Northeast Greenland Begins Ominous Collapse — Giant Zachariae Isstrom Most Recent to Destabilize
GarryRogers Nature Conservation
“North, south, east, and west. At all points of the compass, the entire outer edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet is flooding into the oceans with increasing velocity. For NASA it’s the absolute worst kind of OMG realization. For the world’s warming oceans and airs are clearly worsening an already visible Greenland melt. And a new report just out of the University of California (Irvine) today shows that a massive glacier containing enough water to raise seas by more than 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) is the most recent of a growing number of these ice giants to initiate a swift rush into the ocean.
“Called Zachariæ Isstrøm, this enormous glacier dominates a large section of the northeast-facing shores of Greenland. The glacier, hundreds of feet tall and plunging hundreds more feet below the ocean surface, like many in our world, now faces the combined threat of warming airs and waters…
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November 13 Energy News
World:
¶ The north of England is set to be home to Europe’s largest floating solar power system. Water company United Utilities is developing a 12,000 panel system covering an area of more than 45,000 square meters. It will cover about 33% of their electricity needs. The system will be on Godley reservoir in Hyde, Greater Manchester. [CNBC]
Image courtesy of United Utilities
¶ The carbon content of electricity generation in Ireland fell to a record low last year, according to new figures by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland. The country avoided 2.6 million tonnes of CO2 emissions in 2014. SEAI said without renewables, power generation emissions would have been around 23% higher. [Energy Voice]
¶ The UK’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and campaign group Oil Change worldwide (OCI) have now published a detailed analysis of G20 subsidies to oil, gas and coal production. The G20 countries spent…
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In Greenland, another major glacier comes undone#Auspol #EarthToParis #COP21
It’s big. It’s cold. And it’s melting into the world’s ocean.
It’s Zachariae Isstrom, the latest in a string of Greenland glaciers to undergo rapid change in our warming world. A new NASA-funded study published today in the journal Science finds that Zachariae Isstrom broke loose from a glaciologically stable position in 2012 and entered a phase of accelerated retreat. Theconsequences will be felt for decades to come.
The reason? Zachariae Isstrom is big. It drains ice from an area of 35,440 square miles (91,780 square kilometers). That’s about 5 percent of the Greenland Ice Sheet. All by itself, it holds enough water to raise global sea level by more than 18 inches (46 centimeters) if it were to melt completely. And now it’s on a crash diet, losing 5 billion tons of mass every year. All that ice is crumbling into the North Atlantic Ocean.
North Greenland glaciers are…
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This week in nuclear and climate news
CLIMATE CHANGE. Obama Administration enables nuclear industry to pitch itself as climate change solution. Nuclear lobby hoping to be part of Paris Climate Talks. Christiana Figueres: a climate action force to be reckoned with.
TRANS PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP Big Corporations need not worry about Climate Agreements: the Trans Pacific Partnership will fix that for them! Nov 16 – 18 Mass Mobilization To Stop The TPP.
NUCLEAR WEAPONS. Oh goody! America has a more ‘usable’ bombin Europe! Russia leaks ‘Secret’ Plans For Nuclear Weapons. USA trying to persuade Pakistan to constrain its nuclear weapons program. $493 billion invested in nuclear weapons by banks, insurance companies and pension funds. Narrowly avoided accidental nuclear apocalypse in 1983 revealed. Jeremy Corbyn has got it rightabout Trident nuclear missiles.
RUSSIA. Russia’s militarisation of the Arctic, and the danger of itsmini nuclear reactors.
JAPAN. Radiation effects from Fukushima have been chronically underestimated.
INDIA. It seems that nobody will be liable for a nuclear disaster in India! India shuts down nuclear criticGreenpeace.
