The week in nuclear news
Christina Macpherson’s websites & blogs
North Korea. What a week – of bellicose threats against USA, South Korea and Japan, claims of intercontinental ballistic missiles. closing down of joint “two Koreas’ ‘” Gaeseong industrial complex, and all sorts of dire warnings! North Korea now. Even North Korea’s pal China got angry with them, as did Russia. However, President Obama states that N. Korea does not have a nuclear missile. USA had ramped up stealth jet flights over North Korea, and military drills in South Korea. North Korea now wanting talks, demanding end of sanctions and an end to South Korea-US joint military drills.
USA. Obama approves drastically more lax rules on what is “permissable” radiation in food and water.New peer-reviewed research published in the Open Journal of Pediatrics indicates that babies on West coast are developing hypothyroidism as a result of Fukushima radiation. Govt to dump over 400 containers of nuclear waste in Nevada. Legal action in Colorado to force uranium companies to clean up their radioactive messes.
UK. New nuclear build in doubt, as French company EDF not sure about going on with it, due to financial uncertainties. 47 people arrested at protest in Scotland against Trident nuclear weapons project
Fukushima nuclear reactors releasing 400 tons of radioactive water every day. Tepco may now empty this into the Pacific Ocean. Concerns in Japan over radioactive boars. Much debate over radiaoactive emissions. Nuclear lobby working hard to downplay any health risks.
Renewable Energy. Germany launches project to speed up storage of wind and solar energy. Saudi Arabia commits to spending $109 billion on renewable energy.
Breaking! Picures of Boston Bombing suspects!
This first posit has been proved false.. see below for update info..
This Picture is reportedly of the Boston bomber. In the picture a gentleman is seen first with a rucksack on and then later without the rucksack. The individual is then, soon after, seen walking to the train station.
The individual with the missing rucksack is seen with another individual in the light blue trainer style top.
This is just a heads up on a possible varification of who might be involved..
I am also suspicious of the recent Niacin attacks in the USA as the Syrian rebels were reported to have captured some laboratories and the site of a nuclear reactor attacked by the Isrealis.
Update
‘We are not the bombers!’ Track team immigrants wrongly accused of planting Boston marathon bombs
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/039979_Boston_marathon_bombers_suspects.html#ixzz2QrN6LTnW
FBI releases images of 2 suspects at Boston Marathon
World Apr. 19, 2013 – 06:55AM JST
BOSTON —
The FBI on Thursday released photos and video of two suspects in the deadly Boston Marathon bombings and asked for the public’s help in identifying the men. The agency’s website crashed within moments.
FBI Agent Richard DesLauriers said the images are from surveillance cameras near the explosion sites shortly before Monday’s blasts at the world’s most famous marathon. He said one suspect is believed to have planted the devices near the finish line.
The images came out hours after President Barack Obama promised a grieving city to hunt down whoever was responsible.
Authorities had warned not to expect the case to be cracked quickly as they looked through a vast response to their plea for photos and video from the blast scene.
The images show two young-looking men wearing baseball caps, wearing jackets and carrying backpacks along the race route and weaving through the crowd.
Fukushima radiation brings hypothyroidism to babies on USA West coast
Study: Fukushima radiation fallout has devastated health of US babies on West Coast and in other areas http://www.naturalnews.com/039923_Fukushima_radiation_hypothyroidism.html#ixzz2Qr6W6hxg April 15, 2013 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer New peer-reviewed research published in the Open Journal of Pediatrics raises fresh concerns about the health effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster on American children and babies. As has long been suspected by those with an understanding of the widespread reach of radioactive fallout from Fukushima, newborns living in California, Hawaii, Washington, and other West Coast states appear to have been directly affected by Fukushima fallout in a serious way, which is reflected by the disproportionate rate of hypothyroidism observed amongst this demographic.
Conducted by a duo of scientists from the Radiation and Public Health Project, a non-profit education and scientific organization that seeks to understand the relationship between nuclear radiation exposure and public health, the research evaluated average rates of hypothyroidism both before and after the Fukushima disaster. In their findings, Joseph J. Mangano and Janette D. Sherman reported that, compared to one year earlier, babies born between one week and 16 weeks after the nuclear meltdowns in Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington were 28 percent more likely to suffer from congenital hypothyroidism.
