More than 200 former employees of an RCA television and semiconductor plant in northern Taiwan have died of cancer and at least 1,000 others are suffering from the disease, in what industry watchdogs are calling the worst cancer cluster in the history of high-tech. A group of former plant workers arrived in Silicon Valley yesterday to tell their story and plead for justice, which has to date been elusive. Workers believe that the plant polluted the groundwater with toxic chemicals, leading to stillborn babies and cancer cases, but a 1999 lawsuit filed in Taiwan by former workers was dismissed, and …

We're not sure whose job it is to go through all the thousands of pages of documents related to Vice President Dick Cheney's formerly secretive energy task force, but they sure are having a grand old time. This week, the needle in the haystack was a memo sent to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham by Jane Hughes Turnbull, an executive at a California renewable energy company. In the memo, Turnbull chalked up her resignation from the National Coal Council to President Bush's decision to reverse a campaign pledge to cut carbon dioxide emissions. She said his reversal stemmed from vigorous lobbying …

The Bush administration canceled yesterday a two-year ban on new mining claims in roughly 1.2 million acres in and around southern Oregon's Siskiyou National Forest. The ban was imposed by the Clinton administration in response to lobbying efforts by conservationists, who wanted the area declared a national monument. Instead, former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt imposed the moratorium to allow time for further study and public comment. But the Bush administration, a pal to mining interests and no friend to new national monuments, lifted the ban, which was set to expire in January 2003. In its place, the Bureau of Land …

The U.S. Forest Service yesterday came out against adding any new wilderness areas to southeastern Alaska's 17 million-acre Tongass National Forest. The recommendation was a response to a ruling by U.S. District Judge James Singleton, who sided with environmentalists last year in ordering the Forest Service to determine if there were parts of the temperate rain forest that Congress could set aside as wilderness areas (where logging, mining, and road-building would be prohibited). The Forest Service's conclusion came as a blow to environmentalists, who saw it as further proof of the Bush administration's lack of commitment to wilderness preservation. The …

The Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation's largest public power producer, decided yesterday to restart a troubled nuclear reactor at its Browns Ferry plant in northern Alabama. The reactor has been out of use since 1985, when all three of the plant's reactors were shut down after engineers discovered that the reactors did not match their blueprints. Two of the three reactors were restarted in the 1990s; restarting the third one will cost $1.7 billion and is in keeping with the energy vision of President Bush, who strongly supports nuclear power. The TVA decision drew criticism from area residents, who are …

In more nuclear news, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham acknowledged yesterday that a proposed nuclear waste depository in Yucca Mountain, Nev., could only handle a portion of the waste that will be generated by commercial power plants and the government in the coming decade. The acknowledgement undercut President Bush's pro-Yucca argument that radioactive waste should be consolidated into one single, more secure location. As currently planned, Yucca Mountain has a maximum capacity of 77,000 tons -- but by the time the dump opens, there will be an estimated 65,000 tons of waste already piled up around the country, and reactors will …

In an apparent effort to diffuse criticism from environmentalists, the Bush administration is considering stepping up legal action against some polluting utility companies. U.S. EPA Administrator Christie Whitman has ordered the agency's regional enforcement officials to look for companies that have violated the Clean Air Act by upgrading power plants without installing state-of-the-art pollution-control equipment, as required under New Source Review regulations. The Clinton administration sued nine companies for New Source Review violations, but no new suits have been filed in the 16 months that President Bush has been in office. On the contrary: Environmentalists and some within the EPA …

The Bush administration appealed a federal court decision yesterday that would limit mountaintop-removal mining and asked the judge to clarify that the ruling "should be read as not applying nationwide or to activities other than coal mining." On May 8, U.S. District Judge Charles H. Haden II of West Virginia ruled that coal mining valley fills, such as those produced by mountaintop removal, are not allowed under the federal Clean Water Act, and blocked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from issuing permits for new fills. In its appeal, the Department of Justice said the ruling "casts a tremendous cloud …

There might be a severe drought facing much of the nation, but billions of dollars in subsidies is soon to rain down on the bread-basket states, thanks to a farm bill signed by President Bush yesterday. Notwithstanding a White House pledge to wean farmers off of government funding, the bill is expected to cost $190 billion over 10 years, or $83 billion more than the cost of continuing current programs. A senior Republican official said Bush reversed course in the hopes of gaining an additional Republican seat in the Senate from one of the farm states next fall. The bill …

The Bush administration is unhappy about a new ad campaign attacking its plan to move some 30 tons of plutonium from Colorado to South Carolina for temporary storage. The campaign was launched last week by South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges (D), who opposes the plan, fearing that his state could become the permanent resting grounds for the radioactive waste. The feds have declined to guarantee that that won't happen, so Hodges has taken his case to the airwaves, asking South Carolinians to tell the U.S. Department of Energy to store the waste ... somewhere other than South Carolina. The DOE …