an eerie tableau. Crumpled bedsprings jut from the cooled embers while a noxious liquid, glimmering like a futuristic rainbow, trickles from a drainage pipe. Saint Elizabeth's, called Saint E's by local residents, is one of the oldest and largest federal psychiatric hospitals in the United States. Dumping this waste in the patients' backyard is serious business-- incinerator ash contains a host of dangerous toxic chemicals. But a certain irony is unmistakeable. A nation neck deep in garbage, garbage that is rich in recoverable resources, is rushing to burn its refuse. The burning precludes recovery, releases toxic wastes into the air and leaves a poisonous pile of black ash, which is buried in the ground-- certainly a form of madness, by u any standards. America's cities are drowning in garbage. With landfills in the U.S. closing at a rate of ten per week, the days of town dumps are clearly numbered. According to David Morris and Neil Seldman of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, more than half the cities in the U.S. will exhaust their current landfills by 1990. More than 2,000 have closed in the last five years for environmental reasons, and another 700, for lack of space. With the landfill clock ticking away, town and city councils are under pressure to make quick decisions about waste management. With little or no guidance from federal and state governments, they are forced to deal with their garbage crises alone. Well, not actually alone. Large corporations and high priced consultants gladly offer their services, presenting what appears to be an out-of-sight, out-of-mind solution: mass-burn incineration. Richard Denison of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) describes the usual scenario: "You have a local solid waste manager, a city government employee, with a garbage problem. An incinerator company or consulting firm waltzes in and says, 'Give us money, get municipal bonds issued, and we'll take care of your problem.' It's one-stop shopping." Hearing the hard- sell, most local solid waste managers don't even think about the residual ash. And there's the rub. Both the ash and the smoke from the incinerator stack are poisonous. Fly ash, gleaned from the stacks by filters, is the most harmful; according to EDF's compilation of data from dozens of U.S. incinerators, all fly ash samples exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hazardous waste limits for cadmium or lead. Bottom ash, the burned remains of the garbage, exceeded EPA's lead limits in four of ten samples, and roughly half the samples of combined fly and bottom ash were over the limit. The EPA's November '87 report on four municipal incinerators supports EDF's findings--dangerously high levels of lead, cadmium, and other metals were found in the ash from all four incinerators. According to EDF's Richard Denison, "The EPA report corroborates what we've seen around the country but underestimates the problem. It's representative of one set of incinerators out there--the older ones." Ironically, ash from state-of-the-art plants is even more hazardous, because the modern facilities have more efficient air pollution control devices. Toxics scrubbed out of the stacks end up in the ash. So why would any city in its right mind want to deal with the stuff? Jim Vallette, Greenpeace toxics campaigner, explains, "Right now most municipalities aren't worrying about ash. The EPA hasn't technically classified incinerator ash as hazardous waste, so they can landfill it as though it were household garbage." But the city landfill is where the worries begin, not where they end. Ash is spread by wind and water. Dioxins and toxic metals in the ash accumulate up the food chain and are readily absorbed and retained in the tissues of living organisms. Bound to soil particles, their persistence in the environment increases significantly. As rain water trickles through buried ash, dioxins, heavy metals, and other toxic substances are carried along. They work their way down to the aquifers and streams, polluting local water supplies. "It's ironic," says Jim Vallette. "The reason cities started building incinerators in the first place is because town dumps are filling up and polluting water supplies. Now they're dumping the same toxics that were in their garbage to start with, plus a whole new set created in the furnaces. The difference is that some of those toxics are more concentrated and more soluble in water than they were in their original state." What comes out of the stacks is just as frightening. Besides dioxins and furans, incinerators emit roughly 27 different metals, over 200 organic chemicals and a variety of acidic gases. An average 1,600 ton-a-day incinerator blows out 0.06 pounds of dioxins and furans, 510 pounds of hydrocarbons, 5,000 pounds of lead, 361 pounds of cadmium, 2,244 pounds of chromium, 20 pounds of mercury, and 13,250 pounds of zinc every day. The toxic effluent receiving the most attention is dioxin. According to Dr. Barry Commoner, it is actually created inside the smokestack after the gases leave the combustion chamber. His findings were confirmed by Canadian scientists, who reported in The Journal of Chromatography and Science that fly ash acts as a catalyst in the formation of dioxin. EPA's National Human Adipose Tissue Survey demonstrated that seven out of ten samples of human fat tested in recent years contain the most toxic of dioxins: 2, 3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo- p-dioxin (see Eco notes, Greenpeace, March/April '88). According to the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems (CBNS), the fatty tissues of citizens in several parts of the U.S. contain average dioxin levels of 6.4 parts per trillion. CBNS says that this dosage is sufficient to cause an "unacceptable" increase in cancers in the exposed population, especially breast-fed children. If all 220 of the incinerators proposed across the U.S. are built, dioxin emissions would bring many segments of the U.S. population beyond this already "unacceptable" level. In a report released in the fall of 1987, the EPA estimated that the health threat from breathing incinerator pollution will be minimal--four to sixty more cases of cancer nationwide each year. But the agency considered only inhaled airborne pollutants, ignoring the other pathways into the human body: skin, food and water. "There hasn't been enough work on exposure to dioxins through the food chain, where the impact is much greater," says Dr. Paul Connett, assistant professor of chemistry at St. Lawrence University. Connett, who is national coordinator of Work on Waste U.S.A., says, "The brunt of risk analysis is being done by highly-paid consultants who are very conscious of the desired outcome by those footing the bill. Nobody knows what the cancer rate is going to be. These risk analyses can be off by a factor of a thousand." Technologies do exist to limit the release of metals and acid gases into the atmosphere, but they are not systematically used, and they do nothing to reduce dioxin formation. Only a handful of the 110 incinerators operating in the U.S.