To 27 August – the week in nuclear and climate news
The thing about climate change is – it’s all happening faster than we expected! Only a few days ago, MEDIA MATTERS was highlighting the way that mainstream media was practically ignoring the Amazon forest fires. That is changing. World leaders are now alert to this international tragedy.The Amazon fires bring to the fore the awful dilemma facing climate scientists in telling the public the truth about the world’s climate crisis.
The recent Russian nuclear accident cast a bit of gloom over Russia’s launching of its floating nuclear reactor for the Arctic region. Questions are still flying around about the radioactive illnesses and deaths involved in that accident. Also – a general recognition of the Russian government’s record of secrecy about nuclear accidents.
I suspect that the USA and UK nuclear industries are getting pretty desperate about their commercial future, and the necessity to export new nuclear technology. There’s a hasty push going on in Australia to buy Small Modular Nuclear Reactors. In a rater undignified rush, there are no less than 4 separate Parliamentary Nuclear Inquiries going on, with abnormally short times permitted for Submissions.
Distinguished scientist Martin Rees – world must fight climate change, don’t waste tax-payers’ money on space travel.
Massive wildfires are burning across the world- July was hottest month ever. New fires – hundreds – in Amazon rainforests. Life on Earth threatened by climate change – loss of Amazon Forests.
Sea level rise only half the story – climate change is altering ocean waves.
Chinese Academy of Sciences warns on the safety hazards of new nuclear .
JAPAN. Hiroshima Round Table’s urgent appeal to save nuclear agreements. International concern growing over Fukushima’s radioactive contamination of surface-level soil. Warning on radiation risks at some parts of Fukushima, for Olympic Games 2020. Controversy over radiation and heat surrounding Tokyo Olympics. The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster and Its Tragic Aftermath.
GREENLAND. Who will clean up America’s nuclear wastes in Greenland?
ICELAND. Funeral for the first glacier lost to climate change.
USA.
- The Green New Deal – Bernie Fraser.
- Massachusetts Attorney General objects to transfer of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station license to Holtec. Plymouth League of Women Voters Sends Letter of Protest to NRC Re Plans to Approve Transfer of Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station to Holtec Inc.
- Grand space travel plans – to rescue USA’s collapsing nuclear industry? USA administration promotes space nuclear power for travel and for weapons. White House new system guidelines for nuclear power in space includes weapons grade materials.
- USA’s nuclear regulators concerned about possibility of an electromagnetic pulse attack.
EUROPE. 18 nuclear power plants in the EU are operating without a valid license. Wind and rooftop solar could meet most of EU electricity needs. Renewables – onshore wind from Europe– enough to power the world.
IRAN. Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif visits G-7 Summit. Iran working productively with France, to save nuclear deal,
RUSSIA.
- As Trump trashed nuclear weapons treaty, Putin promises ‘symmetrical response’ to US missile test.
- Safety concerns about floating nuclear reactors, and Rosatom admits that electricity from small floating nuclear reactors is more expensive.
- Russia tells Nuclear Watchdog:Radiation From Blast Is ‘None of Your Business’. Nuclear monitoring stations went mysteriously quiet after Russian missile facility explosion. “ZATO” Russia’s many closed cities, – some the sites of nuclear accidents.
UK. Brexit proving a problem for the nuclear industry – shortage of welders for Hinkley Point C project. Cumbria councillors worried at “regulated asset base” plan for residents to pay in advance for new nuclear build. Dismay at safety risks of restarting Hunterston Nuclear Reactor 4. UK Office of Nuclear Regulation seems to have increased the number of cracks permitted in Hunterston nuclear reactor. Rolls-Royce in talks to sell French nuclear business to Framatome.
SOUTH KOREA. South Korea to increase radiation testing of Japanese food. South Korea might make own food arrangements for Fukushima Olympic events. South Korea demands answers over Fukushima radioactive water eventual sea dumping.
