Electrical Fire Knocks Out Spent Fuel Cooling at Nebraska Nuke Plant

A fire [1] in an electrical switch room on Tuesday briefly knocked out cooling for a pool holding spent nuclear fuel at the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant [2] outside Omaha, Neb., plant officials said.

The safety of deep pools used to store used radioactive fuel at nuclear plants has been an issue since the accident at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant in March. If the cooling water a pool is lost, the used nuclear fuel could catch fire and release radiation.

As ProPublica reported earlier, fire safety is a continuing concern [3] at the country's 104 commercial reactors, as is the volume of spent fuel [4] piling up at plants.

Officials at Fort Calhoun said the situation at their plant came nowhere near to Fukushima's. They said it would have taken 88 hours for the heat produced by the fuel to boil away the cooling water.

Workers restored cooling in about 90 minutes, and plant officials said the temperature in the pool only increased by two degrees.

The fire, reported at 9:30 a.m., led to the loss of electrical power for the system that circulates cooling water through the spent fuel pool, according to a report [5] from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A chemical fire suppression system discharged, and the plant's fire brigade cleared smoke from the room and reported that the fire was out at 10:20 a.m., the NRC said.

Mike Jones, a spokesman for the plant's owner, the Omaha Public Power District, said Fort Calhoun has a backup pump to provide water to the spent fuel in case the main system is lost. That pump, which runs on a separate power supply from the rest of the plant, was inspected and standing by on Tuesday, but plant operators restored main power to the pool before the emergency pump was needed, he said.

Fort Calhoun's single reactor has been shut down since April for refueling. The plant had already been operating under a heightened level of alert because of nearby flooding on the Missouri River, the NRC said. The cause of the fire remained under investigation this morning.

Exclusive: Multiple independent lab tests confirm oil in Gulf shrimp

Experts operating states apart confirm toxic content in not just shrimp, but crab and fish too

The federal government is going out of its way to assure the public that seafood pulled from recently reopened Gulf of Mexico waters is safe to consume, in spite of the largest accidental release of crude oil in America's history.

However, testing methodologies used by the government to deem areas of water safe for commercial fishing are woefully inadequate and permit high levels of toxic compounds to slip into the human food chain, according to a series of scientific and medical professionals interviewed by Raw Story.

In two separate cases, a toxicologist and a chemist independently confirmed their seafood samples contained unusually high volumes of crude oil and harmful hydrocarbons -- and some of this food was allegedly being sent to market.

One test, conducted by a chemist from Mobile, Alabama, employed a rudimentary chemical analysis of shrimp pulled from waters near Louisiana and found "oil and grease" in their digestive tracts.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) tests, which are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), have focused on the animal's flesh, with samples shelled and cleaned before undergoing examination.

Unfortunately, many Gulf coast residents prepare shrimp whole, tossing the creatures into boiling water shells and all.  More...

How Japan Caught and Hid $2Billion Worth of Rare Tuna – 2006  Sydney Morning Herald

AUSTRALIA'S top fisheries manager has revealed Japan illegally took $2 billion worth of southern bluefin tuna, effectively killing the stock commercially.

An investigation into the imperiled fishery found Japanese fishers and suppliers from other countries caught up to three times the Japanese quota each year for the past 20 years, and hid it.

The Australian Fisheries Management Authority's managing director, Richard McLoughlin, said it was an enormous international fraud. "Essentially the Japanese have stolen $2 billion worth of fish from the international community, and have been sitting in meetings for 15 years saying they are as pure as the driven snow. And it's outrageous."

Mr McLoughlin was speaking at an ANU seminar in a speech recorded and posted on the internet. The official findings of the inquiry were presented at an international meeting in Canberra in July, but remained confidential.

Mr McLoughlin's revelations raised the prospect yesterday that other fisheries in the Pacific and Indian oceans were pilfered. There were also renewed calls for southern bluefin to be protected under international wildlife law.

One of the world's most expensive fish, southern bluefin migrate around the temperate waters of Australia and grow to about 200 kilograms. A $280 million industry is based on catching the fish in the Great Australian Bight and cage-fattening at Port Lincoln.

