French corporation EDF will close down all 7 of its advanced gas-cooled reactor nuclear power stations in Britain within the next decade.
French-based global power developer EDF Energy vowed to put all seven of its advanced gas-cooled reactor nuclear power stations in the United Kingdom into the defueling and decommissioning stages within the next decade.
The company’s agreement with the UK government calls for shutting down the AGR stations by 2030. At that point EDF’s generating capacitywill consist of Sizewell B, HPC, potentially Sizewell C (currently under construction) and renewables including solar, onshore and offshore wind.
Power Engineering 25th June 2021
‘Strong Evidence’ Links Uranium Mining to Lung Cancer
The U.S. Nuclear Weapons Program Left ‘a Horrible Legacy’ of Environmental Destruction and Death Across the Navajo Nation Inside Climate News, By Cheyanne M. Daniels, Amanda Rooker, June 27, 2021 ”………………….‘Strong Evidence’ Links Uranium Mining to Lung Cancer
Uranium mining began in the Southwest in 1944, when the United States no longer wanted to depend on foreign sourcing of the uranium that was needed for nuclear research and weapons development as part of the Manhattan Project, the secret World War II effort to develop the atomic bomb. The federal government was the sole purchaser of uranium ore until 1971, but private companies operated the mines.
Navajo miners were not fully informed about the dangers of uranium mining specifically, despite the fact that scientists had concluded by the late 1930s that uranium mining caused lung cancer, even if debate existed about exactly why, according to a 2002 study published in the American Journal of Public Health. The miners were not informed about the potential risks of their work.
The investigation focused on white miners, although mortality rates were reported for non-white miners. One study looked at 3,238 white miners, while a second involved 757 non-whites, mainly Navajos. The studies were performed without the consent of the workers.
In both white and non-white cohorts, “strong evidence” was found for an increased incidence of lung cancer. In the study of 757 non-white miners, 10 deaths were expected, but 34 were documented, meaning researchers found more than three times the number of lung cancer deaths than they expected.
Tommy Reed, 64, a member of the Navajo Radiation Victims Committee who began working in a uranium mine when he was in high school, said his father was one of the Navajo miners studied.
“They studied my father and a lot of the men … and ladies that were in the mines there,” Reed said. “My dad, like many other men that were (miners), spent nine months on a ventilator. How much more of our story can cut deep, where one can comprehend the struggle that we have?”
For Reed, extending the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act isn’t to place blame but to ensure that other miners, uranium workers and downwinders are compensated for illnesses related to radiation exposure. But if he had to place blame, Reed said, he would point to the federal agencies that allowed the mining to take place and the related illnesses to go undiagnosed and untreated.
“They knew, and they had numbers on them. They studied, it’s on the books, there were human experimentations,” said Reed.
“We’re just five-finger people,” he said, using a Navajo word for human beings. “But these five-finger people are the ones that they relied on, the people that are most expendable.”
In response to this legacy of environmental destruction, death and racism, the Navajo Nation Council passed the Diné Natural Resources Protection Act in 2005 to mandate that “no further damage to the culture, society and economy of the Navajo Nation occurs because of uranium processing until all adverse economic, environmental and human health effects from past uranium mining” have been eliminated or substantially reduced……………… https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27062021/nuclear-weapons-navajo-nation-uranium-mining-environmental-destruction-health/
Key Witness in US Case Against Assange Changes His Story, by Joe Lauria — Rise Up Times
“This is the end of the case against Julian Assange.” -Edward Snowden
Key Witness in US Case Against Assange Changes His Story, by Joe Lauria — Rise Up Times
What Is It Costing to Build Armageddon? by Bill Adamski and Jay Kvale — Rise Up Times
“Demonstrating dramatic downsizing by way of example, both superpowers can jointly demand that the seven other nuclear states follow.”
What Is It Costing to Build Armageddon? by Bill Adamski and Jay Kvale — Rise Up Times
Nuclear fusion’s unlikely future, – too late for climate action
Fusion- next steps for the UK, 26 June 21, Nuclear fusion is being talked up as the next big energy thing- although it remains some way off and there are many technical and economic question marks. But Boris Johnson is evidently a fan. The UK government, keen to maintain headway in this field after the UK’s exit from Euratom, has set aside £222m for the development of new fusion technology.
