The danger of government secrecy and cover-ups: Kate Brown’s “Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future” illuminates the truth about radioactive legacy of nuclear industry.
The world has a third pole – and it’s melting quickly An IPCC report says two-thirds of glaciers on the largest ice sheet after the Arctic and Antarctic are set to disappear in 80 years Guardian, Gaia Vince Sun 15 Sep 2019 “…….. . Over the past two decades, the Mingyong glacier at the foot of the mountain [ Khawa Karpo, Tibet] has dramatically receded. …….
Mingyong is one of the world’s fastest shrinking glaciers, but locals cannot believe it will die because their own existence is intertwined with it. Yet its disappearance is almost inevitable.
Khawa Karpo lies at the world’s “third pole”. This is how glaciologists refer to the Tibetan plateau, home to the vast Hindu Kush-Himalaya ice sheet, because it contains the largest amount of snow and ice after the Arctic and Antarctic – about 15% of the global total. However, a quarter of its ice has been lost since 1970.
This month, in a long-awaited special report on the cryosphere by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists will warn that up to two-thirds of the region’s remaining glaciers are on track to disappear by the end of the century. It is expected a third of the ice will be lost in that time even if the internationally agreed target of limiting global warming by 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is adhered to.
Whether we are Buddhists or not, our lives affect, and are affected by, these tropical glaciers that span eight countries. This frozen “water tower of Asia” is the source of 10 of the world’s largest rivers, including the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Yellow, Mekong and Indus, whose flows support at least 1.6 billion people directly – in drinking water, agriculture, hydropower and livelihoods – and many more indirectly, in buying a T-shirt made from cotton grown in China, for example, or rice from India.
Joseph Shea, a glaciologist at the University of Northern British Columbia, calls the loss “depressing and fear-inducing. It changes the nature of the mountains in a very visible and profound way.”
Yet the fast-changing conditions at the third pole have not received the same attention as those at the north and south poles. The IPCC’s fourth assessment report in 2007 contained the erroneous prediction that all Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. This statement turned out to have been based on anecdote rather than scientific evidence and, perhaps out of embarrassment, the third pole has been given less attention in subsequent IPCC reports.
There is also a dearth of research compared to the other poles, and what hydrological data exists has been jealously guarded by the Indian government and other interested parties. The Tibetan plateau is a vast and impractical place for glaciologists to work in and confounding factors make measurements hard to obtain. Scientists are forbidden by locals, for instance, to step out on to the Mingyong glacier, meaning they have had to use repeat photography to measure the ice retreat.
In the face of these problems, satellites have proved invaluable, allowing scientists to watch glacial shrinkage in real time. …….
One reason for the rapid ice loss is that the Tibetan plateau, like the other two poles, is warming at a rate up to three times as fast as the global average, by 0.3C per decade. In the case of the third pole, this is because of its elevation, which means it absorbs energy from rising, warm, moisture-laden air. Even if average global temperatures stay below 1.5C, the region will experience more than 2C of warming; if emissions are not reduced, the rise will be 5C, according to a report released earlier this year by more than 200 scientists for the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). …….
As the third pole’s vast frozen reserves of fresh water make their way down to the oceans, they are contributing to sea-level rise that is already making life difficult in the heavily populated low-lying deltas and bays of Asia, from Bangladesh to Vietnam. What is more, they are releasing dangerous pollutants. ….. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/15/tibetan-plateau-glacier-melt-ipcc-report-third-pole
A terrifying new animation shows how 1 ‘tactical’ nuclear weapon could trigger a US-Russia war that kills 34 million people in 5 hours, Business Insider, ELLEN IOANES, DAVE MOSHER, SEP 14, 2019, A new simulation called “Plan A,” by researchers at Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security, shows how the use of one so-called tactical or low-yield nuclear weapon could lead to a terrifying worldwide conflict.
In the roughly four-minute video, a Russian “nuclear warning shot” at a US-NATO coalition leads to a global nuclear war that leads to 91.5 million deaths and injuries.
Under President Trump, the US is ramping up production of tactical nuclear weapons, ostensibly to target troops and munitions supplies. While advocates say these weapons would keep wars from escalating, the simulation finds the opposite outcome.
The dissolution of the INF treaty in August raised the stakes for nuclear war, as both the US and Russia were free to develop weapons previously banned under the treaty.
