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Disgrace of Canada’s submission to USA, in boycotting UN nuclear ban talks

Canada’s absence betrays its history on nuclear talks, RAMESH THAKUR AND CESAR JARAMILLO, The Globe and Mail, Mar. 27, 2017 Ramesh Thakur is a professor at the Australian National University and co-convenor of the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. Cesar Jaramillo is executive director of Project Ploughshares in Waterloo, Ont.

Negotiations begin Monday at the United Nations in New York on a “legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading toward their total elimination.” These talks flow from resolutions adopted late last year by the General Assembly in landslide votes. These negotiations could be the most significant multilateral development on nuclear-arms control since the indefinite extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1995 and the adoption of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty in 1996……

Canada’s proud record of leadership in nuclear-arms-control initiatives makes its submission to U.S. obstructionism especially egregious.

Nuclear peace depends on deterrence and fail-safe mechanisms working every single time. Nuclear Armageddon will result from deterrence or fail-safe mechanisms breaking down just once. Similarly, stable deterrence requires rational decision-makers in every nuclear-armed country all the time…….http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/canadas-absence-betrays-its-history-on-nuclear-talks/article34427081/

March 31, 2017 Posted by | Canada, politics international, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Cover-up of America’s nuclear waste disaster: Hanford, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Westlake…

Hanford, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and West Lake provide only a snapshot of the wider picture. Consider the Rocky Flats Plant, a former nuclear weapons production site not far from Denver, Colorado.

“It’s a Cover-Up, Not a Clean-Up”: Nuclear Waste Smolders in Sites Across the US truth Out  March 30, 2017 By Daniel Ross, Truthout | Report Renowned wartime journalist Wilfred Burchett described the damage from the atomic bomb that flattened Hiroshima as “far greater than photographs can show.” When it comes to the enduring legacy of the Manhattan Project on home soil, the damage to the environment and human health is proving similarly hard to grasp.

The covert project to create the world’s first atomic weapon during WWII, coupled with the nuclear proliferation of the Cold War era, has left a trail of toxic and radioactive waste at sites across the nation that will necessitate, by some margin, the largest environmental cleanup in the nation’s history. The amount of money that has been poured into remediating the waste already is staggering. Still, it appears that the scale of the problems, and the efforts needed to effectively tackle them, continue to be underestimated by the authorities responsible for their cleanup.

Since 1989, the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Environmental Management — the agency charged with cleaning up “legacy” radioactive waste — has spent over $164 billion disposing of nuclear waste and contamination, completing the cleanup at 91 of 107 sites across the country. And yet between 2011 and 2016, the DOE’s Environmental Management environmental liability grew by roughly $94 billion.

Though the president’s proposed 2018 budget siphons $6.5 billion into the DOE’s Environmental Management program, up slightly from $6.2 billion this year and last, that figure is still below the roughly $8.5 billion (after adjustment for inflation) the program received in 2003. It is also well below the amount required to effectively meet urgent issues head on, said Don Hancock, director of the Nuclear Waste Program at the Southwest Research and Information Center……..

The fight over what the final budget will look like has only just begun. But beyond these hovering questions marks is something much more concrete: the sheer magnitude of the legacy waste problem, which can be traced all the way back to that game-changing atomic project of the 1940s.

Hanford: Beset With Costly Overruns Continue reading →

March 31, 2017 Posted by | - plutonium, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Hazards of uranium mining have been known for centuries

Native American uranium miners and the Trump budget, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists  Robert Alvarez, 30 Mar 17, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists  “…….The hazards of uranium mining have been known for centuries. As early as 1556, dust in the Ore Mountain (Erzgebirge) mines bordering Germany and what is now the Czech Republic was reported to have “corrosive qualities… it eats away the lungs and implants consumption in the body…” By 1879, researchers found that 75 percent of the miners in the Ore Mountains had died from lung cancer. By 1932, the Ore Mountain miners were receiving compensation for their cancers from the German government. Uranium mining was convincingly linked to lung cancer by dozens of epidemiological and animal studies by the late 1930s.

In 1942, Wilhelm C. Hueper, the founding director of the environmental cancer section of the National Cancer Institute, brought the European studies to light in the United States—concluding that radon gas was responsible for half of the deaths of European miners after 10 to 20 years of exposure. By this time, uranium had become a key element for the making of the first atomic weapons. Hueper’s superiors blocked him from further publication and discussion in this area; they told him that dissemination of such information was “not in the public interest.”

In fact, withholding information about workplace hazards was deeply embedded in the bureaucratic culture of the early nuclear weapons program. In 1994, the Energy Department made a previously secret document, written in the late 1940s, public. It crystallized the long-held rationale for keeping nuclear workers in the dark: “We can see the possibility of a shattering effect on the morale of the employees if they become aware that there was substantial reason to question the standards of safety under which they are working. In the hands of labor unions, the results of this study would add substance to demands for extra-hazardous pay.”

Kee Begay worked in the mines for 29 years and was dying of lung cancer when I first met him. “The mines were poor and not fit for human beings,” he told me. Begay also lost a son to cancer. “He was one of many children that used to play on the uranium piles during those years. We had a lot of uranium piles near our homes—just about 50 or 100 feet away or so. Can you imagine? Kids go out and play on those piles.”

In 1957, the US Public Health Service reported that the average radiation lung dose to Indian miners was 21 times higher than was allowed in the Atomic Energy Commission’s nuclear weapons plants. In 1962, the Public Health Service revealed that radon exposure in the mines was statistically linked to lung cancer among US miners—at a rate comparable to what Heuper had warned about 20 years earlier.

Lung disease associated with radon exposure was “totally avoidable,” former chief health scientist for the AEC Merrill Eisenbud said in 1979. “The Atomic Energy Commission … is uniquely responsible for the death of many men who developed lung cancer as a result of the failure of the mine operators, who must also bear the blame, because they too had the information, and the Government should not have had to club them into ventilating their mines………..”http://thebulletin.org/native-american-uranium-miners-and-trump-budget10657?platform=hootsuite

March 31, 2017 Posted by | 2 WORLD, history, Reference, Uranium | Leave a comment

Trump attack, in his war on science and on the Earth’s climate

Trump has launched a blitzkrieg in the wars on science and Earth’s climate Skeptical Science 28 March 2017 by dana1981Today, Trump signed executive orders taking aim at America’s climate policies. On the heels of a report finding that the world needs to halve its carbon pollution every decade to avoid dangerous climate change, Trump’s order would instead increase America’s carbon pollution, to the exclusive benefit of the fossil fuel industry.

Trump’s anti-climate executive orders

One part of the executive order tells the EPA to review and revise (weaken) its Clean Power Plan and methane regulations. However, revising these regulations isn’t so simple. It requires proceeding through the same years-long rulemaking process the EPA used to create the rules in the first place. This involves considering the scientific evidence, crafting draft rules, responding to millions of public comments, and defending the new plan in court. Environmental attorneys are confident “this is another deal President Trump won’t be able to close.”

A second part of the executive order tells the EPA to ignore the government’s estimated price on carbon pollution. The Republican Party wants to lower the current estimate, but most evidence indicates the government is dramatically underestimating the cost of carbon pollution. Trump gets around this inconvenient evidence by ordering the EPA to simply deny the existence of those costs.

A third part of the executive order ends a moratorium on new coal leases on public lands before a review is completed to determine if taxpayers are being shortchanged due to the lands being sold too cheaply. Environmental groups are set to immediately challenge this order. Regardless, lifting the moratorium would have little effect on coal production or mining jobs.

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt would undoubtedly be happy to follow Trump’s orders. In his previous job as Oklahoma Attorney General and fossil fuel industry puppet, one of Pruitt’s 14 lawsuits against the EPA was aimed at the Clean Power Plan. However, the Clean Air Act requires the government to cut carbon pollution. Trump and Pruitt may not like it, but the law, scientific evidence, and public opinion fall squarely against them.

Trump’s anti-science budget

A few weeks ago, Donald Trump released his first proposed budget, and it’s also fiercely anti-science and anti-climate………https://www.skepticalscience.com/trump-blitzkrieg-wars-on-science-climate.html

March 31, 2017 Posted by | climate change, politics, USA | Leave a comment

Governors of New York and California Reaffirm Commitment to Exceeding Targets of the Clean Power Plan

Governor Cuomo and Governor Brown Reaffirm Commitment to Exceeding Targets of the Clean Power Plan, https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-and-governor-brown-reaffirm-commitment-exceeding-targets-clean-power-plan MARCH 28, 2017 Albany, NY, With the announcement that the United States will begin to dismantle the Clean Power Plan, New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and California Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today issued the following statement reaffirming their ongoing commitment to exceed the targets of the Clean Power Plan and curb carbon pollution:

“Dismantling the Clean Power Plan and other critical climate programs is profoundly misguided and shockingly ignores basic science. With this move, the Administration will endanger public health, our environment and our economic prosperity.
 
“Climate change is real and will not be wished away by rhetoric or denial. We stand together with a majority of the American people in supporting bold actions to protect our communities from the dire consequences of climate change.
 
“Together, California and New York represent approximately 60 million people – nearly one-in-five Americans – and 20 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. With or without Washington, we will work with our partners throughout the world to aggressively fight climate change and protect our future.”

New York and California lead the nation in ground-breaking policies to combat climate change. Both states – which account for roughly 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States – have adopted advanced energy efficiency and renewable energy programs to meet and exceed the requirements of the Clean Power Plan and have set some of the most aggressive greenhouse gas emission reduction targets in North America – 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. New York and California will continue to work closely together – and with other states – to help fill the void left by the federal government.

New York’s Climate Leadership
Greenhouse Gas Emission Reductions: Established ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction targets to reduce emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050. These targets have made New York a leader across the country in fighting climate change.

Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI): Spearheaded the formation of the successful RGGI cap-and-trade program between northeast and mid-Atlantic states, led effort to reduce RGGI’s carbon emission cap by 45 percent in 2014, and recently called for an additional cap reduction of at least 30 percent between 2020 and 2030.

Reforming the Energy Vision: Established a comprehensive energy strategy to make the vision for a clean, resilient, and affordable energy system a reality, while actively spurring energy innovation, attracting new jobs, and improving consumer choice.

Clean Energy Standard: Established the most comprehensive and ambitious clean energy mandate in the state’s history, requiring that 50 percent of electricity in New York come from renewable energy sources like wind and solar by 2030.

Clean Energy Fund: Established a $5 billion fund that is jump-starting clean-tech innovation, mobilizing private investment, capitalizing the nation’s largest Green Bank, and helping eliminate market barriers to make clean energy scalable and affordable for all New Yorkers.

Coal-Free New York: Committed to close or repower all coal-burning power plants in New York to cleaner fuel sources by 2020.

Offshore Wind: Approved the nation’s largest wind energy project off the Long Island coast in 2017 and made an unprecedented commitment to develop up to 2.4 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030.

California’s Climate Leadership
Greenhouse Gas Emission Reductions: Established ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction targets to reduce emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050. These targets have made California a leader across the country in fighting climate change.

Cap-and-Trade: Established the most comprehensive carbon market in North America, investing more than $2.6 billion from the Cap-and-Trade program in programs and projects that reduce emissions and support communities disadvantaged by pollution.

Renewable Energy: Established landmark targets that require at least 33 percent of California’s electricity comes from renewable energy sources by 2020, and 50 percent by 2030.

Energy Efficiency: Established targets that double the rate of energy efficiency savings in California buildings and require residential buildings to be Zero Net Energy by 2020, and all commercial buildings to be Zero Net Energy by 2030.

Super Pollutant Reduction: Established the nation’s toughest restrictions on destructive super pollutants, such as methane, black carbon, and hydrofluorocarbon gases.

Low Carbon Fuel Standard: Established requirements for producers of petroleum-based fuels to reduce the carbon intensity of their products, helping drive the replacement of fossil fuels with renewable natural gas and diesel, low-carbon ethanol, and clean electricity, giving consumers more clean fuel choices while driving significant clean fuel investment and creating new economic opportunities.

Zero Emission Vehicles: Established a program requiring increased sales of zero emission vehicles – a policy adopted by 10 states – resulting in more than 30 new models of clean and affordable vehicles that are reducing consumer gasoline and diesel costs. California also adopted North America’s first greenhouse gas emission car standards – later adopted as a national program – and adopted the nation’s first heavy-duty vehicle and trailer greenhouse gas emission reduction requirements, which led to similar national requirements.

These efforts complement New York and California’s ongoing efforts to broaden collaboration among subnational leaders on climate change, including through the Under2 Coalition – a pact among cities, states and countries around the world to limit the increase in global average temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius in order to avoid potentially catastrophic consequences. New York and California are among the Under2 Coalition’s 167 jurisdictions representing more than one billion people and $25.9 trillion in combined GDP – more than one-third of the global economy.

March 31, 2017 Posted by | climate change, renewable, USA | Leave a comment

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution continues to monitor Pacific Ocean fish for radiation

 

Why is this headline so melodramatic, when the content of this article is quite restrained?

 

Fukushima nuke radiation POISONING world’s water – including FISH Brits eat, Daily Star UK 29 Mar 17 BRITS could be eating salmon and tuna containing nuclear radiation from the Fukushima disaster according to a study. Salmon caught in the Pacific Ocean, which are imported for sale as a luxury product in UK shops, were found to contain worrying amounts of radiation.

Highly toxic Cesium-134, the nuclear fallout from Fukushima, was recently found in Tillamook Bay and Gold Beach, in the US state of Oregon. The terrifying discovery was reported by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.Cesium-134 was also detected in 2015 in Canada when a salmon pulled from a river in British Columbia was found to contain radiation….

….Japanese fish have tested positive for dangerous levels of radiation and now, it seems, fish as far away as the US have been infected by the waste.

Alaskan Salmon is imported for sale in most major UK supermarkets when Scottish salmon is out of season. After being caught in the Pacific, these fish then make a 22,000 mile journey via China to supermarket shelves here in Britain.

A statement on the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution website said: “For the general public, it is not direct exposure, but uptake by the food web and consumption of contaminated fish that is the main health concern from the oceans.

“Most fish do not migrate far from their spawning grounds, which is why some fisheries off Fukushima remain closed.

“But some species, such as the Pacific bluefin tuna, swim long distances and could pick up cesium in their feeding grounds off Japan before crossing the Pacific.” Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist at the institution, said that the levels of radiation should not affect anyone eating the salmon, but admitted that he would be closely monitoring radiation levels.

“We don’t expect to see health concerns from swimming or fish consumption, but we would like to continue monitoring until (the radiation level) goes back down again,” he said.

“In Japan, at its peak celsium-134 levels were 10 million times higher than what we are seeing today on the West Coast.”

The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservations (DEC), in conjunction with the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services and other state, federal, and international agencies, continues to test Alaska seafood for any potential impacts resulting from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.

Testing performed in previous years showed no detectable levels of Fukushima-related radionuclides. Testing in 2016 also confirmed the quality and health of Alaska seafood has not been impacted by the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Fish species were chosen for testing based on their importance to subsistence, sport, and commercial fisheries and because they spend part of their life cycle in the western Pacific Ocean.

These species include: king salmon, chum salmon, sockeye (red) salmon, pink salmon, halibut, pollock, sablefish, herring, and Pacific cod. Samples of fish were taken by DEC Environmental Health Officers during regular inspections of commercial fishing processors throughout the state.

The results of testing conducted on Alaska fish in 2016 showed no detection of Fukushima-related radionuclides Iodine-131 (I-131), Cesium-134 (Cs-134), and Cesium-137 (Cs-137). more http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/600099/Fukushima-radiation-nuclear-waste-poisoning-world-water-fish-Brit-eat-supermarket

March 31, 2017 Posted by | oceans, radiation | Leave a comment

Nevada’s determined fight against plan for Yucca Mountain nuclear dump

Decades-old war over Yucca Mountain nuclear dump resumes under Trump budget plan, LA Times,  Ralph Vartabedian, 29 Mar 17 An abandoned tunnel in the desolate Nevada desert, barricaded only by a chain-link fence, is all that remains of the nation’s tortured effort to create a permanent repository for nuclear waste 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

After spending $11 billion, the Energy Department met with unrelenting opposition from Nevada and was forced to shut down the program at Yucca Mountain — the only remotely viable option for storing tons of deadly waste that currently has nowhere to go — in 2010……..

At an estimated cost of $100 billion, the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump would rival the International Space Station in cost and complexity, requiring construction of roughly 300 miles of new railroad tracks to transport the waste, development of advanced robots to work underground and fabrication of special titanium shields to keep the waste intact for, it is hoped, hundreds of thousands of years.

The $120 million outlined by Trump this month in his budget blueprint would restart the ponderous licensing process that was abandoned by the Obama administration and begin plans for a temporary storage facility at an undetermined location…….

Nevada officials have put every ounce of their political muscle into stopping the dump…….The state is quickly gearing up for a new fight, readying new legal strategies and pushing a resolution through the state Legislature.

“The Trump administration’s attempt to revive Yucca Mountain is naive and a waste of taxpayer dollars,” said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), who successfully fought off the Energy Department for years when she was the state’s attorney general. “It is a nonstarter.”

Cortez Masto said the state is united against the dump across party lines, including Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval, another former attorney general……..

Nevada has filed some 300 legal “contentions” against the Energy Department’s license, each of which must be examined by a special board. The state is swinging into action to file even more contentions if the license action is resumed, said Robert Halstead, chief of the state’s nuclear office.

“They think because Reid is gone, this will be a cakewalk. Wrong,” Halstead said. “I see them going through a licensing procedure that will cost $1.5 billion and take five years, with a 50% chance of success.”……

The Energy Department’s failure to keep its promise to move forward with a disposal project, even while it collected the money, has created a swamp of litigation.

Most of the nation’s commercial reactors, including the shuttered San Onofre plant in northern San Diego County, are located on rivers, lakes and oceans — a risky location for storing highly radioactive fuel rods. And much of the nation’s nuclear weapons waste, which could also end up at Yucca Mountain, is stored in leaky tanks and steel drums.

The nation’s nuclear utilities have won judgments and settlements of $6.1 billion, arguing that the government’s failure to take the waste has increased their storage and operation costs, said Jay Silberg, an attorney representing the industry. And the Energy Department has projected that it may be liable for up to $25 billion more…….http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-na-yucca-revival-20170329-story.html

March 31, 2017 Posted by | USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Demolition of McCluskey Room at Hanford’s Plutonium Finishing Plant

Workers demolish site of nuclear mishap in Washington state , San Franciso Chronicle, NICHOLAS K. GERANIOS, ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 30, 2017,  SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — Workers at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state have finished demolishing the site of a famous nuclear accident during the Cold War that exposed a man to the highest dose of radiation from the plutonium byproduct americium ever recorded, the U.S. Department of Energy announced Thursday.

The McCluskey Room was named for Harold McCluskey, who in 1976 survived the horrifying accident and died 11 years later of unrelated causes after becoming known as the Atomic Man.

 A contractor recently demolished the room — the first of four main buildings that made up the Plutonium Finishing Plant complex that will be torn down.

“Completing demolition on this building was years in the making and is both historic and a significant risk reduction,” said Tom Teynor, project director for the Department of Energy.

Hanford, located in southeastern Washington, began making most of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear arsenal during World War II.

Plutonium production has ended and the site is now engaged in a massive cleanup of nuclear waste. That work is expected to take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars.

One of the most heavily contaminated portions of the site — half the size of Rhode Island — is the Plutonium Finishing Plant, where plutonium was converted into hockey puck-shaped disks and shipped to factories where nuclear weapons were assembled…….http://www.sfchronicle.com/news/us/article/Workers-demolish-site-of-nuclear-mishap-in-11039438.php

March 31, 2017 Posted by | decommission reactor, USA | Leave a comment

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