NORTH KOREA. Kim Jong-un oversaw test of ‘super large multiple rocket launcher. Toxic leak from North Korea’s nuclear programme.
UKRAINE. Bitcoin Hackers Charged As Nuclear Power Plant Security Compromised.
SOUTH AFRICA. South Africa scraps Russian nuclear plant plans.
CHINA. China dominates worldwide solar and wind energy generation.
Russia fears fatal consequences if the NEWSTART nuclear arms treaty is allowed to lapse
Calls on Donald Trump to start talks about the last remaining nuclear weapons agreement between Russia and the U.S. remain unanswered, 18 months before it expires, increasing the risk of an unhindered arms race, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman. The consequences will be “quite fatal” if Russia and the U.S. let lapse the 2010 New START treaty limiting both nuclear powers’ strategic arsenals, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on a call with reporters Monday. “Undoubtedly, strategic stability on the overall global level will be affected, because we all — I mean humanity — we will be left without a single document that would regulate this area.”…….. (subscribers only) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-26/russia-says-u-s-silence-on-last-nuclear-treaty-may-be-fatal |
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Pakistan’s Imran Khan warns on military action over Kashmir, nuclear weapons.
Imran Khan addresses Pakistan on Kashmir, threatens nuclear war once again https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/imran-khan-addresses-pakistan-on-kashmir-threatens-
nuclear-war-once-again-1591842-2019-08-26
Imran Khan, who was addressing Pakistan on the Kashmir situation, said that Pakistan will go to any extent on the issue, even nuclear war.
HIGHLIGHTS
- Imran Khan said entire world will feel ramification of Indo-Pak nuclear war
- He said Pakistan had tried to open dialogue with India but other side didn’t respond
- He also reiterated that he was Kashmir’s ambassador in the world
- …
“If the [Kashmir] conflict moves towards war then remember both nations have nuclear weapons and no one is a winner in a nuclear war. It will have global ramifications. The superpowers of the world have a huge responsibility…whether they support us or not, Pakistan will do everything possible,” Imran Khan said in his address.Imran Khan said that the time had come for Pakistan to be decisive on the Kashmir issue.
He added that Pakistan had made attempts to open dialogue with India but had not found the same support from the other side.
- He said that India accusing Pakistan of aiding terrorism as well as holding the neighbour responsible for the February Pulwama attack had hampered talks between the two nations.
“So we wanted to be friends with everyone…When I came into power, I made many overtures for dialogue [with India] but there were always some problems,” Imran Khan said.
The Pakistani prime minister added that his government had waited for the end of the Indian elections, so talks could start with a new government but then India changed the status of Jammu and Kashmir.
He was referring to India’s decision to abrogate Article 370 and bifurcate the state of Jammu and Kashmir into two Union Territories.
“On August 5 they annexed Kashmir and decided that it was now a part of Hindustan. They violated the UN resolutions and their own constitution and supreme court decisions,” Imran Khan said.
- The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) chief reiterated that he was willing to be Kashmir’s ambassador in the world and said that he would take up the issue at the meeting of the UN General Assembly in September.
Imran Khan also assured the people of Pakistan that his government will stand by the Kashmiris till India lifts the restrictions in the Valley.
Tensions between India and Pakistan spiked after India abrogated provisions of Article 370 of the Constitution, evoking strong reactions from Pakistan.
A Small Nuclear Reactor exploded in Russian accident – fallout isotopes prove this
Isotopes’ Composition Proves Nuclear Reactor Was Involved in Russian Explosion, Expert Says
Analyses of the radionuclides in the fallout over Severodvinsk show several isotopes that would not have been present if was a simple RTG in the explosion.
Trump on climate change- USA companies’ profits more important. He is expert on environment
Trump’s climate session no-show, ABC News, 27 Aug 19
A $US20 million ($29.5 million) pledge to battle wildfires raging across the Amazon is being seen as one of the few solid agreements to come out of the meeting — but it appears to have come about with little input from Mr Trump.