The risk of nuclear war has increased dramatically in the past two years,” the project states. Nuclear strikes are an extremely remote possibility, but their chances are rising experts warn.The simulation is called “Plan A,” and it’s an audio-visual piece that was first posted to to YouTube on September 6. (You can watch the full video at the end of this story.) Researchers at the Science and Global Security lab at Princeton University created the animation, which shows how a battle between Russia and NATO allies that uses so-called low-yield or “tactical” nuclear weapons – which can pack a blast equivalent to those the US used to destroy Hiroshima or Nagasaki in World War II – might feasibly and quickly snowball into a global nuclear war.
Russia’s First Atomic Submarines: A Nuclear Nightmare for 1 Reason , by Sebastien Roblin National Interest, September 14, 2019,They were not exactly top of the line–think massive safety issues. Mix that with nuclear power…
Key point: The power of the November class’s reactors was bought at the price of safety and reliability.
The United States launched the first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, in 1954, revolutionizing undersea warfare. The Nautilus’s reactor allowed it operate underwater for months at a time, compared to the hours or days afforded conventional submarines. The following year, the Soviet Union began building its own nuclear submarine, the Project 627—known as the November class by NATO. The result was a boat with a few advantages compared to its American competition, but that also exhibited a disturbing tendency to catastrophic accidents that would prove characteristic of the burgeoning Soviet submarine fleet during the Cold War.
…… the power of the November class’s reactors was bought at the price of safety and reliability. A lack of radiation shielding resulted in frequent crew illness, and many of the boat suffered multiple reactor malfunctions over their lifetimes. This lack of reliability may explain why the Soviet Union dispatched conventional Foxtrot submarines instead of the November-class vessels during the Cuban Missile Crisis…..
In fact, the frequent, catastrophic disasters onboard the Project 627 boats seem almost like gruesome public service announcements for everything that could conceivably go wrong with nuclear submarines. Many of the accidents reflected not only technological flaws, but the weak safety culture of the Soviet Navy. …….
As the Soviet Union was succeeded by an economically destitute Russia, many decommissioned nuclear submarines were left to rust with their nuclear fuel onboard, leading to safety concerns from abroad. International donors fronted $200 million to scrap the hulks in 2003. Flimsy pontoons were welded onto K-159 to enable its towing to a scrapping site, but on August 30 a sea squall ripped away one of the pontoons, causing the boat to begin foundering around midnight. The Russian Navy failed to react until hours later, by which the time submarine had sunk, taking eight hundred kilograms of spent nuclear fuel and nine of the ten seamen manning the pontoons with it. Plans to raise K-159 have foundered to this day due to lack of funding.
This is just an accounting of major accidents on the November-class boats—more occurred on Echo- and Hotel-class submarines equipped with the same nuclear reactors. Submarine operations are, of course, inherently risky; the U.S. Navy also lost two submarines during the 1960s, though it hasn’t lost any since.
The November-class submarines may not have been particularly silent hunters, but they nonetheless marked a breakthrough in providing the Soviet submarine fleet global reach while operating submerged. They also provided painful lessons, paid in human lives lost or irreparably injured, in the risks inherent to exploiting nuclear power, and in the high price to be paid for technical errors and lax safety procedures. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russias-first-atomic-submarines-nuclear-nightmare-1-reason-80456
Faster pace of climate change is ‘scary’, former chief scientist says.BBC, By Roger Harrabin, BBC environment analyst 16 Sept 10, Extreme events linked to climate change, such as the heatwave in Europe this year, are occurring sooner than expected, an ex-chief scientist says.
Prof Sir David King says he’s been scared by the number of extreme events, and he called for the UK to advance its climate targets by 10 years.
But the UN’s weather chief said using words like “scared” could make young people depressed and anxious.
Campaigners argue that people won’t act unless they feel fearful.
Speaking to the BBC, Prof King, a former chief scientific adviser to the government, said: “It’s appropriate to be scared. We predicted temperatures would rise, but we didn’t foresee these sorts of extreme events we’re getting so soon.”
Several other scientists contacted by the BBC supported his emotive language.
The physicist Prof Jo Haigh from Imperial College London said: “David King is right to be scared – I’m scared too.”
“We do the analysis, we think what’s going to happen, then publish in a very scientific way.
“Then we have a human response to that… and it is scary.”
