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The Dangers of Nuclear Energy and the Need to Close Vermont Yankee

Photo: Andy Duback/Greenpeace
With nuclear energy, uranium atoms split inside a reactor, and radiation heats water to its boiling point creating steam to spin a giant turbine. It all seems like ingenious, efficient, and clean energy production. So where's the mess? Now consider plutonium, a horribly carcinogenic and highly fissionable substance, radioactive for more than half a million years. If exposed to air, it will ignite. Like little pieces of confetti, very fine plutonium particles will disperse after ignition.

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Why Food Inc. Fails: Documentary Bites Off More Than It Can Chew

After six years in the making, Robert Kenner's Food Inc. made it onto the silver screen just in time for this summer's harvest. Directed and produced by Kenner himself, and co-produced by the author who brought us Fast Food Nation, investigative journalist, Eric Schlosser, Food Inc. explores the modern diet alongside the agriculture-industrial-complex responsible for the sugary/salty/fatty provender manufactured to mollify modern dieters.

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The Privatization of the Global Freshwater Commons

Water Rights Protest, Phillipines
Around the world, scarcity of potable water is becoming a portentous matter. Rivers and streams are vanishing, and the desiccation and depletion of entire watersheds and aquifers is increasing the world over. When seeking a reason for the withering away of drinkable water and the silencing of gushing streams, it becomes obvious that there is not one sole factor contributing to this dire situation, but many. Global warming and climate change, industrial modes of production, dam construction, and water privatization all conduce to the problem of water scarcity.