Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label pollution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pollution. Show all posts

Sunday, August 20, 2023

Oops

The obvious jibe:
Russia's invasion of the moon isn't going very well either.

But there's something else.

I think I realize and appreciate how difficult it is to make something work properly over a distance of almost a quarter of a million miles. So I can respect the skill and the effort.

What bothers me is that humans are doing to the moon what we've done everywhere else. ie: We're trashing it.

The US has left junk up there from 6 crewed missions, plus dozens of missions of the US and other countries where we either deliberately crashed the thing into the surface or managed to land nice and easy. But we never clean up after ourselves.

And don't get me wrong - I'm not saying we shouldn't stretch and reach and aspire to bigger and better whatever. But seriously, humans are too often turning out to be a fucking plague. And there's something very karmic about how we're fouling the nest so badly that we're likely accelerating the timeline to where we're no longer the dominant species. And it's more than just possible we're hastening our own extinction.

Clementine Lunar Orbiter 1994


On the fucking moon.

Anyway - Russians:


Russia’s Lunar Lander Crashes Into the Moon

The robotic Luna-25 spacecraft appeared to have “ceased its existence” after a failed orbital adjustment, the space agency Roscosmos said.


A Russian robotic spacecraft that was headed to the lunar surface has crashed into the moon, Russia’s space agency said on Sunday, citing the results of a preliminary investigation a day after it lost contact with the vehicle.

It is the latest setback in spaceflight for a country that during the Cold War became the first nation, as the Soviet Union, to put a satellite, a man and then a woman in orbit.

The Luna-25 lander, Russia’s first space launch to the moon’s surface since the 1970s, entered lunar orbit last Wednesday and was supposed to land as early as Monday. At 2:10 p.m. on Saturday afternoon Moscow time, according to Roscosmos, the state corporation that oversees Russias space activities, the spacecraft fired its engine to enter an orbit that would set it up for a lunar landing. But an unexplained “emergency situation” occurred.

On Sunday, Roscosmos said that it had lost contact with the spacecraft 47 minutes after the start of the engine firing. Attempts to re-establish communications failed, and Luna-25 had deviated from its planned orbit and “ceased its existence as a result of a collision with the lunar surface,” Roscosmos said.

An interagency commission would be formed to investigate the reasons for the failure, it added.

Luna-25, which launched on Aug. 11, was aiming to be the first mission to reach the moon’s south polar region. Government space programs and private companies all over Earth are interested in that part of the moon because they believe it may contain water ice that could be used by astronauts for future space missions.

Another country, India, will now get the chance to land the first probe in the lunar south pole’s vicinity. Its Chandrayaan-3 mission launched in July, but it opted for a more roundabout but fuel-efficient route to the moon. It is scheduled to attempt a landing on Wednesday.

“It’s unfortunate,” Sudheer Kumar, a spokesman for the Indian Space Research Organization, said about the Russian lander’s crash. “Every space mission is very risky and highly technical.”

That India may succeed after Russia failed would be a blow to President Vladimir V. Putin, who has used Russian achievements in space as part and parcel of his hold on power.

That is part of the Kremlin’s narrative — a compelling one for many Russians — that Russia is a great nation held back by an American-led West that is jealous of and threatened by Russia’s capabilities. The country’s state-run space industry in particular has been a valuable tool as Russia works to remake its geopolitical relationships.

“The interest in our proposals is very high,” the head of Russia’s space program, Yuri Borisov, told Mr. Putin in a televised meeting in June, describing Russia’s plan to expand space cooperation with African countries. The initiative is part of the Kremlin’s overall efforts to deepen economic and political ties with non-Western countries amid European and American sanctions.

Interest in the Luna-25 mission within Russia itself appeared muted. The flight lifted off from a remote spaceport in Vostochny in the country’s Far East at an hour when most Russians, who live in the country’s west, were probably sleeping. The mission’s progress toward the moon was not a major subject in state media.

In recent decades, Russia’s exploration of Earth’s solar system has fallen a long way from the heights of the Soviet era.

The last unqualified success was more than 35 years ago, when the Soviet Union was still intact. A pair of twin spacecraft, Vega 1 and Vega 2, launched six days apart. Six months later, the two spacecraft flew past Venus, each dropping a capsule that contained a lander that successfully set down on the hellish planet’s surface, as well as a balloon that, when released, floated through the atmosphere. In March 1986, the two spacecraft then passed within about 5,000 miles of Halley’s comet, taking pictures and studying the dust and gas from the comet’s nucleus.

