Novel chemical process a first step to making nuclear fuel with fire

DOE/LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY

Research News

 

IMAGE: COMBUSTION SYNTHESIS OF LNBTA COMPOUND. view more 

CREDIT: LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY.

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., November 24, 2020 -- Developing safe and sustainable fuels for nuclear energy is an integral part of Los Alamos National Laboratory's energy security mission. Uranium dioxide, a radioactive actinide oxide, is the most widely used nuclear fuel in today's nuclear power plants. A new "combustion synthesis" process recently established for lanthanide metals -- non-radioactive and positioned one row above actinides on the periodic table -- could be a guide for the production of safe, sustainable nuclear fuels.

"Actinide nitride fuels are potentially a safer and more economical option in current power-generating systems," said Bi Nguyen, Los Alamos National Laboratory Agnew postdoc and lead author of research recently published in the journal Inorganic Chemistry, which was selected as an American Chemical Society Editors' Choice Featured Article.

"Nitride fuels are also well suited to future Generation IV nuclear power systems, which focus on safety, and feature a sustainable closed reactor fuel cycle. Actinide nitrides have superior thermal conductivity compared to the oxides and are significantly more energy dense," said Nguyen. Nitrides are a class of chemical compounds that contain nitrogen, versus oxides, which contain oxygen.

Actinide nitride fuels would provide more safety and sustainability because of their energy density, offering up more energy from less material, as well as better thermal conductivity -- allowing for lower temperature operations, giving them a larger margin to meltdown under abnormal conditions.

Actinide nitrides, however, are very challenging to make and the production of large amounts of high purity actinide nitrides continues to be a major impediment to their application. Both actinides and lanthanides are at the bottom of the periodic table and potential methods to make actinide materials are typically first tested with the lanthanides because they behave similarly, but are not radioactive.

Los Alamos National Laboratory and Naval Research Laboratory scientists discovered that LnBTA [lanthanide bis(tetrazolato)amine] compounds can be burned to produce high-purity lanthanide nitride foams in a unique technique called combustion synthesis. This method uses a laser pulse to initiate dehydrated LnBTA complexes, which then undergo a self-sustained combustion reaction in an inert atmosphere to yield nanostructured lanthanide nitride foams. This work was funded by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program.

LnBTA compounds are easily prepared in bulk and their combustion is readily scalable. There is an ongoing collaboration between the Laboratory's Weapons Modernization and Chemistry divisions to examine actinide analogues for combustion synthesis of actinide nitride fuels.

###

The research team includes Nguyen, David Chavez, Bryce Tappan, and Alexander Mueller of the Explosives Science and Shock Physics group, Jacqueline Veauthier and Jaqueline Kiplinger of the Inorganic Isotope and Actinide group, Brian Scott of Materials Synthesis and Integrated Devices group, and Damon Parrish of the Naval Research Laboratory.

Research paper: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.inorgchem.0c02480

CAPTION

Scanning electron microscope images of cerium nitride foam.

About Los Alamos National Laboratory

Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is managed by Triad, a public service oriented, national security science organization equally owned by its three founding members: Battelle Memorial Institute (Battelle), the Texas A&M University System (TAMUS), and the Regents of the University of California (UC) for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.

Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.

LA-UR-20-29589

German researchers compile world's largest inventory of known plant species

Catalogue vastly expands global knowledge of plant diversity

GERMAN CENTRE FOR INTEGRATIVE BIODIVERSITY RESEARCH (IDIV) HALLE-JENA-LEIPZIG

Research News

 

IMAGE: LEIPZIG IS HOST TO THE OLDEST BOTANICAL GARDEN IN GERMANY. ON AN AREA OF ONLY THREE HECTARES, AROUND 6500 OF THE 350,000 PLANT SPECIES WORLDWIDE GROW HERE. view more 

CREDIT: SWEN REICHHOLD

Leipzig could mean for the future of plant taxonomy what Greenwich meant for world time until 1972: it could become the reference city for correct scientific plant names. In an outstanding feat of research, the curator of the Botanical Garden of Leipzig University, Dr Martin Freiberg, and colleagues from iDiv and UL have compiled what is now the largest and most complete list of scientific names of all known plant species in the world. The Leipzig Catalogue of Vascular Plants (LCVP) enormously updates and expands existing knowledge on the naming of plant species, and could replace The Plant List (TPL) - a catalogue created by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London which until now has been the most important reference source for plant researchers.

"In my daily work at the Botanical Garden, I regularly come across species names that are not clear, where existing reference lists have gaps," said Freiberg. "This always means additional research, which keeps you from doing your actual work and above all limits the reliability of research findings. I wanted to eliminate this obstacle as well as possible."

World's most comprehensive and reliable catalogue of plant names

With 1,315,562 scientific names, the LCVP is the largest of its kind in the world describing vascular plants. Freiberg compiled information from accessible relevant databases, harmonized it and standardised the names listed according to the best possible criteria. On the basis of 4500 other studies, he investigated further discrepancies such as different spellings and synonyms. He also added thousands of new species to the existing lists - species identified in recent years, mainly thanks to rapid advances in molecular genetic analysis techniques.

