nuclear-news

Science and Technology:

¶ New research from Ohio State University determined that a calving event creating an enormous iceberg in West Antarctica in 2015 was even more notable than first thought. It was the result of a deep, subsurface rift that formed approximately 20 miles inland. This implies that the glacier is deteriorating faster than thought. [CleanTechnica]

Rift in Antarctic glacier

World:

¶ The European Commission unveiled a reform of Europe’s power grid after 2020 on Wednesday. The draft law, which still needs to be approved by member states and the European Parliament, sets a binding target to cut energy use by 30% by 2030 and for renewable energy to make up at least 27% of the bloc’s power mix by 2030. [Zawya]

¶ The recently completed Kamuthi Solar Power Plant in Tamil Nadu is the largest solar power plant in the world. Since Delhi, Mumbai…

Map of predicted changes in soil C stocks by 2030-50 due to a 1°C rise in global average temperature. The darker red the color, the greater the carbon loss.

Image courtesy of the researchers
A new global analysis finds that warming temperatures will trigger the release of trillions of kilograms of carbon from the planet’s soils into its atmosphere, driven largely by the losses of soil carbon in the world’s colder places. The increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentration will accelerate the pace of climate change.

For decades, scientists have speculated that rising global temperatures might reduce the ability of soils to store carbon, potentially releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and triggering runaway climate change. Yet dozens of studies at single locations in different places around the world have produced mixed signals on whether this storage capacity will actually decrease—or even increase—as the planet warms.

A new…

Pope Francis attends his general audience at the Vatican, November 16, 2016Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters)

Donald Trump’s denial of climate change has made him an adversary of environmentalists — a group that includes the world’s most revered religious leader.

In an address to a group of scientists at the Vatican this week, Pope Francis suggested science has become more important than ever.
“Never before has there been such a clear need for science to be at the service of a new global ecological equilibrium,” the pope said, adding that the goals of the scientific and Christian communities are increasingly converging around the need to protect the planet. These sentiments echoed those more elaborately described in the pope’s encyclical on the environment, which was published in June 2015.
The delegation of 80 scientists — called the Pontifical Academy of Sciences — includes physicist Stephen Hawking as well as Nobel laureates in the fields…

A photograph featuring the Jury members and attending winners of the Film4Climate Global Video Competition.
As the COP22 Film4Climate Global Video Competition begins, the mood is somber: it’s the end of the first week of the Conference of Parties and just five days after the announcement of Trump’s election win. While uncertainty and fear for the future are palpable, there’s also a sense of hope, as this is where the efforts for taking action on climate change merge with the creative medium of filmmaking.
Part of the World Bank Group’s Connect4Climate initiative, the Film4Climate competition features the winners of various categories for under-one-minute PSA videos, and short films under five minutes. Winning productions portray both singular and comprehensive, oftentimes highly self-made movies that reflect the realities of and actions taken by many on the ground.

Jeffrey Sachs, Professor at and director of Earth Institute at Columbia University, addressing the audience…

Major parties push a losing uranium sector to India at great risk http://www.smh.com.au/comment/major-parties-push-a-losing-uranium-sector-to-india-at-great-risk-20161128-gszld4.html  Dave Sweeney , 29 Nov 16 

With little fuss or fanfare, Australia’s two major parties have this week agreed to fly under the radioactive radar and pass an innocuous enough sounding law with some very far reaching implications.

The Indian Civil Nuclear Transfers Act exists to provide “certainty to Australian uranium producers” who want to sell the controversial product to India.

In 2015 a detailed investigation by Parliament’s treaties committee found there were serious and unresolved nuclear safety, security and governance issues with the proposed sales plan. It also found a high level of legal uncertainty.

