• Fire at Georgia Nuclear Plant Quickly Contained
  
• EPA Denies Petition to Ban Sewage Sludge on Farmland
  
• Timber Sale in Montana's Grizzly Country Reversed
  
• Groups Appeal Grazing Expansion in Montana National Forest
  
• Nationwide Database of Underground Mine Maps Funded
  
• Honey Bee Genome Sequence Made Public
  
• Consumer Electronics Show Opens Environmental TechZone
  

Fire at Georgia Nuclear Plant Quickly Contained

The fire lasted 22 minutes, but it did not spread beyond the boundary of the modular building, known as a Kelly building. "The Kelly building was in a contaminated area, but there was no radioactive release outside of the Kelly building," according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) official report of the incident.

In 1998, the commission ordered the Southern Company to take corrective action to upgrade its fire barriers at the Hatch nuclear power plant. The Thermo-Lag fire barriers manufactured and supplied by Thermal Science, Inc., of St. Louis, Missouri, had been used to provide fire resistance to wiring and equipment at nuclear plants.

The NRC had been concerned that this fire barrier material may not provide the intended level of fire protection and that licensees may not be meeting regulatory requirements. The Southern Company complied with the NRC fire barrier upgrade order.

Concern was aroused when the Hatch plant had to shut down due to a fire in 1990.

The Edwin I. Hatch Nuclear Plant located near Baxley in southeastern Georgia's Appling County, is one of Georgia Power's two nuclear facilities and is one of three nuclear facilities in the Southern Company electric system.

EPA Denies Petition to Ban Sewage Sludge on Farmland

On the same day, the agency published its review of regulations governing the use and disposal of sewage sludge. The review was prompted by criticism of EPA's sludge rules by the National Research Council (NRC).

In both responses, the agency decided to permit the continued application of sewage sludge on agricultural fields.

The petition to EPA offers a detailed case regarding the dangers of land application of sewage sludge and requests this practice be prohibited. Signatories include the United Mine Workers of America, Clean Water Action, the Organic Consumers Association, the Center for Food Safety, Farm Aid, and Citizens for a Future New Hampshire.

The petitioners say the sludge contains heavy metals, radioactive materials, and other contaminants such as medical waste and is harmful to people, livestock and the environment.

Since the EPA allowed the practice 10 years ago, the petitioners complain that millions of tons of sewage sludge have been applied to American farmland. No system is in place to track health and environmental problems arising from the sludge, although 350 people have reported sludge related health incidents to the Cornell Waste Management Institute, and three people have died immediately after contact with the sludge.

"The EPA has once again chosen to make its controversial rulings on a holiday in the hope that no one will notice it's obfuscating," said Laura Orlando, a spokesperson for the coalition. "But EPA's dodging the ball when no one is looking is not going to make the facts go away: cows are dying, people are getting sick, and the food supply is being poisoned."

Timber Sale in Montana's Grizzly Country Reversed

Deputy Regional Forester Kathleen McAllister today reversed the Gallatin National Forest Supervisor's decision to implement the Windmill Timber sale because it failed to provide a reasonable range of alternatives that meet the purpose and need for the project.

The Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Native Ecosystems Council and The Ecology Center appealed the timber sale, which would have permitted logging of an estimated 4.5 million board feet of trees from 690 acres of occupied grizzly bear habitat in the Mill Creek drainage.

The land at issue is located about 24 miles south of Livingston, Montana and adjacent to the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness.

This timber sale was planned to help pay for the Big Sky Lumber Company land trade, but the conservationists say it did not fulfill the terms of the land trade.

"Only the government could claim with a straight face that losing $376,953 will help buy land," said Michael Garrity, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. "This would have done the exact opposite."

The Gallatin Land Consolidation Act requires the Forest Service to pay Big Sky Lumber with a combination of cash or land trades. Any shortfall in cash could result in additional Gallatin National Forest lands being given to the lumber company.

The conservation groups appealed the sale because they said the Forest Service failed to apply the legal protection for grizzly bears required under the Endangered Species Act. Grizzly bears are a species listed for protection under the act.

