North Korea says nuclear war on Korean Peninsula inevitable
‘Established fact’: North Korea says nuclear war on Korean Peninsula inevitable https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/12/07/established-fact-north-korea-says-nuclear-war-korean-peninsula-inevitable/929796001/ A nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula is inevitable because of threatening military drills by South Korea and the United States, North Korea’s foreign ministry said in comments carried by the official Korean Central News Agency late Wednesday.
Solar power to take over, on Chernobyl’s nuclear wasteland
Chernobyl’s nuclear wasteland primed for solar power explosion. Bellona, by Charles Digges, Some would be rightly spooked by the idea of electricity produced by a glowing source emanating from Chernobyl, but thanks to a €100 million investment plan, that’s exactly what’s could happen.
It’s not, however, what you think. The electricity will come from a solar park sprouting in the middle of the carcinogenic wastelands surrounding the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster as part of a joint project between a Kiev engineering firm called Rodina Energy Group and Enerparc, a clean energy company based in Hamburg, Germany.
Ukraine’s minister of ecology, Ostap Semerak, announced a plan last July to revitalize the nearly 2000-kilometer swathe of land encircling the plant that gave nuclear disaster its name.
Long lasting radiation in the area makes farming, forestry, hunting, and just about anything else too dangerous, so renewable energy is seen as something productive to do with the huge empty area.
Luckily, all of the transmission lines that were laid to carry electrons from the notorious plant to Ukraine’s major cities – and that helped feed what is now the country’s 50 percent reliance on nuclear energy – remain largely intact.
When it’s done, the solar park could provide half the energy that originally flowed from Chernobyl, marking an inspiring comeback for an area inhabited by dystopian radioactive wild boar……..
the Chernobyl area could end up producing 2.5 gigawatts of solar produced electricity, pumping out half of what Chernobyl uses to produce before it melted down and exploded – with absolutely none of the danger……..
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development – which financed Chernobyl’s New Containment Structure – is understandably wary of bankrolling projects in a radioactive exclusion zone. The solar farms, after all, are installed and maintained by people.
This poses some very real difficulties. Workers can only spend a limited amount of time in the exclusion zone, so their shifts are short, which means a bigger workforce is required – as is more money to pay them.
Yet they are challenges worth grappling with. If Ukraine manages to create a renewable energy rebirth on the site of the nuclear disaster that helped fell the Soviet Union, it would be a revolution of an altogether different kind.
New York City’s public advocate, Letitia James, focuses on climate action
New York City’s watchdog sets her sights on climate change, Grist, on Dec 7, 2017 As New York City’s public advocate, Letitia James is first in line to succeed Mayor Bill de Blasio. The first woman of color to be elected to hold citywide office in the Big Apple, she investigates complaints against city agencies and introduces legislation in the city council. Effectively, she’s the city’s official watchdog. And she recently set her sights on climate change, which she regards as an imminent threat to New Yorkers.
The already high cost of climate change – and the cost will hit us all
Armenia considers plan to abandon nuclear power and go for renewables
Armenia Debates Shift Away From Nuclear Power, Eurasia Net
Surge in USA storage for renewable energy
U.S. Energy Storage Surges 46% Led by Big Project in Windy Texas https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-07/u-s-energy-storage-surges-46-led-by-big-project-in-windy-texas By Brian Eckhouse
Driven by regulatory demands and sharp price declines, energy-storage is becoming more common. Prices for lithium-ion battery packs have fallen 24 percent from 2016 levels, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Utilities including Exelon Corp., Duke Energy Corp. and American Electric Power Co., meanwhile, are increasingly receptive to storage projects, which potentially will facilitate wider adoption of wind and solar power.
Women Leaders Aren’t Making Enough Foreign Policy Decisions, and it’s a Problem
While women are leading the resistance, the halls of power in D.C. and states across the country lag pathetically behind. We saw this perhaps most vividly when Trump gathered an all-male group of politicians at the White House to discuss his efforts to gut women’s health care. In a single photograph, the gross underrepresentation of women’s voices in government and on issues directly impacting their lives was crystal clear.
And it was exactly that photograph — and the utterly out-of-sync gender dynamics it laid bare — that stuck in our minds this month as we sat in a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Trump’s unrestrained power to wage nuclear war. A committee with a 20:1 male-to-female ratio heard testimony from three men on whether one man should have total, unchecked power to start a nuclear war and blow up the planet. This is a system that, as Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) said, “boggles the rational mind.”