--in Framing ham, Massachusetts; Marion County, Oregon; Clairmont, New Hampshire; Biddeford, Maine; and Commerce, California--employ acid gas scrubbing procedures. The scrubbers in the Oregon facility, for instance, have reduced hydrogen chloride emissions to 10 parts per million (ppm). In contrast, the Peekskill, New York, incinerator emits 500 to 600 ppm of hydrogen chloride, a level which Technology Review magazine calls "typical of scrubber less plants throughout the U.S." State-of-the-art pollution controls will not be required on current or new plants for some time. The EPA plans to impose technology-based limits on new incinerator emissions beginning November 1989 and on existing incinerator emissions beginning in 1993. Until the EPA writes emission guidelines, states and localities are on their own. Despite the health and environmental issues, the rush to burn is being hastened by incentives provided by Congress, the EPA and the Department of Commerce. From the late 1970s through 1986, incinerator investors could take advantage of energy tax credits, the investment tax credit and accelerated depreciation rules. Since 1986, the trend is away from private ownership and toward government-owned waste-to-energy plants, which are leased to private firms that operate them. Public ownership means that tax exempt bonds can be used for financing. And the 1978 Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act requires utilities to buy power from waste-to-energy incinerators at a price set by each state, guaranteeing another source of income. EPA policy historically has tilted toward an incineration regime by not dealing with the garbage crisis. After President Reagan took office in 1981, nearly all of the money devoted to garbage disposal was diverted to hazardous waste enforcement--a hot issue at the time. But even after Superfund was implemented to help clean up hazardous dumps, resources were not directed back to garbage disposal. Garbage and other "non-hazardous" waste programs were systematically starved--their budgets cut from $29 million in 1979 to $16 million in 1981, and their staff nearly halved, from 128 to 74. Then in 1982, 73 of the 74 employees were either reassigned or laid off, and funding plummeted to $322,000. A particularly useful EPA grants program--one that provided money to states developing long-range garbage disposal plans--was discontinued. There are now ten EPA staff members working on garbage programs. At press date EPA had neither issued new regulations for municipal landfills (ordered by Congress in 1984) nor formulated guidelines regarding incinerator ash disposal. In the absence of such requirements, waste handlers are free to fill in the blanks for themselves. What this institutional bias has brought us is the modern mass- burn incinerator-- technologically sophisticated, shiny and sleek and, unlike the Washington incinerator, difficult to approach without security clearance. All of the action is inside, in a vast storage room, where a crane operator is sealed off from the garbage by a plexiglass window. With the slide of a lever, the gigantic steel crane is activated, lifting tons of trash with each bite, and forcing it down the gullet of the combustion chamber. The trash is engulfed by scorching 40-foot flames, while the supporting grate shakes and mixes it to allow even burning. Actual incineration time is just a second or two at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Forced air is injected above the fire to maintain temperatures in excess of 1,500 degrees, in an attempt to destroy some of the toxic gases. The burning trash heats water in the boiler to produce steam. The steam drives a turbine to generate electricity. When approaching city and town councils, waste-to-energy corporations often cite the success of mass-burn technology in Europe. But trash incinerators in places like West Germany start from a different premise. Garbage is reduced at the source by discouraging excess packaging; glass, metals, paper and combustibles are extracted and collected for recycling. Only the remainder is burned. U.S. incineration is approached in a more direct fashion--throw it all into the fire. In fact, many incinerator contracts require municipalities to produce a certain amount of garbage. If the quota is not met, garbage must be imported from other sources. This "burn everything" mentality wreaks havoc in the guts of incinerators and in the lungs of people breathing the heavy metals and toxic chemicals in incinerator-contaminated air. European-style mass-burn incinerators used in America have suffered frequent breakdowns and repairs. Our trash (high in plastics and metals) produces strong acidic gases that corrode incinerator interiors, especially when it is burned at the temperatures required to produce enough steam for electricity generators. Most European plants don't generate electricity, although many use the steam to heat proximate buildings. According to a Newsday survey last year, half of all mass-burn plants operating in the U.S. have had unscheduled shutdowns, and three others have closed permanently. The marketers of these facilities are as new to the business as their clients. Wheelabrator Environmental Systems, Ogden Martin, American REF-FUEL, Combustion Engineering, Foster Wheeler, Westinghouse Electric, Waste Management Inc., Consumat, and Thermo Electron are earning millions selling incineration technology, yet four of them have never built an incinerator plant of any kind. Ogden Martin Systems, one of the more experienced waste-to-energy corporations, is under contract to build 14 incinerators at a cost of $2.3 billion, yet it has only three plants currently in operation, none more than two years old. Still, waste-to-energy plants have been welcomed in more than forty states, the bulk of which are mass-burn facilities. More than 111 incinerators burn about 5 percent of the nation's garbage, and over 220 are planned or under construction. By the mid-1990s there could be 300 incinerators burning up to 25 percent of the municipal waste stream. According to Cynthia Pollock of the Worldwatch Institute, "Mass-burn plants appeal to city administrators because they require no change in waste collection patterns, their management can be turned over to a private owner if desired, low cost financing mechanisms are available and there is a guaranteed market for the energy produced." Ultimately, this enormous investment of time, and expertise, with its accompanying environmental and public health costs, is doing little more than reduce the volume of the nation's wastes. And even this small gain is disputed. Not all garbage in the waste stream is incinerated, and raw garbage compacts in a landfill. Given the practical realities, a well-operated incinerator will reduce the amount of landfill space required by about 60 percent. This means that landfill space will be extended by two-and-a-half times: five years of landfill space is extended to about thirteen. And the technology that provides this "service", the modern incinerator, has a lifetime of about 20 years and a cost of $50-$400 million. The mind-set associated with incineration is that we can deal with the whole trash stream with one method, and we can if we want to "waste" our land, air, water, health and money. Incinerators perpetuate landfills and all of the problems associated with them - contamination of water supplies and loss of resources. Other choices are far cheaper and safer and can still achieve a 60 percent volume reduction in our waste stream. A combination of recycling and composting, source reduction, education, reuse and product redesign are affordable, environmentally benign solutions to our garbage problems. Neil Seldman of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance says that 30 to 40 percent of municipal waste can be separated at the source into compost material, cans, glass, and paper. Another 30 to 40 percent can be recovered at special processing plants. The final 20 to 40 percent can be landfilled - this is equal to the volume of ash produced by a modern incinerator. "It's a plastic bag crisis, not a waste crisis," says Dr. Connett. "The solution is to go down and see what's in our plastic bags. The paper, cardboard, cans, glass, and food are all resources until they're mixed up and put into a plastic bag. Then they're waste. Using high-tech burning machines is simply perfecting the destruction of our natural resources. We need to recycle in a way we've never done before. People are ready for it, but they're not being given the leadership. When given a chance, people recycle. We've got to recycle as if there's a war on. And there is a war on - a war against waste." Judy Christrup is Associate Editor of Greenpeace Magazine. RECYCLING: WASTE AS A RESOURCE Connie Murtagh Walter Hang of the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) spends a lot of time thinking about garbage. He wants communities