The LCVP now comprises 351,180 vascular plant species and 6160 natural hybrids across 13,460 genera, 564 families and 84 orders. It also lists all synonyms and provides further taxonomic details. This means that it contains over 70,000 more species and subspecies than the most important reference work to date, TPL. The latter has not been updated since 2013, making it an increasingly outdated tool for use in research, according to Freiberg.

"The catalogue will help considerably in ensuring that researchers all over the world refer to the same species when they use a name," says Freiberg. Originally, he had intended his data set for internal use in Leipzig. "But then many colleagues from other botanical gardens in Germany urged me to make the work available to everyone."

LCVP vastly expands global knowledge of plant diversity

"Almost every field in plant research depends on reliably naming species," says Dr Marten Winter of iDiv, adding: "Modern science often means combining data sets from different sources. We need to know exactly which species people refer to, so as not to compare apples and oranges or to erroneously lump different species." Using the LCVP as a reference will now offer researchers a much higher degree of certainty and reduce confusion. And this will also increase the reliability of research results, adds Winter.

"Working alone, Martin Freiberg has achieved something truly incredible here," says the director of the Botanical Garden and co-author Prof Christian Wirth (UL, iDiv). "This work has been a mammoth task, and with the LCVP he has rendered an invaluable service to plant research worldwide. I am also pleased that our colleagues from iDiv, with their expertise in biodiversity informatics, were able to make a significant contribution to this work."

###

This research was in part supported by the DFG - Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (FZT-118).

 

Tree rings capture an abrupt irreversible shift in east Asia's climate

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE

Research News

 

The abrupt shift to hotter and drier conditions over inner East Asia is unprecedented and may herald an irreversible shift to a new climate regime for the region, according to a new study. The findings reveal a positive feedback loop fueled by declining soil moisture, which may have nudged the area's climate over an important tipping point. Extreme heatwaves and droughts are two of society's most pressing concerns as climate change driven by human activity continues unabated. Global warming has already led to recent and rapid shifts in climate worldwide, including inner East Asia, which has experienced some of the most pronounced heatwave-drought concurrences in recent decades. It's thought that such abrupt and substantial changes represent the crossing of critical thresholds within the climate system and signal irreversible shifts from one climate regime to another. But, identifying tipping points and new climate norms is difficult; not only does it require a thorough understanding of a region's natural climate variability over timescales that often exceed available records, regime shifts are likely triggered by complex interactions between a variety of poorly understood factors in the highly dynamic climate system. To determine whether the heatwave-drought trends observed in inner East Asia indeed exceed the range of natural climate variability, Peng Zhang and colleagues used tree-ring data to reconstruct a record of heatwave frequency and soil moisture for the region spanning the past 260 years. Zhang et al. found that the rise in concurrent heatwave-drought events over the last two decades is unique and beyond the natural variability revealed by their centuries-long record. What's more, the authors demonstrate that the rise in heatwave-drought events may be caused by a positive feedback loop between decreasing soil moisture and increasing surface warming - a pattern that's potentially the start of an irreversible trend that's likely to produce more frequent and severe events. While much remains to be understood about the occurrence and mechanisms of climate regime shifts, developing trustworthy long-term climate records is crucial in detecting changes in the interactions of climate variables, discovering past shifts and predicting tipping points of potential future shifts, write Qi-Bin Zhang and Ouya Fang in a related Perspective.

Satellite images confirm uneven impact of climate change

University of Copenhagen researchers have been following vegetation trends across the planet's driest areas using satellite imagery from recent decades

FACULTY OF SCIENCE - UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN

Research News

 

University of Copenhagen researchers have been following vegetation trends across the planet's driest areas using satellite imagery from recent decades. They have identified a troubling trend: Too little vegetation is sprouting up from rainwater in developing nations, whereas things are headed in the opposite direction in wealthier ones. As a result, the future could see food shortages and growing numbers of climate refugees.

More than 40 percent of Earth's ecosystems are arid, an amount that is expected to increase significantly over the course of the 21st century. Some of these areas, such as those in Africa and Australia may be savannah or desert, where sparse rainfall has long been the norm. Within these biomes, vegetation and wildlife have adapted to making use of their scant water resources, but they are also extraordinarily vulnerable to climate change.

Using extensive imagery from satellites that monitor Earth every day, researchers from the University of Copenhagen's Department of Geosciences and Natural Resources Management have studied the evolution of vegetation in arid regions. Their conclusion is unequivocal:

"We observe a clear trend of arid areas developing in a negative direction in the most economically challenged countries. Here, it is apparent that the growth of vegetation has become increasingly decoupled from the water resources available and that there is simply less vegetation in relation to the amount of rainfall. The opposite is the case in the wealthiest countries," explains Professor Rasmus Fensholt of the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management.

