One of the more serious impacts of human-caused climate disruption occurs when seawater absorbs excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. When this occurs, the carbon dioxide reacts with the water to form carbonic acid, which then ultimately reduces its pH level. For much of the marine life in the oceans, the consequences of this will be dire.
“Animals that have a calcium carbonate shell such as, corals, coralline algae, pteropods, bivalves and gastropods are negatively affected by ocean acidification,” said Richard Feely, a senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. “In some cases, their shells are weakened or actually dissolve while the animal is still alive. Fish behavior is also impacted by ocean acidification such that some species lose their ability to navigate or avoid predators.”………
As oceans absorb increasing amounts of our industrial emissions of CO2, their pH is expected to drop to a staggering 7.7 pH by 2100, according to professor of marine chemistry Aleck Wang at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Wang told National Geographic that by 2100, “you are going to start seeing calcium carbonate shells dissolve. It’s not going to be that far away.”
Most scientists studying the impacts of ocean acidification agree that by killing off the types of organisms Feely mentioned (corals, oysters, types of phytoplankton, etc.), major portions of the oceanic food chain could be greatly impacted.
Feely told Truthout that key marine organisms and ecosystem services face contrasting risks from the combined effects of ocean acidification, warming and sea level rise, and that even under the most stringently controlled CO2 emissions scenario, warm water corals and mid-latitude bivalves “are considered to be at high risk by 2100.”
“Under our current rate of CO2 emissions, most marine organisms are expected to have very high risk of impacts by 2100 and many by 2050,” Feely said. “These results are consistent with evidence of biological responses during high-CO2 periods in the geological past. Impacts to the ocean’s ecosystem services follow a parallel trajectory.”
……… According to Feely, high latitude and upwelling regions of the oceans are already “seriously affected by ocean acidification,” and he said that he and his colleagues are “already observing dissolution of pteropod shells in the Arctic and Southern Oceans, and also upwelling regions along the West Coast of North America.”
………Feely’s deepest concerns about ocean acidification are that so many ecosystem processes that humans depend on for food and survival are already impacted by both oceanic warming and acidification, and the risks of these impacts to these services only increases with continued CO2 emissions, which currently show little signs of slowing down.
“[The impacts] are predicted to remain moderate for the next several decades for most services under stringent emission reductions,” Feely said. “But the business-as-usual scenario would put all ecosystem services at high or very high risk over the same time frame.”
A 2015 study warned that ocean acidification could cause dramatic changes to phytoplankton, the basis of the entire oceanic food web.
Feds push for low-cost commercial treatment of Hanford waste. State has concerns, BY ANNETTE CARY, acary@tricityherald.com, RICHLAND, WA
The Department of Energy is making plans to encase 2,000 gallons of waste now held in Hanford’s underground tanks in concrete-like grout, part of a continuing demonstration project.
DOE recently released a fact sheet that indicated its interest in continuing the demonstration project and listing what it sees as the benefits of the project, called the test bed initiative.
The project is a departure from plans to turn radioactive and hazardous chemical waste into a stable glass form at the $17 billion vitrification plant under construction at the nuclear reservation.
But DOE still needs to get other parties on board.
The Washington Department of Ecology, a Hanford regulator, has sent DOE a list of questions about the project. The state would need to issue permits and approvals for some aspects of the demonstration project.
“Current core work at the Hanford Site is already being deferred and delayed due to a lack of funds,” said Maia Bellon, Ecology director, in the letter to DOE. “We are concerned about (Department of) Energy pursuing a new initiative that could divert even more funding away from existing priorities that are tied to consent decree deadlines.”
The project also faces a congressional hurdle.
Language included in the Senate’s fiscal 2019 Hanford budget recommends no money be spent on the test bed initiative.
The Senate budget language must be reconciled with the House budget language for the same year, which was bullish on the project. It directed $15 million be spent on the next phase of the demonstration.
The first phase of the demonstration project, grouting three gallons of the 56 million gallons of waste held in Hanford’s underground tanks, was successfully completed in December.
