Day: August 20, 2023

Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft has crashed into the moon.

“The apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the moon,” Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, said Sunday.

On Saturday, the agency said it had a problem with the craft and lost contact with it.

The unmanned robot lander was set to land on the moon’s south pole Monday, ahead of an Indian craft scheduled to land on the south pole later this week.

Scientists are eager to explore the south pole because they believe water may be there and that the water could be transformed by future astronauts into air and rocket fuel.

Russia’s last moon launch was in 1976, during the Soviet era.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida made a brief visit to the tsunami-wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant on Sunday to highlight the safety of an impending release of treated radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, a divisive plan that his government wants to start soon despite protests at home and abroad.

His trip comes hours after he returned home Saturday from a summit with U.S. and South Korean leaders at the American presidential retreat of Camp David. Before leaving Washington on Friday, Kishida said it is time to make a decision on the treated water’s release date, which has not been set due to the controversy surrounding the plan.

Since the government announced the release plan two years ago, it has faced strong opposition from Japanese fishing organizations, which worry about further damage to the reputation of their seafood as they struggle to recover from the accident. Groups in South Korea and China have also raised concerns, turning it into a political and diplomatic issue.

The government and the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., say the water must be removed to make room for the plant’s decommissioning and to prevent accidental leaks from the tanks because much of the water is still contaminated and needs further treatment.

Japan has obtained support from the International Atomic Energy Agency to improve transparency and credibility and to ensure the plan by TEPCO meets international safety standards. The government has also stepped up a campaign promoting the plan’s safety at home and through diplomatic channels.

IAEA, in a final report in July, concluded that the TEPCO plan, if conducted strictly as designed, will cause negligible impact on the environment and human health, encouraging Japan to proceed.

Kishida told reporters after Sunday’s plant visit that he hoped to meet with the head of the national fisheries organization on Monday before his ministers decide the date at a meeting next week, Kyodo News agency reported. Kishida did not mention a starting date for the water release, which is widely expected to be at the end of August.

During his visit on Sunday, Kishida saw wastewater filtering and dilution facilities and met with TEPCO president Tomoaki Kobayakawa and other top officials. He urged the officials to prioritize safety in the release and help prevent reputational damage to local fisheries, Kyodo said.

While seeking understanding from the fishing community, the government has also worked to explain the plan to South Korea to keep the issue from interfering with their relationship-building. Japan, South Korea and the U.S. are working to bolster trilateral ties in the face of growing Chinese and North Korean threats.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s government recently showed support for the Japanese plan, but he faces criticism at home. During a joint news conference at Camp David, Yoon said he backs the IAEA’s safety evaluation of the plan but stressed the need for transparent inspection by the international community.

Kishida said Friday the outreach efforts have made progress, and that the decision will factor in safety preparations and measures for possible reputation damage on the fisheries.

A massive March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s cooling systems, causing three reactors to melt and contaminating their cooling water. The water is collected, filtered and stored in around 1,000 tanks, which will reach their capacity in early 2024.

The water is being treated with what’s called an Advanced Liquid Processing System, which can reduce the amounts of more than 60 selected radionuclides to government-set releasable levels, except for tritium, which the government and TEPCO say is safe for humans if consumed in small amounts.

Scientists generally agree that the environmental impact of the treated wastewater would be negligible, but some call for more attention to dozens of low-dose radionuclides that remain in it.
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The language is stark: People in torched areas of Maui should not try to filter their own drinking water because there is no “way to make it safe,” Maui County posted on its Instagram account this week.

The message reached Anne Rillero and her husband, Arnie, in Kula, who were eating yet another meal of frozen pizza. The couple feels incredibly lucky they and their home survived the fires that raced across Maui in recent days, wiping most of Lahaina off the map. The number of confirmed fatalities was raised on Friday to 114 people.

When a neighborhood organization alerted them not to drink their water and to air out the house even if they run the tap, the couple decided to eat off paper plates to avoid exposure. No washing dishes.

“It’s alarming that it may be in the water system for awhile,” said Rillero, a retired conservation communication specialist who has lived on the island for 22 years.

Brita filters, devices connected to refrigerators or sinks and even robust, whole-home systems are unlikely to address the “extreme contamination” that can happen after a fire.

“They will remove some of it, but levels that will be acutely and immediately toxic will get through,” said Andrew Whelton, a Purdue University researcher and expert in water contamination after wildfires in urban areas.

The Maui fires damaged hundreds of drinking water pipes, resulting in a loss of pressure that can allow toxic chemicals along with metals and bacteria into water lines.

“You can pull in contaminated or dirty water from the outside, even when those lines are underground,” said David Cwiertny, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Iowa.

Hundreds of families could be in the same situation as the Rilleros in the Lahaina and Upper Kula areas, where people have been told to minimize any contact with county water including showers. In Lahaina alone, aerial imagery and damage assessment data generated by Vexcel Data show 460 buildings apparently undamaged by the fires. These are places where people are returning.

For now, the county has told people to use bottled water for all their needs or to fill jugs at tankers called water buffalos, which have been brought in near the burns.

The state health department’s environmental health division told Maui County, which operates water delivery systems for most residents, to test for 23 chemicals. Those are just the ones for which the federal government has set limits for drinking water.

These warnings reflect new science and are intended to avoid the whiplash of conflicting information received by people impacted by the 2018 Camp Fire in California, who received messages from four different agencies.

Until a few years ago, wildfire was only known to contaminate drinking water at the source, such as when ash runs into a river or reservoir. California’s Tubbs Fire in 2017 and the Camp Fire “are the first known wildfires where widespread drinking water chemical contamination was discovered in the water distribution network,” according to a recent study published by several researchers including Whelton with the American Water Works Association.

After the Camp Fire destroyed Paradise, California, officials didn’t initially understand that smoke and chemicals had leached into the water through broken and melted water pipes. So they did what was standard after other fires: they told people to boil water before use.

Concerned about benzene contamination, the Paradise Irrigation District water utility then changed the order and told people to avoid the water, district Assistant District Manager Mickey Rich said.

Four days later, the California State Water Resources Control Board announced people could drink it as long as it didn’t smell. Two and a half weeks later, that agency announced there was benzene in the water.

Two months after that, a third agency, a county health department, told the public the water was unsafe and not to attempt to treat it on their own.

“There were a lot of unknowns,” Rich said. “When the scientists came six months into the recovery, they really answered a lot of questions that we wish we would have had at the beginning.”

New contaminants also have been discovered recently. The chemicals that Hawaii’s state government told Maui County to test for are called volatile because they tend to become airborne, like gasoline that turns to vapor when it drips from the pump onto your car.

But Whelton’s new research on the Marshall Fire in Boulder County Colorado, shows a group of heavier compounds, called “semi-volatile,” can contaminate damaged water lines as well, even when benzene and other better-known chemicals are not there.

“We found SVOCs leaching from damaged water meters into drinking water,” Whelton said. “You can’t use VOCs to predict whether SVOCs are present.”

For people on Maui who get their water from private wells, now would be a good time to get it tested, said Steve Wilson, a groundwater hydrologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

If fire burns near a well, it can damage the cap, which keeps out debris. Plastic in the lining can even melt, releasing hazardous fumes into the well.

“In the case of a fire, it may look fine, but it’s hard to know,” Wilson said. “It might have affected something on the inside.”

Experts caution complete restoration of safe water will take a long time.

“I would implore anybody not to make a decision about lifting the water safety order until you have repeated validation that there is no contamination that poses a health risk,” Whelton said.
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