By chief economics correspondent Emma Alberici Maria Teresa Farci’s legs start to shake as she reads aloud from the diary she kept that describes, in heartbreaking detail, the last moments of her 25-year-old daughter’s tortured life.
Key points:
Eight former commanders of a bombing range are before Italian courts
Locals living near Quirra firing range describe multiple cases of deformities and cancer as “Quirra syndrome”
Italy’s army has dismissed a report linking exposure to Depleted Uranium to disease suffered by the military
“She died in my arms. My whole world collapsed. I knew she was sick, but I wasn’t ready.”
Her daughter, Maria Grazia, was born on the Italian island of Sardinia with part of her brain exposed and a spine so disfigured her mother has never allowed her photo to be published.
This was only one of many mysterious cases of deformity, cancer and environmental destruction that have come to be called the “Quirra syndrome”.
Eight Italian military officers — all former commanders of the bombing range at Quirra in Sardinia — have been hauled before the courts.
It’s unprecedented to see Italian military brass held to account for what many Sardinians say is a scandalous coverup of a major public health disaster with international consequences.
Bombs and birth defects — is there a link?
In the year baby Maria Grazia was born, one in four of the children born in the same town, on the edge of the Quirra firing range, also suffered disabilities.
Some mothers chose to abort rather than give birth to a deformed child.
In her first television interview, Maria Teresa told Foreign Correspondent of hearing bombs exploding at the Quirra firing range when she was pregnant.
Enormous clouds of red dust enveloped her village.
Later, health authorities were called in to study an alarming number of sheep and goats being born with deformities.
Shepherds in the area had routinely grazed their animals on the firing range.
“Lambs were born with eyes in the back of their heads,” said veterinary scientist Giorgio Mellis, one of the research team.
“I had never seen anything like it.”
One farmer told him of his horror: “I was too scared to enter the barn in the mornings … they were monstrosities you didn’t want to see.”
Researchers also found an alarming 65 per cent of the shepherds of Quirra had cancer.
The news hit Sardinia hard. It reinforced their worst fears while also challenging their proud international reputation as a place of unrivalled natural beauty.
The military hit back, with one former commander of the Quirra base saying on Swiss TV that birth defects in animals and children came from inbreeding.
“They marry between cousins, brothers, one another,” General Fabio Molteni claimed, without evidence.
“But you cannot say it or you will offend the Sardinians.”
General Molteni is one of the former commanders now on trial.
Years of investigation and legal inquiry led to the six generals and two colonels being charged with breaching their duty of care for the health and safety of soldiers and civilians.
After repeated attempts, Foreign Correspondent was refused interviews with senior Italian military officials and the Defence Minister.
Governments earning money by renting out ranges
Sardinia has hosted the war games of armed forces from the west and other countries since sizable areas of its territory were sectioned off after World War II.
Rome is reported to make around $64,000 an hour from renting out the ranges to NATO countries and others including Israel.
Getting precise information about what has been blown up, tested or fired at the military sites and by which countries is almost impossible, according to Gianpiero Scanu, the head of a parliamentary inquiry that reported last year.
Many, including current Defence Minister Elisabetta Trenta, have previously accused the Italian military of maintaining a “veil of silence”.
Speaking exclusively to the ABC, chief prosecutor for the region, Biagio Mazzeo, said he is “convinced” of a direct link between the cancer clusters at Quirra and the toxicity of the elements being blown up at the defence base.
But prosecuting the case against the military comes up against a major hurdle.
“Unfortunately, proving what we call a causality link — that is, a link between a specific incident and specific consequences — is extremely difficult,” Mr Mazzeo said.
What is being used on the bases?
A recent parliamentary inquiry revealed that 1,187 French-made MILAN missiles had been fired at Quirra.
This has focussed attention on radioactive thorium as a suspect in the health crisis.
It’s used in the anti-tank missiles’ guidance systems. Inhaling thorium dust is known to increase the risk of lung and pancreatic cancer.
Another suspect is depleted uranium. The Italian military has denied using this controversial material, which increases the armour-piercing capability of weapons.
But that’s a fudge, according to Osservatorio Militare, which campaigns for the wellbeing of Italian soldiers.
“The firing ranges of Sardinia are international,” said Domenico Leggiero, the research centre’s head and former air force pilot.
Whatever is blown up on the island’s firing ranges, it’s the fine particles a thousand times smaller than a red blood cell that are being blamed for making people sick.
These so-called “nanoparticles” are a new frontier in scientific research.
They’ve been shown to penetrate through the lung and into a human body with ease.
