Zero Carbon Nuclear Boost For New Jersey / Beyond the Headlines / BirdNote®: Roseate Spoonbill: Hot Pink / Toxic Black Hair Products / Former EPA Chief Gina McCarthy Launches Center for Climate, Health and the Environment At Harvard In this episode, we connect some dots between environmental factors and public health. Black women may be far more exposed than white women to chemicals that disrupt the body's hormone system, research shows. These chemicals can be found in 50% of hair care products marketed to black women, and just 7% of those marketed to white women -- and that may help explain why black women have a higher incidence of early menarche, preterm birth, diabetes, and other hormone-mediated illnesses. 

 

Research is also emerging about how climate change can affect public health, with heat waves, wildfires, storms and pathogens, and communicating these complex links to the public can pose a challenge. But former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy was never one to back down: and she's taking on the twin foes of climate change and public health, with a new initiative at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health called "C-CHANGE" (the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment).

 

And since the world needs more carbon-free energy in order to prevent those public health consequences, nuclear energy is getting a PR boost. Some like that it does not emit greenhouse gases like the other baseload power sources of coal, oil and natural gas. Others worry about accidents and the lack of no long-term storage plan for radioactive spent fuel from conventional reactors. The State of New Jersey says the benefits outweigh the concerns and has decided to subsidize two aging nuclear plants that were scheduled to close.

 

Those stories and more, in this installment of Living on Earth from PRI.

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