2020 May 03 « nuclear-news

The Southwest Research and Information Center says that rules are ignored in nuclear waste construction in New Mexico

Appeal: New Mexico ignored rules in OK of nuke site work, https://www.myhighplains.com/news/new-mexico/appeal-new-mexico-ignored-rules-in-ok-of-nuke-site-work/ by: SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN, Apr 28, 2020, ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — A watchdog group wants the New Mexico Court of Appeals to put the brakes on a key construction project at the nation’s only underground nuclear waste repository.The Southwest Research and Information Center alleges state environmental officials ignored regulations and past practices in giving temporary approval for contractors to begin building a new ventilation shaft at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

The state stands by its decision.

A radiation release in 2014 forced the repository’s temporary closure.

Resulting contamination limited the air flow underground, prompting the need for a new system so full-scale operations can resume.

May 3, 2020 Posted by Christina MacPherson | safety, USA | Leave a comment

Comment Period For Proposed Nuclear Waste Dump In New Mexico extended by 60 days

60-Day Extension Of Public Comment Period For Proposed Nuclear Waste Dump In New Mexico, KRWG, By NEWS EDITOR AND PARTNERS • MAY 2, 2020 U.S. Senators Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich, and U.S. Representatives Xochitl Torres Small, Ben Ray Luján, and Deb Haaland are welcoming an announcement from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that their March 20 request has been met and a 60-day extension on the public comment period will be implemented for the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for Holtec’s proposed spent nuclear fuel storage facility in Southeast New Mexico. Here is statement from the office of Senator Martin Heinrich:

“Allowing for full public participation, as NEPA requires, is particularly important for projects involving nuclear waste,” the delegation said. “Any proposal to store commercial spent nuclear fuel raises a number of health, safety and environmental issues, including potential impacts on local agriculture and industry, issues related to the transportation of nuclear waste, and disproportionate impacts on Native American communities.”…….https://www.krwg.org/post/60-day-extension-public-comment-period-proposed-nuclear-waste-dump-new-mexico

May 3, 2020 Posted by Christina MacPherson | safety, USA | Leave a comment

The COVID-19 crisis is a warning for the future

Scientists call for the COVID-19 pandemic to be seen as a warning for the future, Examiner, Jackson Worthington 2 May 20

As Tasmania prepares to enter the recovery phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, calls are growing for the crisis to be seen as a warning for the future. The pandemic has had widespread health and economic ramifications across Tasmania. Thirteen people have died, thousands have been quarantined and more than 20,000 people have lost their jobs.

While we don’t know exactly what animal species the virus originated from, scientists widely consider bats the likely source.

Dr Scott Carver is a senior lecturer at the University of Tasmania who specialises in the ecology and epidemiology of infectious diseases. He said human impacts on the environment can create new contacts with animals and increase risk of pathogens transferring between animals and humans.

“Pathogen spillover between species … happens quite often,” Mr Carver said. “It is just that most pathogens don’t cause really significant health outcomes. Some of them, however, do.

“The chance of any one spillover event resulting in an epidemic is low, but if you increase the opportunity for that to happen, through increasing new contacts, then the probability increases.”

He said implementing policies to limit the risk of potential future pandemics would benefit both public health and biodiversity.

“With a growing human population size and growing human impacts on the environment it is not surprising that you get more of these events happening,” Dr Carver said.

“It is incumbent upon us to really take a serious look at the way we treat the environment and think about policies that can limit these sorts of things.”

UTAS’s Dr Olivia Hasler believes legislating a law of ecocide could be one way to approach establishing these policies.

“Ecocide is an attempt to criminalise human activities that destroy and diminish the well-being and health of ecosystems and species within an ecosystem,” she said.

She said the COVID-19 pandemic had highlighted how connected we were as a society, and she hoped that would not be forgotten in the recovery effort.