Italian biomedical engineer Dr Antonietta Gatti gave evidence to four parliamentary inquiries.
She has suggested a possible link between disease and industrial exposure to nanoparticles of certain heavy metals.
The World Health Organisation says a causal link is yet to be conclusively established and more scientific research needs to be done.
Dr Gatti said armaments had the potential to generate dangerous nanoparticles in fine dust because they are routinely exploded or fired at more than 3,000 degrees Celsius.
Inquiry confirms causal links
In what was labelled a “milestone”, a two-year parliamentary investigation into the health of the armed forces overseas and at the firing ranges made a breakthrough finding.
“We have confirmed the causal link between the unequivocal exposure to depleted uranium and diseases suffered by the military,” the inquiry’s head, then centre-left government MP Gianpiero Scanu, announced.
The Italian military brass dismissed the report but are now fighting for their international reputation in the court at Quirra where the eight senior officers are now on trial.
The ABC understands commanders responsible for another firing range in Sardinia’s south at Teulada could soon also face charges of negligence as police conclude a two-year investigation.
Until now the military has been accused of acting with impunity.
‘We were driven out’: Fukushima’s radioactive legacy, SMH, By Simon Denyer, 4 February 2019 Namie: Noboru Honda lost 12 members of his extended family when a tsunami struck the Fukushima prefecture in northern Japan nearly eight years ago. Last year, he was diagnosed with cancer and initially given a few months to live.
Today, he is facing a third sorrow: watching what may be the last gasps of his home town.
For six years, Namie was deemed unsafe after a multiple reactor meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
In March 2017, the government lifted its evacuation order for the centre of Namie. But so far, hardly anyone has ventured back.
Its people are scattered and divided. Families are split. The sense of community is coming apart.
“It has been eight years; we were hoping things would be settled now,” the 66-year-old Honda said. “This is the worst time, the most painful period.”
For the people of Namie and other towns near the Fukushima plant, the pain is sharpened by the way the Japanese government is trying to move beyond the tragedy, to use the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as a symbol of hope and recovery, a sign that life can return to normal after a disaster of this magnitude.
Its charm offensive is also tied up with efforts to restart the country’s nuclear-power industry, one of the world’s most extensive networks of atomic power generation.
Six Olympic softball games and a baseball game will be staged in Fukushima, the prefecture’s bustling and radiation-free capital city, and the Olympic torch relay will start from here.
But in Namie, much closer to the ill-fated nuclear plant, the celebration rings hollow……….
Just 873 people, or under 5 per cent, of an original population of 17,613 have returned. Many are scared – with some obvious justification – that their homes and surroundings are still unsafe. Most of the returnees are elderly. Only six children are enrolled at the gleaming new primary school. This is not a place for young families.
Four-fifths of Namie’s geographical area is mountain and forest, impossible to decontaminate, still deemed unsafe to return. When it rains, the radioactive cesium in the mountains flows into rivers and underground water sources close to the town.
Greenpeace has been taking thousands of radiation readings for years in the towns around the Fukushima nuclear plant. It says radiation levels in parts of Namie where evacuation orders have been lifted will remain well above international maximum safety recommendations for many decades, raising the risks of leukaemia and other cancers to “unjustifiable levels”, especially for children.
In the rural areas around the town, radiation levels are much higher and could remain unsafe for people to live beyond the end of this century, Greenpeace concluded in a 2018 report.
“The scale of the problem is clearly not something the government wants to communicate to the Japanese people, and that’s driving the whole issue of the return of evacuees,” said Shaun Burnie, senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace.
“The idea that an industrial accident closes off an area of Japan, with its limited habitable land, for generations and longer – that would just remind the public why they are right to be opposed to nuclear power.”
When Trump supporters chant “make America great again,” I have difficulty imagining that any of them are longing for the days when radiation exposure went unregulated. Nevertheless, that’s precisely the direction the EPA is headed with its latest appointment.
Brant Ulsh, a health physicist working for a consulting firm, will serve as both a scientific advisor to the EPA and as the new leader of the Radiation Advisory Committee. Ulsh is a controversial choice because he is considered the nation’s most outspoken critic of radiation levels.
His papers and positions put him at odds with the overwhelming majority of the scientific community that believes coming into contact with even low levels of ionizing radiation poses a significant cancer risk. He claims the science is too outdated and insufficient to warrant the existing government standards.
“Once again the Trump administration is moving to the fringe for its scientific advice, choosing someone who could undercut foundational protections from radiation,” wrote the Natural Resources Defense Council in a statement regarding Ulsh’s appointment. “We need sound science to dictate health protections, not dangerous theories.”