Petteri Taalas, who is secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said he fully supported UN climate goals, but he criticised radical green campaigners for forecasting the end of the world.
It’s the latest chapter in the long debate over how to communicate climate science to the public.
Will emotive language leave young people depressed?
Dr Taalas agrees polar ice is melting faster than expected, but he’s concerned that public fear could lead to paralysis – and also to mental health problems amongst the young.
“We are fully behind climate science and fully behind the (upcoming) New York climate summit”, he said.
“But I want to stick to the facts, which are quite convincing and dramatic enough. We should avoid interpreting them too much……….
What is the science behind extreme weather events?
The loss of land ice in Antarctica, for instance, is at the upper range of predictions in the IPCC AR5. And there are record ice losses in Greenland
Then there’s this year’s French heatwave.
Dr Friederike Otto from Oxford University is an expert in the attribution of extreme events to climate change.
She told us that in a pre-climate change world, a heatwave like this might strike once in 1,000 years.
In a post-warming world, the heatwave was still a one in 100 year phenomenon. In other words, natural variability is amplifying human-induced climate heating.
“With European heatwaves, we have realised that climate change is a total game-changer,” she said. It has increased the likelihood (of events) by orders of magnitude.
“It’s changing the baseline on which to make decisions. How do we deal with summer? It is very hard to predict,” Dr Otto explained.
Researchers had not yet had time to investigate the links between all of the major extreme weather events and climate change, she said.
With some phenomena such as droughts and floods there was no clear evidence yet of any involvement from climate change. And it was impossible to be sure that the slow progress of Dorian was caused by climate change.
‘We can’t wait for scientific certainty’
Prof King said the world could not wait for scientific certainty on events like Hurricane Dorian. “Scientists like to be certain,” he said.
“But these events are all about probabilities. What is the likelihood that (Dorian) is a climate change event? I’m going to say ‘very high’…….
Should the UK bring climate targets earlier?
Prof King said the situation was so grave that the UK should bring forward its date for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases to almost zero from 2050 to 2040……. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49689018
Chernobyl’s dark history: Australian returns home 33 years after the world’s worst nuclear disaster, News 7 Steve Pennells 15 September 2019
Chernobyl – just the word is enough to evoke visions of a nuclear holocaust.
But for thousands of Australians, the nightmare was all too real. They are the children of Chernobyl – scarred by their experiences – and now, more than 30 years on, determined to confront the past.
Inna Mitelman grew up in Belarus, in the shadow of Chernobyl. 33 years later, she’s happily settled in Melbourne with two children of her own. Her parents, Irina and Ilia, live close by.
“I remember it as a very beautiful place to grow up,” Inna tells Sunday Night’s Steve Pennells. “The people were lovely. I had a very beautiful childhood, I can tell you that much.”
For Inna, it was an idyllic existence, with her best friend Natasha living in the apartment right next door.
“We were pretty much inseparable,” Inna explains. “Our parents were very close friends, they were like family. We used to come into each other’s houses without knocking. My house was her house, her house was my house.”
Chernobyl was 100 kilometres away – but on the 26th of April 1986, that was much too close.
The explosion in Reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant would be the worst nuclear accident in history. A safety test gone wrong ruptured the reactor core and caused a fire that released vast clouds of radioactive contamination. But the Soviet authorities supressed the true scale of the disaster – and only after 36 hours was the order given to evacuate the nearby city of Pripyat, home to the power plant workers and their families.
Inna Mitelman was only 11 years old when the refugees from Pripyat arrived on her doorstep, but the memory is still vivid.
“The first thing I remember is seeing new kids in our yard in the morning when we walked out to go to school,” Inna recalls. “There were wrapped up in blankets.”
As the fire continued to rage in the reactor, badly injured power plant workers and fireman were brought to the Pripyat hospital.
Today, the hospital at Pripyat stands abandoned, like the rest of this once-thriving city. But 33 years ago, the reactor was spewing out 400 times more radioactive material than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs combined.
Sergii Mirnyi soon learnt the truth. He was the commander of a radiation reconnaissance unit. It was his job to seek out the worst of the hot zones……..
“I’ve got thyroid nodules which were discovered when I was pregnant with my second child,” Inna reveals. “The surgeon said I’ve got [a] 50 per cent chance of developing thyroid cancer, so let’s just get it out now.”
