nuclear-news

Science and Technology:

¶ Solar Impulse, the zero-fuel airplane, has flown the first leg across the continental US in its attempt to fly around the world. It left Mountain View, California, at dawn on Monday and landed 16 hours later in Goodyear, Arizona. It was the 10th leg of its round the world quest. [BBC]

A pre-dawn take-off for Solar Impulse from Moffett Airfield.
Solar Impulse photo.

World:

¶ Manitoba Hydro is now helping customers go solar. The crown corporation announced the details of the new Power Smart Solar Energy PV Program. The plan allows goodies for businesses and home owners to go solar, while selling surplus solar energy back to Manitoba Hydro. [CleanTechnica]

¶ Denmark’s Vestas Wind Systems A/S has fully installed 31 turbines at the 310-MW Lake Turkana wind farm in Kenya. The Lake Turkana Wind Power project will use total of 365 pieces…

Alongside the better known old, defective, Indian Point nuclear power station near New York City lurks a lesser known menace.

“You’ve seen the narrow one-lane Route 9 that serves two lanes of traffic and serves as the main evacuation route for so many who live and work around Indian Point. You’ve seen the traffic congestion in off-hours and the dangerous roads that lead across Bear Mountain Bridge. You’ve seen that the lines on the map really are not lots of roads, but small country lanes leading to nowhere… So, we ask that you take our concerns about the proposed dry cask storage system very seriously. In today’s environment, a minor mishap with a cask could cause many caskets!” (Thomas J. Abinanti, Westchester County Board of Legislators, 2004)

Buchanan NY, home to Indian Point Nuclear Power Station, Chernobyl Exclusion Zone overlay via Greenpeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/code/2016/chernobyl/index.html (Interactive map at the original…

Cover sheet of NRC letter to Exelon raising questions about the company’s efforts to reclassify public documents on emergency planning.

It might seem that we’re guilty of dumping on Exelon in these pages, which is possibly true, especially since there is an apparently endless supply of Exelon-initiated issues worthy of bringing to public attention. After all, Exelon is the nation’s largest electric utility, the largest nuclear utility, and while we haven’t developed a test for this yet, quite likely the nation’s greediest electric utility.

Still, consider this one from Crain’s Chicago Business Review,  which has been doing a great job of trying to hold Exelon accountable: it turns out that while Exelon has been pleading poverty in Springfield, Illinois–home of the Illinois legislature–and loudly proclaiming it needs a bailout to keep at least three uneconomic reactors operating; when the company goes to Wall Street, Exelon paints quite a different…

To Obama’s statement after B.B. King’s death, almost a year ago, that “there’s going to be one killer blues session in heaven tonight.” one can but reply that there’s going to be a killer of a nuclear accident in Mississippi or somewhere else soon, and that will be a reason for a killer blues session in heaven alright. https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/05/15/bb-king-blues-has-lost-its-king-and-america-has-lost-legend

“BB King on December 9, 2010 in DC. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)”

Obama apparently intends to evac to his father’s birthplace, Kenya, or he wouldn’t have beem running around the world begging to dump foreign nuclear waste upon America, to be buried there, under the guise of “non-proliferation”. Unless, of course, he’s just blinkered, drugged up and/or insane. [Oh, wait, maybe he just thinks that everyone should die of life-shortening cancers like his mother did. And, as a smoker he is clearly not health…

Opinion:

¶ “Tesla Model 3 Is Changing Auto History” • In its first week alone, the Tesla had amassed, “about $14 billion in implied future sales, making this the single biggest one-week launch of any product ever.” And it’s growing. Last week, Tesla had almost 400,000 orders for the Model 3. [CleanTechnica]

Tesla Model 3

¶ “Stuck in Time – Ruined Chernobyl nuclear plant to remain a threat for 3,000 years” • It is 30 years since Chernobyl came to mean more than just a little village in rural Ukraine. Now, 25 years after the country that built it ceased to exist, the full damage of that day is still argued. [The Keene Sentinel]

World:

¶ The price per barrel of global benchmark Brent Crude ended April just above $47. Since dipping briefly below $30 in January, it has risen by nearly two-thirds. That sounds a…

Drigg the quaint coastal village is also home to the UKs ‘Low Level Waste Repository’ (the word ‘Nuclear’ has been dropped from the official title) Although locals know this as the  Nuclear Dump.  Drigg is located near the Sellafield nuclear site on the shifting sands of the Cumbrian coast. Up until the late 1980s radioactive wastes including plutonium wastes were tumble tipped into trenches. Now the site has gone all hi tech and compacts radioactive waste into rusting shipping containers, any void in the container is filled with concrete.

The site sits above West Cumbria Aquifer from which is drawn the borehole water supply for much of West Cumbria while Sellafield gets most of its water from Wastwater.

The plan is to keep on dumping the high end of “low level” radioactive waste here despite the threat of inundation not just from the Irish Sea but also from the rivers…

Protesters picketed the entrance of the nuclear new build forum at Whitehall in London on April 20th: https://southwestagainstnuclear.wordpress.com/2016/04/20/energy-minister-and-delegates-challenged-at-nuclear-new-build-conference-in-london/

While a legal opinion warns that the French Government Plan to “Subsidise EDF” could be illegal, as discussed further below, state-owned EDF’s existence outside of France is unfair and should be illegal. No one appears to be addressing the obvious that the very existence of AREVA, EDF, Rosatom and China General Nuclear Power Corporation and their subsidiairies – all state owned nuclear behemoths which act as international corporations – comprises unfair trade and business practices. If France wants to have state-owned utilities within France, Russia within Russia, and China within China, then that should be their right, and it can be under their parliamentary control, responsive to their taxpayers. However, to let AREVA, EDF, Rosatom, and now China General Nuclear Power to prance around the world pretending to be corporations when they…

A reduction in the amount of oxygen dissolved in the oceans due to climate change is already discernible in some parts of the world and should be evident across large regions of the oceans between 2030 and 2040. — The National Center for Atmospheric Research in a press release on April 27th.

*****

Loss of oxygen in the world’s oceans. It’s one of those really, really bad effects of a human-forced warming of our Earth. One of the those climate monsters in the closet that Steve Pacala talks about. The kind of thing we really don’t want to set loose.

Deoxygenated Oceans as Major Killing Mechanism During Hothouse Extinctions

The damage caused by ocean oxygen loss is multi-variant and wide-ranging. The most obvious harm comes in the form of generating environments in which oxygen-dependent life in the oceans can no longer breathe. Any living creature that filters oxygen out…