Global

In rural West Virginia, largely hidden among steep hills, stands a $255 million facility designed to transform fracking waste into freshwater and food grade quality salts. Proponents hailed it as one of the most important environmental projects undertaken by the oil and gas industry in recent U.S. history. But local conservation groups and residents remained skeptical from the start, warning that the plant could leak toxic waste into water and air, harming human health and ecosystems in a largely forested region where tight-knit communities live close to the land.

The facility, called Clearwater, was built by the Denver, Colorado-based oil and gas extraction company, Antero Resources, and an affiliate of Veolia, the multinational French waste, water and energy management company. It lies in the heart of north central Appalachia’s booming Marcellus and Utica gas fields — America’s top natural gas-producing region — and was built to process 600 truckloads per day of fracking wastewater. Laden with heavy metals, chemicals and other contaminants, this waste frequently exhibits levels of radioactivity hundreds of times the safe limits set by regulators.

We begin GREEP #152 with the great LIBBE HALEVY, creator of the Nuclear Hotseat, who tells us about the triumphant debut of the award-winning documentary SAN ONOFRE SYNDROME.  

This SOS masterpiece by MARY BETH BRANGAN & JIM HEDDLE of the Ecological Options Network join us later in the call to explain the great grassroots victory in shutting the two San Onofre reactors….followed by the horrific struggle to deal with their atomic waste.

In honor of Indigenous People’s Day, ANDREA MILLER shares some her amazing native brilliance rooted in her Cherokee background.

Introduced by MYLA RESON, we hear from ANNA RONDON of the southwestern tribes who are fighting to protect our Earth from the horrors of uranium mining.

TATANKA BRICCA reminds us of our Star Origins as well as our Indigenous roots amidst the struggle to call in powers of the Four Directions, and in hopes of freedom for the wrongly imprisoned LEONARD PELTIER..

From PAT MARIDA in central & southern Ohio we hear a brilliant dissection of the catastrophic Portsmouth/Piketon uranium enrichment/Bomb-making disaster in Shawnee/Miami land.

Humanity’s cancer shows up in Israel and Palestine. Missiles fly, hell makes global headlines, thousands of people die, many of them (oh God, of course) children.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declares: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly. . . . We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.”

That’ll show ’em! Revenge rules. Kill the human animals, even if they’re toddlers.

Regardless of the precise strategy of the Palestinian group Hamas, or any other Palestinian movement for that matter, the daring Palestinian military campaign, deep inside Israel, on Saturday, October 7, was only possible because Palestinians are simply fed up. 

17 years ago, Israel imposed a hermetic siege on the Gaza Strip. The story of the siege is often presented in two starkly different interpretations. For some, it is an inhumane act of ‘collective punishment’; for others, it is a necessary evil so that Israel may protect itself from so-called Palestinian terrorism. 

Largely missing from the story, however, is that 17 years are long enough for a whole generation to grow up under siege, to enlist in the Resistance and to fight for its freedom.

No new U.S. reactors, big or small, fission or fusion will be built here within at least the next five years…more like ten. Those that try will do nothing but divert resources away from the Solartopian technologies needed to save the Earth.

They’ll also lose big money for their billionaire backers and the taxpayers who’ll be forced to bail them out.

There are now 93 large uninsured light-water reactors licensed for operation in the US. One more-- Georgia’s Vogtle #4-- may open within the next year or so.

All of them emit radioactive Carbon-14. They release additional greenhouse gasses through the process of mining, milling and enriching uranium-based fuel, as well as attempting to store it once it’s become radioactive waste.  

All commercial reactors burn at ~570 degrees Fahrenheit, warming the planet on their own.  

Meanwhile, there are zero such commercial nukes in the pipeline. None are under construction.