“The President had scheduled meetings and bilaterals with Germany and India, so a senior member of the administration attended in his stead,” press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement.
CNN and the Guardian reported Mr Trump appeared to be unaware of when the climate session would be held when asked by reporters. He thought it had not happened yet…..
The US president up-ended last year’s G7 summit in Canada, walking out of the meeting early and disassociating himself from the final communique having initially endorsed the document. …..
World leaders’ closing remarks
US President Donald Trump: …….
- On climate change: “We are the number one energy producer in the world. It is tremendous wealth — I am not going to lose that wealth on dreams, on windmills, which frankly are not working that well.”
- “I want the cleanest water on Earth, I want the cleanest air on Earth … I think I know more about the environment than most people.” https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-27/trump-ready-to-meet-irans-president-to-solve-nuclear-impasse-g7/11451490
Japan to decommission reactors at world’s biggest nuclear plant?
Japan may decommission reactors at world’s biggest nuclear plant, https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/japan-decommission-reactors-world-biggest-nuclear-plant-190826074851152.html
Plant operator Tepco says it may start decommissioning at least one reactor five years after restarting two others. Japan‘s Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) said on Monday it may start to decommission at least one nuclear reactor at its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa power plant, the world’s biggest nuclear plant by capacity, within five years of restarting two of the reactors at the site.Tepco President Tomoaki Kobayakawa made the comments in a statement outlining its response to a request for plans on the station’s future by the government of the city of Kashiwazaki in Niigata prefecture, where the plant is located.
In 2017, Tepco received initial regulatory approval from the Japanese government to restart reactors 6 and 7 at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, each with a capacity of 1,356 megawatts (MW). The plant site has seven reactors with a total capacity of 8,212MW, equal to 20 percent of Japan’s nuclear capacity.
The facility is Tepco’s last remaining nuclear plant after it announced plans to shut its Fukushima Daini station, near the Fukushima Daichi plant where a massive earthquake and tsunami caused the meltdown of three of the site’s reactors in 2011.
Kashiwazaki’s Mayor Masahiro Sakurai demanded in 2017 that Tepco submit plans to shut at least one of reactors 1 to 5 in return for approval of the restart of reactors 6 and 7, a city official told the Reuters news agency by phone on Monday. The Kashiwazaki mayor will take about a month to evaluate Tepco’s plan, the official said.
Tepco said on Friday that Kobayakawa would brief local officials on Monday about its answers to the city’s request.
Tepco may take steps to decommission more than one of reactors 1 to 5 within five years after the restart of reactors 6 and 7 if it is confident it can secure enough non-fossil fuel energy sources, according to the statement.
A Tepco official said on Monday the company is aiming to have renewable and nuclear power produce 44 percent of total output by 2030.
Tepco has been trying to convince local authorities near Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, who have sign-off rights on nuclear restarts, that it has overcome operational failings revealed at Fukushima.
Eight years ago, nearly 20,000 people died in an earthquake and tsunami that precipitated what became Japan’s worst nuclear disaster. At least 160,000 people were forced to leave their contaminated homes.
In April, Japan partially lifted an evacuation order in one of the two towns, Okuma, for the first time since the disaster, but many former residents are still reluctant to return.
The other town, Futaba, remains off-limits, as are several other towns nearby.
NATO nuclear bombs are stored in violation of international law in Italy, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Turkey.
