Global heating to bring more frequent, more extreme, ocean waves
EXTREME WAVES SET TO BE BIGGER AND MORE FREQUENT
As the planet warms, researchers are warning that the frequency and magnitude of extreme wave events may rise by around 10 per cent by the end of century, increasing flood risks. Pursuit, By Dr Alberto Meucci and Professor Ian Young University of Melbourne, 13 June 20
When most of us think about what climate change will do to our coastlines we tend to focus on how sea-levels are rising as the polar ice caps melt and the oceans warm. But that is only part of the story.
What many don’t realise is that at the same time as sea levels are rising, storms are increasing in magnitude and frequency, resulting in larger ocean waves. These waves increase coastal erosion and the risk of flooding.
Our new research suggests that by the end of the century the magnitude of extreme wave events will have increased by up to 10 per cent over extensive ocean regions, and the frequency of storms that generate extreme waves will have increased by five to 10 per year.
This may not sound like a big increase, but it means that almost 60 per cent of the world’s coastline will experience larger and more frequent extreme waves.
At a time when 290 million people already live below the 100-year flood level (that is, they live below levels where there is at least a one per cent probability of flooding every year), an increase in the risk of extreme wave events may be catastrophic, as larger and more frequent storms will cause more flooding and coastline erosion.
Extremes are defined as unexpected, unusual and sometimes unseasonal events. Like extreme floods, extreme waves are classified by the frequency with which they tend to occur, and this frequency drives the design requirements for ocean structures or coastal defences. For example, defences may be designed to cope with a 100-year wave event.
Extreme ocean waves generated by strong surface winds can reach heights of over 20 meters at the high latitudes of the globe – that’s as high as four double-decker buses stacked on top of each other.
But the surface winds that drive wave heights are in turn driven by the climate system, and so are subject to climate change. A warming planet is causing stronger and more frequent storm winds which in turn trigger larger and more frequent extreme waves, and the 100-year events may begin to occur every 50 or even 20 years.
Estimating the probability of occurrence of extreme waves is challenging, let alone estimating how their frequency and magnitude may change in the future. This is due to the small number of ocean observations available.
The buoys and offshore platforms scientists use to observe ocean movements are sparsely distributed, and satellite measurements are limited in how often they sample a single location.
But advances in computing technology and the modelling of data, allows us to simulate the Earth’s changing climate under different wind conditions, recreating thousands of simulated storms to evaluate the magnitude and frequency of extreme events.
Our research used a unique statistical ensemble approach, where we pooled data from an unprecedented collection of thousands of modelled ocean wave extremes to estimate future extreme events. These extremes were derived from global wave models based on wind forces generated from seven different global climate models.
The vast amount of modelled ocean extremes generated allowed us to apply an ensemble statistical analysis that reduces the uncertainty around the estimation of future projections of extremes. …….. Co-authors of the research are: Dr Mark Hemer, CSIRO, Oceans and Atmosphere, Hobart Australia; Professor Roshanka Ranasinghe, Department of Water Science and Engineering, IHE-Delft, Netherlands; and Ebru Kirezci, University of Melbourne
Grave climate risks to Sizewell C nuclear project – all too close to the sea
  Times 10th June 2020, As if big nuclear power plants weren’t already toxic enough. To the usuallist — exploding costs, endless delays, ruinously pricey electricity and a vast clean-up bill — Sizewell C brings another joy. And not just that it’s being partly built by CGN of China: odd reward for the crackdown on Hong Kong. No, it’s that Sizewell C is in a “dangerous location”. Or so says Nick Scarr from the Nuclear Consulting Group, a collection of academics and experts. The consulting engineer has examined the plans from France’s EDF and CGN to build the 3,200MW nuke on the Suffolk coast from the perspective of coastal erosion and climate change. And, assuming he’sright, his paper is alarming — unless you’re relaxed about the risk of the plant being encircled by sea.
Sizewell C will be bigger and closer to the sea than the site’s existing reactors. Mr Scarr takes issue with EDF claims that it’ll be effectively protected by the offshore Sizewell-Dunwich bank and a coralline crag, so creating a “natural wave break”. He points to studies showing waves are getting through in storms, while at the Sizewell C site the crag is more gravelly than desired.
