Hello friends, it's the Environment Show and welcome.
Health problems around the Los Alamos National Laboratory have caught the attention of the
Department of Energy, now investigating charges the lab violated safety and health standards.
Also this time, the ozone hole over Antarctica is growing bigger this year, while some scientists
believe the effects will be local, Jean-Michel Cousteau sees the whole planet in jeopardy.
So everything is completely connected and if we sit back here in the northern hemisphere
and we think we can get away with it because Antarctica is in the southern hemisphere, big mistake.
Also this time, city trees are dying off and cities lose more than just pretty decoration.
These stories this time on the Environment Show we hope you'll stay with us.
The Environment Show is a national production made possible by the JM Kaplan Fund of New York
and this is Bruce Robertson.
Nearly 50 years ago, scientists worked around the clock at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico,
the birthplace of America's atomic bomb.
Well now there's growing concern that waste from that laboratory is causing health problems.
The U.S. Department of Energy is investigating charges that the lab violated environmental safety
and health standards.
Devar Ardalan reports that some citizens believe there is a link between possible violations
and an unusual cluster of brain tumors in their communities.
A tiny creek carries water from a city pipeline into a picturesque canyon.
50 years ago, at this same spot, the Los Alamos National Laboratory's dumped untreated radioactive
waste into this heavily wooded area.
Since then, the area has been called acid canyon and it's this dumping that has some
Los Alamos residents worried.
They say there's a chance that a cluster of brain tumors could be related to the lab's
contamination.
Walking through acid canyon, Alan Stoker, the lab's hydrogeologist, points to areas where
high levels of radioactivity had seeped into the earth.
The plutonium continues to be moved periodically by summer thunderstorm runoff events and sometimes
snow melt runoff when we have a lot of snow.
The levels no longer are changing very much.
What we have is a situation where the largest part of the residuals are accumulated down
in the wide part of Pueblo Canyon.
That's where most of the remaining inventory of residuals is today.
A cleanup in the 1980s removed all high concentrations of plutonium and uranium in acid canyon.
According to Stoker, the remaining waste is within guidelines set by the Environmental
Protection Agency and the health risk is acceptable.
But recently, the laboratories released the critical self-evaluation that blames the
problems in Los Alamos County on 50 years of largely trouble-free science, resulting
in arrogance, ignorance of environment, and preoccupation with science rather than
institutional responsibilities.
I have a brain tumor in.
It's not cancer, but it's a tumor in.
It sounds like it hits pretty close.
I've been studying Newt's or Energy, and I believe this is a pattern.
A couple of miles from acid canyon, Tyler Musia plays back one of the many messages he's
gotten from people who claim their victims of the lab's oversights.
After normal circumstances, Musia, a trained sculptor, would spend hours creating human
figures.
These days, he's been more concerned about human lives.
He's become a citizen activist speaking out against the labs.
In Los Alamos County, at the moment, just from a non-scientist point of view, we see
a huge facility dealing with radiate nuclei.
We see the laboratory's own documents indicating a large number of radioactive accidents in
the last two decades.
And according to every document, I can get my hand on it.
From the public, we're seeing a health effect.
I increase rates of leukemia, increase rates of multiple sclerosis, and the brain tumors.
Musia has gathered a list of 72 names from people throughout the country who once lived
and worked in Los Alamos.
These people claim to have brain tumors, or cancer, caused by radioactive emissions.
A local physician, Dr. John Johnson, has confirmed that 21 people on the list have died of primary
brain tumors.
But according to Johnson, there's no evidence that radioactive materials released by the
labs have caused the tumors.
A study of that nature is going to answer a lot more questions than my reviewing a few
charts.
I hope that they'll have the manpower and financial backing to really go into detail on all
of these cases and try to link something together and also reassure us all in Los Alamos
that we really are, not above a national average in our incidence of these tumors.
Meanwhile, lab official John Puckett says members of the community should feel free to come
forward with any concern.
In this day and age, it is of utmost importance that everybody feel free and be willing to
come forward and state any kind of concerns within the laboratory.
We have multiple levels of methods by which an employee can raise a concern for anything
to do with safety and the public needs to feel the same way.
There is absolutely no intimidation.
For his part, Tyler Mercier says he wants to see an extensive oversight of the lab's
environmental monitoring program.
