Disasters

"IRVINE, Calif. -- A non-radioactive ammonia leak at a Southern California nuclear plant prompted an emergency alert and precautionary evacuation of nearby workers before it was contained Tuesday, authorities said.

Workers stopped the leak by 5 p.m., about two hours after it was detected in a storage tank in the water purification system of Unit 3 at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, said Todd Adler, the plant's engineering manager.

"Freakish weather disasters – from the sudden October snowstorm in the Northeast U.S. to the record floods in Thailand – are striking more often. And global warming is likely to spawn more similar weather extremes at a huge cost, says a draft summary of an international climate report obtained by The Associated Press."

"AUSTIN — The drought map created by University College London shows a number of worryingly dry areas around the globe, in places including East Africa, Canada, France and Britain.

But the largest area of catastrophic drought centers on Texas. It is an angry red swath on the map, signifying what has been the driest year in the state’s history. It has brought immense hardship to farmers and ranchers, and fed incessant wildfires, as well as an enormous dust storm that blew through the western Texas city of Lubbock in the past month.

"One of the darkest Halloweens ever loomed for about 3 million households left without power on Sunday by a rare October snowstorm in the Northeast that bedeviled transportation and killed at least eight people."

"KORIYAMA, Japan—Nearly eight months after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident scattered radioactive material over surrounding communities, Japan still is struggling to figure out how to clean up the mess, exacerbating fears about health risks and fanning mistrust of the government.

"The Army Corps of Engineers says it desperately needs about $1 billion to repair the damage from this year's catastrophic flooding in the Missouri and Mississippi basins."

Ten years after the anthrax attacks that followed 9/11, the nation has spent some $60 billion trying to put together a biodefense program. One reason Americans do not know the scale of the government's failure is the extreme secrecy with which the programs are conducted. Profits, politics, and the manipulation of public fears may be making the nation's vulnerability to the worst public health threats even  worse.

"The disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March released far more radiation than the Japanese government has claimed. So concludes a study that combines radioactivity data from across the globe to estimate the scale and fate of emissions from the shattered plant."

"BP won approval from the Interior Department to drill its first exploratory oil well in the Gulf of Mexico since the blowout of its Macondo well a year and a half ago touched off the country's worst offshore environmental disaster."

"The Fukushima Plate is tableware with its own built-in safety mechanism. Underneath the plate is a radiation meter that logs whether your sushi has absorbed too much seaborne radiation from the Fukushima disaster earlier this year."