The Japanese overcatch was uncovered by Australian industry figures who scrutinised publicly available market documents.

An independent review was ordered after the Federal Government put its concerns to Japan at a meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna. The Japanese also sought a review of Australian southern bluefin tuna farming.

Mr McLoughlin detailed the fraud on August 1 during a wide-ranging speech on national fisheries reform at a lunchtime seminar to the Australian National University's Crawford School of Economics and Government.

"It's just been revealed that … on a 6000-tonne national quota, Japan's been catching anything between 12,000 and 20,000 tonnes for the last 20 years, and hiding it. And has probably killed that stock … And that's one of our major fisheries in Australia."

At the end of the seminar he was asked how it happened. "Largely it's [because] the Japanese only ever allowed Japanese observers on Japanese boats. And essentially it was just plain fraud.

"There were many thousands of tonnes of bluefin a year that were coming in unreported, or were being caught in Taiwanese or Thai boats that were coming in through the back door of Japanese business houses; that were going onto the marketplace recorded as big eye tuna, or you know, northern bluefin or something like that. So it has been an enormous international fraud … [discussion of which] has reached all sorts of levels of government at the present time."

Asked what the solution was, Mr McLoughlin said attempts had been made for years to put satellite monitoring systems on the Japanese vessels. "They won't have a bar of it," he said.

Legal catch limits for southern bluefin have been steady at about 14,080 tonnes in recent years, despite indications the fish stock is still in dire straits.

But it is a relatively tiny portion of the Japanese appetite for tuna. The country imports about 650,000 tonnes of tuna annually, much of it from the Pacific and Indian oceans.

"This is a defining case," said Glenn Sant, the Oceania director of the global wildlife trade monitoring organisation, Traffic. "People can no longer believe what they are told. What we now have to have is transparency."

At least until the early 1990s there was substantial under-reporting or non-reporting of catches in the South Pacific, said Sandra Tarte, of the University of the South Pacific.

The findings also raised a red flag over the Japanese whale fishery, said Humane Society International's Nicola Beynon. "Any countries that are contemplating lifting the moratorium and letting Japan go whaling must be concerned about the probability that it will be misreported as well," she said.

The Bureau of Rural Sciences said the most recent estimate by Australian scientists of southern bluefin's parental biomass - the quantity of adult tuna - was that it stood at as little as 4 per cent of its original size.

Ms Beynon said the commission had proved itself inept many times over.

Where does the US get its crude? Here's what you need to know.

Boston - The United States consumes more oil than any other country in the world: 18.7 million barrels of oil per day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration's (EIA) short-term energy outlook.

To satisfy that demand, the United States imports 9 to 12 million barrels of oil per day.

The top seven countries on the following list account for more than $140 billion worth of oil every year:

1. Canada

Canada reigns as the United States' leading oil supplier, exporting some 707,316,000 barrels of oil per year (1,938,000 barrels per day) — a whopping 99 percent of its annual oil exports, according to the EIA.

Canada's exports to the United States are worth more than $37 billion and account for 16 percent of the total trade between the two countries, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's Foreign Trade Statistics. Canada holds the second largest oil reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia. And 95 percent of this oil is in sand deposits in Alberta, which makes the oil extraction process difficult.

2. Mexico

Mexico sends more than 400 million barrels of oil per year (or 1,096,000 barrels per day) to the U.S., according to the EIA. In 2009, that flow was worth over $22 billion.

Since Mexico's oil wells were nationalized in 1938, the country's oil industry operates under the control of PEMEX, the second largest oil company in the world.

3. Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia sends 360,934,000 barrels of oil per year (989,000 barrels per day), 20 percent of its total oil exports, to the United States, according to the EIA. Holding about one-third of the world's daily oil supply, Saudia Arabia’s economy is fueled by oil. Oil accounts for 90 percent of Saudi Arabia's export revenues and 45 percent of its GDP, according to the CIA World Factbook.

4. Venezuela

Venezuela sends the United States 352,278,000 barrels of oil per year (965,000 barrels per day), according to the EIA. The Venezuelan economy is heavily reliant on oil as it accounts for 90 percent of the country's export revenue and 30 percent of the country's GDP, according to the World Factbook. In May 2009, following its socialist policies, Venezuela's state oil company Petroleoes de Venezuela took over private companies operating in the east of the country, increasing the total number of nationalized oil companies to 74.

