By Yoichi Shimatsu
Exclusive to Rense
8-7-14
City officials in
Toledo, Ohio, have repealed their warning about drinking impure water
from Lake Erie even though toxic concentrations are not significantly
lower than in early August when a ban on tap water was imposed. That
advice against consuming even boiled tap water came after the
discovery of rising levels of poisonous compounds from a harmful type
of algae blooming in the lake.
The about-face in
public-health policy is the unfortunate outcome for a municipal
government that cannot feasibly supply bottled water for daily use by
400,000 area residents. Declaring lake water to be safe, however,
doesn’t make it any safer. Instead of facing up to the actual
causes of declining water quality, Toledo officials can only hope the
blue-green algae blooms will cease before voters start to keel over
with kidney damage and liver cancer.
Lake Erie’s water
is being contaminated by microcystin LR, a protein-based toxin
released by a harmful strain of cyano-algae (cyano is Greek for the
color blue and in this case unrelated to cyanide). The medical term
for microcystin poisoning, which induces headaches, fatigue and renal
damage, is the Caruaru syndrome, named after a Brazilian village
where inhabitants died after drinking contaminated water. Toxic
blooms can occur in tropical regions and semitropical south China but
are rare in temperate climes.
Convergence of
Interests
For many years,
activists with the local Beyond Nuclear movement have complained that
algae blooms on Lake Erie are caused by unnaturally high temperatures
from releases of wastewater used to cool Reactor 2 at the Enrico
Fermi nuclear plant.
Fermi’s
26-year-old Reactor 2 is a GE boiling water unit identical to two
reactors that melted down at Fukushima. This year’s abnormally cold
weather across the Midwest shows clearly that warm-water releases
from the Fermi facility are the only possible cause of heating in the
southern half of Lake Erie, as asserted by anti-nuclear activists..
Plant operator
Detroit Edison, a subsidiary of DTE Corporation, claims the outflows
from Fermi 2 are in compliance with environmental regulations on lake
temperature. Any management admission of unreported hot-water
releases could ruin chances of regulatory approval of a planned
Reactor 3.
The Fermi facility
is located in Monroe County, Michigan, between Detroit and Toledo, at
the geographic center of the massive algae blooms along the western
and southern shores of Lake Erie. Satellite photos from the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) show the lake water outside the
facility is clear, likely due to the fact that nothing grows in
overheated wastewater. Toward the west and east the lake is deeply
tinted aqua-green from algae.
Algae blooms with
the consistency of split pea soup is caused by two factors: the
warming of fresh water and introduction of dissolved phosphorus and
nitrogen fertilizer residues out of the mouth of the Maumee (Miami)
River in the Toledo area.
There is also
contamination at the political level. The confluence of agriculture
chemicals and nuclear wastewater is difficult to challenge because of
converging interests of agribusiness and nuclear energy. Detroit
Edison’s parent company DTE operates a political action committee
(PAC) that donates to the election campaigns of Ohio and Michigan
congressman, including House speaker John Boehner. The major promoter
of genetically modified corn and soybeans, Cargill, has an even
longer recipient list of Midwestern politicians. The smart money is
not e armarked for water purity.
Resurgent Blooms
From the 1960s until
the ‘80s, algae flourished in Lake Erie due to rising use of
phosphorus and nitrogen fertilizer for soybeans and corn in the
Maumee watershed in eastern Indiana, northern Ohio and southern
Michigan. The expansion of agribusiness and the lucrative global
trade in grain through the Chicago commodities exchange were the
driving force for intensive farm output achieved by spreading
chemical fertilizers.
In the interval
between then and now, farming methods were radically altered to
lessen the effect of farm chemicals on water quality, resulting in
the disappearance of algae blooms for two decades. Untreated sewage
dumping into Lake Erie was also drastically reduced, belatedly
following the 1978 Clean Water Act.
In summer 2008,
however, cyano-algae started to reappear, and then three years later
a massive bloom blotted out the southern half of the lake shore.
Blue-green algae are photosynthetic and add oxygen to the water, but
after dying and rotting in huge quantities form a black sludge,
creating oxygen-starved dead zones.
The resurgence in
algae growth is baffling because agricultural use of phosphorus and
nitrogen are lower than in during historical high levels of the past.
Improved farming practices such as no-tillage and crop rotation have
lowered fertilizer application, on many farms by a third.
