Animals in radiation zones are not doing well
above – Chernobyl bird at right has facial tumour
Not thriving, but failing https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2018/03/11/not-thriving-but-failing/ https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2018/03/11/not-thriving-but-failing/ Animals in radiation zones are not doing well, By Linda Pentz Gunter
It started with wolves. The packs around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, which exploded on April 26, 1986, were thriving, said reports. Benefitting from the absence of human predators, and seemingly unaffected by the high radiation levels that still persist in the area, the wolves, they claimed, were doing better than ever.
Appearances, however, can be deceptive. Abundant does not necessarily mean healthy. And that is exactly what evolutionary biologist, Dr. Timothy Mousseau and his team began to find out as, over the years, they traveled to and researched in and around the Chernobyl disaster site in the Ukraine. Then, when a similar nuclear disaster hit in Japan — with the triple explosions and meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi on March 11, 2011 — Mousseau’s team added that region to its research itinerary.
Mousseau has now spent more than 17 years looking at the effects on wildlife and the ecosystem of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. He and his colleagues have also spent the last half dozen years studying how non-human biota is faring in the wake of Fukushima. Ninety articles later, they are able to conclude definitively that animals and plants around Chernobyl and Fukushima are very far indeed from flourishing.
Mousseau’s findings strongly contradicted earlier work including the 2006 Chernobyl Forum report which claimed the Chernobyl zone “has become a wildlife sanctuary,” and a subsequent article published in Current Biology in 2015 that said wildlife was “thriving”around Chernobyl.
“I suppose everyone loves a Cinderella story,” speculated Mousseau, who is based at the University of South Carolina. “They want that happy ending.” But Mousseau felt sure the moment he read the Forum report, which, he noted, “contained few scientific citations,” that the findings “could not possibly be true.
What Mousseau found was not unexpected given the levels of radiation in these areas and what is already known about the medical effects of such long-term exposures. Birds and rodents had a high frequency of tumors.
“Cancers are the first thing we think about,” Mousseau said. “We looked at birds and mice. In areas of higher radiation, the frequency of tumors is higher.” The research team found mainly liver and bladder tumors in voles and tumors on the head, body and wings of the birds studied.
But Mousseau wanted to look beyond cancers, which is what everyone expects to find and what researchers had looked for, but only in humans. There were few wildlife studies, a fact Mousseau found surprising, given nature’s ability to act as a sentinel for likely impending human health impacts.
Mousseau and his fellow researchers found cataracts in birds and rodents. Male birds had a high rate of sterility. And the brains of birds were smaller. All of these are known outcomes from radiation exposure.
“Cataracts in birds is a problem,” Mousseau said. “A death sentence.”
Mental retardation has been found among children exposed to radiation in utero. Mousseau and colleagues discovered the same pattern in the birds they studied. “Birds already have small brains, so a smaller brain size is a definite disadvantage,” he said.
There were also just fewer animals in general. “There were many fewer mammals, birds and insects in areas of higher radiation,” Mousseau said. And they had their hunch as to why.
He and his colleagues extracted sperm from the male birds they caught and were shocked to find that “up to 40% of male birds in the radiologically hottest areas were sterile.”
The birds’ sperm were either deformed or dead. None would be able to reproduce. The discovery, he said, was “not at all surprising. These are the levels of radiation known to influence reproduction. At the same time, there is no safe level of radiation below which there aren’t detectable effects.”
Fewer birds have already been observed in the contaminated areas around Fukushima, said Mousseau. “Although it’s too early to assess the long term impact on abundance and diversity around Fukushima, there are very few butterflies and many birds have declined in the more contaminated areas. If abundance is compressed, biodiversity will follow.”
The consequences of radiation exposure, says Mousseau, “will have a tremendous impact on the quality of life of these animals, and the length of quality of life. It need not necessarily be cancers,” that cause these damages he said. “There is no doubt that the levels of radiation in Chernobyl and Fukushima generate genetic damage.”
Read more about Dr. Timothy Mousseau’s work.
Trump’s new uranium plans threaten Grand Canyon area
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New Trump Nuclear Plan Favors Uranium Mining Bordering the Grand Canyon, The administration, seeking to restore America’s “competitive nuclear advantage,” also wants to create a $150 million uranium reserve in the coming decade. Inside Climate News, Judy Fahys APR 26, 2020
Evergreen forests blanket the Grand Canyon’s less traveled northern plateau, and the perfume of Ponderosa pine drifts down a creekbed to the bottom of the great redrock canyon. Downstream, the strangely blue waters of the Little Colorado River meet the main Colorado, coming from the southern plateau close to sacred places for indigenous people who have lived here for centuries.
