TULSA, Okla. (AP) — Police believe the same attacker or attackers are behind a series of early-morning shootings in which three people were killed and two others were critically wounded within a three-mile span of north Tulsa.
Homicide detective Sgt. Dave Walker said investigators don't have the results of forensic tests yet, but police think the early Friday morning shootings are linked because they happened around the same time in the same general area and all five victims were out walking when they were shot.
Police don't believe the victims knew one another and are trying to determine the circumstances behind the killings.
Four shooting victims were found in yards, and the fifth in a street. Police identified those killed as Dannaer Fields, 49, Bobby Clark, 54, and William Allen, 31. Fields was found wounded about 1 a.m. Friday, Clarke was found in a street about an hour later, and Allen was discovered in the yard of a funeral home about 8:30 a.m.
Minutes after Fields was found, police found two men with gunshot wounds in another yard two blocks away. They were taken to hospitals in critical condition but expected to survive, police said. Their names have not been released.
Police Capt. Steve Odom said in his 30 years with the police department, he'd never seen so many shootings happen in such a short time.
Walker said detectives interviewed people Friday afternoon in the neighborhoods where the shootings happened and believe a white man driving a white pickup truck may have been involved.
Tulsa City Councilor Jack Henderson urged people to be cautious but not let "some crazy, deranged person mess up their weekend."
"There's no need to become a vigilante," Henderson said, adding that he has been assured police are working on the case as a "24/7 round-the-clock deal."
Four shootings in north Tulsa may be connected; three dead, two hurt
Tulsa City Councilor Jack Henderson (left), NAACP Tulsa Chapter President the Rev. Warren Blakney and pastor Millard Jones meet Friday at the North Peoria Church of Christ about the north Tulsa shootings that left three people dead and two others injured. JOEY JOHNSON/for the Tulsa World
By JERRY WOFFORD, ZACK STOYCOFF & DAVID HARPER World Staff Writers Published: 4/7/2012 2:16 AM Last Modified: 4/7/2012 7:01 AM
Police believe that four shootings that left three people dead and two others injured at separate locations and times early Friday were all connected in what they are calling an "unprecedented" event.
Lead homicide detective Sgt. Dave Walker said police were able to tie the shootings together because of the similarities in what the victims were doing when they were shot, when they occurred and their proximity - within three miles of each other in north Tulsa.
All of the victims were walking through neighborhoods when they were shot, Walker said.
"There is no forensic evidence to link at this point," he said. "Timing and location lead us to believe they may be connected."
Police are still trying to determine the circumstances surrounding the shootings but don't believe the victims knew each other.
Because all the victims were black, the local chapter of the NAACP and other local black leaders met Friday evening in an effort to calm unrest while promoting safety.
Police had found Dannaer Fields, 49, lying wounded in a yard in the 1000 block of East 51st Place North shortly after 1 a.m. Friday. She later died at St. John Medical Center.
Three minutes later, police found two men with gunshot wounds in another yard two blocks to the east. The men were taken to St. John Medical Center and St. Francis Hospital in critical condition but were expected to survive, police said. Their names were not released Friday.
At about 1:50 a.m., officers found Bobby Clark, 54, in the street with a gunshot wound in the 300 block of West 63rd Street North. Clark later died at Hillcrest Medical Center.
At about 8:30 a.m., officers received a call about a body in the 800 block of East 36th Street North, said Capt. Steve Odom. Police discovered William Allen, 31, lying in the yard of Jack's Memory Chapel funeral home with a gunshot wound to the chest, Odom said. Allen was pronounced dead at the scene.
On Friday afternoon detectives went back to the neighborhoods where the shootings occurred to speak to residents again, Walker said. Detectives were working through tips and leads they had received and were able to discern that a white man driving a white pickup might have been involved.
No further descriptions of any suspects were available.
The NAACP Tulsa president, the Rev. Warren Blakney Sr., said Friday night that "we're very concerned" that someone was evidently "targeting black people to shoot."
"I'm on edge for my people," Blakney said at a meeting at the North Peoria Church of Christ, 2217 N. Peoria Ave.