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NATO Nuclear Gaff, Voltaire Network , by Manlio Dinucci It’s a stale old secret. But it is also one of the most
formidable denials of the Atlantic Alliance: nuclear bombs are stored in violation of international law in Italy, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Turkey. By mistake, a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly wrote it in a report immediately withdrawn. VOLTAIRE NETWORK | ROME (ITALY) | 26 AUGUST 2019 That the United States keeps nuclear bombs in five NATO countries – Italy, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Turkey – has long been proven (especially by the Federation of American Scientists – FAS) [1]. But NATO never officially admitted it. However something has just gone off the rails. In the document titled “A new era for nuclear deterrence? Modernization, Arms Control and Alien Nuclear Forces”, by Canadian Senator Joseph Day on behalf of the Defense and Security Committee of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, the’ secret ’has been revealed. ….. Accusing Russia of keeping many tactical nuclear weapons in its own arsenal, the document states that the US nuclear weapons deployed in advanced positions in Europe and Anatolia (ie near Russian territory) serve “To ensure the full involvement of the Allies in NATO’s nuclear mission and the concrete confirmation of the US nuclear commitment to the security of the European allies of the Alliance”. As soon as Senator Joseph Day’s document was published online, NATO intervened by deleting it and then republishing it as an amended version. Too late though……… This confirms what we have documented for years …… All this in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratified by both the US and Italy. Meanwhile the Parliament is tearing on the TAV but not on the Bomb, that it tacitly unanimously approves. …………… Translation Roger Lagassé Source |
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Russia launched two ballistic missiles from nuclear-powered submarines in the Arctic Ocean and the Barents Sea
Russia says it launched 2 ballistic missiles in the Arctic Ocean as part of combat training By Amir Vera, CNN August 25, 2019 Russia launched two ballistic missiles from nuclear-powered submarines in the Arctic Ocean and the Barents Sea on Saturday, according to a tweet from the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Contradictory reports from Russia, over the Aug. 8 nuclear incident
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Russia says nuclear accident during suspected missile engine test released radioactive gas cloud https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russia-nuclear-accident-released-radioactive-gas-cloud-isotopes-government-reveals-today-2019-08-26/ AUGUST 26, 2019 MOSCOW — Russia’s state weather and environment monitoring agency on Monday released new details about a brief spike in radioactivity following a mysterious explosion at the navy’s testing range that has been surrounded by secrecy and fueled fears of increased radiation levels.
Russia’s state weather and environmental monitoring agency Rosgidromet said Monday the brief rise in radiation levels was caused by a cloud of radioactive gases containing isotopes of barium, strontium and lanthanum that drifted across the area. The agency said its monitoring has found no trace of radiation in air or ground samples since Aug. 8. It has previously said that the peak radiation reading in Severodvinsk on Aug. 8 briefly reached 1.78 microsieverts per hour in just one neighborhood — about 16 times the average. Readings in other parts of Severodvinsk varied between 0.45 and 1.33 microsieverts for a couple of hours before returning to normal. The authorities said those readings didn’t pose any danger, and the recorded levels were indeed several times less than what a passenger is exposed to on a long-haul flight. Still, contradictory statements from the authorities and their reluctance to reveal details of the explosion have drawn comparisons to the Soviet cover-up of the 1986 explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the world’s worst nuclear disaster. The Defense Ministry denied any radiation leak even as the local administration in Severodvinsk reported a hike in radiation levels and told residents to stay indoors — a move that prompted frightened residents to buy iodine, which can help reduce risks from exposure to radiation. Russian media reported that the victims of the explosion received high doses of radiation. They said that medical workers at the Arkhangelsk city hospital that treated three of those injured said they hadn’t been warned that they would treat people exposed to radiation and lacked elementary protective gear. The Moscow Times on Monday cited Igor Semin, a cardiovascular surgeon at the hospital, who scathingly criticized the authorities in a social network post for failing to warn the hospital workers about the deadly risks. “They were abandoned and left to fend for themselves,” the newspaper quoted Semin as saying. Asked about the doctor’s statement, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the authorities will look into the matter. Officials have said the explosion in Nyonoksa occurred during tests of a “nuclear isotope power source” of a rocket engine — a cryptic description that made many observers conclude that the test involved one of Russia’s most secretive weapons — the prospective Burevestnik (Storm Petrel) nuclear-powered cruise missile which was code-named “Skyfall” by NATO. U.S. President Donald Trump has thrown his weight behind that theory, saying the U.S. learned much from the failed test. |
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Donald Trump’s idea – use nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States
https://amp.axios.com/trump-nuclear-bombs-hurricanes-97231f38-2394-4120-a3fa-8c9cf0e3f51c.html
Jonathan Swan, Margaret Talev, 26 Aug 19, President Trump has suggested multiple times to senior Homeland Security and national security officials that they explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States, according to sources who have heard the president’s private remarks and been briefed on a National Security Council memorandum that recorded those comments.