Earlier this month, President Hugo Chavez stated that his government would stop all oil exports to the United States if Washington's ally, Colombia, attacks Venezuela.

5. Nigeria

Nigeria sells 40 percent of its huge oil supply to the United States. Nigeria exports 281,291,000 barrels per year (771,000 barrels per day) to the United States, according to the EIA. But Nigeria is feeling the full brunt of the "oil curse." The vast earnings from oil have not translated into substantial improvements for ordinary Nigerians. People living in the oil-producing Niger Delta area, in particular, are very poor and the environment has been degraded by oil drilling.

Beginning in 2006, this reality led rebel groups groups to violently protest against the oil pipelines. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta attacked and kidnapped foreign oil workers. The rebel insurrection are blamed for causing Nigeria's oil production to drop by as much as 20 percent. Furthermore, Nigeria has experienced 2,400 oil spills since 2006, decreasing the industry’s efficiency, according to Reuters.

6. Angola

Angola exports 163,790,000 of barrels of oil per year (449,000 barrels per day) to the United States, worth around $9 billion in 2009, according to the EIA. In recognition of its huge oil production, Angola is now the chair of OPEC.

In May 2008, due to unrest in Nigeria, Angola surpassed Nigeria as the largest oil producer in Africa. The majority of Angola's wells are located offshore in the Atlantic Ocean due to limited onshore exploration from 1975 to 2002 when the country faced civil unrest. Angola is the world's seventh largest oil producer but the United States's sixth largest oil source as it exports 31 percent of its oil to the United States.

7. Iraq

Iraq exports 163,684,000 barrels of oil per year to the United States (448,000 barrels per day), worth over $9 billion in 2009, according to the EIA. This makes the United States Iraq’s number one oil export partner.

Our biggest gadget makers—including HP and Apple—may inadvertently get their raw ingredients from murderous Congolese militias. A new movement wants them to trace rare metals from ‘conflict mines.’

It takes a lot to snap people out of apathy about Africa’s problems. But in the wake of Live Aid and Save Darfur, a new cause stands on the cusp of going mainstream. It’s the push to make major electronics companies (manufacturers of cell phones, laptops, portable music players, and cameras) disclose whether they use “conflict minerals”—the rare metals that finance civil wars and militia atrocities, most notably in Congo.

The issue of ethical sourcing has long galvanized human-rights groups. In Liberia, Angola, and Sierra Leone, the notorious trade in “blood diamonds” helped fund rebel insurgencies. In Guinea, bauxite sustains a repressive military junta. And fair-labor groups have spent decades documenting the foreign sweatshops that sometimes supply American clothing stores. Yet Congo raises especially disturbing issues for famous tech brand names that fancy themselves responsible corporate citizens.

 

A key mover behind the Congo campaign is the anti-genocide Enough Project: witness its clever spoof of the famous Apple commercial. Major names like Hillary Clinton and Nicole Richie have gotten on board. And the timing is perfect: new rules requiring American-listed companies to improve their supply-chain transparency are folded into the financial-reform bill that passed Congress this week.

Congo is a classic victim of the resource curse. Its bountiful deposits—in everything from copper to diamonds—are brazenly plundered by corrupt governments and regional warlords while the population goes without basic services. Today, most violence—including mass rape, slavery, mutilation, and possibly even forced cannibalism—is concentrated in the war-ravaged eastern Kivu provinces, where the Congolese Army and ethnic militias bludgeon each other over the right to trade in mineral ore. One study estimates 5.4 million people have been killed since 1998; 45,000 fatalities still occur each month. Infant mortality and death from HIV/AIDS are also rampant—Congo ranks 16th and sixth-highest in the world, respectively, on these measures.

Haraz N. Ghanbari / AP

Photos: View a timeline of the devastating gulf oil spill

A Timeline of the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico

Still, minerals like tantalum, tin, and tungsten are essential for our wired lifestyle. Tantalum—of which Congo produces about 20 percent of world’s supply—makes capacitors that store electric charge, allowing our devices to function without batteries. Tin is used to fortify circuit boards. Tungsten helps our iPhones vibrate.