2,110 percent increase in iodine-131 on US West Coast following Fukushima linked to hypothyroidism Each of these states and the Pacific Ocean, according to the study, experiences significantly elevated levels of radioactive iodine-131 (I-131), as well as various other radioactive isotopes, in the days and weeks following the March 11, 2011, disaster. Based on the data, the 2,110 percent increase in detectable I-131 all along the U.S. West Coast following the disaster appears to be directly correlated with the higher-than-average rates of congenital hypothyroidism. Continue reading
According to Obama, North Korea does not have nuclear missile
Obama says he doesn’t believe North Korea has nuclear missile By 
Jethro Mullen, April 17, 2013 (CNN) — President Barack Obama has said he doesn’t believe North Korea can fit a nuclear warhead on a missile, casting strong doubt on an alarming assessment disclosed last week by the Pentagon’s intelligence arm.And he warned the young North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that weeks of threats against the United States and South Korea had only served to isolate the regime further….. http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/17/world/asia/koreas-tensions/index.html
USA raises “permissable” radiation level. Why?
Shocking raise in nuclear radiation ‘safety levels’ announced Digital 
Journal By R. C. Camphausen Apr 17, 2013 – Washington – Shocking is not only that the White House is significantly raising so-termed ‘safety levels’ for nuclear radiation in drinking water and soil, but also that mainstream media are all too quiet about this assault on people’s health.
Rather than doing something to reduce the dangers invisibly emanating from nuclear plants and enriched weaponry, the White House and the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) have apparently chosen to accommodate the nuclear industry rather than protect the population.
In the original article, published on the website of Helen Caldicott and also at Global Research, we read that the new ‘safety levels’ couldincrease a longstanding 1 in 10,000 person cancer rate to a rate of 1 in 23 persons exposed over a 30-year period.
Raising these radiation guides known as PAGs (Protective Action Guides), can only mean one or two things. Either, radiation levels in drinking water and soil are terribly high right now, due to Chernobyl and Fukushima for example, or they are expected be alarmingly high in the near future.…. http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/348161
Texas fertiliser plant explosion ‘like a nuclear bomb’
“I live about a thousand feet from it and it blew my screen door off and my back windows. There’s houses levelled that were right next to it. We’ve got people injured and possibly dead.”
- AFP
- April 18, 2013
A FERTILISER factory in Texas exploded in a massive fireball, killing as many as 60 to 70 people, local media reported, amid fears a second tank at the plant could also erupt in flames.
Dozens of homes were destroyed, more than 130 people were evacuated from a nearby nursing home, and at least 100 patients were admitted to hospitals following the massive blast at the plant in the town of West, outside Waco.
“It’s like a nuclear bomb went off,” West Mayor Tommy Muska told CNN.
There were conflicting reports about the death toll in the chaotic aftermath of the explosion in the southern US state, which witnesses said sent a huge fireball into the air.
GALLERY: Fertiliser plant explosion
The figure of up to 60-70 dead was initially reported by KWTX television, citing the director of West emergency services, George Smith.
Keith Hopkins, an administrator with Providence hospital in Waco, told AFP that emergency personnel in West had also given him the figure of 60 to 70 fatalities.
A spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, D L Wilson, told reporters he could not “confirm or deny” the figure, saying: “We have confirmed fatalities. The number is not current yet. It could go up by the minute.”
Mr Muska said that he didn’t yet know how many people had been injured or killed. He said buildings in a five-block radius from the plant were severely damaged by the explosion.
Mr Muska said that volunteer firefighter had responded to a fire at the West Fertisliser plant about half an hour before the explosion. Muska says he’s a volunteer firefighter himself and his helmet was knocked off when the explosion tore through the plant.
Glenn A Robinson, the chief executive of Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center in Waco, said that his hospital had received 66 injured people for treatment, including 38 who were seriously hurt. He said two helicopters carrying more patients were on their way to the hospital.
The United States was already on edge in the wake of Monday’s deadly twin bombings in Boston, and a scare in Washington over mail apparently laced with the poison ricin sent to President Barack Obama and a US senator.
The huge blast also came just before the 20th anniversary on Friday of a deadly confrontation in Waco between federal authorities and heavily armed members of a religious group, the Branch Davidians.
The explosion at the West fertiliser plant occurred just before 8.00 pm (12.00pm AEST), Waco Assistant Fire Chief Don Yeager told AFP by phone.
The cause was not immediately known but he said it was an anhydrous ammonia explosion.
Nuclear power completely uncompetitive on costs
Jerry Taylor: For Now, Nuclear Can’t Compete. Jerry Taylor, WSJ, 17 April 13 Nuclear power simply cannot compete with gas-fired power. And absent some major technological breakthrough, it’s unlikely to do so in the future.