Both plateaus are also where mining companies want to unearth uranium. Mining those claims has been barred since 2012, when Congress imposed a 20-year mining ban across 1,000 acres here because past uranium extraction has polluted drinking water and poisoned the air and the ground. Local tribes and environmental groups that sought the temporary ban have been pressing Congress to make the ban permanent. But in a sweeping plan to revive the domestic uranium mining industry unveiled Thursday, the Trump administration proposed instead to open the scenic and sacred areas once again in the name of economic vitality and national security. Allowing more uranium mining on federal lands is just one of the suggestions that emerged from an eight-month review by the White House Nuclear Fuel Working Group. Proposals outlined in the Restoring America’s Competitive Nuclear Advantage report quickly triggered criticism. Some environmentalists say that the administration shouldn’t propose using taxpayer funds during a pandemic to bail out a dirty, uncompetitive industry that’s largely owned by foreign companies. ….. |
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Earth Day 2020: Climate change would be small fry compared to nuclear war
Earth Day 2020: Climate change would be small fry compared to nuclear war https://www.pressenza.com/2020/04/earth-day-2020-climate-change-would-be-small-fry-compared-to-nuclear-war/
21.04.2020 – Abolition 2000, On this Earth Day 2020, members of the Abolition 2000 coodinating committee and others have written a statement in support of the need to address the triple threats facing humanity today: climate change, global pandemics and nuclear devastation. The statement is open for signatories by anyone who would like to endorse it. It highlights the fact that although climate change is a huge threat to human civilization given that a tipping point could be reached at any time, and covid-19 is killing thousands of people every day, a nuclear war has the capability to destroy civilization in a matter of days.
Addressing the threats to Planetary Survival
Earth Day 2020 sign on statement from members of the Abolition 2000 global network to eliminate nuclear weapons
The year 2020 marks the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day[i] and finds the planet facing existential threats like never before in human history.
The threat from climate change is manifesting itself more and more strongly as the years go by through extreme weather events, forest fires on a vast scale, the bleaching of coral reefs, and receding glaciers, among others. This year also sees the world facing a pandemic which, as we speak, is costing thousands of lives every day and seems likely to have an impact on our civilization for years, if not decades to come.
Alongside these threats to human existence, however, is the lesser-considered, but more dangerous threat from nuclear disaster, and in this context we recall that the year 2020 also marks the 75th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing an estimated 500,000 people either through immediate incineration by the blast or subsequent death over the following months and years from agonising radiation poisoning[ii]. 2020 also marks the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the United Nations to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” by putting in place the common security mechanisms to achieve this. Unfortunately, the end of the 2nd World War also kicked off a race for nations to develop nuclear technology that has the possibility to inflict a more devastating blow to the planet in 10 days than climate change will have in 100 years.
Today, some 14,000 nuclear weapons – most of which are vastly more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki – continue to pose an intolerable threat to humanity as identified by Atomic Scientists who judge the planet to be a symbolic 100 seconds to midnight on their doomsday clock[iii]. These weapons, thousands of which can be launched within minutes of the order being given, are in the hands of sometimes erratic leaders who cannot be trusted to put the wellbeing of the planet ahead of their own domestic agendas. Research published in 2013 by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War concludes that up to 2 billion people would be at risk of starvation in a nuclear conflict consisting of the use of only 100 nuclear warheads[iv], and evidence from the ICRC showed that there is no capacity to provide humanitarian assistance in the case of nuclear bombs used in populated areas[v], either.
In addition, the over 400 nuclear power stations distributed all over the planet are capable of poisoning the entire planet with toxic radioactive waste that needs to be stored safely for 250,000 years. Each one of these stations is an accident waiting to happen and a potential terrorist threat. Over the last 50 years in which Earth Day has been marked, we have seen dramatic accidents at reactors in Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. At the time of writing, forest fires around Chernobyl are cause for concern as they approach the reactor location, and the fires themselves are re-releasing into the atmosphere the radioactive material previously absorbed by trees and other plants since the reactor exploded[vi].