If you’re wondering what angle Ulsh is working, he admits to it in his own papers. Evidently, he’s concerned that our radiation regulations put “unnecessary burdens” on corporations. Funny how the conservatives in power always seem more concerned with the extra money rich companies pay to keep people safe than actual public safety.
For what it’s worth – and it should be worth a lot, EPA head Andrew Wheeler – just last year the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements reviewed 29 studies that reconfirmed a correlation between low level radiation exposure and an increased risk of cancer.
As a scientific advisor to the EPA and the head of the Radiation Advisory Committee, Ulsh could play a pivotal role in rolling back the standards that dictate acceptable amounts of radiation. Since humans can’t detect when they’re exposed to radiation, we rely on enforcement of these limits to keep us safe.
Make no mistake – this appointment isn’t accidental. There are countless scientists who could have led the Radiation Advisory Committee that accept the existing scientific consensus on radiation levels. To choose an outlier like Ulsh is to look for someone to deliberately take the agency in a different direction.
In fact, thanks to an Associated Press story from last year, we know that the EPA was already making plans to throw out regulations on radiation, so having a scientist like Ulsh bring his own opinions could be the ideal vehicle in order to accomplish that agenda.
At the risk of being hyperbolic, at this point, I think we’ve got to ask ourselves: is the Trump administration just trying to kill us? They’re appointing fossil fuel lobbyists to oversee climate change, corporate polluters to worry about clean water, chemical bigwigs to regulate pesticides and now a pro-radiation guy to set radiation standards.
Is nothing sacred? Does the Trump administration feel no obligation to keep the American people safe? If the EPA is so confident that scientists are wrong and radiation isn’t actually harmful, maybe it should start by experimenting at the White House before unleashing it on the public at large.
Even radical climate change action won’t save glaciers, endangering 2 billion people At least a third of the huge ice fields in Asia’s towering mountain chain are doomed to melt due to climate change, according to a landmark report, with serious consequences for almost 2 billion people.
Even if carbon emissions are dramatically and rapidly cut and succeed in limiting global warming to 1.5C, 36% of the glaciers along in the Hindu Kush and Himalaya range will have gone by 2100. If emissions are not cut, the loss soars to two-thirds, the report found.
The glaciers are a critical water store for the 250 million people who live in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya (HKH) region, and 1.65 billion people rely on the great rivers that flow from the peaks into India, Pakistan, China and other nations.
“This is the climate crisis you haven’t heard of,” said Philippus Wester of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (Icimod), who led the report. “In the best of possible worlds, if we get really ambitious [in tackling climate change], even then we will lose one-third of the glaciers and be in trouble. That for us was the shocking finding.”
Wester said that, despite being far more populous, the HKH region had received less attention than other places, such as low-lying island states and the Arctic, that are also highly vulnerable to global warming.
Prof Jemma Wadham, at the University of Bristol, said: “This is a landmark piece of work focused on a region that is a hotspot for climate change impacts.”
The new report, requested by the eight nations the mountains span, is intended to change that. More than 200 scientists worked on the report over five years, with another 125 experts peer reviewing their work. Until recently the impact of climate change on the ice in the HKH region was uncertain, said Wester. “But we really do know enough now to take action, and action is urgently needed,” he added.
The HKH region runs from Afghanistan to Myanmar and is the planet’s “third pole”, harbouring more ice than anywhere outside Arctic and Antarctica. Limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels requires cutting emissions to zero by 2050. This is felt to be extremely optimistic by many but still sees a third of the ice lost, according to the report. If the global rise is 2C, half of the glaciers are projected to melt away by 2100.
Since the 1970s, about 15% of the ice in the HKH region has disappeared as temperatures have risen. But the HKH range is 3,500km long and the impact of warming is variable. Some glaciers in Afghanistan and Pakistan are stable and a few are even gaining ice, most probably due to increased cloud cover that shields the sun and changed winds that bring more snow. But even these will start melting with future warming, Wester said…….https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/04/a-third-of-himalayan-ice-cap-doomed-finds-shocking-report
UK Turns Away From Nuclear As Poland Prepares To Embrace It, Clean Technica, February 4th, 2019 by Steve Hanley
…… Nuclear advocates insist atom-powered generating plants are safe in much the same way fossil fuel advocates insist pipelines and supertankers are safe. What they mean is that when things go wrong, the damage can be easily contained and the amount of human suffering is a small price to pay for the enormous profits to be made in the meantime.