Behind the scenes: During one hurricane briefing at the White House, Trump said, “I got it. I got it. Why don’t we nuke them?” according to one source who was there. “They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they’re moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can’t we do that?” the source added, paraphrasing the president’s remarks.
Asked how the briefer reacted, the source recalled he said something to the effect of, “Sir, we’ll look into that.”
Trump replied by asking incredulously how many hurricanes the U.S. could handle and reiterating his suggestion that the government intervene before they make landfall.
The briefer “was knocked back on his heels,” the source in the room added. “You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting. People were astonished. After the meeting ended, we thought, ‘What the f—? What do we do with this?'”
Trump also raised the idea in another conversation with a senior administration official. A 2017 NSC memo describes that second conversation, in which Trump asked whether the administration should bomb hurricanes to stop them from hitting the homeland. A source briefed on the NSC memo said it does not contain the word “nuclear”; it just says the president talked about bombing hurricanes.
The source added that this NSC memo captured “multiple topics, not just hurricanes. … It wasn’t that somebody was so terrified of the bombing idea that they wrote it down. They just captured the president’s comments.”
The sources said that Trump’s “bomb the hurricanes” idea — which he floated early in the first year and a bit of his presidency before John Bolton took over as national security adviser — went nowhere and never entered a formal policy process.
White House response: A senior administration official said, “We don’t comment on private discussions that the president may or may not have had with his national security team.”
A different senior administration official, who has been briefed on the president’s hurricane bombing suggestion, defended Trump’s idea and said it was no cause for alarm. “His goal — to keep a catastrophic hurricane from hitting the mainland — is not bad,” the official said. “His objective is not bad.”
“What people near the president do is they say ‘I love a president who asks questions like that, who’s willing to ask tough questions.’ … It takes strong people to respond to him in the right way when stuff like this comes up. For me, alarm bells weren’t going off when I heard about it, but I did think somebody is going to use this to feed into ‘the president is crazy’ narrative.”
Trump called this story “ridiculous” in a Monday tweet from the G7 summit. He added, “I never said this. Just more FAKE NEWS!”
The big picture: Trump didn’t invent this idea. The notion that detonating a nuclear bomb over the eye of a hurricane could be used to counteract convection currents dates to the Eisenhower era, when it was floated by a government scientist.
The idea keeps resurfacing in the public even though scientists agree it won’t work. The myth has been so persistent that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. government agency that predicts changes in weather and the oceans, published an online fact sheet for the public under the heading “Tropical Cyclone Myths Page.”
The page states: “Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.”
About 3 weeks after Trump’s 2016 election, National Geographic published an article titled, “Nuking Hurricanes: The Surprising History of a Really Bad Idea.” It found, among other problems, that:
Dropping a nuclear bomb into a hurricane would be banned under the terms of the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. So that could stave off any experiments, as long as the U.S. observes the terms of the treaty.
Atlantic hurricane season runs until Nov. 30.
