The ground beneath Portugal, Spain and northern Morocco shook violently on Nov. 1, 1755, during what came to be known as the Great Lisbon Earthquake. With an estimated magnitude of 8.5 to 9.0, the temblor nearly destroyed the city of Lisbon and its lavish palaces, libraries and cathedrals. What wasn't leveled by the quake was mostly demolished in the ensuing tsunami and fires that raged for days. Altogether, at least 40,000 people were killed.

More than 250 years later, geologists are still piecing together the tectonic story behind that powerful earthquake. A unique subduction zone beneath Gibraltar, the southernmost tip of the Iberian Peninsula, now seems to be culprit. Subduction zones are the spots where one of Earth's tectonic plates dives beneath another, often producing some of the world's strongest earthquakes.

"At a global scale, subduction is the only process that produces magnitude-8 or -9 earthquakes," said Marc-Andre Gutscher, a geologist at the University of Brest in France. "If subduction occurred, and is still occurring here, then it's highly relevant to understanding the region's seismic hazards."

It has snowed in some areas of Romania in the last 24 hours, and traffic was hindered on roads in Neamt and Suceava counties in the Northern area of the country. Some local roads have even been closed down on Sunday evening (April 8 ). Drivers in Romania are already required to use summer tires on their cars, so traffic has been canceled on some roads also to prevent accidents due to the lack of winter tires.

The Prahovei Valley, the week-end destination for many tourists from Bucharest also has a small layer of snow, in mountain resorts like Azuga, Buşteni and Sinaia.

While traveling in Japan several weeks ago, Fairewinds' Arnie Gundersen took soil samples in Tokyo public parks, playgrounds, and rooftop gardens. All the samples would be considered nuclear waste if found here in the US. This level of contamination is currently being discovered throughout Japan. At the US NRC Regulatory Information Conference in Washington, DC March 13 to March 15, the NRC's Chairman, Dr. Gregory Jaczko emphasized his concern that the NRC and the nuclear industry presently do not consider the costs of mass evacuations and radioactive contamination in their cost benefit analysis used to license nuclear power plants. Furthermore, Fairewinds believes that evacuation costs near a US nuclear plant could easily exceed one trillion dollars and contaminated land would be uninhabitable for generations.

[BEGIN: RIC Conference Footage]

NRC Chairman Jaczko: The events at Fukushima reinforce that any nuclear accident with public health and safety or environmental consequences of that magnitude, is inherently unacceptable. But we focussed on the radiological consequences of this event. I believe we cannot ignore the large social and economic consequences such an event poses to any country with a nuclear facility that deals with such a crisis.

In Japan, more than 90,000 people remain displaced from their homes and land, with some having no prospect for a return to their previous lifestyle in the foreseeable future. While not easy to characterize, these are significant hardships on these people and they are inherently unacceptable. So as we look to the future and we look in a proactive way, we ultimately will have to address the issue of how do we deal with nuclear events that lead to significant land contamination. And displacement, perhaps permanently, of people from their homes and their livelihoods and their communities.

[END: RIC Conference Footage]

Arnie Gundersen: What you have just heard was the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's chairman, Gregory Jaczko, saying that the NRC does not take in to account mass evacuations and people not getting back on their land for centuries when it does a cost benefit analysis as to whether or not a nuclear plant should be licensed.

I am Arnie Gundersen from Fairewinds and today I am at the Regulatory Information Conference put on by the NRC in Washington D.C.

So today, I am in Washington D.C. Couple of weeks ago though, I was in Tokyo and when I was in Tokyo, I took some samples. Now, I did not look for the highest radiation spot. I just went around with five plastic bags and when I found an area, I just scooped up some dirt and put it in a bag. One of those samples was from a crack in the sidewalk. Another one of those samples was from a children's playground that had been previously decontaminated. Another sample had come from some moss on the side of the road. Another sample came from the roof of an office building that I was at. And the last sample was right across the street from the main judicial center in downtown Tokyo. I brought those samples back, declared them through Customs, and sent them to the lab. And the lab determined that ALL of them would be qualified as radioactive waste here in the United States and would have to be shipped to Texas to be disposed of.

Now think about the ramifications for the nation's capital, whether it is Tokyo or the United States. How would you like it if you went to pick your flowers and were kneeling in radioactive waste? That is what is happening in Tokyo now. And I think that is the point that Chairman Jaczko was trying to make. When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does it's cost benefit analyses now, it does not take into account the cost to society if you have to evacuate for generations or if you have to move 100,000 people, perhaps forever.