…….Spent fuel remains dangerously radioactive for thousands of years and nuclear facilities require massive amounts of water to keep things cool inside the containment area. One of the primary reasons nuclear power is beloved by utility companies is because they are guaranteed a certain rate of return on their investments. In order to make more money, spend more money.
The way the electric utility game is rigged, customers are automatically saddled with the cost of paying for all new investments made by the companies, often for decades. Once the decision to build a nuclear power plant is made, the cost to pay for it goes on for 30, 40, or more years, even if new, less expensive technology becomes available in the meantime.
Nuclear Projects Abandoned In UK
Hitachi has been planning to build a new nuke on the Welsh island of Anglesey on the site of a previous power plant decommissioned in 2015. However, it has now notified the UK government that it will abandon that project unless the government commits major new financial resources to bring the $26 billion facility to completion. Hitachi has already sunk nearly $3 billion into the proposed Wylfa Newydd project.
Last November, another UK nuclear power project in Cunbria, to be built by Toshiba, was abandoned, leaving UK utility customers on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars already invested by National Grid to build the transmission lines needed to connect that facility to the grid. According to the The Times of London, ratepayers will be paying for those losses for decades via surcharges added to their energy bills. Another Japanese company — Mitsubishi — has also withdrawn recently from a proposal to build a nuclear power plant in Turkey according to Nikkei Asian Review.
What is the reason for so many abandonments of nuclear power projects? Money. Investors are looking down the road and seeing renewables getting less expensive. If it takes 30 years or more to recover the cost of a nuclear plant, what are the odds that it will still be making a profit in 2050? If you said somewhere between zero and none, go to the head of the class.
Renewables To Blame For Nuclear Woes
Forbes reports on a rather startling announcement. Greg Clark, the government minister in charge of the UK energy board, told Parliament recently, “The cost of renewable technologies such as offshore wind has fallen dramatically, to the point where they now require very little public subsidy and will soon require none. We have also seen a strengthening in the pipeline of projects coming forward, meaning that renewable energy may now not just be cheap, but also readily available.”
In all, three new nuclear plants in the UK are now likely to be abandoned. Together, they were expected to provide up to 15% of the nation’s energy needs in the future. How will the country make up for the loss of that capacity? Forbes says an analysis by the UK Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit shows renewables will do the heavy lifting needed to keep all British tea pots boiling happily for decades to come.
Jonathan Marshall, head of analysis at the ECIU says, “In recent years, government has quietly cut back its expectations for nuclear new-build and that’s looking more and more realistic as the price of renewable generation falls and the benefits of the flexible smart grid become more apparent. Filling the nuclear gap with renewables would indeed require an increase in rollout, but one that is well within UK capabilities. With enough focus on smart low-carbon energy, there’s no reason why Britain shouldn’t achieve all its energy objectives despite the cancellation of these nuclear stations.”
In particular, the ECIU analysis found a combination of an additional 11.3 GW of onshore wind, 5.7 GW of offshore wind, and 20.8 GW of new solar capacity would be sufficient to fill the nuclear gap. Hitting those targets should be easy, given the acceleration of installed renewable energy capacity taking place today.
Poland Set To Move Forward With Its First Nuke
Despite the hoopla about renewables in the rest of the world, Poland, which currently gets 80% of its electricity from burning coal, expects to move forward with plans to build its first nuclear power plant. The 1.5 GW facility, which could go online by 2033, will be the first of several nukes the country expects to build as it prepares to increase its installed power portfolio to 73 GW as compared to 40 GW today. It expects nuclear power to provide about 10% of that total……….
The Polish plan will still see about 60% of the nation’s energy come from burning coal in 2030 with most of the lignite burning facilities being shut down around 2040 or so. Which raises this question. If solar and wind installations can be designed, built, and brought online within a matter of years, why spend $20 billion on last century technology that will take a decade or more before it begins contributing to the nation’s energy supply?
A Timid Response To An Urgent Problem
The answer to that question reveals everything that is wrong with the way most nations are tiptoeing around the global warming emergency. Make lots of flowery promises. Give the people huge helpings of pie in the sky pronouncements. But go as slowly and timidly as possible into the future while funneling profits into well connected pockets all the while.
The truth is, the utility industry is used to thinking in terms of 30 to 40 year timelines. It is widely seen as the most risk averse industry in the world. “What was good enough for our grandfathers is good enough for us. Stick with what has worked in the past. Don’t take a chance on new technology that might upset the apple cart.” The problem is, the world can’t wait for the utility industry to dither and dawdle its way to tomorrow. We need bold, decisive action now to slash carbon emissions today, not in 2040. By then it will be too late.
