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Nuclear waste transport , and legal action – UK

CORE Briefing 17th Sept 2020, With both the Pacific Egret and Grebe back in Barrow docks after their stints at Falmouth and Rosyth ship yards for safety and fitness Certification checks, return high level nuclear waste shipments from Sellafield to Germany will resume this autumn. A shipment due to take place in March this year was cancelled and its transit permit withdrawn by Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer to avoid the risk of Covid 90 infection to 6000 federal police officers needed to guard its safety.
But In a letter to Friends of the Earth Hesse on 15/9/20 the Federal Office for Nuclear Safety and Nuclear Waste Disposal ordered the immediate re-issuing of the transport permit for a new date this autumn. The group has announced it will fight this decision in court. A total of 3 shipments containing seven castors containing highly radioactive nuclear waste resulting from German spent fuel reprocessing at Sellafield will travel by rail along the West Cumbrian coast to the port of Barrow in Furness, loaded onto one of the INS (NDA subsidiary) ships and carried to the German port of Nordenham. From there it will travel by rail to the interim storage facility at Biblis nuclear power plant.

Due to numerous safety issues with storage of high-level waste at Biblis, the BUND Hessen has filed a lawsuit saying it will take legal action against the now reinstated transport licence. With last Sunday’s local German elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, the Greens achieved a record result with 20% and there will be green mayors in the former capital Bonn, Münster and the anti-nuclear stronghold Aachen.

http://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Plain-sailing.docx

September 19, 2020 Posted by | Legal, safety, UK, wastes | Leave a comment

The revolving door between government members and the nuclear industry

New nuclear role for former Cabinet minister, News and Star , By Federica BedendoReporter   A former Cabinet minister has been appointed as the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s social value specialist.18th September

Hazel Blears will provide advice to the whole of the NDA group on how to increase the social, economic and environmental impact of its work to decommission and clean up the UK’s oldest nuclear sites.

She is a nationally recognised expert in this field and is chairman of the Social Investment Business and a trustee of the Social Mobility Foundation. Ms Blears is also a former cabinet minister and, during her time as an MP, was one of the authors of the Social Value Act……. https://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/18725570.new-nuclear-role-former-cabinet-minister/

September 19, 2020 Posted by | politics, UK | Leave a comment

Plutonium in Hinkley nuclear mud dumping, but National Resources Wales’ call for full testing is ignored

September 19, 2020 Posted by | environment, UK | Leave a comment

U.S. general says that North Korea has a ”small” number of nuclear weapons (over 70?)

September 19, 2020 Posted by | North Korea, weapons and war | Leave a comment

While other nations seek conciliation, agreement, the U.S. will declare that all international sanctions are back in force

September 19, 2020 Posted by | Iran, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

USA DID have a plan to drop 80 nuclear weapons on Nortrh Korea

Yes, The United States DidDraw Up A Plan To Drop 80 Nuclear Weapons On North Korea, In 2017, a war between North Korea and the United States was “much closer than anyone would know,” President Trump claims. The Drive BY THOMAS NEWDICK, SEPTEMBER 18, 2020. 
Current nuclear war plans are among any nuclear-armed military’s most closely guarded secrets. Details of one such attack plan recently became available, however, revealing that the United States envisaged using 80 nuclear weapons in case of war with North Korea. The way this particular detail emerged is also pretty unusual — the associated passage appeared in U.S. journalist Bob Woodward’s book Rage, detailing President Trump’s administration, which was published this week.

This can be read two ways: a potential attack from the North could involve the use of 80 nuclear weapons, or the same number of weapons can be envisaged as a possible U.S. response to a first strike ordered by Pyongyang.

In an interview with NPR, Woodward cleared up any confusion, noting that the 80 nuclear weapons were part of a U.S. attack plan — OPLAN 5027, which would include ‘decapitating’ the North Korean regime of dictator Kim Jong-un.

“I think given North Korea is a rogue nation, they have, as I report, probably a couple of dozen nuclear weapons well-hidden and concealed,” Woodward explained to NPR. The veteran journalist confirmed that the then U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis was worried he might have to issue orders for a nuclear strike on North Korea. “The potential we’d have to shoot to prevent a second launch was real,” Mattis admitted.
“You’re going to incinerate a couple million people,” Mattis told himself, according to Woodward. “No person has the right to kill a million people as far as I’m concerned, yet that’s what I have to confront.” 
According to Woodward, Trump was worried that shooting down a North Korean ballistic missile (nuclear-armed or otherwise) on a trajectory headed toward the United States could prompt a full-scale nuclear attack from the “Hermit Kingdom.” Woodward writes that Trump had delegated authority to Jim Mattis to launch a conventionally armed interceptor missile to shoot down any North Korean missile that might be headed for the United States.

