The massive earthquake in Japan yesterday and the resulting tsunami has also added fears about the plant in Malaysia’s east coast which faces the Pacific Rim’s ring of fire, the world’s active volcanic region. The 8.9 magnitude earthquake in Japan and the 10-metre high tsunami it sent surging into cities and villages, sweeping away everything in its path.
Australian mining company Lynas Corporation has begun construction of the rare earth refinery in Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s home state, raising fears of a repeat of the radiation pollution in Bukit Merah, Perak that has been linked to at least eight leukemia cases in the local community there.
The Asian Rare Earth plant is now the subject of a quiet US$100 million (RM303 million) cleanup exercise by Mitsubishi Chemical which shut down the facility nearly two decades ago.
“This issue is important but the public is generally not well-versed in the negative effects. I propose we prepare leaflets to be distributed,” the opposition leader wrote to his Pakatan Rakyat (PR) colleagues in an email this week., has been going around the country for ceramahs to promote his PR’s economic programmes and promises in its Buku Jingga for the next general elections, widely expected to be held this year.
The New York Times reported this week that the refinery in Gebeng, just 70 kilometres north of Najib’s Pekan constituency, will be the first such plant outside China in nearly three decades.
Environmental hazards have made other countries wary of rare earth processing, leaving China to control 95 per cent of global supply of rare earth metals.
The metals are crucial to high technology products such as the Apple iPhone, Toyota Prius and Boeing’s smart bombs.
The newspaper said that if prices of the metals stayed at current levels, the Lynas plant would generate over RM5 billion a year in exports for Malaysia, or nearly one per cent of its entire economy.
However, Lynas corporate and business development vice president Matthew James has denied that the plant will be dangerous and told The that radiation will be minimal as the raw material used has only 2 per cent of the thorium found in the material processed in Bukit Merah.
Thorium is the radioactive element found in nearly all rare earth deposits.
PKR vice president Fuziah Salleh, who is also Kuantan MP, responded saying that a local group of citizens has been trying to raise awareness there and has echoed Anwar’s call to drum up the issue
.
PAS Youth chief Nasrudin Tantawi has also questioned the need for theplant to be located in Gebeng, some 2,500 kilometres away from Lynas’ mine in Mount Weld, Australia.
“Are the wide deserts of Australia not enough to build this factory if it is really safe as they say it is?” said Nasrudin.
China may be the epicenter of the global environmental crisis. Along the Yangtze, Yellow and Pearl rivers, fragile ecosystems meet the world's largest population and most rapacious economy. In an epic journey, Jonathan Watts, the Guardian's Asia environment correspondent, has visited the places where the world's factory is bursting at the environmental seams. In a new book, he reports what he has seen.
On his journey, Watts passes through the logging towns of China's far North and the cancer villages of industrial Henan. He visits tiger farms in the mountains of Guizhou, and stomps through the computer graveyards of Guangdong. He travels to the world's most polluted city in the mining belt of Shanxi, and to the rapidly shrinking glaciers of Xinjiang. Watts follows the new railway to the mineral-rich Tibetan plateau, which he likens to the opening of the American West in the 19th century. And he finds himself in a glamorous Barbie showroom in one of Shanghai's glitzy shopping malls. Most of the places which our traveler visits are not pretty. China is paying a hefty price for its intensive agriculture, breakneck industrialization, and rapid urbanization. Lush forests have given way to dust bowls and industrial wastelands. Plant and animal species are being extinct at a rapid pace. Millions of people are being displaced from lands that cannot sustain them anymore. Birth defects in some places reach 20 times the global average, and whole villages are dying of AIDS due to a cynical blood donation business.
Affected people are protesting against abuses, and courageous civil society activists have taken up their cause. In 2005, China registered 5,000 mass incidents and 128,000 smaller conflicts over environmental concerns. "With no democracy, China's government is being held accountable by riot", comments Watts.
During his 100,000 miles journey, the author also finds the signs of a greener future - innovative green laboratories, eco-cities and the wind farms which spruce up in the steppes of Gansu and Inner Mongolia at a rapid pace. Yet even though China leads the world in the development of renewable energy, hundreds of millions of workers and farmers strive to join the American way of life, and the country's urbanization will continue. Their demand will require a further growth of mining, logging and coal consumption. "The result is neither red nor green", comments Watts; "it is black or grey."
The six-month trip to the far corners of the Middle Kingdom is a tough slog for the author and his readers. The Chinese actors whom we meet pass so quickly that we rarely get to know them as individual people. The traveler keeps our interest alive through his own curiosity and his thoughtful insights into Chinese politics and culture. "China's political system now exhibits the worst elements of dictatorship and democracy", Watts observes: "power lies neither at the top nor at the bottom, but within a middle class of developers, polluters, and local officials who are difficult to regulate, monitor, and challenge."