Worse in Asia and Africa, better in South America and Australia

The researchers analyzed 15 years worth of satellite imagery of vegetation and rainfall -- from 2000 to 2015. To compare the evolution of vegetation in arid regions of the world, the researchers removed precipitation totals from the equation. In other words, they produced a calculation that accounts for the fact that some regions received more rain in past decades, while other regions received less.

This provides a more accurate picture of ecosystem health, as human influences become easier to identify: In other words, whether resource use is balanced or whether an ecosystem's resources have been overexploited, with potentially fatal consequences -- as imbalanced systems may be irreparable.

"Here, our results demonstrate that in arid regions, particularly those in Africa and Asia, less vegetation grows for the amount of rainwater that falls, while more vegetation grows in arid areas of South America and Australia," says lead author Christin Abel, a postdoc at the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management.

Infographic text: Areas with purple hues indicate where vegetation growth relative to rainfall is declining, while green hues reveal areas where vegetation has grown more than expected. White areas represent ecosystems where vegetation growth is in balance with the water resources available.

According to the researchers, there may be several explanations for why climate change and rising global temperatures are impacting vegetation in arid regions of the world's poorest countries. Among the most obvious is rapid population growth, in Africa for example, where there is an increasing need to exploit land that is otherwise poorly suited for agriculture. Doing so produces lower yields and puts increasing amounts of livestock on too little grass in already fragile ecosystems.

Conversely, vegetation in arid areas of the world's wealthier countries seems to be coping better with climate change. This is likely due to the intensification and expansion of larger farms, where more economic resources allow for, among other things, irrigation and fertilization.

Food crises and more climate refugees

As a result of climate change, future trends for the planet's poorest areas only seem to be getting worse. Forecasts point to an expansion of today's arid areas where they will make up a larger and larger share of our global ecosystems. This may result in more and more people being left without food and their needing to migrate.

"One consequence of declining vegetation in the world's poorer arid regions areas may be an increase in climate refugees from various African countries. According to what we've seen in this study, there is no indication that the problem will diminish in the future," explains Rasmus Fensholt.

For a number of years, satellite imagery has let researchers observe that, overall, it actually appears that the world's arid regions have become greener. However, when researchers look at how much vegetation arid areas in developing countries get in relation to rainfall amounts, the picture looks different.

"We have been pleased to see that, for a number of years, vegetation has been on an upwards trend in arid regions. But if we dig only a tiny bit deeper and look at how successfully precipitation has translated into vegetation, then climate change seems to be hitting unevenly, which is troubling," says Rasmus Fensholt.

###

#SAVETHEAMAZON

Peru’s Oil Industry Is Engulfed In Crisis


Editor OilPrice.com
Thu, November 26, 2020

A combination of sharply weaker oil prices, inconsistent regulation, the COVID-19 pandemic, and constant conflict in the Amazon where most of Peru’s onshore oil industry is located has triggered a crisis that has brought the industry to the brink of collapse. This was recently recognized by Peru’s National Society of Mining, Oil, and Energy (SNMPE – Spanish initials) which released a media statement (Spanish) asking the central government to implement measures to reverse the crisis. Lima has long downplayed Peru’s considerable oil potential in preference to advancing the Andean country’s mining industry and exploiting its vast mineral wealth. That saw Peru become the world’s second-largest copper producer and the red metal, which is a vital ingredient in a range of industrial applications, become the country’s top export. The severe economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, with the IMF predicting that Peru’s economy will shrink by a worrying 14%, sees Lima looking to bolster the economy and GDP growth by any means possible.

This has sparked a renewed focus on ramping-up activity in Peru’s oil industry. In October 2020 Peru’s Ministry of Energy and Mines announced it was (Spanish) preparing a series of regulatory proposals aimed at providing greater clarity for the exploration and exploitation of the country’s hydrocarbon resources. While this is designed to attract greater investment and boost activity in Peru’s petroleum industry, it appears to be singularly insufficient to achieve that, particularly considering the latest media release from the SNMPE. A key issue facing Peru’s nascent petroleum industry is the Andean country’s limited proven oil reserves. At the end of 2018, the last time they were officially measured, the Ministry of Energy and Mines determined (Spanish) Peru only had 344.5 million barrels of proven oil reserves and proven possible and probable (3P) reserves of 660.4 million barrels, some of the lowest of any oil-producing nation in Latin America. The Andean country, however, is believed to possess considerable hydrocarbon potential with Peru assessed to have prospective and contingent petroleum resources of almost 24 billion barrels. Most of that oil potential is contained in the Marañon Basin which is part of the Putumayo-Oriente-Marañon Basin complex that stretches through the Amazon from southeastern Colombia to northeastern Peru. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated the Putumayo-Oriente-Marañon Basin holds mean undiscovered hydrocarbon resources of 3.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent including just over 3 billion barrels of crude oil. This underscores the tremendous oil potential of the Marañon Basin, which if correctly exploited will give Peru’s economy a solid boost, particularly if oil keeps rallying higher.

