nuclear-news

Audio-Video doesn’t start until after 30 minutes in.
Oct 07 2015 3:30 PM
Plutonium Disposition and the MOX Project
Rayburn HOB – 2118
Witnesses:
Frank G. Klotz, Administrator, National Nuclear Security Administration
Mr. John J. MacWilliams, Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Energy, U.S. Department of Energy
Dr. Thom Mason, Director, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
For more information and witness testimony click here.
http://docs.house.gov/Committee/Calendar/ByEvent.aspx?EventID=104026 (Nothing there yet).

One of the Congressmen states that CBI-Areva’s US MOX project is a taxpayer horror story and it’s almost Halloween. However, all of the proposed plutonium options are also health and safety horror stories in the making. They need to find a place to put 34 metric tonnes of weapons grade plutonium. Their proposal is to dilute it and place it in WIPP, which is still closed due to an accident, which ejected plutonium and americium throughout the facility and even into the outer…

World:

¶ Scotland has reached and surpassed its target of generating 500 MW of locally and community owned renewable energy five years early. Scotland’s Energy Minister announced that Scotland has already installed an estimated 508 MW of community and locally owned renewable energy capacity, well in advance of its target of 2020. [CleanTechnica]

Whitelee’s wind farm with Arran in the background. Photo by Bjmullan. CC BY-SA 3.0. Wikimedia Commons.

¶ Scotland’s onshore wind industry is pulling ahead of England’s, but England is focusing a lot of its attention on its offshore industry. These are the key findings from a new report from the UK’s leading renewable energy trade association, RenewableUK, which published its annual Wind Energy in the UK report this week. [CleanTechnica]

¶ Sterling and Wilson is planning to construct 300 MW of solar plants in Egypt. The company already won two solar PV…

What?s pulling the plug on the world?s carbon sink? Geoff Gallice, CC BY
Oliver Phillips and Roel Brienen, The Conversation, March 18, 2015.

“Tropical forests are being exposed to unprecedented environmental change, with huge knock-on effects. In the past decade, the carbon absorbed annually by the Amazon rain forest has declined by almost a third.

“At 6m km2, the Amazon forest covers an area 25 times that of the UK, and spans large parts of nine countries. The region contains a fifth of all species on earth, including more than 15,000 types of tree. Its 300 billion trees store 20% of all the carbon in the Earth?s biomass, and each year they actively cycle 18 billion tonnes of carbon, twice as much as is emitted by all the fossil fuels burnt in the world.

“The Amazon Basin is also a hydrological powerhouse. Water vapour from the forest nurtures agriculture to…