USA. US EPA Supports No Safe Dose of Radiation; Objects to NRC Proposal of 100 mSv per Year: Comment Deadline 19 Nov. 11.59 PM. Cover-up of radiation hazard at children’s holiday camp in Southern California. Not much real help to nuclear lobby from White House. USA’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission considering 80 year licenses for nuclear reactors!. Legal case over St Louis radioactive trash – 2700 cancer cases from nuclear radiation?
UK. Miscarriages and Congenital Conditions in Offspring of Veterans of the British Nuclear Atmospheric Test Programme. Chromosome Translocations in Nuclear Test Veterans. What is going to happen toDana Durnsford, The nuclear proctologist?
PRISM (Power Reactor Innovative Small Module) and MOX much touted, but nuclear waste burial is best.
CANADA Canadians near nuclear power stations given iodine pills.
FINLAND‘s underground nuclear waste storage plan approved.
Radiation effects from Fukushima have been chronically underestimated
‘Million Cancer Deaths From Fukushima Expected in Japan,’ New Report Reveals A shocking new report defies the chronically underestimated impacts of the Fukushima’s triple meltdown on the risk of cancer in exposed populations, which does not just include Japan, but arguably the entire world. Sayer Ji, Green Med Info Waking Times, 10 Nov 15
A new report from Fairewinds Energy Education (FEE), “Cancer on the Rise in Post-Fukushima Japan,” reveals that the ongoing multi-core nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant that started in March 2011 has produced approximately 230 times higher than normal thyroid cancers in Fukushima Prefecture, and could result in as many as one million more cancers in Japan’s future as a result of the meltdown.
According to the new report, data provided by a group of esteemed Japanese medical professionals and TEPCO, confirm a direct link of numerous cancers in Japan to the triple meltdown. Continue reading
It seems that nobody will be liable for a nuclear disaster in India!
liability for foreign suppliers may now be entirely removed, not just diluted.
In his one and a half year in office, Modi hasn’t demonstrated any particular penchant for consistency, but this would be his most dangerous U-turn, imperilling millions of innocent Indian lives.
Who will be liable for an Indian Fukushima? Nobody, it seems, Catch News, KUMAR SUNDARAM@pksundaram|10 November 2015
- India to entirely exempt foreign nuclear suppliers from liability – AEC said last week
- Who will be responsible in case of an accident then?
What breakthrough!
- There was a Indo-US breakthrough on N-liability – Modi last week
- Can a complete exemption from liability be called a breakthrough?
Big Corporations need not worry about Climate Agreements: the Trans Pacific Partnership will fix that!
Trans-Pacific Partnership deal “an act of climate
denial” http://www.nationalobserver.com/2015/11/10/news/trans-pacific-partnership-deal-act-
climate-denial By Charles Mandel If a climate change policy interferes with a corporation’s business, under the terms of the recently signed, secretive TPP deal, the corporation could sue a state government.
“The TPP is an act of climate denial,” said Jason Kowalski, the U.S. policy director at 350.org.
“It denies the scientific imperative to leave fossil fuels in the ground by granting corporations incredible powers over the sovereign right of countries to fight climate change on their own.”
At issue is the investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism included in the trade deal. ISDS’s allow foreign investors to use a secret tribunal to launch a lawsuit if they believe government actions might affect their future profits.
The TPP could limit a country’s ability to put in place any agreement it reaches at the Paris climate change summit because of concerns over lawsuits, according to Pierre-Yves Serinet, coordinator of the Quebec Network on Continental Integration.
“It creates a chill effect on the state to even create those policies,” he told National Observer, noting that 70 per cent of all the cases in trade deals involve ISDS attacks on environmental policies.
ISDS mechanisms are found in other trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement.
Corporations have used the trade mechanism over 600 times to challenge governments, Maude Barlow, the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians said in her forward to the recent report,An ISDS Carve-out to Support Action on Climate Change.
Canada faces $2.6-billion in challenges from American corporations under NAFTA alone.
