UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) failure to deal with its high level nuclear waste – now sending it to Sellafield

NIS 28th Nov 2018 The Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) plan to send up to 5,000 barrels of Higher Activity Waste to Sellafield for treatment and storage. Since the year 2000 AWE has been under pressure from its regulators to take action to reduce its holdings of radioactive waste, some of which dates back to the 1983 moratorium on waste being dumped at sea.

This culminated in an improvement notice in 2015 from the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) which required AWE to produce a plan for dealing with its waste holdings.

Earlier efforts to deal with the waste floundered when a plan to procure a super-compactor and build a waste treatment centre at AWE Aldermaston. The building originally intended to house the super-compactor was unable to meet modern seismic resilience standards and the plan was abandoned when the Ministry of Defence (MoD) refused to spend the £78m required to build a new facility. The plan produced by AWE to satisfy the 2015 improvement notice concluded that sending the waste to be treated and stored at Sellafield would be preferable to building an on-site waste facility.
https://www.nuclearinfo.org/article/waste-awe-aldermaston-other/awe%E2%80%99s-nuclear-waste-plan-send-it-sellafield

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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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