Long history of misguided suggestions to nuclear bomb hurricanes
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The idea has evidently surfaced multiple times in the administration, as Swan outlined, including during a hurricane preparedness briefings at the White House. “I got it. I got it. Why don’t we nuke them?” the president evidently interrupted, according to Swan’s source. “They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they’re moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can’t we do that?” Even in a White House system engineered to respond quickly and authoritatively to a president’s whims, questions, or orders, no one knew what to do with an idea so obviously batty. As one source reportedly told Swan, “You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting. People were astonished. After the meeting ended, we thought, ‘What the f—? What do we do with this?’” (Trump denied the reports in a tweet Monday.) The truth, though, is that Donald Trump’s apparent brainstorm—as terrible an idea as it is—actually has a long history. Seventy years ago, it was at the forefront of American scientific thought. What makes Trump’s embrace of nuking hurricanes unique is that, broadly speaking, no policymaker has seriously considered it a good idea since the days that the 73-year-old president was wearing diapers. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—when the US unleashed a destructive technology more powerful than anything in history—at first spurred unbridled excitement over the power of the atom…… Engineers dreamed of the day when nuclear engines would replace gasoline-powered automobiles, when a lump of Uranium-235 the size of a vitamin pill would power the family car for years at a time. In those heady early years of the atomic age, many scientists imagined a world where humans could routinely use nuclear weapons to cleave the earth and remake its climate. Decades before climate change became a major concern, one book, Almighty Atom: The Real Story of Atomic Energy, suggested using atomic weapons to melt the polar ice caps, gifting “the entire world a moister, warmer climate.” Thought experiments exploded over how harnessing the power of the atom would finally unleash humans’ ability to control and reshape their environment through geo-engineering. “For the first time in the history of the world, man will have at his disposal energy in amounts sufficient to cope with the forces of Mother Nature,” ……. One of the first tourist attractions in Las Vegas was the chance to wake up early, stand outside your hotel, and watch the flash and mushroom cloud from the bombs rolling into the sky. The after-effects of radiation—the invisible and inescapable poison spread by nuclear explosions—became clear soon enough. With that awareness, early atomic enthusiasm waned, particularly as bombs leapt from nuclear to thermonuclear, the atomic bomb’s power of kilotons—that is, a thousand tons of TNT—growing to the hydrogen bomb’s megatons, the equivalent of a million tons of TNT….. nuking hurricanes entered the conversation. According to International Spy Museum historian Vince Houghton, whose book Nuking the Moon details wacky military and intelligence schemes, an American meteorologist named Jack Reed, one of the nation’s earliest hurricane hunters, appears to be the first to seriously consider bombing a hurricane. His calculations held that maybe one or two 20-megaton bombs might be able to deflect a hurricane from land. He called for a test of the theory, but found it embraced by precisely zero policymakers …. Reed’s idea would actually now be prohibited under international law by the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty. Yet the appeal of nuking hurricanes has never really gone away. The issue is such a MacGuffin that NOAA has dedicated a webpage to debunking it: “During each hurricane season, there always appear suggestions that one should simply use nuclear weapons to try and destroy the storms,” the weather service writes. “Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.” The idea has enough staying power that the meteorologists at NOAA even took on the underlying science, pointing out that there’s little evidence that even a successfully placed atomic bomb would do anything to alter a hurricane’s formation —the systems are simply too large, too strong, and most of all, a nuclear explosion wouldn’t affect the underlying dynamics, …… Even for Donald Trump, launching 80 nukes a year seems extreme https://www.wired.com/story/nuking-hurricanes-polar-ice-caps-climate-change/ |
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Fish transport around Scandinavia in nuclear-powered Russian ship
 Russia starts nuclear-powered fish transport around Scandinavia Container carrier “Sevmorput” is now being loaded with 200 refrigerated containers with fish at port in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy and will soon set sail for the Northern Sea Route and further south to St. Petersburg. Barents Observer Thomas Nilsen
“This test-voyage with the container carrier gives hope that one time such deliveries will become regular,” says Kamchatka Governor Vladmir Kuzmitsky in an interview with the region’s own portal.The 200 containers are filled with frozen fish, fillets, caviar and other seafood, a total of 5,000 tons. The voyage takes three weeks, of which the two first will be along the Northern Sea Route, north of Siberia. This is the first time a Russian civilian nuclear-powered ship sails with cargo outside the coast of Norway. From the North Sea, “Sevmorput” will continue in the narrow waters between Sweden and Denmark, sailing through the Great Belt and into the Baltic Sea before final port call to St. Petersburg. Rosatom confirmed the voyage in a tweet on Monday. “Sevmorput” is expected to cross the Barents Sea and sail outside Norway by the second week of September. Then, the ship will sail back the same route and a second voyage will come in late October……. https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/industry-and-energy/2019/08/russia-starts-nuclear-powered-fish-transport-around-scandinavia |
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Nuking a Hurricane Would Probably Just Create a Slightly Bigger, Radioactive Hurricane
Nuking a Hurricane Would Probably Just Create a Slightly Bigger, Radioactive Hurricane https://www.livescience.com/trump-hurricane-nuclear-bomb.html By 26 Aug 19, o Planet Earth
Has Trump been reading old Live Science articles about nuking hurricanes? And if not, should he be?