Friends of the Earth International noted that in 2009, Vattenfall — a Swedish energy company — launched a US$1.9-billion ISDS case against Germany for its decision to delay a coal-fired power station in order to impose stricter environmental standards.
To avoid the suit, the government reached a settlement that involved removing additional environmental requirements, enabling the coal plant to begin operations in 2014.
A number of environmental groups are also outraged that the 12-country trade deal fails to mention climate change policy, which is something they feel agreements must now consider.
“The words ‘climate change’ don’t even appear in the text, a dead give-away that this isn’t a 21st-century trade deal,” Michael Brune, executive director of the U.S. Sierra Club, said in a statement.
“It sets us back further, empowering fossil fuel corporations to challenge our public health and climate safeguards in unaccountable trade tribunals while increasing dirty fossil fuel exports and fracking.”
“We think it’s a very bad agreement on many fronts, and obviously in Canada it’s been negotiated by a government that’s not there anymore, that was very secretive and non-transparent,” Serinet said.
Both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland have previously said the deal would be open to a full debate in Parliament.
Oh goody! America has a more ‘usable’ bomb in Europe!
America’s new, more ‘usable’, nuclear bomb in Europe The B61 bomb, 180 of which are stockpiled in Europe, is getting an upgrade which will make it more “usable” in the eyes of some in the American military, Guardian, Julian Borger Wednesday 11 November 2015, The $8 billion upgrade to the US B61 nuclear bomb has been widely condemnedas an awful lot of money to spend on an obsolete weapon. As an old fashioned ‘dumb’ bomb it has no role in US or NATO nuclear doctrine, but the upgrade has gone ahead anyway, in large part as a result of lobbying by the nuclear weapons laboratories.
In non-proliferation terms however the only thing worse than a useless bomb is a ‘usable’ bomb. Apart from the stratospheric price, the most controversial element of the B61 upgrade is the replacement of the existing rigid tail with one that has moving fins that will make the bomb smarter and allow it to be guided more accurately to a target. Furthermore, the yield can be adjusted before launch, according to the target.
The modifications are at the centre of a row between anti-proliferation advocates and the government over whether the new improved B61-12 bomb is in fact a new weapon, and therefore a violation of President Obama’s undertaking not to make new nuclear weapons. His administration’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Reviewsaid life extension upgrades to the US arsenal would “not support new military missions or provide for new military capabilities.”
The issue has a particular significance for Europe where a stockpile of 180 B61’s is held in six bases in five countries. If there is no change in that deployment by the time the upgraded B61-12’s enter the stockpile in 2024, many of them will be flown out to the bases in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Turkey………
The great thing about nuclear weapons was that their use was supposed to be unthinkable and they were therefore a deterrent to contemplation of a new world war. Once they become ‘thinkable’ we are in a different, and much more dangerous, universe.
It is a universe in which former vice president Dick Cheney has apparently lived for some ………….http://www.theguardian.com/world/julian-borger-global-security-blog/2015/nov/10/americas-new-more-usable-nuclear-bomb-in-europe
Canadians near nuclear power stations given iodine pills
East end given iodine pills as nuclear disaster precaution http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/11/10/east-end-given-iodine-pills-as-nuclear-disaster-precaution.html200,000 GTA homes and businesses have just received pills to protect them from radiation
Residents and businesses within 10 kms of the the Pickering and Darlington Nuclear Generating Stations will receive potassium iodide pills, meant to protect in case of the nuclear disaster.
If you live in Durham Region or Scarborough, you may have just been mailed a package of pills in a calming sky blue box. Those pills are meant to protect you in the event of a nuclear disaster — a disaster that you, living within a sensitive 10km zone surrounding the Pickering and DarlingtonNuclear Generating Stations, would be on the frontlines of.
Entergy WILL shut down FitzPatrick nuclear plant
on November 10, 2015 SCRIBA, N.Y. – At a meeting with Wall Street analysts today, the owners of FitzPatrick nuclear plant reiterated their plan to shut down the power plant by early 2017 and made no mention of any potential to reverse the decision.