Jonathan Watts understands that the world's environmental problems were not made in China, but, he says, "they are sliding past the point of no return here". The ultimate villain of his book is not the gritty miner from Shanxi, but the friendly shopper in Shanghai who, according to a survey, owns an average of two cell phones, 1.7 air conditioners, 1.7 television sets, and more than one fridge. The coal miners have been recognized as a problem, but the shoppers, who keep the wheels of mining and pollution turning, are being heralded as the saviors of the global economy. Nobody wants to stop them.
"It is unreasonable to ask China to save the world", Jonathan Watts writes at the end of his important book, "but the country forces mankind to recognize that we are all going in the wrong direction. Here, more than anywhere, the current path of human progress looks certain to lead to destruction. Here, more than anywhere, we all need to look forward and step back."
James had told that the company chose Malaysia instead of refining the ore in Australia, due to savings in already available infrastructure and labour.
He said that the plant would need a larger supply of water, natural gas, industrial land and chemicals such as lime and sulphuric and hydrochloric acid — all readily available in Malaysia.
“Each container contains about US$1 million (RM3.04 million) of rare earth so the transport cost is negligible,”
A Harvard University study published on Feb 17, 2011, has determined that the true costs of using coal to generate electricity in America are between $330 and $500 billion dollars annually. The study, "Mining Coal, Mounting Costs -- The Life Cycle Consequences of Coal" by the Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment examines the costs for so-called "cheap coal" that don't show up on the monthly electric bill: the so-called "externalities" or hidden costs. In a time of huge budget deficits, Americans -- and our leaders in Washington -- should be looking at these costs.
All businesses try to externalize their costs. For example, Toyota requires its auto parts suppliers to warehouse their parts and deliver them to the assembly line on a "just-in-time" basis, so that Toyota doesn't have to build huge storage warehouses. Toyota's just-in-time system thus externalizes their costs for warehousing the parts onto their suppliers.
In the 1960's, soda manufacturers sold their product in returnable bottles. There was much less litter, because people would pick up the bottles and return them for the 2 cent or 5 cent deposit. In order to increase their corporate profits, Coca Cola and Pepsi switched to aluminum cans and then to plastic soda bottles. Today our roadsides and streams are filled with trash, and over 40 percent of the litter is drink containers. The taxpayers foot the bill when highway workers clean up the trash, and the soda companies make bigger profits: they have externalized their costs onto the public.
Coal companies are adept at externalizing their costs. For example:
- When Appalachian streams become polluted with sediment and heavy metals because of mountaintop removal mining, the public pays to clean up the water so it's safe to drink -- but they don't pay the cost on their electric bill, they pay it on their water bill!
- When a child in North Carolina suffers an asthma attack or ear infection because of a coal-burning TVA power plant in Tennessee, the North Carolina family pays the cost of the child's medication -- not TVA.
- When a community in the Appalachian Mountains suffers from depreciated property values because a coal company is showering the town with coal dust, the homeowners pay the cost when they sell their homes and move away.
- And when heavy coal trucks destroy the roads and bridges in the mountain towns, the taxpayers have to pay to fix the roads -- not the trucking or coal companies. According to the study, the price of coal-generated electricity would be.18 per kW-Hr higher if it actually included these externalized costs.
A few years ago the Indiana University School of Medicine did a study and determined that the public health cost of burning coal for Hoosiers was $5 billion annually. Pollution from burning coal causes heart disease, lung disease, and asthma and puts mercury into the environment. The American Lung Association estimates that 24,000 excess deaths nationally are caused by pollution from coal-fired power plants every year.
In Kentucky, the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (MACED) did a study which found that in 2006 coal generated $528 million in revenue for the state of Kentucky, but it cost $643 million in state expenditures. Similarly, in West Virginia, Downstream Strategies issued a report which determined that coal's net costs to West Virginia for 2009 were $97 million.
The numbers in the Harvard study are astronomical, and will hopefully stir some public debate about coal's true costs. About five years ago, when Ontario's leaders calculated the public health care costs of burning coal and compared them to other forms of electricity generation, they found that burning coal was overwhelmingly more expensive than renewables and hydro-power. Because Canada's public health care system means that the health care costs of burning coal are being paid out of government coffers, Ontario is nowphasing out the use of coal. Here in America, we just put the costs of coal on the backs of poor people without health insurance and little kids with asthma, while the coal company makes huge profits. We often hear that alternative sources of energy, such as wind power and solar power are "too expensive" and not cost-competitive with "cheap" sources of energy like coal. Now we know that is not true.
James said.
James also said that the Kuantan facility, located in the Gebeng industrial area, will be the largest rare earth processing plant in the world once completed next year.
No comments:
Post a Comment