Colonised and indigenous peoples have, in the large part, borne the brunt of nuclear devastation – from the mining of uranium and the testing of nuclear weapons on indigenous peoples land, to the dumping, storage and transport of plutonium and nuclear wastes, and the theft of land for nuclear infrastructure.[vii]
On this Earth Day, as the world faces the triple threats of climate change, virus pandemic and nuclear oblivion, we 
call on all people of good faith around the world to come together and construct the foundations of a new world: a world without nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, a sustainable world in which the land, oceans, atmosphere, glaciers, wildernesses, flora and fauna in all its diversity can recover, and an equitable world with an economic system that provides a dignified life for all the planet’s inhabitants.
An essential part of this new world will be better implementation of the UN Charter prohibition on war and the utilisation of diplomacy and law to resolve international disputes. It will also require redirection of military spending towards human security, the elimination of nuclear weapons, the rapid phasing out of nuclear power, and a turn to clean, safe renewable energy sources.[viii][ix]
As a species, we have the capability of doing this, and the current global crisis is the wake-up call we need in order to make a better world for all.
We, the undersigned, are ready to do our part. Who is with us?
Click here to add your name to the list of signatories
Click here to view the full list of signatories
[i] https://www.earthday.org/earth-day-2020/
[ii] https://www.pressenza.com/2019/07/interview-with-kathleen-lawand-international-committee-of-the-red-cross/
[iii] https://thebulletin.org/2020/01/press-release-it-is-now-100-seconds-to-midnight/
[iv] https://www.ippnw.org/pdf/nuclear-famine-two-billion-at-risk-2013.pdf
[v] https://www.regjeringen.no/globalassets/upload/ud/vedlegg/hum/hum_malich.pdf
[vi] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52274242
[vii] http://www.abolition2000.org/en/resources/newsreleasesstatements/moorea-declaration/
[viii] http://www.abolition2000.org/a2000-files/sustainable-now.pdf
[ix] https://www.irena.org/newsroom/pressreleases/2020/Apr/Renewable-energy-can-support-resilient-and-equitable-recovery
Arctic marine life threatened as a result of Alaskan sea ice disappearing
Disappearing Alaskan sea ice is significant for Arctic marine ecosystem, Science Daily , April 22, 2020, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science
- Summary:
- A new study shows that plant materials originating in Arctic sea ice are significantly incorporated into marine food webs that are used for subsistence in local communities of the greater Bering Strait region. The research has the potential to demonstrate the importance of sea ice ecosystems as a source of food in Arctic waters in Alaska and beyond.
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A new study shows that plant materials originating in Arctic sea ice are significantly incorporated into marine food webs that are used for subsistence in local communities of the greater Bering Strait region.
The study led by scientists from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science traced persistent biological compounds that are uniquely generated by microscopic plants in sea ice and found that the compounds are present throughout the base of the food web. The research has the potential to demonstrate the importance of sea ice ecosystems as a source of food in Arctic waters in Alaska and beyond.
“It is widely thought that the loss of sea ice habitat will have far-reaching implications for Arctic ecosystems,” said lead author Chelsea Wegner Koch, a graduate research assistant and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
“As sea ice breakup occurs earlier and forms later each year, the open water period is expanding and the sources of food are shifting away from sea ice and towards greater proportions of open water production. This production in the absence of sea ice differs in the quality, quantity, and timing of delivery to the seafloor,” she said.
- Efforts to account for the proportional shifts in contributions of ice algae have been incomplete due to the lack of a specific tracer that can be definitively assigned to ice algae rather than open-water phytoplankton. The compounds reaching the seafloor that were studied are associated with food for a range of seafloor animals that in turn provide food for ecologically and culturally important organisms, such as the bearded seal, Pacific walrus, gray whale and spectacled eider that forage on the shallow sea floor. …… https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200422151134.htm
Coronavirus recovery can pave the way to a green energy future
around the world, electricity demand has reduced in COVID-19 hotspots. This could have a knock-on effect for the renewable sector.China, where the outbreak first took hold, is the world’s biggest electricity consumer. Output from factories has been substantially diminished with many unable to return to their jobs in manufacturing. Due to the curtailing of industrial electricity use, cuts in energy consumption for 2020 could be equivalent to the power used by the whole of Chile, according to IHS Markit.
In Europe, peak power consumption has also gone down. Italy, Spain, and the UK have all seen an average 10 per cent drop in energy usage with bars, restaurants, offices and factories, which remain closed as social distancing measures continue.In particular, fossil fuel based sources of electricity have been impacted by reduced requirements. Coal, usually one of the cheapest options, has now become the most expensive fuel in the world in the face of cheap green alternatives and natural gas, according to Bloomberg Green.
PAVING THE WAY FOR A GREEN FUTURE?