There is a hundred miles between us and a dozen nuclear power plants here in Washington D.C. Fukushima was almost 200 miles away from Tokyo, and yet Tokyo soil in some places, the ones I just happened to find, would qualify as radioactive waste here in the United States.

How would we feel if our nation's capital were contaminated to that degree? So I agree with Chairman Jaczko, new nukes and old nukes that are being re-licensed should include as a cost in their analysis what we have learned to be happening in Tokyo and in Japan.

Thank you very much and I will keep you informed.

Over the past two weeks, nine polar bears have shown up in the southern Beaufort Sea region near Barrow, Alaska, with patches of fur missing and skin lesions, say scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey who are perplexed by the cause of the odd symptoms.

The animals were otherwise healthy in appearance and behavior, according to the USGS, whose scientists first noticed the patchy polar bears during their annual monitoring of the animals in the Beaufort Sea region; this polar bear population stretches from Barrow, Alaska, east to the Tuktoyuktuk region of Canada.

The skin symptoms can be tricky to see unless the bear is observed up close, USGS scientists said. But in the polar bears they have observed to date, the most common areas affected include the muzzle and face, eyes, ears and neck.
The researchers aren't sure whether there is a link between the polar bears' skin symptoms - fur loss called alopecia, and other skin lesions - and those reported in other animals in the region.

Dry and breezy conditions were fanning brush fires and wildfires up and down the East Coast, including one on Long Island, N.Y., where two blazes merged overnight, officials said Tuesday morning.

"The fire is not under control. It's burning heavily," NBCNewYork.com quoted Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone as saying at a press briefing. "We're putting as much water on it as we can."

The weather conditions made for "red flag warnings" along the East Coast, NBC weather anchor Al Roker said on TODAY. Areas from Long Island to Florida and as far west as Kentucky were under the advisory, which reflects extremely dangerous fire conditions.

In Long Island's Suffolk County, a state of emergency was declared Tuesday and mandatory evacuations were earlier ordered for an undetermined number of residents in Ridge and Manorville.

Farmers in Vietnam's central region are struggling with the mass mortalities of their lobster crops. Meanwhile, farmers in the Mekong Delta in the south are constantly fighting against heavy tiger and white-legged shrimp deaths.

The provincial Departments of Agriculture and Rural Development in the Mekong Delta report that many provinces have begun the newest shrimp crop this year -- but large amounts have succumbed to disease.

So far, 848.3 million breeder shrimp have been released on 12,412 ha by 11,563 farming households in coastal areas in Tra Vinh Province, of which over 40 million on more than 1,017 ha farmed by 800 households have die.

Fukushima to Burn Highly-Radioactive Debris

Fukushima will start burning radioactive debris containing up to 100,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogram. As Mainchi notes:

The state will start building storage facilities for debris generated by the March 2011 tsunami as early as May at two locations in a coastal area of Naraha town, Fukushima Prefecture, Environment Ministry and town officials said Saturday.

***

About 25,000 tons of debris are expected to be brought into the facilities beginning in the summer, according to the officials.

***

If more than 100,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium are found per kilogram of debris, the debris will be transferred to a medium-term storage facility to be built by the state. But if burnable debris contains 100,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium or less, it may be disposed of at a temporary incinerator to be built within the prefecture, according to the officials.

Within the 20-km-radius no-go zone spanning across Naraha and five other municipalities along the coast, debris caused by the magnitude 9.0 quake and the subsequent tsunami has amounted to an estimated 474,000 tons, much of remaining where it is.

How much radiation is that?

It is a lot.

Nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen has said that much lower levels of cesium - 5,000-8,000 bq/kg (20 times lower than what will be allowed to be burned at Fukushima) - would be sent to a special facility in the United States and buried underground for thousands of years. See this and this.

It is comparable to the levels of radioactivity found within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. See this and this.

A swarm of tornadoes that tore through the Midwest and Southeast in early March has earned the grim title of the nation's first billion-dollar weather disaster of 2012.

From March 2 through the early hours of March 3, 132 tornadoes were reported across nine states. Although those numbers are preliminary, and will undoubtedly decrease once overlapping reports are eliminated, their aftermath was devastating, causing more than $1.5 billion in damage and killing 40 people.

The storms killed four people in Ohio, but they took the greatest toll in Indiana, killing 13, and Kentucky, where 23 people died.

The costly disaster follows on the heels of a record-breaking year for devastation wrought by the vagaries of the weather and longer-term climate conditions. Last year, the United States experienced 14 separate events that caused $1 billion or more in damage. Five of those events were tornado outbreaks.