and people to recycle rather than burn. America's daily refuse - consisting of newspapers and corrugated cardboard, food scraps, yard waste, metal and tin cans, plastics and packaging materials, cleaning solvents, motor oil and batteries - adds up to about 400,000 tons of garbage a day, or 3.5 pounds per person. Major cities generate the most debris per person; a study issued by the Worldwatch Institute revealed that New Yorkers throw away nine times their weight in garbage each year. Opinions vary, but most sources say that at least half of the consumer waste stream is recyclable under present U.S. technology. Newspaper, paperboard, cardboard and other recyclable paper makes up roughly 40 percent of American garbage. About 28 percent of waste paper is recycled in the U.S., mostly by paper mills. A good deal of the remaining waste paper is exported to other nations who, in answer to their own shortages of virgin materials, recycle and reuse it. Last year, 4.2 million tons of waste paper were exported by the U.S. to recycling nations such as Japan and Taiwan, where it was reformulated for, among other things, T.V. and stereo boxes, which are shipped back to the United States. But in the U.S., most recyclables are competing with virgin materials and losing. Federal transportation subsidies are provided for the use of raw resources like timber, sand and bauxite. The government also offers tax breaks on shipping costs and capital investments for manufacturers using primary, rather than secondary materials. And the mass-burn incinerator industry requires so much trash that recycling in many communities is discouraged by the technology. As prices for landfilling and incineration rise, recycling emerges as a cost-effective alternative. Nationwide, costs for garbage handling run from $100 a ton for incineration and $90 a ton for landfilling to $40 per ton to recycle. Hang believes that European recycling programs in which new equipment separates paper, plastics, ferrous metals and food wastes from the waste stream can be copied in U.S. cities at a start-up cost of $6 million. A new mass burn incinerator, by contrast, costs between $50 million and $400 million. Unfortunately, a rapidly growing portion of the consumer waste stream is made up of plastics and packaging items. Packaging waste has increased by 80 percent since 1960, and plastics are making up an ever-increasing 8 percent by weight and 30 percent by volume of the national waste stream, according to a Newsday report. These plastics don't compact in landfills, they don't incinerate safely, and to date, they don't recycle easily. But while recycling plastics is complicated, it is not impossible. A fledgling plastics recycling industry is taking plastic bottles and containers and shredding them, then using this as filler for sleeping bags, parkas, etc. At Rutgers University, plastic trash is being remade into plastic lumber. Similar in appearance to an ordinary plank of wood, the material can be used in the same manner as normal lumber, according to the developers. Recycling can be made more attractive if the right incentives are established. A key factor in the success of a recycling program in the township of Camden, New Jersey, has been the Camden Recycling Facility, which processes and finds markets for 22 percent of the area's waste. Likewise, in rural Wilton, New Hampshire, 65 percent of the population takes part in a drop-off recycling program, The New Hampshire Resource Recovery Association. The non-profit association provides buyers for the town's processed trash. Recycling has caught on in more than 500 rural and suburban communities across the nation. The township of Springfield, Pennsylvania, started a curbside recycling program in 1983. Over 85 percent of the citizens participate in the program, and officials say they divert 1,500 tons of garbage a year from landfills and incinerators. In 1981, rural Hamburg, New York, passed a two-year trial recycling law. After participation rates passed 95 percent, the town decided to make it permanent. Still, most state officials are sluggish when it comes to recycling, largely because of the institutional and psychological bias in favor of incineration. In order to make recycling programs work, says Hang, the option for incineration has to be removed. "Tradition is to burn or bury. Everyone knows now that landfilling is bad, but the pitch for the past 20 years has been to build incinerators. We have to block incineration. You've got to go whole-hog if you want to go with recycling." A recent study conducted by Newsday confirmed that while state governments have spent over $300 million promoting incineration, a mere $8 million was spent on promoting recycling. "They are loath to contemplate a program that has never been done anywhere else in the country. Incineration is the legacy we've inherited," says Hang. "We've got to declare a crisis. Everybody's got to pitch in." Ultimately, of course, the real solution to the growing waste problem is to reduce our use of throwaway materials. Plastics, excess packaging and hazardous household chemicals can largely be eliminated from the waste stream. "Recycling them is better than burning them or burying them. But the ultimate goal is to live without them," said Pat Cosiner, Greenpeace's National Toxics Campaign Coordinator. Connie Murtagh works for the Toxics Campaign at Greenpeace. ACTION ACCESS BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND, THE MMPA Passed in 1972, the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) has never fully lived up to its mandate. Special interest groups attacked the law, winning amendments that undermined its intent. What was left was grudgingly enforced, under pressure from the conservation community (see "Can We Save Marine Mammals?" Greenpeace, January/February 1988). Sixteen years later, we have a second chance to make the MMPA work. Please support full re-authorization of the act by writing your two senators, your congressperson and the committee chairmen listed below. Urge them to support these changes: Eliminate all dolphin deaths worldwide caused by intentional capture in tuna purse seine fishing nets. Reduce the number of marine mammals killed incidentally by U.S. commercial marine fishing to levels approaching zero. Require adequate monitoring and reporting of these takes. Assure that special attention is paid to depleted species. Develop conservation plans and provide ecosystem protection zones to aid in their recovery. Require that recipients of permits for live display use marine mammals for truly educational purposes. Prohibit riding and other types of harassment of captured animals. Likewise, require that permits granted for scientific research result in relevant and useful findings, benefiting the species taken. Increase funding for marine mammal research. Increase enforcement activities. WRITE: Senator Ernest Hollings, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC 20510. Representative Gerry Studds, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, DC 20515 MINERAL RIGHTS After six years of negotiation, representatives of the Antarctic Treaty nations are putting the finishing touches on a plan that could allow the exploitation of Antarctic mineral reserves. Their final agreement is "seriously flawed," according to Greenpeace's Paul Bogart. "Although the text's environmental provisions appear to be substantial, in practical terms there are major loopholes that will enable miners to escape the consequences of the inevitable environmental damage." Greenpeace has opposed the negotiations from the start, calling instead for the establishment of a World Park, with no minerals extraction. Public opinion, your opinion, will play a crucial role in U.S. Antarctic policy, and we urge you to call or write both your Senators, asking them to oppose the minerals convention. WORK FOR PEACE Greenpeace is looking for volunteers for the 1988/89 Over- wintering Team at our World Park Base in Antarctica. Available positions include: medical