With decommissioning of the plant not due until 2150, Mr Scarr believes EDF and CGN are paying far too little attention to forecasts from the Met Office and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Not least the notion that once-a-century “extreme sea level events”, are “projected to occur much more frequently by 2050”. He says the once in 10,000 year flood risk that “EDF trumpets” is “just 0.71m above the historical 1953 flood level”. This is only Mr Scarr’s opinion, but he says his paper has been “approved” by Professor Andrew Plater of Liverpool
University: a leading coastal geomorphologist. So what’s EDF’s
response? Well, it reckons Mr Scarr’s analysis of the effects of the sandbank and crag is both confused and wrong. It also says it has evaluated
the likely effect of climate change. “The design of the power station, including its sea defence and the raised platform it will be built on, will protect Sizewell C from flooding,” EDF insists. It says it’ll take an “adaptive approach”, raising the sea defences “during the lifetime of Sizewell C if needed”. Mr Scarr says such an approach only works for
construction projects such as painting the Forth Bridge every year, not sea defences for a nuclear plant. Indeed, he reckons it’s “clear evidence” that the location cannot “offer the criteria necessary for long-term safety of the project”. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/business/sizewell-c-debate-turns-a-bit-salty-gvvzhp7rf |
Seeking ways to remove carbon from the air
 Entrepreneurs tasked with removing carbon pollution from the air https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/06/entrepreneurs-tasked-with-removing-carbon-pollution-from-the-air/
‘Visionary leaders and entrepreneurs can really have a hand in scaling these carbon removal solutions.’ Carbon emissions from power plants, transportation, and industry cause global warming. But reducing that pollution may not be enough to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Some scientists say the world must also remove carbon that’s already in the atmosphere.Giana Amador is cofounder of the nonprofit Carbon180. She says that a number of industries already have strategies to soak up carbon pollution. “We can farm in ways that store more carbon in the soil. We can plant more trees,” she says. “And there are also technologies that are basically big fans that use chemical reactions to capture carbon directly from the air and separate that out into a pure stream of CO2 that can then be either sequestered underground or used in products like cements and plastics.” But to meet climate goals, these solutions need to scale up dramatically. To help, Amador’s nonprofit has started a fellowship. It helps entrepreneurs launch businesses that – within a decade – can remove a billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. “We think that visionary leaders and entrepreneurs can really have a hand in scaling these carbon removal solutions,” Amador says. |
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Nuclear power plants in the path of oncoming Cyclone Nisarga
 Concerns raised over nuclear and chemical plants in  Maharashtra as cyclone Nisarga heads towards the state Opindia, 2 June, 2020, OpIndia Staff As the Cyclone Nisarga is heading towards the coasts of Maharashtra, a huge concern has been expressed regarding the nuclear and chemical plants that may come in its direct path. Expectedly, the cyclone will enter the coasts late Tuesday night or early Wednesday.
Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray while updating about the cyclone said, “Care is being taken to prevent power outages. Precautions are being taken at chemical units and nuclear power plants in Palghar and Raigad.” Maharashtra posses a string of chemical and nuclear plants. In Palghar, the oldest Tarapur Atomic Power Plant complex and other power units are present while Mumbai has the BARC set up and Raigad houses power, petroleum, chemicals, and other major industries besides the Mumbai port trust, the Jawaharlal Nehru Post trust and vital installations of the navy. People living in non-pucca houses have been shifted to safer shelters for them and slum dwellers have been asked to vacate for their own safety. As per reports, 50 patients were shifted from the Bandra Kurla complex COVID-19 hospital to the Goregaon NESCO hospital. Rescue operations underway…….. The Indian Meteorological Department announced that depression in the Arabian Sea may develop into a cyclonic storm in the next 12 hours and further intensify into a severe cyclonic storm within 24 hours. The deep depression – ‘Cyclone Nisarga’, which is headed towards the coasts in Maharashtra and Gujarat, is likely to hit the western coast on Wednesday……. https://www.opindia.com/2020/06/cyclone-nisarga-creates-concerns-for-nuclear-and-chemical-plants-maharashtra/ |
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Climate Experts Predict ‘Grim Future’ For Nuclear Power
Climate Experts Predict ‘Grim Future’ For Nuclear Power
The result of research into black swans – called “Synthesising Unprecedented Coastal Conditions: Extreme Storm Surges” aka SUCCESS – was presented at the meeting. It was important to conduct this research, the academic said, because “the storm surge of 5th December 2013 caused sea levels in many parts of the country that were the highest ever recorded and begs the obvious question – could they have been worse?”
All in all, the presentations and discussions at the meeting would not have been particularly welcome to the ONR, whose job it is to make sure nuclear power stations are built to standards that guarantee public safety. In a statement to VICE, an ONR spokesperson said “ONR requires that nuclear new build sites are able to withstand extreme natural hazards, by designing against a one in 10,000 year event. Sites must identify these external hazards, which include the impact of climate change, and demonstrate that they are adequately protected against them throughout the lifetime of the facility.”
