Pandora's Promise

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1992193/

In the spring term of AP Environmental Science class, energy is a big part of our discussion. The movie, Pandora's Promise, delivered a comprehensive understanding and study of the newest yet most unpredictable of all energy sources, the nuclear energy. The movie discusses the development and the future of nuclear energy as well as introducing the possible downfalls that people have fear in this new type of power.

Pandora’s Promise opens by presenting thousands of environmentalists marching through the streets holding their signs protesting against the usage of Nuclear Energy. “There’s no compromise in the defense of mother Earth.” is the motto of their action. Which raises the question of safety issues surrounded nuclear energy.

This documentary featured several pro-nuclear scientists and activities, who demonstrate their view on the topic and the reason why they believe nuclear power is the solution to the world's energy crisis. Many of those people have once been an antinuclearist before, however, new developments and information changed their minds, “whenever you change your mind drastically, you start to wonder what you were thinking”. This film, even though titled as 'Pandora's Promise', focused on shifting the common misconception of the safety of nuclear energy and making more and more people become the supporters of this new, powerful, and mysterious energy source.

The common misconception of nuclear power often relates to the fact that nuclear power is such a dominating factor in military warfare. People's fears come from the atomic bombs which have completely wiped out a city during world war two, as well as some nuclear leakage, happened throughout the history of nuclear power that ruined a city for decades. People see nuclear power as a “window into an Armageddon”. The word "Nuclear" was made to be feared by people. One activist in the film explains how his childhood is related to the fear of nuclear and how this could block blind people from seeing the benefit of nuclear energy.

The public generally chose to ignore the good and positive things and pay a lot of attention to issues and negative results. When few of the nuclear energy sites have failures, it swings the public opinion completely. For example, the airplane, what people do not realize is the fact that only couple planes have crushed per year yet there are thousands of millions of airplanes flying every single day. Also, the advertisement from the antinuclearism also contributes to creating a fearful image for nuclear energy in people's mind.

The movie progresses to discuss the world's energy crisis and the topic of energy as a whole. The movie claims that energy equals life quality, and by the year of 2100, the world's energy need will be triple the need we have right now. This explained the need for a new powerful energy source that can meet those demands in order for us to continue human practices.

Coal is the most common resources of energy. The movie exhibits the safety issues of this type of energy source, "fossil fuel combustion leads to over 3,000,000 deaths each year through air pollution”. The movie proposed the solution to the world's energy crisis: Nuclear energy. Nuclear power, behind wind power, is the second safest way of producing energy. The common misconception of nuclear radiation often leads to cancer is that human is exposed to radiation all the time. One kind of radiation is called background radiation and people are all exposed to it all the time and nothing bad would follow up from that. The difficulty is that the public opinion is very hard to swing, once they have a conception of radiation, they rarely do any more research before settling down in their minds.

Nuclear waste is the last topic in this film. There are 70,000 tons of accumulated nuclear waste being stored in dry casks in parking lots and storage lots. The waste can be used in the future as a recycled source of energy; despite the common belief,  nuclear power is actually a renewable resource. The problem of getting support for the nuclear energy project is the public misconception of nuclear energy and mass production of nuclear power does mean that people are privy to nuclear weaponry, which in many people's point of view is a huge threat to their lives.

In general, the movie discusses the origin of nuclear energy and the problem it faces right now is not technological issues but rather the human factor. Public opinion is the string that is pulling the energy production backward. The misconception of the dangerous nature of nuclear power restrained our progress to more potential energy.

This movie confirmed many of my conception regarding nuclear power and also correct some misconception of my own. I always believe that with proper method, technology, and funding, nuclear energy is the best way to be the main source of energy. Sustainable development will not be happening if our society still heavily depend on fossil fuel related energy. Nuclear power is green and productive, it is also controllable despite the contradicting beliefs. With the increasing demand for energy all over the world, previous energy generating methods are getting outdated, they can no longer meet the world's demand. Therefore nuclear power is one of the solutions to the world's energy crisis, however, it still needs to be taken care of very precisely. Any incident can possibly lead to detrimental results.

