Fallujah,another name for dioxins and heavy metals

Now that the beeb have got it at last it is unlikely to go away.Don't the Americans have a bare faced cheek..."always interested in public health..don't have any official reports"...not unlike the SLWP though,come to think of it!It is likely to be the various forms of uranium in the munitions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XExbH673R3A&feature=related

CORONER'S JURY SAYS URANIUM GUILTY

A coroner’s jury, last week, found that a soldier from IRAQ1 contracted cancer from depleted uranium in theatre. To do this they decided that the model of radiation damage proposed by the MOD was wrong, and that a model of internal radiation damage proposed by Professor Busby was to be preferred. Together with the Corby limb deformity decision of a month ago, the case adds to set a series of legal precedents about the effects of inhaling uranium, heavy metals and dioxins. This makes any refusal to measure heavy metals and dioxins near hazardous waste incinerators irresponsible and failing to set up public health monitoring around them grossly negligent. The HPA case for no research is now untenable, in my opinion. No doubt there will be appeals, but please bear in mind the opinions of the judge over Corby and a jury over cancer. It is not eccentric or foolish to believe that incinerators can be hazardous, either through their chimney emissions or their waste residues. The burden of proof and guarantee of safety now definitely resides with the commissioning council and the developer, and they can’t prove anything without measurement.

A Tragi-Comedy in Several Parts

Scaremongering A La Mode….or “plus ca change”……

Characters: the usual suspects, Production : Croydon Advertiser, Feb and March 1995 (Public kept in dark over contaminated gasworks…and Gasworks row flares up…), Values: plenty on resale

Enter stage left:

Foe Croydon (Paul de Zylva):
“There is a toxic legacy from the days of town gas production, with all sorts of chemicals seeping into the subsoil. British Gas has a huge public liability to clear its sites up." ( Independent consultants had identified arsenic, mercury, chromium, nickel and cadmium…but no mention was made of the complex hydrocarbons and dioxins guaranteed to be there as well).

British Gas:
“We have nothing to hide over work on sites which might be contaminated. We only sell them to reputable buyers. The reason why detailed studies of pollution are not made available for public inspection is because soil analysis procedures are extremely complex for the non-specialist. General publication can lead to a misleading perception of the actual risk, and result in pressure to carry out remedial works which may not resolve the real problem." (!)

Foe Tandridge (Barbara Child):
"Local residents have a right to be kept informed of any potential contamination in their area, and should not be kept in the dark on a need to know basis." ( Godstone Road, Whyteleaf)

Sir Paul Beresford ( Central Croydon MP and junior environment minister):
“The friends of the earth campaign has been alarmist and irresponsible. It’s not fair on people living nearby and makes me really cross. Perhaps they are having a go at me because I am an environment minister. I insist that there are adequate safeguards to make sure that once-polluted sites pose no danger. The information is complex. If you go to a doctor he might give you a prescription, but he doesn’t explain the complicated details of the drug." (really? some doctor!)

The curtain falls...

Some years later…..time having passed by…..the greater understanding of particulates.....dioxins..... The Corby Judgement…..the 2007 graph of early neonatal deaths is published by Croydon PCT (see below)…..new developments around Factory Lane…new residues from new incinerators to deal with.

Part the Second:

“Parallel Processes”
….procurement and public consultation (they never meet)

the audience feels its going backwards to the future !?

INTER-AGENCY COLLUSION

Toxic Burn, The Dioxin War and Smogtown….......

"catchy titles and a fun read"? ( all available from Amazon)

They are a depressing trinity, because the illnesses described make you feel quite sick, and the deliberately protracted legal cases, enquiries and government agency buckpassing take a real effort to follow. There is a common thread to them all, whether the East Liverpool WTI incinerator, The Agent Orange Vietnam veterans or the air pollution of Los Angeles.