Marañon Basin and Oil Producing Areas

Maranon  Source: Petroperu.

Most of Peru’s discovered oil reserves and undiscovered hydrocarbon resources along with the core of its operational petroleum industry and related infrastructure are in the country’s Amazon region. It is this which has been the cause of a key source of conflict for Peru’s hydrocarbon sector. Allegations of mismanagement, corruption, and environmental damage along with a lack of social license and a shortfall of resources in the region are key drivers of the persistent conflict impacting Peru’s petroleum industry. Many of those issues have been aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic which highlighted the deep divisions between Peru’s rich and poor as well as the latter’s lack of access to basic resources. This includes a lack of access to essential amenities including electricity, running water, and basic medical treatment. This is despite the substantial government revenue generated by the region which is responsible for most of Peru’s oil production. The sharp impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on indigenous communities caused tensions to boil-over in early August 2020 triggering violent protests in Peru’s Amazon leading to attacks on energy infrastructure and oil fields. That forced upstream oil producer PetroTal to shutter its Bretaña oilfield. Protestors also seized control of a Petroperu pump station, impacting pipeline operations.

Community blockades and protests are common events in Peru’s Amazon, which is one of the country’s most impoverished regions despite its considerable oil wealth. Canadian oil junior Frontera Energy was forced to declare force majeure in March 2020 regarding its operations at Block 192 located in the Amazon Basin on Peru’s border with Ecuador. This along with ongoing community opposition to the oil industry in the region coupled with lengthy pipeline outages is a primary reason for Frontera choosing to reconsider making investments in Peru. PetroTal earlier this month announced it had curtailed oil production to 5,000 barrels daily, or around half of its normal oil output, so as to preserve oil inventories in light of ongoing social unrest and threats of disruption to operations at its Bretaña field. This is despite a September 2020 agreement between the government and local communities for increased funding and access to basic resources. But cutting production to conserve oil inventories indicates that PetroTal’s management is not confident that the agreement between local communities and the government will allay social unrest and prevent further protests. The Petroperu owned and operated Oleoducto Nor Peruano (ONP), which originates in Peru’s Loreto department is in the Amazon Basin, is the only economic means of transporting the crude oil produced in the Marañon Basin to the Bayóvar terminal on Peru's Pacific Coast. The ONP has a long history of outages and oil spills. These have caused considerable environmental damage, polluted waterways contaminated drinking water, and sharply impacted local communities. That is another source of ongoing community enmity toward Lima and Peru’s petroleum industry. Those incidents only serve to further undermine any attempts to broaden the social license for oil companies to operate in the region.

Ongoing conflict, social unrest, and sharply weaker oil prices have caused investment in Peru’s oil industry to plummet, falling to $200 million for the first eight months of 2020, which is half of what it was for the same period a year earlier. The SNMPE claims that exploration activity has ground to a halt and no new oil wells have been drilled over the last five months. This the executive director of the society, Pablo de la Flor, claims indicates that Peru’s oil industry in crisis and close to collapse.

Drill rig and oil production data supports this assertion. The latest Baker Hughes rig count does not show any operational drilling rigs in October 2020, or for the four preceding months, compared to four operational rigs for the same month in 2019. Oil production for October 2020 (Spanish) averaged a mere 37,800 barrels daily, which was almost 33% lower than a year earlier. October natural gas output of 1.254 million cubic feet daily and total hydrocarbon liquids production of 122,000 barrels of oil equivalent daily were 12% lower than for the same period in 2019. Those numbers underscore the fact that Peru’s hydrocarbon sector is facing a crisis.

Until the many headwinds including a lack of social license and ongoing civil conflict are resolved, Peru’s oil industry will remain under considerable pressure, impacting production and fiscal revenue. It will also weigh upon urgently needed investment by foreign energy companies to expand exploration and boost Peru’s limited oil reserves. It is important that the SNMPE’s plea to Peru’s central government and local communities in the Amazon doesn’t fall on deaf ears and Lima enacts appropriate policies to deal with the deep-seated issues which are impacting the country’s petroleum operations.

By Matthew Smith for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com

Mine ponds amplify mercury risks in Peru's Amazon

Gold miners have dramatically altered the landscape of Peru's Amazon, increasing mercury poisoning risks for humans and wildlife

DUKE UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: THOUSANDS OF ARTIFICIAL PONDS LIKE THIS ONE, CREATED WHEN RAINWATER FILLED IN AN ABANDONED GOLD MINING PIT, ARE AMPLIFYING RISKS OF MERCURY EXPOSURE FOR HUMANS AND WILDLIFE IN THE PERUVIAN... view more 

CREDIT: MELISSA MARCHESE

DURHAM, N.C. - The proliferation of pits and ponds created in recent years by miners digging for small deposits of alluvial gold in Peru's Amazon has dramatically altered the landscape and increased the risk of mercury exposure for indigenous communities and wildlife, a new study shows.