It has also asked local authorities to nominate potential sites for a prototype fusion plant, based on the MAST Tokamak developed at Culham in Oxfordshire. The Atomic Energy Authority will assess the sites before making recommendation to the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Candidate sites for the ‘Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production’ (STEP) project include Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, Nottinghamshire and Aberthaw Power Station, near Barry, in Wales. With there being concerns about local job as coal plants close, new projects like this are obviously attractive, but the STEP programme is fairly leisurely, with a commercial-scale plant not being expected until 2040.
The basic requirement for a viable fusion plant is to be able to sustain fusion reactions between relatively easily obtained hydrogen isotopes in a plasma of superhot gas for long enough to get more energy out than is needed to run the system. ITER, a very big 500MW rated conventional helical tokamak prototype, is being built with international support in France, but the STEP programme offers a possibly faster route using a much smaller spherical device. To make that viable you need higher power superconducting magnets to sustain/contain the plasma. The STEPs team have come up with a way to put thin layers of superconducting rare-earth barium copper oxide (ReBCO) on metal tape. The team says that the technology should be deployable in a test fusion pilot plant ‘in the early 2030s’.
However, they are not alone. First Light, an Oxford University spin off company based in an industrial park in Oxford, are developing a novel inertia confinement system. And Canadian company General Fusion is to build and operate a demonstation Magnetised Target fusion plant plant at UKAEA’s Culham Campus near Oxford. It involves injecting hydrogen plasma into a liquid metal sphere, where it is compressed and heated so that fusion occurs. The company, which is backed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, says its goal is to bring fusion energy to the world by the early 2030s. There are also pioneering projects underway in the USA and elsewhere – some with 2030 targets. Though there is some debate over target criteria and what counts as operational success- presumably a real total energy gain. And also debates over safety, security, environmental impacts and of course costs.
It is very early days for these novel technologies, but there have been assessments made of health and safety risk factors in relation to ITER-type reactors, a key one being the creation of X and gamma ray activated containment materials from the powerful internal radiation fluxes. So, as a Nature paper explained, even though they will be shorter lived than the waste produced by fission reactors, ITER-type plants will produce wastes that have to be dealt with, and will need shielding and careful access control to protect workers and the public. All of which will add to the cost.
It is rare to see much in the way of convincing analysis of costs – with so many different still developing technologies and little work done yet on exactly how the neutron energy released by fusion reactors would be converted to electricity, it’s too early to say. ITER’s web site says that the average cost per kilowatt of electricity is expected to be similar to that from a nuclear fission plant ‘slightly more expensive at the beginning, when the technology is new, and less expensive as economies of scale bring the costs down’.
However, there are other views: one study in 2018 put the estimated mid-range capital cost of an ITER-type commercial plant at roughly twice that from on shore wind, although it claimed that the average cost of energy would be similar, while it would be cheaper than wind when external (impact) costs were added. That is very surprising and seems to be based on the assumption that fusion plants’ external impacts would be tiny, whereas it has been argued that there could be significant issues e.g. from the release of radioactive tritium.
The smaller inertia confinement systems may of course turn out to be cheaper since they do not need large complex energy-hungry magnetic containment systems. First Light has claimed that it could deliver a Levelised Cost Of Energy (LCOE) as low as $25/MWh compared with $100/MWh for conventional nuclear energy and up to $50/MWh for onshore wind. However, that is all very speculative, whereas one thing has been clear, year by year renewables like wind and especially solar PV are getting cheaper.
Despite all these uncertainties and concerns over technical and operational viability, there is a lot of optimism about fusion, for both ITER and for the national programmes going on in parallel. However, it sometime involves over-egged media attention alluding to imminent breakthroughs. In reality, ITERs development programme stretches out decades ahead, with the first test run maybe in 2035, but, even if all goes well, it seems from project planning reports that a commercial-scale ITER follow up is not likely to be available to feed power to the grid until well after 2050!