When asked if he believed the shootings were racially motivated, Blakney said that when there are reports that someone "systematically shot black folk, what is one left to believe?"
Still, Blakney and Tulsa City Councilor Jack Henderson encouraged people to remain calm while also being cautious this weekend.
Henderson said people should not let "some crazy, deranged person mess up their weekend," but he added that the community "needs to watch their backs" until the perpetrator is caught.
Blakney said "we want to make sure our people are going to be safe" and encouraged them to stay away from people they don't know.
Henderson said he has been assured that Tulsa Police have dedicated a lot of officers to focus on this case as a "24/7 round-the-clock deal."
Blakney said that "there's no need to become a vigilante."
Walker said residents can expect to see increased patrols in the areas where the shootings occurred and across the city. Law enforcement groups, including the Northern Oklahoma Violent Crimes Task Force and the FBI, are offering their services, as well.
"This is an opportunity to do what we're supposed to do," despite having little evidence to work with, Walker said. "It's a challenge.
"I haven't seen anything like this in my career."
Odom said that in his 30 years with the Tulsa Police Department, he doesn't know of any such group of homicides and shootings to happen in as few hours.
According to the Tulsa World's statistics, the killings are the city's 12th, 13th and 14th homicides of 2012.
Walker said the public needs to be aware "of anyone stopping to talk to them for any reason at any time."
Odom said people should call the police "if they see anything, hear anything or see anything, hear people talking, because we truly and desperately want their help."
Anyone with information about the shooter or shooters is asked to contact Crime Stoppers at 918-596-COPS or http://tulsaworld.com/crimestoppers , call the Homicide Tip Line at 918-798-8477 or email detectives at homicide@cityoftulsa.org.
Tips may be made anonymously, and anyone with information that leads to a conviction could receive a cash reward.
Original Print Headline: 4 Tulsa shootings may be related
Rachel Maddow is a national treasure and the best broadcaster on television. She shines a light on so many stories that most people don't even know exist. I didn't know about this nuclear waste dump in Texas or Harold Simmons. Aren't the people in Texas freaking out over this?
Canisters of uranium waste are placed in a burial pit at the West Texas dump in 2009. AP archives
By Anna M. Tinsley atinsley@star-telegram.com Posted Sunday, Apr. 15, 2012
Huge numbers of trucks carrying low-level radioactive waste from dozens of states will soon travel highways nationwide -- including those in the Metroplex -- on their way to a remote disposal site in West Texas.
Shipments from up to 36 states will head to a dump in Andrews County near the New Mexico border, owned by Dallas billionaire and generous Republican political donor Harold Simmons, despite concerns from environmentalists and others worried about potential accidents or contamination once the loads are left at the Waste Control Specialists facility.
"Texas is going to become a nuclear waste dump if everything happens under their plans," said state Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, an opponent of the facility. "We will be the major route for nuclear waste.
"I am absolutely concerned about the transportation of the materials, about the high volume of nuclear waste traveling on our interstates through areas such as Fort Worth and Dallas," he said. "I think it's a really bad idea to have that much nuclear waste rolling down our interstates unguarded."
The first shipments, possibly this month, will likely come from the state's two nuclear plants, Comanche Peak near Glen Rose and the South Texas project in Matagorda County. Truckloads of contaminated waste from other states, which require a formal application process and approval, could start by summer.
Officials aren't publicly outlining the shipment routes, although many say loads are likely to cross major highways in North Texas as dangerous materials already do.
In the past eight years, 72 incidents nationwide involving trucks carrying radioactive material on highways have caused $2.4 million in damage and one death, the Transportation Department's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration says.
Workers at the Andrews County site say various shipments, including contaminated sludge from New York's Hudson River in 2009, have arrived without incident.
"We have been successfully and without any incidents at all transporting this material for quite some time," said Chuck McDonald, a spokesman for Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists. "Transportation of low-level radioactive waste is highly, highly regulated, requiring specified types of containers and vehicles.
"It's going to be addressed and is addressed by appropriate government entities."
A 'win' for Texas?