And Mercier continues to receive messages and phone calls from throughout the country.
The upcoming epidemiological study funded by the Department of Energy will audit the laboratory
for some two months and study all forms of cancer in the area.
After that, the so-called Tiger Team will develop an action plan that describes how the
lab will correct its environmental, safety and health deficiencies.
For the High Plains New Service, I'm Devar Ardalan.
From Billings, Montana, the High Plains New Service is a production of the Western
Organization of Resource Councils.
Dr. Sherwood Rowland, a chemist at the University of California, Irvine, is perhaps the world's
leading authority on ozone depletion.
In 1974, he and a colleague at MIT were the first to announce the destructive effects of
chlorofluorocarbons on ozone over the continent of Antarctica.
He says this year, the size of the hole which has been fluctuating for the past decade
should have been smaller.
It's not.
The amount of area that has less ozone over it covers essentially from about 60 degrees
south latitude all the way to the pole.
This represents an area that is several times the area of the United States.
When I say there is less ozone in the 1960s, the average amount over that area would have
been around 300 or 320 dobs and units, a dobs and unit being the way everybody talks
about ozone.
This year, it dropped down in some spots as low as 110.
So is it a combination of it getting thinner as well as increasing in its geographic size?
In the time period of the last few years, the hole in 1987 was deeper and larger than
in 1986.
And then in 1988, it was more like 1986.
Then 1989, it came back to being very deep.
1990 was very deep.
And there was an expectation on some people's parts that it would slack off again the way
it had in 1988.
But it did not, and in fact was slightly deeper this year than it has been in any other
year.
The significance merely is that now a deep hole is a regular event.
It's happened in four years out of the last five.
And there is every reason to believe it will happen more or less like this for a long
time into the future.
The wide deep hole is missing ozone, a gas like oxygen only with three atoms instead of
just two, that is, O3 instead of O2.
Oxygen itself makes up 21% of the atmosphere.
And when bombarded by ultraviolet radiation for the sun, which is all the time, some of
that oxygen gets split up into single atoms of oxygen.
And these single atoms then combine with ordinary oxygen which has two atoms and gives you a
three atom version in that ozone.
The amount of ozone is less than one part per million as against 21% of the diatomic
or the two atom oxygen.
Now Dr. Roland, here is the crux of the issue I suppose.
Do we know what has set this in motion?
Yes, the key factor is that there is far more chlorine in the atmosphere and in the stratosphere
now than there was in the 1960s.
And the major sources of this chlorine are the chlorofluorocarbony compounds which are
more often known by the DuPont trademark name, the Freon.
And particularly ones that are called chlorocarbony 1112 and 1113.
Fluorocarbony 11 and 12 were used as propellants and aerosol sprays in the United States until
they were banned about a little more than a decade ago.
Fluorocarbony 12 is the refrigerant gas in your home refrigerator and in your automobile
air conditioner.
Fluorocarbony 1113 has been used to clean a very large fraction of the electronics that
you find in your home.
Let me ask you then that there are no industries of any significance on the continent of
Antarctica.
Why has there been such a concentration of these chlorine gases over that continent?
The first thing to remember is that the gases which are put into the atmosphere, if they
last for even a few years, mix very rapidly over the entire atmosphere or the lower atmosphere.
So that we make measurements of the chlorofluorocarbony gases ourselves by collecting air samples
in distant locations.
Distant location could be, for instance, Barrow, Alaska in the North, Slope and the South
Pole.
And the concentration of the chlorofluorocarbony gases between the North Pole and the South
Pole is not the concentration difference, is not very great because the gases have been
rather thoroughly mixed.
In the stratosphere itself, the air, the way that air gets into the stratosphere is to
boil up in the tropics.
And then once it gets up in the upper atmosphere, move forward.
So that what it finally gets pulled, gets over the South Pole, it has concentrations
that are typical of what was in the lower atmosphere a few years before.
Dr. Roland says the chlorine gases tend to stay in the atmosphere over the poles rather
than cycle around the planet because the cold temperatures lock the air masses and cause
a circular motion for months, especially during the Antarctic winter, summer in the northern
hemisphere.
The air just goes round and round.
Under water explorer Jean Michel Cousteau, has spent a good deal of time on terra firma
in Antarctica, he says the issue of the ozone hole is related to the greater issue of global
warming.