"In heavily mined watersheds, there's been a 670% increase in the extent of ponds across the landscape since 1985. These ponds are almost entirely artificial lakes created as thousands of former mining pits fill in with rainwater and groundwater over time," said Simon Topp, a doctoral student in geological sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who co-led the study.

Landscapes formerly dominated by forests are now increasingly dotted by these small lakes, which, the study finds, provide low-oxygen conditions in which submerged mercury - a toxic leftover from the gold mining process - can be converted by microbial activity into an even more toxic form of the element, called methylmercury, at net rates 5-to-7 times greater than in rivers.

"Methylmercury poses especially high risks for humans and large predators because it bioaccumulates in body tissue as it moves up the food chain. That's particularly concerning given the high biodiversity and the large number of indigenous populations that live in the Peruvian Amazon," said Jacqueline Gerson, a doctoral student in ecology at Duke University, who also co-led the study.

These heightened risks likely also occur in other locations where unregulated artisanal small-scale gold mining takes place, including Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of South America, she said.

Topp, Gerson and their colleagues published their peer-reviewed study Nov. 27 in Science Advances.

Artisanal gold miners use mercury, a potent neurotoxin, to separate their gold ore from soil and sediments, often without adequate safety precautions to protect themselves or the environment.

Mercury poisoning can cause a wide range of health impacts, including tremors, muscle weakness, vision and hearing impairments, and loss of coordination and balance. In severe cases, it can lead to birth defects or death.

Some of the mercury used by the miners is burned off into the air or spilled into nearby rivers, creating far-reaching environmental and human health risks that have been well documented in past studies. The new study is the first to document how the mining has altered the landscape and simultaneously amplified the risks of mercury poisoning through the creation of ponds and the microbial processing of mercury into methylmercury that occurs there.

To conduct the study, the scientists collected water and sediment samples at sites upstream and downstream of artisanal gold mining sites along Peru's Madre de Dios River, its tributaries, surrounding lakes, and mining ponds during the dry season in July and August of 2019. They measured each sample for total mercury content and for the proportion of that mercury that was in the more toxic form of methylmercury.

By combining these measurements with more than three decades of high-resolution satellite data from the region, they were able to determine the extent of artificial ponding and mercury contamination at each site and identify causal links.

"You can clearly see that the increase in artificial lakes and ponds in heavily mined areas accelerated after 2008, when gold prices dramatically increased along with mining activity," Topp said. By contrast, the total surface area of ponds in areas without heavy mining increased by an average of only 20% over the entire study period.

"We expect that this trend, and the environmental and human health risks it causes, will continue as long as gold prices remain high and artisanal small-scale gold mining is a profitable activity," he said.

###

Co-authors of the new study were John Gardner, Xiao Yang and Tamlin Pavelsky of UNC-CH; Emily Bernhardt of Duke; and Claudia Vega and Luis Fernandez of Wake Forest University's Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation in Peru.

Funding came from Duke University.

CITATION: "Artificial Lake Expansion Amplifies Mercury Pollution from Gold Mining," Jacqueline R. Gerson, Simon N. Topp. Claudia M. Vega, John R. Gardner, Xiao Yang, Luis E. Fernandez, Emily S. Bernhardt and Tamlin M. Pavelsky. Science Advances, Nov. 27, 2020. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd4953

15 Contemporary US Indigenous Photographers Whose Work You Should Know

Kalen Goodluck, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Kalen Goodluck
The Apache Tears Motel

"Kalen Goodluck is Diné, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Tsimshian. The Apache Tears Motel was once a historic roadside stop for motorists in Tucson off Benson Highway and featured a kitsch statue of a cross-legged Indian donning a headdress. It sits on a tract of land illegally seized from Western Apache Bands in 1886 and was sold to benefit the University of Arizona’s endowment. This photo and others was a part of High Country News’ ‘Land Grab Universities’ project, an investigation into how expropriated Indigenous lands formed the foundation of today’s public land grant university system."



Will Wilson, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Will Wilson

"When it comes down to it, I really love sharing the craft. The wet plate process really enables a slower more personal and direct experience of photography, and then there is the gifting of the photographic object to the sitter in exchange for a digital facsimile. I made this recently. It's the AIR protagonist figuring out the drone he uses to photograph Abandoned Uranium Mines on the Navajo Nation. For many of my tintypes, you can engage with the person and collaborator in the portrait through the Talking Tintype app, it's a free download from the Apple App Store. I also run the photography program at The Santa Fe Community College."

Josué Rivas, Chinook, Cowlitz, and Clackamas Territory | Portland, OR

Josué Rivas
A woman walks in the snow during a blizzard. Standing Rock, North Dakota, USA. November, 2016.

“I want my images to be a reminder of our collective power not only as Indigenous peoples but also as human beings. The intention of my work is to be a starting point for a conversation about decolonization, acknowledgment, healing, and reconciliation, not only with each other but also with all our relations.

