by Robin Bravender

Climate scientists are refuting claims that raw data used in critical climate change reports has been destroyed, rendering the reports and policies based on those reports unreliable.

By Robin Bravender

A free-market advocacy group has launched another attack on the science behind U.S. EPA's proposed finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute -- a vocal foe of EPA's efforts to finalize its "endangerment finding" -- petitioned the agency this week to reopen the public comment period on the proposal, arguing that critical data used to formulate the plan have been destroyed and that the available data are therefore unreliable.

By Jay Reeves

A painter who was fired after complaining about a potential safety threat at a nuclear power plant in north Alabama won his whistleblower lawsuit against a Tennessee Valley Authority contractor in a decision made public Monday.

GAP has submitted and is posting comments on the President’s scientific integrity policy. On March 9, the White House announced the draft policy and specified that it should include agency by agency whistleblower policies, for which it requested guidance. GAP’s comments analyze seven core recommendations to:

1. Comply with the current Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA) and Anti-Gag Statute by eliminating loopholes in its policies that require prior approval to communicate unclassified information that falls into new hybrid secrecy categories such as “Unclassified But Sensitive”
2. Adopt internal whistleblower policies that implement dormant, decade-old recommendations of the Commission on Research Integrity
3. Voluntarily adopt additional free speech protections in pending legislation to strengthen the WPA
4. Exercise visible leadership by agency chiefs to end the environment of fear
5. Eliminate prior restraint for media communications
6. Eliminate authority to make changes in the text of published material without the author’s knowledge and approval, and
7. Train managers to accept scientific freedom and openness as the operating premise for the workplace environments they supervise.

Written by GAP Senior Counsel, Richard Condit. Versions of this op-ed also appeared in the East Oregonian and Hermiston Herald.

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and Environmental Quality Commission (EQC) are responsible for overseeing the disposal of chemical warfare agents stored at the Umatilla Chemical Weapons Depot, including 2,200 tons of mustard agent.

Prior to 2007, the plan was to simply incinerate the waste, a practice defended because it is a quick fix. In theory, dangerous byproducts of the incineration process (lead, dioxin, PCBs) would not be emitted in harmful quantities because of the purported maturity of the incineration technology and the addition of filtration systems.

There's a big problem. The mustard agent contains a significant amount of mercury — which incineration can't destroy and filters won't completely capture. If the plan to incinerate proceeds, which the DEQ and EQC want, it is a certainty that mercury will be released into surrounding communities and the environment, including the Columbia River.

The following op-ed was written by GAP Nuclear Oversight Director Tom Carpenter.

Late last month, the U.S. Department of Energy, along with the EPA and Washington state, hosted the annual "State of the Site" meeting on Hanford, in Seattle.

To those of us who are frequent attendees at such events, this one bore a depressing similarity to many of the past meetings called for a similar purpose -- to review the state of the Hanford nuclear site's efforts to clean up the largest and most expensive toxic mess in the United States.

Hanford opened in 1942 to produce, on an industrial scale, the plutonium used in the first nuclear explosion in the Nevada desert in 1945 -- followed shortly by the use of the plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, Japan.

More than 40 years later, Hanford had opened and closed nine nuclear production reactors, five plutonium reprocessing facilities and numerous laboratory and support facilities, all in support of the Cold War mission to create America's nuclear arsenal.

Written by GAP Nuclear Oversight Director Tom Carpenter and Institute for Policy Studies senior scholar Robert Alvarez. Note: A version of this op-ed also appeared in the Keene Sentinel (N.H.).

President George W. Bush and his energy secretary, Samuel Bodman, have recently intensified their lobbying to revive “nuclear recycling” through a program they call the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, or GNEP.

This is hardly a new idea. In 1996, the National Academy of Sciences reported on the feasibility of recycling nuclear fuel. It was an intriguing idea because of its promise to reduce the amount of waste that had to be buried, where it could conceivably seep into drinking water at some point in its multimillion-year-long half-lives. But the Academy's conclusion was unequivocal–- the idea was supremely impractical. It would cost up to $500 billion in 1996 dollars and take 150 years to accomplish the transmutation of dangerous long-lived radioactive toxins.

Now the Bush administration is actively promoting GNEP as a sweeping panacea –- to supply virtually limitless energy to emerging economies, to "reduce the number of required...waste depositories to one for the remainder of this century" and to "enhance energy security, while promoting non-proliferation." The National Academy of Sciences’ findings have been swept aside, even though the idea is as costly and technologically unfeasible as it was in the 1990s.