But this dependency has a cost in human rights. The U.N. Group of Experts reported last year that the annual trade in gold, tin, and coltan (or tantalum ore) delivers hundreds of millions of dollars into the coffers of the FDLR militia, whose myriad factions include Congolese Army renegades and Hutu fighters associated with the 1994 Rwandan genocide. With irregular arms delivery tracked from North Korea and Sudan, there is little doubt that bounty funds butchery.

Conflict-free sources of the “three T” minerals do exist. Yet Congo has a huge competitive advantage over resource-rich rivals like Australia, Canada, and Brazil. Ore extraction is both cheap and lucrative for the militias that control the mines. For one, they can coerce miners to work for a pittance (an average of $1 to $5 per day). For another, they can enforce protection rackets on legitimate operators or simply steal minerals after they’ve been mined. Then the militias extract bribes and impose taxes along the transport route.

Yet supply-chain audits are far from rigorous because the minerals change hands so many times on the way to the market. After transiting across Africa, the ore is eventually shipped from ports in Kenya and Tanzania to multinational smelting and processing companies located mainly in Asia; from there, component manufacturers purchase the metals and convert them into capacitors and circuit boards; finally, these are sold to electronics manufacturers. Hewlett-Packard, for example, says, “[T]hese issues are far removed from HP, typically five or more tiers from our direct suppliers.” Nonetheless, it “expects” suppliers to operate in a manner that does not directly support armed conflict. The company also claims to possess repeated assurances from capacitor suppliers that they do not use Congo-sourced tantalum (although it remains unsure where the tantalum comes from).

Replying personally on his iPhone to a concerned customer last month, Apple CEO Steve Jobs made similar points: “We require all of our suppliers to certify in writing that they use conflict-[free] materials. But honestly there is no way for them to be sure. Until someone invents a way to chemically trace minerals from the source mine, it’s a very difficult problem.” And Microsoft has said that a “conflict mineral free supply chain is a priority.”

The minerals trade already suffers from a lack of international enforcement. A U.N.-approved certification scheme known as the Kimberley Process currently operates to prevent blood diamonds from entering mainstream markets (one requirement is that diamonds be shipped in tamperproof containers). But there is no equivalent for other minerals often mined in war zones. Germany wants certified trading chains—linking international purchasers with conflict-free mining sites. (It is piloting a program to “fingerprint” legitimate tantalum sources in Congo and Rwanda.) But the logistics are daunting and there has been little international support since the 2007 G8 summit, when the concept was first advanced.

In the meantime, local transparency requirements may partly fill the breach. The financial-reform bill passed this week requires American-listed companies to disclose whether they source minerals from Congo. (Although importantly, the provision does not make such trade illegal—out of a fear of damaging the livelihoods of Congolese who rely on legitimate mines.) Companies must provide independently audited reports showing what they’ve done to avoid financing armed conflict—such as citing documentation between the African source country and the Asian processor. Failure to cooperate or the filing of a false report could result in court sanctions.

David Sullivan, policy manager for Enough, says the bill places the onus on companies to do their homework. He praises companies such as Intel that are already building an audit process. “We [have] yet to see a smoking gun from a conflict mine to a major electronics brand, but the companies are fairly upfront about the fact there’s no mechanism in place to ensure these minerals are not seeping into their supply chains.” The National Association of Manufacturers, however, lobbied hard against the provision—a spokeswoman told NEWSWEEK that, given the intricate nature of global supply chains, the requirements (particularly for non–electronics manufacturers) would be difficult to implement. “The battleground will be how this law is translated into regulation,” says Sullivan.

When President Obama signs financial reform, we’re likely to start hearing (and thinking) much more about Congo’s conflict minerals. In the end, Enough and its allies believe awareness drives better policy. So as we lovingly thumb our latest high-tech device, perhaps some self-reflection: after all, the final point in the supply chain is us.

An upcoming Need To Know report from the windy prairies of Wyoming will look at how the push for a green economy is creating strange alliances in a conflict between renewable energy proponents and wildlife conservationists.