However, some of smaller rival projects may beat it to the market. In that regard, the UK and USA are reputedly in something of a race and China and South Korea are also in the game. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. There have been some perhaps rather optimistic claims by developers. For example, in 2014 Lockheed claimed that for their ‘compact fusion’ programme they were aiming for a ‘prototype in 5 years, defence products in 10, clean power for the world in 20 years’. That raised some eyebrows. It will probably take longer that that for any of the schemes. Possibly much longer. In which case there is no way that fusion can help deal with the urgent problem of climate change, which raises the question – why is so much being spent on it? Perhaps $20 billion globally so far and at least that again now likely to be invested in new research programmes.
It may be reasonable to mount smallish long-term programmes, since, at some point in the future, we may need a power source for deep space travel, not least to get access to the helium 3 from the asteroids in order to run fusion reactors: given its use for electric vehicles, we may run out of lithium for tritium production. But why bother with the huge effort to get fusion plants running on earth? We have the sun, a free fusion reactor in the sky, that delivers all the energy we could ever need, without charge. And the technology needed to use it is available now, not, at the very best for fusion, in a decade or two, and more likely not until 40 years on…
Renew Extra Weekly 26th June 2021
https://renewextraweekly.blogspot.com/2021/06/fusion-next-steps-for-uk.html
High school lobbyists ‘thrilled’ as Winnipeg unanimously supports ban on nuclear weapons,
CBC News · Jun 27, 2021 Two Winnipeg high school students are “thrilled” after their campaign to get the city’s support for a ban on nuclear weapons got council’s unanimous backing.
“We were both thrilled because this is months and months of work,” Avinashpall Singh said of Thursday’s vote.
Singh and classmate Rooj Ali started working in March toward their goal of getting the City of Winnipeg’s support for the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as part of the youth-led International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons Cities Appeal.
High school lobbyists ‘thrilled’ as Winnipeg unanimously supports ban on nuclear weapons,
City joins 14 others across Canada in backing UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/winnipeg-city-council-supports-nuclear-ban-unanimously-1.6082203
CBC News · Jun 27, 2021 Two Winnipeg high school students are “thrilled” after their campaign to get the city’s support for a ban on nuclear weapons got council’s unanimous backing.
“We were both thrilled because this is months and months of work,” Avinashpall Singh said of Thursday’s vote.
Singh and classmate Rooj Ali started working in March toward their goal of getting the City of Winnipeg’s support for the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as part of the youth-led International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons Cities Appeal.
That campaign looks to gain support at a municipal level for the first legally binding international agreement to ban nuclear weapons.
They got endorsements from organizations including the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the Rotary Club of Winnipeg and Manitoba’s Mennonite Central Committee, and gave presentations to city committees and councillors across Winnipeg — all while balancing homework and other commitments at River East Collegiate.
It’s a cause the students have been working on for years, they told CBC’s Weekend Morning Show host Stephanie Cram on Sunday.
“This cause is incredibly important for us because, among other things that our generation will be inheriting, it will still be a world still full of nuclear weapons. And so we aren’t going to stay silent as this happens,” Singh said.
“I think by far the most important reason is that [a nuclear incident] doesn’t have to be with intent. It could also be through an accident that something catastrophic could happen. And so [if we’re] trying to eliminate that risk totally, disarmament is the only guarantee toward that. No other solution exists.”
Ali says she hopes their achievement with city council inspires other young people to get involved in issues that matter to them.
“No cause or activism work is too impossible to achieve,” Ali said.
“The key to making change is to start. And we started this not knowing where it could end up, but we took it so far and we’re so happy for that.”
The move means Winnipeg joins 14 other Canadian cities, including Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, in support of the nuclear weapons prohibition treaty, the campaign’s website says.
However, while Canada has said it’s committed to nuclear disarmament, it has so far not signed the UN treaty.
Ali says that’s why getting Winnipeg’s support felt like such a win — it added one more city to the list of those willing to go on the record that it stands in support of the ban, and potentially sends a message to Ottawa.