Subsequent missions to Mars that launched in 1988 and 1996 failed.

The embarrassing nadir came in 2011 with Phobos-Grunt, which was supposed to land on Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two moons, and bring back samples of rock and dirt to Earth. But Phobos-Grunt never made it out of Earth’s orbit after the engines that were to send it to Mars did not fire. A few months later, it burned up in Earth’s atmosphere.

An investigation later revealed that Russia’s financially strapped space agency had skimped on manufacturing and testing, using electronics components that had not been proven to survive the cold and radiation of space.

Otherwise, Russia has been confined to low-Earth orbit, including carrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station, which it jointly manages with NASA.

Luna-25 was to have completed a one-year mission studying the composition of the lunar surface. It was also supposed to have demonstrated technologies that would have been used in a series of robotic missions that Russia plans to launch to the moon to lay the groundwork for a future lunar base that it is planning to build with China.

But the schedule for those missions — Luna 26, 27 and 28 — has already slipped years from the original timetable, and now there are likely to be further delays, especially as the Russian space program struggles, financially and technologically, because of sanctions imposed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Although NASA and the European Space Agency continue to cooperate with Russia on the International Space Station, other joint space projects ended after the invasion of Ukraine. For the lunar missions, that means Russia needs to replace key components that were to come from Europe, including a drill for the Luna-27 lander.

Russia has struggled to develop new space hardware, especially electronics that reliably work in the harsh conditions of outer space.

“You cannot really fly in space, or, at least, fly in space for a long time, without better electronics,” said Anatoly Zak, who publishes RussianSpaceWeb.com, which tracks Russia’s space activities. “The Soviet electronics were always backwards. They were always behind the West in this area of science and technology.”

He added: “The entire Russian space program is actually affected by this issue.”

Other ambitious Russian space plans are also behind schedule and will likely take much longer than the official pronouncements to complete.

Angara, a family of rockets that has been in development for two decades, has only launched six times.

A few days ago, Vladimir Kozhevnikov, the chief designer for Russia’s next space station, told the Interfax news agency that Oryol, a modern replacement for the venerable Soyuz capsule, would make its maiden flight in 2028.

Back in 2020, Dmitry Rogozin, then the head of Roscosmos, said that the maiden flight of Oryol would take place in 2023 — meaning that, in just three years, the launch date has slipped five years.

Landing on the moon is treacherous, and China is the only country to do so successfully this century — three times, most recently in December 2020. Three other missions have crash-landed in recent years, most recently an attempt by Ispace, a Japanese company. Its Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander crashed in April when a software glitch led the vehicle to misjudge its altitude.

Wednesday, August 03, 2022

Stay Outa The Rain


Great - now we're learning that we've fucked up the planet to the point that even the rain is trying to kill us off.



Most Rainwater on Earth Contains PFAS Exceeding Safe Levels, Study Finds

New research from Stockholm University shows that PFAS in rainwater around the world are exceeding safe levels. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are chemical pollutants, often called “forever chemicals” present in many everyday items, like food packaging and clothing. The chemicals leach into the environment, affecting everything from the air we breathe to even rainfall.

The study, published in Environmental Science & Technology, tested four selected perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAAs): perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), perfluorohexanesulfonic acid (PFHxS), and perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA) in rainwater, soil, and surface waters in different locations globally.

The researchers concluded that PFOA and PFOS levels in rainwater “greatly exceed” the Lifetime Drinking Water Health Advisory levels from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The study also noted that all four of the tested PFAAs in rainwater were often above the Danish drinking water limits, and PFOS levels were usually higher than the Environmental Quality Standard for Inland European Union Surface Water.

Rainwater wasn’t the only problem, either. “Atmospheric deposition also leads to global soils being ubiquitously contaminated and to be often above proposed Dutch guideline values,” the study said.

As such, the authors said there is really no way to avoid these chemicals on Earth anymore.

