VCK Chief Thol. Thirumavalavan opposes Nuclear fuel storage facility in Kudankulam plant
  Nuclear fuel storage facility in Kudankulam plant opposed https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/current-affairs/160619/nuclear-fuel-storage-facility-in-kudankulam-plant-opposed.html
DECCAN CHRONICLE.Jun 16, 2019 Chennai: VCK chief Thol Thirumavalavan has opposed the construction of Away From Reactor (AFR) Spent Fuel Storage facility within the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in Tirunelveli saying it is totally against the rules and regulations. “Away from reactor means away from the campus. They have to choose a proper place which does not affect the people. They have to choose a place which is not affected by any natural calamity. But that is not possible now. So they are trying to construct Away From Reactor (AFR) Spent Fuel Storage facility within the campus which is dangerous,” he said.
He said the opposition parties including the DMK are opposed to the construction of Nuclear waste plant within the campus as it is totally against the rules and regulations. “So we will hold a demonstration on June 25 against it,” he told reporters here on Saturday. Leaders of other parties including CPI and Muslim League were present on the occasion. If possible, he would meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi and prevail upon him to halt the construction of the AFR. Director of Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) Sanjay Kumar has said that all nuclear power stations in operation in India and other countries had facilities to store new as well as spent (used) fuel on the premises of the plant. The scheme for the storage of spent fuel in a nuclear power plant was two-fold — one facility is located within the reactor building/service building, generally known as the spent fuel storage pool / bay, and the other is located away from the reactor, called the Away From Reactor (AFR) Spent Fuel Storage Facility, but within the plant’s premises, he had said.
Meanwhile, ahead of a scheduled public hearing on July 10, anti-nuclear groups have opposed the proposal to set up an ‘AFR’ facility on the premises of the KKNPP.
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Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak restates opposition to Yucca Mountain restart plan
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Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak restates opposition to Yucca Mountain restart plan https://www.nevadaappeal.com/news/government/nevada-gov-steve-sisolak-restates-opposition-to-yucca-mountain-restart-plan/# June 12, 2019 Geoff Dornan gdornan@nevadaappeal.com In a sharply worded letter to the chairman and ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Gov. Steve Sisolak has again stated his and Nevada’s complete opposition to any plans to restart the licensing of Yucca Mountain.
“My position and that of the state of Nevada remains identical to the position of Nevada’s past five governments,” the letter says. “I am totally opposed to any legislative effort to restart the Yucca Mountain project.” He said this latest piece of legislation, “would seriously weaken Nevada’s current due process rights to challenge documented safety concerns and adverse environmental impacts in the legally-mandated licensing proceeding.” The result, he said, will be to waste billions of additional ratepayer and taxpayer dollars in an attempt to, “force an unsafe site on an unwilling state.” “The proposed legislation only exacerbates the erosion of trust and confidence caused by the federal government’s recent secret shipments of weapons-grade plutonium into our state,” Sisolak wrote. He said he intends to keep his promise to Nevadans not one ounce of nuclear waste will be delivered to Yucca Mountain while he’s governor. The letter was sent to committee Chairman Frank Pallone, D-New Jersey, and Ranking member Greg Walden, R- In written testimony prepared for that hearing, Bob Halstead, director of Nevada’s Agency for Nuclear Projects, reiterated Nevada’s long standing conclusion Yucca Mountain is unsuitable because of its geology and hydrology, its proximity to military aircraft training and testing (Nellis Air Force Base) and its distance from existing railroads. “The proposed repository emplacement drifts would be located in fractured rock above the water table and would inevitably leak dangerous radionuclides into the groundwater where they would be transported to an aquifer,” Halstead wrote. He said that aquifer provides water for drinking, agriculture, food processing and Native American religious ceremonies. Halstead also charged the proposed legislation, “fails to honestly address the cost of Yucca Mountain.” He said Nevada’s estimate for future costs of the dump are “at least $100 billion in 2019 dollars.” |
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Lithuanian Energy Institute scientists seriously working on nuclear decommissioning system
David Lowry’s Blog 13th June 2019 Last week I attended the European Commission-sponsored Euradwaste
conference in Pitesti, Romania, where a presentation on decommissioning
Ignalina was made by scientists (Prof. Poskas & Dr Narkunas) from the
nuclear engineering laboratory of the Lithuanian Energy Institute in
Kaunas, the nation’s second city after capital Vilnius.
