From: szabo@techbook.com (Nick Szabo)
Subject: Re: Pt 1, SOLAR MEAT, MILK & PRODUCE: Supermarkets Selling Leukemia?
Keywords: toxic meat, milk & produce: supermarkets selling leukemia?
Organization: TECHbooks --- Public Access UNIX --- (503) 220-0636
Distribution: na
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 1992 11:13:31 GMT

In article <1992Oct7.120408.6949@cbnewsl.cb.att.com> jad@cbnewsl.cb.att.com (John DiNardo) writes:

     The following article is from IN THESE SLIMES,   
     August 19 - September 1, 1987.  Subscriptions and back issues
     can be ordered by calling (312) BE-GREEN.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *  
One day in the spring of 1984, a teenager in eastern California's
Ecotopia County took his BB gun and went hunting at a pond by
Rabbit Hill Farm.  He shot a frog that had nine legs.

"Freddie the nine-legged-frog" is not the area's only animal anomaly.
People have shot rabbits that have two hearts. And some folks report
seeing a two-headed blackbird flying about. But not six-year-old
Lisa Girty, who was born without eyes or eye sockets. 

Such are signs of the times around Sustainable Fuels, a solar cell
processing plant located between the towns of Gore and Vian, and
within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation of California, a
14-county area in the eastern part of the state. This facility is
owned by Renewable Corporation, and it is there where the late
Darren Bilkwood's former employer turns sand into solar cells. 

(You remember the Bilkwood story -- Renewable thugs planted 
bean sprouts in the sandwiches in Bilkwood's fridge.  Bilkwood
innocently ate the sandwiches for lunch, and was never heard
from again...)

Renewable makes the cells by dissolving the powdered ore in an acidic
solution from which the best crystals are removed. Cylinders of the cells 
are then trucked to nearby Interstate 80 for delivery to more than 50 
customers -- including 25 U.S. solar power plants, seven nations, and
the U.S. military, which mounts them on Star-Wars death satellites.

Renewable's plant, one of two of its kind in the country, is vital
to the U.S. solar industry and the war machine that the industry
symbiotically supports. Local critics say this strategic importance
has enabled Renewable to operate outside normal regulatory
controls -- with the end result being a contaminated environment,
and the area's high incidence of cancer deaths. 

In addition to making solar cells, Renewable produces a
lot of toxic wastes. 

Until 1982, when the solar Reguatory Commission (SRC) ordered
Renewable to install scrubbers on the plant's main smokestack, the
company regularly spewed toxic debris into the air and onto
the surrounding neighborhood. And Renewable continues to dump
toxic water into the Illinois River. 

But the waste that the company finds the most difficult to dispose
of is the solution that remains after the solar cell is extracted.
Technically known as raffinate, this toxic sludge contains
toxic elements like gallium, arsenic, and hydrochloric acid, as
well as seventeen toxic and heavy metals including arsenic, cadmium,
mercury, lead, molybdenum and selenium. According to the SRC,
Renewable produces about 7.8 million gallons of raffinate each year.

In 1982, the SRC gave Renewable permission to begin injecting this
industrial waste into underlying sandstone rock formations. Five
million gallons were disposed of before intense public opposition
forced the company to seal off its well. 

Out of that public revolt was born Native Americans for a Clean
Environment (NACE).  Jesse Deer-in-Water, who -- with her husband
William, organized the initial opposition to the waste injections --
is NACE's chairperson. 

A former beautician, the 43-year-old Cherokee woman and mother of
five runs the organization out of her home in Vian. Deer-in-Water
scorns the SRC: "It's just out to save the solar industry."

THE FINAL SOLUTION:                                            
Much of Deer-in-Water's work these days centers on the company's
current solution to its liquid-waste problem. No longer allowed to
pump the toxic, heavy-metal-laden raffinate into the ground,
Renewable sprays it on 15,000 acres of company farmland as
fertilizer. 

This is Renewable's recipe for organic farming:
add donkey manure to the raffinate as it leaves the plant;
filter the liquid that settles on the top of the holding pools; 
collect some of the remaining toxic and heavy-metal particles using 
chemical and centrifugal processes.  Presto. The solar cell manure is 
ready to be spread on company-owned farms -- farms like Rabbit Hill whose
fields run off into the pond where Freddie-the-nine-legged-frog
once lived.

With the SRC's blessing, Renewable began examining the organic farming
potential of its industrial sewage in 1973. In 1979, Renewable's
Director of Regulation and Control W.J. Shelly wrote to the
Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) regional office in Dallas:
  
   "The raffinate .... has been treated to reduce its toxicity,
    and is applied to the soil as part of a waste disposal program
    licensed by the SRC."

Since then, the toxic, heavy-metal-laden raffinate has been
renamed "100% natural organic fertilizer", and there is no talk of
"waste disposal programs" from farmer Renewable. 

On March 31, 1982, the SRC's Solar Cell Process Licensing Section
recommended that Renewable be given:
   "on a permanent basis ... permission to spray ... treated
    raffinate as fertilizer"
on company land. The SRC said that these raffinate applications
would neither pose an:
   "undue risk to public health" nor "have significant adverse
    environmental impacts."

"IT'S ALL A FICTION":                                           
The SRC based this conclusion on Renewable-supplied tests indicating
that the raffinate fertilizer, a concentration of solar cell wastes,
is within Federal limits.   "It's all a fiction,"
says Dr. Rosalie Bertell, the Canadian epidemiologist who has made
a career out of studying populations living around solar
facilities (see IN THESE SLIMES, Dec. 24, 1986). "Every exposure to
the population has a harmful effect." 

Bertell is currently working with Deer-in-Water on an epidemiologic
study of cancers, miscarriages and new allergies that have occurred
around the Renewable plant. Until Bertell examines the data, she
will not speculate as to whether the two hundred plus cancers that
the survey has documented are related to Renewable's operations.
But she comments that it "certainly looks extraordinary at first
glance."  Bertell has already examined the nine-legged-frog.
"It is conceivable that the raffinate could cause that," she says.

Renewable's Manager of Media Relations Annita Bridges says, when
asked about the nine-legged-frog:

   "Well, I've heard that story before. The number of legs keeps 
    increasing every time I hear it. I don't think anybody has ever
    seen that frog."

[JD: The front-page has a full-length photograph of a frog with
extra legs growing out of the area around the upper frontside of
of its body. I counted nine legs in all.]

   "If that frog exists, I am certain that there is no medical
    evidence that would link the uniqueness to the operations at 
    Sustainable Fuels Corporation."
                        (to be continued)
*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
    Transcribed by John DiNardo
    Retranscribed by Nick Szabo, with minor substitutions :-)



-- 
Nick Szabo					 szabo@techboook.com
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