doctor; radio technician; diesel electric generator mechanic; and biological scientist. Positions are open to both men and women. Applicants must be conversant in English. Previous Antarctic experience highly desirable; polar, mountaineering or isolation experience helpful. Health must be excellent. Commitment will be required from September 1988 through March 1990. Volunteers will receive survival training for the Antarctic. Please apply in writing as soon as possible and enclose a resume to Nancy Foote, Greenpeace Antarctica Campaign, 1436 U Street, NW, Washington, DC 20009. COME TOGETHER Campus and community environmental groups are invited to join the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) to share ideas, information and news. Contact SEAC, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, CB# 5115, YMCA Building, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-5115. CAPITAL VOLUNTEERS Our membership services office needs help! If you live in the Washington, D.C., area and can volunteer some daytime hours to respond to information requests, please call Jeff Wise at 462-1177. GREENPEACE ACTS In April, Greenpeace celebrated the opening of its new sibling organization, Greenpeace Action. Greenpeace Development Director, Vickey Monrean explains, "Greenpeace Action will allow us to broaden our range of involvement with issues that require extensive grassroots lobbying." While Greenpeace Action focuses on the same agenda of issues as Greenpeace USA, it has a different legal and administrative structure that allows it to engage in an unprecedented amount of grassroots organizing and lobbying. "This is a way for us to be more active in protective legislation, such as the MMPA. We will be able to take our fight to Capitol Hill and develop a new kind of support," Monrean adds. Due to the focus on lobbying, donations to Greenpeace Action are not tax- deductible. COASTAL UNITY A national campaign to protect the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) from oil and gas development was announced in early March at a conference hosted by Greenpeace and attended by coastal activists, local government officials and representatives of more than 20 environmental groups. The campaign will focus on Congressional action to defer, and in some cases prohibit, offshore drilling plans. Legislation will also be sought to strengthen the role of coastal states in offshore drilling decisions. Please write your Senators and Representatives and urge them to support the Consistency Bill, HR 3203 and S 2324, which will require oil development on the OCS to comply with state coastal zone management plans. To get involved, please contact: Greenpeace/OCS Campaign 1436 U Street, NW Washington, D.C 20009 THE DEATH OF ELLENTON Plutonium, Politics, and the State of South Carolina by Andre Carothers Where the broad Savannah flows along to meet the mighty sea, There stood a peaceful village that meant all the world to me. Twas the home of happy people, I knew each and every one, All my kin and all the friends I love, the town was Ellenton. But the military came one day and filled out hearts with woe. We'll study war right here they said the little town must go. Then they came with trucks and dynamite, the din and dust rose high, As I stood and gazed in silence there and watched my hometown die. The little church was hauled away, the fields were brown and bare, And in their place a mighty plant, they build the H-bomb there. Now the smoke hangs o'er the valley, like the mist before my eyes, That has been there ever since the day I saw my hometown die. "The Death of Ellenton" by the Johnson Family Singers. It's not hard to attract attention at the Savannah River Plant, particularly if you are roaring along its southwestern boundary in a 250-horsepower speedboat, like we were, with a man in the bow training a telephoto lens on the far bank. Particularly since the private army that guards this nondescript stretch of South Carolina river is negotiating a new five-year, $300 million contract. And especially since, after 30 years of working quietly behind a smokescreen of secrecy and deft public relations, the lid has been blown off the business here, the business that has taken up a Chicago-sized piece of South Carolina pine forest, poured millions of gallons of toxic and radioactive waste into the ground-water and veiled the southeastern United States in a radioactive mist - the business of making plutonium and tritium for nuclear bombs. So we weren't surprised by the uniformed guards that followed in a cowled speedboat. Or the sixth grade teacher, sheriff s deputies who politely interrupted our lunch on the Georgia side of the river. But the helicopter, well, that seemed like a bit much, at least at first. But that was before I began to understand the psychological state of South Carolina and its relationship with things nuclear, an uneasy alliance called "schizophrenic" by one local activist and "downright insane" by another. Today, South Carolina's once-invisible Savannah River Plant, like its sister plant in Washington state and the entire U.S. government nuclear weapons complex, is under siege. Three decades of undercover production of plutonium and tritium have left South Carolina with more high-level radioactive waste than any known place on earth. The breakneck pace of warhead production set by the Reagan Administration has forced the Department of Energy (DOE) and its contractors to run roughshod over local laws and sensibilities and push the aging reactors well past the limits of safety and common sense. The DuPont Company, having managed the site since day one, is getting ready to pack up and leave because the place is such a mess they don't want to be liable for anything that might go wrong. And South Carolina, the state that in the 70s was called "the most pro-nuclear state in the country" is now wondering if perhaps it hasn't been burned, forever. If there had been a cultural historian on the staff after World War II, the Truman Administration might have had second thoughts about choosing South Carolina as the site for a multibillion dollar "bomb factory." This is the penultimate southern state, General Sherman's "hell-hole of secession," where in certain circles the civil war is still known as The War of Northern Aggression. This is the state whose economy for its first hundred years had more in common with a one-crop Caribbean slave island than the industrial north. This is the Palmetto State, where the state legislature passed a bill commemorating the "shag" as the official state dance, where a curious combination of ringing hospitality and insular clannishness leaves visitors slightly off-balance, feeling at once welcome and clearly kept apart. When the U.S. government announced in 1950 that the town of Ellenton and a few neighboring communities, comprising 1,500 families, a few small businesses and 150 cemeteries, would be uprooted to accommodate a military facility, South Carolina characteristically presented both faces. The invasion was at once condemned as a Truman plan to "import alien and northern voters," welcomed as an economic boon, and accepted with both pride and resignation as a patriotic duty. And so the Savannah River Plant (SRP) joined Washington's Hanford Nuclear Reservation as one of two massive complexes supplying fuel for the nation's nuclear arsenal. E.I. DuPont de Nemours Company was asked by the government to run it. For more than thirty years, DuPont has reigned here, Washington's local emissary, managing state politics and opinion in a manner that mixed cloying summer camp paternalism with a Big Brother dictatorship. The Savannah River Plant News, an employee newspaper published by DuPont, set the tone with reports on the softball scores of the teams carved from the facility's 15,000 employees, the spotless safety record, the women's knitting club and the latest promotions. DuPont tree specialists planted 40,000 seedlings a day, turning the condemned farmland into the state's most productive tree farm. The