My identity is the foundation and serves as a guide for my work. Whether I'm documenting Indigenous movements or creating spaces for us to tell our own story, my ancestors stand behind me and my descendants in front of me. My practice is also guided by the understanding that we as Indigenous peoples will exist in the future; I believe we are in a moment where telling our own stories and reclaiming our narrative is a first step towards reimagining what that future looks like. Technology will shape visual storytelling, and I think Indigenous peoples will be at the forefront of that transition. My hope is that our identity will continue to serve as a reference point for the stories we tell now — we are future ancestors.”

SEE THE REST HERE 

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/piapeterson/contemporary-indigenous-photographers

GOOD NEWS


The TikToker Fired For His Viral Paint-Mixing Account Has A New Job

Tony Piloseno said he got job and collaboration offers from almost every major paint company, but he "really connected with" the founder of Florida Paints over a shared "passion for paint."

Tanya Chen BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on November 24, 2020
Instagram: @tonesterpaints

https://www.instagram.com/p/CH5kudPH24l/?utm_source=ig_embed

Tony Piloseno, the 22-year-old Ohio University student who was fired by Sherwin-Williams over his wildly successful paint-mixing TikTok account, has accepted a full-time job working for a Florida-based paint company aptly called Florida Paints.

Piloseno received job offers from almost all the "major paint companies ... Benjamin Moore, Behr, all those guys," he told BuzzFeed News, after his story went viral.


While he was focused on building his @tonesterpaints account, his passion from day one was always mixing paints in-house. At Florida Paints, he'll be once again working as a sales associate in a physical store.

"I talked to a bunch of people from a bunch of companies, but Don Strube, the co-owner of Florida Paints, he really connected with me when he called me and talked about his passion for paint," Piloseno said. "I found that very special."

Strube is also aware of and encourages Piloseno to continue to "express his [creativity] on social media."

"I really want to work in the paint industry along with social media itself, while still making content," Piloseno said.

He's also arranged with the administration at Ohio University to finish his degree online while he starts work at Florida Paints next month.

Piloseno plans on using funds from his GoFundMe (a total of $2,365) that he was originally going to spend on more paint supplies toward his big move to Orlando.

Due to the latest surge of COVID-19 cases, Piloseno said he'll be getting tested before he starts his new job, and he'll "be wearing a mask regularly in the store."

"I just want to say I really do appreciate all the fans and my audience for having my back — for seeing my side of things," he added.

64.3K434223

@tonesterpaints

Reply to @peterpan020 i got you #glowintbedark #paintmixing #colorwheel #satisfying

Weeeeee - Trippie Redd

Discover more on TikTok
MORE ON THIS
A College Student Behind A Massively Popular Paint-Mixing TikTok Page Was Fired From Sherwin-Williams Tanya Chen · Nov. 18, 2020



Tanya Chen is a social news reporter for BuzzFeed and is based in Chicago.

ICE Expelled 33 Immigrant Children Back To Guatemala After A Judge Said They Couldn't

“It is unconscionable that they are leaving the kids there and that they did not immediately bring them back,” one immigration analyst said.

Hamed Aleaziz BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on November 24, 2020

Eric Gay / AP
Immigrants from El Salvador and Guatemala who entered the US illegally board a bus in 2015.

The Trump administration expelled 33 children who came to the US without a parent back to Guatemala after a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking the controversial practice that same day.

The injunction was issued Wednesday by US Judge Emmet Sullivan minutes before an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) flight left for Guatemala City with the 33 children.

An ICE official confirmed that the flight left “shortly before ICE was informed of the court's injunction” against Title 42, the public health provision used by the Trump administration to expel people from the US citing the coronavirus pandemic.

The official said that ICE officers on the ground did not become aware of the judge’s order until the flight had landed and Guatemalan authorities were greeting the children, who remained in Guatemala as of Tuesday.

“We are aware of the situation and are looking into it. Hopefully, no child is being denied the benefit of the ruling,” said Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney who led the lawsuit that resulted in the preliminary injunction blocking the policy.

The expulsion of the 33 children happening on the same day of Sullivan’s order could force the agency to bring back the children because it violated the judge’s decision, legal experts said.

“It is unconscionable that they are leaving the kids there and that they did not immediately bring them back,” said Sarah Pierce, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. Even if the flight took off before ICE officials knew, she added, “the expulsion is not only putting kids on the plane and taking off, it is also placing them in another country.”


Brad Doherty / AP
Immigrants are checked and loaded onto a plane in 2014 at Brownsville South Padre Island International Airport Texas.

Pratheepan Gulasekaram, a professor at Santa Clara University Law School, said ICE’s repeated issues in court under the Trump administration could play a factor in this case if Sullivan assesses whether they violated his order. Federal court judges have complained that they were lied to by officials in cases involving immigration policy during the Trump administration.

“It is not out of the power of the district court, if someone could raise the matter, to order ICE to return the children that it removed on that flight,” he said, noting that ICE officials will likely say that there will be practical difficulties in tracking down and locating the 33 children.

