The Growing Dangers of Indian Point
It was a beautiful spring day and, in the control room of the nuclear reactor, the workers decided to deactivate the security system for a systems test. As they started to do so, however, the floor of the reactor began to tremble. Suddenly, its 1,200-ton cover blasted flames into the air. Tons of radioactive radium...
Read MoreThe Past Battles the Future at Seneca Lake
Let’s amend the famous line from Joni Mitchell’s “Yellow Taxi” to fit this moment in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. There, Big Energy seems determined to turn paradise, if not into a parking lot, then into a massive storage area for fracked natural gas. But there’s one way in which that song...
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Is Fracking About to Arrive on Your Doorstep?
For the past several years, I’ve been writing about what happens when big oil and gas corporations drill where people live. “Fracking” -- high-volume hydraulic fracturing, which extracts oil and methane from deep shale -- has become my beat. My interviewees live in Pennsylvania’s shale-gas fields; among Wisconsin’s hills, where corporations have been mining silica,...
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