………The state of Washington and the Hanford Advisory Board have advocated for more double-shell tanks to be built to provide more space for waste to be emptied from single-shell tanks. DOE has been opposed to building more storage tanks, saying it would rather spend money on treating waste………https://www.tri-cityherald.com/latest-news/article215368935.html
David Lowry’s Blog 23rd July 2018 ‘Mark-your-own-homework’ nuclear “safeguards” proposed by UK Government as
part of Brexit plans. A week ago the Government published a near 100-page
report titled ‘The future relationship between the United Kingdom and the
European Union’, which has provoked much public and political discussion.
Congress drops bid to loosen supervision of nuclear agency abc By MATTHEW DALY, ASSOCIATED PRESS, WASHINGTON — Jul 23, 2018,
Congress is abandoning an effort to loosen Cabinet control over an agency responsible for securing the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
A provision in a defense policy bill would have removed the National Nuclear Security Administration from direct control of the Energy Department, where it’s been housed since its creation in 2000.
The provision was dropped as House and Senate lawmakers negotiated a compromise defense bill, aides said Monday. The defense bill could come up for a vote in the House this week.
The Trump administration and senior lawmakers from both parties opposed the nuclear provision, but it was included in a defense bill passed by the Senate in June.
The measure would have empowered the NNSA to act nearly on its own, freed from what a report by the Senate Armed Services Committee calls a “flawed DOE organizational process” that has led to “weak accountability, … insufficient program and budget expertise and poor contract management.”
That report cites a series of delays and cost overruns at the agency, including a contentious project to reprocess weapons-grade plutonium and uranium into fuel for commercial reactors at a site in South Carolina.
The White House and Energy Secretary Rick Perry oppose the reorganization, saying it would usurp Perry’s authority to set policy in crucial areas. The bill also would make the nuclear agency’s general counsel independent of the Energy Department’s legal division……….
Criticism of the nuclear agency isn’t new.
A congressional commission led by a former Army undersecretary and retired Navy admiral concluded in 2014 that it had failed in its mission and relied too heavily on private contractors that had turned it into a massive jobs program with duplicative functions and a “dysfunctional management and operations relationship.”
The commission, however, did support the current oversight arrangement.
Perry told Congress this year that there have been “historically questionable expenditures of dollars” by the NNSA, including at the South Carolina nuclear project, but he said officials were working to ensure taxpayers “are getting a good return on our investment.”
Koizumi calls on opposition to challenge LDP’s nuclear policy, THE ASAHI SHIMBUN, July 24, 2018
Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has criticized the Abe administration for its pro-nuclear energy stance and called for the policy to be made an election issue when Japanese go to the polls next year.
In a recent interview with The Asahi Shimbun in Tokyo, Koizumi, 76, said, “It isn’t possible any more for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to end nuclear power generation. He did not try to do so, even though he could have.”
Among extremely rare remarks for a former prime minister and former Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker to make, Koizumi also said he expects opposition parties to make ending Japan’s reliance on nuclear power a key point for debate in the next Upper House election to be held in summer 2019.
Koizumi made his anti-nuclear stance clear in a news conference in 2013, seven years after he stepped down as prime minister.
Since then, he has repeatedly demanded that the Abe administration change its energy policies and bring nuclear power generation to an end.
Tokyo 2020 will host the XXXII Olympic Summer Games, Jul 24 – Aug 9.
How safe will the athletes be – competing in this new era of climate change heat?
How safe will anyone be, with the continuing danger of Fukushima’s wrecked nuclear reactors, and Japan’s accumulations of nuclear radioactive trash?
Ironically, Japan would appear to most thinking people to be a most unwise choice for the 2020 Olympics, because of the continuing dangerous situation at Fukushima.
But most people have missed the connection to the military-industrial-corporate-global-nuclear-complex.
It’s a large part of the reason WHY JAPAN WAS CHOSEN – TO PROVE TO THE WORLD THAT FUKUSHIMA DOESN’T MATTER – THAT THE NUCLEAR INDUSTRY IS JUST FINE!