Poland may be proud that it is about to get its first nuke. But by celebrating that move, it is admitting it has no realistic plan for protecting its citizens — or the rest of the global community — from the ravages of a warming planet. Just as the UK can obtain all the energy it needs from renewables instead of nuclear facilities, so can Poland, if it only could find the political will to do so. Tepid responses to a global emergency are the things that will doom us all to a planet incapable of supporting human life for many. Poland’s epitaph may well be, “Too little, too late.” https://cleantechnica.com/2019/02/04/uk-turns-away-from-nuclear-as-poland-prepares-to-embrace-it/
This is the first installment of a monthly series by Dahr Jamail and Barbara Cecil, entitled, “How, Then, Shall We Live? Finding Our Way and Peace of Heart Amidst Global Collapse.
”Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.
—Izumi Shikibu
………..Our intent with this series is not to rehash data, but to share the ways we are digesting the global decline and finding solid ground in ourselves and within our day-to-day lives. We hope that our thinking and choices will inspire readers to ponder what is uniquely theirs to do. The depth of our global crisis requires a new understanding of what hope means. At the end of each piece, we will include annotated reference material that informs our own perception in reliable and expansive ways. ……..https://truthout.org/articles/as-the-climate-collapses-we-ask-how-then-shall-we-live/
EDF halts Flamanville 1 nuclear reactor over pump malfunction https://www.euronews.com/2019/02/04/edf-halts-flamanville-1-nuclear-reactor-over-pump-malfunction, 04/02/2019 -PARIS (Reuters) – French utility EDF said its 1,300 megawatts (MW) Flamanville 1 nuclear reactor was disconnected from the power grid on Sunday following in an unplanned outage due to a malfunction of a pump in the secondary circuit of the reactor.
EDF said the reactor was disconnected safely in order to allow technical teams to carry out repair works on one of the two pumps supplying water to the secondary circuit.
“Both pumps must be available for full power operation of the unit,” EDF said.
The reactor in the north of France restarted production on Jan. 27 after a prolonged outage for its third 10-year overhaul since April 2018.
EDF said it informed nuclear safety authority ASN about the incident which had no impact on other facilities.
The reactor is expected to resume electricity production on Feb. 8
Power production was halted at the Flamanville 2 reactor, which has a similar capacity, on January 10 for its third decennial upgrade. The reactor is expected back online on July 10.
(Reporting by Bate Felix; Editing by Sudip Kar-Gupta
Rare Ice Phenomenon Forced a Shutdown at a N.J. Nuclear Reactor, Fortune, By JIM EFSTATHIOU JR. and BLOOMBERG ,February 1, 2019
The arctic blast wreaking havoc across much of the U.S. was cold enough to shut down a nuclear reactor, thanks to a rare phenomenon called frazil ice.
Public Service Enterprise Group shut one unit at its Salem nuclear plant in southern New Jersey early Thursday after intake screens froze over, restricting the flow of water needed to cool the reactor, according to spokesman Joe Delmar. A second unit at the station on the Delaware river was powered down because of the same problem.
The 60-foot (18-meter) tall intake screens rotate in and out of the water, preventing debris like floating wood from entering the plant. Under extreme conditions like this week—overnight low temperatures at the station fell into the single digits—the frazil ice can accumulate on the screens, blocking the flow. That caused water circulators to shut down and prompted Newark-based Public Service to take the plant offline………http://fortune.com/2019/01/31/ice-shutdown-new-jersey-nuclear-reactor/
US Navy awards $15.2bn to build two nuclear-powered aircraft carriers Naval Technology, 4 Feb 19, The US Navy has awarded a $15.2bn contract modification to Huntington Ingalls Industries’ (HII) Newport News Shipbuilding division to build two nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.
The multi-ship contract comes after the US Navy expressed its intention to pursue a block-purchase of two Ford-class aircraft carriers in a bid to save money.
According to the Navy, the deal is expected to deliver savings of more than $4bn to the government.
Under the contract, HII will provide the detail design and construct the Gerald R Ford-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers Enterprise (CVN 80) and CVN 81.
Newport News Shipbuilding president Jennifer Boykin said: “Today’s announcement is a triumphant step toward returning to a 12-ship aircraft carrier fleet and building the 355-ship Navy our nation needs.
Radiation for dummies, Space Daily, by Staff Writers, Paris (ESA) Jan 28, 2019Meet Helga and Zohar, the dummies destined for a pioneering lunar flyby to help protect space travelers from cosmic rays and energetic solar storms.
These two female phantoms will occupy the passenger seats during Orion’s first mission around the Moon, going further than any human has flown before.