“Not one city is going to make a difference,” she said.
“But when more cities do it — especially here in Canada, as Winnipeg joins the list — then hopefully we can turn that conversation up to the national level and make this a priority, because right now it’s not as discussed as it should be and that needs to change.”
The biggest issue is still awareness, so Ali and Singh’s work isn’t done yet. Next, they say they plan to take the campaign to other cities and municipalities in Manitoba and Canada.
Radioactive Waste Contaminates the Land and Water
The U.S. Nuclear Weapons Program Left ‘a Horrible Legacy’ of Environmental Destruction and Death Across the Navajo Nation Inside Climate News, By Cheyanne M. Daniels, Amanda Rooker, June 27, 2021 ”……………Radioactive Waste Contaminates the Land and Water
Uranium is recovered from the earth in two ways. The first is conventional mining of the ore, in which miners dig the rock out of open pits that strip away the topsoil. The second, which is the most common extraction method in the United States, pumps chemicals into groundwater to dissolve uranium from the rock, known as “situ leaching.”
After the extraction, the ore is taken to mills, where it is crushed, ground up and dissolved to be solidified, dried and packaged.
Regardless of the extraction method, mining and milling uranium leaves behind radioactive waste that contaminates water and the land, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Waste from open pit mines is often left in piles outside the mine, while tailings from the milling process remain radioactive and contain hazardous chemicals.
“Wind can blow radioactive dust from the wastes into populated areas and the wastes can contaminate surface water used for drinking. Some sites also have considerable groundwater contamination,” according to the EPA website.
The EPA is conducting water studies at three areas on the reservation that have been affected by historical mining to “inform future investigations and potential cleanups by EPA and private parties.”
The Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education said in a June 2020 study that while high concentrations of uranium and arsenic may be found naturally in some areas, contamination is “especially troublesome on the Navajo Nation, where past (uranium) mining activity may have contaminated water supplies.”
Out of 82 unregulated wells sampled for the study, nine exceeded the maximum contaminant level for drinking water standards for uranium and 14 exceeded standards for arsenic. Because of these contaminants, a study published by the Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology in March 2020 found that nearly 30 percent of Navajo homes had to rely on hauling water to meet their needs.
The lack of drinking water affects not only the Navajo living on the reservation, but their livestock and land usability, as well.
The EPA began investigating the effects of the uranium mines in the Cove region in January 2015, after a settlement from Tronox, a company spun off from Kerr-McGee in 2006, provided almost $4.4 billion for cleanup of more than 50 abandoned uranium mines. Forty-two of the mines are on or near the Navajo Nation, which received $45 million in the settlement, and 32 are in the Cove area, where more than 7 million tons of ore were mined, according to the EPA.
The funds allowed for the assessment and cleanup of 230 of the 523 abandoned uranium mines across the reservation, which is ongoing. In the Northern Abandoned Uranium Mine Region, where the Cove Chapter is located, 121 of the 229 mines are targeted in the cleanup process.
Kerr-McGee was among the companies that extracted a total of 30 million tons of uranium ore from the Navajo land from 1944 until 1986. In his testimony in March before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Nez, the Navajo Nation president, said that “not a single one” of the 523 abandoned mines on Navajo lands “has been cleaned up properly.” https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27062021/nuclear-weapons-navajo-nation-uranium-mining-environmental-destruction-health/
Iran refuses to give nuclear site images to IAEA
Iran refuses to give nuclear site images to IAEA
Parisa Hafezi, DUBAI, June 27 (Reuters) – The speaker of Iran’s parliament said on Sunday Tehran will never hand over images from inside of some Iranian nuclear sites to the U.N. nuclear watchdog as a monitoring agreement with the agency had expired, Iranian state media reported.
“The agreement has expired … any of the information recorded will never be given to the International Atomic Energy Agency and the data and images will remain in the possession of Iran,” said Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf.