Steve Dale comments:Trees take up the Cesium-137 via their roots and pump it to their growth tips. A forest fire could spread radioactivity everywhere again. People avoiding the No-Go areas might have the radiation come to their lungs via smoke.
TOKYO (Kyodo) — The Japan Coast Guard will deploy two large patrol vessels to areas of the Sea of Japan to reinforce protection of nuclear power plants against terrorism, sources familiar with the matter said Saturday.
Two new 1,500-ton vessels with helipads will be deployed between fiscal 2019 and 2020 to the coast guard’s Tsuruga office in Fukui Prefecture where several nuclear plants are located, according to the sources.
Patrol boats of similar size, each costing about 6 billion yen ($54 million), will be introduced in other parts of the country in the future, they said.
The government is moving to strengthen counterterrorism measures in the run-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, in line with an agreement in February with the International Atomic Energy Agency to bolster Japan’s capacity to respond to nuclear terrorism.
The coast guard expects the new ships will also enhance its ability to respond to North Korean boats engaged in illegal fishing, and to unidentified ships sighted off the central Japan coast, the sources said.
The new ships could also be used to respond to emergency situations at nuclear plants in other areas, and crew will receive special training in dealing with radioactive substances, they said.
An additional 60 to 80 coast guard crew will be posted at the Tsuruga office, nearly doubling the personnel there.
The Tsuruga office belongs to the 8th Regional Coast Guard Headquarters, which is responsible for patrolling waters along a 2,000-kilometer stretch of Japan’s central and western coasts. That office operates three patrol boats, the largest being the 350-ton Echizen.
To better deal with China’s growing maritime assertiveness, Japan has allocated an initial budget of a record 211.2 billion yen to the Japan Coast Guard for fiscal 2018.
Fukushima Pref. beach opens to swimmers for 1st time after tsunami, nuclear disasters
Children play at Haragamaobama Beach, which opened for swimmers for the first time in eight years in the city of Soma, Fukushima Prefecture, on July 21.
July 21, 2018
SOMA, Fukushima — Haragamaobama Beach here was opened to swimmers on July 21 for the first time in eight years after the area was struck in March 2011 by a massive tsunami following the Great East Japan Earthquake.
The beach is the first in the northern part of the prefecture to reopen after the disaster. Three beaches earlier opened in the southern city of Iwaki.
Haragamaobama Beach attracted about 56,500 people in 2010. However, 207 people in the area died in the March 11, 2011 disaster, and the tsunami littered the beach with debris.
The beach is about 45 kilometers away from the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant, which was struck by meltdowns following the quake and tsunami. The city has not found any detectable levels of radioactive substances in seawater quality tests it started in 2016. It reopened the beach after preparing tsunami evacuation routes.
Sayaka Mori, 29, a nursing care worker in the northern prefectural city of Minamisoma, came to the beach with her 3-year-old daughter and played at the water’s edge. “I grew up at my home in front of the sea. It was natural to play at the beach. I want my child to know the delight of playing in the sea,” she said.
Only 24 of 70 beaches reopen to public since 2011 tsunami
A family plays on Hirota public beach in Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, on July 20.
July 20, 2018
RIKUZENTAKATA, Iwate Prefecture–A public beach officially opened here July 20 for the first time in eight years, underscoring the destruction of sites along the Tohoku coast that bore the initial brunt of the 2011 tsunami.
Hirota beach in Rikuzentakata, a city that was devastated in the disaster, is one of 24 beaches that will be officially open to the public this summer in the prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima.
That figure is only about a third of the 70 that were available before the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami struck the Tohoku region on March 11, 2011.
Miho Mitsui, who lives in Rikuzentakata’s Hirotacho district, visited Hirota beach with her two young daughters on the morning of July 20.
“Until this year, we were disappointed at being unable to go into the sea, especially with the water so clear,” the 28-year-old homemaker said. “I want to come here every day.”
Before the 2011 disaster, Hirota and the city’s other public beach, Takata Matsubara, were key parts of social life among the locals.
Takata Matsubara beach became known as the site where a pine forest was wiped out by the tsunami, leaving only one “miracle pine tree” standing. The tree has since died, and the city is still trying to restore sand at the beach, which is still not officially open to the public.
