The guns of August killed 15 million…the missiles of October could kill 8 billion.

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL 2 Oct 24

There’s an eerie similarity to the blundering of nations that ignited the slaughter of WWI and the blundering of nations, led by America, which could lead to nuclear war 110 years later.

Two weeks ago President Biden blinked on authorizing the UK to use US technology to fire its Storm Shadow missiles deep into Russia. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer came to the White House seeking US permission to allow its Ukraine proxies to fire those US guided Storm Shadows in a desperate, futile bid to stave off Ukraine’s inevitable defeat.

It may take time to get the full story why Biden blinked. Russia’s UN speech declaring such missile strikes risk putting the US at war with Russia set the tone. Likely, a backchannel communication between a high ranking Russian official to a US counterpart helped seal the sensible US rejection of Starmer’s crazed war provoking proposal.

President Biden has spent his entire term mishandling the issue of NATO membership for Ukraine and autonomy for Donbas Ukrainians into a horrific lost war that could still go nuclear. After provoking it, Biden led a joint US, UK effort to scuttle the Ukraine, Russia negotiated peace set to end it in the first month without Ukraine losing a square mile of territory. Thirty-one months later, Ukraine has lost 4 oblasts, about a fifth of its territory, without a prayer of regaining.

Biden’s biggest mistake was likely framing the war as a zero sum game whereby the US must achieve total victory ensuring Russia’s total defeat. That explains why Biden and his UK poodle, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, demanded Ukraine President Zelensky reject the peace agreement about to end the war early on. Biden’s Ukraine destroying agenda could not allow any settlement short of unconditional Russian defeat and humiliation. All that accomplished was over half a million Ukrainian troops dead, millions displaced or fled Ukraine, a shattered economy, and Ukraine’s collapse now inevitable

To prevent that, Ukraine’s Zelensky and current UK Prime Minister Starmer continue badgering Biden to unleash the missiles of October. Some US officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have also been lobbying Biden to ignore the reddest of Russia’s red lines

That may still happen. In response, Russia has publicly notified America and NATO that it has revised its nuclear policy to specifically allow their use when attacked by a non-nuclear country that is backed by a nuclear country. Russia will consider such attacks as putting Russia at war with the supporting nuclear power.

Let’s fervently hope President Biden continues to heed reality. By not publicly ruling out long range missile strikes, he’s likely still considering authorizing them to stave off a Ukraine defeat before the election. Losing a war, however criminal and senseless to begin with, in not good election strategy.

Biden, Blinken, Starmer, Zelensky all need to be locked into a room for a seminar on the stumbling and bumbling by revered European rulers that unleashed WWI. Then they must toss out their zero sum game against Russia and negotiate a win-win end to a war just as senseless, that could eventually be infinitely more destructive than the War To End All Wars 110 years ago.

October 4, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Hurricane Helene sends a warning

https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/10/01/hurricane-helene-sends-a-warning/

A nuclear plant, fortunately closed, was inundated, but we may not get so lucky next time, writes Linda Pentz Gunter

As no one can have failed to notice, our country has been ravaged once again by violent weather extremes, most recently by Hurricane Helene, which left areas in the south submerged and destroyed, and led to a significant number of deaths.

The press has routinely been describing the extreme flooding, especially in places such as North Carolina, as “Biblical. But, as my partner and colleague at Beyond Nuclear Paul Gunter points out, it is nothing of the sort. As should be obvious by now, our ever more frequent climatic disasters are entirely human-caused.

Acts of God, whether you are a believer or not, have absolutely nothing to do with it.

Try telling that to our political leaders. No matter who wins in November, we are looking at drilling (Trump) or fracking (Harris) or possibly both. And, of course, more nuclear power!

The fact that all of these will obviously make the climate crisis far worse far faster does not pass these people by. They know it. But they push both fossil and fissile energy anyway, submitting willingly to the bidding of their corporate paymasters who would rather celebrate near-term greed and gain than leave a livable world to their children and grandchildren.

This means we are led by climate criminals who go not only unpunished, but who are routinely re-elected.

The push for license extensions for our aging reactor fleet is particularly heinous. The lapdog nuclear regulator, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has been exposed by the Government Accountability Office in a damning report as entirely uninterested in how the ravages of the climate crisis might jeopardize the safety of nuclear power plants.

“NRC doesn’t fully consider potential increases in risk from climate change,” wrote the GAO. “For example, NRC mostly uses historical data to identify and assess safety risks, rather than data from future climate projections.”