Fitted with more than 5600 sensors, the pair will measure the amount of radiation astronauts could be exposed to in future missions with unprecedented precision.
The flight test will take place during NASA’s Exploration Mission-1, an uncrewed trip to the vicinity of the Moon and back to Earth.
Radiation poses a major health risk to people in space. Astronauts on the International Space Station receive doses 250 higher than on Earth. Away from Earth’s magnetic field and into interplanetary space, the impact on the human body could be much higher – up to 700 times more.
Two sources of radiation are of concern: galactic cosmic radiation and virulent solar particle events. This radiation could increase the crew’s risk of cancer and become a limiting factor in missions to the Moon and Mars.
Helga and Zohar The two phantoms simulate adult female torsos. Both Helga and Zohar are made up of 38 slices of tissue-equivalent plastics that mimic the varying density of bones, soft tissue and lungs. Similar dummies are used in hospitals to quantify the right dose of radiation for cancer therapies.
“We chose female phantoms because the number of women astronauts is increasing, and also because the female body is typically more vulnerable to radiation,” explains Thomas Berger, lead scientist of the Matroshka AstroRad Radiation Experiment (MARE) at the German Aerospace Center, DLR.
Sensors have been fitted in the most radiation-sensitive areas of the body – lungs, stomach, uterus and bone marrow. While thousands of passive dosimeters will record the radiation dose from launch until return to Earth, a set of 16 active detectors will map the radiation dose both on the phantoms’ skin and internal organs during flight.
A divided Commission at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on January 24 approved the Mitigation of Beyond-Design-Basis Events rulemaking (Final Rule). The NRC began the rulemaking in December 2016 as part of its efforts to evaluate and implement, if necessary, regulatory changes in response to the Fukushima Daichi event in March 2011. In somewhat of a surprise, the majority of Commissioners last week rejected large portions of the proposed rule submitted by the NRC staff over two years ago. The rationale for changing the Final Rule demonstrates a renewed emphasis on applying backfit analyses. Continue reading →
The returning residents of Fukushima’s nuclear disaster
Near site of Fukushima nuclear disaster, a shattered town and scattered lives, WP, By Simon Denyer, February 3 2019 NAMIE, Japan — Noboru Honda lost 12 members of his extended family when a tsunami struck the Fukushima prefecture in northern Japan nearly eight years ago. Last year, he was diagnosed with cancer and initially given a few months to live.
Today, he is facing a third sorrow: Watching what may be the last gasps of his hometown.
For six years, Namie was deemed unsafe after a multiple-reactor meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant following a 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
In March 2017, the government lifted its evacuation order for the center of Namie. But so far, hardly anyone has ventured back.
Its people are scattered and divided. Families are split. The sense of community is coming apart.
“It has been eight years; we were hoping things would be settled now,” the 66-year-old Honda said. “This is the worst time, the most painful period.”
For the people of Namie and other towns near the Fukushima plant, the pain is sharpened by the way the Japanese government is trying to move beyond the tragedy, to use the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as a symbol of hope and recovery,a signthat life can return to normal after a disaster of this magnitude.
Its charm offensive is also tied up with efforts to restart the country’s nuclear-power industry, one of the world’s most extensive networks of atomic power generation.
Six Olympic softball games and a baseball game will be staged in Fukushima, the prefecture’s bustling and radiation-free capital city, and the Olympic torch relay will start from here.
But in Namie, much closer to the ill-fated nuclear plant, that celebration rings hollow, residents say.
This was a close-knit community of farmers, fishermen and potters — of orchards, rice paddies and cattle sandwiched between the mountains and the sea. It was a place where people celebrated and mourned as a community, and families lived together across generations.
That’s all gone. On the main street, a small new shopping arcade has opened. But a short walk away, a barber shop stands abandoned, its empty chairs gathering years of dust. A sign telling customers to make themselves at home is still displayed in a bar, but inside debris litters the floor. A karaoke parlor is boarded up. Wild boars, monkeys and palm civets still roam the streets, residents say.
Just 873 people, or under 5 percent, of an original population of 17,613 have returned. Many are scared — with some obvious justification — that their homes and surroundings are still unsafe. Most of the returnees are elderly. Only six children are enrolled at the gleaming new elementary school. This is not a place for young families.
Four-fifths of Namie’s geographical area is mountain and forest, impossible to decontaminate, still deemed unsafe to return. When it rains, the radioactive cesium in the mountains flows into rivers and underground water sources close to the town.