For “officially opened” beaches, municipal governments and other operators provide maintenance and other care, check the water quality to ensure safety, and operate necessary facilities.
But at some of the sites in the Tohoku region, the beaches have essentially disappeared.
In the village of Tanohata, Iwate Prefecture, more than 100 kilometers north of Rikuzentakata, the two public beaches have been closed to the public over the past eight years for the construction of seawalls.
Tanohata Mayor Hiroshi Ishihara decided to use the Tsukuehama beach as a temporary public beach from July 26, saying it is “undesirable to deprive children, who live in the coastal village, of the experience of swimming in the sea.”
Haragamaobama beach in Soma, Fukushima Prefecture, about 40 kilometers north of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, is also scheduled to reopen for the first time in eight years on July 21.
But south of the nuclear plant, in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, the city government in May decided that Kattsuo beach could no longer be considered a public beach. Much of the sandy area of the beach disappeared in plate movements caused by the offshore earthquake as well as the construction of seawalls.
Nobiru beach and the surrounding area in Higashi-Matsushima, Miyagi Prefecture, will remain closed for now.
A city government official said the beach area will reopen once “escape routes are set up (for possible future tsunami).”
The Iwate prefectural government has set up a technical review committee to explore the feasibility of restoring sand at Negishi beach in Kamaishi and Namiita beach in Otsuchi that were hit hard by the tsunami.
John Urquhart 19th July 2018 Miscarriages and their causes are rarely discussed in public but for many women they are an unfortunate fact of life. To be more precise; for every 10,000 pregnancies, an estimated 3,000 end with a miscarriage. Very few people know that a significant proportion of these miscarriages is due to chromosome aberrations in the foetus, particularly Down Syndrome.
Boué examined 1,500 foetuses that had naturally aborted. He found that 38% had Down Syndrome. So on that basis, for every 10,000 pregnancies, 1,114 miscarriages occur due to a Down Syndrome condition in the foetus. On the other hand, the actual number of children born with Down Syndrome is less than 10 in 10,000.
Even allowing for therapeutic abortions, this implies that 99% of all foetuses with Down Syndrome are eliminated before reaching full term. A very comprehensive quality control system that must have developed over thousands of years through natural selection.
The very high number of foetuses that start with Down Syndrome would suggest there is some omnipresent environmental factor to which humans are very sensitive.
The Down Syndrome condition, along with other chromosome aberrations, together account for 50% of all natural miscarriages. The aberrations arise when genes on the chromosomes translocate and this is a form of genomic instability. We now know that one source of such instability is radiation. Could natural background radiation be a major cause of the Down Syndrome condition?
We know that radiation levels can vary significantly at times. Gamma monitoring by the independent Argus Network over the last thirty years reveals that, under certain conditions, washout of radionuclides occurs which significantly increases radiation levels. A dramatic illustration of this phenomenon occurred several years ago when workers outside the Berkeley nuclear power station were caught in a rainstorm outside the plant and subsequently triggered radiation monitors on their way in! It was found that their clothes were covered with short-lived, naturally-occurring radionuclides including alpha and beta particles, which when breathed in, can penetrate deep into the body.
So, is natural background radiation a major source of miscarriages in women? Hardly any research has been done in this area, particularly as miscarriages are not a notifiable condition and records are hardly ever kept. So, it is necessary to concentrate purely on the relationship between radiation and Down Syndrome.
In 1972, Eva Alberman reported research findings which showed that exposure to x-rays of mothers to be increased the likelihood of giving birth to a Down Syndrome child, but only at least six years after exposure.
What happened when all mothers to be in Britain were exposed to an unexpected bout of radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear accident in early May 1986? Three large radioactive plumes from the accident swept south to north over the country and where they were intercepted by rain showers, significant amounts of radioactive debris were deposited. One such area was Wales, which it is generally agreed, had significantly higher levels of fallout.
official figures for Down Syndrome comparing England and Wales between 1983 and 2004. In exactly six years after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, Down Syndrome levels in Wales, which previously had matched those in England, increased by about 45% over their English counterparts. This six-year delay effect exactly mirrors the findings of Eva Alberman.