“We argue here that we’re not within this safe operating space anymore, because we now have these chemicals everywhere, and these safety advisories, we can’t achieve them anymore,” said Ian Cousins, lead author of the study and professor at Stockholm University.
“I’m not saying that we’re all going to die of these effects. But we’re in a place now where you can’t live anywhere on the planet, and be sure that the environment is safe.”


PFAS earned the name “forever chemicals” due to their inability to break down in the environment. The CDC noted that these pollutants move through soils and waters in the environment and can bioaccumulate in wildlife. Humans can also breathe in PFAS, and the pollutants can also get into the bloodstream.

While more studies on the effects of PFAS on human health are needed, existing studies suggest there could be links between “forever chemicals” and certain types of cancer, reproductivity issues and developmental delays.

Scientists are concerned that the increasing amounts of PFAS in drinking water could show an increase in health complications in the future, though.

“In this background rain, the levels are higher than those environmental quality criteria already. So that means that over time, we are going to get a statistically significant impact of those chemicals on human health,” Crispin Halsall, a professor at the University of Lancaster who was not involved with the study, told the BBC. “And how that will manifest itself? I’m not sure but it’s going come out over time, because we’re exceeding those concentrations which are going to cause some harm, because of exposure to humans in their drinking water.”

Some governments are creating more relaxed PFAS limits as well. With the prominence of PFAS, strict limits on PFAS levels have halted construction projects, leading some places to loosen the guidelines to avoid impacting economic activities.

The other option is to remove these pervasive pollutants from water and soil. Current methods of removing PFAS are expensive, although some scientists are developing sustainable, low-cost ways to remove PFAS from the environment.
             
Also EcoWatch:

Scientists Develop New Material to Clean Up Forever Chemicals

Researchers from Texas A&M AgriLife of Texas A&M University have developed a new bioremediation technology using plant-based material and fungi that could take care of cleaning up per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. These pollutants, also called “forever chemicals” or PFAS, are found in soil, water, and even human and animal blood and may be harmful to humans and other species.

PFAS are found just about everywhere, from food wrappers and dental floss to clothing and electrical wire insulation. While more research is needed on health implications from PFAS exposure, the CDC notes that these chemicals may affect development, reproduction and the immune system and may cause liver damage. Extremely high exposures of PFAS may also be linked to cancer.

“PFAS do not degrade easily in the environment and are toxic even at trace level concentrations,” said Susie Dai, associate professor in the Texas A&M Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology. “They must be removed and destroyed to prevent human exposure and negative impacts on the ecosystem. PFAS are so stable because they are composed of a chain of carbon and fluorine atoms linked together, and the carbon-fluorine bond is one of the strongest chemical bonds. They can occur in water at a very low concentration and you have to concentrate them and then destroy them.”

The only way to actually get rid of these “forever chemicals” is by burning them, which is a lengthy and expensive process. After incineration, other products, like active carbon, are used to finally clean up the PFAS.

But Texas A&M researchers have found a new way to use a plant-based material that adsorbs the pollutants. As explained by ScienceDirect, adsorption is “The use of solids for removing substances from either gaseous or liquid solutions.” The adsorbent material is then consumed by microbial fungi. The team recently published their findings for the process framework, which they call Renewable Artificial Plant for In-situ Microbial Environmental Remediation (RAPIMER), in Nature.

“The plant’s cell wall material serves as a framework to adsorb the PFAS,” Dai explained. “Then this material and the adsorbed chemical serve as food for a microbial fungus. The fungus eats it, it’s gone, and you don’t have the disposal problem. Basically, the fungus is doing the detoxification process.”

This sustainable PFAS clean-up system could scale for commercial use, leading to a better way to remove these chemical pollutants from the environment. It could also come in handy as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers creating PFAS thresholds to its water quality standards, which will require municipal water treatment plants to find cost-effective solutions to monitor and remove PFAS from the water if necessary.

Tuesday, February 16, 2021

Energy


We're finally starting to see some acceleration as we make our move from dirty fuels to wind and solar. And of course, eventually, we'll transition from that to something else.

But you know what? I think it's a pretty good bet that we won't be faced with quite the shit-pile clean up that we have to deal with here at the end of the carbon-driven economy.

I remember very distinctly, back when I was a travelin' man, driving up I-95 approaching Philly from the south, and the smell - especially in the humidity of the summer months - was unbelievable. And it didn't stop at Philadelphia. The stench seemed to follow me all the way up the petro-chemical corridor thru New Jersey.