Time that journalists reported on the threat of global heating to the nuclear industry
Really? Not a mention of the ill effects that climate change has on nuclear power, nor the fact that it, and the uranium mining that feeds it, are highly water guzzling.
Therefore most nuclear reactors are sited near the sea, or near rivers and estuaries.
They have to cut back or even shut down in very hot weather. They are vulnerable to sea level rise, and extreme events – flooding, hurricanes, wildfires.
Far from nuclear power combatting climate change, it’ds the other way around.
As for Small Modular Nuclear Reactors working against climate change, you would need literally millions of them to be quickly operating around the world, to have any effect on global heating. Time that you journalists told the whole story, not just the nuclear lobby’s version
Global ‘hot spots’. Australia very vulnerable to droughts, as planet heats
Australia among global ‘hot spots’ as droughts worsen in warming world, The Age, By Peter Hannam, June 1, 2020 The world’s major food baskets will experience more extreme droughts than previously forecast as greenhouse gases rise, with southern Australia among the worst-hit, climate projections show.
Scientists at the Australian National University and the University of NSW made the findings after running the latest generation of climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Future drought changes were larger and more consistent, the researchers found.
“Australia is one of the hot spots along with the Amazon and the Mediterranean, especially,” said Anna Ukkola, a research fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes and lead author of the paper published in Geophysical Research Letters.
For southern Australia, the shift to longer, more frequent and more intense droughts up to 2100 will be due to greater variability in rainfall rather than a reduction in average rainfall. For the Amazon, both mean rain and variability changes…….
One reason for the prediction of worse droughts is that the latest models assume the climate will respond more than previously understood to increased atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
Australia’s vulnerability to big shifts in annual rainfall already challenge the country’s farming sector, while also leaving much of the country’s south more at risk of bad bushfire seasons – such as last summer’s – as forests dry out.
The CSIRO has long forecast a large reduction in stream flows in the Murray-Darling Basin, for instance, as reduced cool-season rainfall combines with higher temperatures. Such a trend appears to have already begun.
While a more moderate emissions trajectory will still produce more intense, frequent and longer lasting droughts in most of the world’s mid-latitude regions than current conditions, the shift will be less than if carbon emissions remain near the top of forecasts. ……..https://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/australia-among-global-hot-spots-as-droughts-worsen-in-warming-world-20200601-p54ydh.html
An American nuclear reactor flooded by an extreme rainfall event – during the pandemic
COVID Infects World Nuclear Plants May 27, 2020, by Radio Ecoshock
“………AN AMERICAN REACTOR FLOODED BY AN EXTREME RAINFALL EVENT – DURING THE PANDEMIC
Grant Smith mentioned the climate threat to nuclear installations. We have a case of that right now. The American mid-West has experience record-setting extreme rainfall events. The City of Chicago just had it wettest May, for the third year in a row. All that rain burst two dams in Michigan, flooding out the city of Midland, population 42,000. It also flooded the Dow Chemical plant that has produced noxious chemicals for years, including Agent Orange. The company acknowledges their chemicals have leaked out over the years. It has been declared a Superfund site, among the worst in the country requiring federal cleanup funds. There are chemicals lining the river, now being stirred up by the flood, and washing down into Lake Michigan.
What is less reported is the Dow nuclear reactor at that flooded site. It is a smaller research reactor built in the 1960’s, called a TRIGA 1 model. The reactor is sunk down into the ground. It doesn’t have cooling rods, but depends on convection for water cooling. Although the reactor was not operating at the time of the flood in late May, the design suggest it probably still had nuclear materials inside. Are they now leaking out into the river and Lake Michigan. So far, the company says “no”. With no federal oversight reporting we can rely on, you just have to take the word of Dow Chemical that this reactor is perfectly safe during this extreme rainfall event. Nothing to worry about here, they say. Beyond nearly 400 very large nuclear power plants in the United States, there are thousands of smaller reactors scattered around the country, at Universities, military bases, and private companies. Who is keeping track of those as climate change and a pandemic come knocking at the door?
