With a warming climate, bears are emerging from hibernation early (or not hibernating at all), at times when their typical foods may not be available, possibly leading them to seek out human food more and more.Silviu Matei
The black bear affectionately known as Hank the Tank, whom authorities once thought responsible for 28 home invasions and 152 reports of conflict behavior in South Lake Tahoe, will be spared. DNA analysis of the scenes showed that at least two other bears had broken into some of the homes, and California wildlife officials will neither kill Hank nor place him in a sanctuary. Instead,they’re going to intensify hazing and mitigation efforts designed to keep Hank and the other bears out of people’s yards and homes, and importantly, out of harm’s way.
People are dying from more intense heat waves, hurricanes and flooding. Forests are disappearing because of worsening wildfires, droughts and pest invasions. Rising sea levels are imperiling coastal communities and ecosystems.
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White House issues executive order on cryptocurrency
For China, the speed and severity with which the U.S. and its allies sanctioned Russia is a warning sign that could guide future economic and foreign policy.
“This is a very multilateral moment,” said Reva Goujon, senior manager for the China corporate advisory team at Rhodium Group.
Beijing has refused to call Russia’s attack on Ukraine an invasion. China has focused on promoting negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, and it opposes the economic measures that have been taken against Russia.
Ukrainian authorities said Wednesday that a power cut caused by Russian attacks on Kyiv could deprive the Chernobyl nuclear site of power within 48 hours, leading to a potential meltdown of spent nuclear fuel.
The International Atomic Energy Agency on Wednesday played down risks of an imminent problem at Chernobyl, the site of the world’s biggest nuclear accident, in 1986, which contaminated large areas of surrounding countryside and sent a plume of radioactive dust that spread across Europe. They and other experts say Ukraine’s nuclear facilities are on the whole modernized and robust.
Never before has such an intense conflict taken place around so many nuclear power facilities.
Last week, a Russian projectile caused a fire at a building in the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, the Zaporizhzhia facility in Ukraine, around 340 miles southeast of Kyiv, which contains six reactors.
Communications between Ukraine’s regulator and some of the nuclear facilities has been reduced and on Tuesday, the IAEA said it had lost contact with monitoring systems that send the agency data and information on activities at Chernobyl.
The irradiated fuel ponds of the type Ukrainian authorities warned about at Chernobyl on Wednesday contain radioactive substances like iodine, cesium and plutonium. However, they are usually built out of concrete and buried underground.
At Chernobyl, the nuclear waste has been stored for over two decades, making it potentially hazardous to staff but unlikely to cause a major accident.
“The Chernobyl Power Plant has been shut down since 2000, and therefore the spent fuel rods stored on the site have been cooled for 22 years. Therefore they will not be producing significant amounts of heat, making a release of radiation very unlikely,” said Prof. Geraldine Thomas of Imperial College London.
Related video: Ukraine nuclear agency says Chernobyl has lost power, warns of potential radiation leak (MSNBC)
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John Roberts: When will Putin pull the nuclear card?
Steve Nesbit, president of the American Nuclear Society, sees the chances of an explosion or meltdown at Ukraine’s nuclear facilities being relatively low.
One risk is a hydrogen explosion at Ukraine’s pressurized water reactors of the type that happened in the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in the U.S. If a reactor was knocked off the power grid and the backup system failed, there could be damage to the core of the reactor within hours, which could lead to a buildup of hydrogen outside the reactor. However, as was the case at Three Mile Island, a hydrogen explosion shouldn’t pierce through the concrete containment structure shielding the reactor, built to design major shocks, Mr. Nesbit said.
The IAEA has said there has been no turnover of the more than 200 staff at Chernobyl since Feb. 23, raising worries about their well-being and ability to do their jobs. Missiles have struck two other nuclear-related facilities, although none of the incidents has yet caused any radioactive release, the agency said.
“The situation in Ukraine is unprecedented and I continue to be gravely concerned,” International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi said last week.
