Aida Edemariam, in The Guardian

, interviews Joseph Stiglitz about his new book, written with Linda Bilmes, The Three-Trillion-Dollar War.

Taras Grescoe, (bio, slightly out of date,

here; in a Times Op-Ed called “How to Handle an Invasive Species? Eat It,” has a proposal for dealing with, among other invasive species, the Asian carp.

Closer to home, the Asian carp, which has been working its way north from the Mississippi Delta since the 1990s, is now on the verge of reaching the Great Lakes. This voracious invader, which weighs up to 100 pounds and eats half its body weight in food in a day, has gained notoriety for vaulting over boats and breaking the arms and noses of recreational anglers.

it is high time we developed a taste for invasive species

Having outcompeted all native species, it now represents 95 percent of the biomass of fish in the Illinois River and has been sighted within 25 miles of Lake Michigan. The only thing preventing this cold-water-loving species from infesting the Great Lakes, the largest body of fresh water in the world, is an electric barrier on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.

One of the great unsung epics of the modern era is the worldwide diaspora of marine invasive species. Rising water temperatures brought on by global warming have allowed mauve stingers and harmful algae to thrive far beyond their native habitats. Supertankers and cargo ships suck up millions of gallons of ballast water in distant estuaries and ferry jellyfish, cholera bacteria, seaweed, diatoms, clams, water fleas, shrimp and even good-sized fish halfway around the globe.

Thanks to the ballast water discharged by ships entering American ports, Chinese mitten crabs now infest San Francisco Bay, and the Chesapeake’s oysters are preyed upon by veined rapa whelks native to the Sea of Japan. Sixty percent of the species in the St. Lawrence River were introduced by ships that ply the seaway to Lake Ontario. Continue reading →

Matthew Wald has a piece in yesterday’s Times about the rules governing the growing piles of waste from nuclear power plants, which the federal government is obliged to store – indefinitely, for all practical purposes. [photopress:NRC_yucca_drawing.jpg,thumb,pp_image]

What’s most disturbing isn’t actually new

– Wald’s explanation of the long-standing setup is troubling enough:

• The federal government has obliged itself to “dispose” of nuclear waste for a fee of one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour
• Because it hasn’t taken the waste away on time – nuclear utilities have sued the federal government for their costs in storing the waste until it’s picked up
• it was supposed to have started picking up the waste in 1998
• this is costing about $500 million per year; because these payments are the result of lawsuits – they’re paid out of a “judgment fund,”

According to Wald,

Initially, the Energy Department tried to pay the damages out of the Nuclear Waste Fund, the money collected from the nuclear utilities, plus interest, which comes to about $30 billion. But other utilities sued, saying that if the government did that, there might not be enough money left for the intended purpose, building a repository. So the government now pays the damages out of general revenues.

The damages are large relative to the annual budget of the Energy Department, which is about $25 billion. But the money comes out of the Treasury, not the Energy Department. Under a law passed in the Carter administration, such payments are recognized as obligations of the federal government and no further action by Congress is required to make them.

The money comes out of a federal account called the Judgment Fund, which is used to pay settlements and court-ordered payments. For the last five years, the fund has made payments in the range of $700 million to $1 billion, with the average payment being $80,000 to $150,000. In contrast, payments to utilities have been in the tens of millions.

Matthew Wald, “As Nuclear Waste Languishes, Expense to U.S. Rises,” The New York Times

, 17 February 2008.

Perhaps a useful goal here would be, at a minimum, to attribute these costs to the cost per kilowatt hour of nuclear power. Strong evidence that, before we see nuclear power as central to our energy problems, we hedge our bets with safer options.

Lawrence Livermore lab explanation of the Yucca Mountain project here.