Instead, the NRC is intent on colluding with the nuclear industry to sell us nuclear power as some sort of answer to the climate crisis.

Apart from the fact that nuclear power is too expensive and too slow, as we have argued here countless times, it is actually a hazard under climate chaos conditions. And we got the perfect demonstration of this from Hurricane Helene.

First of all, because of the extreme radiological risks, some nuclear power plants in the path of the hurricane were shut down as a preemptive precaution including Hatch in Georgia. This makes them completely useless in the wake of the storm’s onslaught when people are desperate for electricity.

Then take the case of the Crystal River nuclear power plant on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Floodwaters swamped the site. Fortunately the plant has been shuttered since 2013 but all of the high-level irradiated radioactive fuel waste is still stored there.

“The whole site was flooded, including buildings, sumps, and lift stations. Industrial Wastewater Pond #5 was observed overflowing to the ground due to the surge,” read a report filed by plant owner, Duke Energy.

Given the present enthusiasm for extending the licenses of the still operating US nuclear reactor fleet — and they are talking about out to 80 or even 100 years for reactors that were never designed or intended to run that long — Crystal River might easily still have been operating.

Under today’s rush to relicense — and even reopen the country’s most dangerously degraded reactors including Palisades in Michigan — it probably would be.

Did nuclear waste escape as a result of the Crystal River nuclear site flood?

“We are still in the process of obtaining access and assessing the damage, but due to the nature of this event we anticipate difficulty with estimating the total discharge amount of wastewater, and impacts are unknown at this time,” wrote Duke in its report.

In other words, we may never know.

The implication of a nuclear plant inundated by a massive storm surge does not have to be imagined. We saw it at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan on March 11, 2011, when a 50-foot tsunami swept over the inadequate sea wall and knocked out the backup onsite power after the earlier earthquake had already severed the offsite power connection.

Meanwhile, Crystal River owner Duke is the very same company that is trying to secure a license extension for its three Oconee reactors in South Carolina that sit downstream from not one but two dams!

The three reactors are sited 300 feet below the water level in Lake Jocassee behind Jocassee Dam and five feet below the water level in the immediately adjacent Lake Keowee.

What could possibly go wrong? Nothing, argues Duke, for whom the idea of a dam overtopping or breaking, sending a wall of water directly at the plant — effectively an inland tsunami — just isn’t a credible possibility.

Out of our scope, declares the NRC, which contends it cannot include an assessment of likely climate change impacts on Oconee operations within its environmental review for license renewal.

Beyond Nuclear and the South Carolina chapter of the Sierra Club have been fighting this through legal channels and will continue to do so.

After last week, you might expect such a blinkered view of current — never mind future — climatic conditions to change. But it won’t.

Retrofitting an old nuclear plant to adequately protect it against the impacts of a climate crisis never prepared for, costs money.

October 4, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | climate change, USA | Leave a comment

Assange: ‘I’m Free Because I Pled Guilty to Journalism’

Assange: ‘My Naivete Was Believing in the Law’

October 1, 2024, By Julian Assange / Consortium News

Julian Assange’s address Tuesday morning to the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), updated to include Assange’s responses during the Q&A:

Ladies and gentlemen, the transition from years of confinement in a maximum security prison to being here before the representatives of 46 nations and 700 million people is a profound and a surreal shift. The experience of isolation for years in a small cell is difficult to convey. It strips away one sense of self, leaving only the raw essence of existence………………………………………………………………….

Sooner I will start to investigate the circumstance surrounding my detention and conviction, and the consequent implications for human rights. However, like so many of the efforts made in my case, whether they were from parliamentarians, presidents, prime ministers, the pope, U.N. officials and diplomats, unions, legal and medical professionals, academics, activists or citizens, none of them should have been necessary.

None of the statements, resolutions, reports, films, articles, events, fundraisers, protests and letters over the last 14 years should have been necessary. But all of them were necessary because without them, I never would have seen the light of day. This unprecedented global effort was needed because the legal protections of the legal protections that did exist, many existed only on paper when not effective in any remotely reasonable time.

On the Plea Deal

I eventually chose freedom over and realizable justice. After being detained for years and facing 175 year sentence with no effective remedy. Justice for me is now precluded, as the U.S. government insisted in writing into its plea agreement that I cannot filed a case at the European Court of Human Rights or even the Freedom of Information Act request over what it did to me as a result of its extradition request.

