Increasing consumer demand for sustainably-sourced products has created a need to benchmark sustainability at the field level. To address this issue, some companies are offering incentives to producers, but are still lacking participation. This study estimated producers’ willingness to accept for participating in sustainability programs and implementing sustainable practices at the field level using a double-bounded dichotomous-choice framework. The results revealed preferences for longer contracts in length of time, industry as the verification party, supplemental benefits that yield an economic incentive, and a per-bale payment. This project will give new insights to the value and importance of documenting, verification, and traceability throughout the supply chain.

This study examines the effect of nozzle flexibility on vortex ring formation at a Reynolds Number of Re = 1000. The flexible nozzles impart elastic energy to the flow, increasing the hydrodynamic impulse of the vortex ring dependent on the input fluid acceleration and the initial nozzle tip deflection (predicted by the measured nozzle damped natural frequency). When these time scales are synchronised, the output velocity and hydrodynamic impulse of the vortex ring are maximised. Vortex ring pinch-off is predicted using the output velocity for each nozzle and is confirmed with closed finite time Lypunov exponent contours. The lowest tested input formation length, L/D = 1, where L is the piston stroke length and D is the nozzle diameter, generates a greater increase in impulse than L/D = 2 and L/D = 4, due to a higher relative increase in total ejected volume and by remaining in the single vortex formation regime. At L/D = 2 and L/D = 4, multiple vortex structures are observed due to the interplay of the counter-flow generated by the nozzles re-expanding and the steady input flow. At the end of the pumping cycle, during fluid deceleration, the flexible nozzles collapse. This helps in suppressing unfavourable negative pressure regions from forming within the nozzle, instead expelling additional fluid from the nozzle. Upon reopening, beneficial stopping vortices form within the nozzles, with circulation correlated to nozzle stiffness. This highlights a secondary optimal stiffness criterion that must be considered in a full-cycle analysis: the nozzle must be compliant enough to collapse during deceleration, yet remain as stiff as possible to reopen quickly to maximise efficiency in refilling.

In July 1969, a leak of chemical weapons on Okinawa sickened more than 20 U.S. soldiers and laid bare one of the Pentagon's biggest Cold War secrets: the storage of toxic munitions outside of the continental United States.

Public outrage following the Okinawa accident forced the White House to launch Operation Red Hat — codename for a mission to remove the chemicals from the island.

[For forty years, beginning with a desert test visible from the Sky Bar at Las Vegas’ Desert Inn, 928 nuclear devices were exploded at the Nevada test site, many of them above ground. In March 2005, the 8,000 square foot Atomic Testing Museum opened its doors near the Las Vegas strip. As Greg Mitchell records in the following piece, the museum is as notable for what goes unmentioned as for the events it depicts: these include the victims of the first atomic bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the plight of the “downwinders”, more than 12,000 of whom have filed claims in relationship to cancer and other illnesses that may be linked to the nuclear tests or uranium mining.]

[The movie “Original Child Bomb” aired on Saturday night August 6 at 5:30 p.m. on Sundance Cable, and several times the following week. Those interested in ordering it can write Mary Becker of the Thomas Merton Center at marybecker@cox.net]

New York In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan almost 60 years ago, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This included footage shot by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams. In addition, for many years all but a handful of newspaper photographs were seized or prohibited.

More than six months after dozens of rusty chemical barrels were unearthed from former U.S. military land in Okinawa City, their contents have been identified - and they appear to offer conclusive proof that the toxic Vietnam War defoliant Agent Orange was buried on the island.

Announced in early July, the results of two separate studies - one conducted by Okinawa City and one by the Okinawa Defense Bureau - both detected the three signature components of Agent Orange: the herbicides 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D as well as highly-toxic TCDD dioxin.

Thousands of barrels of Agent Orange were unloaded on Okinawa Island and stored at the port of Naha, and at the U.S. military's Kadena and Camp Schwab bases between 1965 and 1966, an American veteran who served in Okinawa claims.

In a Jacksonville Florida interview in early April with The Japan Times and Ryukyu Asahi Broadcasting Co., a TV network based in Okinawa, former infantryman Larry Carlson, 67, also said that Okinawan stevedores were exposed to the highly toxic herbicide as they labored in the holds of ships, and that he witnessed it being sprayed at Kadena Air Base.

On 13 August 2004, a U.S. Marine Corps transport helicopter crashed onto the campus of Okinawa International University, Ginowan City, injuring the three service members on board and sparking a large fire. Although the accident occurred on civilian soil, U.S. forces cordoned off the scene and blocked access to Japanese police investigators; according to some reports the only local representatives allowed through the blockade were delivery drivers bringing pizzas to the American MPs. That night, the national Japanese TV news networks either failed to cover the crash or afforded it scant attention.

More than two years after the triple disasters that included the meltdowns at TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, between 160,000 and 300,000 Tohoku residents remain displaced, the power station teeters on the brink of further disaster, and large swathes of northern Japan are so irradiated they may be uninhabitable for generations to come. But today in Tokyo, it is as though March 11, 2011 never happened. The streets are packed with tourists and banners herald the city's 2020 Olympic bid; the neon lights are back on and all memories of post-meltdown power savings seem long forgotten.

A Japanese translation of this article is available here

Two leading Agent Orange specialists have weighed in on the recent discovery of 22 barrels buried on former military land in Okinawa City. Richard Clapp, professor emeritus at Boston University School of Public Health, and Wayne Dwernychuk, the scientist previously in charge of identifying defoliant contamination in southeast Asia, likened the levels of dioxin contamination in Okinawa City to dangerous hot-spots in Vietnam where the U.S. military had stored toxic defoliants during the 1960s and ‘70s.

To top it off last week, the Japanese Defense Minister threatened to fire live (albeit tracer) rounds on Chinese aircraft which continue to buzz the disputed Senkaku islands - 400 km west of Naha, the Okinawan capital.

It was against this drumbeat of resurgent Japanese militarism that more than 140 Okinawan civic representatives made a historic trip to Tokyo on Sunday. This was the first time since Okinawa reverted to Japanese control in 1972 that leaders from each of Okinawa's 41 municipalities have visited the nation's capital - and despite the bitter cold, they were met with a warm reception by 4000 Tokyoites at a rally in Hibiya Park.

The worst nuclear disaster to strike Japan since a single bomb fell over Nagasaki in 1945 occurred in the spring of 2011 at the Fukushima nuclear power plant following the epic tsunami. On August 22, The New York Times reports (in submerged fashion, headlining Gaddafi's imminent fall in Libya) the disturbing news that a wide area around the Fukushima plant “could soon be declared uninhabitable, perhaps for decades, after a government survey found radioactive contamination that far exceeded safe levels.”