Woodward said that Mattis confided in him that he was not worried that Trump might launch a preemptive strike against North Korea. Instead, the source of his angst was the North Korean leader in Pyongyang.

In fact, such was Mattis’s level of concern that he would sleep in his gym clothes, Woodward claims. “There was a light in his bathroom… if he was in the shower and they detected a North Korean launch.”

There were alarm bells set up in Mattis’s bedroom and kitchen too, and on more than one occasion during the summer of 2017 they sounded the alert, and he entered the communications room in his Washington DC residency. Woodward explains that Mattis’s car was also constantly followed by an SUV with a team equipped to plot the flight path of any incoming missile, whether it was threatening Japan, South Korea, or the United States. If Mattis considered the missile hostile, he had a mobile communications link to issue launch orders to shoot it down. …………

Clearly, the status of a nuclear-armed North Korea provided much pause for thought within the U.S. administration during Mattis’ tenure as Secretary of Defense. That a strike plan against North Korea involving 80 nuclear weapons was discussed between the president and his defense secretary isn’t all that hard to imagine………..

One of the options under consideration in Washington was OPLAN 5015, a nuclear strike to take out the North Korean leadership, which Woodward also refers to, drawing again from his extensive interviews with Trump. Specifically, Woodward mentions “updating” such a plan — after all, Kim Jong-un and his predecessors will have always been priority targets in the case of an all-out war. ……………… https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36519/yes-the-united-states-did-draw-up-a-plan-to-drop-80-nuclear-weapons-on-north-korea

September 19, 2020 Posted by | North Korea, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

USA taxpayers set up by government in the effort to save uneconomic nuclear power

September 19, 2020 Posted by | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

September 18 Energy News — geoharvey

Opinion: ¶ “The Climate Alarms Are Blaring – Are People Not Hearing Them?” • One has to wonder – are we unable to perceive the climate’s warning signs? As human beings, we have the ability to learn that for every action, there is a reaction. However, it seems that we as a species are choosing […]

September 18 Energy News — geoharvey

September 19, 2020 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Grief in Western America, as inequities, wildfires, and climate change collide

Climate Grief Is Burning Across the American West
Climate change is making wildfires bigger, fiercer, and deadlier, fueling a new kind of despair on the West Coast—and beyond.   Wired  16 Sept 20,
GRIEF HAS SETTLED over the western US, along with the thick haze of smoke pouring from dozens of massive wildfires up and down California, Oregon, Colorado, and Washington. It’s grief over the thousands of structures and at least 33 lives lost so far; grief over another villain conspiring with Covid-19 to lock people indoors; grief that the orange-hued dystopia of Blade Runner is now a reality in smoky San Francisco; grief over losing any sense of normalcy, or indeed a clear future.Enveloping all of those emotions—packaging them into an overwhelming feeling of doom—is climate grief, as psychologists call it, the dread that humans have thoroughly corrupted the planet, and that the planet is now exacting its revenge. Wildfires were around before human-made climate change, but by pulling a variety of strings, it’s made them bigger, fiercer, and ultimately deadlier, creating what fire historian Steve Pyne has dubbed the Pyrocene, an Age of Flames.

By burning fossil fuels, we’ve primed the landscape to burn explosively, and by pushing human communities deeper and deeper into what was once wilderness, we’re provided plenty of opportunities for ignition—and plenty of opportunities for grief as these forces catastrophically combine.

“So much is out of our control,” says Adrienne Heinz, a research psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, who studies the effects of disasters like wildfires and the Covid-19 pandemic. “We lose our sense of personal agency over how we will live—the decisions are made for us.”

It shifts from grief over what’s happening with our climate—can we feel safe in our own communities?—to despair, the differentiator being that you don’t feel like tomorrow is going to be any better than today,” Heinz adds. “That’s where it gets really dark.”