“A law against ecocide would provide accountability to those that are in positions of power to make decisions about the use of our resources and shared land,” Dr Hasler said…… https://www.examiner.com.au/story/6743091/human-impacts-on-the-environment-could-be-increasing-the-risk-of-pandemics/?cs=95

May 3, 2020 Posted by Christina MacPherson | environment, health | Leave a comment

Michael Moore’s sham attack on renewable energy has had rigorous debunking

Rolling Stone 1st May 2020, Bill McKibben: ‘A Bomb in the Center of the Climate Movement’: Michael Moore Damages Our Most Important Goal. Basically, Moore and his colleagues
have made a film attacking renewable energy as a sham and arguing that the environmental movement is just a tool of corporations trying to make money off green energy.

“One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion that alternative technologies, like wind and solar, are somehow different from fossil fuels,” Ozzie Zehner, one of the film’s producers, tells the camera. When visiting a solar facility, he insists: “You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels.”

That’s not true, not in the least — the time it takes for a solar panel to pay back the energy used to build it is well under four years. Since it lasts three decades, it means 90 percent of the power it produces is pollution-free, compared with zero percent of the power from burning fossil fuels.

It turns out that pretty much everything else about the movie was wrong — there have been at least 24 debunkings, many of them painfully rigorous; as one scientist wrote in a particularly scathing takedown, “Planet of the Humans is deeply useless. Watch anything else.”

Moore’s fellow filmmaker Josh Fox, in an epic unraveling of the film’s endless lies, got in one of the best shots: “Releasing this on the eve of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary is like Bernie Sanders endorsing Donald Trump while chugging hydroxychloroquine.”

Here’s long-time solar activist (and, oh yeah, the guy who wrote “Heart of Gold“) Neil Young:
“The amount of damage this film tries to create (succeeding in the VERY short term) will ultimately bring light to the real facts, which are turning up everywhere in response to Michael Moore’s new erroneous and headline grabbing TV publicity tour of misinformation. A very damaging film to the human struggle for a better way of living, Moore’s film completely destroys whatever reputation he has earned so far.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/bill-mckibben-climate-movement-michael-moore-993073/amp/

Inside Climate News 30th April 2020, 6 Things Michael Moore’s ‘Planet of the Humans’ Gets Wrong. The documentary’s “facts” are deceptive and misleading, not to mention way out
of date. Filmmaker Michael Moore’s new documentary purports to expose hypocrisy at the heart of the renewable energy movement. But the video, released on YouTube last week, is a mess of deceptive and outdated anecdotes, and a succession of ridiculous arguments. It will almost
certainly do far more harm than good in the struggle to reduce carbon emissions.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29042020/inside-clean-energy-michael-moore-planet-of-the-humans-review

Observer 3rd May 2020, Planet of the Humans is an environmental documentary that has enraged
renewable energy experts and environmentalists, with some calling for its high-profile executive producer, Michael Moore, to apologise. It was released for free less than two weeks ago, and at the time of writing had had close to 5m views on YouTube. Across its 102 minutes, the film’s
producer and narrator, Jeff Gibbs, weaves a disjointed narrative that renewable energy is just as bad as fossil fuels, high-profile environmentalists are corrupted by capitalism and population growth is the great unspoken enemy. “It is truly demoralising how much damage this film has done at a moment when many are ready for deep change,” said the Canadian activist and journalist Naomi Klein.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/03/once-again-michael-moore-stirs-the-environmental-pot-but-conservationists-turn-up-the-heat-on-him

May 3, 2020 Posted by Christina MacPherson | renewable, spinbuster | 2 Comments

Half of highly radioactive exhaust stack dismantled at Fukushima Nuclear Reactor 1

Asahi Shimbun 30th April 2020, Work to dismantle the upper half of an exhaust stack at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant finished on April 29, the first time a
structure highly contaminated by radiation was dismantled at the plant. The
chimney, which is 120 meters tall and about 3 meters in diameter, was used
for the No. 1 and No. 2 reactors of the plant, operated by Tokyo Electric
Power Co. On the morning of April 29, workers spent an hour to lower sliced
parts of the stack to the ground from a height of about 60 meters. With its
upper half removed, the chimney now stands 59 meters high.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13339580

May 3, 2020 Posted by Christina MacPherson | Fukushima continuing | Leave a comment

Petersberg Climate Dialogue to be held virtually this year

Sustainable Recovery**

Livestream recording of “Financing Climate Ambition in the context of
COVID-19”. A sustained green, resilient recovery from COVID-19 requires
significant investments to scale and achieve economy-wide transformation,
particularly in developing and emerging markets. Delivering this
sustainable recovery and creating new opportunities for growth will involve
accelerating the transition towards a low-carbon, resilient future that is
already underway.