This is not a matter of opinion. This is a matter of economic fact. Even with all of the production tax credits, loan guarantees and a battery of other direct and indirect subsidies, nuclear power remains the most expensive source of conventional electricity on the grid once capital costs are plugged into the equation. That’s why no one has ordered a new nuclear power plant in decades. That’s why nuclear power plants are being retired today in the face of cheap natural gas for as far as the eye can see. Continue reading
A plan to crash plane into Oak Ridge nuclear reactor
Book: Hijackers had airplane in nosedive heading for U.S. nuclear reactor — “A very, very scary situation” -Energy Official http://enenews.com/book-hijackers-had-airplane-in-nosedive-heading-for-u-s-nuclear-reactor-a-very-very-scary-situation-energy-official
Title: The odd side of Oak Ridge history
Source: Knoxville News
Author: Frank Munger
Date: April 16, 2013
On the morning of Nov. 11, 1972, Oak Ridge stood still — or nearly so — while a hijacked Southern Airways jetliner circled above.
“It was a very, very scary situation,” Jim Alexander, a retired public affairs officer at the Department of Energy, recalled in a 2001 interview.
The hijackers threatened to crash the airplane into the Oak Ridge nuclear facilities if their demands, including $10 million in cash, were not met. […]
The threat was real, according to a 1977 book, “The Odyssey of Terror.”
The author, Ed Blair, wrote that the hijackers went berserk after placing a call to the White House and being shunned by John Ehrlichman, an aide to President Nixon, who apparently was unaware of the crisis. Blair reported that the hijackers held a grenade to the pilot’s head and ordered him to dive the plane toward the Oak Ridge reactor. The plane was actually in a nosedive when a report came over the radio that the money demands were being met […]
See also: Japan Gov’t Experts: Airplane crash affecting Fukushima spent fuel pool a key security issue for future
47 arrested in UK protest against Trident nuclear missiles
Scrap Trident’: British police arrest 47 protesters at Faslane nuclear base RT April 15, 2013 Forty-seven people were arrested in a protest at the UK’s Faslane Naval Base in Scotland. ‘Scrap Trident’ anti-nuclear activists blocked the base’s entrances, lying on the ground in a human chain tied together with metal and plastic tubes….. The protesters called for the Trident nuclear weapons program to be scrapped, and for its £100 billion budget money spent instead on social programs. “I am taking action to stop the breach of the peace committed by the UK by owning and refusing to disarm the weapons of mass destruction,” Dominic Lindley, a 20-year-old development officer said as quoted by scraptrident.org.
“These weapons are both inhumane, illegal and their use can never be justified. In the next few years the UK has an opportunity to join the vast majority of countries in the world by disarming our pointless nuclear weapons and spend the £100 billion wasted on them on vital services for our communities like the NHS, Education and the Welfare State,” Lindley added….. http://rt.com/news/anti-trident-protest-faslane-879/
Move to have uranium companies clean up their mess in Colorado
A Fight in Colorado Over Uranium Mines NYT, By DAN FROSCH April 16, 2013 SLICK ROCK, Colo.”……..Despite bursts of activity from 2003 through 2008, most uranium mines scattered across Colorado have largely been out of production for decades, a testament to fluctuating mineral prices. Now the future of these mines is at the crux of a dispute that could set a precedent for how they are handled.
Environmental groups in Colorado contend that many of the state’s 33 uranium mines should be forced to clean up, given that uranium mining, which flourished here during the cold war, has gone dormant. In legal filings, they have alleged that companies like Cotter are skirting potential costs associated with cleanup, which is required by the state after an operation shuts down. Continue reading
Saudi Arabia to spend $109 billion on renewable energy projects
Saudi Arabia To Add 50GW Of Renewables By 2030 http://www.energymatters.com.au/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=3693 17 April 13 Saudi Arabia plans to spend $109 billion on renewable energy projects over the next 20 years, installing more solar and wind power capacity than the rest of the world to date. Continue reading
Germany moving ahead on renewable energy storage
Germany’s Energy Storage Incentives Start May 1 http://www.energymatters.com.au/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=3694 17 April 13, New renewable energy subsidies in Germany may do for battery storage globally what the nation did for solar power.
