nuclear-news

Will Donald Trump’s election victory improve nuclear defence policy or plunge us into a new Cold War? Will the world continue moving towards nuclear weapon abolition, or will the nuclear powers keep up and grow their stockpiles instead? How should the world deal with North Korea’s repeated violations of the Test Ban Treaty? And do we really understand how the nuclear age has affected the survivors of nuclear accidents?

In retrospect, 2016 was always going to bring these questions to the fore, marking as it did significant anniversaries of two of the world’s worst nuclear disasters: Fukushima (five years ago) and Chernobyl (30 years ago). While the health consequences of both incidents are still debated, their psychosocial effects and economic impact are beyond doubt.

Five years after the Fukushima accident, Japan is still working to decontaminate the affected area. It’s cost five trillion yen (about £35 billion) so far and demanded the labour of 26,000 clean-up workers – many of them vulnerable to exploitation and social exclusion.

Forced and so-called “voluntary” evacuees from Fukushima are still adjusting to life away from home. There are 100,000 of these “nuclear refugees” still displaced; two thirds have reportedly given up hope of ever returning. With the Tokyo 2020 Olympics looming, and compensation costs spiralling, the Japanese government recently declared more areas as officially safe – despite evacuees being reluctant to return. Their fears were stoked in November when an aftershock from the original Fukushima earthquake hit Japan. Thankfully, there wasn’t a second catastrophe.

We also saw the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, which continues to effect a wide swathe of Ukraine and Belarus. Dealing with the consequences of the disaster consumes around 6% of Ukraine’s national budget, and 2.15m Ukrainians still live on territory that’s officially considered contaminated………

Economic and environmental change

It’s also been a bad year for uranium. The uranium mining and production sector has been faltering ever since Fukushima, and this year’s international overproduction further depressed prices. Global production and extraction activity stalled, earning it the dubious distinction of 2016’s “worst-performing raw material”.

As the industry waits for the market to recover, debates rage over the future of the only current operational uranium mill in the US and proposed developments at sacred and ecologically fragile zones – the Grand Canyon, the Aboriginal Kakadu National Park in Australia, and the Karoo in South Africa. Meanwhile, precarious states such as the Ukraine and Kazakhstan have agreed to jointly produce uranium, also betting the industry will recover.

But nuclear energy’s byproducts still have major environmental impacts, and we still have no solution for managing nuclear waste in the long term. In the US, a potential revival of the repository project in Yucca Mountain has been posited by Trump’s advisors. Meanwhile, Australia is unwilling to provide long term storage, and the long term outcomes remain to be seen……… https://theconversation.com/the-anthropocene-is-a-nuclear-epoch-so-how-can-we-survive-it-69393