For the people of Northern California, an exhausting parade of massive wildfires have marched across the landscape over the past several autumns, with many people having to evacuate several years in a row. Last October, the Kincade Fire burned 120 square miles. The November before, the Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 86 people. And in October 2017, the Tubbs Fire obliterated 5,600 structures and killed 22.

“The catchphrase—kind of with a bitterness around here—is, ‘This is the new normal,’” says Barbara Young, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Healdsburg, north of San Francisco, who had to evacuate last month. “And so with that, I think it’s implied that this isn’t going away—our climate is changing. These aren’t flukes, this is the trend. And I think everyone is very clear that this is not a one-off. This is every year now.”  ……………

Thus inequities, wildfires, and climate change collide. Each massive problem on its own is difficult for the human mind to parse, much less all three together. “I am doing a lot of work with people on really increasing psychological self-care, spiritual self-care, physical self-care, and to help that fatigue,” says Young, the therapist in Healdsburg. “And I do think that is connected with climate grief. Finally, maybe we are forced to see how interconnected everything is.”  https://www.wired.com/story/climate-grief-is-burning-across-the-american-west/

September 17, 2020 Posted by | climate change, psychology - mental health, USA | 1 Comment

Western Canadians do not want ”Small” nuclear reactors in Sakatchewan

Premier asks Trudeau to support nuclear reactors in upcoming throne speech, Yorkton This Week Michael Bramadat-Willcock – Local Journalism Initiative (Canada’s National Observer) / Yorkton This Week, SEPTEMBER 16, 2020 Premier Scott Moe has sent a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau outlining Saskatchewan’s priorities ahead of the federal throne speech on Sept. 23. In it, he is asking Trudeau to support nuclear development in the province.

Moe wants the development of small modular nuclear reactors, also known as SMRs, in Saskatchewan to be part of Trudeau’s green agenda. ……..

In December, Moe signed a memorandum of understanding with the premiers of Ontario and New Brunswick to work together on further developing the nuclear industry.  ……..

In his letter, the premier also focused on support for the oil and gas sectors, and pushed for pausing the carbon tax.

The Supreme Court of Canada will hear arguments on the federal carbon tax at the same time as the throne speech is delivered. …………

But western Canadians don’t all see eye-to-eye on the deployment of nuclear reactors, even small ones.

Committee for Future Generations outreach co-ordinator Candyce Paul of La Plonge at the English River First Nation earlier told Canada’s National Observer that while they haven’t been consulted on any aspects of the plan, all signs point to the north as a site for the reactors.

On Tuesday, Paul called it ironic that Moe spoke of western alienation from Ottawa when many in the north feel the same way about Regina.

“Trudeau, please represent the people of northern Saskatchewan because Scott Moe does not,” Paul said.

Paul’s group fights nuclear waste storage in Saskatchewan and was instrumental in stopping a proposal that considered Beauval, Pinehouse and Creighton as storage locations in 2011.

“When we informed the communities that they were looking at planning to bury nuclear waste up here in 2011, once they learned what that entailed, everybody said, ‘No way.’ Eighty per cent of the people in the north said, ‘No way, absolutely not.’ It didn’t matter if they worked for Cameco or the other mines. They said, if it comes here, we will not support it coming here,” Paul said in an interview last month. ………..

Paul said the intent behind using SMRs is anything but green and that the real goal is to prop up Saskatchewan’s ailing uranium industry and develop oilsands in the northwest.

“He’s put it right in the letter. His fear is they’re going to put out a green policy that will hurt the oil and gas sector,” Paul said.

“They’ve been looking for a way to bring the tar sands to northern Saskatchewan. We all know the mess that makes. Using small modular reactors is not lessening the carbon impact.”

She said in August that communities around Canada, and especially in the Far North, have long been pitched as sites for SMR development and nuclear waste storage, but have refused.

“None of our people are going to get trained for operating these. It supports people from other places. It doesn’t really support us,” Paul said.

Paul said on Tuesday that SMRs under 200 megawatts are currently excluded from environmental impact assessments, which means a lack of opportunity for public input.

She also said that interconnected water systems in the north would mean pollution would travel quickly into the ecosystem if there was a mishap at a reactor site.

Brooke Dobni, professor of strategy at the University of Saskatchewan’s Edwards School of Business, told Canada’s National Observer in August that any development of small reactors would take a long time.