Renewable energy sources seem to have been given an unexpected boost. Around 40 per cent of the electricity generated in the UK on Sunday 5th March came from wind farms, with nearly a fifth being provided by solar energy. This was due to the unusually sunny day, says the National Grid ESO carbon intensity tracker.
These conditions have meant that renewable sources generated more than enough energy to cover the country’s reduced needs. Green supplier, Octopus Energy, even paid some customers to use energy during the day, using a scheme that has previously only been available during the night when demand is very low.
“In most economies that have taken strong confinement measures in response to the coronavirus – and for which we have available data – electricity demand has declined by around 15%, largely as a result of factories and businesses halting operations,” Dr Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency wrote in a blog post.
“In this way, the recent drop in electricity demand fast-forwarded some power systems 10 years into the future, suddenly giving them levels of wind and solar power they wouldn’t have had otherwise without another decade of investment in renewables.”
He went on to explain that this increase in renewable energy usage could even help some countries figure out how to deal with the drop in power that comes from the sun setting or a strong wind dying down. Previously, these kinds of fluctuating energy sources have proved challenging for those who work to keep our lights on. Managing them more ntelligently by shutting off solar panels at midday when there is more electricity than usual and slowing down wind power as demand decreases at night are just some options Dr Birol suggests.
These new findings have also put the spotlight on more reliable and often neglected sources of green energy, like hydropower, which are essential to making sure we have a consistent supply of energy. In exceptional situations like the current pandemic, where a fluctuation in energy supply could put lives and employment at even greater risk, this is particularly important.
To save the planet, cultural, social and political transformation is essential; new technologies only part of the answer.
Why relying on new technology won’t save the planet https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200420125510.htm April 20, 2020, Lancaster University
- Summary:
- Over-reliance on promises of new technology to solve climate change is enabling delay, say researchers. They argue instead for cultural, social and political transformation to enable widespread deployment of both behavioral and technological responses to climate change.
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Overreliance on promises of new technology to solve climate change is enabling delay, say researchers from Lancaster University.
Their research published in Nature Climate Change calls for an end to a longstanding cycle of technological promises and reframed climate change targets.
Contemporary technological proposals for responding to climate change include nuclear fusion power, giant carbon sucking machines, ice-restoration using millions of wind-powered pumps, and spraying particulates in the stratosphere.
Researchers Duncan McLaren and Nils Markusson from Lancaster Environment Centre say that: “For forty years, climate action has been delayed by technological promises. Contemporary promises are equally dangerous. Our work exposes how such promises have raised expectations of more effective policy options becoming available in the future, and thereby enabled a continued politics of prevarication and inadequate action.
- “Prevarication is not necessarily intentional, but such promises can feed systemic ‘moral corruption’, in which current elites are enabled to pursue self-serving pathways, while passing off risk onto vulnerable people in the future and in the global South.
The article describes a history of such promises, showing how the overarching international goal of ‘avoiding dangerous climate change’ has been reinterpreted and differently represented in the light of new modelling methods, scenarios and technological promises.
The researchers argue that the targets, models and technologies have co-evolved in ways that enable delay: “Each novel promise not only competes with existing ideas, but also downplays any sense of urgency, enabling the repeated deferral of political deadlines for climate action and undermining societal commitment to meaningful responses.
They conclude: “Putting our hopes in yet more new technologies is unwise. Instead, cultural, social and political transformation is essential to enable widespread deployment of both behavioural and technological responses to climate change.”
The researchers map the history of climate targets in five phases: “stabilization,” followed by a focus on “percentage emissions reductions,” shifting to “atmospheric concentrations” (expressed in parts per million), “cumulative budgets” (in tonnes of carbon dioxide), and currently “outcome temperatures.”
- In the first phase (around Rio, 1992) technological promises included improved energy efficiency, large-scale enhancement of carbon sinks, and nuclear power
- In the second phase around the Kyoto summit (1997) policy promises focused on cutting emissions with efficiency, fuel switching and carbon capture and storage (CCS).
- In the third phase (around Copenhagen, 2009), CCS became linked to bioenergy, while policy focused on atmospheric concentrations.
- Phase four saw the development of sophisticated global carbon budgeting models and the emergence of a range of putative negative emissions technologies.
- Policy in phase five focused increasingly on temperature outcomes, formalised with the Paris accord of 2015.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Lancaster University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
A warning to Idaho residents on the danger of Hanford’s nuclear wastes
A study released by the National Cancer Institute in 1997 showed that 25 states had citizens exposed to high levels of radiation due to nuclear testing.