Many of the state’s rugged ranchers have become unlikely proponents of wind power. Livestock rearing can be a hard life and plenty of landowners welcome the secondary source of income that would come from leasing their acreage to wind companies. But in some areas, plans for turbine development have been put on hold because of a hefty, chicken-sized bird called the sage grouse.

Thousands of sage grouse blanketing the Western sagebrush was a common scene in the 19th century. In recent decades, though, agricultural and industrial developments have decimated their population. Now, wind looms as a potential threat. Grouse don’t like to nest near tall structures — like towering wind turbines — because they provide perches for predators. (It’s quite unlikely a hawk could find a foothold on the spinning blades of a turbine, but try explaining that to a mother sage grouse).

Environmental advocates petitioned for the bird to be placed on the Endangered Species list, but earlier this year the Department of the Interior announced that the grouse would only be a “candidate species” for endangered status: The federal government will monitor their population annually, but the bird will not be subject to extensive national protection.

That could all change, however, if sage grouse numbers fall any further or new threats enter their habitat. So with the shadow of the Endangered Species Act still looming, Wyoming state officials have enacted their own conservation initiatives. For now, that means wind development in core sage grouse habitats is on hold.

Sydney, Australia - Australia has delayed until June 18 the release of a report into the oil blowout and spill at the Montara offshore platform in the Timor Sea last year.
The late 2009 blowout, less that one tenth the flow of the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico and in much shallower water, took 73 days to kill. The Inquiry was told the oil from the blowout covered 90,000 kilometres of sea and reef – much more than the area admitted to during the spill.
WWF-Australia is asking the Australian government why its response effort to the Montara oil spill was so weak in comparison to what is happening in the US.
“We’re seeing an environmental and economic catastrophe taking place in the United States,” said Dr Gilly Llewellyn, WWF-Australia’s Manger of Conservation. “There are lots of parallels between the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the oil spill we faced last year in the Timor Sea. That is, until you compare the responses.”
“In light of the current crisis and the wholehearted response, we must ask, did the Australian Government do everything it could when faced with a similar task?”
Information which has come to come to light since the blowout has shown that 247 people worked to contain the spill and that operator PTTEP refused offers of help from nearby rigs. Information made available by PTTEP and government authorities charged with coordinating the response to the spill was limited. The company, which admitted that the wells at the Montara site did not meet their own safety standards, was given another drilling licence during the spill.
In the US, 7500 people have been mobilised in an industry-wide response to the BP spill, with President Barack Obama spearheading a US government response which has included an immediate inspection of other wells and a halt in all new offshore oil and gas exploration while the spill is dealt with and investigated. The extent of the spill can be followed in satellite imagery on a public response web site.
As the oil and gas exploration around the globe moves into more remote, more vulnerable and more technically challenging areas, industry and regulators must recognise that these same places are also making the task of avoiding accidents and responding to spills more difficult.
“What concerns WWF is that in many of these remote places such as the Arctic and coastal East Africa, there will not be a US level response to a significant oil spill. Indeed we may see less than an Australian response,” said Dr Llewellyn
“The unacceptable costs of these incidents on the environment, the economy and the community should give us even more impetus to rethink our addiction to oil.”

Amazonian Chernobyl – Oil - Ecuador’s Environmental Disaster

Claire Kendall Aug 2008 Telegraph

Once it was pristine rainforest. Now it has been described as an Amazonian Chernobyl.

• Plan to use mushrooms to clean up oil contamination
• John McCain and Barack Obama trade barbs on Big Oil
• Ecuador wants $350m to leave oil underground

Millions of gallons of crude oil and toxic waste - the legacy of an oil extraction programme - has blighted 1,700 hectares of land and poisoned the rivers and streams in Sucumbios in the north-east corner of Ecuador.

The region is home to five different indigenous tribes and its rich biodiversity includes many thousands of plant and animal species.

Oil has been one of the South American country's most profitable exports since the 1960s but it has come at a terrible environmental price.

Amazon Watch, the Environmental action group, claim that in excess of 17m tonnes of oil waste has been dumped in open and unlined pits which has poisoned the land and the water course.

Locals claim that many oil pits in the 1990s were simply covered in plastic, rubble and soil and are still leaking toxic chemicals into local water supplies.