A combination of our burning fossil fuels and cutting trees has severely affected the planet's
cycle of breathing, whereby carbon dioxide is removed and oxygen is replaced in the atmosphere.
By having done all of these things, we are threatening the melting of the ice caps.
And Antarctica, we back to Antarctica, if you look at pictures taken from satellites, so
it doesn't go way back, it's only 20 years or so.
We can already see, as you juxtapose pictures taken from satellite at the same altitude,
the shrinking of the ice of Antarctica as a continent.
In Antarctica, it's covered on the average by 3 kilometers, or let's say a mile and a
half, of ice on the average.
That ice is the part of the thermostat of the planet.
It's what allows us to not be burned, to enjoy the kind of climate that we have, and
it happens through the atmosphere, and it happens through the ocean currents.
A lot of the cold Antarctic ocean currents are coming in deep ocean, deep waters, and
running alongside, for example, the Americas, and reaching the Amazon river, where 20%
of all the fresh water of the entire land masses of the world outpours itself into the Atlantic.
And as this cold, rich, indituent Antarctic current, which is that region, it has, because
of the geology, it has to go up, and it mixes with the Amazon fresh water, and all of
that goes into the Caribbean, some of it goes into the Gulf, some of it reaches the very
large currents, which then, the Gulf Stream, which then runs along North America and crosses
the Atlantic and goes all the way to England and so on.
So everything is completely connected, and if we sit back here in the northern hemisphere,
and we think we can get away with it, because I'm talking to guys in the southern hemisphere,
big mistake.
Ozone forms a smothering protective layer all around the planet.
It is thinnest over the poles because of the cold temperatures there.
Dr. Roland says the scientific community generally believes the whole over Antarctic
Earth will continue to expand, the layer elsewhere around the planet will continue to thin
out, until around the beginning of the next century.
After that, he says Ozone is expected to begin to repair.
However, he says we will never completely reverse the damage.
An analogy that is often used is to think about a bathtub with a hole with the stopper out,
so the water can run out, and they faucet on so the water is running in.
And as you run the water in and it's running out, there will always be a level of water
in the bathtub.
And what we've done is put another hole in the tub, so the level is going to be less.
And gradually over the course of the 21st century, that other hole will fix itself.
But because these molecules are very long-lived, the timescale is very long.
We would expect the ozone hole that we're seeing over Antarctica to last essentially all
of the 21st century.
Dr. Sherwood Rowland, a scientist in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California,
Irvine.
He along with Dr. Mario Molina at MIT first alerted the world to destructive effects of CFCs
on ozone in 1974.
We also spoke with John Michel Cousteau at the Cousteau Society headquarters in New York
City.
This is Bruce Robertson.
We've heard about endangered forests, those threatened by logging in the Pacific Northwest
or rainforests burned in Brazil.
But what about the one or two trees on your city property, their part of a forest also,
the urban forest.
Like its rural counterparts, it may be in trouble.
In July, New York City's forestry budget was dropped from over $5 million to only $660,000
the chief forester and 100 of his employees were laid off.
As a result, there are now 20 pruners for 2.7 million trees.
Environmental officials say that even before the budget cut, trees were being pruned on a
28-year cycle, but a five to seven-year trim is what's recommended.
John Wiloky is the chairman of the National Urban Forest Council and the Director of the
American Forestry Association.
He travels around the country assessing urban forest health, and he calls New York City's
situation the worst.
That after all is the definition of a desert, a place where things don't grow.
And by that definition, big chunks of New York City are a desert.
Now given its vast number of large buildings, given the fact that it gets as hot as it
does in the summer, it really needs trees.
These are the places in the country.
And yet, trees were the thing that New York City cut most deeply when it added budget
crisis.
And like I said, they made a 1% cut in a budget overall, but they made an 80% cut in the
urban forestry effort.
That strikes me as being really not very smart.
But it's not just a problem in New York.
Barry Bessler is the assistant director of the Fairmount Park Commission in Philadelphia.
He says his agency has operated with the same hard dollar budget for the past 10 years.
So as the value of the dollar decreased, the quality of tree care did also.
We have approximately 250,000 street trees known in Philadelphia, and they are trees along
the curbside in front of property throughout Philadelphia.
So that quarter million trees are not in very good shape.