Ukraine has four nuclear plants dotted around the country, plus the Chernobyl site near the Belarus border, supplying around half of the country’s electricity supply. The facilities, which include 15 reactors, are generally considered safe and reasonably modernized, including being outfitted with safety procedures recommended after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, experts say.
Only Zaporizhzhia and Chernobyl have so far been taken over by Russian forces, following fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces.
Senior Ukrainian officials have spoken in alarming terms about the fate of the country’s nuclear facilities. President Volodymyr Zelensky said after the Zaporizhzhia fire it could have caused an accident six times as large as Chernobyl, and on Wednesday, his foreign minister said the risks to Ukraine’s nuclear facilities from Russia’s invasion is putting the whole of Europe in danger. On the other side, the U.N. atomic agency has dismissed Russian claims in recent days that Ukraine is working on nuclear weapons.
Mr. Grossi is in discussions with Ukraine about sending a team of experts to help deal with safety risks. He has also proposed mediating negotiations between Ukraine and Russia to agree on a framework to keep fighting away from nuclear facilities. Neither idea has yet got off the ground.
For now, Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia are both being run by their Ukrainian staff, although the IAEA reported that at Zaporizhzhia, plant management have been ordered to check decisions on running the facilities with the Russian commander at the site.
Mark Zheleznyak, a professor at the Fukushima Institute of Environmental Radioactivity, who is from Ukraine, said that were Russia to put its own staff in charge of the Ukrainian sites, they could do so with relative ease. Ukraine’s water pressurized reactors are based on designs that remain common in Russia, he said.
“It was a Soviet design. For sure, Russian knowledge about these reactors is no better or worse than Ukrainians,” he said.
Given the intensity of conflict in Ukraine, experts say they can’t exclude the risk of a major accident. But their greatest concerns are human error by staff who are working in stressful conditions and not getting proper rest, food or medicine; the difficulty emergency repair teams could face in reaching facilities amid the war; and nuclear facilities running short of vital spare equipment—from diesel for backup power systems to cooling water for spent waste pools.
Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com
What’s the best way to honor and celebrate the birds?
United Poultry Concerns and Chicken Run Rescue want to hear YOUR ideas for ways to inspire compassion and action for chickens. Winning entries will receive prizes and be publicized by UPC and CRR!
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The US intelligence community believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin views the conflict in Ukraine as a “war he cannot afford to lose,” suggesting he is likely to escalate the conflict without any concern for the number of civilians killed, the US’s top intelligence chiefs told Congress.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said at a congressional hearing Tuesday that US intelligence assesses Putin is unlikely to be deterred by the setbacks the Russian military has faced in Ukraine, suggesting he is doubling down on his campaign to keep Ukraine from joining NATO.
Since pheasants are commonly raised in outdoor flight pens and it’s not feasible to raise them indoors, producers face a unique risk when it comes to avian influenza.Tom Venesky, tvenesky@lancasterfarming.com
As cases of highly pathogenic avian influenza turn up inNew York,New Jersey and Delaware, poultry and game bird producers in Pennsylvania worry their state could be next.
The threat of the disease was a major focus at the 2022 Pennsylvania Game Breeders and Hunting Preserves Conference held Feb. 28 in State College.
While much of the disease concern centers on commercial poultry farms and backyard chicken flocks, those who raise game birds such as pheasants, quail and chukars need to be equally vigilant, according to Megan Lighty, an avian diagnostic and outreach veterinarian with Penn State Extension.
That may be a surprise to Russia as its invasion grinds toward a third destructive week. Not only has it seemingly underestimated its neighbor’s resolve, but now its ability to wage — let alone win — a prolonged conflict has come into question.
Between the stiffer-than-expected Ukrainian resistance,Russia’s early military woesand theexpansive penaltiesthat have roiled Moscow’s economy, could President Vladimir Putin look for an early offramp to end the war?
Ukrainian officials and Russia experts did not express much optimism.