Since its inception in 2010, the Petersberg Climate
Dialogue has provided a forum for high-level political discussions,
focusing both on the international climate negotiations and on advancing
climate action on the ground.

This year, the Petersberg Climate Dialogue
will be held virtually for the first time, and will focus on climate
ambition in the context of a green, resilient recovery. See, in particular
Mark Carmey from 41.43 He asks “what can we do to drice climate finance
in support of the transition to a net zero economy?” A related question
is what will be the economics of a post-Covid world? The new economy will
require a massive reallocation of capital. It provides an opportunity to
require companies and sectors to have net zero transition plans. The aim of
his work on Cop-26 is to ensure that every financial decision takes climate
into account. 120 countries have committed to net zero. That means every
company, every sector, every pension fund in those countries should have a
net zero plan which it has disclosed. When countries are designing their
recovery strategies they would do well to use this new financial framework
that is centred around the transition to net zero because that will amplify
the effectiveness. Once the war against Covid in won our ambition should be
to build a planet fit for our grandchildren.

Climate Policy Initiative 29th April 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sLyUMokSvI

Top regulator who steered banks’ revival after last crash has a new crisis
mission: ‘My green energy plan to spark the economy back to life’. With the
oil price at record lows, Lord Turner concedes that fossil fuels ‘are
suddenly going to look cheap’ as travel resumes – potentially making a
switch to cleaner energy less attractive. But he is adamant that investment
in green fuel would create jobs and give Britain’s post-coronavirus economy
a much-needed boost. For instance, a jobs cull in North Sea oil could be
offset by transferring workers with marine engineering skills to building
bases for offshore windfarms, he says. ‘North-west Europe is blessed with
huge amounts of offshore wind potential, and both the UK and the rest of
Europe should be planning for massive offshore wind developments in the
North Sea that can give us green electricity at a low price,’ he says.
‘It’s a huge strategic opportunity.’ When pressed on whether the Government
should bail out struggling companies, rather than letting some firms fail,
it’s the first time his smooth theorising is rattled. ‘I’m not getting into
the specifics of individual companies,’ he says testily. ‘But any company
that receives a bailout should have green targets attached.’

Daily Mail 2nd May 2020

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/news/article-8280895/Lord-Turner-green-energy-plan-economy-life.html

May 3, 2020 Posted by Christina MacPherson | ANTARCTICA, climate change | Leave a comment

Solar heating

Renew Extra 2nd May 2020, Dave Elliott: Solar power prospects are looking good, but for solar heat as
well as solar electricity. It is clear than solar photovoltaic power generation is booming around the world, with over 580 GW of PV solar installed by the end of 2019, and much more expected, but it’s worth noting that there is also a large amount of direct solar heating system capacity in use (470 GW thermal), and that too is also growing.

Most of this capacity is in the form of standard roof-top solar heat collectors, with China in the lead (330 GWth), but large community-scaled solar heating arrays have been developed in Europe and elsewhere, some of them linked to
large inter-seasonal heat stores, allowing summer heat to be used for winter warming via local district heating networks.

Denmark has been a leader in this field, with its flagship 13.5 MW Marstal project and many others. The heat stores typically involve large lined pits with floating insulating covers for heat retention. In most cases, the solar input
augments heat supplied by other means, including from biomass combustion, but new approaches are being adopted which enhance the solar and bioenergy input using large heat pumps. Although (fossil) gas fired heating still often has the edge, solar heating with heat stores can be competitive with other heating sources if district heating networks already exists, as they do in Denmark. And of course the carbon emissions associated with using
fossil gas are then avoided.https://renewextraweekly.blogspot.com/2020/05/solar-heats-up.html

May 3, 2020 Posted by Christina MacPherson | 2 WORLD, renewable | Leave a comment