happy family aura was pursued relentlessly and with great success. Local businesses championed DuPont's cause because the company paid twice the local rate, pumping $350 million a year into the troubled rural economy. Politicians likewise rallied to the cause, in typical southern fashion. Legend has it that one state senator's support for splitting the atom on the banks of the Savannah was guaranteed, "as long as he got his half." The editor of the plant's newspaper became editor of the nearby Aiken Standard, the town of New Ellenton was established, and slowly the memory of Ellenton's death faded. The mammoth construction site, with its five reactor complexes, 230 miles of highway and 153 scattered dumps for toxic waste and radioactive debris blended chameleon-like into the porous, forgiving South Carolina soil. Soft-spoken, almost fragile, with an air of kindness and gentility that is almost unnerving, Bill Lawless seems at first a most unlikely whistleblower. But in fact, just five years ago, he was one of the first to come out. That's what they call it when someone breaks the code of silence and goes public with evidence of wrongdoing at the "Bomb Plant." They come out - like a debutante, or a refugee. Within a year of quitting his DOE post as project manager of the plant's Burial Ground, where radioactive waste and toxic chemicals are buried or poured into pits, Lawless decided to testify at the trial of a handful of protesters who had been arrested for trespassing at the plant gates. Lawless' testimony was the first revelation of the deceptive and unsafe practices that had remained secret since the 1950s. It would not be the last. His most famous confession ("It always gets their attention," he told me) is about the cardboard boxes. Radioactive wastes that are not so concentrated or dangerous that they must be stored in double-walled tanks were buried in cardboard boxes. Not special, reinforced, double-lined cardboard boxes, just plain old cardboard boxes. Then he talked about the double set of books. DuPont and DOE, he said, have two sets of information from which they analyze the rate at which toxic and radioactive wastes travel through the sandy soil into the groundwater. One set of statistics is drawn from the "public" sampling wells, figures often manipulated by flushing the wells with water or pumping them out and then drawing a sample. The other is for internal use only. The internal figures are either unpublished or buried in reports often labelled "draft" and thus protected from public requests under the Freedom of Information Act. And, most chilling of all, he talked about the waste contaminated with tritium and strontium-90 that was slowly leaking into the groundwater. This was the first deviation from the model - the way things ought to be, according to DuPont and DOE - versus the way things actually were. DuPont had models for how radioactive elements would move in groundwater, how radiation would disperse over surrounding communities, how safety records should look and how DuPont employees should act. Things that didn't fit the model were not wrong, they just didn't exist. Thus, for DOE and DuPont, Lawless' testimony was more than just treason, it was insanity. "People suffer from a form of cognitive dissonance at SRP," says Lawless, "They see things are wrong, but they are not supposed to be wrong, so they don't see them. Radionuclide migration was something we weren't supposed to see. Public records showed tritium levels two or three times the drinking water standard, but our own records showed levels a thousand times that. They said strontium-90 didn't move, and they said plutonium didn't move, but we found it happening. It just wasn't supposed to happen." "The people that work at SRP are normal human beings, and they are great human beings, but there is a form of thought control here. If they tell you that things are supposed to look good, and they tell everyone else that things do look good, then you can't expect people to go against management and say it is not so. It took someone very naive, like me, to write it up." At the same time as Bill Lawless was undergoing a crisis of conscience about waste-handling inside the plant, citizens outside - from Columbia, Atlanta, Augusta, Savannah and Charleston - were beginning to wonder about the wisdom of the region's increasingly irrevocable relationship with the atom. In the early 70s, Ruth Thomas founded Environmentalists, Incorporated, hoping to organize legal challenges to the state's polluters. A few years later, Michael Lowe helped found the Palmetto Alliance, modelling it on New England's grass-roots, civil disobedience-oriented Clamshell Alliance. These groups, in the words of Bob Alvarez, were the "midwives" of organized opposition to SRP. Oblivious to the growing opposition, the Defense Department and its partners in the commercial nuclear industry persisted with the rapid nuclearization of the state. In the late 70s, Allied Gulf Nuclear Services neared completion of a commercial reprocessing plant, called Barnwell Nuclear Fuel Plant, to recover plutonium and uranium from spent nuclear fuel. At the same time, ChemNuclear Services opened a low-level waste dump. Both were located in Barnwell County, right on the edge of the Savannah River Plant. The final indignity came with the election of Ronald Reagan. Already, the aging nuclear weapons production plants were being pressed by outgoing President Jimmy Carter to increase production of tritium and plutonium, and Reagan pushed the schedule up still further. Reagan's first "Stockpile Memorandum," the Defense Department's schedule for warhead construction (also known as "the shopping list"), set priorities for fifteen years instead of the usual eight, and proposed building 21,000 warheads inside of a decade. Meeting this demand would require restarting an old mothballed reactor at Hanford and one at Savannah River. It would shift DOE's emphasis further into bomb-making, turning it, in the words of one weapons lab physicist, into "The Department of Bombs...... Carter restarted the engine of the nuclear weapons complex," says Bob Alvarez of the Washington-based Environmental Policy Institute, and Reagan put the pedal to the metal." With the rekindling of DOE's nuclear fires, South Carolina found itself facing a brand new nuclear future, just as a handful of investigators were digging into what was appearing to be a very frightening past. Inspired by the discovery, in the University of South Carolina library, of a document showing that DuPont had been keeping tabs on the waste stream and the radiation exposures of work, Alvarez filed a Freedom of Information Act request and soon found himself owner of three shelves of bound SRP data. "It was a great collection of information. We could analyze their operations based on their actual numbers - the releases, everything - not the reports that they had prepared from the numbers." Once again, reality began to conflict with DuPont models. Based on the reams of raw data supplied by DOE, Alvarez and his colleagues at the Environmental Policy Institute pumped out analysis after analysis showing, among other things, that people in the area were getting radiation doses 50 times what they should have been getting according to DuPont models. They discovered that the high-level wastes in the 51 underground tanks contained more plutonium (about 50 bombs worth) than safe- ty and common sense would suggest ("It must be a real dirty operation," said Alvarez). They showed that a cloud of radioactivity that DOE alleges had drifted over from a Nevada test in March of 1955 was more likely the result of a serious release from the reactor area. They discovered a leukemia rate among some workers twice what it should have been. They pointed out that if the U.S. Geological Survey was correct, and there was a decent, if slim, chance that the Charleston Earthquake of 1886 could repeat itself in Barnwell County, then a rupture of the high-level waste tanks was likely. In that event, more than a