Now, Inna wants to return to her homeland, to understand a tragic event from her past that still haunts her.
“I’m terrified,” Inna admits. “There’s a reason why we haven’t been back. But you need to do this to confront it and deal with it and move on. Because the worst thing that ever happened to me [was] probably my best friend dying when I was 11, and I think having to deal with that freaks me out as well.”
“We first found out that something was wrong with her when she became cross-eyed. They found a brain tumour, they operated, but she died the next morning.”
“This was my best friend. This was the person that I grew up with. Her death, it destroyed me.”
Natasha’s family moved out after the death of their daughter. But Inna is determined to find them.
Inside the exclusion zone
2,500 square kilometres of contaminated territory – including Pripyat – are now abandoned after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
Pripyat was a brand new city, right next to the nuclear power plant. It was a jewel in the Soviet crown, with a thriving population of 50,000 people. It was emptied in the course of a single day, with residents forced to leave with only what they could carry…….
For many new mothers here in Belarus, there’s a profound fear that the effects of Chernobyl might be passed on to a second generation.
At the local Children’s Hospital, chief doctor Irina Kalmanovich has been treating Chernobyl survivors for more than 30 years. She has no doubt she is still seeing children suffering from the disaster – and unlike other doctors in this repressive regime, she’s willing to risk saying it.
China’s gambling on a nuclear future, but is it destined to lose? By James Griffiths, CNN September 14, 2019 Hong Kong (CNN Business)Panicked shoppers thronged supermarket aisles, grabbing bags of salt by the armful. They queued six deep outside wholesalers. Most went home with only one or two bags; the lucky ones managed to snag a five-year supply before stocks ran out.
This was China in the days after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster, when people in cities up and down the country’s highly populated east coast bought huge quantities of iodized salt in the misguided belief it would protect them from radiation.
The 2011 disaster — the worst nuclear accident in 25 years — threw a major wrench into China’s ambitious nuclear plans. It sent authorities scrambling to reassure people that they were not at risk of a similar catastrophe and sparked an immediate moratorium on new power plants.
That ban was lifted this year. Now, China is gradually ramping up construction again.
With around a dozen nuclear power plants in the works, China will overtake France as the number two producer of atomic energy worldwide within two years. If it continues with its aggressive plan, it will surpass the United States to become number one by 2030.
China is the world’s largest consumer of energy, thanks mainly to industrial activity. This is only going to increase, with households expected to use nearly twice as much energy by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency. At present, some 60% of that energy consumption is powered by coal. But China is spending heavily on natural gas and nuclear power, as well as renewables — the country accounted for almost half of all investments in the latter globally in 2017.
Beijing’s outward enthusiasm for nuclear energy masks a multitude of challenges facing China’s atomic plans.
Surveys and protests against proposed nuclear plants suggest ordinary Chinese are a lot less enthusiastic about nuclear power than their leaders are. The potential ramifications of a nuclear disaster in the world’s most populated country are stark, to say nothing of economic or environmental fallout. And while China’s nuclear industry has a strong safety record — and domestic regulations have tightened since Fukushima — some fear corruption and supply line issues could undercut these efforts.
Nuclear is also not the attractive clean energy solution it once was. In the years following the Fukushima disaster, renewable energy such as solar and wind have plummeted in price thanks in part to heavy Chinese investment, while new safety standards have driven up the cost of nuclear power.
“For a long time, China was basically subsidizing the (nuclear) industry, and now they’re trying to put it on a market footing,” said Miles Pomper, a Washington-based expert in nuclear energy at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
“When you do that, oftentimes it doesn’t meet the market test, especially competing with wind and other kinds of power.”
China’s National Energy Administration and Atomic Energy Authority did not respond to requests for comment for this report.
Nuclear panic
The Fukushima disaster was a shocking wake-up call to all countries with coastal nuclear plants. It raised concerns that other plants could be vulnerable to tsunamis and other extreme weather…….
The sudden aversion to nuclear energy reached China, where the State Council immediately suspended approval of nuclear power projects and ordered a comprehensive safety inspection of all existing facilities. New regulations were passed, including the 2020 Vision for Nuclear Safety and Radioactive Pollution Prevention, which set safety standards and inspection goals, as well as a Nuclear Safety Act that went into effect last year.