The announcement could further complicate talks between Iran and six major powers on reviving a 2015 nuclear deal……………… https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-says-nuclear-site-images-wont-be-given-iaea-deal-has-expired-2021-06-27/
Iran says Nuclear Deal Salvageable But Will Not Negotiate Forever
 |
Iran Says Nuclear Deal Salvageable But Will Not Negotiate Forever NDTV, 27 June 21,
Iran and the US have been holding indirect talks on reviving the 2015 agreement between Tehran and six powers that imposed restrictions on Tehran’s nuclear activities in exchange for lifting international sanctions.
Dubai:
Iran said on Saturday it believes a reinstatement of its 2015 nuclear deal with major world powers is possible but warned that Tehran “will not negotiate forever”.
“Out of a steadfast commitment to salvage a deal that the US tried to torpedo, Iran has been the most active party in Vienna, proposing most drafts,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said on Twitter, referring to talks aimed at reviving the nuclear deal.
Iran and the United States have been holding indirect talks on reviving the 2015 agreement between Tehran and six powers that imposed restrictions on Tehran’s nuclear activities in exchange for lifting international sanctions. …………. https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/iran-says-nuclear-deal-salvageable-but-will-not-negotiate-forever-2473303
‘Julian Assange indictment is attack on press freedom,’ his father and brother tell St. Paul forum — Rise Up Times
“Reporting truth is not a crime..”
‘Julian Assange indictment is attack on press freedom,’ his father and brother tell St. Paul forum — Rise Up Times
We’re marching at the People’s Assembly demonstration because there’s an alternative to nuclear weapons.
”It has never been more vital that we build the mass movement against nuclear weapons and for peace’..
Kate Hudson is the general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)
This Saturday, from all across the country, tens of thousands of ordinary people will turn out for the People’s Assembly national demonstration.
They’ll do so to demand a new normal because what passes for normality at the moment cannot be allowed to continue. From huge government corruption to an underfunded NHS under threat from privatisation, with billions spent on new nuclear weapons while school children go hungry; this is no way to recover from the pandemic, let alone build the kind of society that is good for everyone to live in.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament will be there of course, because the fundamental argument of the People’s Assembly remains true – austerity is a political choice, government spending is a political choice, and there is no choice more political than allocating billions for nuclear weapons whilst underfunding the NHS and its staff.
And we’ll also be there because we know that, if we are to achieve a world without nuclear weapons, we need to work together across civil society, linking together the demands of our communities and movements, embracing a vision that sees disarmament as part of a more just and peaceful world. Experience over many generations shows that exercising our democratic right to protest is fundamental to achieving progressive change; so our presence on Saturday’s demonstration is also about reasserting that right at a time when the government wants to restrict those liberties.
Our mobilisation for this demo was given impetus by the shock decision by Boris Johnson to increase the UK’s stockpile of nuclear weapons from around 195 warheads to 260 warheads – an increase of more than 40%. This, as well as the brutal assault on the Palestinian people, has energised the peace and anti-war movement. CND has had hundreds of new members, all incensed by the government’s disgraceful priorities during this pandemic, putting weapons of mass destruction before healthcare.
Thanks to a recent legal opinion CND commissioned from leading experts, we can say conclusively that the decision to increase the UK’s nuclear arsenal is illegal under international law, because it breaks the Non-Proliferation Treaty. This violation is also a break with years of stated government policy, under successive Tory and Labour governments which have seen significant nuclear reductions over the past 30 years.
Moreover, the decision, which is likely to cost tens of billions, is out of joint with new international realities. There is a genuine possibility that the U.S. will return to the Iran nuclear deal. Across the world, dozens of countries have adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which came into force at the beginning of the year.
Only last week, Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin declared that ‘a nuclear war should never be fought and could never be won’ – something the UK government is said to have opposed behind the scenes. ……….
It has never been more vital that we build the mass movement against nuclear weapons and for peace. The incompetence and callousness of the Johnson government extends internationally, leaving Britain and the world a more dangerous place.
There is something deeply wrong with a society where the money that could be used to pay nurses and NHS staff decently are instead used to buy and build more weapons of mass destruction. The People’s Assembly demonstration on Saturday is a chance to show we can and must build an alternative
NASA wants to increase allowable radiation exposure for astronauts – women affected most.