In the early 1980s, the federal government encouraged states to build low-level nuclear waste landfills either by forming compacts with other states or on their own. Texas and Vermont teamed up to create a compact to dispose of waste from the two states and federal sources. Last year, state lawmakers approved the Andrews County site; the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission recently agreed to let as many as 36 states ship waste there.
The Texas Compact Disposal Facility, the nation's only commercial facility licensed to dispose of certain types of low-level waste, formally opened last year in a sparsely populated area about 350 miles west of Fort Worth. Waste Control Specialists spent millions to build and open it.
Shipments of Class A, B and C waste sent there will include medical materials and hospital equipment such as beakers, test tubes and X-ray machines, as well as items that have come in contact with radioactive material such as gloves, shoe covers, trash, rags and dirt.
Those items will be placed in steel and concrete containers that will then be placed in other steel and concrete containers built into red bed clay. When the main container is filled, the entire area will be sealed, McDonald said.
Texas shipments will be first.
"We're going to take radioactive materials out of Texas urban centers and dispose of them in an arid, isolated location that we believe is a good location," McDonald said. "We believe it's a win for the state of Texas."
Nebraska may be among the first of the other states. Officials with a public power district are close to a $3.1 million agreement to dispose of long-stored low-level waste such as radioactive filters.
The company has a 15-year license to collect and dispose of the material, with options to renew for two 10-year terms. State lawmakers have banned materials from foreign countries at the site.
Environmental concerns
Environmentalists have complained about the site for years, worried that the waste might contaminate groundwater.
Opponents say they believe that Simmons' political clout prompted the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to give favorable treatment to the project, despite environmental questions, and later led the 2011 Legislature to permit limited amounts of waste from other states that were not part of the original Texas-Vermont compact.
Three staff members of the environmental agency quit in protest in 2007, saying that higher-ups ignored their concerns about possible groundwater contamination.
"We continue to have concerns about the site itself and whether or not there is enough protection ... and whether there will be contamination of the water," said Karen Hadden, executive director of the statewide SEED Coalition environmental group. "Once radioactivity gets into groundwater, it's a difficult thing to clean up and it can get into the millions and billions of dollars."
Waste Control officials have said they have responded to concerns through the licensing process and have conducted tests that show the site to be safe.
"We have taken core samples around the site so we know exactly what the geology looks like," McDonald said. "It's not going to impact any drinking water supply in any way. "It's an ideal site."
SEED has asked state officials for an independent audit system to do spot-checks and random audits to make sure that safety procedures are followed, shipping procedures are accurate, and limits on volume and types of radioactive waste are met.
"We want to make sure shipments are right when they arrive -- that they are the correct material, packaged properly, don't have water in the disposal pit," Hadden said. "We want to make sure it's put in the right place and marked properly."
Accidents happen
In February, an Arlington train derailment blocked traffic for hours. Only corn syrup was spilled, but it could have been much worse: More than a dozen train cars that did not derail were filled with dangerous chemicals including flammable crude oil, sodium hydroxide, liquid chlorine and sulfuric acid, reports said.
While the Arlington accident involved a train, and low-level radioactive shipments will be moved by truck, local emergency management officials say they are prepared for an emergency, partly because of training received for special events such as the Super Bowl.
"I-20 has been a designated radioactive shipment corridor for some time," Arlington Assistant Fire Chief Jim Self said. "We've had training over the years ... and this is not a foreign idea to us.
"The Arlington Fire Department is prepared for any kind of radioactive-related emergency," Self said.
Local officials say they don't know when these shipments will pass through the Metroplex.
"We will make sure our first responders are aware of the different types of materials out there," said Juan Ortiz, Fort Worth's emergency management coordinator. "The response, planning and training is not completely new to us.
"We have a lot of the capabilities in place," he said. "But this is a challenge that most communities will have to figure out how to overcome."
In case of an accident, standard procedure is to contain spilled materials, make sure they don't get into waterways and prevent people from coming into contact with them, officials have said.
But many communities may not be as prepared, especially small Texas towns that might lack emergency management teams or personnel trained to respond to hazardous-material emergencies, Hadden said.
"Shipments can go through any major city, any major highway, and you have no way of knowing when you see an accident if there are radioactive materials involved," Hadden said. "There has really been no analysis of the best transportation routes or of emergency preparedness."