Greenpeace has been taking thousands of radiation readings for years in the towns around the Fukushima nuclear plant. It says radiation levels in parts of Namie where evacuation orders have been lifted will remain well above international maximum safety recommendations for many decades, raising the risks of leukemia and other cancers to “unjustifiable levels,” especially for children.
In the rural areas around the town, radiation levels are much higher and could remain unsafe for people to live beyond the end of this century, Greenpeace concluded in a 2018 report.
“The scale of the problem is clearly not something the government wants to communicate to the Japanese people, and that’s driving the whole issue of the return of evacuees,” said Shaun Burnie, senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace. “The idea that an industrial accident closes off an area of Japan, with its limited habitable land, for generations and longer — that would just remind the public why they are right to be opposed to nuclear power.”
Today, Namie’s former residents are scattered across all but one of Japan’s 47 prefectures. Many live in the nearby town of Nihonmatsu, in comfortable but isolating apartment blocks where communal space and interaction are limited. With young people moving away, the elderly, who already feel the loss of Namie most acutely, find themselves even more alone.
It’s only one month into 2019 and meteorologists are already talking in superlatives as extreme weather patterns have brought cities and towns across the globe to a standstill.
Thermometer on snow shows low temperatures – zero. Low temperatures in degrees Celsius and fahrenheit. Cold winter weather – zero celsius thirty two farenheit.
In the United States this week, some 200 million Americans experienced a historic deep freeze that saw temperatures plummet below -32 degrees Celsius (-26 Fahrenheit), killed at least 23 people and led to the cancellation of more than 2,300 flights.
On Thursday, temperatures in 11 states in the continental US saw temperatures lower than the one recorded in Utqiagvik, Alaska’s northernmost city, situated north of the Arctic Circle.
Authorities in some of the hardest-hit cities such as Minneapolis and Chicago implored residents to stay indoors to prevent frostbite — in one Chicago hospital, doctors treated 50 frostbite victims; some may lose an arm or a leg.
Across the pond, the United Kingdom recorded record lows this week as frosty weather pounded parts of England, Scotland and Wales.
On Thursday, residents in Braemar in northeast Scotland experienced -14.4 C (6.1 F), according to the UK’s national weather service, the Met Office. This was the lowest temperature recorded in the UK since 2012.
Heavy snow has created roadblocks for travelers across the country. Some flights at London’s Heathrow Airport were canceled Friday; passengers were stuck on snow-covered runways at airports in Manchester and Liverpool earlier in the week.
Hundreds of schools across parts of England and Wales closed Friday, with the Met Office continuing to warn of treacherous driving conditions in some southern parts of the country.
In the southwestern county of Cornwall Thursday night, more than 100 motorists ended up abandoning their cars on a major highway blanketed in snow and walking to a pub, where they spent the night.
Parts of France also came under a weather warning after heavy snow fall, Météo France, the national meteorological service, warned earlier this week.
But as parts of the US and Europe saw record lows, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology announced it had been the country’s hottest January on record.
The “unprecedented” heat wave that burned its way through all of the country’s melted roads, saw infrastructure fail and killed thousands of animals.
In the Northern Territory, the bodies of dozens of wild horses were found strewn along a dried-up water hole. In Victoria, more than 2,000 flying foxes died from heat stress, in what local media described as a “nightmare” event. Similar mass flying fox deaths have been recorded in the states of New South Wales and Queensland.
In the southern state of Tasmania, dozens of bushfires broke out, destroying homes and wilderness as hundreds of firefighters sought to get the blazes under control.
On January 24, residents in the southern city of Adelaide experienced the hottest day on record for their city, with temperatures peaking at 46.6 C (116 F).
Throughout the country, health warnings have been issued, advising people to stay indoors during the hottest part of the day, minimize physical activity and keep hydrated.
While the current heat continues to cause problems for Australians now, scientists warn that without coordinated action on climate change, heat waves will become more likely.
“Climate change is making heat waves more likely but any individual event is effectively a weather phenomenon,” Ben Webber, lecturer in climate science in the Climatic Research Unit at the UK’s University of East Anglia, told CNN.
“We can try and mitigate against the worst effects of climate change by reducing carbon emissions, that’s really the best thing to do — but obviously that requires global action. So individuals can help, but it has to be a big global action to be effective,” he said.
“That comes back to what politicians have been trying to agree on … and that’s why these extreme events are part of the motivation for striving to limit global mean temperatures’ rise to less than 2 degrees (Celsius) or possibly to 1.5 degrees against current levels,” Webber said. While we can’t control the weather, he added, we can adapt to and minimize the impact that extreme weather can have on us.
That comes down to having the necessary infrastructure in place to deal with the extremes, he said.