Indigenous Indian people blame the pollution on the US oil giant Chevron - formerly Texaco - and say it has caused a catalogue of health problems including severe birth defects, spontaneous miscarriages and cancers.

Their plight has attracted a galaxy of environmentalists and campaigners including film star Daryl Hannah, Sting and Trudie Styler and British 'Eco-aristocrat' Zoe Tryon, daughter of the Prince of Wales' late friend, Lady Tryon. More...

You know, a lot has been said about BP and its contributions to the natural beauty of the Gulf Coast states. But what we haven't heard as much about are BP's contributions to journalism, have we? I mean, we've basically covered the fact that BP's been doing a good job at preventing journalism from happening. But all that's about to change, because BP is sending its own journalists to the region, dispatched abroad from their regular offices, in Hell. Basically, having grown tired of blocking other reporters from covering the story, BP is going to spend its own money on a bunch of in-house PR professionals who will reliably block themselves from covering the story. It's precisely the sort of genius move you'd expect from the company that's now more despised than Goldman Sachs, the corporate fecal-demons of 2009. The pioneering work of these BP reporters will be collected in an online magazine called "Planet BP," which the Wall Street Journal's Benoit Faucon likens to Monty Python's famous song, "Always Look On The Bright Side of Life." It's an apt comparison:

Per Faucon:

But in Planet BP -- a BP online, in-house magazine -- a "BP reporter" dispatched to Louisiana managed to paint an even rosier picture of the disaster. "There is no reason to hate BP," one local seafood entrepreneur is quoted as saying, as the region relies on the oil industry for work.

Indeed, the April 20 spill on the Deepwater Horizon is being reinvented in Planet BP as a strike of luck.

"Much of the region's [nonfishing boat] businesses -- particularly the hotels -- have been prospering because so many people have come here from BP and other oil emergency response teams," another report says. Indeed, one tourist official in a local town makes it clear that "BP has always been a very great partner of ours here...We have always valued the business that BP sent us."

Over at CJR, Ryan Chittum's gone deep into the belly of Planet BP to find "their greatest propaganda hits," and finds them to be, on balance, "tone-deaf," "obnoxious," possessed of no evident "shame" and heavily bent on happy-faced advertorial mush. But the term I'd add is "cliched," because the most ridiculous piece of "journalism" on offer is this article, cited by Chittum, penned by "reporter" Tom Seslar. Here's the lede:

Paul, a well-spoken man supplementing his Social Security income by driving a Houston taxi, sees BP's current image challenges as similar to what he faces all day long.

YES! It's the hoary old "conversation with a taxicab driver" story, a terrible reportorial habit that's ordinarily beaten out of reporters by editors, with shillelaghs!

"Your job is really a lot like mine," he said as soon as he learned why he was driving me to George Bush Intercontinental Airport just after sunrise. I was setting off on the first day of a trip as a BP reporter, planning to seek out and write about some of the people most immediately affected by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. People period, not just BP people.

Okay, so, it seems that the job of Houston taxicab drivers is to smilingly lie to people as they slowly ruin their lives. That's good to know. How does Seslar see his work? As it happens, our taxicab driver is there to provide him with that information as well.

When Paul had asked me where I was flying to, and whether it was for business or pleasure, I explained my aim as a BP journalist.

In recent weeks, Paul said, he has driven a number of people who were either coming to or leaving Houston to work on the oil spill in one way or another - everybody from BP employees and other response experts to news media people covering the big story.

"The spill is a sad, unfortunate situation," Paul offered as we rode along the freeway. "But I never know for sure how a particular rider feels about any subject. So no matter what topic comes up, I just stick to the facts. You can't go wrong if you stick to the facts.

"If I would try to spin it one way or the other, I'd run the risk of losing my credibility and offending somebody at the same time," Paul said to me. "That's why I see a similarity between how you and I both have to operate. Just stick to the facts and you can't go wrong."

Yeah, BP! You can learn a lot from this magical taxicab driver!

Paul's sage advice reaffirmed what I've learned about communication through 37 years of work for BP (or its heritage companies) and during earlier jobs as a reporter for three large daily newspapers and a wire service.