The rare earths inside microcomputers make our lives easier. But just how toxic are the guts of your smartphone?
By Kiera Butler | November/December 2012 Issue
It's a sweltering late February afternoon when I pull into the Esso gas station in the tiny town of Bukit Merah, Malaysia. My guide, a local butcher named Hew Yun Tat, warns me that the owner is known for his stinginess. "He's going to ask you to buy him tea," Hew says. "Even though he owns many businesses around here, he still can't resist pinching pennies."
An older man emerges from the station office. His face and hands are mottled with white patches, his English broken.
"I'll talk to you," the man says, "but only if you buy me tea." He grins.
"You should be ashamed of yourself," says Hew, laughing. "A rich man like you."
Esso Man couldn't believe his luck. He wasn't a rich man back then, and Asian Rare Earth offered three times as much as his usual gigs, just for trucking waste away from the plant. They didn't say where or how to dump the waste, and he and his three drivers were paid by the load—the quicker the trip, the more money they earned. "Sometimes they would tell us it was fertilizer, so we would take it to local farms," Esso Man says. "My uncle was a vegetable farmer, so I gave some to him." Other times, the refinery officials said the stuff was quicklime, so one driver painted his house with it. "He thought it was great, because it made all the mosquitoes and mice stay away."
In fact, Esso Man and his drivers were hauling toxic and radioactive waste [ http://www.motherjones.com/documents/463359-woon-tan-kan ], as they'd discover a year later, when Asian Rare Earth tried to build a dump in a neighboring town. Residents there began to protest, and a few activists took a Geiger counter to the plant, where they found levels of radiation that were off the charts—up to 88 times higher than those allowed under international guidelines. In 1985, after residents sued, the government ordered the plant to be closed until Asian Rare Earth cleaned up its mess.
Two years later, the site still wasn't completely clean, but Asian Rare Earth got permission to reopen the plant. The protests began anew, and Hew, one of the leaders of the opposition, was jailed for two months. When he got out he snuck back to the protests, which grew in size and popularity. In 1992, the residents who'd sued Asian Rare Earth won a permanent injunction against the plant. It was overturned by the Supreme Court, but Asian Rare Earth had had enough, and it pulled out of Bukit Merah and shut down operations entirely.
But by then, Hew says, the villagers were anxious. Pregnant women living near the plant had miscarried [ http://www.motherjones.com/documents/463359-woon-tan-kan ]; some gave birth to children who were sickly, or mentally disabled, or blind. Other children in the village developed leukemia.
Officials told residents that the waste was properly disposed of. But in 2010, a local paper visited Asian Rare Earth's dump site and found 80,000 drums containing 4.2 million gallons of radioactive thorium hydroxide. That year, Mitsubishi broke ground on a secure, underground storage area to properly house the waste of its former subsidiary. The New York Times recently called [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/business/energy-environment/09rareside.html ] the $100 million Asian Rare Earth recovery "the largest radiation cleanup yet in the rare earth industry."
As we finish our dessert, I ask Esso Man about the white patches on his skin, which started appearing several years after he'd worked with Asian Rare Earth's waste. His doctors speculate they might have to do with his exposure to radioactivity, he says, but they can't be sure. Such medical guesswork is common in Bukit Merah, since no one has ever formally studied the impact of radiation exposure among the village's 11,000 residents. (Mitsubishi denies any health effects.) And anyway, sometimes Esso Man thinks it might just be stress that's causing his skin condition. "I feel regret about working for that company," he says glumly. "I feel bad that I gave people all that toxic waste. Even my own uncle." All of Esso Man's drivers have died young—not one lived past his 50s. "I don't know why they died and I am still alive."
After we drop Esso Man back at his gas station, Hew takes me to the nearby home of Lai Kwan, a local woman who worked as a bricklayer at the Bukit Merah plant while she was pregnant in 1982. Hunched over and walking slowly, she looks older than her 69 years. In her modest living room, photos of her eight children, now grown, line the walls. In the corner is a small cluster of flowers and vials of powder that I take for a Buddhist shrine, but Lai Kwan explains that they are gifts from her friends and neighbors, and that the vials contain chicken essence, known in Chinese medicine for its healing properties.
Lai Kwan recalls that soon after she started working in the plant, she heard rumors from the Japanese workers that the materials they were refining were dangerous. Several of her coworkers miscarried, and when she found out she was pregnant, she worried about her baby's health. So a few months later, she quit. Her son, Cheah Kok Liang, was born in 1983, profoundly retarded and nearly blind. Lai Kwan's husband left when the boy was a toddler. Now 29, Cheah still lives at home and requires full-time care. He's suffered from frequent chest infections his whole life, but it's hard to tell when he's getting ill, since he can't communicate. I ask to meet him, but Lai Kwan explains that he is sleeping. "If he were awake right now, I couldn't be talking to you."
What will happen to Cheah when she can't care for him anymore? "It's getting harder now," she says. "He's heavy, and I have arthritis." Money is tight—since Lai Kwan can't read or write very well, she'd only be able to find work at a factory, and she can't leave Cheah alone for a whole shift. A few months ago, a local politician visited and promised to help, but "every time I call she says she is too busy," says Lai Kwan, showing us a picture of the politician and her son in the local newspaper.
A doctor from Kuala Lumpur tells me that he visited Bukit Merah to treat the eight children there who developed leukemia, seven of whom have died. Though there has never been a formal epidemiological study of the area, radiation exposure is a known cause [ http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/CancerCauses/OtherCarcinogens/MedicalTreatments/radiation-exposure-and-cancer ] of childhood leukemia, and no local I talked to could remember a single case of the disease before the plant opened.
About six weeks after I get back to the United States, I receive word that Cheah passed away suddenly. The cause of his death is still unknown.
I have come to Malaysia because of my iPhone. I already knew that behind its sleek casing lurked a problematic history. I'd read the stories about Apple's Chinese factories [ http://www.businessinsider.com/foxconn-factory-tour-2012-2?op=1 ]—about teenage girls working 15-hour shifts [ http://www.timeslive.co.za/scitech/2012/08/22/apple-foxconn-improve-chinese-plants-but-more-left-to-do-audit ] cleaning screens with toxic solvents, about suicides among exhausted workers whose lives are no longer their own. But I had a much dimmer idea of my phone's history before the Foxconn plant—where did those components they put together come from? What were its guts made of? My phone's shady past, it turned out, began long before it was assembled in a Chinese factory. The elements used to power all our high-tech gadgets come from a very dirty industry in which rich nations extract the good stuff from the earth—and leave poor countries to clean up the mess.
To the Malaysian government, the Lynas plant represents an opportunity to become a major player in one of the most lucrative, fastest-growing industries in the world. In the 20 years since the Bukit Merah plant closed, demand for rare earths has increased tenfold [ http://,%20http//www.sbireports.com/Rare-Earth-Elements-6066525/ ], from roughly $1 billion to $10 billion today. A recent report [ http://www.motherjones.com/documents/463283-rare-earths-global-supply-chain ] predicted it to grow another 36 percent by 2015.
Elements of Style The rare earths lurking inside your hybrid car and smartphone.
But here's the catch. Rare earths always occur alongside [ http://www.motherjones.com/documents/463290-ntn-lynas-report ] the radioactive elements thorium and uranium, and safely separating them is a complex process. Miners use heavy machinery to reach the raw ore, which contains anywhere between 3 and 9 percent rare earths, depending on the deposit. Then the ore is taken to a refinery and "cracked," a process wherein workers use sulfuric acid to make a liquid stew of sorts. The process is also hugely water- and energy-intensive, requiring a continuous 49 megawatts (enough to power 50,000 homes [ http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/BoiLu.shtml ]) and two Olympic swimming pools' worth of water every day.
Workers then boil off the liquid and separate out the rare earths from rock and radioactive elements. This is where things get dangerous: Companies must take precautions so that workers aren't exposed to radiation. If the tailings ponds where the radioactive elements are permanently stored are improperly lined, they can leach into the groundwater. If they are not covered properly, the slurry could dry and escape as dust. And this radioactive waste must be stored for an incomprehensibly long time—the half-life of thorium is about 14 billion years [ http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/radionuclides/thorium.html ], and uranium's is up to 4.5 billion years [ http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/docs/radwaste/402-k-94-001-umt.html ]. Reminder: Earth itself is 4.5 billion years [ http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html ] old.
All this so that my friends and I can settle an argument about the order of Metallica's first three albums from the comfort of our bar stools.
Kuantan, the town where Lynas has built its new rare-earth refinery, is a popular vacation spot [ http://www.lonelyplanet.com/malaysia/peninsular-malaysia-east-coast/kuantan ]—laid-back and unpretentious, with uncrowded beaches and delicious seafood. By early fall, Lynas' rare-earth ore will begin to arrive.
Shipping ore thousands of miles is extremely expensive. But the company says [ http://www.lynasandmalaysia.com/ ] the cheaper labor, electricity, and chemicals in Malaysia make it worthwhile. Malaysians who oppose the plant see a much more troubling dynamic. "Australia is a first-world country that wants the developing world to do its dirty work," says Fuziah Salleh [ https://twitter.com/fuziah99 ], Kuantan's parliamentary representative and an outspoken critic of the Lynas project. "Our environmental laws are very lax, and Lynas knows exactly where to take advantage of it. If you look at Australia, there are very strict laws about controlling the waste, dust, and air quality. But here in Malaysia—even if we have those laws—it is very hard to enforce."
That hasn't done much to reassure the people of Kuantan. "Lynas doesn't care what happens to us," one fisherman tells me. "They just want their money." They are also less than thrilled that their government has promised Lynas a 12-year tax holiday.
But even more dubious is what Lynas proposes to do with the radioactive solids: Isolate them—the company is not forthcoming with any details as to how—before diluting them with soil or concrete and selling the mixture as fertilizer or construction materials [ http://www.motherjones.com/documents/463352-radioactive-solid-waste-treatment-lynas-eia ].
"They have yet to establish it is either economically or practically feasible," says Dr. Peter Karamoskos, a radiation safety adviser for the Australian government. Noting that Lynas' waste is six times as radioactive as levels recognized as safe, he does a quick calculation: "By the end of 10 years of 1 million tons of waste, where are you going to find 6 million tons to dilute it with? Where are you going to find the clients to take up that stuff? Where are their contracts? Any builder who touched this waste would be out of business immediately. You can argue that if you diluted it adequately you could use it. However, remember the problem is that buildings get demolished. Once you start doing that, you release that back into the environment."
No wonder the plant has become a rallying cause for the opposition parties in upcoming elections. Even in Kuala Lumpur, 150 miles from the plant, I saw bumper stickers bearing the words "Save Malaysia! Stop Lynas!" [ http://savemalaysia-stoplynas.blogspot.com/ ] and here in Kuantan, the slogan is everywhere—on flyers in store windows, on T-shirts, and even on umbrellas.
Among the local protesters is an environmental consultant and Kuantan native named Lee Tan, who now lives mostly in Australia but hasn't forgotten a single crevice of her hometown. A stout, cheerful woman in her early 50s, Tan takes me to a roadside fish stand in the nearby village of Sungai Karang, where a handful of families sit around plastic tables as kids dart around underfoot and a few hungry cats lick their chops near the trash area out back. This is a Muslim village, and Tan and I are the only women not wearing a tudung, the Malaysian headscarf. The shop's owner, 31-year-old Jamil Jusuf, is making his specialty: fried fingers of selayang and padang fish dusted with spicy meal, wrapped tightly in leaves and grilled over an open flame. Jusuf says he first heard about the refinery from tourists. "They told me that the waste will go right where I get my fish from," he says.
Over at a fishing dock on the Balok River, just a few hundred yards from Lynas' waste release site, a fisherman says that he has heard that the opposition party, which is largely made up of ethnic Chinese, is using the Lynas issue to get more votes; the Malay-dominated government has been very supportive of Lynas. He produces a beat-up booklet bearing the Lynas logo. "Lynas has come here many times to hand out pamphlets," he says. Later, Tan translates the pamphlet for me. "The Lynas plant will not be dangerous to the public, the surrounding area, or its workers," declares one bolded heading.