The timber sale area is used by female grizzly bears with cubs, but the Service's Forest Plan standard for areas outside the recovery zone applies only the lowest priority for grizzly bear conservation.

Dr. Sara Johnson of Native Ecosystems Council in Three Forks said, "Mill Creek has already suffered significant impacts to grizzly bear habitat. This timber sale would have displaced grizzlies from over 5,000 acres of their habitat and could easily result in more dead grizzly bears."

"The Gallatin National Forest has seven timber sales planned in occupied habitat and they have not looked at the cumulative effects of logging on grizzly bears," Johnson warned.

Groups Appeal Grazing Expansion in Montana National Forest

The proposal by Ennis District Ranger Mark Petroni calls for increased cattle production, barbed wire fencing, water diversions, pipelines and stock tanks, all installed to benefit ranchers but paid for by taxpayer dollars.

Conservation groups the Western Watersheds Project and the Gallatin Wildlife Association have appealed to the regional forester in northern Montana to withdraw the proposal because it would harm native fish and wildlife populations.

"Critical habitat and native fish and wildlife populations are being sacrificed to thousands of cattle in the area," said Glenn Hockett, Montana director of Western Watersheds Project and president of Gallatin Wildlife Association. "The Forest Service is stuck in an outdated paradigm that focuses on the needs of domestic farm animals at the expense of native keystone species."

The Antelope Basin-Elk Lake area provides critical wildlife habitat and a key migratory corridor for elk, mule deer, moose, antelope, bighorn sheep, bison, sage grouse and large carnivores, most of which travel to and from Yellowstone National Park.

The 48,000 acre basin also supplies headwaters habitat for beaver, arctic grayling and westslope cutthroat trout.

The Forest Service recently completed an analysis of the Antelope Basin-Elk Lake area that indicating that many native species, including bighorn sheep, bison, beaver, sage grouse, grayling and cutthroat trout are virtually extinct in the area. Yet the agency has offered no management alternative that restores any of the species to their historic habitat.

The conservation groups contend that the proposed grazing alternative for Antelope Basin-Elk Lake is a violation of the Beaverhead Forest Plan that requires fish and wildlife habitat needs to be addressed in any management strategy. They say the Forest Service failed to prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement - a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.

"The public lands in Antelope Basin-Elk Lake could be a mecca for fish and wildlife, and a place for wild bison to roam in Montana," Hockett said. "Instead the Forest Service is offering cow-trampled streams, dewatered springs, stock tanks and barbed-wire fences, which virtually assure fish and wildlife habitat will remain fragmented, degraded and unoccupied. It's a shame."

Nationwide Database of Underground Mine Maps Funded

The MSHA is granting a total of $3.9 million to 13 states to establish an electronic system of digitizing underground maps for abandoned mines across the country.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) already has started to scan maps in its repositories as well as those belonging to outside organizations. DEP also is creating a database of information on the locations of underground mine maps belonging to outside parties. The MSHA grant will pay for either or both of these efforts.

Environmental Protection Secretary Kathleen McGinty said, “Ensuring the safety of Pennsylvania miners is a chief concern. The federal funds will greatly assist us in our efforts to establish as thorough and complete an archive as possible, so we know where these underground mine voids are and can prevent future accidents like that at Quecreek Mine in July 2002."

Nine miners working in Quecreek Mine No. 1, thinking they were a safe distance from mine voids, accidentally broke through to the abandoned Saxman Coal & Coke Co.’s Harrison No. 2 Mine on July 24, 2002, flooding Quecreek and trapping the nine miners for nearly 78 hours before they were pulled to safety.

Last July, McGinty released a final report on the Quecreek accident that showed the accident occurred because of maps that inaccurately depicted mine workings.

To date, the DEP has scanned about 3,900 maps from its repositories and outside sources and logged 9,000 entries into the database of map locations and contact information. The agency can use that contact information to gain access to the maps during the permit application review process.