Their work has been on assessing and modelling the distribution of radioactive carbon-14,
in the very high stack of graphite blocks around the reactor core prior to
dismantling. This suggests that even though Ms Rekasiute feels the
Lithuanian government “mainly pretends” the adjoining company city of
Visaginas “isn’t there”, the government in Vilnius is seriously
trying to find safe ways to dismantle the plant using the trained local
workforce.
The experience gained will certainly prove useful to the UK,
which has several reactors either already closed, or close to closure, such
as the troubled Hunterson reactors near Glasgow, where hundreds of cracks
have been discovered in the graphite core.
http://drdavidlowry.blogspot.com/2019/06/lessons-learned-from-lithuanian-reactor.html
UK Labour’s energy policy means that nuclear energy could be prioritised over renewables
Dave Toke’s Blog 15th June 2019 Labour’s proposals to take the national and regional energy grid back
into public ownership may give a boost to workers’ interests over
shareholder profits, but the way the proposals are set out produces an
increased risk of nuclear power being given priority over renewable energy.
Put simply that is because the way the proposals are structured means more
power to the GMB in particular, a body which is very pro-nuclear and which
is relatively hostile to renewable energy and a smart energy network.
Labour announced the plan, in May, to take the transmission and
distribution energy structure into public ownership, as well as plans to
set up a ‘National Energy Agency’ (to run the National Grid), Regional
Energy Agencies (to run regional distribution), and give opportunities for
municipal ownership of distribution on a local basis.
This plan can achieve traditional Labour Movement objectives, but its impact on pushing forward a
green agenda is doubtful. Put bluntly, the more that power is given to
bodies that will be influenced by organisations like the GMB (who favour
centralised power station solutions), the less useful will be the outcome.
The proposals make a gesture in favour of municipalisation, but for most
places the reality will be central control.
Control over the grid should be
given to local authorities as a matter of course, perhaps in consortia
(certainly at a national, transmission, level). Local authorities are
influenced by the local electorate and local citizen groups. They will be
sympathetic to green energy priorities. On the other hand centrally owned
quangos will be insulated from such democratic input and will be under the
thumb of the existing industrial establishment. Innovation will go out of
the window.
In USA Catholic priests, some in gaol, some facing gaol – for dramatic opposition to nuclear weapons
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Why we brought hammers to a nuclear fight, https://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/article231300873.html, BY PATRICK O’NEILL, JUNE 16, 2019, On April 4, 2018, the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s assassination, I joined six other Catholic pacifists in an attempt to symbolically enflesh the prophet Isaiah’s command to “beat swords into plowshares” (Is. 2:4).
After cutting a lock, we entered Naval Station Kings Bay in St. Marys, GA with hammers, baby bottles of blood and crime scene tape to expose the horrific D-5 nuclear weapons aboard the Trident submarines that imperil life as we know it on Planet Earth. Kings Bay is home port to six Trident submarines. Each Trident can carry 24 D-5 missiles, each of which can carry up to eight 100-kiloton nuclear warheads. Trident is the most insidious and evil weapon of mass destruction ever constructed. Once inside Kings Bay, in an attempt to smash an idol, I hammered and poured blood on a cement statue of a D-5 at a missile shrine display. The government charged the seven of us with three felonies (depredation of government property, destruction of government property, conspiracy) and misdemeanor trespass. Three of our group — Fr. Steve Kelly, S.J., Elizabeth McAlister (widow of the late Catholic anti-war prophet, Philip Berrigan), and Catholic Worker Mark Colville, remain incarcerated in the Glynn County Jail in Brunswick, GA. McAlister turned 79 and Kelly turned 70 while incarcerated. The others, Martha Hennessy (granddaughter of Catholic Worker Movement founder, Dorothy Day), Clare Grady, Carmen Trotta, and I, have been out under a cash bond and on house arrest with a curfew and electronic ankle monitors for more than a year. Kelly, McAlister and Colville refused the bond conditions. For more than a year the case has been tied up in pretrial motions. We are expecting to go to trial this summer. If convicted, the seven of us will likely go to prison. Efficacy was not my motivation for joining this group. My faith led me to address the sinfulness of nuclear weapons. We live in a world where nuclear weapons on perpetual hair-trigger alert have become “normal.” We used high drama as a wake-up call to hopefully get people thinking about the fate of the earth and human survival. Never before has our world been