Once we get our heads a little farther out of our asses, we just might see some big leaps forward.

In the meantime, I can be optimistic about this, with that famous caveat from Mr Nixon: "Don't count on the fella that makes the mess to stick around and clean it up."


Wearing blue hard hats, white hazmat suits and respirator masks, workers carted away bags of debris on a recent morning from a sprawling and now-defunct oil refinery once operated by Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES).

Other laborers ripped asbestos from the guts of an old boiler house, part of a massive demolition and redevelopment of the plant, which closed in 2019 after a series of explosions at the facility.


Plans call for the nearly 1,400-acre site to be transformed into a new commercial hub with warehousing and offices. All it will take is a decade, hundreds of millions of dollars, and confronting 150 years’ worth of industrial pollution, including buried rail cars and a poisonous stew of waste fuels poured onto the ground. A U.S. refinery cleanup of this size and scope has no known precedent, remediation experts said.

It’s a glimpse of what lies ahead if the United States hopes to wean itself off fossil fuels and clean up the toxic legacy of oil, gas and coal.

President Joe Biden wants to bring the United States to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to fight climate change through a shift to clean-energy technologies, while reducing pollution in low-income and minority neighborhoods near industrial facilities.

It’s a transition fraught with challenges. Among the biggest is what to do with the detritus left behind. The old PES plant is just one of approximately 135 oil refineries nationwide, to say nothing of the country’s countless gas stations, pipelines, storage hubs, drill pads and other graying energy infrastructure.

In recent months, at least six other large U.S. oil refineries - from New Jersey to California - have announced they will close or cease oil refining as the coronavirus pandemic has sapped global fuel demand.

“The energy transition will require massive attention to both new infrastructure and addressing aging or outdated systems,” said Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne School of Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines.

In Philadelphia, a private-sector company is taking the lead. Hilco Redevelopment Partners, a real estate firm that specializes in renovating old industrial properties, bought the PES refinery out of bankruptcy for $225.5 million in June.

Asbestos abatement alone will require four years to complete
, said Roberto Perez, chief executive of the Chicago-based company.

“There’s enough pipeline to connect you from here to Florida, and the majority of that pipeline today is wrapped in asbestos,” Perez said.

The full extent of the pollution won’t be understood for years. Also uncertain is the ability of the refinery’s previous owners to pay their share of the cleanup. The facility has had multiple owners over its lifetime and responsibility has been divided between them through business agreements and legal settlements.

A lot is riding on the outcome. Transformation of the refinery, the oldest and largest on the U.S. East Coast, could bring jobs to a low-income, racially diverse neighborhood that needs them.

But residents also want a say in how the work proceeds after enduring the brunt of the refinery’s pollution. Some complained about feeling shut out of the process during a recent virtual public meeting organized by companies involved in the cleanup.

The refinery’s previous owner, Sunoco Inc, had gone years without holding city-mandated public meetings about pollution at the site.

Evergreen Resources Group, LLC, a subsidiary of Sunoco’s parent company, Energy Transfer LP, which is in charge of managing a share of the cleanup, declined to comment on the lapse in meetings. It pointed to a website it launched last year to engage with the public about the project.

Hilco’s Perez has no illusions about the work ahead.

“This is a very heavy lift,” he said. “It’s probably one of the most complicated things I’ve ever done.”

SURPRISES IN A TOXIC SOUP

Oil refining at the Philadelphia site began in 1870, 100 years before the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Gasoline, once a worthless byproduct of heating oil, was routinely dumped by the refinery into the soil, according to historians and researchers. Leaks and accidents spewed more toxins. The June 2019 blasts alone released 676,000 pounds of hydrocarbons, PES said at the time.

The Philadelphia site is not unique. About half of America’s 450,000 polluted former industrial and commercial sites are contaminated with petroleum, according to the EPA.

“That’s one of the reasons that a lot of these refineries have been kept going for such a long time,” said Fred Quivik, a Minnesota-based industrial historian. “They’re so contaminated, it’s hard to figure out what else to do with them.”

Cleanup in Philadelphia will be painstaking. After asbestos abatement comes the demolition and removal of 3,000 tanks and vessels, along with more than 100 buildings and other infrastructure, the company said.

