First the U.S. invaded Iraq — then left it poisoned — Beyond Nuclear International
Scientists find uranium and thorium in children with birth defects
via First the U.S. invaded Iraq — then left it poisoned — Beyond Nuclear International
Where are the national anti-war monuments? — Beyond Nuclear International
None exist to celebrate peace and those who work for it
via Where are the national anti-war monuments? — Beyond Nuclear International
Water shortages to hit 1.9 billion people as glaciers melt
1.9 billion people at risk from mountain water shortages, study shows https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/09/billion-people-risk-water-supply-rising-demand-global-heating-mountain-ecosystem
Rising demand and climate crisis threaten entire mountain ecosystem, say scientists, Jonathan Watts Global environment editor, @jonathanwatts, Tue 10 Dec 2019 A quarter of the world’s population are at risk of water supply problems as mountain glaciers, snow-packs and alpine lakes are run down by global heating and rising demand, according to an international study.
The first inventory of high-altitude sources finds the Indus is the most important and vulnerable “water tower” due to run-off from the Karakoram, Hindu Kush, Ladakh, and Himalayan mountain ranges, which flow downstream to a densely populated and intensively irrigated basin in Pakistan, India, China and Afghanistan.
The authors warn this vast water tower – a term they use to describe the role of water storage and supply that mountain ranges play to sustain environmental and human water demands downstream – is unlikely to sustain growing pressure by the middle of the century when temperatures are projected to rise by 1.9C (35.4F), rainfall to increase by less than 2%, but the population to grow by 50% and generate eight times more GDP.
Strains are apparent elsewhere in the water tower index, which quantifies the volume of water in 78 mountain ranges based on precipitation, snow cover, glacier ice storage, lakes and rivers. This was then compared with the drawdown by communities, industries and farms in the lower reaches of the main river basins.
The study by 32 scientists, which was published in the Nature journal on Monday, confirms Asian river basins face the greatest demands but shows pressures are also rising on other continents.
“It’s not just happening far away in the Himalayas but in Europe and the United States, places not usually thought to be reliant on mountains for people or the economy,” said one of the authors, Bethan Davies, of Royal Holloway University.
“We always knew the Indus was important, but it was surprising how the Rhône and Rhine have risen in importance, along with the Fraser and Columbia.”
The study says 1.9 billion people and half of the world’s biodiversity hotspots could be negatively affected by the decline of natural water towers, which store water in winter and release it slowly over the summer.
This buffering capacity is weakening as glaciers lose mass and snow-melt dynamics are disrupted by temperatures that are rising faster at high altitude than the global average.
“Climate change threatens the entire mountain ecosystem,” the report concludes. “Immediate action is required to safeguard the future of the world’s most important and vulnerable water towers.”
As well as local conservation efforts, the authors say international action to reduce carbon emissions is the best way to safeguard water towers.
Citing recent research by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Davies said 75% of high-altitude snow and ice would be retained if global warming could be kept within 1.5C. However, 80% would be lost by 2100 if the world continued on a path of business as usual.
The Santa Susana nuclear waste scandal
The Santa Susana Field Laboratory was established seventy years ago as a remote site for work too dangerous to conduct near communities. It’s situated on a rise on the north-west end of the Los Angeles Valley. What was once sparsely inhabited is now a packed community of 150,000 living within five miles of the site and more than half a million people living within 10 miles.
To the north, the community of Simi Valley. To the south-west, Thousand Oaks. And to the east, Chatsworth, Canoga Park, and West Hills. From these suburban streets, the hills around Santa Susana provide a beautiful backdrop of round sandstone and golden grass. But the picturesque view hides a secret—the fact that Santa Susana Field Laboratory is one of the most contaminated sites in California.
The site is no longer active; that doesn’t mean it’s benign. Over the years Santa Susana hosted a variety of activities, including ten nuclear reactors, a rocket engine testing facility, and multiple open-air “burn pits” where radioactively and chemically contaminated items were “disposed of” through burning. These activities left their mark. In 1959, one of the nuclear reactors partially melted down, an incident that scientists estimate may have released more radioactive iodine than Three Mile Island. And rocket-engine testing released toxic chemicals like TCE, dioxins, PCBs, and heavy metals. Wind and rain, and fires like the Woolsey Fire that burned 80 percent of the site in 2018, continue to carry contaminates from the site into the neighborhoods that have grown up around it.
All of this history is known, and really, none of these facts are in dispute. That’s why community members like Melissa Bumstead and Lauren Hammersley (both of whose daughters had rare forms of cancer), community organizations like Physicians for Social Responsibility–Los Angeles and Committee to Bridge the Gap, and celebrities like Kim and Kourtney Kardashian have all been advocating on this issue. The Santa Susana Laboratory must be cleaned up, and cleaned up quickly. But the Trump administration is trying to walk away from its commitments, and that’s a clear danger to nearby residents.
Today, responsibility for the site is shared by Boeing, the Department of Energy, and NASA. Back in 2010, the Energy Department and NASA both signed legally binding agreements with California setting strict levels of cleanup to “background levels.” Essentially, this means cleanup to the condition the site was in before all of the pollution. The agreements also require the federal agencies obtain approval from California for all aspects of the cleanup. This was the right deal to make; NRDC strongly supported the deal then, and still does to this day.
But now the Department of Energy and NASA seem to be trying to shirk their obligations.
First, the Energy Department issued a Final Environmental Impact Statement for remediation of the areas of the Field Lab it is responsible for. This is a legally required document designed to set forth the harms for the public, as well as the plan to mitigate those harms. In this document, the Department acknowledges that most of what it is considering violates its agreement with California, but it provides one-sided assurance that it will negotiate these points with California. Then in September, the Energy Department issued decisions to demolish multiple buildings without California’s consent, directly contradicting the cleanup obligations spelled out in the agreement.
NASA seems to be taking a similar course; in October it published a supplemental environmental impact statement proposing alternatives that would leave most of the contamination not cleaned up, in violation of its agreement with California. Absurdly, NASA argues that each of the alternatives it considers provides the same health benefits even though all but one of the alternatives would abandon in place most of the contaminated soil. It presented this information at “public meetings” in November but called the police when members of the public tried to share their concerns that NASA’s alternatives would breach the agreement to reach the required “background levels.” In short, NASA is setting itself up to violate the binding cleanup standards set by California and doesn’t seem to want the public to know that’s what it’s doing.
But under their agreements with California, and also under the primary hazardous waste law, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), the Energy Department and NASA don’t have the authority to choose how much they must clean up and how much contamination they can abandon in place. This authority is California’s alone.
Luckily, the state of California is on top of it, closely monitoring the situation. Both the California EPA and the Department of Toxic Substances Control strongly reminded the Energy Department of its obligations and that the state would enforce the cleanup agreement. Should NASA follow through on any of the alternatives it has considered that would ignore its obligations, we are hopeful California stands ready again.
But enough is enough for all of this. The cleanup agreements are well thought out documents, have broad public support, and it’s readily apparent that the neighbors of Santa Susana Field Laboratory will continue to be at risk until the Department of Energy, NASA, and Boeing meet their full obligations to clean up the site. We stand beside California, local organizations, and community members to ensure that these toxic remnants will be removed and the site cleaned up so the nearby residents can live in safety and peace.
The status of Japan’s nuclear policy and future prospects
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Tohoku reactor restart: What is the state of Japan’s nuclear policy? Japan Times, BY ERIC JOHNSTON 9 Dec 19, OSAKA – In late November, the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) gave the green light for restarting the No. 2 reactor at Tohoku Electric Power Co.’s Onagawa plant in Miyagi Prefecture, which had been damaged in the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami. The announcement once again put the spotlight on the country’s nuclear power policy, not only in Tohoku but nationwide.
Why did the Onagawa restart attract so much attention?
While the Onagawa plant is actually the second damaged on 3/11, after the Tokai No. 2 power station in Ibaraki Prefecture, to pass the NRA’s new safety regulations for nuclear power plants prepared after the disaster, it happens to be the nuclear plant closest to the epicenter of the magnitude 9 quake that struck off the Tohoku coast that day. The Onagawa facility is located near Ishinomaki, which received extensive damage and much domestic and international media attention after the tsunami claimed the lives of 74 Okawa Elementary School students. In addition, the Onagawa reactor, which was flooded on 3/11, is the first boiling water reactor to have its restart application approved by the NRA. There are three kinds of nuclear reactors in operation in Japan: 14 pressured water reactors (PWRs), four advanced boiling water reactors (ABWRs) and 13 boiling water reactors (BWRs), which are the same kind as those at the Fukushima No. 1 plant destroyed by the 3/11 quake and tsunami. The PWRs are considered more technologically stable than the other kinds, and have a better ability to contain radiation. Now that the NRA has greenlighted Onagawa’s restart, does that mean it will happen anytime soon? That depends on a number of factors. The Onagawa plant is not ready to be fired up tomorrow. It must first complete the installation of various anti-disaster measures, including a 29-meter-high, 800-meter-long seawall along the Pacific coast to guard against tsunami as high as 23.1 meters. That will not be completed until sometime in fiscal 2020, which begins April 1. Furthermore, various local governments, including Ishinomaki and Miyagi Prefecture, will have to give their consent to the restart. That could involve long, drawn out negotiations between the utility and local residents and politicians. It’s also probable that lawyers and local citizens opposed to a restart will seek a court injunction to halt the move based on safety concerns. If a court approves an injunction, that will create further delays. How many other nuclear power plants are there and what are their statuses? As of this month, there are nine reactors officially in operation. Four belong to Kansai Electric Power Co. (Kepco), which provides electricity mainly to Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, Hyogo, Shiga and Wakayama prefectures. Another four belong to Kyushu Electric Power Co. One of Shikoku Electric Power Co.’s reactors at its Ikata plant is also operating……. What about the future for nuclear power in Japan? The government’s long-term energy policy for 2030 calls for nuclear power to make up around 20 to 22 percent of the nation’s energy mix, and it is pushing hard for the restart of as many idled reactors as possible. By then, the plan calls for renewable energy to account for 22 to 24 percent of the mix, LNG to make up 27 percent, coal 26 percent and oil 3 percent. But the obstacles to restarting, or continuing to operate, nuclear plants in the coming years are vast. In addition to local opposition that could delay restarts for months or years, costing the utilities money, they include such issues as the economics of running reactors past 40 years, for which the utilities must first spend money to upgrade their facilities in order to meet new NRA standards regarding reactors older than four decades. While Kepco has secured permission to operate three reactors already over 40 years old for another two decades at the most, other utilities with reactors currently more than 30 years old — such as Tepco’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa No. 1 reactor (34 years old) — will have to decide within a few years whether it’s worth the investment of money and time to apply for a two-decade extension or whether it’s cheaper to decommission. A second problem has to do with spent nuclear fuel generated by the restarted reactors. Tokyo is making efforts to find local governments able and willing to have a midterm spent fuel storage facility built in their backyard, and has agreed to offer financial incentives for anyone willing to accept a facility. No luck so far. Meanwhile, in Fukui Prefecture, which has the largest concentration of reactors (13 commercial reactors plus the Monju experimental fast-breeder reactor) in the nation, Gov. Tatsuji Sugimoto is insisting that such storage facilities be built outside the prefecture. His position could lead to other prefectures hosting nuclear power plants to take a firmer stance with utilities and the central government over what to do with spent nuclear fuel when they come seeking local consent for their own restart plans. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/12/09/reference/japan-nuclear-power-onagawa-reactor-restart/#.Xe6m4egzbIU |
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Religion and climate change – Dr Katharine Hayhoe
Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Climate Change But Were Afraid to Ask, Forbes, Devin Thorpe 9 Dec 19, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe is a climate scientist who leads the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University and is the host and producer of the PBS series Global Weirding. I asked her everything you want to know about climate change but were afraid to ask…..
DT: What would you tell someone who wants to do their part to solve climate change?
It’s time to reset US nuclear waste policy
 Life after Yucca Mountain: The time has come to reset US nuclear waste policy, The Hill, BY DAVID KLAUS AND ROD EWING, 12/09/19 After decades of inaction and stalemate, there are small but significant signs that the U.S. government may finally be ready to meet its legal commitment to manage and dispose of the more than 80,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel at 74 operating and shut-down commercial nuclear reactors sites in 35 states across the country. The signs of progress include:
While the debate over the fate of Yucca Mountain is primarily responsible for the current standoff, pressure for action is increasing at the local level where closed plants and what to do with the spent fuel stored on site has become a particularly hot political issue. Seven U.S. reactors were permanently closed from 2013 through 2018 and an additional 13 are set to close by 2025. There are now 21 “stranded sites” scattered across the country – closed reactor sites with no ongoing reactor operations. Moreover, the number of plant closures is expected to increase as plants age and state regulators refuse to adopt rate structures that value the type of base load power provided by nuclear reactors.
There also is pressure for action at the national level. The failure of the U.S. government to take ownership of the spent fuel has cost the taxpayers $7.4 billion in damages paid to utilities for continued storage at their reactor sites — and costs are projected to increase as more reactors close. With government payments to utilities already running some $600 million per year, the government estimates the total cost may ultimately be as high as $34 billion. Industry estimates are in the range of $50 billion……
Perhaps most significant obstacle is the dysfunction in our current political system. In normal times, political compromise to address the most significant current problem – the growing amounts of spent fuel at closed reactor sites around the country – should be in reach. It is time to reset U.S. policy and accept that the Yucca Mountain site is not going to be licensed and built. Legislators working in good faith should be able to resolve the funding issue, develop a fair, consent-based process for selecting a site for a long-term spent fuel repository and amend federal law to no longer hold the development of a consolidated interim storage facility hostage to that process. David Klaus formerly served, among other positions, as Deputy Under Secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy and Counsel to the Energy and Commerce Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. He is an Affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Professor Rod Ewing is the co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and led a recent initiative – Reset of America’s Nuclear Waste Management Strategy and Policy. https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-environment/473627-life-after-yucca-mountain-the-time-has-come-to-reset#.Xe6gyaz6YH4.twitter
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Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz suggests bombing Iran to stop its nuclear program
 FM: Bombing Iran to stop its nuclear program remains ‘an option’
Speaking with Italian media on the sidelines of a foreign policy conference in Rome, Israel Katz rebukes European leaders for not taking a more aggressive stand against Tehran. Iranian FM accuses Israel of testing nuclear missile aimed at his country. Israel Hayom 12-08-2019 The option to launch a preemptive strike against Iran to prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon remains viable, Foreign Minister Israel Katz said in an interview Saturday. Speaking with Italian-language daily Corriere della Sera, Katz – asked whether Israel was mulling military options vis-à-vis the Islamic republic – said, “Yes, it is an option. We will not allow Iran to produce or obtain nuclear weapons. If it were the last possible way to stop this, we would act militarily.” The comments were reportedly made on the sidelines of a foreign policy conference in Rome. They came just hours after Iran announced its ready to unveil a “new generation” of nuclear-related “products,” including new centrifuge systems and a heavy water power plant scheduled to be built by the spring of 2020. Katz further admonished European leaders for not taking a more aggressive stand against Iran over its repeated, escalating violations of the 2015 nuclear deal…… On Friday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif accused Israel of holding “a nuclear missile test aimed at Iran.” “Israel today tested a nuke-missile, aimed at Iran,” Zarif said on Twitter, adding that the United States, Germany, France and the United Kingdom “never complain about the only nuclear arsenal in West Asia – armed with missiles actually DESIGNED to be capable of carrying nukes – but has fits of apoplexy over our conventional & defensive ones.” The Israeli defense establishment successfully tested a rocket propulsion system on Friday. Defense officials stressed that the test was planned in advance and carried out as planned. https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/12/08/fm-bombing-iran-to-stop-its-nuclear-program-remains-an-option/ |
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Floating small nuclear reactors bring serious risks
nuclear experts have highlighted crucial negatives that cast doubt on the floating nuclear utopia.Jan Haverkamp, Greenpeace Netherlands senior expert nuclear energy and energy policy, sees the three main disadvantages of Akademin Lomonosov to be the big human factors risk, its problematic construction, and the pollution of the Arctic region with nuclear waste.
this project is reintroducing a major pollution risk in an area which functions as a climate regulator for the globe – “the Arctic pristine area, which is a very important natural area for the entire balance on the planet,”
Is floating nuclear power a good idea? Power Technology By Yoana Cholteeva, 9 Dec 19, Floating nuclear power promises to provide a steady source of energy at hard-to-reach locations, but at the same time the dangers inherent in nuclear power make some question whether it’s safe enough for areas where help is hard to find. Is floating nuclear power really a good idea? Yoana Cholteeva investigates.
Russian nuclear company Rosatom announced the arrival of the world’s first floating nuclear power plant, Akademik Lomonosov, in September 2019 when the technology was transported to the port of its permanent location in Russia’s Far East. The 144m-long and 30m-wide vessel has now docked at the port in Pevek, off the coast of Chukotka, where it will stay before its commissioning next year.
Akademik Lomonosov will use small modular reactor technology and is equipped with two KLT-40C reactor systems with 35MW capacity each. It has been designed to access hard-to-reach areas where it can operate for three to five years without the need for refuelling. It also has an overall life cycle of 40 years, which may be extended to 50 years Continue reading
Health Ethics of Nuclear Energy – theme for December 2019
The early mutations of butterflies around Fukushima are alarming as the mutations disorders have been increasing with the offspring.
In a similar study on mice after 25 years of the Chernobyl catastrophe, it yielded the following outcome: “The rate of mutation amongst the field mice is one hundred thousand times higher than normal”
“There is a linear dose-response relationship between exposure to ionizing radiation and the development of solid cancers in humans. It is unlikely that there is a threshold below which cancers are not induced”
Ethics of Nuclear Energy Abu-Dayyeh (P.hD) Amman – H.K. of Jordan Ayoub101@hotmail.com E_case Society (President) www.energyjo.com [Extract]
“……2- Health Risk Analysis,
If “risk” is defined as the product of probability of an accident happening with its severity, we ought to start this title by considering first major commercial nuclear accidents of level 7 on the INES scale, as a priority in analysis, so we must consider 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe where “Emissions from Chernobyl reactor exceeded a hundredfold the radioactive contamination of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki”(10).
The latest New York Academy report on Chernobyl catastrophe has published horrendous facts of more than a million causalities; the new book concludes: Chernobyl death toll: 985,000, mostly from cancer (11). A paper by Kristina Voigt and Hagen Scherb also showed that after 1986, in the aftermath of Chernobyl, around 800,000 fewer children were born in Europe than one might have expected. The overall number of “missing” children after Chernobyl could have reached about one million (12); not to mention that the researchers have not covered all countries in their count!
According to UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation), adding to the latter casualties, between 12,000 and 83,000 children who lived in the vicinity of Chernobyl were born with congenital deformations, and also estimate that around 30,000 to 207,000 genetically damaged children were born worldwide (13). Amongst the interesting findings was that only 10% of the overall expected damage was actually seen in the first generation; the worse is yet to come with the offspring. A similar research on butterflies around Fukushima has yielded a similar result which will be discussed later.
As for the level 6 on the INES scale, it is classified as a serious nuclear accident that includes the accident at the Kyshtym facility in Russia in 1957, unfortunately not much research was published! on level 5, accidents with wider consequences include United Kingdom Windscale facility in the year 1957, Chalk River – Canada in 1952 and the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, Continue reading
Pentagon to get more control over the news? Is this a GOOD idea?
 The Pentagon Wants More Control Over the News. What Could Go Wrong?The Pentagon is using a moral panic over “fake news” to gain influence over the domestic news landscape, Rolling Stone
By MATT TAIBBI 9 Dec 19, If there’s a worse idea than the Pentagon becoming Editor-in-Chief of America, I can’t remember it. But we’re getting there:
From Bloomberg over Labor Day weekend: Fake news and social media posts are such a threat to U.S. security that the Defense Department is launching a project to repel “large-scale, automated disinformation attacks,” as the top Republican in Congress blocks efforts to protect the integrity of elections. One of the Pentagon’s most secretive agencies, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is developing “custom software that can unearth fakes hidden among more than 500,000 stories, photos, video and audio clips.” Once upon a time, when progressives still reflexively distrusted the military, DARPA was a liberal punchline, known for helping invent the Internet but also for developing lunatic privacy-invading projects like LifeLog, a program to “gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees, or does.” DARPA now is developing a semantic analysis program called “SemaFor” and an image analysis program called “MediFor,” ostensibly designed to prevent the use of fake images or text. The idea would be to develop these technologies to help private Internet providers sift through content. ….. Stories about the need for such technologies are always couched as responses to the “fake news” problem. Unfortunately, “fake news” is a poorly-defined, amorphous concept that the public has been trained to fear without really understanding. ……. Fake news has a long history in America. Its most pernicious incarnation is never the work of small-time scam artists. The worst “fake news” almost always involves broad-scale deceptions foisted on the public by official (and often unnamed) sources, in conjunction with oligopolistic media companies, usually in service of rallying the public behind a dubious policy objective like a war or authoritarian crackdown. From the sinking of the Maine in 1898, to rumors of a union-led socialist insurrection before the Palmer raids in 1919, to the Missile Gap in the late fifties and early sixties (here is the CIA’s own website admitting that one was “erroneous”), to the Gulf of Tonkin lie that launched the Vietnam War, to the more recent WMD fiasco, true “fake news” is a concerted, organized, institutional phenomenon that involves deceptions cooked up at the highest levels. …… the final, omnipresent ingredient in most major propaganda campaigns is the authoritarian solution. Here, it’s unelected, unsupervised algorithmic control over media. We’ve never had a true news regulator in this country, yet the public is being conditioned now to accept one, without thinking of the consequences. The most enormous issue posed by the modern media landscape is the industry’s incredible concentration, which allows a handful of private platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Google – to dominate media distribution. This makes it possible to envisage direct levers of control over the public’s media habits that never existed back when people got much of their news from local paper chains with individual distribution networks. We’ve already seen scary examples of misidentified foreign subversion, from the Washington Post’s repeat editorials denouncing Bernie Sanders as a useful idiot for the Kremlin to the zapping of hundreds of domestic political sites as “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” What if the same people who can’t tell the difference between Truthdig and Pravda get to help design the new fake news algorithms? That’s a much bigger worry than the next Paul Horner or even, frankly, the next Russian Facebook campaign. While Donald Trump is in the White House, progressives won’t grasp how scary all of this is, but bet on it: In a few years, we’ll all wish we paid more attention when the Pentagon announced it wanted in on the news regulation business. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/darpa-fake-news-internet-censorship-879671/ |
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Ontario’s First Nations to vote on nuclear waste plan near Lake Huron
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First Nation vote on nuclear waste DGR set for Jan. 31 https://london.ctvnews.ca/first-nation-vote-on-nuclear-waste-dgr-set-for-jan-31-1.4718866 Scott MillerVideographer @ScottMillerCTV Contact
Friday, December 6, 2019 WINGHAM, ONT. — The Saugeen Ojibway Nation (SON) will decide if nuclear waste is buried along the shores of Lake Huron in a little over a month.The First Nation band of approximately 5,000 will hold a binding vote on Jan. 31, 2020 to find out if their members want Ontario Power Generation (OPG) to bury 230,000 cubic metres of low- and intermediate-level nuclear waste under part of the Bruce Power site near Kincardine, or not.
Officials say whatever the people decide, that will be the band’s position on the proposed Deep Geological Repository (DGR). If they vote yes, OPG would still require federal government approval to move forward with the project. If SON votes no, OPG says they’ll start looking for an alternative site in Ontario. There are over 200 resolutions opposing the project, from municipal councils within the Great Lakes Basin, in Canada and the United States. Councils in nearby Bruce County have declared their support for the project. |
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To store Canada’s nuclear wastes close to Lake Huron – the worst of the worst
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Site near Lake Huron one of two finalists to store Canada’s nuclear waste, Herald Mail Media, By Keith Matheny Detroit Free Press (TNS), Dec 8, 2019
Canada has narrowed to two communities its list of potential hosts for a permanent national repository for its most radioactive waste — spent fuel from nuclear power generation. And one of those two finalists is on the shores of Lake Huron. If chosen, Huron-Kinloss/South Bruce, in Bruce County, Ontario, could host a large repository, 1,650 feet or more underground, to which the entire nation’s spent nuclear fuel supply would be transported and stored, essentially forever. “This is the worst of the worst” waste, said Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist with the nonprofit Beyond Nuclear, based in Tacoma Park, Md. “It’s highly radioactive irradiated nuclear fuel. It is dangerous forever.”……
Canada has an inventory of almost 2.9 million used nuclear fuel bundles currently stored above-ground in wet pools and dry containers at the nuclear plant sites where the waste is generated. That’s about 128 million pounds of highly radioactive material, a number that is growing. The site along Lake Huron is in the same county where another underground storage facility — this one for low-to-intermediate-level radioactive waste from Ontario’s 19 nuclear reactors — was proposed. That plan, still under consideration, generated loud opposition throughout the Great Lakes Basin beginning about five years ago, especially in Michigan. Michigan’s Democratic U.S. senators, who were among those urging a halt to the lower-radiation waste storage on the Great Lakes, expressed alarm that Canada is now considering putting its most dangerous nuclear wastes along the Great Lakes as well. “This makes no sense,” U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow said. “Canada has as much at stake as we do in protecting our Great Lakes. There is no justification for a nuclear waste site so close to Lake Huron to even be under consideration.” Stabenow said she would reach out to the Canadian government regarding the issue. U.S. Sen. Gary Peters noted that the Great Lakes provide drinking water to 40 million people on the U.S. and Canadian sides. “That’s why we need to do everything we can to protect the Great Lakes for future generations,” he said. “I am extremely concerned about the possibility of hazardous nuclear waste being stored near the Great Lakes. Any accident could have catastrophic and long-term consequences to the health and well-being of Michigan and the country. I urge the Nuclear Waste Management Organization in Canada to reconsider naming a finalist location so close to the Great Lakes.” The finalist decision was made by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, which consists of the nation’s generators of nuclear power and its wastes: Ontario Power Generation, New Brunswick Power Corp. and Hydro-Quebec. Under an act of Canada’s parliament in 2002, the organization is tasked with designing and implementing Canada’s plan for the safe, long-term management of used nuclear fuel. …… The sites were winnowed to five last month, and last week, the organization decided on its two finalists: Huron-Kinloss/South Bruce and Ignace, a rural community in northwest Ontario about 150 miles north of western Lake Superior….. Bruce County is home to Ontario Power Generation’s Bruce Nuclear Generation Station, which has eight reactors. “You have a company town, Kincardine Ontario, with one of the largest nuclear plants on Earth,” said Brennain Lloyd, project coordinator for NorthWatch, a regional coalition in northeast Ontario that works on regional issues.Many area residents, with family ties to the nuclear plant, expressed support for the low-to-intermediate radioactive waste repository, and would have an economic interest in the spent fuel disposal site, Lloyd noted. “Everybody who drinks Great Lakes water is being held hostage to the decision-making of these few thousand people,” she said. While several nations, including France, Sweden and Finland, are at various stages of designing deep geologic repositories for their spent nuclear fuel, there has not yet been any proof, anywhere, that the concept works over the very long term, said Gordon Edwards, president of the nonprofit Canadian Citizens for Environmental Responsibility, based in Montreal. ….. Belfadhel said the completed repository site would have on-site monitoring for “over 100 years.” Edwards said that’s a pittance of what will be needed. “The pyramids of Egypt are only 5,000 years old; the Great Lakes are only about 10,000 years old, created by the last Ice Age,” he said. “The idea that we can create structures that can last longer than the lifetime of the Great Lakes since they were first created is very presumptuous.” Another problem is transporting highly radioactive spent fuel to the site, Kamps said. “Are they going to use barges on the Great Lakes? What if they sink?” he said. “If not barges, are they going to use trains and trucks? What if they crash? What if they are attacked by terrorists? If there are releases, it’s probably going into the lakes. “You’re talking about concentrating 22 reactors’ worth of spent fuel. If you’re going to concentrate that much radioactivity in one place, terrorists might consider attacking it for the ultimate dirty bomb on the planet. …… The proposal to store the most dangerous waste in the world near the Great Lakes should not even be considered, Edwards said. “The people who previously expressed themselves against the low and intermediate-level waste dump need to rise up again,” he said. “All of the high-level waste from all of Canada’s nuclear reactors, it’s ridiculous to put it right beside the Great Lakes. It’s millions of times more radioactive than the low and intermediate level waste.” https://www.heraldmailmedia.com/news/nation/site-near-lake-huron-one-of-two-finalists-to-store/article_a98ff7b8-3b2f-52e7-b55c-c21a6e9d12ca.html |
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Britain, France, and Germany press Iran over its ballistic missile program
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Europeans Ramp up Pressure on Iran, Britain, France, and Germany say Iran’s ballistic missile program is inconsistent with the nuclear deal and improves its capacity to deliver nuclear payload. Tehran counters that Europeans have failed to meet obligations under the pact. FP.com,
BY COLUM LYNCH
DECEMBER 6, 2019, Three key European powers this week inched closer to the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran, saying that Tehran’s ballistic missile program is inconsistent with its obligations under the Iran nuclear accord. Iran’s ballistic program—which was largely prohibited by the United Nations Security Council before the adoption of the Iran nuclear pact in 2015—has been a source of contention between Washington and Tehran. Under the terms of the agreement, Iran reserved the right to develop ballistic missiles for conventional warheads. But it pledged not to develop missiles capable of delivering a nuclear bomb. Under President Donald Trump, the United States—which pulled out of the nuclear deal in May 2018—maintains that Iran has been violating the spirit of the agreement by developing banned missile capabilities under the cover its conventional weapons program. The administration recently got a boost from Britain, France, and Germany, which signed a joint letter last month declaring that “Iran’s developments of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles and related technologies is inconsistent” with its obligations under a U.N. resolution that endorsed the nuclear accord. Foreign Policy is publishing the letter, which was made public by the United Nations earlier this week, as part of our Document of the Week series. The letter constituted the latest sign that key European powers—which remain committed to the nuclear pact—are seeking to shore up their relations with Washington and to chastise Tehran for what they view as its gradual retreat from its obligations under the nuclear pact. But Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, accused them of seeking to “cover up their miserable incompetence” in living up to their own obligations under the nuclear pact. If the United Kingdom, France, and Germany “want a modicum of global credibility, they can begin by exerting sovereignty rather than bowing to US bullying,” he said. The European powers assert that an Iranian launch of a Shahab-3 medium-range missile—which appeared footage posted on social media in April—included a booster that the Missile Technology Control Regime concluded is capable of delivering a nuclear weapon. The 35-member association of the world’s main missile producers urges restrictions on the export of nuclear missile technology……… https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/06/europe-iran-ramp-up-pressure-ballistic-missiles/ |
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France’s nuclear industry in dire straits
The French nuclear revolution is rusting away, December 6, 2019, THE AUSTRALIAN, Henry Ergas “……..France’s nuclear power industry faces a future that is more uncertain than ever. The problems gripping the industry were highlighted late last month in an official report prepared by the former president and chief executive of PSA Peugeot Citroen, Jean Martin Folz.
While the report’s focus is on the difficulties that have plagued the construction of a new reactor at Flamanville in northwestern France, its implications reach much further.
With nuclear power plants accounting for more than 70 per cent of its overall electricity generation, no country is as dependent on nuclear energy as is France.
The decision to rely so massively on nuclear energy was taken in 1974, after the oil shock of the previous year had underlined France’s vulnerability to Middle Eastern oil. Prime minister Pierre Messmer launched a crash program that led to the construction of 56 reactors in just 15 years.
…….. however, most of France’s generators are approaching the final decade of their useful life. Planning for their replacement has been a stop-start affair, with the Greens’ increasingly strident opposition to nuclear power deterring successive governments from taking action.
As a result, only the Flamanville plant received the go-ahead, with construction beginning in 2007 for an expected entry into service in 2012. Virtually from the outset, the project was beset by woes. At this stage, the total costs of construction are four times greater than initially estimated, while the plant will not enter service before the end of 2022.
The problems stem partly from the sheer complexity of the new reactor, which is the first of its kind to be built in France.
Additionally, the catastrophe at Fukushima in 2011 led to regulatory changes that necessitated costly redesigns. And the project has suffered more than its fair share of mismanagement, aggravated by a byzantine allocation of responsibilities between EDF, the main French electricity utility, which oversaw the project, and many layers of subcontractors.
However, as the Folz report shows, the primary cause of the difficulties lies in the erosion of the industry’s skill base during the long hiatus from the end of the crash program in 1990 to the initiation of Flamanville………
There is, at this point, no prospect of France scaling up its nuclear program 
………The cost blowout at Olkiluoto drove Areva, the “national champion” of France’s nuclear industry, into bankruptcy.
Even with an injection of $7.3bn in public funds EDF, which acquired Areva, lacks the balance sheet strength to underwrite new projects, while the French government’s borrowing ability is hampered by its already too high levels of debt.
To make matters worse, the regulated prices at which EDF has to sell the power it generates mean that it cannot charge its European clients the full value of the baseload it supplies.
As for global investors, who might provide the debt financing EDF would require, they are wary of projects that are risky in themselves ….
Given those constraints, the government has announced a modest plan to eventually build six additional reactors. So far, however, there are no actionable decisions beyond the completion of Flamanville. And work on the next generation of reactors….. has been quietly downgraded, making it likely that there will no fourth generation reactor of French design.
The consequences for France itself are far-reaching. Beginning in the late 1950s, French firms succeeded in one high-technology market after the other by developing or acquiring a rather basic design (including the Westinghouse Pressurised Water Reactor, the Mirage jet fighter and the TGV high-speed train) that they upgraded while producing it on a large scale.
That era is over, and there is every sign France is struggling with almost all the major projects it has in train.
The Folz report should therefore come as an ominous warning for Australia’s submarine project, as it identifies French industry’s serious managerial and technological weaknesses in a range of areas, such as precision welding, that are crucial to that project’s success……. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/the-french-nuclear-revolution-is-rusting-away/news-story/afe4546ed799939cf117d71f05035c5e
1.This Month
Ethics, Nuclear Power, and Global Heating – theme for December 2019
Ethics of Nuclear Energy Abu-Dayyeh (P.hD) Amman – H.K. of Jordan Ayoub101@hotmail.com E_case Society (President) www.energyjo.com [Extract]
Abstract:
This paper attempts to refute the myth of “clean nuclear energy”, and discusses the unethical impact on the environment of the overall process of the nuclear energy electricity production industry, from mining to decommissioning, through the problematic framework of “health risk analysis”, “economical feasibility” and “sustainability”. It also focuses on the economic and safety fragility of developing countries in the South to deal with big loans or a possible catastrophe, not to mention managing nuclear waste for a very long period of time.
Finally, the paper diverges all the inductions of the different criteria discussed towards inferring a global categorically imperative ethical perception based on a biocentric stance that takes United Nations recommendations into consideration, such as the “Precautionary Principle”, the declarations on Human Rights and the rights of future generations to a healthy and sustainable environment, in order to settle down to an “ecosophical” conclusion.
1- Introduction: The “clean nuclear energy” myth!
Nuclear energy is still one of the options used today across the world, thought to be a clean source of energy that produces neither CO2 nor other Ozone related pollutants into the atmosphere. However, it is now been verified that the complete fuel cycle of nuclear energy production is generous in producing GHG as well as CFCs; from mining and milling to fuel enrichment, constructing and operating the nuclear facility, transportation of nuclear fuel, safety and security measures, reprocessing and recycling the depleted nuclear fuel, manufacturing by-products, encasing and burying the nuclear waste and eventually decommissioning the nuclear facility and its surrounding environment, including the contaminated soil(1).
Concerned communities in Japan who are removing contaminated soil and conducting clean up operations are using independent researchers because they have lost faith in their government: “The roots of mistrust came out after authorities issued radiation readings that often turned out to be incorrect”(2). This comes as a proof that governments don’t consider life cycle assessment mechanisms in calculating accurate GHG emissions, insurance, cost of KWh of electricity produced or genome radioactive infuriation. Most of the research is government sponsored or controlled by nuclear commissions, thus falling in “conflict of interest” controversy.
The nuclear fuel cycle is a generous CO2 emitter that can exceed 288 grams of CO2 e/KWh, or (66)g as a mean value, even when existing studies fail to consider emissions of co-products (3) which cause global warming too. Research on light water nuclear reactors showed CO2 emission up to 220 g/KWh (4), yet this value is expected to rise as uranium ore grade worldwide is deteriorating by time. The USA ore grade average, for example, dropped from 0.28% U3O8 to 0.07 – 0.11% (1100 ppm) in 40 years (5). The complete life cycle assessment mechanism considered to calculate CO2 equivalent (CO2 e/KWh) in the previous analysis can raise this value significantly!
A comparative study on GHG emissions of thin-film photovoltaic electricity generation yielded a range of carbon foot print of 14-26 g/KWh under 2400 KWh per square meter per year, through a performance of 80%, for a life time of 30 years(6). A median value of carbon foot print for wind power was calculated to be 11 g/KWh(7), compared to the 66 g for nuclear without considering co-products emissions, uranium ore grade deterioration …etc.
The nuclear fuel cycle also produces chemical compounds that can harm the Ozone layer due to the generous emissions of CFCs during uranium enrichment. CFC 114 produced is an Ozone layer depletory, where as 93% of the CFC 114 released in the USA is from uranium enrichment (8).
Further more, the enrichment of uranium is a highly polluting industry during which U238 (Depleted Uranium) is produced; a heavy metal, 1.7 times heavier than lead, used in encasing ammunition among other things. It burns upon impact and 80% of its weight disintegrates into aerosol powder (half – radioactive life 4.5 billion years, the same as the Earth’s age) (9).
Regardless of these justified arguments, some might still argue that nuclear energy emits far less CO2 than some fossil fuels, particularly coal. However, we would like to counter-argue that claim on the basis that nuclear energy production is unethical on the bases of a set of criteria:
Health risk analysis, economic feasibility, sustainability, security and liability, which will be discussed in this paper. Additional arguments would be based on the “Precautionary Principle”, United Nations Declaration on Human Rights and the right of future generations in a healthy, safe and sustainable environment.
For those who might still believe that moral responsibility and ethical stances don’t change the world just have to wait and see how an ethics committee decision shaped the future of nuclear Germany!…………”
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PETITION https://www.ohioansagainstnukebailouts.com/petition
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