more at risk of the prospect of nuclear war. The Doomsday Clock, maintained by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, stands at two minutes to midnight. President Donald Trump frequently engages in chest-thumping, and he bragged that he has the “biggest button,” a reference to nuclear weapons. Trump alone, under the vested power of the executive branch, can decide to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances. Trump backs nuclear weapons expansion, and he has vowed to pull the U.S. out of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty that was signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. INF led to nearly 2,700 short- and medium-range missiles being eliminated, and an end to a dangerous standoff between U.S. and Soviet nukes in Europe. In addition, in July, 2017, an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations — but not the United States — voted to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons — a landmark international agreement that establishes a pathway to nuclear disarmament. The seven Kings Bay defendants are parents of 20 children. We want to assure a nuclear-free world for the generations to come. Humans must turn away from war-making, and find ways to embrace nonviolent solutions to international conflicts. I don’t relish a prison sentence, but I consider it a small price to pay if we peacemakers can help prevent the use of nuclear weapons. We should take to heart the warning of Dr. King: “The choice today is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence.” (Patrick O’Neill and his wife, Mary Rider, cofounded the Fr. Charlie Mulholland Catholic Worker House in Garner, an intentional community that provides hospitality to women and children in crisis.) |
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Chernobyl ‘suicide divers’ saved Europe from nuclear devastation
The world held its breath as the brave volunteers risked it all to but to prevent a second huge explosion. he world owes him an eternal debt, but for Chernobyl hero Alexei Ananenko, it was just part of the job.Engineer Alexei was one of three men who volunteered to wade through radioactive water to prevent a second cataclysmic explosion at the stricken nuclear reactor.
Decked from head to toe in protective clothing, they descended into the bowels of Reactor 4 on a doomsday mission as the world held its breath.
Their heroism gripped viewers of Sky Atlantic drama Chernobyl. But with great understatement, 60-year-old Alexei insisted last night: “It’s nothing to brag about. Why should I feel a hero?
“I was on duty and it was my job. I was trained in what to do.”………
Experts believed that if 185 tons of molten nuclear lava hit the water below it would cause a radioactive steam explosion of 3-5 megatons – so massive that it would leave much of Europe uninhabitable for 500,000 years. Alexei was one of the few employees who knew where the latches and valves were located to drain water from the coolant system.
He, senior engineer Valeri Bespalov and shift supervisor Boris Baranov were tasked with turning them off.
Firefighters drained a huge volume of water so the men would not have to swim, but they were still forced to walk through radioactive fluid three metres below ground level.
The image of them carrying search lights as they wade through a toxic soup is captured in the TV drama…….
After the explosion a cloud of radioactive strontium, caesium and plutonium affected mainly the Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus, as well as parts of Russia and Europe. Between 1987 and 1990, 530,000 workers – known as liquidators and conscripted from across the USSR – worked in and around Chernobyl to clear up the toxic mess. ……….. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/selfless-chernobyl-suicide-divers-saved-16523155
Iran to further scale back compliance with nuclear deal
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Iran to further scale back compliance with nuclear deal, CNBC 17 June 19,
KEY POINTS Iran will announce further moves on Monday to scale back compliance with an international nuclear pact that the United States abandoned last year, according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/16/iran-to-scale-back-nuclear-deal-commitments.html |
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France’s big plans for offshore wind
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Renews Biz 14th June 2019 , French environment minister Francois de Rugy has outlined today how France
intends to meet its new 10GW offshore wind target by 2028. A 1GW fixed-bottom project to be built off Normandy will soon be open to public consultation, he said. Tenders will also be launched in the near future for three 250MW floating offshore wind farms and an up to 1GW fixed-bottom development off the island of Oleron. One 250MW floating project, comprising about 20 turbines, will be allocated to the south of Brittany in 2021, with the other two will be located in the Mediterranean in the Occitanie and PACA regions, De Rugy said. |
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