billion curies of long-lived radioisotopes would be released in the southeastern United States, making the 50 million-curie Chernobyl meltdown look like spilled milk. Alvarez's revelations Michael Lowe and joined the criticisms of other courageous whistle-blowers. After years of trying to encourage reform on the inside, Arthur Dexter, a DuPont physicist, went public in 1985 with a report on a leak from a building called the canyon, where the reprocessing of spent fuel takes place. He became the leading critic of the reac- tors' so-called "containment system." Unlike commercial reactors, the military reactors have no concrete dome to keep in radioactive contamination in case of an accident. Instead, they rely on filters and carbon sponges, a system that Dexter considers far from adequate. "An explosion would destroy the air filters, and some water could render those charcoal beds worthless," says Dexter, "And then you'd have radioactive iodine and other poison pouring out of the building." Engineer Fred Christensen came forward to recount the story about the time the reactor almost blew up - about the frantic control room engineer who barked out, "close the rotor valves" to stem a cooling water leak on the reactor floor. Had he not been countermanded by a senior manager, says Christensen, "the reactor would have gone off in a big whoof." Christensen's personal reactor safety plan, he confessed, involved using a pair of wire cutters he kept in his desk drawer to cut a beeline through SRP's fences - upwind from the meltdown. But it was Washington's imperious push to open the L-reactor that finally broke the nuclear spell over South Carolina. "They basically said they were going to start up the reactor," says Michael Lowe, "but they didn't have to do an environmental impact statement. The idea that they could reopen a 30-year-old nuclear reactor, dump contaminants into the ground, heat up Steel Creek with cooling water to 150 degrees and add to the already enormous pile of sizzling radioactive wastes and say that there is no significant environmental impact - it's unbelievable." "What they were really saying is, 'look, don't bother us with your rules and regulations. We've got bombs to build.' And anyone who tried to stop them was 'working against the national interest.' Well, people down here just don't like to be pushed around that way." Frances Close Hart, a member of one of the state's most prominent families, was one of those people. A Palmetto Alliance volunteer for a short time, she had just started her own group, the Energy Research Foundation, to pursue legal challenges to the bomb plant. Joining with the Natural Resources Defense Council, ERF sued the Department of Energy for refusing to do an environmental impact statement. Soon they were joined by several regional environmental groups such as Georgia's Coastal Citizens For a Clean Environment and, halfway through the proceedings, by the state of South Carolina. Two years later, they had won the lawsuit and significantly delayed the L-reactor start-up. But they had also changed the tenor of South Carolina's plutonium politics. The damage to DOE and DuPont was far greater than the two years in lost time and money. The state government had joined Frances Close Hart and a national environmental group in suing DuPont and the DOE. Opposition to DuPont and SRP had become acceptable, even respectable. "Here was one southern state and a handful of southern activists having a tangible effect on the arms race," marvelled Bob Alvarez. South Carolina, "the most pro-nuclear state in the country," had grown up. Or, as one South Carolina activist with a sense of history put it, "We returned to our roots." After Chernobyl, it was no longer just Art Dexter, Bob Alvarez, Ruth Thomas, Frances Hart, Michael Lowe, Bill Lawless and a dozen other activists against the Savannah River Plant. Suddenly, everyone was peering into the Department of Energy's military reactors to see whether the disaster upstream of Kiev could happen upstream of Savannah, Georgia, or on the banks of the Columbia in Washington. The flurry of self-examination reached a crescendo in 1987. The year opened with the revelation that the SRP reactors had been running at a power level beyond the capabilities of the cooling system, and the levels were reduced by a quarter. In January, a panel of experts convened by the Department of Energy recommended that Hanford's N-reactor be closed for repairs; in an unusual dissenting opinion, two of the panel's members, including the chairman, called for it to be closed down forever. A year later, it would be. In March, 1987, it was decided that the SRP reactors were still cranked up too high, and power was cut by half. Six months later, a memo from a House Subcommittee revealed that DuPont personnel had shut down sprinkler systems in the tritium facility because they were more worried about computers getting wet than the building burning down. And in October, the long-awaited National Academy of Sciences report on the Savannah River Plant came out. The National Academy of Sciences is the government's reality check. It has been called in to look at the nuclear industry several times over the years, but never before has it turned in such a scathing report. The 67-page critique called the oversight of DOE "ingrown and largely outside the scrutiny of the public." All the reactors at Savannah River Plant are subject to corrosion, cracks and "other symptoms of acute aging." Confirming Arthur Dexter's criticisms, the report condemned the filter "containment system" as unlikely to withstand the hydrogen explosion associated with an accident. Some sort of rigorous oversight is required, concluded the National Academy of Sciences, to bring the Department of Energy and its contractors under control. The Academy's report was released the morning of October 29, 1987. Three hours later, DuPont announced that when its contract ran out at the end of 1989, it would leave. On the first of March, a Tuesday morning, I drove through the Savannah River Plant on the state highway. At the entrance a guard checked the time, counted the number of people in the car and wrote the information on a card. I handed this card to another guard who looked me over when I came out, 20 miles down the road at the other side of the plant. The scenery is pretty, mostly pine trees and the occasional soupy South Carolina marsh, broken by dozens of billboards that exhort the SRP employees: "Security Means jobs," "Security is Your Business," and one curious admonition to "Play Safely." Around lunchtime, over the radio, a newsbroadcaster announced that a release of radioactive tritium had occurred at the plant at 6:18 that morning. It amounted to approximately 20,000 curies, the result of an equipment malfunction. At no time was there any danger to the public, the reporter quoted a DuPont manager as saying; the exposure at the plant boundary would be far less than an average chest x-ray. It was difficult to feel reassured. I remembered Bill Lawless talking about how they pulled numbers out of the air. I wondered if the "exposure at the plant boundary" was calculated from one of the any computer-generated models DuPont had devised, based on the way they would like things to be. Obviously, tritium gas didn't fan out in perfect concentric circles from the point of release. Didn't the direction of the prevailing winds make a difference? The reassurance came so quickly from DuPont it had the mark of an oft-used and unthinking reflex, like arms raised to ward off a blow. Arthur Dexter says these plants are too dangerous for humans to run. "You have to be perfect to do what they do there," he said, "and nobody's perfect. Eventually something will go wrong." DuPont wanted to be perfect, so much so that it put an elaborate false front on the messy business of making bombs in South Carolina and painted a picture of a gleaming technological wonderland where nothing went wrong, where the only news allowed was good news. Such illusions, they found, become