“When there is an earthquake in that area, the radiation fallout will be equal to Chernobyl,” Brodesser said in her lecture. “When, not if.”
They know what they’ve done’: America’s nuclear past threatens Idaho’s future https://www.idahopress.com/news/local/they-know-what-theyve-done-americas-nuclear-past-threatens-idahos-future/article_a02826ba-b62f-5964-9b08-09dbe300d596.html, By ASHLEY MILLER amiller@idahopress.com MERIDIAN — In a time before social distancing, the lecture hall of the Idaho College of Osteopathic Medicine was packed. Students, staff, politicians and community members sat intermixed in the seats, elbow to elbow.
But Kaaren Brodesser stood alone.
Before she started her lecture on March 10, she was introduced simply as an advocate. More than that, she is a witness, part of a small group of people fighting for the rights of Idahoans whose lives changed on July 16, 1945, when the U.S. conducted the first-ever nuclear test, setting off a series of events the world is still struggling to fully understand.
These are downwinders, and they are dying.
‘THEY KNOW WHAT THEY’VE DONE’
In the 1950s and ’60s, the bulk of America’s nuclear testing was done in a 680-square-mile piece of desert about 65 miles outside of Las Vegas. The Nevada Test Site was ground zero for America’s Cold War preparations, testing the effects and power of the nuclear bombs designed by the military. From 1951 to 1958, around 100 aboveground nuclear tests were conducted on the site. The site was chosen for its relative isolation from any densely populated cities; however, in the end, distance was not the solution it first seemed.
The term “downwinders” refers to anyone who lived in communities exposed to nuclear radiation during the end of World War II and the peak of the Cold War (roughly the late 1940s to 1980). During the construction and testing of nuclear weapons, wind patterns directed the fallout far beyond the safety perimeters of the sites, spreading radiation hundreds and even thousands of miles away.
In the book “Atomic Farmgirl,” author Teri Hein details her life growing up downwind of Hanford, Washington, where the bulk of America’s plutonium was produced for many decades. She explains the fallout like this: When Mount Saint Helens erupted in 1980, ash drifted far past the state lines of Washington. The wind carried and then settled the debris into neighboring states. Nuclear radiation fallout can be thought of in the same way. The testing locations in Nevada and the production plants in Hanford are the eruption. The radiation then drifted into Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and beyond.
The radiation was in the air and, more importantly, in the crops and livestock of these communities. According to the National Cancer Institute, a significant portion of the Intermountain West was exposed to high doses of radiation from the tests, specifically the radioisotope Iodine-131. Iodine-131 is processed in the thyroid, the gland in your neck that regulates hormones. This is why children seemed to be the hardest hit from the fallout: their thyroid is still developing and isn’t strong enough to process the high dosage of Iodine.
NCI’s list of medical issues tied to downwinders is long, ranging from multiple sclerosis to various forms of cancer that slowly eat away at your life. That’s something that Emmett resident Tona Henderson knows only too much about. Continue reading
Smoke from Chernobyl area wildfires made Ukraine’s capital have the worst air pollution in the world
Unilad 18th April 2020, Wildfires burning near the Chernobyl nuclear plant have covered the capital
of Ukraine in smoke and made its air pollution among the worst in the
world. Residents burning rubbish near Chernobyl accidentally sparked fires
on April 4, and though firefighters managed to contain the initial blazes,
three new fires began to spread in the contaminated exclusion zone on
Thursday, April 16. The fires were propelled by strong winds and smoke has
engulfed the capital Kyiv. While many residents are adhering to
stay-at-home orders anyway, authorities are now encouraging residents to
close their windows to prevent the smog filling their houses.
Trump uses the pandemic, to decimate environmental restrictions. Nuclear waste to landfill decision is just one example.
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https://americanindependent.com/donald-trump-administration-nuclear-waste-cleanup-coronavirus-new-mexico-covid-19/ By Josh Israel,April 8, 2020 The coronavirus pandemic is making the problem even worse.