Entergy Corp. CEO Leo Denault gave projections of future company earnings that included expectations that FitzPatrick will close in about a year. He made no mention of any talks with New York state to keep the plant open………http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2015/11/entergy_affirms_plan_to_shut_fitzpatrick_nuclear_plant_no_mention_of_talks.html
Finland’s underground nuclear waste storage plan approved
It approved Posiva Oy’s plan to construct a spent nuclear fuel encapsulation plant and disposal facility at the island of Olkiluoto, western Finland. Local people have accepted the plan.
Up to 6,500 tonnes of uranium may be deposited in the facility, some 450 meters (490 yards) below the surface in the granite bedrock. It is estimated to become operational from around 2023.
Sweden has similar plans, but Posiva said it is a few years behind Finland. “This is a huge step for us. We’ve done research and development work for this for more than 40 years,” said CEO Janne Mokka.
The world has 270,000 tonnes of used fuel stockpiled, much of it under water in ponds at nuclear power stations, adding to the urgency of finding a permanent storage solution for material that can remain toxic for hundreds of thousands of years.
In Posiva’s disposal process, the waste will be packed in copper canisters and transferred into tunnels and further into deposition holes lined with bentonite buffer. Construction is expected to cost just under a billion euros, and the total cost estimate, including operational costs for 100 years, is 3.5 billion euros ($3.8 billion).
Before the repository can go operational, Posiva must yet again analyze its environmental impacts, including the ability to retrieve the nuclear waste if necessary as well as the transport risks……..http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/12/us-finland-nuclear-idUSKCN0T121120151112#iT2IC6O0Eo49wfxQ.97
Russia leaks ‘Secret’ Plans For Nuclear Weapons
Russian News Stations Air ‘Secret’ Plans For Nuclear Weapons, Huffington Post 12 Nov 15
A spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin said the plans should not have been aired. MOSCOW (AP) — President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman said plans for a new submarine-launched nuclear torpedo shown on Kremlin-controlled television were secret and should never have been aired.
NTV and Channel One showed a large document — filmed over a military officer’s shoulder during a meeting with Putin — with drawings and details of a weapons system called Status-6.
The torpedoes could create “extensive zones of radioactive contamination” that would make enemy coastal areas “unsuitable for military, economic, business or other activity for a long time,” the document said.
The channels later removed the footage, which was shot during a meeting on Monday in Sochi.
“It’s true that some secret information was caught by the camera and therefore it was subsequently removed,” Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said late Wednesday. “We hope this will not happen again.”
The appearance of the video on television channels under such tight Kremlin control raised suspicions that it was done intentionally to cause alarm in the West….. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/russia-nuclear-weapons-plans_5644a8f2e4b045bf3dede9fa
Mayak Production Association the source of nuclear fuels on black market
Fuel For a Nuclear Bomb Is Probably on the Black Market Right Now http://www.maxim.com/maxim-man/article/black-market-nuclear-fuel-2015-11
And it often originates from one site in Russia.
The detailed report begins with an account of a failed attempt that occurred in Moldova in 2011 to pass off 22 pounds of highly enriched uranium for a few hundred thousand dollars. The transaction was actually a sting, and it ultimately led to the imprisonment of a Moldovan lawyer named Teodor Chetrus for attempting to smuggle the material. Chetrus’s arrest, however, did nothing to ease Western worries about a terrorist group or rogue nation acquiring the ability to make their own nuclear bomb:
Instead, it stoked them, because the resulting international probe into the case has sparked fresh, and previously unreported worries, that thieves inside of Russia somehow made off years ago with a full bomb’s worth of highly enriched uranium. Western spies fear the thieves have been doggedly looking for a buyer for the past sixteen years, by repeatedly dangling in front of them identical, genuine samples of that highly valuable material.