brittle with age. Compared to the half-life of some of the nuclear particles in its soil, South Carolina's infatuation with the atom was vanishingly brief. Like a giant sponge, the sandy soil will hold the millions of gallons of contaminated water from SRP indefinitely. To clean up the mess here, and the mess at Hanford, could cost $100 billion, or about a dollar for every three dollars spent on the nuclear arms race since 1943. The 35 million gallons of high-level waste are to be turned into glass and stored permanently, a dangerous and decades-long process. And many people are convinced that what we have learned about SRP's dangerous legacy in the last eight years is only a small part of the story. But the Defense Department is poised to begin again, evoking national security to support its demands for a new set of multi-billion dollar plutonium and tritium production complexes. South Carolina is at the top of the list, but I doubt it will be so accommodating this time. Many people here are wondering whether the definition of national security shouldn't include the preservation of the state's environment and the health and safety of its citizens. "South Carolina responded to the call from Washington, and for a while, we forgot to take care of ourselves," says Michael Lowe. "Now, I don't know if we'll ever think about our country's security in the same way again. It's taken on a new meaning down here. It's a lot closer to home now." THE TRITIUM QUESTION David Albright, a physicist with the Federation of American Scientists, has devoted years poring over documents, radiation release reports and budget requests to answer two questions: how much plutonium and tritium do the United States and Soviet Union have, and how much do they need? The questions are important ones, because although the U.S. plutonium and tritium production reactors are dangerously dilapidated, the Pentagon insists on running them. At the same time they are also demanding up to $10 billion to construct a new production reactor. The most annoying aspect of the problem is that the U.S. government refuses to outline its needs. In fact, it has lied. "In the past, the DOE has dramatically overprojected its needs for plutonium production for new warheads," says Albright, "and the amount we have is barely a secret. Certainly the Soviets are familiar with it." When DOE Secretary John Herrington admitted last February that the U.S. is "awash in plutonium," contradicting years of pleas for more production, he did not reinforce DOE's reputation for honesty. "If we can't believe the Department of Energy's statements about plutonium," says Greenpeace nuclear campaigner Jim Beard, "how can we believe it when they say we need a new production reactor?" Albright and his colleagues have come up with a number for the U.S. stockpile of plutonium - about 100,000 kilograms - and he thinks the Soviet Union has about the same. Since plutonium can be recycled from old weapons and essentially lasts forever, most analysts agree that more production is not needed. Last November, a coalition' of experts and groups, including former CIA head William Colby, SALT I negotiator Gerard Smith, former Arms Control and Disarmament Agency head Paul Warnke, and MIT President Emeritus Jerome Wiesner circulated the "Plutonium Challenge," calling for a two-year ban on plutonium production. According to Frank von Hippel of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Yevgeny Velikhov, head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and top Gorbachev adviser, favors the idea. Tritium presents another problem. Used since the mid-5Os to boost the explosive power of nuclear warheads, tritium decays - its half-life is about 12 years. Tritium's short lifespan means that, without a steady resupply of the material, most nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal will eventually stop working. Tritium's lifespan also creates a problem for the arms control community. Many environmental and arms control groups, while loath to support the construction of a new production reactor, find it hard to oppose ensuring a steady tritium supply in the face of arguments for "maintaining deterrence." As Albright says, "tritium erodes political alliances." But for some, the question is not hard to answer. "I say we should shut the facilities down. They are just too dangerous," says physicist Arthur Dexter, who for three decades worked for the Department of Defense at the Argonne Laboratory and then at the Savannah River Plant. Damon Moglen, director of Greenpeace's nuclear campaigns, agrees: "Ensuring environmental health and safety requires that plutonium and tritium production stop. If this means the Soviet Union and the United States have to start thinking seriously about disarmament, then so be it." The Federation of American Scientists, Greenpeace, the Environmental Policy Institute, the Energy Research Foundation, Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Union of Concerned Scientists. WHALE WATCH In late January, the Japanese whaling fleet slaughtered the first of 300 minke whales in the name of "science," ignoring a decisive mail-in vote by the full International Whaling Commission and the threat of sanctions under U.S. whale protection laws. Pressure from Greenpeace and a coalition of environmental groups helped persuade the U.S. Commerce Department to "certify" Japan on February 9 under the Packwood-Magnuson and Pelly Amendments. Packwood-Magnuson triggers a 50 percent cut in Japan's fishing allocation in U.S. waters, but as the U.S. fleet used up the fishing quota, Japan's allocation for 1988 stands at zero. Pelly still offers the U.S. leverage over Japan, however. President Reagan must decide within 60 days whether restrictions should be imposed on sales of Japanese fish products in the U.S. In past certification proceedings, the President has argued that sanctions were not called for because the offending nation had taken steps to remedy the transgression. Japan has, however, expressed contempt for the U.S. action by continuing to whale even after being certified. Iceland's insistence on conducting a "scientific" whale hunt has provoked a coalition-led boycott of Iceland fish products. Greenpeace kicked off the boycott with a February 16th rally in Atlanta, Georgia. Captain D's, owned by Shoney, Jerrico's Long John Silver restaurants and Burger King are large purchasers of Icelandic fish. Greenpeace and its allies are hoping that the public outcry will encourage these companies to buy their fish elsewhere. Rallies have been held in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, and Richmond, Virginia. Greenpeace is also targeting seafood trade shows for protests, and successful demonstrations have been held in Long Beach, California, and Boston, Massachusetts. Meetings with the corporate buyers of Icelandic fish have been less successful. While sympathetic to the plight of whales, none of the nation's largest importers have yet agreed to end their dealings with Icelandic fish companies. Greenpeace will continue to add to the 60,000 signatures already collected on petitions asking the three restaurant chains to boycott Icelandic fish. SHARE THE BEACH Dune buggies, joggers, campfires, frolicking dogs, soda cans, and artificial lighting - these signs of "fun in the sun" are serious threats to sea turtle eggs and hatchlings along Florida's coast, where nine of every ten turtle nests in the U.S. are found. Florida is prime nesting area for the threatened loggerhead sea turtle. Greenpeace has organized 150 volunteers to protect eggs and hatchlings along a 50-mile stretch of northeast Florida beach, from Amelia Island to New Smyrna Beach. Hatchery programs also have been established in a few of the Greenpeace beach patrol areas. Turtle-saving will get an additional boost on May 1, when regulations governing the use of Turtle Exclusion Devices (TEDS) in the Gulf of Mexico's shrimp fishing industry go into effect. TEDs have been successfully used since October along parts of the Atlantic coast, supporting environmentalists' contention that the devices can both save turtles and ensure a successful shrimp catch. ASH UNDER FIRE In mid-February, a Greenpeace team of two investigators, a photographer, and a film crew went to Haiti to document the dumping of 3,000 tons of toxic ash from Philadelphia's municipal incinerator. The shipment, a result of Philadelphia's ill-considered municipal waste disposal program, was rejected from the ports of Guinea-Bissau, Honduras, the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Dominican Republic. It ended its 17-month odyssey by entering Haitian waters under the pretence of importing "ingrais pour le sol," or fertilizer. Before the Haitian government could be warned of the Khian Sea's contents (municipal incinerator ash contains high levels of heavy metals, dioxins and furans) workers hired by the boat's managers dumped a third of the ship's 14,000-ton load on a beach outside the city of Goniaves. Haiti's Minister of Commerce Mario Celestin ordered the ship to cease unloading the ash. The ship's crew reloaded a quarter of the toxic pile before slipping out of Gonaives February 5th under cover of night. Greenpeace investigators hung a banner at the site of the ash dump reading, "Danger: Toxic Wastes From U.S.A." and held a press conference, demanding that the ship return and remove the rest of the ash. The Khian Sea now sits in the Delaware bay, awaiting the results of ash toxicity tests and directions on a final U.S. destination. At a press conference in the "City of Brotherly Love," Haitians presented Mayor Goode with petitions signed by 867 citizens of Haiti, asking him to bring the remaining 3,000 tons of ash back to Philadelphia. Philadelphia has already been burned by its ash problem once; a plan to dump a load of 250,000 tons of the city's municipal refuse in a Panamanian wetland was scuttled last fall by Greenpeace and its allies. The carrier, a barge called the Bark, was discovered moored off Guinea, West Africa in early March. The Bark's owners, Bulkhandling, Inc., hope to convince the Guinean government to mix the ash with cement and produce concrete building blocks. DOLPHINS SLAUGHTER EXPOSED When Sam LaBudde applied for a job on a tuna boat, he was not looking for money and a spell working at sea. He wanted to document the extent of the dolphin death toll in the nets of the foreign tuna fishing fleet. "I was looking for a way to get involved in environmental action, and I was willing to commit myself," said LaBudde. "It was obvious someone had to do this." Keeping his background as a U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service biologist and his video camera hidden, LaBudde came away with video tape that confirmed conservationists' worst fears. "The tape shows that the killing is totally out of control," says Todd Steiner, research biologist for the San Francisco- based Earth Island Institute. "Nearly 200,000 dolphins from already severely reduced populations have been killed in the last two years." Because dolphins in the Eastern Tropical Pacific tend to gather above schools of yellowfin tuna, fishing fleets for years have cast nets around both species, resulting in the drowning and mutilation of millions of dolphins. The appalling toll helped prompt the passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972, which calls for the U.S. tuna fleet to reduce dolphin kills "to insignificant levels approaching zero." To dodge the law, many of the American boats have reflagged, registering in countries like Venezuela, Panama, Mexico and Vanuatu. Foreign nations that wish to import tuna to the United States are supposed to demonstrate that their fleet operates in a manner comparable to the U.S. fleet, but no regulations exist. Environmentalists assume that, since foreign tuna is coming into the U.S., requests to import tuna from abroad are simply rubber-stamped at the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service. LaBudde's film shows the reality of the slaughter. "In one of our first sets, we had more than 1,000 dolphins in a net and all of them were in danger of drowning," LaBudde said. "Probably 200 dolphins were killed, and we only caught one tuna." Another set killed more than 100 coastal spinners, a species of dolphin so endangered that it is supposed to be fully protected. This set yielded only six tuna. "Past assurances that this 'incidental killing' is under control ring hollow in light of this footage," said Lesley Scheele of Greenpeace. The impact of LaBudde's film cannot be overestimated. Experts predict that it will encourage Congress to strengthen the MMPA during reauthorization hearings this year (See Action Access). Scheele hopes the film will also reveal the truth about the deadly cost of tuna fishing worldwide. "The industry has had 30 years to develop alternatives to fishing 'on dolphins' and to stop the killing. We believe it is time to end this practice altogether." NUKEM SCANDAL Since February, the West German nuclear industry has been besieged by press reports of plutonium smuggling and the illegal transport and storage of highly radioactive wastes. With the recent suicides of two executives involved in the scandal, a picture has emerged of an inherently dangerous industry operating with an appalling degree of autonomy, oblivious to regulatory and common sense safeguards. The charges primarily implicate Nukem, a manufacturer of nuclear fuel elements, and its subsidiary Transnuklear, a radioactive transport company. Over a period of several years, Transnuklear reportedly moved more than 2,400 barrels of falsely labelled nuclear material between Belgium and West Germany. Transnuklear purported to ship low-level radioactive waste from West German power plants to the Belgian nuclear facility, Mol, for treatment, and then return it to Germany for permanent storage. Between 1982 and 1984, however, Transnuklear illegally brought back at least 320 mislabelled barrels of Belgian nuclear waste containing trace amounts of highly radioactive cobalt 60 and plutonium and delivered them to unauthorized storage sites. "It was probably a way for someone to make a fast deutschmark," speculates Warren Donnelly, a senior specialist for the Congressional Research Service. "I think it shows a cynical disregard for the environment." Beginning in 1985, Transnuklear allegedly paid out bribes estimated as high as 21 million Deutschmarks, equivalent to more than $12.25 million, to both conceal illegal cross-border ship- ments and to obtain waste transportation contracts. Worse, two barrels of high-level radioactive material en route from Belgium to West Germany have disappeared, sources say. As one newspaper aptly asked: "How can drums of [radioactive] waste apparently be shuttled across frontiers with no more control than that applied to cheese and sausage meat?" Growing evidence also suggests active collaboration between the Belgian nuclear company, Belgonucleaire, and Germany's Transnuklear to illegally ship radioactive material across international lines. Particularly worrisome are reports of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium smuggled to Libya and Pakistan. Other press accounts have alleged that Belgonucleaire sent at least 600 kilograms of plutonium to Pakistan over several years, along with equipment and engineering expertise to help Pakistan develop the bomb. If true, these activities would be clear violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The U.S. State Department calls the allegations "totally unfounded." The scandal underscores the difficulty of controlling the global commerce in nuclear materials, guarding against catastrophic nuclear releases and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons technology. "This is a warning for what could have happened," Warren Donnelly explains. "You can't assume that just because people are dealing with radioactive materials they're going to act responsibly with them, and just because nothing catastrophic has happened is no reason for complacency."