Articles by Grist staff

Sheep Trick

Angering environmentalists, Aboriginals, and regional government officials alike, the Australian government has announced that it will build a controversial nuclear waste dump at a sheep station in South Australia. Located near the desert town of Woomera, the dump will house low-level radioactive waste from medical, university, industrial, and research facilities around the country. In what […]

Tidal Wave of the Future

The San Francisco Bay could soon become more than just a beautiful backdrop to Fog Town: It could become the engine that powers the city itself. This week, San Francisco became the first major U.S. city to investigate commercial tidal power, when it signed on to a $2 million pilot project to generate electricity using […]

Radio-inactivity

The Pentagon dramatically underestimated the amount of radioactivity to which U.S. Armed Forces members were exposed during Cold War-era atomic testing and explosions, a National Academy of Sciences panel announced yesterday. However, the panel found that the “ionizing radiation” to which the majority of the veterans was exposed — either during testing or in the […]

Have a Cow, Man

The state of South Dakota is leading the nation in the Partners for Fish and Wildlife project, a federal conservation program designed to help farmers and ranchers reduce their negative impact on native prairie ecosystems. Conversion of wild grasslands to croplands is a major environmental problem in South Dakota and other prairies states. Under the […]