Five current or former U.S. officials who have tracked nuclear smuggling, and who declined to be named because this assessment is classified, said it is now a consensus view within the intelligence community.
But wait, it gets worse! According to this report, Western intelligence has no idea “exactly who has this nuclear explosive material, and where they may be.”
Journalists Douglas Birch and R. Jeffrey Smith write that the anxieties regarding nuclear materials in the wild go back some 16 years. Since 1999, there have been at least three incidents in which “identically packaged containers of highly-enriched uranium have been seized by authorities outside of Russia.”
All those packages have been forensically traced to the early 1990s and one source: the Mayak Production Association, a giant nuclear facility in the Ural Mountains.
One quote from the report ratchets up the pucker factor considerably while emphasizing exactly why this is the stuff of military suspense fiction:
While seven of those involved in the smuggling have so far been prosecuted in Bulgaria, France and Moldova, officials say they are just low-level members of a shadowy international ring with Moldovan and Russian connections, all working for a person or persons whose identity remains cloaked.
So far, efforts at stopping the spread of these materials has only taken small-time go-betweens out of commission. The masterminds are still out there.
Reading the report in full is worth the time, if you don’t want to sleep well for a while. It will make you wish James Bond was real.
$493 billion invested in nuclearweapons by banks, insurance companies and pension funds
RBS slammed for investment in nuclear weapons http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/latestnews/entryid/1904/rbs-slammed-for-investment-in-nuclear-weapons.aspx 12/11/2015 New ‘Banking on the Bomb’ report
The report, Don’t Bank on the Bomb, published today by Dutch peace organization PAX, outlines how the institution has $6973million invested in the nuclear weapons industry. The company has investments in 21 out of the 26 nuclear weapons-producing companies outlined in the report, more than any other UK bank.
The report also identifies 382 banks, insurance companies and pension funds which have made USD 493 billion available to nuclear weapons producers since January 2012.
The top 10 investors alone provided more than USD 209 billion to the identified nuclear weapon producers. All of the top 10 are based in the USA.
The top 3: Capital Group, State Street, and Blackrock, have more than 95 billion USD combined invested in the producers named in this report.
In Europe, the most heavily invested are BNP Paribas (France), Royal Bank of Scotland(United Kingdom) and Crédit Agricole (France).
In the Asia-Pacific region, the biggest investors are Mitsubishi UFJ Financial (Japan), Life Insurance Corporation of India, and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial (Japan).
How the other UK banks faired:
- HSBC $4,469m
- Barclays $5,881m
- Lloyds Banking Group $1,921m
However it is not all bad news.
The research shows that 53 financial institutions prohibit or limit investments in nuclear weapon producers. This is a 150% increase compared to last year’s report.
The authors say that this overall increase illustrates the growing stigmatization of nuclear weapons because of the renewed focus on their humanitarian consequences.
Wilbert van der Zeijden, co-author of the report:
“No bank, pension fund or insurance company should have financial relations with companies involved in weapons of mass destruction. In the case of a nuclear detonation, the humanitarian consequences will last for decades and effective aid will not be possible. The only way to prevent this from happening is to outlaw and eliminate nuclear weapons. Stigmatizing these inhumane and indiscriminate weapons, and excluding them from investments, will help.”
Hall of Fame
There are 13 financial institutions listed in the report’s Hall of Fame who do not invest in any nuclear weapon producers.
These institutions have outstanding policies preventing any type of investment in any company with association to nuclear weapons.
The Co-op Bank was the only UK bank to make it into the Hall of Fame.
This comes on the back of the company re-establishing and strengthening their ethical policy after pressure from Ethical Consumer’s Save Our Bank campaign.
The researchers are now calling on all financial institutions to stop any investments into weapons of mass destruction, and on governments to ban nuclear weapons once and for all.
Ethical Consumer gave a presentation on Divestment to campaigners and Members of Parliament. Read the blog here.