Then comes the ground itself. Hilco’s Perez said dirt quality varies widely on the site and will have to be handled differently depending on contamination levels. Clearing toxins like lead must be done with chemical rinses or other technologies, said Charles Haas, professor of environmental engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

The site also has polluted groundwater and giant benzene pools lurking underneath, according to environmental reports Sunoco filed over the years with the federal and state governments.

Perez, Hilco’s chief executive, said clean energy will be a centerpiece of the final project. The warehouse complex, for example, will aim to feature charging stations for a fleet of electric delivery vehicles, he said.

The company is also considering a hotel, residential homes, and a restaurant on the site, two people familiar with the plans said.

The project is expected to take 10 to 15 years to finish. Cleanup and construction are projected to create about 13,000 jobs, the company said, with another 19,000 jobs tied to warehousing, offices and transporting goods.

PICKING UP THE BILL

The final price tag is unclear.

The development’s fate hinges on previous polluters paying their fair share. The site, founded by the Atlantic Refining Company, later known as ARCO, has cycled through several owners.

Sunoco, which owned the refinery for about two decades, sold its majority stake in 2012 to Carlyle Group Inc, which later formed PES. That deal stipulated that Sunoco assume all environmental liabilities dating to the plant’s inception in the 1800s. Energy Transfer, which bought Sunoco the same year as the refinery sale, now shoulders that burden.

Dallas-based Energy Transfer has $205 million in insurance to cover all of Sunoco’s decommissioned sites, including PES, according to the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Amanda Goodin, a lawyer with the environmental group Earthjustice who has litigated major environmental cleanup cases, said comparable projects, such as clearing shuttered mining operations, can run into the billions of dollars.

“These cleanups are just enormously expensive, and companies basically never set aside enough money to fully remediate a site,” Goodin said.

Energy Transfer would not say how much it expects its share of the PES refinery cleanup to cost, but spokeswoman Vicki Granado said it is “fully funded”.

Hilco, as part of its 2020 purchase of PES, assumed liabilities tied to the last eight years of the refinery’s life, a tab it estimates will amount to “hundreds of millions” of dollars. The company declined to be more specific, but said it believes it has the funds for the job.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection said it has consent orders against Sunoco and Hilco that enable the regulator to sue the companies if they attempt to walk away, spokeswoman Virginia Cain said.


ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

Abdul Muhammad, 34, who lives near the Philadelphia refinery, says life has improved since it shut down. His asthmatic baby son now sleeps through the night, while his wife’s chronic headaches have become less frequent.

“I just don’t want chemicals and environmentally contaminated things going in and out of there,” he said of his wishes for the site.

Philly Thrive, a community activist group, has been pressuring Hilco and city officials to ensure that neighborhood residents have a say in the cleanup and redevelopment.

Some of their hopes rest with the Biden administration, which has committed to direct 40% of any federal clean-energy investment to communities most impacted by industrial pollution.

But whether climate legislation emerges from a divided Congress remains to be seen.

Philadelphia officials hope PES can become a model for refinery cleanups elsewhere. Kenyatta Johnson, a city councilman who represents neighborhoods surrounding the facility, sees a healthy, more prosperous community emerging from its toxic shadow.

“Some may deem the site a health hazard and eyesore, but nevertheless it’s an opportunity,” Johnson said.

Our willingness to re-invent ourselves is a real strength. It's not uniquely American, but we've gotten pretty good at it.

To reiterate my position on "blessings in disguise" or "look for the silver lining":

Maybe we should try to figure out how to get to the blessing part without all the shit we put ourselves through on the front end.

- and -

I'd be a lot more cheery about the whole thing if that silver lining didn't always come wrapped in a dark cloud of fucked-up-edness.

Anyway, maybe things get better from here for a while.

Wednesday, July 04, 2012

The Sky Is Pink

It seems pretty important that we get this one right.


THE SKY IS PINK from JFOX on Vimeo.


And BT-fuckin'-W, it's time to consider something I've been proposing for a very long time on how to make sure these corporate buggers are telling us the truth about the effects of their operations on any given local water supply (eg).  Once a month, the whole executive committee plus one of their family members have to show up and drink a full glass of water straight from the tap of a homeowner selected by his/her neighbors.  Let's see how long it takes to clean this shit up.