I want to be totally clear. I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism. I pled guilty to seeking information from a source. I pled guilty to obtaining information from a source. And I pled guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else.

I hope my testimony today can serve to highlight the weakness, the weaknesses of the existing safeguards and to help those whose cases are less visible but who are equally vulnerable. As I emerge from the dungeon of Belmarsh, the truth now seems less discernible, and I regret how much ground has been lost during that time period. How expressing the truth has been undermined, attacked, weakened and diminished.

I see more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth and more self-censorship. ………………………………

When I founded WikiLeaks, it was driven by a simple dream to educate people about how the world works, so that through understanding, we might bring about something better. ………………………………….

We revealed not just when and where these things happened, but frequently the policies, the agreements and the structures behind them. When we published Collateral Murder, the infamous gotten camera footage of a U.S. Apache helicopter crew eagerly blowing to pieces Iraqi journalists and their rescuers. The visual reality of modern warfare shocked the world, so we also used interest in this video to direct people to the classified policies for when the U.S. military could deploy lethal force in Iraq……………………………………………..

Manning’s Arrests

But 14 years ago, the United States military arrested one of our lead whistleblowers, Private First Class Manning, a U.S. intelligence analyst based in Iraq. The U.S. government concurrently launched an investigation against me and my colleagues………………………………………..

C.I.A.’s Retribution

However, in February 2017, the landscape changed dramatically. President Trump had been elected. He appointed two wolves in MAGA hats. Mike Pompeo, a Kansas congressman and former arms industry executive, as C.I.A. director, and William Barr, a former C.I.A. officer, as U.S. attorney general.

By March 2017, WikiLeaks had exposed the C.I.A.’s infiltration of fringe political parties. Its spying on French and German leaders, its spying on the European Central Bank, European economic ministries, and its standing orders to spy on French on the street as a whole. We revealed the C.I.A.’s vast production of malware and viruses, its subversion of supply chains. Its subversion of antivirus software, cars, smart TVs and iPhones.

C.I.A. Director Pompeo launched a campaign of retribution. It is now a matter of public record that under Pompeo’s explicit direction, the C.I.A. drew up plans to kidnap and to assassinate me within the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and authorize going after my European colleagues, subjecting us to theft, hacking attacks and the planting of false information. My wife and my infant son were also targeted.

A C.I.A. asset was permanently assigned to track my wife. And instructions were given to obtain DNA from my six month old son’s nappy. This is the testimony of more than 30 current and former U.S. intelligence officials speaking to the U.S. press, which has been additionally corroborated by records seized and the prosecution brought against some of the C.I.A. agents involved.

The C.I.A. is targeting of myself, my family and my associates through aggressive, extrajudicial and extraterritorial means. Provides a rare insight into how powerful intelligence organizations engage in transnational repression. Such repressions are not unique. What is unique is that we know so much about this one. Due to numerous whistleblowers and to judicial investigations in Spain…………………………………………………………………………..

Transnational repression is also conducted by abusing legal processes. The lack of effective safeguards against this means that Europe is vulnerable to having its mutual legal assistance and expedition treaties hijacked by foreign powers to go after dissenting voices in Europe. In Michael Pompeo’s memoirs, which I read in my prison cell, the former C.I.A. director bragged about how he pressured the U.S. attorney general to bring an extradition case against me in response to our publications about the C.I.A………………………………………………………………………………..

Criminalizing News-Gathering

Now that one foreign government has formally asserted that Europeans have no free speech rights, a dangerous precedent has been set. Other powerful states will inevitably follow suit. The war in Ukraine has already seen the criminalization of journalists in Russia. But based on the precedent set in my expedition, there is nothing to stop Russia or indeed any other state from targeting European journalists, publishers or even social media users by claiming that their domestic secrecy laws have been violated.

The rights of journalists and publishers within the European space are seriously threatened.

Transnational repression cannot become the norm here. As one of the world’s two great norms, setting institutions, PACE must act.

The criminalization of news-gathering activities is a threat to investigative journalism everywhere. I was formally convicted by a foreign power for asking, for receiving and publishing truthful information about that power. While I was in Europe.

The fundamental issue is simple journalists should not be prosecuted for doing their jobs. Journalism is not a crime. It is a pillar of a free and informed society…………………………….