Expert witnesses including Australian National University Professor of International Law Don Rothwell and former senior DFAT officer John Carlson also highlighted that the plan was in conflict with both Australian domestic law and existing international treaty provisions, most notably the 

PRESS RELEASE FROM NUCLEAR FREE LOCAL AUTHORITIES

NFLA endorse report which outlines serious design concerns with the AP1000 reactor proposed for the Sellafield Moorside site

The Nuclear Free Local Authorities (NFLA) have formally supported and endorsed an independent assessment of the Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear reactor that outlines a number of serious safety concerns.

The independent report was drafted by Pete Roche, the NFLA Scotland Policy Advisor and an independent consultant on nuclear policy. It was commissioned by the Cumbrian NGO Radiation Free Lakeland. With the author and group’s permission, it has been developed into a NFLA New Nuclear Monitor and the NFLA have formally submitted their support of the report to the Office of Nuclear Regulation (ONR). (1)

The AP1000 reactor design is currently going through an extensive ‘Generic Design Assessment’ (GDA) by the ONR. Yesterday, the ONR were reported as saying that the design still has a number of…

There’s nothing normal about what happened to Gatlinburg, Tennessee on Monday.

Sitting at the epicenter of a freakish fall warmth and drought, the scores of fires that raged throughout the southeast into late November had, until recently, spared this sleepy tourist town resting on the slopes of the Great Smoky Mountains. But as winds roared out of the south at up to 87 miles per hour ahead of an approaching cold front on the 28th, the little city’s luck ran out.

(Fire on the mountains near Gatlinburg captured in this photo by a local resident. Image source: Twitter.)

Somewhere, a spark lit. And the bone-dry hillsides filled with ready fuels combined with hurricane force gusts to do the rest. By early evening, the skies over Gatlinburg had been painted orange. Ash and embers were carried aloft by the winds. And all around the city, mountains caught fire and…

World:

¶ The Egyptian government has signed an umbrella agreement with European Development Partners to secure €267 million ($296 million) funding for implementation of a new large-scale windfarm in the Gulf of Suez area in Egypt. The Gulf of Suez windfarm will generate 650 GWh per year, enough for 370,000 Egyptians. [Al-Bawaba]

Wind power (Shutterstock image)

¶ Details of a production cut agreement are due to be finalized
at a formal OPEC meeting in Vienna. But key OPEC members appear to disagree over the plan, and some analysts believe there might not be a deal. With analysts speculating, Brent crude oil was down $1.76 per barrel at $46.48, and US crude was down $1.80 at $45.28. [BBC]

¶ A question mark hangs over a world-leading laboratory that has pioneered research into nuclear fusion for nearly 40 years. The Culham Centre for Fusion Energy near Oxford is…

Jeff Goodell, an American author and editor at Rolling Stone, is noted for saying this: “once we deliberately start messing with the climate, we could inadvertantly shift rainfall patterns (climate models have shown that the Amazon is particularly vulnerable) causing collapse of ecosystems, drought, famine and more.”

We are in the process of testing that theory. In the case of drought, which used to just be a regional affair but has now gone global, Goodell appears to have been right on the money.

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According to a recent report by the World Meteorological Organization, the Earth is on track to hit 1.2 degrees Celsius hotter than pre-industrial temperatures during 2016. From sea-level rise, to melting polar ice, to extreme weather, to increasing numbers of displaced persons, this temperature jump is producing steadily worsening impacts. Among the more vivid of these is the current extent of global drought.

The…

Figure 1: Thanks to the roaring Forties South Australia is installing increasing amounts of wind energy [Source: energyaustralia.com.au, ND]

There was a serious black out incident in South Australia last month due to high winds. Inevitably the anti-wind farm brigade were quick to blame wind farms and inevitably the media (who don’t know any better) were soon parrotting these claims. Is any of this true?No, not in the least. South Australia has seen a significant rise in renewables, in particular wind power over the last few years. They are now supplying 27% of the state’s electricity. However the fact is that the wind farms stayed up and running through the high winds and that it was the collapse of several powerlines that actually caused the black outs.

Figure 2: Wind power has at times met a significant proportion of SA’s electricity demand []Source: The covnversation, 2015