James Norton

On April 7th, Mr. James Norton. came to Proctor and talked about Ganges River and its impact with relation to climate change. On the opening, he said, "If there is magic in this world it is contained in water. “ At first I was full of doubt regarding that statement, but his presentation completely changed my point of view, water is indeed magical. 

"Water gives life but it can also strip it away. “ This is the second quote coming from Mr.James, "It turns rock into sand, turns bone into dust.” As he said these things I started to imagine the image of rock being slowly crashing into the sand and a pile of bone vanishes into dust. It is such a powerful image that really exhibit the power of water. 

Mr. James said that we never have the right amount of water, it is either way too much to become fluid or we don’t have enough. He went on to give some examples of water-related issues in third world countries: Rather than going to school, a kid spends an hour or so walking back and forth between the nearest safe water drinking tap. for 860 million people around the world. 

Then he introduced Ganges River.Ganges River is the most iconic river in the world. There was a lore regarding the birth of this river, someone was looking to place the remains of his ancestors, and he found the Ganges River. 

Mr. James said he wants to know a lot about Ganges river, it starts out from mount Himalayas and all the way to India. Different from all the other gigantic river, Ganges river did not start with small streams but rather a pile of water rushing out between the mountains. He even set out a journey to find the origins of the Ganges river. 

The Himalayas collectively are the biggest chunk of ice except for the two poles, those ice and snow give birth to some of the most impactful rivers in the world and supports the most people in the world. 

He led a team that does the water test to all the source of water in the world. There are plenty Himalayas floods happening around the area, he went on to show some pictures of the flood and other water destructions. He follows the Ganges river to go downstream and witness the huge dam that is the first man-made obstacle of Ganges River. 

Ganges River also resembles an very important spiritual value to the Indians, including the resemblance of life and death. He went on to play a video of the spiritual practice people do around Ganges River. 

He pointed out that most people in Indian don’t see the pollution that is happening to Ganges River. And numerous Indian people explained to him that because the River is mother to them, their cloth and dirt won’t affect her since she will always be pure. However, there are also people that are trying hard to resolve this issue locally. 

There are a lot of diseases living in Ganges River that can easily spread to humans through food, clothing etc. It has affected 20 million people already. 

He then plays several video to exhibit the changes that is happening to India and Ganges River. And the result from water test shows pollution in everywhere, to Himalayas to the down stream. 

Ganges River is a river that has been revered by so many people for such a long time, even though it is being polluted and damaged by humans and non-human factors, it still supports so many people today. Fortunately, there are people working today to save the Ganges.

Lauren Culler

On April 6th, Dr. Lauren Culler came to Proctor and talked about climate change. Dr. Culler works at the Institute of Arctic Studies and Environmental Studies, which are both at Dartmouth College. She’s a scientist who researched at the arctics. 

        Dr. Culler is from Maryland and worked at a lab in universities. They looked at the effects of urbanization on stream ecosystems. She was interested in the human impacts on the environment. She worked in the department of entomology, which is the study of insects. She and her friend collected insects in wetlands to study biodiversity. After she got her master’s degree, she moved to Dartmouth and became an arctic scientist since then. 

        Dr. Culler went through some background information on the arctics with us, such as, “the arctic is all the way at the top of the Earth, and so because of that, it’s really cold. It’s part of the cryosphere, and it contains an incredible amount of ice.” She emphasized on how cold the arctic is and then moved on to Polar Amplification, Positive Feedback, and Self-reinforcing. It’s a concern about the arctic because these cycles are “causing really rapid loss of ice, sea ice in particular.” When the ice sheet on the Arctic ocean starts melting, the darker coloration absorbs more energy from the Sun and will cause more melts. This positive feedback and self-reinforcing cycles are the major causes of the significant decrease of sea ice. 

The dramatic loss of sea ice causes interdisciplinary problems. Arctic animals such as “polar bears, seals, and walruses, really rely on sea ice for their forging, for hunting. When the sea ice goes away, that could have pretty devastating impacts on animals that rely heavily on sea ice.” 

Global warming will affect the entire ecosystem. The increase of temperature will directly influence ectotherms. Ectotherms are animals who don’t have the ability to regular their body temperature and the increase or change in the environment will affect these organisms. The climate change also affects the species growth rate and has a greater impact on many species because in some places it’s not cold enough to kill pests or not hot enough for some species to survive. 