Here is that unusual event report to the NRC about the Dow Chemical reactor in Michigan. For those who want to dive deeper, here is a description of that Triga Mark I reactor……… https://www.ecoshock.org/2020/05/covid-infects-world-nuclear-plants.html
RUSSIAN NUCLEAR INDUSTRY STRUGGLES WITH PANDEMIC, also threatened by climate change
 COVID Infects World Nuclear Plants, May 27, 2020, by Alex Smith, Radio Ecoshock, “……….RUSSIAN NUCLEAR INDUSTRY STRUGGLES WITH PANDEMICNow it the time to talk about the awful virus out of control in Russia, the last bastion of nuclear ambition with an infamous track record. I have to report it, because it seems no one from there feels safe to talk about it. One environment group reported safety questions about secret nuclear cities – after a government minister mentioned it. They declined an interview. I contacted reporters usually willing to do radio, including two from the English language Moscow Times, but got no reply. Radio silence as they say. These are dangerous times in Moscow, as ambulances line up outside hospitals, mortuaries go into overdrive, and the Putin government, like many governments, covers up early mistakes.
o I patch together what little we can find out. The Russian nuclear story, as I said in the beginning, spreads out to governments all over the world, from the Middle East to North Korea. Really their nuclear technology is not much more dangerous than in Japan or America. It is all dangerous when built and run by flawed humans. Every nuclear country has a secret history of near-misses and hidden atomic poisons. Britain, Canada, France, you name it. There is a long list of atomic leaks, break-downs, hair-raising risks all over the world. Like the Trump Administration, the Putin government downplayed the threat of COVID-19 for precious months after it broke out in China. For a while in February, it looked like the pandemic would barely graze Russia. It was business-as-usual. Then the first wave arrived. Now Russia has the third most serious infection in the world, with way over 300,000 cases confirmed, and who knows how many really. The government is reporting low death rates, under 4,000 mortalities. As in China, these numbers are not credible. The real number of deaths has to be many times that. In late May, the Moscow Times ran an article explaining why the Russian government did not count 60% of suspected Covid-19 deaths. Only cases where autopsies showed the disease were counted. But who has time or staff to do thousands of autopsies during a wave of the pandemic? The Moscow health department attributed the obvious spike in deaths to things like “heart failure, stage four malignant diseases, leukemia … and other incurable deadly diseases”. In many ways, Russia is still a secret state. Certainly it has secret atomic cities. These are closed cities. You needed special permits to go there even before the pandemic, in fact, since the 1950’s. Nuclear bombs, missiles, and torpedoes are made there. Factories make reactors that can float in the sea, hide in the ground, or blast out into space. During Soviet times, these cities also specialized in chemical and biological weapons. Some say they still do, though the Russians publicly denounced those weapons. So if was surprising when “The head of Russia’s state nuclear corporation has expressed concerns about the spread of the novel coronavirus to three of its so-called “nuclear cities.” At the beginning of May, Charles Digges from the Russian environment group Bellona wrote about it, after the public announcement by Rosatom chief Alexei Likhachev. Likhachev said: “The situation in Sarov, Elektrostal, Desnogorsk is today particularly alarming.” People in the West do not understand why it is alarming that anything was admitted at all. When he said it, Russia was just the seventh most infected country. Less than a month later, their cases have doubled, and Russia is number two worst. The archipelago of nuclear labs and businesses controlled by Russia’s Rosatom employ around 250,000 people. The company admits they have stashed some workers permanently on nuclear sites, but like the U.S. industry, won’t say how many or where. This is what you do when you have an emergency. During the pandemic, they need to try to isolate enough workers to keep nuclear reactors operating and cool, to keep vast lakes and mountains of nuclear waste cool and secure, literally, to keep the lights on. The record shows safety at many Russian nuclear complexes has been poor at the best of times. There is a long and painful history not just of nuclear accidents – those are legendary – but of atomic neglect. Barrels of highly radioactive materials were just buried all over, or sunk at sea. Nobody is totally sure where all of it went. The Soviet Union left the world a legacy of abandoned hot spots no-go zones. Putin inherited that, and doubled down on Russian nuclear ambitions. The Russians will sell, and have sold, nuclear technology to anyone. Iran? Sure. North Korea, well that transfer of Russian nuclear technology may or may not have been authorized. Now they are building a nuclear reactor in Bangladesh. But why not? Canada gave India nuclear tech that led to their atomic bomb, and trained the Pakistani father of the bomb. Canadian engineers watched as prison slave labor built a Candu nuclear plant in Romania. The Romanians couldn’t really pay, so Canada agreed to take it out in coal and jam. It’s a dirty corrupt business no matter who does it. The on-again off-again felon Mike Flynn was busy trying to selling nuclear reactors to dictators in the Middle East. China wants to make money selling reactors. Nobody makes money selling reactors. Nuclear power is the biggest money pit in the history of money pits. And