In particular, according to a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), new power supplies and water pumps were issued to all Chinese nuclear plants to protect against the flooding and power loss suffered at Fukushima. New emergency response protocols were introduced, including the need for emergency response drills.
The effect of the disaster on China’s domestic nuclear industry has been profound. Some semi-official projections that China might have more than 400 nuclear plants by 2050 “have been cut in half,” according to Mark Hibbs, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment and co-author of “Why Fukushima Was Preventable.”
The failure of Japan, “one of the world’s most technologically equipped and experienced” countries as regards nuclear power, raised serious questions as to whether China too was vulnerable to a serious accident, Hibbs wrote in a report on the country’s nuclear industry last year.
Safety fears
Despite China’s efforts to alleviate public concern after Fukushima with a moratorium and new safety checks, support for nuclear energy remains tepid at best and outright hostile at worst.
A government-supported survey in August 2017 found that “only 40% of the public supports the development of nuclear power in China,” according to the Chinese Academy of Engineering. The Fukushima accident “has had the consequence that the public has become more sensitive to the possible development of nuclear energy projects, and is opposing such projects, especially near their homes.”
Plans to build a nuclear waste processing plant in the eastern province of Jiangsu resulted in violent protests from locals and the project eventually being scrapped in August 2016, according to Chinese media. ……….
“So far, knock on wood, there hasn’t been any significant, major accident (in China),” said Pomper, the nuclear expert. “But there’s certainly a lot of skepticism and concern there, given China’s performance in other sectors in terms of safety.”
China’s industrial safety record has improved substantially in recent years, but “accident rates, death tolls and the incidence of occupational disease are all still comparatively high,” said China Labor Bulletin, a workers’ rights organization. There were 134 work-related accidents each day on average in 2018, according to official figures.
In his report, Hibbs noted that “China faces numerous challenges from its historically weak industrial safety culture and the strain on regulatory capacity that has been exacerbated by nuclear growth.”
“Barring measures to effectively generalize safety culture, more nuclear power reactors in China means greater risk,” he said.
Legacy of disaster
Nuclear is, perhaps, the only industry where accidents in one plant or one country have a major knock-on effect worldwide……It is the long shadow of nuclear disasters that makes the risks too great to bear for many. Parts of the Chernobyl exclusion zone will remain contaminated for at least 300 years, and it will take decades before the Fukushima plant is fully decommissioned, with tens of thousands of residents still displaced. Some areas around the site may never be totally safe .
Following the Fukushima disaster, an initial exclusion zone extending 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) around the stricken plant was established, which was later extended to 30 km (18.6 miles), though some experts said at least 80 km (50 miles) should have been considered.
In the densely populated parts of eastern and southern China where many of the country’s nuclear reactors are located, such an exclusion zone could impact huge numbers of people.
A 20 km exclusion zone around the Daya Bay nuclear plant in southern China, for example, would include much of the nearby areas of Pingshan and Huiyang, affecting around 1 million people. Any larger exclusion zone could effect the nearby metropolises of Shenzhen and Hong Kong, which between them are home to almost 20 million people.
“You’re also dealing with prevailing winds,” said Pomper. “Does this blow off into the rest of China, or Korea or Japan?”‘…..
in the years after Fukushima, as the nuclear industry saw its projects stalled and stringent new safety regulations introduced, renewables have continued to leap ahead, becoming cheaper and more reliable. In the United States, renewable energy, led by solar and wind, is projected to be the fastest-growing source of electricity generation for at least the next two years.
Meanwhile, new regulations and more frequent safety inspections are driving up already the high costs of building new nuclear plants.
“A complaint of the (nuclear) industry is that regulation is costing them all this money and that’s why they’re not competitive,” Pomper said. “But some of it is just basic economics: Nuclear plants are very expensive to build … and it takes a huge (amount of) time to build them.”
He added that while “regulations don’t help, a lot of them are necessary, and (nuclear plants) were not very competitive beforehand.”
Nuclear energy remains a key part of China’s current five-year plan. Whether it is still a priority when that economic blueprint expires next year remains to be seen.
Russia’s state nuclear energy company Rosatom announced on September 14 the arrival in the Arctic port town of Pevek of the nuclear power plant, which Greenpeace has dubbed a “floating Chernobyl.”
