"TEHACHAPI, Calif. -- At the end of an empty road just north of Highway 58 and past the outfield wall of an abandoned high school looms the towering Lehigh Southwest Cement plant -- a behemoth kiln that belches mercury and other toxics into the air, as it has for decades."
"PPG Industries has been selling house paint high in lead content in the African nation of Cameroon for years, and although it says it stopped production of that paint late last year, it has rejected a request that it recall or accurately label its lead paints now selling in stores there."
"Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s old gas lines are riddled with potentially lethal weld flaws, and new welding that the company's crews did during pipeline testing last year is suspect, two veteran welders told state regulators this week."
"Chicken farmers nationwide have stopped feeding their flocks a drug containing arsenic since a 2011 government study suggested the cancer-causing metal may be tainting poultry, but Maryland lawmakers are still struggling with whether to ban the once-widespread practice."
"As a satellite study released today by Nature shows, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have already begun contributing more to the planet's rising seas than the melting of ice caps and glaciers. It is a trend that overthrows conventional understanding of how melting is partitioned, while reaffirming that sea levels are rising as expected."
"MONTREAL -- The transboundary movement of spent lead-acid batteries in North America has environmental and public health consequences to communities in Mexico that are the subject of a new investigation by the Secretariat of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, CEC."
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board is worried about the safety of pipes and equipment which will entomb in glass decades worth of nuclear waste from the cold-war Hanford weapons facility.
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"RICHLAND, Wash. -- Bechtel National, Inc. is designing and building the world's largest radioactive waste treatment plant for the U.S. Department of Energy at the Hanford Site near the Columbia River in southeastern Washington state.
"For the first time in over three decades, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is expected to decide to grant a license to build a nuclear reactor -- a milestone for an industry whose long-hoped-for renaissance is smaller and later than anticipated."
"The vote, set for Thursday, is on two new reactors at the Southern Company's Alvin W. Vogtle plant near Augusta, Ga. It would be the first vote on a construction license since 1978, a year before the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania.
"Documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy, recently unsealed as part of a major lawsuit against Syngenta, reveal how the global chemical company's PR team investigated the press and spent millions to spin news coverage and public perceptions in the face of growing concerns about potential health risks from the widely used weed-killer 'atrazine.'"
A federal judge ruled that once the documents — depositions of US Forest Service employees about a 2007 forest fire in California that burned tens of thousands of acres — had been entered into court records as part of the evidence discovery process, they were presumptively public records and had to remain that way.
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