“As missions go deeper into space, we need to communicate why astronauts are being asked to take on that risk and offer explicit ethical justifications. This report offers a framework for accomplishing that,”
Report backs NASA proposal to change astronaut radiation exposure limits, Space News, by Jeff Foust — June 25, 2021 WASHINGTON — A National Academies committee has endorsed a NASA proposal to change the radiation exposure limits the agency sets for its astronauts but cautioned that the revised limit is still insufficient for human Mars missions.
The June 24 report by a committee established by the National Academies and sponsored by NASA backs the agency’s proposal to set a single lifetime radiation exposure limit for astronauts, rather than different limits based on age and gender.
Currently, lifetime exposure limits range from 180 millisieverts for a 30-year-old woman to 700 millisieverts for a 60-year-old man. Those limits are based on models intended to set a limit of no more than a 3% risk of radiation exposure-induced death (REID) at the 95% confidence level.
NASA proposed changing that to a limit of about 600 millisieverts, regardless of age or gender. That limit is based on the mean 3% risk of REID for a 35-year-old woman, the most conservative case but measured to a different standard than the earlier calculation.
The change, the committee noted, will allow more opportunities for female astronauts given the higher radiation limits. “Taken together, the proposed standard creates equality of opportunity for spaceflight with the trade-offs of somewhat higher allowable exposure to radiation for a subset of astronauts (primarily women) and limiting exposures below otherwise acceptable doses for others (primarily older men),” the committee’s report stated………
While the revised levels will increase flight opportunities for many NASA astronauts, the levels are still more conservative than many other space agencies. Roscosmos, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency all set lifetime exposure limits of 1,000 millisieverts for their astronauts and cosmonauts, without any age or gender differences. The Japanese space agency JAXA does have age and gender differences, varying between 500 and 1,000 millisieverts.
Even those higher levels fall short of projected radiation exposures for round-trip Mars missions, which the report noted would exceed 1,000 millisieverts. Any astronauts who fly on a Mars mission would need a waiver to NASA’s radiation exposure limits, which raises ethical questions. “NASA should develop a protocol for waiver of the proposed space radiation standard that is judicious, transparent, and informed by ethics,” the committee recommended.
“As missions go deeper into space, we need to communicate why astronauts are being asked to take on that risk and offer explicit ethical justifications. This report offers a framework for accomplishing that,” said Julian Preston of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, vice-chair of the committee, in a statement.https://spacenews.com/report-backs-nasa-proposal-to-change-astronaut-radiation-exposure-limits/
Nuclear power is in the front line of climate change – and NOT in a good way
In the last year, climate models have run hot. As knowledge of enhanced climate sensitivity and polar ice melt-rate evolves, it has become clear that sea-level rise is significantly faster than previously thought, resulting in more frequent and destructive storm, storm surge, severe precipitation, and flooding.
With rare extreme events today becoming the norm in the future, existing risk mitigation measures become increasingly obsolete. The corollary to this analysis is that present and planned UK coastal nuclear installations will be at significant risk.
In other words, nuclear’s lower-carbon electricity USP sits in the context of the much larger picture – that UK coastal nuclear will be one of the first, and most significant, casualties to ramping climate impact. Put simply, UK nuclear is quite literally on the front-line of climate change – and not in a good way.
Nuclear Consultation Group 24th June 2021
Japan’s murky management of Fukushima nuclear wastewater
Japan’s murky management of Fukushima nuclear wastewater https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2021/06/25/japans-murky-management-of-fukushima-nuclear-wastewater/
Author: Cheol Hee Park, SNU
On 13 April 2021, the Japanese government announced plans to dispose of the wastewater stored at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean over a period of 30 years.
The plant has about 1000 wastewater tanks that can hold up to 1.37 million tons of contaminated water. Currently, 1.25 million tons are being stored, which accounts for about 90 per cent of the total storage capacity. The tanks are expected to fill up by the autumn of 2022, which prompted the Japanese government to adopt the least expensive option — disposing the wastewater into the sea, starting from 2023.