Apparently, the Senate has a one-woman limit when it comes to foreign policy.
To read the full article at Teen Vogue, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/women-leaders-arent-making-enough-foreign-policy-decisions-and-its-a-problem
Proposal for Japan to ‘rent’ nuclear weapons from USA
‘Dual key’ nuclear weapons-sharing with Washington would save Tokyo trouble of developing own arsenal, protect alliance, Asia Times, DOUG TSURUOKA DECEMBER 6, 2017 , “……the unthinkable has become publicly thinkable. There’s widespread debate in Japan about whether the country should go nuclear – either by developing its own arsenal, or sharing such weapons with the US under a “dual key” arrangement, popularly known as “rent-a-nukes,” to counter the growing threat from North Korea……. http://www.atimes.com/article/will-japan-rent-nukes-us-counter-north-korean-threat/
Drones still buzz around France’s nuclear power plants!
Liberation 5th Dec 2017, [Machine Translation] Drones still buzz around nuclear power plants. After
the autumn 2014 overflights, the authorities took technical and legislative
measures to put an end to them. These efforts only partially address this
new threat.
http://www.liberation.fr/france/2017/12/05/les-drones-bourdonnent-encore-autour-des-centrales-nucleaires_1614412
US government report finds steady and persistent global warming
Skeptical Science , December 2017 by John Abraham
The US Global Change Research Program recently released a Climate Science Special Report. It is clearly written – an authoritative summary of the science, and easy to understand.
The first main chapter deals with changes to the climate and focuses much attention on global temperatures. When most people think of climate change, they think of the global temperature – specifically the temperature of the air a few meters above the Earth surface. There are other (better) ways to measure climate change such as heat absorbed by the oceans, melting ice, sea level rise, or others. But the iconic measurement most people think of are these air temperatures, shown in the top frame of the figure below. [on original] ……..https://www.skepticalscience.com/report-steady-persistent-gw.html
Trump tax bill promotes polluting robots – and damages clean energy workers
Polluting robots win big, clean energy workers get screwed in Trump tax bill http://reneweconomy.com.au/polluting-robots-win-big-clean-energy-workers-get-screwed-trump-tax-bill-37122/ By Joe Romm on 7 December 2017
Think Progress Polluting robots of the world, unite! The GOP tax bill is for you.
The rest of us, however, have a lot to lose from GOP tax changes that favor investments in dirty energy over clean — and robots over human workers.
As one MIT economist told Newsweek, “We are creating huge subsidies in our tax code for capital and encouraging employers to use machines instead of labor.” And unless significant changes are made in the GOP plan, those machines will be running on dirty energy.
The good news is that the Senate tax bill doesn’t roll back those renewable energy tax credits.
The bad news is that it contains language that could seriously undermine the investment in renewables by imposing “a new 100 percent tax” on those credits, as Gregory Wetstone, head of the American Council on Renewable Energy, explained in a statement.
“If this bill passes as drafted, major financial institutions would no longer participate in tax equity financing, which is the principal mechanism for monetizing credits,” Wetstone pointed out.
“Almost overnight, you would see a devastating reduction in wind and solar energy investment and development.” Meanwhile, tax subsidies for fossil fuels, many of which are decades old, would continue unchanged–and the Senate bill opens up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.
This type of clean energy financing will reach $12 billion this year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which examined the impact of this change in detail.
This investment, much of it by multinational finance companies, has helped leveraged some $50 billion a year in U.S. wind and solar projects, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Ironically — or, rather, tragically — harming renewables mostly harms red states. As “The American Prospect” noted, “The states that voted for Trump produce nearly 70 percent of wind energy, while 85 percent of existing wind projects are in GOP-held congressional districts.”
As for longer-term impacts, the GOP plan would cut billions of dollars in incentives for the biggest new source of sustainable high-wage employment in the world — clean energy — just as China and the rest of the world are making massive investments.
What’s unknown at this point is how these and other changes to these tax credits will be dealt with in the final bill, after the House and Senate work out their differences. While the House plan to gut the credits was intentional, it’s not clear that Senators intended to undermine them, so the problem is fixable.
This change would occur just when companies are beginning to automate their factories using robots and advanced computing technology, as corporate tax attorney Robert Kovacev, explained to Huffington Post: “It’s going to accelerate spending, basically, on robots that could displace workers.”
The GOP plan naturally has no tax incentives to encourage businesses to hire more actual workers or to retrain those who lose their job due to automation
Indeed, the Senate bill is so bad that Bloomberg’s editors wrote a piece explaining “Republicans have managed to make a terrible plan worse.” As one example the equipment-expensing provision would take effect immediately, but the Senate only lowers the corporate tax rate to 20 percent (from 35) in 2019.
“This will allow businesses to take deductions on investments while rates are high, then pay a lower rate on the resulting income, creating a perverse incentive to pursue otherwise unprofitable projects,” explains Bloomberg.
So the Senate bill actually encourages companies to replace workers even with unprofitable robots.
Unprofitable polluting robots — quite a legacy for the disastrous GOP tax plan.
Risk of Chernobyl sarcophagus collapsing – radiation danger to workers now sealing it
Vice News 5th Dec 2017, Workers at the Chernobyl Power Plant are now facing some of the highest
radiation levels ever while they put the finishing touches on a new
decontamination structure for the world’s worst nuclear disaster. After
the fallout in 1986, workers at the plant built a sarcophagus to contain
the radiation in just three months.
But it was just a quick fix, designed
without future decontamination in mind. And now, after more than 30 years,
it’s at risk of collapse. Workers are sealing the old structure with a
new one they finished building a year ago, called the New Safe Confinement.
They hope it will hold for the next 100 years.
https://news.vice.com/story/inside-the-clean-up-of-chernobyl-the-worlds-worst-nuclear-disaster
Search narrowed for place to store used nuclear fuel
By Colin Perkel , The Canadian Press Posted: Dec 06, 2017 5:23 PM ET
Waste management authorities have ruled out one part of northern Ontario as a suitable site for a bunker to store used, but highly radioactive, nuclear-reactor fuel rods.
In a statement on Wednesday, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization said the Elliot Lake and Blind River area between the cities of Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie are out of the running.
“Technical studies and engagement with people in the area identified a number of factors that would pose challenges in siting a repository,” the organization said.
“These include complexities associated with the geology, limited access and rugged terrain, and low potential to develop the breadth of partnerships needed to implement the project.”
5 communities left in the running
Three other communities in northern Ontario remain as potential sites: Ignace about 250 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay, Manitouwadge, about 395 kilometres east of Thunder Bay, and Hornepayne, about 480 kilometres east of Thunder Bay.
The other two remaining potential sites — South Bruce and Huron-Kinloss — are close to the Bruce nuclear reactor on the Lake Huron shoreline near Kincardine, Ont., site of a long and ongoing battle by Ontario Power Generation to win approval for a deep geologic repository for low and intermediate level radioactive waste.
‘Huge loss’
Dan Marchisella, mayor of Elliot Lake, expressed disappointment at the exclusion of his community after five years, calling it a “huge potential loss” for the entire district.
The former mining town, once known as the uranium capital of the world, felt that putting itself forward was the responsible thing to do given the vexing question of how best to safely store waste that remains toxic for thousands of years, he said.
“The footprint of that geology they were looking for is not large enough,” Marchisella said in an interview. “It’s very
difficult to access that area.”
The hunt for a place to permanently store used nuclear fuel rods — about 2.7 million bundles currently exist — began in earnest in 2010, with 22 communities expressing interest.
The dangerous material is currently stored in pools of water or in vaults on site at reactors in Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Manitoba.
The envisaged repository would be about 500 metres underground.
Decision by 2023
“The decision to narrow our focus is part of an ongoing, rigorous process to identify a single, safe site in an area with an
informed and willing host and strong potential for the partnerships that will be required to implement the project,” said Mahrez Ben Belfadhel, a vice-president with the waste-management organization.
While the organization expects to be able to choose its preferred site by about 2023, winning any approval for an underground bunker is likely to go years beyond that date if Ontario Power Generation’s odyssey is anything to go by.
The utility took years to win tentative approval in 2015 to build a bunker at the Bruce site near Lake Huron for material that is far less toxic than nuclear fuel rods but has made little progress since.
Federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna is now waiting for Indigenous communities in the area to weigh in — a process likely to take at least another year.