the cost never ends. Deconstruction usually falls on future taxpayers. The dangerous radioactive waste needs to be secured and guarded for tens of thousands of years. It’s never over. Thank goodness nuclear weapons are no longer a threat. Except both Russia and the United States have announced new supersonic atomic delivery missiles in just the last couple of years. Trump is pushing to build new nuclear weapons – the best anybody has ever seen! Britain is always embarking on a new nuclear plan that sinks into hundreds of billions of wasted pounds. Don’t get me started on nuclear waste dump schemes that never work or mini-reactors to save the climate. But the Russians have to be champions of nuclear secrecy. I don’t know of any other whole cities entirely closed off, so secret they did not even appear on maps. Now they say that despite official worries, everything nuclear is under control in Russia. The Rosatom chief reported 47 employees infected with COVID-19. 23 of them are in the secret city of Sarov, he said, in late April. How many are there now? MORE NUCLEAR WORRIES IN RUSSIA AS COVID-19 RUNS RAMPANTEleven hundred miles East of Moscow, the Russian nuclear power plant at Beloyarsk was the first to keep it’s staff on site. Nobody goes home. That was reported in Russian-only by the state news agency Interfax. At least one staff member was sick for days with a high fever. That was in April. The old reactors from the 1960’s are temporarily shut down, but now they run two large fast-neutron reactors there. The Russian group Bellona reports “270 workers isolated at the Rostov nuclear plant took to social media to complain they were being treated like ’cattle’.” That is in Southwest corner of Russia, along the Don River. The workers reported lack of protection against the virus and terrible working conditions. Rosatom says those concerns have since been addressed. URANIUM MINING SHUT DOWN AROUND THE WORLDRosatom also reports the large Russian uranium mining industry has been shut down due to coronavirus concerns. Many mines of all kinds have been closed around the world. We will start to feel the shortages some time in the fall, even though demand has fallen off. The Russians are also concerned about their electric utilities, because as they say “Falling incomes of both retail and corporate consumers might result in a tidal wave of unpaid electricity bills.” The American and European electric utilities fear that too. Uranium mining has been closed down for the pandemic pretty well everywhere from Canada to Kazakhstan to Namibia. Nuclear reprocessing plants are also closed. There is currently a glut of nuclear fuel, but I suppose if the pandemic is not solved in a year or so, nuclear power plants could run low on fuel. Perhaps experts can advise us on that. On April 14, a Russia language news outlet reported three employees of Kursk Nuclear Power Plant were infected by COVID-19. That is in the city of Kurchatov, in the direction of the border with Ukraine. You need a special permit to go there too. How many are infected there now? The Russian nuclear industry, both weapons and power, is not immune to this novel virus. So far they have not been overwhelmed by it. Not that we know of. Now that the pandemic is full blown and still growing in Russia, there is practically nothing coming out about the nuclear danger there. I suppose we will find out 30 years from now when the archives are released. Or maybe any day now, when radioactivity monitors in Sweden or Washington State go off. Of course, that could be coming from Japan, China, Canada, the U.S., or any of the dozens of nuclear operations run by humans with no immunity to a new disease, and economies shaking down. THERE IS ANOTHER HOT SPOT – SIBERIABefore we leave Russia, let me tell you about another hot spot there: Siberia. In last week’s Radio Ecoshock program, two top scientists told us about the coming heat as we load up the atmosphere with carbon. Dr. Radley Horton from Columbia was part of a team that discovered heat beyond human endurance is already popping up in various countries. It’s not that hot in Siberia. I’m sure the locals are enjoying the early summer warmth, although they must be nervous. Forest fires, and they have massive planet-changing forest fires, are already burning in Siberia, when it should be time for the snow to melt. For European and Canadian listeners, that’s 31 degrees C in Siberia, instead of -12 C, over a massive, massive area. Will we see a repeat of the 2010 heat wave over Russia, that killed tens of thousands of people and closed down the country’s wheat export trade? How much carbon will be released this year from forest fires in the far north? It has begun. ‘…… https://www.ecoshock.org/2020/05/covid-infects-world-nuclear-plants.html |
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Extreme heat, humidity, air pollution – combined threat to South Asia
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South Asia’s twin threat: extreme heat and foul air https://climatenewsnetwork.net/south-asias-twin-threat-extreme-heat-and-foul-air/
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Michigan flooding: a warning on potential triple disaster – climate, pandemic, and nuclear radiation
Michigan authorities were forced to face a “no-win compromise” between protecting the public from exposure to Covid-19 while at the same time moving people out of harm’s way after heavy rains caused failures at the Edenville and Sanford dams, leading to devastating floods.
The Dow plant insists there have been no chemical or radiological releases, but the situation will be evaluated once floodwaters recede. Fortunately, no full-scale commercial nuclear power plant was in the path of the Michigan floods.