“Maybe there’s more happening there than meets the eye, but the Kremlin has gone all in on this invasion — a major war of a kind Russia has not fought since 1945,” said…
In the long run, no substantial benefits will result from the further growth of America’s population. The gradual stabilization of the U.S. population through voluntary means would contribute significantly to America’s ability to solve its problems.
That statement from a half-century ago was the unequivocal central finding of the groundbreaking report by the U.S. Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, submitted to the president and Congress on March 27, 1972.
However, rather than moving toward a gradual stabilization, as was clearly recommended, America’s population over the past 50 years has grown to 334 million, an increase of 123 million (about 60 percent) since 1972.
In addition, America’s population is projected to continue growing over the coming decades. According to its main projection series, the Census Bureau expects the nation’s population to be close to 400 million around mid-century.
Preceding the commission’s establishment by several years, former President Richard M. Nixon remarked that “One of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century will be the growth of the population… Whether man’s response to that challenge will be a cause for pride or for despair in the year 2000 will depend very much on what we do today.”
Nixon’s observations are even more prescient today. Given climate change, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, pollution and congestion, population growth in America and the rest of the world remains among the serious challenges to human destiny in the 21st century.
Similarly and more recently, naturalist Sir David Attenborough remarked, “It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth, or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.”
Without a doubt, America’s population growth is a major factor affecting domestic demand for resources, including water, food and energy, and the worsening of the environment and climate change. There is hardly any major problem facing America with a solution that would be easier if the nation’s population were larger. On the contrary, population stabilization would help to resolve several.
Stabilizing the population would reduce pressures on the environment, climate and the depletion of resources and gain time for America to find solutions to its pressing issues. If the United States intends to address climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, etc., it must consider how its population affects each issue.
In contrast to the commission’s central finding, some do not recognize the need to stabilize the population. Their reasons are largely based on profit, politics and power. They give little attention to the consequences of population growth on the nation’s future.
For instance, many economists contend that continued population growth is needed to fuel economic growth. Their “bigger-is-better” arguments simply ignore or dismiss the negative consequences for the country, which are threats to the wellbeing of today’s Americans as well as the long-term sustainability of the nation.
Others argue the nation would be “more happy” with more people. Slow population growth, they claim, hurts not only America’s economic growth but also the national mood. Concerns about climate change and the environment are omitted from their rhetoric.
Some advance nationalistic appeals for continued population growth, maintaining that the more patriotic one is the more one ought to believe in a large and growing America.
Another argument is the view that “America isn’t full” and can accommodate many more people, particularly more immigrants. Those advocates, however, rarely ever specify how large the population must become to be considered full nor do explain why America needs to be full.
Thousands of scientists worldwide take an opposing view. Among their major recommendations for governments to address the climate emergency is a call for the stabilization of the world population, or ideally, a gradually reduced population within a framework that ensures social integrity.
Gradually stabilizing America’s population will provide an exemplary model for other countries to emulate. Rather than racing to increase the size of their respective populations in a world with 8 billion humans and growing, nations would see America moving away from the unsustainable demographic strategy.
As American couples are having fewer children than in the past for a host of social, economic and personal reasons, the nation’s fertility rate is unlikely to return to the replacement level any time soon. And pro-growth calls for Congress or the administration to establish pro-natalist policies to raise fertility appear unlikely to be adopted.
So, with the nation’s fertility below the replacement level, stabilizing America’s population will necessarily involve substantially reducing immigration levels, estimated at approximately 1.1 million per year. If immigration levels were, for example, close to zero, America’s projected population in 2060 would be 320 million versus 405 million if immigration continued at the same pace.
After 50 years since the commission presented its central finding, it is well past the time for the White House, Congress and the American public to embrace the gradual stabilization of the population, which is essential for ensuring the country’s vitality, prosperity and sustainability.
Joseph Chamie is a consulting demographer, a former director of the United Nations Population Division and author of numerous publications on population issues, including his recent book, “Births, Deaths, Migrations and Other Important Population Matters.”
