Evolution response to human waste

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Mutated fish have adapted to freakish amounts of toxic waste

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The good news is that after four decades of factories dumping toxic waste into New Bedford Harbor, fish there are still alive, even thriving. The bad news is that the 3-inch-long Atlantic killifish are full of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), now-banned chemicals that were used in electrical equipment, paint, and plastics. (Poor killifish! They were already soaking up mercury, and now this.)

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One of their receptor proteins has dulled so that PCBs no longer kill them. Cool, right? Not so fast, says Vice:

[T]he presence of killifish at New Bedford has had some impacts higher up on the food chain. Though they thrive in the sediment, they still carry extremely dangerous doses of PCBs that are transferred to larger fish, and ultimately humans, when they’re preyed on.

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So while killifish have evolved in response to pollution, it’s hardly evidence that pollution is anything but harmful.

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Thankfully the EPA is working on cleaning up the harbor, because three-eyed fish are cool in The Simpsons but less so in real life.

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Ah, Yucca — the juggernaut of U.S. nuclear waste policy issues for the past several decades. Should we bury our nasties there or not?

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Even after 5 years of scientific research related to nuclear waste, I still haven’t formed a strong yes or no opinion. In fact, I think the complicated nature of the problem is a big part of why I find it so fascinating. The answer I usually go with is that I think I could maybe support the site itself, but I can’t support the project the way the U.S. government has been planning it. Here are some pros and cons, each of which will eventually get its own blog post.

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Pros
1. On-site interim storage can only last so long, and that stuff has to go somewhere.
2. It is in a fairly remote, sparsely populated area.
3. The government already owns the land.
4. The mountain is located in a large basin (the southern Great Basin), so if nasties do get into the water, they will hopefully be contained in just that one area of the country.
5. Supposedly with the planned engineered barriers (a big steel can, basically) the site is good enough that everything will be a-ok for thousands of years. This is according to a computer program that tries to take everything we know about the site into account. This Discover article spends some time describing the program.
6. Sunk cost: The U.S. has already spent over $10 billion prepping for Yucca. Do we really want to start over?

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Cons
1. It is unfair to the state of Nevada, which doesn’t have a single nuclear power plant and is resolutely against accepting the waste. There is some discussion about this on Alas! A blog.
2. It is only about 100 miles from Las Vegas.
3. Transporting all the waste out there is not straightforward.
4. It’s in the Basin and Range Province. That means earthquakes and maybe even volcanoes. The main concern in technical circles is actually not a big fat whopper of a shake-down so much as increased fracture formation, leading to more water dribbling in, meaning more corrosion and dissolution. Still.
5. There is an enormous amount of uncertainty in the models for what will happen, especially if you really have to try to predict out to, say, 1 million years. There is so much uncertainty that it is unclear how meaningful any assurance of long-term safety based on these models actually is.
6. I’ve heard the dryness of the area sometimes mentioned as a pro. Well, it’s not actually that dry, and I’m not actually convinced this isn’t a con, because it means you have an oxidizing environment.

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