The Trump administration has argued that the current policy is necessary to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in the United States.

“If the Title 42 order were to be undone by the court or the next administration, especially in the midst of a surging pandemic, ICE will be obligated to increase transportation operations, conducting the escorts of individuals and unaccompanied children using commercial airlines and ground transportation, as appropriate,” the ICE official said. “This poses an increased risk to the general public aboard commercial airlines as the Title 42 order was enacted to mitigate the public health risks of aliens attempting to unlawfully enter the United States in the midst of the pandemic.”

Critics said the government was using public health orders from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as an excuse to violate federal laws that govern the processing of unaccompanied children at the border.

BuzzFeed News previously reported that the Department of Homeland Security has expelled unaccompanied immigrant children from the US border more than 13,000 times since March.

Before the pandemic, unaccompanied children picked up by Border Patrol agents would be sent to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), where they would be housed in shelters as they started applying for asylum and waited to be reunited with family members in the US.

The ORR referral process was created by the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which was signed by then-president George W. Bush in 2008. Under the law, Customs and Border Protection officials are generally required to refer the children within 72 hours to the US refugee agency. But those referrals dropped precipitously after the CDC's coronavirus order.

Instead, unaccompanied children at the border are turned back immediately to Mexico or held in detention facilities until a flight can get them out of the country.

In late June, US District Judge Carl Nichols, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, blocked the deportation of a 16-year-old Honduran boy under the CDC's order. While the ruling did not void the policy altogether, it was seen as a blow to the administration. Since then, the government has said it was no longer seeking to use the CDC's order to remove the boy from the country.

ICE officials said four of the children on the flight to Guatemala had tested positive for COVID-19.

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WWF'S SECRET WAR
WWF Admitted “Sorrow” Over Human Rights Abuses

A 160-page report, in response to a BuzzFeed News investigation, found long-standing failures at the celebrated wildlife charity.

Katie J.M. Baker BuzzFeed News Investigative Reporter

Tom Warren Investigations Correspondent

Posted on November 25, 2020


Tim Lane / BuzzFeed News

Read the original March 2019 BuzzFeed News investigation.

One of the world’s largest charities knew for years that it was funding alleged human rights abusers but repeatedly failed to address the issue, a lengthy, long-delayed report revealed on Tuesday.

A BuzzFeed News investigation first exposed in March 2019 how WWF, the beloved nonprofit with the cuddly panda logo, financed and equipped park rangers accused of beating, torturing, sexually assaulting, and murdering scores of people. In response, WWF immediately commissioned an “independent review” led by Navi Pillay, a former United Nations commissioner for human rights.

The 160-page review, which has now been published online, corroborates problems exposed by BuzzFeed News in Nepal, Cameroon, the Republic of the Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The report claimed the panel was prevented by the COVID-19 pandemic from traveling to locations where the abuses reportedly took place.

The review found that WWF had failed again and again to follow “its own commitments to respect human rights” — commitments that are not just required by law but essential to “the conservation of nature.”

In a statement issued in response to the review, WWF expressed “deep and unreserved sorrow for those who have suffered,” and said that abuses by park rangers “horrify us and go against all the values for which we stand.” The charity acknowledged its shortcomings and welcomed the recommendations, saying “we can and will do more.”

Pillay’s review declined to address whether high-level executives, who BuzzFeed News found were aware of “accelerating” violence at at least one wildlife park as early as January 2018, were responsible for the charity’s missteps.

In the Congo Basin, where WWF did an “especially weak” job fulfilling its human rights commitments, the wildlife charity did not fully investigate accounts of murder, rape, and torture out of fear that government partners would “react negatively to an effort to investigate past human rights abuses,” the panel found. There and elsewhere, WWF provided technical and financial support to park rangers, known locally as “eco-guards,” even after learning about similar, horrifying allegations — and, in some cases, after damning reviews commissioned by the non-profit itself confirmed “serious and widespread” reports of abuse.

The report found “no formal mechanism in place for WWF to be informed of alleged abuses during anti-poaching missions” in Nepal, despite torture, rape, and murder allegations ranging from the early 2000s to this past July, when park officials were alleged to have beaten an Indigenous youth and destroyed homes of a local community. “WWF needs to know what is happening on the ground where it works” in order to fulfill its own human rights policies, the report said.


Frank Bienewald / Getty Images
A river in Nepal's Chitwan National Park.

Overall, WWF paid too little attention to credible abuse allegations, failed to construct a system for victims to make complaints, and painted an overly rosy picture of its anti-poaching war in public communications, the report found. "Unfortunately, WWF’s commitments to implement its social policies have not been adequately and consistently followed through,” the report’s authors wrote.

WWF has supported efforts to fight wildlife crime for decades. Although local governments officially employ and pay park rangers who patrol national parks and protected wildlife reserves, in a number of countries across Africa and Asia WWF has provided crucial funding to make their jobs possible. The charity has framed its crusade against poaching in the hardened terms of war.