The next day I snag a meeting with a senior government spokesman, who agrees to speak if I don't publish his name. I ask him what locals will gain from having the plant nearby. "A lot, a lot," he says, before admitting that Lynas will only employ about 300 people. "But because Lynas is here, some other industries will also come."
"Which ones?"
"Siemens," he says. I ask whether the German electronics conglomerate has made a formal commitment. He concedes that it hasn't.
"So have any other companies officially said they would come?"
"Thus far, no other commitments yet."
And what of the plant's potential chilling effect on tourism? He brushes that aside. "Fears created by the opposition have influenced a very tiny segment of the people, especially among the Chinese," he says. "The Malays are not worried, because we have been telling them that this project is safe, so why would they fear?"
From Kuantan, I head back to noisy, frenetic Kuala Lumpur. In my hotel room, I can hear tourists at the karaoke bar next door belting out Whitney Houston hits. Tourism accounts for around 6.7 percent of the country's GDP. Over the last decade, the number of foreign tourists has more than doubled [ http://corporate.tourism.gov.my/research.asp?page=facts_figures ], making it the ninth most visited [ http://mkt.unwto.org/en/barometer ] country in the world, just shy of Germany. That it's a Muslim country makes it an especially popular destination [ http://www.ameinfo.com/malaysia-tourism-targets-400-thousand-arab-298780 ] for visitors from the Arab world. I wonder if radiation fears will hurt tourism.
Most of the 12 rare-earth experts I've spoken to say it's technically possible for Lynas to scrub its waste of all the toxic elements—acids, radioactive substances, and corrosive tailings. But not one has seen sufficient explanation—from either Lynas or Malaysian officials—of exactly how it will do this.
When I ask Lynas if it has plans for a permanent waste storage facility, I receive no response. When I ask how the plant will treat its liquids for release into the river, or the radioactive solids it aims to recycle into construction materials, spokesman Alan Jury declines to provide answers and instead refers me to the International Atomic Energy Agency's review of the plant.
I track down an engineer who worked on the Kuantan plant; he agrees to speak with me if given anonymity. Early on in the construction process, the engineer says, his team noticed serious flaws, including moisture seeps and cracks, in the 22 waste tanks the company was building. The problems led AkzoNobel, a Dutch company that Lynas had contracted to create the linings for the tanks, to pull out of the project, a story [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/business/global/rare-earth-metal-refinery-nears-approval-in-malaysia.html?pagewanted=all ] that the New York Times broke early this year. When I asked about the incident, an AkzoNobel spokeswoman wrote, "Due to changes in the Project specification, AkzoNobel would only recommend the use of its linings on the Project subject to the successful results of longer-term testing. That testing could not be completed within the project timescale."
"My personal opinion is that the plant can operate safely," the engineer tells me, "providing that i's effectively engineered." So far, though, he isn't convinced it is.
"I don't see the waste as impossible to manage, but you can't do it in secret, and you can't do it without good numbers," agrees Gavin Mudd, a senior lecturer of civil engineering at Australia's Monash University. "If Lynas is so confident in its methods, then it should have no problem being transparent."
Lynas spokesman Jury says that the change of contractors was a "commercial decision" and assures me that the new one, Trepax Innovation, is lining the tanks "to meet the international industry standard."
I attend a press conference with Raja Dato' Abdul Aziz bin Raja Adnan, the head of Malaysia's Atomic Energy Licensing Board, the body that subsequently granted Lynas a license to operate. I ask Aziz, who never seems to break a sweat or lose his grin as reporters pelt him with pointed questions, whether the board has looked into the plant flaws. Aziz responds that the plant has been inspected by a registered engineer. When I ask for the engineer's name, Aziz declines to give it. Why wasn't the report available to the public? I ask.
"Because it's Lynas' document," says Aziz.
So it was Lynas that looked into the allegations made by the Dutch contractor? He demurs, so I ask again who inspected the plant.
"I looked into the allegations," he says.
"You personally looked into them?"
"We looked into them."
"So then why can't you tell me the name of the engineer who inspected the building for the safety flaws?"
"That's for you to find out."