The massive plant — a 140-meter towed platform that carries two 35-megawatt nuclear reactors set sail from Murmansk, in northwestern Russia, on August 23 and traveled along the Northern Sea Route to its destination off the coast of Chukotka.
Rosatom said small surrounding communities, along with mining facilities and offshore oil and natural gas platforms, would make use of the electricity.
The nuclear plant has been named the Akademik Lomonosov after the 18th-century Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov.
A Dead Russian Submarine Armed with Nuclear Torpedoes was Never Recovered, National Interest, Robert Farley, September 15, 2019
Key point: She rests at a depth of 15,000 feet —too deep to make recovery practical.
The Bay of Biscay is one of the world’s great submarine graveyards. In late World War II, British and American aircraft sank nearly seventy German U-boats in the Bay, which joined a handful of Allied and German subs sunk in the region during World War I. On April 12, 1970, a Soviet submarine found the same resting place. Unlike the others, however, K-8 was propelled by two nuclear reactors, and carried four torpedoes tipped by nuclear warheads.
The Novembers (627):
The November (Type 627) class was the Soviet Union’s first effort at developing nuclear attack submarines…….
The Novembers were too loud to plausibly find their way into close enough proximity to a NATO port to ever actually fire a nuclear torpedo in wartime conditions…….
On April 8, K-8 suffered two fires, resulting in a shutdown of both nuclear reactors. The boat surfaced, and Captain Vsevolod Borisovich Bessonov ordered the crew to abandon ship. Eight crew members, trapped in compartments that were either flooded or burned out, died in the initial incident. Fortunately, a Soviet repair vessel arrived, and took K-8 under tow. However, bad weather made the recover operation a difficult prospect. Much of K-8’s crew reboarded the submarine, and for three days fought a life-and-death struggle to save the boat. Although details remain scarce, there apparently was no opportunity to safely remove the four nuclear torpedoes from K-8, and transfer them to the repair ship.
Unfortunately, the loss of power onboard and the difficult weather conditions were too much for the crew to overcome. On April 12, K-8 sank with some forty crew members aboard, coming to rest at a rough depth of 15,000 feet. The depth made any effort at recovering the submarine, and the nuclear torpedoes, impractical……
ByViet Phuong Nguyen, September 10, 2019 US Energy Secretary Rick Perry granted “secret authorizations” for six American companies to provide nuclear technology and technical support for Saudi Arabia. Such approvals are granted through Part 810 authorizations and allow companies to do preliminary work on nuclear power ahead of a US nuclear cooperation agreement with another country, but no equipment that would go into a nuclear power plant can be shipped. What does the Part 810 authorization mean? Is it the right choice for the Saudi case? And how does Perry’s authorization affect prospects for American nuclear business and nonproliferation policy in the Middle East?….. https://thebulletin.org/2019/09/decoding-the-us-secret-authorizations-to-sell-nuclear-technology-to-saudi-arabia/
By Associated Press, Wire Service ContentSept. 15, 2019, COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A former South Carolina chief justice will oversee all court cases around the pair of nuclear reactors abandoned during construction in South Carolina.
An order from the state Supreme Court says former Chief Justice Jean Toal will take over all lawsuits about the V.C. Summer nuclear project that lost billions of dollars
Circuit Judge John Hayes had been handling the cases and approved a settlement to a lawsuit by South Carolina Electric & Gas ratepayers that led to rebate checks for less than $100.
The order does not say why Toal is taking over.
Cases still pending include South Carolina’s electric cooperatives lawsuit against the minority partner in the project, state-owned Santee Cooper.
Toal was South Carolina’s first woman elected as Chief Justice, holding the office from 2000 to 2015.
This newsletter is intended to be about matters nuclear. It IS, BUT, again this week, climate change is the overwhelmingly big issue. I cannot do justice to it at all. Thank goodness, we have Covering Climate Now, and other great media, taking up the cause.
Mingyong is one of the world’s fastest shrinking glaciers, but locals cannot believe it will die because their own existence is intertwined with it. Yet its disappearance is almost inevitable.
Faster pace of climate change is ‘scary’, former chief scientist says. BBC, By Roger Harrabin, BBC environment analyst 16 Sept 10, Extreme events linked to climate change, such as the heatwave in Europe this year, are occurring sooner than expected, an ex-chief scientist says.
nuclear-news 