       Greenland is mostly an ice sheet and not a lot of people live there. Dr. Culler showed a couple of pictures of her and her colleagues with some of her students on hills looking out at the ice sheets. They dug down into the soil beneath vegetation to see how far they can dig. They can only dig so far before they’ll hit the permafrost, which is frozen soil, “and it’s like you hit it and you can’t go any further down. It’s been frozen for a really long time and it sort of limits the amount of biological activity going on in this area. ”

Insects are great tools for observing climate change because they’re easy to collect and experiment. Dr. Culler showed us a picture of her friend with a ridiculous amount of arctic mosquitos on his back. I was surprised when I learned that mosquitos in the arctic are the most abundant animal. I never would’ve thought that mosquitos could survive in such cold environment and reproduce in freezing water. They could collect about 2000 mosquitos in around 8 hours. Dr. Culler said that the mosquitos are thriving because they lay eggs in the water but they don’t have many predators. However, it is very unexpected when they found that as the globe got warmer, some ponds started disappearing. Her idea is that “Greenland is a very dry tundra, so the permafrost doesn’t have very much water in it and it doesn’t get a lot precipitation. What we think is happening is that we get these really warm… which causes evaporation. It also causes an increase in evapotranspiration so plants are using more water.” Because the surrounding plants are absorbing more water, the water in the pond leaks through the cracks at the bottom of the pond and leaves the pond more quickly, causing the drying of the pond. 

Global warming and climate change has so many effects on the entire world, but more significantly on the arctic. Just a few degrees warmer could cause a series of changes and lead to many consequences that harm the animals and insects. There are many concerns caused by the general idea of “global warming.” I learned a lot about the series of problems that climate change could have on the arctics. If global warming could have so much influence on the arctics, which is only a small part of the entire Earth, it is obvious that it’s causing countless problems for the entire environment and the ecosystem. Although I never underestimated the impact of climate change, I learned more about many seemingly insignificant problems caused by global warming that could accumulate and cause a disaster. 

Citation: 

Lauren E. Culler

Years of Living Dangerously

I watched season 1 episode 8 and 9 of the Years of Living Dangerously on April 1st. In this series, Matt Damon, Michael Hall, and Tomas Friedman investigate the impact of extreme heat on human health and mortality in several places. 

Matt Damon wanted to show people the significance of climate change, so he traveled to Bangladesh. He found out that in Bangladesh, climate change "is a matter of life and death." It was very different from where he came from because not a lot of people cared or even believed in climate change.

Many scientists in L.A. are concerned about heat waves because it could affect human health and even kill people. The health issues of what heat waves could lead to were misunderstood earlier, because heat deaths is similar to other health issues such as heart attacks and respiratory problems.

I think it's pretty sad that it usually takes someone's life to attract people's attention and realize the severity of an issue. The summer of L.A killed 170 people, including an athlete who died on the field. People started taking the issues of global warming seriously as more and more people die from heat from all over the world.

Matt Damon visited Dr. Atiq Rahman, a climate scientist. He wanted to understand why climate change has such a huge impact on Bangladesh. Since Bangladesh is located at a very low level, “a quarter of the land here is less than 7 feet above sea level." Moreover, Bangladesh already has many rain precipitation, sea level rising that's caused by global warming could inundate Bangladesh. According to Dr. Atiq Rahman, 17% of the land and population will be seriously affected and inundated by global warming. The only way out of this disaster is migration. According to a political science professor, Dr. Tasneem Siddiqi, 75% of the migrants had moved out of Bangladesh because of the rising trend of global warming. The living environment for people was terrible since it's overpopulated and crowded. Many incidents such as building collapses had killed thousands of workers. Moreover, with many lands and building covered by water, diseases come to the picture easily with insanitation. Infections and diseases added more bodies to the pile of the dead.

In the interview about climate change with President Obama, Obama claimed to reduce the use of fossil fuels gradually and establish policies to protect the environment, such as the Clean Air Act and Carbon taxation. The difficulty about fully dedicating to these policies is that Democrats are not in full support because they rely financially on heavy industries. Supporting these policies would decrease their profit, which I think is a ridiculous reason when we're talking about life and death involving billions of people in the future generation.