Cover-up of radiation hazard at children’s holiday camp in Southern California

LA’s Nuclear Secret: Camp Cover-Up, The popular 2,800-acre Southern California camp sits just over the hill from the Santa Susana Field Lab NBC News By Joel Grover and Matthew Glasser Tens of thousands of children who attended a popular camp in the hills northwest of Los Angeles over the last 65 years may have been exposed to radioactive waste and toxic chemicals from a former nuclear and rocket testing facility right next door, the Santa Susana Field Lab, according to documents and scientific studies obtained by the NBC4 I-Team.
LA’s Nuclear Secret: Timelines, Maps, Documents, Interviews
Families who sent their kids to the camp, as well as former camp staff and board members, say top leadership, including a famous TV personality, covered up evidence of the risk and continue to hide important information.
“It’s criminal not to disclose this,” said Erwin Sokol, a counselor at the camp in the 1950s, who later sent his own kids there, and whose wife Caren served on the board of directors. “There are people’s lives at risk.”
Sokol is referring to the Brandeis-Bardin Institute next to Simi Valley, a world famous center for Jewish learning, which runs Camp Alonim for kids and teens and hosts retreats for college students and adults. Purchased in 1947, the 2,800-acre camp is believed to be the largest piece of Jewish-owned land outside of Israel. It sits just over the hill from the Santa Susana Field Lab.
Former Santa Susana Field Lab workers told NBC4 during our LA’s Nuclear Secret investigation that for years, barrels of radioactive waste were burned in a pit right above the Brandeis property, and the radioactive smoke often blew toward the camp.
Workers also told the I-Team how they were ordered to secretly release radioactive gases into the air from crippled nuclear reactors, often when the wind was blowing the gases toward Brandeis and Simi Valley. John Pace, who worked the controls of one of the reactors, told NBC4, “The truth needs to be told” about the secret releases of radiation.
Families Ask I-Team to Investigate Over a dozen former Brandeis senior staff, camp families and board members told the I-Team they tried for years to find out the truth about potential contamination at Brandeis, but were stonewalled by the Institute’s top leaders.
“This is about protecting the health of children,” said Erwin Sokol.
So they asked the I-Team to investigate. Contamination at Brandeis
The I-Team found reports, studies and tests that show campers and staff could have been exposed to radioactive materials and toxic chemicals from the Santa Susana lab that migrated onto the Brandeis property through groundwater, surface water and wind.
Buried away at a National Archives warehouse in Riverside County, the I-Team found a 1997 report done by a scientist, Joel Cehn, who has worked for by Brandeis for years to monitor contamination on its land.
In the report, Cehn writes that after reviewing studies of Brandeis, in his opinion, “Brandeis property is contaminated… with radiological and chemical contaminants. Contaminated groundwater is moving toward the center of the Brandeis property (from south to north).”
Cehn also says, “Surface water, when present, also moves toward the center of Brandeis… some of this water is contaminated with tritium, strontium-90 and dioxins. Soil on the Brandeis property is contaminated… During rainwater runoff events, this soil is carried… to central and northern areas of the Brandeis property. Vegetation on the Brandeis property is contaminated.”
A Cover-Up
“If I had seen this document, I would not have taken the job,” said Rabbi Lee Bycel, who became president of the Brandeis-Bardin Institute in 2000 and served until 2003………
Toxic Water……..
Toxic Soil Brandeis own internal 1997 report, written by their consultant Joel Cehn, said “soil on the Brandeis property is contaminated with tritium, strontium-90, cesium-137, PCB, dioxins, toluene, and petroleum hydrocarbons.”…..
Brandeis Declines to Speak to NBC4 The I-Team requested an interview with the current owners of Brandeis, the American Jewish University, to discuss the contamination.…… Brandeis Withholds Key Documents……. http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/I-Team-LAs-Nuclear-Secret-Camp-Cover-Up-344006382.html
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