Right. When I later ask Jury about the alleged inspection report, he says he doesn't have it.
On the day that I leave Malaysia, a group of Kuantan residents files suit [ http://www.motherjones.com/documents/463345-lynas-zakaria-affidavit-final ] against Lynas and the licensing board, alleging in part that the board had a conflict of interest when it made a deal to receive 0.05 percent of the plant's revenue for "radiation research." When the news site Malaysian Insider asks Aziz about the suit, he responds, "I don't know anything about it."
Does my phone have to have such a toxic footprint? Not if manufacturers—and consumers—are prepared to spend more. In the shadow of the Clark mountain range in California's Mojave Desert, about an hour outside of Las Vegas, is the Mountain Pass Mine, America's only major rare-earth mine and refinery. Owned by a company called Molycorp [ http://www.molycorp.com/ ], it opened in 1952 and for decades produced europium, crucial for making color TVs. But in the late '90s, its wastewater pipes burst [ http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/moja/adhi8a.htm ], and California shut the plant down; cleanup is still ongoing.
By then engineers had developed several major improvements to refining methods. Molycorp's new facility uses hydrochloric acid to remove thorium earlier in the process, when it is still in a solid state. Thorium and other waste solids are mixed into a cementlike substance, which workers spread out in layers over a 100-acre pit lined with high-density polyethylene.
Molycorp isn't perfect. That state-of-the-art tailings field is only permitted for 30 years; after that, a new pit would need to be built. The facility uses about half the water that the old plant used, but its energy demands are seven times greater. What's more, officials are tight-lipped about how much ore Molycorp ships to a refinery in Estonia, and about the methods used at its two Chinese refineries.
And even once Mountain Pass and other new US rare-earth plants are running at full capacity, we won't come close to producing all the rare earths that we consume. The United States contains only 10 percent of the world's known deposits. A recent Congressional Research Service report recommended that the US ensure reliable access to sources in countries like China, where rare earths are more abundant or—more to the point—cheaper to extract and refine. "Unless the consumers (industry or end buyers or both) demand that China and others do things in an environmentally sound manner," Jim Kuipers, a Montana-based engineer and mining consultant, wrote me, "they'll continue to do business as usual."
One night toward the end of my visit to Kuantan, I'm lying in bed in a hostel in the middle of a dark neighborhood. I've been told that I'm the only guest tonight, and the hostel's owner lives on the other side of town. In the middle of the night, I awake to the sound of men's voices yelling outside my room in Mandarin. The front door slams. I sit up in bed, heart pounding. The yelling doesn't stop, and I'm becoming increasingly panicked. Something crashes, and that's it: I grab my phone, call Tan, and text a friend back in the States: "Don't freak out, I'm fine, but can you look up how to make an emergency call in Malaysia just in case?" She quickly texts back, and I feel immediately better. A little while later, the hostel owner, whom Tan called, arrives. "No scared, la!" he assures me. (Malaysians often use "la" at the end of sentences for oomph.) They are just last-minute guests, tea merchants who were out partying. Very drunk but totally harmless. Mortified, I text my friend back. Then I apologize over and over—in English and tortured Malay—to the tired owner.
As I try to fall back asleep, I realize that in this situation, my phone was my security blanket. In different circumstances, it could have been my lifeline.
A few days later Tan and I meet up with a group of anti-Lynas activists, including a chatty local man named Chow Kok Chew. He explains that he moved to the area 30 years ago—from Bukit Merah. "Every day when I went to work, I saw awful smoke," he says. "There were a lot of factories, but none had as much smoke as Asian Rare Earth." It was hard, he says, to start a new life here on the east coast, hundreds of miles away from his hometown. But Chow built a successful career as a construction supervisor and raised three children here. Now it feels like home.
So if the plant gets built, I ask him, will he move yet again? He shakes his head. "I am old." Still, he has been spending most of his spare time reading up about the plant—and encouraging his friends to do the same. Next month, Chow and his friends plan to shave their heads in protest. "If I don't do something," he says, "I'm worried that my grandson will say, 'Grandfather, the first time you kept quiet. The second time you kept quiet, too. Why?'"
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