Freedom of expression and all that flows from it is at a dark crossroad. I fear that unless institutions like PACE wake up to the gravity of the situation, it will be too late. Let us all commit to doing our part to ensure that the light of freedom never demands that the pursuit of truth will live on, and that the voices of the many are not silenced by the interests of the few.

Responses During Q&A

………………………………………………. I’m setting institutions like PA pace must move to make the situation clear that what happened to me cannot happen again.

Why He Attended

I am here because I believe it is an essential first step for PACE to act, to get the ball rolling, to address the problems of transnational repression and also to make it clear that national security journalism is possible within European borders……………………………………………………….

On Asylum

Political asylum is an absolutely essential relief valve for human rights abuses within states……………………….

On the High Court Case

In the final U.K. High High Court case, which I won and the U.S., appealed against.

I won under the basis of nationality discrimination. That is in the U.K. Extradition Act. You’re not meant to discriminate. At trial or during a penalty phase against someone on the basis of their nationality……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. more https://consortiumnews.com/2024/10/01/assange-im-free-because-i-pled-guilty-to-journalism/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=c5e55cd4-c28b-42af-8719-94afd51b6baa

October 4, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Israel’s Ideology of Genocide Must be Confronted and Stopped

Jeffrey D. Sachs • September 30, 2024, https://www.unz.com/article/israels-ideology-of-genocide-must-be-confronted-and-stopped/

Israel’s violent extremists now in control of its government believe that Israel has the Biblical license, indeed a religious mandate, to destroy the Palestinian people.

When Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the podium at the U.N. General Assembly last week, dozens of governments walked out of the chamber. The global opprobrium of Netanyahu and his government is due to Israel’s depraved violence against its Arab neighbors. Netanyahu purveys a fundamentalist ideology that has turned Israel into the most violent nation in the world.

Israel’s fundamentalist credo holds that Palestinians have no right whatsoever to their own nation. The Israeli Knesset recently passed a declaration rejecting a Palestinian State in what the Knesset calls The Land of Israel, meaning the land west of the Jordan River.

The Knesset of Israel firmly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state west of Jordan. The establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel will pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and destabilize the region.

To call the land west of the Jordan the “heart of the Land of Israel” is breathtaking. Israel is one part of the land west of the Jordan, not the entire land. The International Court of Justice has recently ruled that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian lands (those outside of Israel’s borders as of June 4, 1967, before the June 1967 war) is plainly illegal. The U.N. General Assembly has recently voted overwhelmingly to back the ICJ ruling and called on Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territories within one year.

There are many sources of this Israeli brazenness, the most important being the backing of Israel by U.S. military power.

It is worth recalling that when the British empire promised a Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine in 1917, the Palestinian Arabs constituted around 90% of the population. At the time of the 1947 U.N. partition plan, the Palestinian Arab population was approximately 67% of the population, though the partition plan proposed to give the Arabs only 44% of the land. Now Israel asserts the claim to 100% of the land.

Without the U.S. military backing, Israel could not possibly rule over an Apartheid regime in which Palestinian Arabs constitute nearly one half of the population yet hold none of the political power. Future generations will look back in amazement at the success of the Israel Lobby in manipulating the U.S. military to the severe detriment of U.S. national security and global peace.

Yet in addition to the U.S. military, there is another source of Israel’s profound injustice to the Palestinian people, and that is the religious fundamentalism purveyed fanatics such as the self-proclaimed fascist Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s Minister of Finance, and Minister of National Defense Itamar Ben-Gvir. These fanatics hold fast to the biblical Book of Joshua, according to which God promised the Israelites the land “from the Negev wilderness in the south to the Lebanon mountains in the north, from the Euphrates River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west.” (Joshua 1:4).

At the U.N. last week, Netanyahu once again staked Israel’s claim to the land on Biblical grounds: “When I spoke here last year, I said we face the same timeless choice that Moses put before the people of Israel thousands of years ago, as we were about to enter the Promised Land. Moses told us that our actions would determine whether we bequeath to future generations a blessing or a curse.”

What Netanyahu did not tell his fellow leaders (most of whom had in any event vacated the hall), was that Moses laid out a genocidal path to the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 31):

[The LORD] will destroy these nations before you, and you shall dispossess them. Joshua is the one who will cross ahead of you, just as the LORD has spoken. “The LORD will do to them just as He did to Sihon and Og, the kings of the Amorites, and to their land, when He destroyed them. “The LORD will deliver them up before you, and you shall do to them according to all the commandments which I have commanded you.”

Israel’s violent extremists believe that Israel has the Biblical license, indeed a religious mandate, to destroy the Palestinian people. Their Biblical hero is Joshua, the Israelite commander who succeeded Moses, and who led the Israelites’ genocidal conquests. (Netanyahu has also referred to the Amalekites, another case of a God-ordained genocide of foes of the Israelites, in a clear “dog-whistle” to his fundamentalist followers.) Here is the Biblical account of Joshua’s conquest of Hebron (Joshua 10)

Then Joshua and all Israel with him went up from Eglon to Hebron, and they fought against it. They captured it and struck it and its king and all its cities and all the persons who were in it with the edge of the sword. He left no survivor, according to all that he had done to Eglon. And he utterly destroyed it and every person who was in it.

There is a deep irony to this genocidal account. It almost surely is not historically accurate. There is no evidence that the Jewish kingdoms arose from genocides. Most likely they arose from local Canaanite communities adopting early forms of Judaism. Jewish fundamentalists adhere to a 6th century BCE text that is most likely a mythical reconstruction of purported events several centuries earlier, and a form of political bravado that was common in ancient Near Eastern politics. The problem is 21st century Israeli politicians, illegal settlers, and other fundamentalists who propose to live by—and kill by—6th century BCE political propaganda.

Israel’s violent fundamentalists are some 2,600 years out of step with today’s acceptable forms of statecraft and international law. Israel is duty bound to the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, not to the Book of Joshua. According to the recent ICJ ruling and UN General Assembly resolution backing it up, Israel must withdraw in the coming twelve months from the occupied Palestinian lands. According to international law, Israel’s borders are those of June 4, 1967, not the Euphrates to the Mediterranean Sea.

The ICJ ruling and U.N. General Assembly vote is not a ruling against the state of Israel per se. It is a ruling only against extremism, indeed against extremism and malevolence on both sides of the divide. There are two peoples, each with roughly half the overall population (and with no shortage of internal social, political, and ideological divisions within the two communities). International law calls for two states, living side by side, in peace.

The best solution, which we should strive for and hope for sooner rather than later, is that the two states, and the two peoples, get along, and actually draw strength from each other. Until then, however, the practical solution will be peacekeepers and fortified borders to protect each side from the animosity of the other, but with each having the chance to prosper. The utterly intolerable and illegal situation is the status quo, in which Israel rules brutally over the Palestinian people.

Hopefully, there will soon be a State of Palestine, sovereign and independent, whether the Knesset wants it or not. This is not Israel’s choice, but the mandate of the world community and of international law. The sooner the State of Palestine is welcomed as member state of the U.N., with the security of both Israel and Palestine backed by U.N. peacekeepers, the sooner will peace come to the region.

October 4, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

The Anishinaabe community fighting nuclear waste dumping, one step at a time‘

‘There’s more fresh water in this part of the country than there is in the Great Lakes, and they want to destroy that’

Ricochet, Crystal Greene, September 23 2024

Every September long weekend for the past five years, Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies have walked together along the TransCanada Highway 17 to peacefully protest the proposed dumping of nuclear waste on Treaty 3 lands in northwestern Ontario.

Among the walkers at the annual Walk Against Nuclear Waste was an Anishinaabe grandmother, who started the walk in hopes that more people will “wake up” to what’s at stake with the possibility of a deep geological repository (DGR) that would contain all of Canada’s high-level nuclear waste within their watershed.

“This is my last year and I feel like I’m gonna miss it, but it was a good awareness. I’m okay with that,” Darlene Necan, told Ricochet Media as vehicles zoomed by on TransCanada Highway 17, many beeping their horns in support throughout the roadside interview.

On September 1, two groups left from Ignace and Wabigoon at the same time. Over two days the group of about 30 participants walked about 40 kilometres from each direction.

They all met up at a rest stop near Revell Lake, the site where the Nuclear Waste Management Organization has done exploration drilling for the potential $26-billion DGR, which would sit at headwaters of the Wabigoon River and Turtle River watersheds. The underground facility would be used to bury and abandon millions of bundles of spent fuel from Canadian nuclear power plants.

“We cannot foresee the future, but what if it does happen? What if there’s a leak?” Necan said. “The creator gifted us this beautiful land for all of us to live, but who are these people to come here and economically destroy it? Money is never going to last.”