What about other parts of Europe? In “Welcome to Geordiestan” there are detailed facts and discussions of the health impact of the Chernobyl nuclear accident (see details below).
The annual birth defect rates in Belarus, which was heavily contaminated by fallout from Chernobyl: in the most contaminated area, there was a significant jump in birth defects in 1987 and 1988, which could have been caused by exposure of male sperm to radioactive fallout. Levels then return almost to normal but in Belarus as a whole, six years after the Chernobyl nuclear accident the birth defect rate rose to four times the rate before the accident and continued to climb. The impact on the offspring due to parental exposure could be at least ten times higher via women than via men. Once again, there appears to be a six-year effect. These figures cover not only children born with Down Syndrome but all types of birth defects. One of the possible effects of genomic instability is to generate extramutated genes which interact with existing recessive deleterious genes thus bumping up the rate of birth defects.
Clearly, there are many unresolved questions about the impact of radiation on the human female egg but the results from Wales and Belarus suggest that, not only very low levels of man-made radiation may have an effect, but that its genetic consequences are much higher in women than in men.
Yet in the absence of any kind of research into the impact of Chernobyl and other low level radiation sources, the British government has recently announced their goal of increasing the percentage of women working in the nuclear industry to 40%. Could this have the effect of importing a genetic trojan horse into the British nation? Animal studies conducted before and after the Chernobyl nuclear accident show transgenerational effects due to radiation. Ryabokon et al. (2006) showed that, in colonies of bank voles, these effects not only persisted but increased over twenty-two generations.
Genomic instability does not stop at one generation. So women of child-bearing age should seriously consider whether to work in the nuclear industry. Not only for their own sake, but for the sake of their descendants.
Welcome to Geordiestan Published by zencity 2018 ISBN: 978-1-5272-2499-5 UK: £8.99 Now available from bookshops and libraries. For further information email zencity@environment.org.uk
Japan to deploy large patrol boats to guard nuclear plants (Mainichi Japan)
TOKYO (Kyodo) — The Japan Coast Guard will deploy two large patrol vessels to areas of the Sea of Japan to reinforce protection of nuclear power plants against terrorism, sources familiar with the matter said Saturday.
Two new 1,500-ton vessels with helipads will be deployed between fiscal 2019 and 2020 to the coast guard’s Tsuruga office in Fukui Prefecture where several nuclear plants are located, according to the sources.
Patrol boats of similar size, each costing about 6 billion yen ($54 million), will be introduced in other parts of the country in the future, they said.
The government is moving to strengthen counterterrorism measures in the run-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, in line with an agreement in February with the International Atomic Energy Agency to bolster Japan’s capacity to respond to nuclear terrorism…….
The new ships could also be used to respond to emergency situations at nuclear plants in other areas, and crew will receive special training in dealing with radioactive substances, they said. ……
(Transport dangers) Any mainline rail can be used. The condition of the rails in the U.S. is not good. Think of recent train derailments – as NIRS has often asked, “What if nuclear waste had been aboard?” The irradiated nuclear fuel casks aboard trains bound for Holtec/ELEA, NM, combined with the rail cars, would weigh around 180 tons. These would be among the heaviest loads on the rails, and would risk further damaging them.
(Waste container contamination) sometimes the exterior of shipping casks are contaminated, sometimes severely so. Above, 49 such incidents of external contamination were documented in the U.S. from 1949-1996. As revealed by Mycle Schneider of WISE-Paris in the mid- to late 1990s, Areva (now called Orano in the U.S., as at the WCS, TX CISF) experienced a very large number of externally contaminated HLRW shipments.
Because pools are outside radiological containment structures that surround reactors (which can themselves fail, as shown at Fukushima Daiichi), the first step in the direction of Hardened On-Site Storage (HOSS) is to “expedite transfer” of irradiated nuclear fuel from indoor “wet” pools to outdoor dry storage. However, there must be significant upgrades to safety, security, health- and environmental protection associated with dry cask storage – that is, Hardened On-Site Storage (HOSS).