“It could be a good thing, but on the other hand, it might have some pitfalls. Those talks take years,” Dobni said.

He said nuclear reactors face bigger challenges that have to be addressed before they can go ahead, such as public support for protecting the environment, the high cost of building infrastructure, and containing nuclear fallout and radiation.

“Anything nuclear is 25 years out if you’re talking about small reactors, those kinds of things to power up the city,” Dobni said.

“That technology is a long ways away and a lot of it’s going to depend on public opinion.

“The court for that is the court of public opinion, whether or not people want that in their own backyard, and that’s the whole issue anywhere in the world.”

On Tuesday, Paul asked the federal government to invest in critical infrastructure instead.

“We need money spent in a serious way. Not on small modular reactors that could happen in 25 years. We need things now. To bring us up to the standards in our health system, we need health facilities. The public doesn’t want the government subsidizing industries that are about to go bust. It’s a waste of money,” Paul said.

“We have extreme needs that aren’t being met by industry and never will be met by industry. Trudeau, put the money where you want to make some real reconciliation happen.”https://www.yorktonthisweek.com/regional-news/premier-asks-trudeau-to-support-nuclear-reactors-in-upcoming-throne-speech-1.24204052

September 17, 2020 Posted by | Canada, opposition to nuclear | Leave a comment

In tropical areas, increasing heat and humidity will make life almost unbearable

September 17, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change, health | 1 Comment

As Hitachi exits the project, UK government to announce funding for Wylfa nuclear project next month

Hitachi Abandons $26 Billion Nuclear Power Project in U.K.  Bloomberg Green, By Stephen Stapczynski  and Rachel Morison16 September 2020, 

  • U.K. due to make statement on financing model next month
  • U.K. government says still committed to building new nuclear

Hitachi Ltd. exited a long-planned U.K. nuclear power project despite the most generous support package for an atomic station in Britain, a bad omen for future projects.

The Japanese company announced Wednesday that it decided to withdraw from the Wylfa power project in Wales, citing a worsening investment environment due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Work has been suspended on the 20 billion-pound ($26 billion) venture since January 2019 after the company failed to reach a financing agreement with the U.K. government.

The decision is the latest setback for nuclear’s revival, which supporters promote as the carbon-free solution for reliable power at a time of growing climate change concerns. Cost overruns and cheaper competition is stifling projects and developers in Japan, the U.S. and the U.K.

Britain is one of a handful of developed countries still building nuclear reactors, with the government putting them at the middle of an effort to attract billions of pounds of investment in new low-carbon power plants and create thousands of jobs. However, financing these prohibitively expensive infrastructure projects has become a hurdle, especially in the face of cheaper natural gas and renewables.

A financing package offered to Hitachi in 2019 wasn’t enough to attract additional private investor interest. The U.K. has been considering a funding model that would have seen the state shouldering more of the construction risk. The outcome of that consultation has been delayed.

The U.K. said it had offered a package that “went well beyond what any government has been willing to consider in the past.” Atomic energy still forms a key plank of energy policy including in small and advanced modular reactors.

A financing package offered to Hitachi in 2019 wasn’t enough to attract additional private investor interest. The U.K. has been considering a funding model that would have seen the state shouldering more of the construction risk. The outcome of that consultation has been delayed.

The U.K. said it had offered a package that “went well beyond what any government has been willing to consider in the past.” Atomic energy still forms a key plank of energy policy including in small and advanced modular reactors.

Prospects for the Wylfa plant looked more optimistic last month when Horizon Nuclear Power Ltd., Hitachi’s subsidiary developing the project, said it was engaged with the U.K. government on reviving the project.

The future of how the U.K. finances new nuclear is expected to be announced in the government’s long anticipated energy white paper next month……… https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-16/hitachi-abandons-u-k-nuclear-power-project-in-blow-to-industry

September 17, 2020 Posted by | business and costs, politics, UK | Leave a comment

Huge costs of decommissioning Britain’s ”Magnox” nuclear failities just keep going up

UK spending watchdog warns on costs of cleaning up old nuclear plants
Decommissioning charge has risen by £3bn since 2017 and there remains ‘inherent uncertainty’ over final bill, NAO finds,
Nathalie Thomas in Edinburgh,  SEPTEMBER 11 2020,  Estimates of the cost to clear up 12 of the UK’s earliest nuclear power sites have increased by nearly £3bn since 2017 and there remains “inherent uncertainty” over the final bill, the country’s public spending watchdog has warned.