DEP also is creating a database for entering mine production data collected from hard-copy mining reports over the past 130 years to enable searches that will allow comparisons with known maps to get a more accurate picture of mine voids and mine workings.

The department is working with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources to establish a central mine map repository and institute procedures to treat the maps as historical resources. These maps currently are scattered among both public and private holders.

In addition to its efforts to locate and catalogue mine maps, the DEP is implementing procedural and policy changes to correct deficiencies in the department’s policies uncovered by the Quecreek investigation.

The Bureau of Deep Mine Safety’s role will be increased during the permit review process and the bureau will get the power to deny permits. Mine inspectors who are leaving the DEP will be required to turn over all their records and maps to the agency. In addition, a more rigorous permit review process to validate the location of abandoned mines will be established.

Honey Bee Genome Sequence Made Public

The sequence of the honey bee, Apis mellifera, was assembled by a team led by Richard Gibbs, Ph.D., director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. The honey bee genome is about one-tenth the size of the human genome, containing about 300 million DNA base pairs.

Though physically vastly different from humans, "honey bees live in societies that rival our own in complexity, internal cohesion, and success in dealing with the myriad challenges posed by social life, including those related to communication, aging, social dysfunction and infectious disease," the researchers explain.

The scientists belive the genome sequence of honey bees eventually will benefit human health and medicine in the areas of venom toxicology, allergic disease, mental illness, infectious disease, parasitology and gerontology.

The genome sequencing will improve human nutrition by enabling "enhanced pollination of food plants and accelerated delivery of hymenopteran parasitoids for biological control of pests."

The genomic project is expected to improve the sentinel function of honey bees by providing enhanced capabilities for detection and location of harmful chemical and biological agents.

Researchers have deposited the initial assembly, which is based on six-fold sequence coverage of the honey bee genome, into the public database run by the NIH GenBank at: www.ncbi.nih.gov/Genbank.

In turn, Genbank will distribute the sequence data to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's Nucleotide Sequence Database, EMBL-Bank at: www.ebi.ac.uk/embl/index.html, and the DNA Data Bank of Japan at: www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp.

Sequencing of the honey bee genome began in early 2003. NHGRI provided about $6.9 million in funding for the project and the U.S. Department of Agriculture contributed $750,000.

Researchers want to compare the honey bee's genome with the genomes of other organisms to find genes and regulatory regions within DNA. Scientists are particularly interested in comparing the honey bee's genome with the previously sequenced insect genomes, such as the fruit fly and mosquito, as well as with DNA sequences from Africanized bee strains that have invaded many areas of the southern United States.

Consumer Electronics Show Opens Environmental TechZone

As the latest consumer technology products are unveiled by more than 2,300 exhibitors, for the first time this year CES features an environmental TechZone. This zone focuses on energy saving and equipment recycling. A special conference session that addresses the future of recycling electronics products is part of the environmental TechZone, a new concept for the CES.

Ricoh Corporation, the digital office equipment and document solution company is one of the companies staking out its claim to environmental leadership by exhibiting in the environmental TechZone. The zone will highlight various corporations' commitment to protecting and preserving the environment through energy efficiency and electronics recycling.

Ricoh encourages its customers and partners to "Think Globally, Act Locally" promoting environmentally conscious manufacturing, distribution, use and the recycling of its products.

Ricoh equips products with Quick Start-Up technology, which significantly reduces energy consumption while a system is in sleep mode. Duplex copying at the speed of one-sided copying is another Ricoh energy saving feature, and for this innovation, Ricoh was the first recipient of the International Energy Agency's (IEA) "Copier of the Future" award in 1999.

Ricoh's nationwide toner cartridge collection program encourages customers to return their exhausted toner cartridges. This practice not only keeps plastics out of landfills, it also conserves the materials and energy it would take to make new cartridges.

Ricoh's Equipment De-manufacturing Program that recovers more than 95 percent of the material content from equipment that has reached the end of its useful service life.

Other companies in the environmental TechZone are Canon U.S.A., Panasonic, NXTCYCLE Corporation, Collective Good, ReCellular and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency with its EnergyStar program.