Global warming is an issue that doesn't show its severity immediately, but it's like the theory with putting a frog in warm water. Slowly and gradually, the water, or in our case, the Earth, warms up and get hotter and hotter, until we realize we're being cooked and it's too late to stop it. People don't see the danger because it's not obvious yet. But when it is, it's too late. Unfortunately, there are places in the world that are greatly influenced by climate change, and global warming is a deathly weapon to the people, such as those in Bangladesh. People are suffering from a series of consequences of global warming a lot more than we are. Even if a lot of us don't see the power of global warming, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. To preserve this planet and continue species' survival, we all have to work together and take actions without hesitation.

Cradle to Cradle - William McDonough

In the Ted talk video of "Cradle to cradle design" by William McDonough, I learned a lot about the great solutions designers have to help stop global warming.



When William McDonough said,

“The fundamental issue is that, for me, design is the first signal of human intentions, ” 

I agree with McDonough’s viewpoint. When humans are trying to achieve something, the only way to make things easier is to design it. For example, because people had intensions of bringing all their stuff in one container, we designed bags. We intend those bags to be more convenient and light-weighted for us to carry around, so we designed bags with wheels and they became luggages. Some of our designs may have caused different consequences, such as having leads in pencils or cancer-causing chemicals in bathing ducks for babies, the initial intention was to write, or entertain babies, instead of trying to get people sick or even die. When we want cool air on a hot summer, we designed fans and air-conditioners. However, the consequences these products might have caused to damage the environment was not the intentions of these designs.  



In response to his statement:

"what we realize today is that modern culture appears to have adopted a strategy of tragedy. If we come here and say, "Well, I didn't intend to cause global warming on the way here," and we say, "That's not part of my plan," then we realize it's part of our de facto plan. Because it's the thing that's happening because we have no other plan."

I believe that we have a strategy of tragedy. I am confident that we have plans and treatments to the situation of global warming and there are actions to improve our future conditions if global warming isn’t stopped. There are many ways to prevent global warming and many people have awareness of what’s going on with our environment. Even little plans such as not eating meat for one meal a day for everyone in the world, requests for beef production and cow stock would decrease and thus it will lead to less amount of methane gas released into the atmosphere. Even this talk itself has shown many solutions to help save our environment. Having been to the environmental march in New York two years ago and currently living in eco dorm during green dorm challenge, I have many reasons to believe that we are facing and treating and fixing the environmental problems with valid and scientific plans.




Although McDonough believes that design determines our interactions with nature and how we value it, I think that nature shapes the way we design. If nature isn’t the way it is, then we wouldn’t have designed certain things as they are. For example, if we’re in a place like the North pole or South pole and we’re going through the polar night when the sun won’t be up for about six months, we won’t be able to rely on solar panels to provide us energy or electricity. Another example would be if we lack a certain material in nature, then we obviously wouldn’t use it to build or design something else. Moreover, architecture is also a type of designing. Speaking from personal experiences, the buildings in Shanghai and those in Andover are very different. From structure to facility, the campus in both places vary significantly. The buildings’ sizes, the number of stories, and requirements for heaters all vary due to the different environments of the locations. Thus, nature has a great impact on how designs turn out.



A cradle to cradle design is something that is designed to be completely recyclable or reusable. An example for a cradle to cradle design would be a kind of shoes from Nike that has infinitely recyclable polyesters for the top and biodegradable soles for the bottom.
The two metabolisms are biological and technological. In McDonough’s project of a designed cradle to cradle city, the wastes we flush down the toilet are taken in to “construct the wetlands for habitat restoration. And then it makes natural gas, which then goes back into the city to power the fuel for the cooking for the city.” Then the compost will be taken back and act as fertilizers to the farmings they have on the top of the roofs of the buildings. An example for technical metabolism would be the Shaw carpet that is infinitely reusable. The nylon in the carpet would go back to caprolactam and then go back to carpet.



As an environmentalist, William McDonough is really a hero and genius to come up with all the practical and cool designs that could save us significant amount of energy. I admire him for using his knowledge on something so cool and environmental-friendly. I'm really glad to see people like him to stand up and use their knowledge to design things that could save the Earth.