Operating nuclear power stations are required by federal and state laws to maintain radiological emergency preparedness to protect populations within a ten-mile radius from the release of radioactivity following a serious nuclear accident. These measures include mass evacuations.
However, many communities around the nation’s 95 commercial reactors are presently sheltering-in-place at home as a protective action during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Michigan flooding has forced the relocation of thousands of citizens from their stay-at-home lockdown into the social distancing challenges of mass shelters. Evacuating tens of thousands from a likely more far-reaching radioactive cloud to mass shelters, as is presently planned during a nuclear emergency, raises difficult if not impossible choices under pandemic conditions.
In fact, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) (Sect.03.02 p.2) between the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) already obligates the federal government to re-exam radiological emergency plans around nuclear facilities specifically in response to a pandemic, and to identify any shortcomings, deficiencies and enhancements that might be needed under such conditions.
But to date, neither agency has taken the initiative to do so. In fact, the NRC actions are focused on relaxing safety measures required by operating licenses, resulting in extended work hours for reactor operators and security guards, and deferred safety inspections and repairs for as much as another 18 months. This makes an accident more likely.
Given what we are now seeing in Michigan, the NRC and FEMA should lose no time in reviewing their MOU and the viability of their radiological emergency plans, and take action to make any necessary enhancements or shut these nuclear facilities down.
Beyond Nuclear has identified two such actions under the MOU as vital to public health:
- The NRC and FEMA must conduct a “Disaster Initiated Report”, as mandated by the MOU, on the adequacy of offsite radiological emergency response plans during the pandemic, and;
- Federal and state response plans need to be bolstered by the immediate pre-distribution of potassium iodide (KI) tablets by direct delivery to every resident within the ten-mile radius of U.S. nuclear power stations, now, before any accident occurs. This is in accordance with disaster medicine expert recommendations including from the American Thyroid Association (ATA).
- KI, if taken promptly in advance or shortly after exposure to radioactive iodine, is recognized by the US Food and Drug administration as a safe, inexpensive and effective prophylactic prevention for thyroid cancer and other developmental disorders caused by exposure to highly mobile iodine-131. Radioactive iodine is a gas released early in a serious nuclear accident.
- KI is particularly important for the protection of infants, young children and pregnant women and should be readily on hand, according to the ATA and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The ATA further recommends stockpiling KI tablets in schools, hospitals, police and fire stations from 10 miles out to 50 miles from every nuclear power plant. These institutions could then serve to pre-distribute KI free through the mail upon request to every home and business within 50 miles of an operating nuclear plant.
KI is commonly used to iodize table salt in concentrations. When taken in tablet form, it saturates the thyroid with stable iodine and blocks the absorption of radioactive iodine into the thyroid gland.
- KI only protects the thyroid. It does not protect other parts of the body, or prevent damage from other radioactive isotopes released during a nuclear power plant accident, such as cesium-137 or krypton or xenon gases. Ideally, it is used to provide protection to the thyroid — because iodine-131 can be the large and early radioactive exposure first to arrive — while people are still evacuating out of the oncoming radioactive fallout pathway.
KI is a critical adjunct to evacuation, but it should not replace evacuation from a nuclear accident, even during a viral pandemic. If faced with an immediate threat to life, perhaps even a triple threat such as an extreme flood, a nuclear accident and Covid-19 exposure, evacuation must be the immediate decision.
However, at least having KI tablets on hand provides for a reasonable protection from the radioactive iodine, a fundamental human right while seeking to shelter farther away from a nuclear accident.
The prospect of a nuclear disaster prompting a mass evacuation during a viral pandemic reinforces the need for an energy policy focused on safe, clean and affordable renewable energy. It’s time to remove the added and unnecessary danger presented by the 95 nuclear reactors still operating in the US today and transition to a rapid phaseout before a nuclear emergency during a pandemic becomes a nightmarish reality.
Australia, and the world, underestimate how many die due to global heating
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Experts Warn Climate Change Is Already Killing Way More People Than We Record, Science Alert ,CARLY CASSELLA, 25 MAY 2020
People around the world are already dying from the climate crisis,and yet all too often, official death records do not reflect the impact of these large-scale environmental catastrophes. According to a team of Australian health experts, heat is the most dominant risk posed by climate change in the country. If the world’s emissions remain the same, by 2080 Australian cities could see at least four times the number of deaths from increasing temperatures alone. “Climate change is a killer, but we don’t acknowledge it on death certificates,” says physician Arnagretta Hunter from the Australian National University. That’s a potentially serious oversight. In a newly-published correspondence, Hunter and four other public health experts estimate Australia’s mortality records have substantially underreported heat-related deaths – at least 50-fold. While death certificates in Australia do actually have a section for pre-existing conditions and other factors, external climate conditions are rarely taken into account. Between 2006 and 2017, the analysis found less than 0.1 percent of 1.7 million deaths were attributed directly or indirectly to excessive natural heat. But this new analysis suggests the nation’s heat-related mortality is around 2 percent. “We know the summer bushfires were a consequence of extraordinary heat and drought and people who died during the bushfires were not just those fighting fires – many Australians had early deaths due to smoke exposure,” says Hunter……. “Death certification needs to be modernised, indirect causes should be reported, with all death certification prompting for external factors contributing to death, and these death data must be coupled with large-scale environmental datasets so that impact assessments can be done.” …… Such action, they say, is imperative. Not only for Australia but many other countries in the world. The United Kingdom has documented some problems with accurately filling out death certificates, and cities in several parts of the world are on track for similar heat-related mortality rates as Australia. But there are some places that will need to do more than just update their current system. In the tropics, there’s little valid mortality data on the more than 2 billion people who live in this heat-vulnerable region. And that makes predicting what will happen to these communities in the future much trickier. “Climate change is the single greatest health threat that we face globally even after we recover from coronavirus,” says Hunter. “We are successfully tracking deaths from coronavirus, but we also need healthcare workers and systems to acknowledge the relationship between our health and our environment.” In an unpredictable world, if we want to know where we’re going, we have to know where we’ve been. Figuring out how many of us have already died from climate change will be key to that process. We can’t ignore it any longer. The correspondence was published in The Lancet Planetary Health. https://www.sciencealert.com/official-death-records-are-terrible-at-showing-how-many-people-are-dying-from-the-climate-crisis |
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The flooding danger to nuclear radioactive sites -Michigan dams fail
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Michigan dams fail near Midland; ‘catastrophic’ flooding underway — Dow Chemical research reactor potentially in harm’s way http://www.beyondnuclear.org/climate-change-whats-new/2020/5/21/michigan-dams-fail-near-midland-catastrophic-flooding-underw.html
Fortunately, the Midland commercial nuclear power plant was never fired up, so there is no radioactive contamination there, nor high-level radioactive waste in on-site storage. Dr. Mary Sinclair, a co-founder and co-leader of Don’t Waste Michigan*, helped lead the successful resistance to the Midland nuclear power plant, way back in the 1970s and 1980s.
The reason the Midland nuclear power plant was stopped, at 90% construction completion on one reactor and about 50% on the other, was that safety-significant buildings were sinking into the ground, not unlike the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Of course, it took many years of dedicated commitment and hard work by anti-nuclear activists, talented environmental attorneys, and even a courageous Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) whistle-blower testifying before Congress, to prevail against greed-driven companies like Midland-based Dow Chemical, and Jackson, MI-based Consumers Energy.
A similar situation is unfolding at the Vogtle Units 3 and 4 nuclear power plant construction site in GA. BREDL has launched an intervention at the NRC against Vogtle Unit 3, due to it sinking into the ground as well. And Nuclear Watch South has also intervened at the NRC against Vogtle Unit 3’s fuel loading, due to major, widespread violations of ITAAC QA.
Speaking of Dow, there is, however, a 1967-era research reactor at its Midland facilities, that is potentially in harm’s way from the flooding, as we speak (See NRC Event Notification Report, May 20, 2020, Event Number 54719) . And there is, of course, off the charts bad dioxin and other toxic chemical contamination in or near these waterways, compliments of Dow. This includes a Superfund site, severe contamination downstream in the Tittabawassee River, as well as wastewater retention ponds at Dow Chemical itself. Groups like Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination (CACC)*, Lone Tree Council, and others, have for decades watch-dogged the toxic goings-on at and downstream from Dow.
Mary Sinclair’s son, Peter Sinclair, a climate protection leader, is quoted in the Washington Post article linked above. Here are some passages from the article, including Peter Sinclair’s quote:
Dow Chemical Co.’s Midland headquarters was evacuated, with only essential staff remaining on-site to monitor the situation. The facility is associated with a Superfund site due to excess dioxins, which are known to cause cancer, in the riverbed downstream of the plant. New video released by the Michigan State Police appeared to show some flooding on the Dow property, though the extent and severity is unclear.