The National Audit Office on Friday published its latest report into the long-running saga around the decommissioning of two research sites and 10 early nuclear power stations in Britain, which came to be known as the “Magnox” plants due to the magnesium alloy that was used to cover the fuel rods inside their reactors.
 The spending watchdog also found that the costs to the taxpayer of a botched 2014 tender process to outsource the decommissioning to the private sector was £20m higher than when it last investigated three years ago. Cleaning up the Magnox sites, which were built before privatisation and include Hunterston A in Scotland and Hinkley Point A in Somerset, has turned into a costly and torturous affair.
In 2016 the High Court ruled the 2014 competition for a 14-year contract to decommission the sites — which had been awarded to Cavendish Fluor Partnership, or CFP, a joint venture between UK-based Babcock International and Fluor of the US — had been “fudged” by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, a body attached to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
 A year later ministers, acting on legal advice, terminated the arrangement with CFP nine years early and renegotiated a shorter contract that ran until the end of August 2019. Decommissioning of the sites was then brought in-house by the NDA  .
The NAO’s previous probe in 2017 into the decommissioning concluded that the failed Magnox contract had cost the taxpayer £122m in settlements with unsuccessful bidders, legal costs and staff time. In its latest report on Friday, the watchdog found the NDA had, in addition, agreed to pay up to £20m to exit the contract early, although it praised the authority for renegotiating the agreement under “the challenging circumstances”.
The watchdog also revealed that NDA estimates for the cost of getting all the Magnox plants “cleared and safely enclosed” had increased by up to £2.7bn to as much as £8.7bn since 2017. It added that costs are “likely to be subject to further change, largely because of the inherent uncertainties involved in cleaning up the UK’s nuclear sites”. Once the reactors and waste stores are sealed, the sites are kept secure for a period potentially as long as 80 years for radiation levels to decay. In 2014, the same costs had been estimated at £3.8bn..  …….. https://www.ft.com/content/6f313c84-d314-4160-b124-a68c4e85be09

September 17, 2020 Posted by | business and costs, UK, wastes | Leave a comment

Indigenous woman’s long trek to protest nuclear waste dump, and encourage others.

Concerns about nuclear waste near Ignace, Ont., prompts one woman to hit the pavement , Darlene Necan says not enough Indigenous people raising their concerns over nuclear repository

Jeff Walters · CBC News ·Sep 16, 2020   One woman’s concern over a proposed nuclear waste repository near Ignace, Ont., means she will walk hundreds of kilometres to raise awareness about the project.

For the past decade, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) has engaged the Township of Ignace, and eight nearby First Nations to determine if the area is interested in hosting the repository.

Darlene Necan, a member of the Ojibways of Saugeen First Nation in Savant Lake, about 150 kilometres north of Ignace, said she has concerns over what the project could do to the water in the area.

“The amount of people here are very terrified and scared. Nobody will stand up to nothing,” she said.

Necan has so far walked from Ignace to Savant Lake, and plans to continue on to Sioux Lookout, before looping back to Ignace.

“We did meet up with the tourist camp owners along the way,” she said, referring to camp operators on Highway 599.

“They are in support because they said how are we going to invite the Americans or people from other countries to come fish in our nuke waters now. They say stuff like that.”

Necan said many members of her community have not been engaged in any discussion of nuclear waste – but she said that falls at the hands of Chief and Council, not the NWMO.

We’re still at a loss about this nuclear thing, so a lot of people cannot say that we’re in the wrong for standing up to it. We’re at a loss, because the leadership past, have never consulted, we never even consented to it.”…………..https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/ignace-ontario-nuclear-walk-1.5725341

September 17, 2020 Posted by | Canada, indigenous issues, PERSONAL STORIES, wastes | Leave a comment

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigating FirstEnergy over its involvement in the Ohio nuclear corruption scandal

Now the SEC is investigating FirstEnergy and Ohio’s $1 billion nuclear bailout bill: This Week in the CLE, By Laura Johnston, cleveland.comCLEVELAND, Ohio — Who’s investigating FirstEnergy, in relation to the $1 billion nuclear bailout bill?

We’re talking about the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission investigation on This Week in the CLE…….

September 17, 2020 Posted by | Legal, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment