China issues nuclear safety blueprint, eyes $13 billion investment
“The current [nuclear] safety situation isn’t optimistic,” the report
said.“Its official nuclear capacity target for 2020 for now is 40 GW, less than 5
percent of its current total installed capacity, but enough to power Spain.”
(Reuters) – China will have
to spend around 80 billion yuan ($12.74 billion) by 2015 to upgrade the security
of its nuclear facilities and radioactive contamination control to international
standards, a report issued by the Ministry of Environmental Protection
said.
China, which has an ambitious plan to build as many as 100 reactors over the
next two decades, imposed a ban on approving new nuclear power plants after
Japan’s nuclear crisis in March 2011 and ordered nationwide safety checks on its
41 plants.
The report, which laid out a road map for China’s nuclear safety to reach
international standards by 2020, suggested the government was moving closer to
restarting the approval process for reactor expansion.
It evaluated safety in China’s nuclear-power industry and recommended phasing
out older nuclear reactors sooner, sharing and improving access to information,
enhancing the research and development of nuclear safety and improving the
handling of radioactive waste.
Australia Nuclear agency boss accused of being “…a lying piece of shit.”
”You’ve fabricated the findings, covered up safety incidents … you guys covered it over. You’re a lying piece of shit.”
By Bianca Hall
Oct. 18, 2012, 3 a.m.
THE head of Australia’s nuclear agency briefly broke down at a dramatic Senate estimates hearing yesterday, after an angry whistleblower accused him of covering up a serious incident in which workers were splashed with radioactive material.
Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation chief executive Adrian Paterson was comforted by Senators and staff, and refused to leave the room until the man had left the building.
Listening to Mr Paterson give evidence was former ANSTO worker and whistleblower David Reid, who worked at the facility for almost 30 years, including years as his colleagues’ occupational health and safety representative.”You’re a liar,” Mr Reid growled when Mr Paterson finished telling the inquiry he did not believe the incident had occurred.
”You’ve fabricated the findings, covered up safety incidents … you guys covered it over. You’re a lying piece of shit.”
Mr Reid later told The Age he had been sacked after bringing claims of the incident to management. ”It’s trashed my life; I’ve just been obsessed with it. My marriage fell apart, and I lost my house and I’m living in a caravan. But I can’t let it go.”
New Nobel Prize winner bangs the drums of war! -Tarpley _Press tv banned!
“We also have followed, in quite a bit of detail back in July, around the 15th or the 20th of July this year when NATO attempted to overthrow the government of Syria with a kind of shock and awe, a series of converging deployments; one of the things that they did was to purge the pro-Assad Syrian state media off of ArabSat and NileSat and insert CIA programming and so forth.”
EU banning of Press TV shows opinion dictatorship: Analyst
The company has ordered media services company, Arqiva, to take the Iranian satellite channels off one of its Hot Bird frequencies.
The Iranian channels being taken off the air include Press TV, al-Alam, Jam-e-Jam 1 and 2, Sahar 1 and 2, Islamic Republic of Iran News Network, Quran TV, and the Arabic-language al-Kawthar.
The illegal ban will also affect the satellite broadcast of several Iranian radio stations.
Meanwhile many Press TV viewers have condemned as illegal and hypocritical the ban imposed by the European officials on the broadcast of several Iranian satellite channels, saying that the move throws into question the West’s freedom of speech claims.
Press TV has conducted an interview with Author and Historian Webster Griffin Tarpley from Washington to shed more light on the issue at hand.
He is joined by two additional guests: Robert Oulds, director of the Bruges Group, from Londonand Gordon Duff, the senior editor of Veterans Today from Ohio
What follows is an approximate transcription of the interview.
Global nuclear medicine planning flawed! -Australian plans to combat looming nuclear medicine supply crisis
The Australian Parliament has been updated today on plans to put our country front and centre in the fight against a looming international nuclear medicine supply crisis.
Romania asks companies to reconsider nuclear plan – Investment is going to wind and solar generation
BUCHAREST | Wed Oct 17, 2012 11:10am BST
Oct 17 (Reuters) – Romania has asked four of Europe’s largest power companies to reconsider a plan to build two nuclear reactors after it failed to find other investors, the Eastern European nation’s deputy economy minister said on Wednesday.
Romania, which must replace a third of its plants by 2020, needs new power generation or faces future supply shortages and rising import costs.
However, many power companies have been scaling back investment in central and eastern Europe in light of the euro zone debt crisis and with a renewed focus on wind and solar capacity.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/10/17/romania-nuclear-idUKL5E8LH6XG20121017
McCarthyism -Activist, Leah-Lynn Plante – Jailed for staying silent! (Video plea)
Source of Article Disclose TV
October 12, 2012 –
“Today is October 10th, 2012, and I am ready to go to prison,”
“The arbitrary issuing of subpoenas to activists and pressuring them to divulge information about others in secret proceedings extends to arresting them when they decide to resist,”
“Today is October 10th, 2012, and I am ready to go to prison,” announced 24-year-old Leah-Lynn Plante yesterday. By Thursday morning, the Portland activist was in custody and could remain incarcerated in a U.S. federal prison for 18 months, although she has not been charged with a crime.
Along with two others in the Pacific Northwest, Plante was remanded into federal custody for her refusal to provide a grand jury testimony regarding activists in the region. Matt Duran and Kteeo Olejnik were jailed in previous weeks for, like Plante, refusing to cooperate with a grand jury. All three are now being held in U.S. federal prison, not because they are being punished for crime, but, as the National Lawyers Guild’s executive director Heidi Boghosian told me earlier this year, “to coerce cooperation.”
Writing for Truth-Out in August about the Northwest grand juries and those resisting cooperation, I noted that grand juries “are among the blackest boxes in the federal judiciary system.” The closed-door procedures are rare instances in which an individual loses the right to remain silent. As was the case with the Northwest grand juries resistors, the grand jury can grant a subpoenaed individual personal immunity; Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination are therefore protected, but silence is not. In these instances, refusal to speak can be considered civil contempt. Non-cooperators can be jailed for the 18-month length of the grand jury.
MIchigan -Calls for temporary ‘hardened on-site storage’ of nuclear waste
“Users pay as taxpayers, too – for dry storage,” AP said. “Utilities that have run out of storage space in pools successfully sued the federal government for breach of contract, because it failed to keep to the 1998 deadline to establish long-term storage. By law, the money for dry casks cannot come from the nuclear waste fund, and must come from the federal budget.”
“We can’t keep generating more and more of this waste,” said Jackson, “It’s not socially responsible.”
Published: Monday, October 15, 2012
By Jim Bloch, Voice Reporter
They oppose reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods. They are critical of current methods of storing high level nuclear waste in cooling pools and dry casks.What do they propose to do with the more than 68,000 tons of spent fuel in the U.S. as of 2009, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is growing by 2,000-2,400 tons per year?
The short answer is hardened on-site storage of used fuel rods.
Eternal danger
The problem with high level nuclear waste is that it remains dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of years.
“Spent nuclear fuel is about 95 percent uranium,” said a 2011 AP report. “About 1 percent are other heavy elements such as curium, americium and plutonium-239, best known as fuel for nuclear weapons. Each has an extremely long half-life” – the time it takes to lose half its radioactivity – “(and) some take hundreds of thousands of years to lose all of their radioactive potency. The rest, about 4 percent, is a cocktail of byproducts of fission that break down over much shorter time periods, such as cesium-137 and strontium-90, which break down completely in about 300 years.”
Marshall Islands -UN report offers even-handedness and focus on future?
““The Special Rapporteur’s mission tells the world the Marshall Islands is entitled to know the truth, to be treated with dignity, and to have all those human rights which should never have been lost,” Muller commented, adding the Marshall Islands welcomed the recommendations and “we urge the United States and the international community to do likewise, and we look forward to doing our part to ensure their implementation.
UN report offers even-handedness and focus on future
Giff Johnson
The release in mid-September of the United Nations Special Rapporteur’s report on the human rights impact of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands provides a roadmap for the Unite d States, the United Nations and the Marshall Islands to effectively address the numerous outstanding problems in this north Pacific nation.
One of the most important aspects of Calin Georgescu’s 19-page report for the UN Human Rights Council is its even-handedness and focus on the future.
Among other key points in the report include:
• The United States government should provide compensation needed to pay about $2 billion in Nuclear Claims Tribunal awards;
• Declassify secret reports on the nuclear tests to end a “legacy of distrust”;
• Follow the recommendations of its own Presidentially-appointed Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments that recommended personalized apologies to the individuals who were the unwitting subjects of radiation experiments;
• Calls on United Nations agencies to get involved in solving a number of radiation-related environment and health issues; and
• Calls on the Marshall Islands to sponsor an independent radiological survey of the entire country with the assistance of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
But many islanders have watched with increasing dejection as American courts have tossed out lawsuits by the nuclear ground zero islands of Bikini and Enewetak, and the US government for 12 years has ignored petitions seeking additional nuclear test compensation for personal injuries and land damages, clean-up programs, and loss of past use.
Jack Niedenthal, who works for the Bikini Council, underlined a point now in the minds of many Marshall Islanders following the report’s release: Will the newly released UN report on the Marshall Islands have any impact on the nuclear legacy in the Marshall Islands?
He said the report raises the issues Marshall Islanders have been making for years. “This is exactly the case the nuclear victims have been trying to make to both the US Congress and the US courts,” Niedenthal said.
Nuclear energy technology not suitable for use in Singapore -“Not safe – no where to hide”
Published on Oct 15, 2012 by 154thmedia2012
SINGAPORE: Second Minister for Trade and Industry S Iswaran said a pre-feasibility study has concluded that current nuclear energy technology is not suitable for use in Singapore, even though the latest designs of nuclear power plants are much safer than older designs which remain in use in many countries.
The study involved government agencies, external consultants and independent expert advisers.
Mr Iswaran was speaking in Parliament on Monday in response to a question filed by MP for Nee Soon GRC Lee Bee Wah.
Eighty per cent of Singapore’s energy is generated from natural gas imported from neighbouring countries Indonesia and Malaysia.
In 2010, the government embarked on a pre-feasibility study to explore more energy options, looking to overcome Singapore’s energy constraints and improve energy security.
The study concluded that nuclear energy will not be an option, for now.
Oil Spill Causes Short-Term Damage to Rat DNA, Implications for the BP Gulf oil spill?
“The new study of rats shows a direct link between respiratory exposure to compounds discharged by the fuel and damage to genetic material. In order to analyse the possible alterations to the DNA and its repair processes, the researchers took blood samples from each animal and carried out cytogenic tests.”
ScienceDaily (Oct. 15, 2012) —
An experiment carried out on rodents exposed to fuel similar to that of the Prestige tanker oil spill — which took place nearly a decade ago — shows that inhalation of the fuel causes damage to genetic material. According to the study, led by the University of A Coruña, the results could be used in relation to people who carry out the industrial cleaning of coasts.
On Nov. 19, 2012, it will be ten years since the sinking of the Prestige, which caused one of Spain’s largest ecological disasters. The oil spill reached the coasts of Galicia and the rest of the Cantabrian coast, right up to the Landes area of France and Portugal. Thousands of people aided in the cleaning of the contaminated beaches and were exposed to the fuel for prolonged periods.
In order to confirm the effects of such exposure on the health of human beings in this and other circumstances, a team of researchers from the University of A Coruña carried out an experiment using two different strains of rat and a respiratory chamber especially designed to create fuel exposure. For two hours a day, five days a week, the animals were exposed to a fuel similar in composition to that of the Prestige oil spill. This study has now been published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health.
“Induced damage to genetic material and the development of different respiratory ailments has been previously been seen in people who took part in the oil spill cleanup effort,” Vanessa Valdiglesias, researcher at the Toxicology Unit of the University of A Coruña, explains . The former institution, along with the Institute of Biomedical Research of A Coruña, has already tried to describe the effects of the oil spill on people’s health.
“Nevertheless,” continues Valdiglesias, “in these studies, the environmental exposure measures were scarce or nonexistent, which made it difficult to attribute the observed effects directly to fuel exposure.”
The new study of rats shows a direct link between respiratory exposure to compounds discharged by the fuel and damage to genetic material. In order to analyse the possible alterations to the DNA and its repair processes, the researchers took blood samples from each animal and carried out cytogenic tests.
The results were clear: exposure to fuel through inhalation causes damage to the DNA of both types of rat — both of which differed in susceptibility to the compounds of the fuel — and also alters DNA repair processes.
Pentagon Single-Bid Contracting Hurting Taxpayers -POGO
This news is startling because, according to FPDS-NG (it’s not my number, so don’t shoot the messenger), single-bid offers accounted for $185 billion spent in base contracts and exercised options by DoD in FY 2011, and rules were violated in 31 of the 78 contracts sampled by the IG.
By SCOTT AMEY
Oct 15, 2012
Last week, the Department of Defense (DoD) Inspector General released a report finding that single-bid guidance isn’t being followed and, as a result, “the Services have not realized potential cost savings associated with increased competition and re-competing $390.9 million in contract modifications. DoD also cannot accurately assess the percent of improvements in DoD achieving effective competition.” Specifically, the DoD IG found:
The Services did not follow DoD single-bid guidance when awarding 31 contracts, valued at approximately $656.1 million, out of the sample of 78 contracts awarded as competitive, valued at approximately $1 billion, that we reviewed. Specifically, contracting offices:
- issued 16 of 31 single-bid contracts, valued at $165.3 million, without advertising solicitations for 30 days;
- issued 8 of 31 single-bid contracts, valued at $471.0 million, without adequately determining price reasonableness; and
- issued 7 of 31 single-bid contracts, valued at $19.8 million, without advertising solicitations for 30 days and adequately determining price reasonableness.
In addition, the IG found that DoD did not “develop specific steps to prevent 39 of 47 contract modifications, valued at $390.9 million, from exceeding the 3-year limitation on awarding contract modifications without first recompeting.”
Thai government urged to confirm link to Cambodia’s Nuclear aspirations
By ExpatNewsletter.net | October 14, 2012 at 6:36 am
“But environmental activist Witoon Permwongsacharoen of the Foundation for Ecological Recovery said Cambodia consumed only 1,000 megawatts of electricity per year, meaning there was no need for the country to invest in nuclear power.”
““Cambodia itself doesn’t need such a large-scale power plant,” Mr Santi said. “The project will likely supply electricity to neighbouring countries, including Thailand. The Thai government should make it clear whether it is involved.””
Anti-nuclear activists have called on the Thai government to clarify its involvement in Cambodia’s controversial plan to construct a nuclear power plant in the border province of Koh Kong.
Activists suspect collusion between the Thai government and Cambodia over alleged plans to build a nuclear power plant on the island of Koh Kong, just south of the Trat province border. (Maps from KohKongResort.com)
Documenting ian, blog – showing the truth behind the nuclear disaster in Fukushima area (Video and Photos)
Decontamination (part 1)
UAE issues new nuclear liability law -Disaster Liability capped at around $700 million
by Adam Lane on Oct 15, 2012
The UAE President, His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, has issued a new Federal Law covering civil liability and compensation for nuclear damage that could occur as a result of a nuclear accident.
“This Law was drafted in accordance with the Vienna Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage as amended by the 1997 Protocol, which the UAE acceded to in August 2012. The establishment of such a robust nuclear liability regime is another step forward of the UAE Government’s responsible approach to develop a solid regulatory framework for the peaceful nuclear energy programme.
“This new liability regime provides a clear and predictable process for the public and nuclear industry to deal with compensation for damages that may arise in the case of a nuclear accident,” said H.E. Hamad Al Kaabi, the UAE’s permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), speaking at a press conference held at the Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation HQ.
The new law makes the operator of a nuclear facility solely and exclusively liable for damages that arise from a nuclear incident as defined by the 1997 Vienna Convention. The operator’s liability has been set at 450 million Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), equivalent to around US $700 million.
We are duty-bound to protect our people from nuclear mishaps – Sri Lanka
Oct 15, 2012 04:45 pm
Whether an agreement is signed with India or not, Sri Lanka will implement a disaster management action plan in case of nuclear accidents or a radiological emergency, Minister Champika Ranwaka said following the conclusion of the first round of talks in New Delhi on civil nuclear cooperation.
Addressing a press briefing in Colombo today (15) the Minister of Power and Energy stated that the government is duty bound to protect its people and therefore “no one can question it,” as same as its India’s sovereign right to set up a nuclear plant.
The first round of talks between India and Sri Lanka on comprehensive civil nuclear cooperation was held on Friday (October12) in New Delhi.
We had informed India in May 2011 about our intention to inter a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the two countries based on Article 09 of the 2nd Convention, on early notification of nuclear accidents, he said.
Thereafter various informal discussions and exchanging of documents between two parties representing the countries took place while a formal discussion was held in New Delhi last week, Patali Champika Ranawaka said.
He stated that the talks included nuclear applications, technological assistance, technological transfers, capacity building of officials here as well as about the nuclear safety and response to nuclear accidents, and that India had agreed to participate in this process.
1 This Month
26 April – Chernobyl: Inside the Meltdown airs on National Geographic on Sunday 26th April from 4pm
29 April – Nuclear Expert Webinar #1 – Radiation Impacts on Families with Mary Olson and Cindy Folkers
- 12:15 PM MT – 1:45 PM MT
- Location: Virtual – REGISTER TODAY
4 May -West Suburban Peace Coalition to discuss Iran war at May Educational Forum
Monday, May 4, 7:00 – 8:00 PM Central Standard Time
Title: : How Trump’s Narrative Tries to Shape the Reality of the War on Iran.
Contact Walt Zlotow, zlotow@hotmail.com 630 442 3045 for further information
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
Pine Ridge Uranium is the real threat, not Tehran- Tell Burgum: Stop the Extraction.
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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