“Dow has activated its local emergency operations center and is implementing its flood preparedness plan which includes the safe shutdown of operating units,” wrote the company on its Facebook page. Dow also filed an “Unusual Event Report” with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission because of the possibility that floodwaters could affect its 300 kilowatt nuclear research reactor, located at the plant, though the reactor was already shut down due to the coronavirus outbreak. That reactor was built in 1967. “This is a solidly middle to upper class town because of the Dow plant here,” Peter Sinclair, a Midland resident who is a videographer for Yale Climate Connections, said in an interview. He said a 2017 seasonal flood event, combined with this disaster, may cause property values to decline. This includes expensive lakefront property, since these lakes are now being drained by the flooding. …Sinclair, who is on the dry side of Midland and is sheltering family members who live closer to the flood-affected areas, says this event illustrates what climate scientists have been warning about for years. “[There is the] Larger issue of aging infrastructure plus incremental climate change, this is a point that all the scientists make that the change is gradual, gradual, gradual until the infrastructure fails.” While this catastrophic flooding is very bad enough in its own right, it also raises the specter of worsening flooding impacts on nuclear facilities, in the Great Lakes Basin and across the continent, including the worsening high risk of dam bursts upstream of nuclear facilities.
The July 16, 1979 uranium tailings dam burst in n.w. New Mexico, inundating the Rio Puerco with a flood of radioactive and toxic wastewater, is considered one of the single worst nuclear disasters in U.S. history (that most people have never even heard of). Navajo/Diné shepherds live downstream, such as in the Red Water Pond Road Community. The Rio Puerco is their sole source of drinking and irrigation water. The shallowest of “clean ups” was carried out, leaving most of the escaped contamination in the environment.
The mass evacuation of 10,000 Michiganders to escape the floodwaters, amidst global pandemic stay-at-home and social-distancing orders, also raises the specter of a radiological disaster requiring mass evacuation at a time like this. The NRC, FEMA, related state government agencies across the country, and the nuclear power industry itself, have not addressed this question and concern. How are people supposed to shelter at home, and maintain physical distance from others, when forced to flee for their health and lives, whether from floodwaters as in Midland, or from hazardous radioctivity if a nuclear diaster were to occur during this pandemic emergency. David Lochbaum, retired from UCS, raised just such questions recently in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, when a tornado struck his hometown of Chattanooga, TN, amidst the pandemic; Chattanooga “hosts” multiple atomic reactors in the area.
Dr. Mary Sinclair herself presciently warned about the high risks of storing high-level radioactive waste on the shores of the Great Lakes and the banks of major rivers — the fresh drinking water sources for both Canada and the U.S. — as well as along the ocean coasts (also experiencing climate change-induced sea level rise). She did this in a mid- to late-1990s presentation she delivered on public access television in her area.
Please see this link to Anna Tilden and John Jackson’s 2013 update, of Irene Koch and Dave Martin’s 1990, Great Lakes Nuclear Hot Spots map, posted online.
*Kevin Kamps, Beyond Nuclear’s radioactive waste specialist, serves on Don’t Waste Michigan’s board of directors, and on Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination’s advisory board.
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Climate: Cyclone Amphan disaster in India, Bangladesh
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Cyclone Amphan leaves thousands homeless in eastern India as PM Narendra Modi offers help, SBS News, 23 May 20, Authorities have begun assessing damage and clearing roads in the wake of Cyclone Amphan, which has killed more than 90 people and left millions displaced in eastern India and Bangladesh.
Several thousand people have been left homeless after the most powerful cyclone in more than a decade hit India and Bangladesh this week, as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the area on Friday and pledged aid. Cyclone Amphan killed at least 96 people, officials said, after it swept in from the Bay of Bengal on Wednesday. Eighty fatalities were in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal and 16 were in neighbouring Bangladesh, after winds of up to 185 km per hour caused flooding, blew away roofs, uprooted trees and ripped up power lines…… The total death toll is expected to rise as communications are restored and authorities reach villages cut off by blocked roads, particularly in India’s low-lying Sundarbans delta, home to four million people and thick mangrove forests that are a critical tiger habitat. In the Sundarbans’ Gosaba, an administrative area of the river delta that juts into the sea, the storm completely destroyed around 26,000 homes and damaged another 14,000, local disaster management official Pradip Kumar Dalui said. The cyclone also damaged some 19 kilometres of embankments around Gosaba, causing 13 breaches that led salty water to inundate swathes of land, Prime Minister Modi said. …. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/cyclone-amphan-leaves-thousands-homeless-in-eastern-india-as-pm-narendra-modi-offers-help |
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Nuclear reactor threatened by Michigan flooding, but news media ignores this
Current Event Notification Report for May 20, 2020 https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/event/en.html#en54719
| U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Operations Center Event Reports For
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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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