President Donald Trump wants to nuke hurricanes into submission before they reach the Atlantic coastline, according to a bizarre article published yesterday (Aug. 25) on Axios. “Why can’t we do that?” he reportedly asked. This raises an important question: Has Trump been reading old Live Science articles? And if not, should he be?
Live Science answered this very question in a 2012 article.
“The theory goes that the energy released by a nuclear bomb detonated just above and ahead of the eye of a storm would heat the cooler air there, disrupting the storm’s convection current,” Rachel Kaufman wrote at the time. “Unfortunately, this idea, which has been around in some form since the 1960s, wouldn’t work.”
The problem is the energy involved, Kaufman reported, citing writing by Chris Landsea, a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research meteorologist.
A hurricane is essentially a powerful, super-efficient country-size engine for pulling heat out of the ocean and releasing it into the atmosphere. As a hurricane’s low-pressure system moves over warm water, that water evaporates and then condenses as droplets in the atmosphere. As the water condenses, it releases the heat it’s carrying into the surrounding air. About 1% of that heat energy gets converted into wind; the rest sticks around as ambient warmth, according to the article.
A hurricane can release 50 terawatts of heat energy at any given moment — a significantly greater output than the entire power system, and comparable to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb detonating every 20 minutes. Trying to stop a hurricane with a nuke would be “about as effective as trying to stop a speeding Buick with a feather,” Kaufman wrote, and might even add energy to the storm
Stopping a smaller tropical depression with a nuke might be more realistic, but there are just too many of them and no good way to tell which will develop into powerful, landfalling hurricanes.
“Finally, whether the bomb would have a minor positive effect, a negative effect, or none at all on the storm’s convection cycle, one thing is for sure: It would create a radioactive hurricane, which would be even worse than a normal one. The fallout would ride Trade Winds to land — arguably a worse outcome than a landfalling hurricane,” Kaufman wrote.
The best way to avoid the destruction of a hurricane, remains a boring one: prepare. In case that’s the route you want to go, how to prepare for a hurricane.
Santee Cooper officially cancels contract to end dispute over nuclear parts
New fires – hundreds – in Amazon rainforests
Amazon rainforest burning at record rate
Leaders of the world’s major industrialised nations are close to an agreement on how to help fight the Amazon forest fires and try to repair the devastation.
French President Emmanuel Macron said the G7 countries comprising the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Britain and Canada, were finalising a possible deal on “technical and financial help”.
“There’s a real convergence to say: ‘let’s all agree to help those countries hit by these fires’,” he told reporters in Biarritz on Sunday.
Macron shunted the Amazon fires to the top of the summit agenda after declaring them a global emergency, and kicked off discussions about the disaster at a welcome dinner for fellow leaders on Saturday.
An EU official, who declined to be named, said the G7 leaders had agreed to do everything they could to help tackle the fires, giving Macron a mandate to contact all the countries in the Amazon region to see what was needed.
“It was the easiest part of the talks,” the official said.
A record number of fires are ravaging the rainforest, many of them in Brazil, drawing international concern because of the Amazon’s importance to the global environment……. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/hundreds-of-new-fires-rage-in-the-amazon-as-g7-leaders-offer-assistance
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