What? You've done PR for BP for 37 years? And prior to that, you worked for "three large daily newspapers and a wire service?" And you're still doing the whole "taxicab confessions" thing?

But things soon take a turn for the serious:

"Of course," Paul added as we approached the airport, "I pretty much have to depend on the news media for the facts that I try to stick to. And you never can be absolutely sure about what they're telling you."

He's surely right. There's nothing simple about understanding the oil spill and its impacts. At least that's what I assume I'll continue finding as I move ever deeper into the territory of the massive spill response in days ahead.

TRANSLATION: My challenge will be to artfully and skillfully deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate. But one advantage I have is that I can rely on the inherent complications of this crisis to assist me.

If you too are interested in exploring this very complex state of affairs and meeting some of the people most closely involved, you're invited to come along on our trek.

SHOW ME YOUR MEDALLION FIRST, HACK.

Louisiana Deputies Pull Over Activist at Behest of BP. Deputy falsifies incident report. Sheriff’s department Malcolm Wolfe thinks that’s just fine. You can contact the Major at 985-857-0217

Everyone knows by now that BP is still blocking press access to oil-spill sites even though they're not supposed to anymore. I've been blathering about it for weeks, and it's been all of three days since four contractors wouldn't let me through the Pointe Aux Chenes marina outside Montegut, Louisiana. And though as of June 16 the federal government was saying helicopters could fly reporters as low as 1,500 feet around spill sites, on June 17 I was on a helicopter that was prohibited from flying below 3,000 feet (and whose pilot flipped silent birds at the "military guys" coming over the radio and hassling him about being in the area at all). But a Louisiana sheriff's deputy* pulling over a video camera-wielding private citizen because the head of BP security wanted to ask him some questions is a whole other level of alarming.

Last week, Drew Wheelan, the conservation coordinator for the American Birding Association, was filming himself across the street from the BP building/Deepwater Horizon response command in Houma, Louisiana. As he explained to me, he was standing in a field that did not belong to the oil company when a police officer approached him and asked him for ID and "strongly suggest[ed]" that he get lost since "BP doesn't want people filming":

Here's the key exchange:

Wheelan: "Am I violating any laws or anything like that?"

Officer: "Um...not particularly. BP doesn't want people filming."

Wheelan: "Well, I'm not on their property so BP doesn't have anything to say about what I do right now."

Officer: "Let me explain: BP doesn't want any filming. So all I can really do is strongly suggest that you not film anything right now. If that makes any sense."

Not really! Shortly thereafter, Wheelan got in his car and drove away but was soon was pulled over.

It was the same cop, but this time he had company: Kenneth Thomas, whose badge, Wheelan told me, read "Chief BP Security." The cop stood by as Thomas interrogated Wheelan for 20 minutes, asking him who he worked with, who he answered to, what he was doing, why he was down here in Louisiana. He phoned Wheelan's information in to someone. Wheelan says Thomas confiscated his Audubon volunteer badge (he'd recently attended an official Audubon/BP bird-helper volunteer training) and then wouldn't give it back, which sounds like something only a bully in a bad movie would do. Eventually, Thomas let Wheelan go.

"Then two unmarked security cars followed me," Wheelan told me. "Maybe I'm paranoid, but I was specifically trying to figure out if they were following me, and every time I pulled over, they pulled over." This went on for 20 miles. Which does little to mitigate my own developing paranoia about reporting from what can feel like a corporate-police state.

The media liaison for the government-run Deepwater Horizon Response Joint Information Center told me BP would would get back to me for comment on the incident. I'm still waiting.

* Correction/Update: This story originally stated that a Louisiana state police officer pulled Wheelan over, per Wheelan's recounting of the incident. My apologies to the state police for misreporting their involvement. After many calls made and messages left, I've finally confirmed that the cop in question was actually a sheriff's deputy for Terrebonne Parish. The deputy was off official duty at the time, and working in the private employ of BP. Though the deputy failed to include the traffic stop in his incident report, Major Malcolm Wolfe of the sheriff's office says the deputy's pulling someone over in his official vehicle while working for a private company is standard and acceptable practice, because Wheelan was acting suspicious and could have been a terrorist.