In February we reported Germany would apparently soon formally confirm a start date for an initiative to support the purchase of battery based energy storage systems integrated with solar panel arrays. It took a little longer than rumoured, but that moment seems to have arrived. Continue reading
Fracking brings high rates of uranium into wastewater
Fracking for Uranium Earth First Newswire, by John Upton, 17 April 13, “…….The U.S. Geological Survey found in 2011 that fracking wastewater wells in the northeastern U.S. were contaminated with uranium at levels 300 times greater than the national limit for nuclear plant discharges. Yet Pennsylvania has insisted that there is no problem. The state was reluctant even to test for uranium in fracking wastewater. Now the state has agreed to study the issue….http://earthfirstnews.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/fracking-for-uranium/
USA govt researchng dry nuclear waste storage
U.S. To Invest $15.8 Million For Nuclear Fuel Storage Research GovMonitor, Source: U.S. Department of Energy 17th April 2013 “……. the Energy Department has announced a new dry storage research and development project led by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)… The project will design and demonstrate dry storage cask technology for high burn-up spent nuclear fuels that have been removed from commercial nuclear power plants…. http://www.thegovmonitor.com/economy/u-s-to-invest-15-8-million-for-nuclear-fuel-storage-research.html
AREVA to Supply Nuclear Fuel for a Jordanian Research Reactor -And Saudi expansion moves with EDF
……“Following the signature in 2011 of contracts for supplying DAEWOO with low enriched uranium and for delivering prototype fuels to the KAERI/DAEWOO consortium, this success confirms the quality of the collaboration between AREVA and its Korean partners in the sector of nuclear fuel for research reactors.”…. 1st article
……”Oursel told Al Arabiya that the firm is already training Saudi engineers to prepare them for nuclear energy projects, which he said are expected to create “thousands of jobs”.
Areva and EDF have already set up an office in Riyadh to lay the groundwork for a possible bid for tender, and have established links with local Saudi companies and engineers. That followed a 2011 agreement between France and Saudi Arabia that offered the Saudis atomic know-how and training for local staff.
“Thanks to the subsidiary we have created in Riyadh with EDF, we are contacting all the Saudi suppliers which can play a role in this very important program,” said Oursel.”……. 2nd article
…..Following the lessons learned from Fukushima, the U.S. nuclear industry developed an approach to reinforce the safety measures at nuclear power plants, which includes the development of the regional response centers…….. 3rd article
(Please note the peak after the financial crash of 2008.. straight after the crash 200 billion Euros, to begin with, went into the only “safe” financial bet.. nuclear, the “green” saviour .. Arclight2011)
AREVA to Supply Nuclear Fuel for a Jordanian Research Reactor
AREVA has just signed a contract with the Korean KAERI/DAEWOO consortium to supply fuel elements for the JRTR (Jordan Research and Training Reactor) currently being built in Jordan –
The agreement concerns the supply of nuclear fuel for the first reactor core and for a reload batch. Delivery of the fuel elements is scheduled for the beginning of 2015.
Construction of the JRTR research reactor by the KAERI/DAEWOO consortium is an essential step for Jordan in acquiring the capabilities required for nuclear R&D and producing nuclear power. AREVA (areva.com) is proud to be a part of this project together with the Korean consortium, who is one of the research reactor suppliers, and stands ready to offer its experience regarding construction of a power reactor in Jordan, for which the selection of a supplier is now in progress.
Benoît Bazire, Senior Vice President of the Propulsion and Research Reactors BU, stated:
“Following the signature in 2011 of contracts for supplying DAEWOO with low enriched uranium and for delivering prototype fuels to the KAERI/DAEWOO consortium, this success confirms the quality of the collaboration between AREVA and its Korean partners in the sector of nuclear fuel for research reactors.”
The thermal power of the JRTR will be 5 MW, which can be extended to 10 MW in the future. It will be used for neutron beam research, neutron irradiation services such as medical radioisotope production, and training of Jordanian engineers and scientists.
AREVA Press Office:
Julien Duperray / Katherine Berezowskyj / Jérôme Rosso / Alexandre Thébault
http://www.przoom.com/news/127532/AREVA-to-Supply-Nuclear-Fuel-for-a-Jordanian-Research-Reactor/
French aim to subcontract Saudi firms in hope of nuclear win
France’s Areva says it aims for the majority of its subcontractors to be local firms should it win an expected tender to build nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia plans to build 17.6 gigawatts of nuclear power capacity by 2032, according to the King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy (KACARE).
Areva, which develops nuclear power plants, and the French utility firm EDF, hope to win a slice of the nuclear energy market in the Kingdom.
1 This Month
Protect Sazan Island from the Trump family! https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/protect_sazan_island_from_the_trump_family_loc/?bqFCVab&v=174511&cl=22707147157&_checksum=5e9dde668860e8231c33699735e16a1fbf22ab2cb01da50c999fe8732b9775ef&utm_source=email&utm_medium=blast_email&utm_campaign=174511
Cuba Is Not a Failed State – It Is a Besieged State
PETITION: “Global Appeal to Endorse Palestinian Right of Return of Refugees”
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