Kent Armstrong visited AP Environmental Science during E block on February 6th. As the owner of TerraStryke, Kent introduced us to bio remediation. He told us that he has been in the industry for around 35 or 36 years, and the purpose of his job is to restore contaminated environment.

He talked about how the Brownfields project clean up and redevelop contaminated sites so they could be reused. The idea is to "bring this back into a revenue generating property," such as apartments and offices. The Greenfield is "an area that has not been developed yet," and the Greenfields project is to keep the place pristine and not contaminated. 

As Alan asked about the difference between a Superfund cite and a Brownfield, Kent repsponded: "a Brownfield is more often a private investment, that often times will go get a grant or a loan... is pretty much doing all the work based on grant loan." A Superfund cite has a greater impact and is "impacting more people, more places, more water, and it costs a ton." At a private project, cleaning up dirt or trash is charged in tons but the projects are still under your control, instead of under the rule makers'. However, at a Superfund site is controlled by the government and it creates and then implements the plan without the owner of the property have any say in it. And "anytime the government makes the plan it always cost you more money, because there's so many more people..." involved.

 When he talked about how we determine a site's value and liability, he used his example of checking the Osram company. He said he found "mercury even in a dust form" in the tile of the kitchen. Kent was fired from the job because "I made them aware of the health and safety risk they were exposed to." He was never to be allowed to set foot on Osram property again although he kept doing his job for two and a half years. "It gets hard core man, it gets pretty hardcore." Some of the contaminants that could be found at these sites are metals (lead, mercury, calcium), which are in-organics that cannot be destroyed, solvents (chlorinated, dry cleaners, manufacturing facilities) that are organics that can be destroyed, and petroleum hydrocarbons (gasoline, Diesel).

Kent's job can be divided into four phases. The first is mainly to walk around the property and make visual assessments to the property by walking or driving, checking the ground to see if there's stain and some records. Then they move onto phase two where they "collect samples... From those samples we analyze them..." They're not delineating or saying where the problem is but to tell them what they found in what. After being informed and if they still want the property, Kent would move onto phase three assessment. In phase three, Kent starts delineating. "I'm giving them an idea of what's the magnitude and the scope necessary, associated with your property that you wanna buy to make it so it's functional." This phase gives perspectives of the strategies and efforts required to realize the site compliance. Then in phase four they design remediation and implementation. "How do we clean it up? One of the most expensive way to do it is incineration." Some of the other ways are excavation, stabilization, and bio-remediation (augmentation, bio-stimulation), etc.

After a 48 minute lecture from Kent, I definitely learned a lot about his company and the techniques he uses to assess properties. I am interested by the science behind it. Moreover, I really hope that with the work that Kent and his company does to assess the chemicals and contaminants at sites and properties, more people (owner of the properties) will put time and effort (or money) into cleaning those sites and getting rid of the hazardous chemicals in the environment. I believe his work will help people understand more about toxic wastes and therefore make the environment more healthy. His presentation enlightened me about bio-remediation and I'm glad to see people treating and purifying our one and only Earth. 

TB 117

There is no evidence of flame retardants texture in my dorm, Eco. All the label I can find on the common room and inside my room has no sign of fire retardants.

Below is the chart:


Concluding Questions:

1. I did not find any flame retardant products in my dorm.

2. The most abundant product found to be dosed in flame retardants should be sofa in the common area and foldable chairs in the meeting house.

3. I say chair is probably used more often than the sofa in my dorm since people usually do there homework and other activities on chair.

4. I think both the sofa and chair shares the same amount of risk of affecting health with flame retardants. People are constantly exposed to this type of furniture therefore the exposure rate is fairly high and increase the chance of health risk.

5. After watching TOXIC HOT SEAT, I think the most appropriate way to address the issue of PBDEs are to limit the amount of them adding into the furniture and try to develop other form of flame retardants that would not cause so many health issues. Also more research should be done before those products are added into our furnitures to prevent such health risk.

6. My concern is that although flame retardants are bad for human health and environment health, they do stop the fire from expanding and prevent fire incidents from happening. If we decided that PBDEs have more harm than they have in benefit, what sort of way do we have to stop fire incidents from happening?