CNN’s Gianluca Mezzofiore contributed to this report.
Brant Ulsh, skeptic on radiation limits, to head EPA radiation panel, Japan Times, 2 Feb 19, WASHINGTON– The Environmental Protection Agency has appointed a scientist who argues for easing regulations on lower-level radiation exposures to lead the agency’s radiation advisory committee.
Acting EPA head Andrew Wheeler on Thursday announced the appointment of Brant Ulsh, a health physicist, as one of the EPA’s science advisers and the panel’s chairman. Ulsh has been a leading critic of the EPA’s decades-old position that exposure to any amount of ionizing radiation is a cancer risk.
In a paper he co-wrote last year, Ulsh and a colleague argued that the position was based on outdated scientific information and forced the “unnecessary burdens of costly clean-ups” on facilities working with radiation.
The EPA under President Donald Trump has targeted a range of environmental protections, in line with Trump’s arguments that overly strict environmental rules have hurt U.S. businesses. Environmental and public health advocates say the rollbacks threaten the health and safety of Americans.
Some environmental groups and scientists have criticized what they say is the administration’s openness to an outlier position on radiation risks.
“Once again the Trump administration is moving to the fringe for its scientific advice, choosing someone who could undercut foundational protections from radiation,” Bemnet Alemayehu, a staff scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council environmental advocacy group, said in a statement Friday. “We need sound science to dictate health protections, not dangerous theories.”
EPA spokesman John Konkus declined comment Friday, referring a reporter to a news release announcing the appointment.
Hungary seeks to postpone loan payback to Russia for Nuclear power plant: What will the final cost be?Bellona February 1, 2019 by Charles DiggesBudapest is seeking to modify the terms of a loan it must repay to Russia for building two new VVER-1200 type reactors that will eventually replace Hungary’s Paks nuclear power plant, according to a report from Reuters.
The reactors, which will constitute a plant called Paks II, will be built by Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear power company, at a cost of 10 billion euro ($12 billion), and will replace the older Soviet-built nuclear plant that supplies half of the country’s electricity.
Rosatom’s construction contract, which includes the loan for Paks II, was the subject of a hotly-debated probe by the EU’s Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, which investigated whether the Russian bid violated European competition statutes.
At the time, EU officials and commentators viewed the deal as a Trojan Horse to help cement Moscow’s influence over the right-leaning, rabidly anti-globalist government of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Hungarian financial authorities plan to ask Moscow to postpone collecting on the debt until after the new reactors begin to generate electricity – but it is as yet unclear whether Rosatom will accept new terms. The plant’s construction, meanwhile, is running late. The build was supposed to begin last year………
While the terms of the Paks II loan remain in the shadows, other financing arrangements Moscow has made for building nuclear reactors in other countries suggest that the interest alone could prove to be very expensive for Budapest.
An $11.4 billion, 30-year agreement Rosatom signed with Bangladesh to build the Roopur nuclear plant will net Moscow $8 billion in interest. A $25 billion deal Rosatom is pursuing with Egypt to build that country’s Dabaa plant could, over the 35-year term of that loan, swell to $71 billion.
Terms like this could spell trouble for Hungary in light of Moscow’s tendency to be a kneecapping creditor when it comes to energy projects – especially when Russia sours on the politics of its debtors.
In 2014, at the height of East-West tensions over Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Kremlin officials threatened to cut nuclear fuel supplies to Ukraine’s Soviet built reactors – which would have interrupted their chain reactions and likely caused a catastrophic accident.
Rosatom eventually walked the threat back. But the lurid message in Moscow’s head-fake toward igniting a second Chernobyl was clear: Russian-built reactors are a useful new tool for political blackmail………..
Many in Europe – Hungary included – subsequently sought to diversify their energy supply in favor of nuclear. Yet, in a devious twist, Rosatom has emerged as the most stable and eager nuclear builder on the international market.
For now, Rosatom can afford to offer risky loans thanks to the enormous state subsidies it receives. These subsidies can be funneled into more loans, and the loans then boost the company’s profits on paper. But for the past several years, it has become clear that these subsidies to the company will likely decrease or dry up altogether in 2020.
As a result, Rosatom is amassing so-called memorandums of understanding from any country vaguely interested in nuclear power. The company says is currently has dozens of these MOUs amounting to more than $130 billion in incoming business.
But that claim should be viewed skeptically, as many of the countries for which Rosatom is promising to build reactors – countries like Jordan, Algeria, Nigeria, the Republic of Congo and Bolivia – won’t have the infrastructure to support nuclear power for decades.
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