Ken Raskin , 22 July 18 Trump has whole heartedly opened up the radioactive nightmare in America again. Uranium Mining in the Grand canyon. Into water that supplies much of the western United States.
The Lost Creek uranium mine north of Rawlins shut down operations Wednesday just weeks after reporting one of the largest spills of uranium injection fluid ever recorded in the U.S.
The spill was contained on site and is not a human health hazard, according to federal regulators. The spilled fluid had not yet been pumped into the uranium ore beneath the surface. Radioactive metal contained in the fluid was naturally occurring.
The mine, owned by Littleton, Colorado-based Ur-Energy, reported an Aug. 19 spill of 188,000 gallons of pre-injection fluid at Lost Creek. Another spill of 10,000 gallons of pre-injection fluid at Lost Creek on Tuesday was reported to federal regulators.
See how the article trivializes impact by stating that the radioactive metal contained in the spilled fluid was “naturally occurring.”
Uranium mining rapes the earth and processing and utilization poison the population as well as the eco-systems upon which we depend.
We don’t need nuclear power – its inefficient, costly, dangerous, and no solution exists for waste – and we don’t need nuclear weapons.
We don’t need any more uranium. Its antithetical to security when thought in relation to the preservation of life.””””
Start from Ship Rock NM, where a 90 million gallons of highly radioactive sludge, was released illegally into the environment and, san Juan River. The san Juan River Drains into the Colorado River.
Shiprock is also close to where underground nukes were detonated in New Mexico for project gasbuggy
Shiprock is on the navajo nation.
From there, moving West on the Navajo Nation.
Moving west to the grand canyon and the Uranium Mines there! Also downwind from Nevada nuke testing in the 50s and 60s.
GO NORTH TO Halchita IN DEEP SOUTH UTAH, BY the sacred Monument Valley.
Halchita, is where there was a uranium Mill and where there were mines, on the navajo Nation. Halchita is also downwind, from where the American Military nuke bombed its own citizens with a thousand bombs.
HALCHITA IS NAVAJO land, where half the residents in the area died from cancer.
Move norteast to Blanding, Utah, where energy Fuels is now located. By Bears ears, where Trump just opened unlimited uranium mining, even open pit uranium mining.
BLANDING IS Also downwinder. So many young people dead in mine accidents, prematurely from lung cancer, pacreatic cancer, ovarian cancer, lymphomas, leukemias. MANY PEOPLE THERE HATE URANIUM AND NUCLEAR.
A leader of the sagebrush rebellion, Cal Black, WAS a county commissioner of that county, San Juan County in the 60s and 70s.
Cal Black died with painful tumors, all over his body, at a young age. He regretted his involvement with Uranium, in the end.
The principal of Monticello High School, had a young son, who died of the same leukemia, that cursed so many kids in southern utah. All of those kids were downwinders and uranium babies. Monticello is just 20 miles north of the Energy Fuels genocide factory.
There was a Uranium Mill, right in the middle of monticello. It has not cleaned up all the way, to this day.
The mill and tailings of energy fuels in blanding blows radioactive shit all over s utah to colorado and arizona.
Blanding and energy fuels, are 20 miles s of Monticello Utah.
The heavily contaminated dust from that abomination, blows radioactive shit, to the Ute reservation in colorado 50 miles away, to Bluff Utah by Monument valley and has heavily contaminated the Bears Ears.
There were the numerous nuclear bombs, detonated at the headwaters of and under the Colorado River in the 60s and 70s. There are the towns north of energy fuels along the Colorado river in Utah and colarado, that had to sue the government and corporate polluters for 20 years, to get something done about the radioactive shit in their towns.
And now Trump is back to start it up all over again and make it worse.
This month’s scorching heat wave broke records around the world. The Algerian city of Ouargla, with a population of half a million, had a temperature of 124.3 degrees Fahrenheit on July 6, the hottest reliably measured temperature on record in Africa. In Ireland and Wales, the unusually hot weather revealed ancient structures normally hidden by grass or crops. In Chino, California, the mercury soared to 120 degrees. Another round of hazardous summer heat is expected this week, with record high temperatures possible in the southern United States.