In a multipart series, BuzzFeed News found that WWF’s war on poaching came with civilian casualties: impoverished villagers living near the parks. At the time, WWF responded that many of BuzzFeed’s assertions did “not match our understanding of events” — yet the charity swiftly overhauled many of its human rights policies after publication.

In the US, the series spurred a bipartisan investigation and proposed legislation that would prohibit the government from awarding money to international conservation groups that fund or support human rights violations. It also prompted a freeze of funds by the Interior Department, a review by the Government Accountability Office, and separate government probes in the UK and Germany.

The new review offers more recommendations for the charity to improve its oversight, including hiring more human rights specialists, conducting stronger due diligence before committing to conservation projects, signing human rights commitments with WWF’s government and law enforcement partners in the field, and establishing effective complaint systems so that Indigenous people can more easily report abuse.

The review found that there was no “consistent and unified effort” across WWF’s network of offices around the world to “address complaints about human rights abuses” until 2018.

Many of the panel’s findings pointed directly to the top: “Commitments to meet the responsibility to respect human rights should be approved at the most senior level of the institution,” the panel wrote. Although all of WWF’s offices in the Congo Basin fall under the direct authority of WWF International, staff at its headquarters in Gland, Switzerland did little to oversee the organization’s work there.

WWF International also didn’t provide clear guidance to local offices about how to implement its human rights commitments. For example, there were no network-wide norms about how to work with law enforcement and park rangers. As a result, each program office “was left on its own to develop – or not – codes of conduct, training materials, conditions for supporting rangers, and procedures for responding to allegations of abuse.”

“Ultimately, the responsibility was on WWF International and the WWF Network as a whole to ensure that the allegations of human rights abuses by eco-guards to which WWF was providing financial and technical support were properly addressed,” the panel wrote.


Ezequiel Becerra / Getty Images
WWF International Director General Marco Lambertini


Last October BuzzFeed News revealed that both Director General Marco Lambertini and Chief Operating Officer Dominic O’Neill personally reviewed a WWF-commissioned report documenting “accelerating” accounts of violence by WWF-backed guards in Cameroon. That report was sent to higher-ups in January 2018 — more than a year before BuzzFeed News began exposing similar abuses. Yet Pillay’s review said little about whether WWF executives were responsible for the charity’s failings.

Instead the review focused on WWF’s complex system, under which individual program offices partner with countries “with apparently very limited consultation or oversight from WWF International,” even when WWF International is legally responsible. This obscured “clear lines of responsibility and accountability,” resulting in “difficulties and confusion” and “ineffective” attempts to address human rights, the panel wrote.

The panel couldn’t find a single contract between WWF International and its partner countries that contained provisions concerning human rights responsibilities or the rights of Indigenous people.

The panel also criticized WWF’s press briefings at length, saying it needed to be “more forthcoming about the challenges it faces” and “more transparent about how it responds when faced with allegations of human rights abuses associated with activities that it supports.” In some cases, “it is clear that to avoid fuelling criticism WWF decided not to publish commissioned reports, to downplay information received, or to overstate the effectiveness of its proposed responses.”

An internal focus on promoting “good news” seems “to have led to a culture” in which program offices “have been unwilling to share or escalate the full extent of their knowledge about allegations of human rights abuses because of concern about scaring off donors or offending state partners,” the report said. “WWF at all levels should be more transparent both internally and externally about the challenges it faces in promoting conservation and respecting human rights. Equally important, it must be more forthright about the effectiveness, or lack of effectiveness, of its efforts to overcome those challenges.”

The report attracted immediate criticism from prominent voices who said it did not fully acknowledge the charity’s responsibility for abuses against Indigenous people. Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International, the tribal rights advocacy group, said “the report echoes previous WWF responses in passing the blame onto ‘government rangers.’” A spokesperson for Rainforest Foundation UK said the report “fails to take responsibility” for WWF’s shortcomings “or issue a sincere apology to the many individuals who have suffered human rights abuses carried out in their name.”

The Forest Peoples Program, an Indigenous rights group that has reported abuses to WWF, said the report showed the need for all wildlife charities to take a hard look at themselves.

“The human rights abuses suffered by Indigenous peoples and local communities listed in the report highlight fundamental issues that arise across the conservation sector as a whole, not isolated to WWF,” said Helen Tugendhat, program coordinator at the Forest Peoples Program. “We urge other conservation organizations as well as conservation funders to read this report closely and evaluate and amend their own practices.”

MORE ON THIS
WWF Funds Guards Who Have Tortured And Killed People Tom Warren · March 4, 2019

A Leaked Report Shows WWF Was Warned Years Ago Of “Frightening” Abuses

Katie J.M. Baker · March 5, 2019

WWF Executives Were Warned Of Widespread Atrocities By Anti-Poaching Rangers The Charity Funded

Katie J.M. Baker · Oct. 17, 2019



Katie Baker is an investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in London.


Tom Warren is an investigations correspondent for BuzzFeed News and is based in London.