And a lot of that is attributed to the fact that they don't get regular care, regular
pruning.
And in many cases, the trees just simply die from lack of maintenance.
Bessler says street trees are damaged by cars, dogs, winter salts, and impacted soils.
But he says the commission only takes responsibility for emergency care, and dead trees are not
replaced.
He says the Philadelphia's parks and historical buildings take priority in the commission's
budget.
The situation is bad in other cities as well.
Los Angeles lost a third of its budget.
Now its trees are pruned every 14 to 15 years.
Willocky calls these decisions near sighted.
There's absolutely no question about the fact that some very dumb budget decisions are
being made around this country.
Other programs can be started and stopped at will.
And if you don't build a bridge now, you can build it two years from now.
But you cannot build an urban forest overnight.
An urban forest takes 20 to 50 years to build.
And if we want a good urban forest 20 or 50 years from now, we have to be working on it
right now.
And they say when's the best time to plant a tree?
Well the best time is 20 years ago.
The next best time right now.
Willocky says he does not encourage urban forestry just because trees look nice.
In fact, he would argue for the same thing even if they were ugly and smelly.
That's because the benefits are numerous.
Willocky says one large tree has the same cooling power as five large air conditioners.
That's why a spot in time square is a lot warmer on a summer's day than one in central
park.
Willocky says trees do it with evapotranspiration.
He does physically remove from the ambient air around us as water is evaporated from the
leaves of the trees.
And then it's condensed high in the sky, many, many miles up where most of that he radiates
off into outer space.
So our trees are really part of an air conditioning device.
Trees also block winter winds, prevent erosion and slow water runoff.
But Willocky says one of the greatest benefits relates to our problems with smog and global
warming.
Urban trees have a double effect on the build up of carbon dioxide.
One is that they soak up carbon.
And there's many, many tons of carbon on every locked up in the trees of every acre of
every community in our country.
But far more importantly, they eliminate the need for the generation of a lot of carbon
dioxide in the first place.
So in terms of global warming, our urban trees, some scientists say are up to 14 times more
important than equivalent rail trees in dealing with the carbon dioxide problem.
Bessler says he recognizes these benefits, but his hands are tied.
He argues that it's time for the property owners to take over.
I don't expect in the near future, and Philadelphia, a reversal of the trend that we're in right
now where the public is taking responsibility for these trees in front of their property.
The situation is such that I just don't see our priorities changing and the level of our
resources to put toward this problem changing.
But Willocky disagrees with his policy.
He applauds strong citizens groups that fight for urban trees, but he says the care should
be done by professionals.
Private groups cannot do all of this stuff.
They are an important first step in any community.
Citizens have to take responsibility.
But private groups don't do the city's accounting work for them.
They don't go out and collect the taxes for them.
They don't do the sewer repair.
They don't build the libraries or repair the roofs on the schools.
Why should private groups take care of the trees?
They need professional care.
There are some of this work that can be done by private groups, but if you want a good urban
forest, you've got to spend some money on it.
Just like if you want good streets.
According to Bessler, Philadelphia's residents have found a possible alternative.
Now groups lobby their district representatives in the city to set funds aside for the trees
in their neighborhood.
He says all representatives are now doing that.
But Willocky says the ideal plan is much more comprehensive.
He should be planted in a large space of loose soil and pruned and watered.
Cities also have to set funds aside for inevitable problems like roots that disrupt sidewalks
and pipes.
He cites his hometown of Minneapolis, which plants about six or seven thousand new trees
a year as one of the best caretakers of an urban forest.
There's a lot of very large trees that provide massive canopy, soak up great quantities of
carbon dioxide and keep the city cool in the summer and quite a bit warmer in the winter.
The city of Minneapolis spends twenty dollars per person a year on its trees, but Willocky
says trees are an investment that will eventually save taxpayers' money.
Yet he warns that the focus should not be on what we could save in dollars.
Instead he worries about what we might be losing.
This is Bruce Robertson.
Well, that's our show for this week.
We hope you enjoyed this edition of the Environment Show.
Our piece on urban trees was written and produced by Karen Kelly.
If you know something happening in your area that you think we ought to know about or
if you have a question about this week or any week's Environment Show, feel free to drop
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This is Bruce Robertson.
The Environment Show is made possible by the J.M. Kaplan Fund of New York.
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