Concentration of chemical residuess is also prevented by the rapid
flow of water through shallow Erie, which has the shortest
water-retention period of any of the Great Lakes. It takes only two
years for inflows from the Maumee to exit out the N iagara River, and
then past the much-celebrated falls, into Lake Ontario.
Environmental
scientists attribute recent algae blooms to two trends: sediment from
heavy rainfall in spring 2011; and a higher ratio of dissolved
reactive phosphorus easily absorbed by algae as compared with
insoluble phosphates in fertilizer.
The Heat’s On
This year’s bloom
provides insights into the role of heat and isotopes from nuclear
power plants as stimulants for toxic algae growth. So far 2014 has
been one of 10 coldest years in Midwestern history. Water
temperatures in Lake Erie off Cleveland, northeast of Toledo, have
been slow to snap out of an unseasonably cold spring, rising to only
the Fahrenheit 50s in June and the 60s for most of July.
Algae, in contrast,
require water temperatures of 70-90 degrees F before rapid cell
division that multiplies their numbers.. This differential means that
hot-water flows out of Fermi must be raising surface temperatures by
10 to 15 degrees F, a huge jump considering the lake’s vast volume.
Radiation Spurs
Algae Growth
Blue-green algae are
biologically complex for single-cell plants due to their
photosynthetic capability, which uses sunlight for energy. Though
microscopic, algae are tiny engines that produce complex molecules
such as ethanol and fats that can be used to produced biofuel.
Their biochemical
complexity makes algae susceptible to radiation, especially in their
watery environment. As in the case of marine animals of the North
Pacific now being decimated by Fukushima radiation, very low
radioisotope concentrations in water can have a permanent effect on
species mortality. Algae respond to threats much like microorganisms,
by pushing cell division into overdrive. (In higher organisms,
increased cell division is expressed as gigantism.)
Among the many types
of uranium decay products that escape nuclear plants, one
radionucleotide produced in nuclear power plants has an especial
affinity for algae. Phosphorus-32 is extracted from nuclear reactors
for biological research into tracing the rate of uptake of phosphorus
in the vascular system of plants.
Phosphorus-32, a
beta-ray emitter, could have a role in triggering the formation of
algae blooms in Lake Erie by promoting mutation of their defense
mechanisms. Radiation with P-32 and other uranium products could be
favoring sub-species that produce mycrocystin LR over harmless types
of algae, thereby increasing the amount of toxin in Lake Erie.
Threat Fermi
Enrico Fermi nuclear
plant, named after the Italian-Jewish physicist who designed the
world’s first nuclear reactor known as Chicago Pile-1 and worked on
the Manhattan Project, has a history of serious technical breakdowns.
Fermi 1 was an early-model fast-breeder reactor, which had to
decommissioned due to frequent technical failures before it could
ever produce power on a commercial basis. Fermi-2, a GE Mark 1 unit,
suffered a major turbine failure on Christmas Day 1993, which
required lake water to be pumped into the hot w ell.
In June 2010, a
tornado on Lake Erie made a direct hit on the Fermi-2 reactor,
resulting in the downing of transmission lines and a power blackout
for 30,000 homes. While Detroit Energy reported no damage to the
reactor itself, the following year’s massive algae bloom could well
have been a consequence of emergency water pumping into and out of
the reactor building. Fermi-2 was again temporarily shut down in June
2012, that time by failures in the steam condenser system, a
situation similar to the “corrosion” (c over word for cracks) in
pipes that forced last year’s closure of Southern California
Edison’s San Onfre plant.
If, indeed
radioactive isotopes were released into Lake Erie, the consequences
for human health and the ecosystem could already be farther-ranging
than heat-caused algae blooms and biotoxins in drinking water.
Already, cancer rates around Erie are higher than the national
average. Citizen-based radiation monitoring is much needed for an
accurate threat assessment.
 |
| Japanese earthquake |
Erie provides water
to Cleveland and Buffalo, New York, in addition to Toledo and
Detroit, meaning a nuclear accident would devastate America’s
breadbasket and industrial heartland. Contamination could also reach
the Lake Ontario cities of Toronto, Canada, and Rochester, New York,
and even flow to Montreal. Enrico Fermi nuclear plant has been
described by Midwestern anti-nuke activists as “Fukushima on Lake
Erie.” As a researcher who works inside Japan’s nuclear exclusion
zone, all I can say is: One Fukushima is one too many.
Yoichi Shimatsu, a
Thailand-based science writer who conducts field research inside the
Fukushima exclusion zone, was the founder of one of the first modern
organic farms in the American Midwest and worked extensively in
Indiana agriculture.
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