The prolonged heat wave has been a staple of television news for weeks. However, most of the coverage has been sorely lacking in context: Humans are warming the planet, and scientists have already linked some heat waves to climate change. A recent analysis published in the journal Nature Climate Change concludes that human-driven climate change, rather than natural variability, will be the leading cause of heat waves over the western United States and Great Lakes region as early as the 2020s and 2030s, respectively.
Like the heat itself, much of the media coverage was stupefying. “Major broadcast TV networks overwhelmingly failed to report on the links between climate change and extreme heat,” according to a Media Matters survey. “Over a two-week period from late June to early July, ABC, CBS, and NBC aired a combined 127 segments or weathercasts that discussed the heat wave, but only one segment, on CBS This Morning, mentioned climate change.”
TV coverage would undoubtedly improve if weather forecasters were better informed about climate science. But four Republican senators with close ties to the fossil fuel industry are trying to eliminate government funding for a National Science Foundation designed to help forecasters (and by extension, the general public) “become more familiar with the science behind how their local weather and its trends are related to the dynamics of the climate.”
The Pickering Nuclear Station has a deadly secret: 740,000 radioactive fuel bundles sitting on site — the legacy of close to 50 years of nuclear operations.
These bundles contain radioactive materials that can penetrate the human body, leading to serious illness or death. They also contain an enormous amount of plutonium, the key ingredient in nuclear warheads or dirty bombs. There is enough plutonium on-site at Pickering today to construct more than 11,000 nuclear warheads.
We recently asked internationally recognized risk expert Dr. Gordon Thompson to review the advisability of storing this enormous pile of toxic waste in the midst of Canada’s largest urban area and next to the source of our drinking water.
His conclusion was stark: The Pickering site, he found, is “suboptimal as a spent nuclear fuel-storage site from perspectives including defensibility, proximity of populations, and potential to contaminate Lake Ontario.” He added that the current waste storage facilities have no protection from rocket, bomb or aircraft attacks from the air or water and that, overall, the site is “lightly defended” at best.
Half-a-century after the start of nuclear power operations in Canada, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization is still on the hunt for a “willing host” community to accept thousands of tonnes of spent fuel that will remain highly radioactive for thousands of years.
This means there is little chance the waste currently being stored at Pickering is going anywhere in the next 60 to 100 years. To add insult to injury, while Ontario Power Generation is planning to expand its conventional storage facilities so that Pickering can continue to produce and store more toxic nuclear wastes, it has no plans to make its new storage facilities as safe as possible. Specifically, it has no plans to build above-ground, attack-resistant, reinforced-concrete vaults to protect Pickering’s wastes from a terrorist attack.
Continuing to operate this patched-up nuclear plant surrounded by millions of people, while piling up more and more toxic nuclear wastes in conventional commercial storage buildings, is the very definition of an extremely bad idea that can only get worse.
Those who support keeping Pickering running until 2024 or beyond, such as Premier Doug Ford, need to explain how they plan to safeguard the thousands of tonnes of deadly waste already stored at the site and why it is a good idea to continue adding more.
— Angela Bischoff is the director of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance. We’re behind Ontario’s coal phase-out and are now working to move Ontario to a 100-per cent renewable electricity system.
House of Lords 19th July 2018 The EU Energy and Environment Sub-Committee has written to the Minister for Business and Industry, Richard Harrington MP, following an evidence session with the Office for Nuclear Regulation which considered their efforts to prepare for Brexit.
The Committee has written to BEIS’ Minister for Business and Industry to ask for further clarity on the ONR’s future funding arrangements, and to request regular updates between now and the point of withdrawal to ensure the ONR’s preparation remains on track.
The Committee also asks for an update on negotiations regarding the intended Nuclear Cooperation Agreements with the USA, Canada, Japan and Australia. https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/lords-select/eu-energy-environment-subcommittee/news-parliament-2017/nuclear-preparedness-letter-to-minister/
nuclear-news 