It is one of collusion between powerful industries with their falsified science, government departments and agencies and so called independent inquiries. These are not some red-top, sensationalist or politicised rants , but carefully researched histories of often small peoples’ determined fight for environmental justice. The stories are really shocking because they expose how completely expendable we and our children all are to the globalised economic barons that rule our governments and the EU.
Have you ever heard of the Coalite Bolsover plant explosion? No ?I didn’t think so, it was our own version of Seveso, the Italian plant explosion that happened some 8 years later and brought our own accident to light. Did you know Al Gore broke his promises to Ohio to stop the building of the largest hazardous waste incinerator in the world? Did you know that Los Angeles had an air pollution problem since 1945 and the motor car was not identified as the cause for 30 years!?
You can pick your poison and have a good read.....it is now all firm American history.....you will never be the same again,I promise.

Well, when the plans and reassurances eventually come over the hill from the SLWP, DEFRA, The London Waste Board and the WasteMongers for the Not-Incinerator, remember the Greenwich Peninsula, Byker, Bolsover and Corby.

EMISSION DISCREPANCIES

Risky Business.....issue 2
“Little local difficulties” in the industry

A UK waste incinerator has operated under a management regime that falsified emissions monitoring data in breach of its environmental permit, a former employee at a site has alleged recently (see UKWIN link,news,Manchester). The operator rejects the claims but the Environment Agency has pledged to investigate.
One of his most serious allegations is that the plant’s continuous emissions monitoring system was regularly turned off during start-up and shutdown [a time in the in all incinerator cycles notorious for high dioxin emissions], and when the plant was operating abnormally. This means no accurate record of emissions would be made at these times and the flue gas treatment system was also not in use. The consequences of this would be that emissions of acid gases and organic pollutants such as dioxins would not be effectively abated - a breach of the site’s environmental permit.
When a French company bought an Italian incinerator recently it certainly didn’t get a bargain. It found that emissions data had been extensively and deliberately falsified, the police were involved and hard discs were seized.

NANOPARTICLES

Nanoparticles…….New Incinerators, New waste streams, New Problems. The changing face of waste, more metals, more electricals and more plastics.

When you put metals into a furnace they are usually lumps, large or small and relatively safe, you can’t breathe a lump of lead in, for example. After you have heated them up, and made them go through chimney reactions they become very tiny particles and become very much more dangerous, mercury and cadmium being particularly serious examples. You will be surprised to hear that there are no laws regulating heavy metal discharge levels in air, apart from lead, so that councils can get away with not monitoring them. The levels of metals emitted by incinerators is very high, and much higher than found in emissions from cars. You may well hear of PM 10’s or even PM2.5’s….these particles are PM0.18’s! Filters designed for bigger particles won’t be able to cope…..even now cyclists masks do not protect them from traffic particulates. There is evidence from Mexico city that these can pass directly into the brain, via the nose, as well as being small enough to get into the blood via the lungs.

Another very real problem is the plastic packaging that everybody has got used to, as well as the plastics in bottles etc. PVC doors and windows are more than 90% organic chlorine, and will become more of the waste stream in future. The chlorine atoms in plastic are related to the formation of dioxins, directly. The more plastic in the burn the more dioxins are produced, to enter the merry-go-round of afterburning, flue gas washing and filter capture (or not!).

Many electrical goods contain PBDEs, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, and are finding their way into incinerator waste streams. They are also the flame retardants in furniture, now a legal requirement.

The face of incineration has changed in more ways than one. There are no easy reassurances, and no easy way to check what was on that lorry that just went in the depot. You can guess the number of wrongly declared lorry loads in the world history of incineration, but, by the time they got discovered, it was all too late.

POISONED PENINSULA DECOMMISSIONING

Pyrolysis, the poisoned peninsula and the problems of decommissioning.


The contemporary world faces a toxic legacy: environmental contamination caused by past industrial activities. In Britain most came from gasworks and coke plants which used pyrolysis to convert coal to gas.The by-products of pyrolysis are some of the most carcinogenic compounds known to man. In addition to concentrating pollution geographically, the manufacture of gas and coke displaced it chronologically by creating hazards that would long endure. Today, decades after they ceased production, many of the places where gasworks and coke plants once stood remain contaminated by toxic by-products.

Both the Dome and the Olympic Park had the bad luck to be planned and built on contaminated sites.The experimental nuclear reactor of Queen Mary’s college and its associated contamination provided considerable extra expense for one set of developers and the site of the South Metropolitan Gas company became a nightmare for the Dome builders.

The Greenwich peninsula contained "hot spots" with particularly high concentrations and quantities of hazardous chemicals. One of these was a big underground tar tank which had been shattered by a Luftwaffe bomb. But the chemicals left in the ground by years of spills and leakages dotted around the site had spread widely with the flow of groundwater. One type of waste, a catalyst contaminated with cyanide, was used as a foundation for roads there. The decontamination work has involved pumping up contaminated water and separating out the noxious chemicals, and taking 200,000 tons away in hundreds of lorry loads of the most contaminated soil to landfill sites (where are they now?) at a cost initially projected at 10.5 million but ended up half complete at 185 million.Any further development there can only be strictly curtailed, and a Japanese buyer walked away.

When any modern technology has at its base the physical chemistry process of pyrolysis it has the problem of how to dispose of the ash and tar.First there will be the storage costs,then the decomissioning.Be sure they will be fully accounted for in the contract, and not, like in the nuclear industry, left to be picked up by the local council tax payer.

INCINERATOR HORMONES and REBRANDING

There’s a massive re-branding of incinerators going on. The government and the international incinerator builders know they must change the public’s mind about their terrible image .The history of numerous serious accidents, deliberate flouting of regulations to ghastly effect and just incompetence and human error have left a bad taste in the mouth.
So, Modern Thermal Treatment, Energy from Waste and Biogas have sprung into being as the flag wavers of experimental methods of mass waste disposal. The London Waste Board is supposed to plan our future, but it is “packed” with people who have vested interests in incineration. The South London Waste Plan started a consultation, which it then stopped half way. Its promised to collect and share the replies of people who had taken the trouble to attend, but this has been hidden away in appendices. Some of its groups were prevented from discussing their worries on the night. There is a suggestion that they only need to have shown willing, a spurious consultation, to get their licence to “buy” an incinerator.
The problem is that there is very big money involved here. The other problem is that some of the worst potential effects are delayed, by which time the birds will have flown. The serious air pollution you will be able to measure straight away (if you are allowed), but the peak of cancers come twenty years later. The way to understand the problem of dioxins is to know they are like the body’s own hormones. These chemical messengers of the blood and brain are very, very, tiny, weigh next to nothing …but are just the right shape to be “recognised” and their message understood. If you think of some of the most important ones, the steroids, they are shaped a bit like the Olympic rings logo, you would be surprised and shocked to see that dioxins and furans have a very similar shape. The body mistakes them for “messengers”…and switches on by mistake (millions of cancer doses in a gram).
Japan is the country that has most incinerators, and has burned for longest in the world. It was also fire-bombed extensively in the war. The meat and milk it ate came from its own fields, and its animals had concentrated the chemicals, which are naturally indestructible. Its cancer rates have doubled since the war, and it now has the highest rate of male colorectal caner in the world (WHO 2005). DEFRA, the government body responsible for selling the safety of incinerators has a track record of its own….It sacked the scientist who discovered that BSE might move to humans and thus delayed effective action…it mismanaged the first foot and mouth outbreak and started the second one all by itself! It tried to rush the Royal Society (independent scientists) into agreeing that incinerators were safe, but they refused.
There is one potentially safe method of incineration that uses very high temperatures and turns everything into glass…but it is expensive, and much less profitable (PLASMA-GAS). I bet we will be offered “cheap and dirty”, so the profits can roll. Shame about the hundreds of thousands who will live under the plume and not have been given any voice.