The United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) remain sympathetic to the Japanese decision, saying that it meets the international standard. On the other hand, China and South Korea have voiced concerns about the decision. They are distrustful of and dissatisfied with the sudden decision made by the Japanese government. The difference is starkly highlighted in how the wastewater is being referred to by different countries. Japan and the United States call it ‘treated water’ while China and South Korea define it as ‘contaminated water’.
The Japanese government explained that it will fully treat and dilute the wastewater until the contamination level is reduced to at least one-hundredth of its original concentration. Officials say that tritium will be reduced to one-fortieth of the Japanese government’s normal standard. Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso even claimed that the treated water will be drinkable.
he Japanese government also made it clear that before the accident in 2011 the Fukushima nuclear plant disposed of 2.2 trillion becquerels of tritium into the sea each year, which caused no problems. They added that because tritium is a weak radioactive isotope, most of the material will exit the human body, meaning its negative impact will be small.
Despite the Japanese government’s efforts to convince people outside of the country, the most vocal opposition has come from within Japan. The Japan Fishermen’s Association argued that they will not accept the Japanese government’s decision. They explain that the decision went against the government’s promise in 2015 that the release would not happen without their consent. Fishermen from Fukushima and Ibaraki are particularly sensitive about the potential consumer backlash over the radioactive wastewater release, which will directly impact their livelihoods. About 70 per cent of fishermen oppose the government’s decision. It remains unclear whether the Japanese government will be able to persuade them.
Concerns from neighbouring countries are another hurdle to overcome. There is little sign that the Japanese government fully consulted adjacent countries before it announced the decision. Because of the lack of prior consultation and reliable notice, the Japanese government’s decision should be regarded as a unilateral move. South Korea and China should not approach this issue to drag down Japan’s efforts to resolve the problem. At the same time, it is Japan’s responsibility to be attentive to neighbouring countries’ legitimate concerns.
Securing transparency in the process of implementing the plan is another challenge. Despite the Japanese government’s explanation, it remains uncertain whether various nuclides other than tritium can be reliably removed using the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS). Passing on the correct and reliable information to concerned parties in and outside the country is necessary. Japan should incorporate third-party specialists to provide objective and reliable information about the process.
Finally, verifying the safety of the water with international standards would give comfort to and garner trust from concerned parties, including Japanese fishermen. The IAEA could mobilise experts or build a verification team on behalf of Japan and its neighbouring countries so that all concerned regional countries can be persuaded about the safety of the water.
The Japanese government should better fulfil its responsibilities, justify the necessity of its decision, remain transparent about its implementation of the plan and be resilient in verifying the safety of the water it disposes of.
Cheol Hee Park is Professor at the Graduate School of International Studies and Director of the Institute of International Affairs, Seoul National University.
South Africa the only country to have dismantled its nuclear weapons capability,
SA the only country to have dismantled its nuclear weapons capability, Robin Möser 25 Jun 2021 ext month, on 10 July, marks the 30th anniversary of South Africa’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), but it seems this step will not receive the world’s attention it should get. South Africa is still the only example of a state that has given up its indigenously developed nuclear weapons arsenal and subsequently adhered to nonproliferation norms.
Today, developments concerning continuous missile and nuclear tests in North Korea, the United States’ unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear deal with Iran in 2018, and the last-minute extension of the New Start Treaty between the US and Russia in February this year demonstrate the urgency of discussing nuclear disarmament on a global scale.
Revisiting the unique South African case of nuclear disarmament and NPT accession provides a crucial starting point, as it demonstrates that disarmament is possible. Moreover, the South African example shows that to forgo nuclear weapons needs both domestic political preconditions and an international context perceived to be conducive. It cannot succeed solely based on the moral conviction of political leaders that disarmament is good. The actions taken by the FW De Klerk government between 1989 and 1991 illustrate that his decisions gravitated to assessing domestic political risks and potential benefits that the decision to disarm and sign the NPT would bring for his government………………………. https://mg.co.za/opinion/2021-06-25-sa-the-only-country-to-have-dismantled-its-nuclear-weapons-capability
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