In addition, scores of communities around the Great Lakes have decried any suggestion the site so close to the lake is suitable — paving the way for what could be years of court battles.
In defence of its choice, Ontario Power Generation has said transporting radioactive material to long distances to a storage site would only add costs and increase the risk of toxic releases.
Marchisella, who said nuclear material already moves safely up and down Canada’s highways every day, did express concern at storing waste anywhere near a Great Lake, as OPG is proposing for its facility.
“As the planet gets warmer, we know that water levels continue to rise,” Marchisella said.
“So when you look at the northern communities further up north, we’re higher up in altitude.”
To ease the pain of rejection, the waste organization said it would make up to $600,000 available to Blind River, Elliot Lake and Sagamok Anishnawbek First Nation, and another $300,000 for Spanish and the North Shore for community projects.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/nuclear-storage-northeastern-ontario-1.4436342?cmp=rss
Environmental dangers from North Korea’s nuclear bomb tests
WILL NORTH KOREA’S KIM JONG UN DESTROY THE ENVIRONMENT WITH HIS NUCLEAR BOMBS? http://www.newsweek.com/will-north-koreas-kim-jong-un-destroy-environment-his-nuclear-bombs-729609 BY North Korea’s pursuit in successfully launching a long-range nuclear missile brings about a number of questions. Among them: How would the bombs affect the environment?
Although Kim Jong Un has yet to impact the United States’ physical environment, his nuclear tests have already caused extensive damage on his own soil. Testing at the country’s Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Facility has caused a majority of the trees—about 80 percent—in the area to die, according to defectors from the region. The defectors, who were interviewed by The Research Association of Vision of North Korea, also noted that the underground wells no longer had water, according to a report published in Chosun Ilbo, a South Korean newspaper.
Another notable concern is the bomb’s potential to contaminate the area with radioactive material. Although North Korean government radiation levels came back normal in September, there’s the still risk of future leaks, especially if more tests are conducted, Chinese scientists told the South China Morning Post.
The scientists warned that another nuclear test under Mount Mantap could cause it to collapse and suffer a radiation leak.
“We call it ‘taking the roof off’: If the mountain collapses and the hole is exposed, it will let out many bad things,” Wang Naiyan, former chairman of the China Nuclear Society and senior researcher on China’s nuclear weapons program, told the South China Morning Post.
Radiation also would impact other forms of life.
“In areas where humans are killed or injured by radiation, the same lethality for animals would be expected. If large herds of farm animals were affected, poor sanitation could become a significant problem,” authors of the book Effects of Nuclear Earth-Penetrator and Other Weapons wrote.
The authors noted that plants would get hit hard too, especially pine and spruce, which are among the species that are the most sensitive to radiation.
“It is conceivable that forests could be killed, which in turn could result in forest fires. The demise of the pine forest near the Chernobyl plant was one notable example of this effect,” the authors, who are part of the National Academies of Sciences, wrote.
Earth’s ozone layer would also take a large hit from nuclear blasts, according to a 2006 study. Climate scientists who conducted the research found that the extent of damage capable of nuclear weapons could impact the Earth for decades.
“Nuclear weapons are the greatest environmental danger to the planet from humans—not global warming or ozone depletion,” Alan Robock, a coauthor of the study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, told The Guardian.
KEPCO chief to resign amid heightened prospects of winning nuclear deal in UK
THE INVESTOR] The head of Korea Electric Power Corp. has offered to quit, the company said on Dec. 7, after it was selected as the preferred bidder in a project to build a nuclear power plant in Britain.
Cho Hwan-eik said he thought that by stepping down he can “pave the way” for the younger generation and he is pleased to “leave the company in good spirits,” as KEPCO is one step closer to winning a deal to build two nuclear reactors in Moorside, northwest England.
Cho is set to leave the company in a ceremony scheduled on Dec. 8.
The former vice minister of trade, industry and energy took KEPCO‘s top post in December 2012 and won a second term that was set to end on March 27. In South Korea, it is not unusual for a leader of a public company to step down before his or her term ends.
Cho’s announcement came soon after KEPCO said it was selected as the preferred bidder by Toshiba.
The Japanese industrial giant has a 100 percent stake in the NuGen consortium in charge of building the nuclear power plant in Britain.
By Alex Lee and newswires
1 This Month
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
of the week–London Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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