leakage

Reports continued to come in Monday night detailing the third explosion to hit the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in the past 4 days.The plant, located in northeastern Japan, was first ravaged by the 9.0-magnitude earthquake that hit northern Japan last week. Soon after, two hydrogen explosions caused fires that have since been contained. News of the first two explosions only worsened the public's fear of a catastrophic release of radiation into the atmosphere. According to one report, the third explosion "was heard at 6:10 a.m. local time on Tuesday, a spokesman for the Nuclear Safety Agency said at a news conference. The plant's owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co., said the explosion occurred near the suppression pool in the reactor's containment vessel. The pool was later found to have a defect."

Not good news. And while leaking radiation is a major fear, early reports still vary when it comes to just how bad the situation is. According to the TIME NewsFeed: "In a televised address to the nation at 11 a.m., Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan spoke of the high-pressure situation. Kan advised people within 19 miles of the affected power plant to stay indoors. According to the Associated Press, some 180,000 people within a 12-mile radius had already been evacuated. "There is a very high risk of further radioactive leaks," he said."I ask you to stay calm." Still, it has been confirmed that "radiation leaks are now severe enough to pose a significant threat to people's health"...and that's a statement from Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety spokesman.

The massive earthquake, which has shifted the entire island of Japan by an estimated eight feet, is truly a disaster on a global scale. It's also a disaster that has very suddenly thrust nuclear power back into the limelight...and to say the exposure has been unflattering would obviously be a gross understatement. This is the kind of disaster, on the scale of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, that will take people—both in Japan, and elsewhere—a very long time to forget...or forgive.

Right now, the hope is that the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant will avoid a full meltdown. CBS News defines a meltdown as "when the nuclear fuel inside the reactor gets so hot, it literally melts. Uranium pellets are inside the long fuel rods. If the reactor is not cooled properly, the tubes can fall apart, with the radioactive material falling to the bottom." A description that sounds scarily like the preface to a China Syndrome-esque scenario, but CBS News has also reported that the situation at Fukushima Dai-ichi is not yet as bad as the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, and nowhere near the Chernobly tragedy: "Even with the two [update: three] Fukushima explosions, so far this is nothing like Chernobyl. In 1986, the control rods malfunctioned and the fuel rods melted down. A subsequent explosion catapulted tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere."

Nuclear reprocessing. You often see it in the news, usually related to what countries are doing it and why. Reprocessing in India and China may get more ink, but the the U.K. & France do far more of it. In the United States, on the other hand, we do not currently reprocess our spent nuclear fuel. So why not? Now that many environmentalists are reevaluating nuclear power (thanks to its status as a low-carbon fuel), many are asking just that: why shouldn't we be recycling this stuff? Almost seems like the least we can do, given the complications of mining and transporting uranium, right?

Not so fast. The fellows at The Union of Concerned Scientists aren't quite so keen on reprocessing. In fact, they're actually quite...concerned about it. As scientists. In their own words, here's what their list of major concerns boils down to:

• Reprocessing would increase the risk of nuclear terrorism.
• Reprocessing would increase the ease of nuclear proliferation.
• Reprocessing would hurt U.S. nuclear waste management efforts.
• Reprocessing would be very expensive.

Very legitimate-sounding concerns, scary-sounding, even—but not everyone would agree. After all, France and Britain seem to be doing alright and they've been reprocessing for decades. To find out more about the argument for reprocessing, we talked to CEO of Duke Energy (and Beyond the Light Switch expert) Jim Rogers.

Jim Rogers knows energy. Just this past Monday he rolled out plans for a $13.7 billion megadeal that will make Duke Energy the largest electric utility in the nation. So how can he consider something that has raised such serious concerns in the past to now be no different than "recycling"? First, Rogers addressed fears that reprocessing will create a greater risk of nuclear terrorism, saying that he finds it much easier to mitigate the risk of proliferation "in the 

...That is the question. But if we don't drill, how else are we going to secure the nation's supply of what many are calling the 'bridge fuel' that's going to help us go from a carbon-based (coal) energy economy to a low-carbon (or even carbon-free) one: natural gas.

In the documentary, BTLS focuses on two gas-drilling booms or gas 'plays', as the industry calls them-the established Barnett shale in Texas, and the gargantuin Marcellus shale, which covers much of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York. Due to the recent discovery of the Marcellus shale's potential for natural gas production (once thought to be played out), gas drilling companies are making a mad dash to lease land and get wells drilled. And in many places (as BTLS documented in Houston, Pennsylvania) the gas boom has meant economic prosperity for many struggling farmers and local business owners.
 
Also resulting from the rush to drill: concerns over the environmental impacts of shale drilling, specifically those impacts resulting from a new technique of gas-drilling called hydraulic fracturing [also shortened to hydrofracking, or just fracking]. But the effects of getting that gas out of the ground aren't just going to impact the areas covering the Marcellus, there are many other gas-producing shale formations covering the rest of the continental U.S...including the state of Michigan.

Michigan's Antrim shale was the site of a large gas play in the 1990's, at the time making it "the most actively drilled shale gas play in the US, with thousands of wells drilled." That's over 10,000 wells drilled. So do Michiganders need to be worried about fracking-related water and air contamination? For answers I talked to Amy Mall, Senior Policy Analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Amy contributes to the NRDC's awesomely informative staff blog, 'Switchboard', and is the authority on anything and everything related to oil and gas production.

Right now, however, you may be asking yourself 'isn't drilling regulated by the government'? The BTLS Braintrust asked the same question of the NRDC, who reminded us that state regulators only know what we tell them. If communities and land-owners ask the right questions of regulators and drilling companies (preferably with a lawyer present, cautions Mall) we can all avoid a fate similar to that of DISH, TX.

According to Mall, gas drilling permits are issued by year, so in addition to the more than 10,000 active wells currently in Michigan, there were 270 new permits issued in the state last year alone. Each of those 270 communities could be the next to face an environmental clean up if drillers and land owners don't proceed with caution. So what are the right questions? And who should you ask?