Necan, 65, is also known for asserting Anishinaabe title by building a cabin on her traditional territory at Savant Lake, Ontario, without permits, after she grew tired of waiting for housing from her band, Ojibway Nation of Saugeen #258. She was charged under the Public Lands Act with construction on so-called Crown land.

It’s no surprise that she took on the responsibility to alert others about the NWMO’s plan to transport, bury and abandon the waste.

There is a strong sense of urgency as the NWMO is set to finalize its chosen waste site, narrowed down from a list of 22 locations in Canada, a process that began in 2010.

By the end of the year, NWMO will choose either the Revell Lake site, near where the walk ended, or a Bruce County site in southwestern Ontario.

Rather than having the radioactive waste shipped by truck or train for the next 50 plus years —which they foresee is an accident waiting to happen — walkers say they want to see the waste all kept where it originated from, and for Canada to stop producing nuclear energy altogether.

The NWMO is an industry-funded organization made up of representatives from Canada’s nuclear power industry who’ve been looking for a way to deal with the approximately 100,000 tonnes of waste they’ve produced that will be radioactive for tens of thousands of years.

In a report to the Standing Committee on Environmental and Sustainable Development, a northwestern Ontario coalition “We the Nuclear Free North” describes the flaws and weaknesses of the DGR project along with the serious risks expressed by experts.

“Numerous experts in the fields of geology, chemistry and physics warn of the insufficiency of current scientific knowledge to guide a project of the nature and magnitude of the NWMO’s proposed plan,” the coalition wrote .

Their report broke down NWMO’s “conceptual” plan.

The waste would be transported by truck and received at a fuel packaging plant where it would be placed into containers.

The water used during the process to decontaminate the devices used for the waste in-transit would become contaminated with radionuclides and moved into a tailings pond, and be contained as a low-to-medium level radioactive liquid waste.

The waste in containers would be lowered to the DGR underground storage facility, made up of rooms blasted out of precambrian rock, 500 to 1000 metres below the Earth’s surface.

Since there is no way for the high-level radioactive nuclear fuel to deactivate, except for time, it would continue to generate heat, years after being stored. It could lead to pressure build-up, causing fractures in the DGR walls, where the groundwater would seep in and mix with water-soluble radionuclides.

Eventually, the free-moving contaminated water would reach the two watersheds, through cracks in the DGR, and a sump pump would need to be used to bring liquid to a surface tailings pond.

Another risk to hosting a DGR in the Revell Lake area are low magnitude earthquakes that have been documented by Environment Canada. A quake could fracture the DGR and increase flow of water into the facility and send contaminated water into the watersheds…………………………………………………………. more https://ricochet.media/indigenous/the-anishinaabe-community-fighting-nuclear-waste-dumping-one-step-at-a-time/

October 4, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, indigenous issues, opposition to nuclear, wastes | Leave a comment

UK Government seeks software to track radioactive waste as nuclear site decommissioned

1 oct 24, Power Technology,

Ten months after the Joint European Torus ceased operating, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority is embarking on a long-term decommissioning project and needs new software to support its work

A government body is seeking to make a six-figure investment in software to help log and track radioactive waste created over the coming years as a long-standing nuclear fusion research site is decommissioned.

Based in Oxfordshire, the Joint European Torus (JET) facility began operating in 1983 and conducted its final test late last year. A decommissioning process – which will last until 2040 – has now begun. Work will be led by the UK Atomic Energy Authority, an arm’s-length body of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.,………………………………………

Government seeks software to track radioactive waste as nuclear site decommissioned

October 4, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | UK, wastes | Leave a comment

First civil nuclear site decommissioned in the UK

It took 10 years for Veolia and Imperial College London to complete the
decommissioning of the first civil nuclear site in the UK. The Reactor
Centre at Imperial’s Silwood Park eco-campus in Ascot housed the UK’s
last civilian nuclear reactor for almost 50 years until it closed in 2012.

The long and complex project required demolition of the reactor, safely
managing hazardous materials, and restoring the site to its original state
to make it safe for public use. Veolia’s specialist decommissioning team,
KDC, supported Imperial in planning the complex project, which included the
cutting operations to reduce the reactor concrete shielding, removal and
demolition of the facility. The operation required the design and use of
new equipment to safely deconstruct the facility.

Construction Management 1st Oct 2024,
https://constructionmanagement.co.uk/first-civil-nuclear-site-decommissioned-in-the-uk/

October 4, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | decommission reactor, UK | Leave a comment