Frannce govt calls for improvements in the safety of the country’s nuclear power plants

FT 6th July 2018 , A French government commission has called for improvements in the safety of
the country’s nuclear power plants, including their ability to withstand
terrorist attack, putting further pressure on state-backed power utility
EDF.

The parliamentary commission set up to look at the safety and security
of nuclear installations in France said, in a report published on Thursday,
that the fleet remain vulnerable to accident and attack. The report comes
at a time of heightened political pressure for heavily indebted EDF, which
operates France’s nuclear fleet and faces a multi-billion euro bill to
extend the life of ageing plants.

Although an EPR is now coming online in
China, EDF is waiting for its Flamanville plant in France, which is seven
years late and €7bn over budget, to start up. A recently discovered
problem with weldings has increased uncertainty. EDF’s EPR projects in
Finland and at Hinkley Point, south-west England, are also running late and
over budget.

According to the parliamentary report, the NGO Greenpeace has,
over the last 30 years, “conducted 14 intrusion attempts in order to
demonstrate the vulnerability” of the French nuclear sites. The commission
put forward 33 suggestions to improve the situation – including reducing
reliance on subcontractors, putting more police on the ground at nuclear
sites, reconsidering waste disposal methods, being clearer on the timeline
for shutting down plants and strengthening the powers of the French nuclear
regulator, the ASN.
https://www.ft.com/content/347980d2-8067-11e8-bc55-50daf11b720d

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How the viewing public was ‘protected’ from seeing what the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombing did to people

Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the cutting room floor https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-on-the-cutting-room-floor/ By Thomas Gaulkin, August 5, 2019 Seventy-four years after nuclear weapons were first and last used in war, it can be challenging to conceive of the devastation they cause. But even in the immediate months after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, news accounts offered a view of ingenuity and destruction that often elided the human cost.

The newsreels below [on original] were mainly screened to audiences in 1946 and 1947 and detail the destructive force of the explosions almost entirely through excited accounts of the structural damage to the cities. There’s occasional mention of the lost city populations and the scientific knowledge to be gained from studying their casualties, but hardly any description of what people actually suffered, let alone personal accounts. It’s instructive to look at and listen to these reports today, and contemplate what is missing.

The 12-minute reel below was produced by the US War Department in 1946. “Tale of Two Cities” makes selective use of film that was confiscated from a Japanese filmmaker, Akira Iwasaki—though you wouldn’t know that from the narration, which boasts that “army cameramen have found and filmed pictorial evidence that tells in twisted steel and stone the effect of death-dealing atomic power.” (Some twenty years later, historian Eric Barnouw obtained more of Iwasaki’s footage and produced a remarkably different narrative that documented the horrible physical impact of the attacks on Hiroshima’s citizens.)

Contrasted with the triumphant tone of the news/propaganda made for 1940s audiences, silence changes everything. Made public only decades later, the two films below —one beginning with footage of wounded victims, the other, a full-color glimpse of survivors picking up the pieces of the ruined city—report what those above do not, without a single word.

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