The Trump administration has been under fire for not doing enough to clean up nuclear waste. And now, with the COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing measures, the efforts are effectively on hold. At the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, an underground nuclear waste facility operated by the Department of Energy, new shipments of hazardous material from nuclear sites across the country have reportedly been stopped to protect workers from the coronavirus. According to an Associated Press report, the small number of essential employees working at nuclear facilities around the country, including Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington, are focusing on safety, security, and information technology. Cleanup efforts have been frozen. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) told the wire service this week that worker safety is a priority, but more effort is needed to speed nuclear cleanup. “We are fighting to make sure workers and their families are taken care of during this crisis and that workers have the resources they need to meet cleanup goals when they are able to safely return to their jobs,” she said. Cantwell, Washington Sen. Ron Wyden (D), and New Mexico Democratic Sens. Martin Heinrich and Tom Udall raised concerns in early March that the Trump administration was not planning to spend enough money to do needed nuclear waste cleanup. Funding for those efforts, they warned, was being cut in favor of spending more money on modernization of the nation’s nuclear arsenal. The landfill decision is the latest in a line of moves by the Trump administration that flout environmental concerns. It also comes as the administration is under fire for using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to decimate environmental protections. The Environmental Protection Agency announced last week that it was temporarily suspending enforcement of civil environmental regulations, allowing the fossil fuel industry to ignore monitoring and compliance obligations. The agency additionally rolled back automobile pollution standards enacted during the Obama administration. Donald Trump has repeatedly promised America “crystal clear clean water and clean air” but has significantly changed environmental regulations, often going beyond the loosening of rules that industry asks for. Last year, Trump told reporters at a NATO summit in London that climate change was “very important” to him, saying he thought about it “all the time.” However, months later, his administration curbed a series of methane regulations that even some energy companies opposed. And despite claiming he wants “crystal clear” water, Trump has signed a series of orders allowing construction on highly controversial oil pipelines to move forward. “Nobody in the world can do what you folks do,” he told a group of pipeline engineers in April last year before signing an order making it difficult for states to intervene and stop such projects. “And we’re going to make it easier for you.” |
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Climate change could cause sudden biodiversity losses worldwide
 Climate change could cause sudden biodiversity losses worldwide, Science Daily, April 8, 2020
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Nuclear power plant shut down by host of tiny shrimp clogging filters
Masses of tiny shrimp shut down nuclear power plant in southern China twice in one week, 1 Apr 2020,The Star, By Holly Chik The Power-Generating Units Of A Nuclear Plant In Southern China Were Shut Down Twice Last Week After Its Water Filters Were Blocked By Masses Of Small Shrimp, The Safety Regulator Said.
Big shoals of the tiny acetes – krill-like shrimp that are just a few centimetres long – flooded the seawater diversion channel and circulating water pumping stations of the Yangjiang Nuclear Power Station in Guangdong on March 24, the National Nuclear Safety Administration said in a statement.
They crippled the water pumping stations and caused one of the nuclear plant’s six power-generating units to go into automatic safe shutdown, while the other five units ran at 80 per cent of capacity. The unit that shut down was powered up again the next day after station staff cleared the acetes and cleaned the filters.
But soon after on March 25, the same thing happened, with large shoals of acetes again finding their way into the pumping stations and causing four power-generating units to shut down automatically. The station shut off the other two units for safety reasons. …….
The Hong Kong Nuclear Society also noted that similar incidents had happened before.
“Similar events have occurred at nuclear power plants using seawater as a coolant for their power-generating units [including non-nuclear ones] throughout the world, including China,” said Luk Bing-lam, chairman of the society.
Anxieties over proposal to allow some nuclear waste to be disposed in landfills
Advocates raise questions about proposal to allow some nuclear waste to be disposed in landfills The Hill, BY RACHEL FRAZIN – 04/03/20 Scientists and advocates are raising concerns about a proposed relaxation on regulations for disposing of nuclear waste, saying that the government should halt the proposal as the scientific community focuses on the coronavirus.
A March 6 Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) proposal would allow for the disposal of some nuclear waste in municipal landfills, rather than a licensed facility.
Advocates say the proposal could put public health at risk, pushing the NRC to give the public more time to weigh in.
“What they’re trying to do is prop up a failing industry so that the cost of decommissioning these [nuclear] reactors is reduced so you don’t have to send it to a place that is expensive because it’s designed to safely handle it,” said Dan Hirsch, the former director of the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy.
“I find it just astonishing that they would do that in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic,” he added. “How the NRC can look themselves in the mirror to propose massive deregulation and do it in the midst of the pandemic, I find it just ethically shocking.”……..
“If they’re going to consider it at all, it should only be considered once the pandemic is behind us,” he said.
Currently, the nuclear waste in question is typically disposed of at licensed waste disposal facilities, which have adequate training and equipment to protect public health.
The proposal would grant some exceptions to this regulation for waste with a cumulative radiation dose level of up to 25 millirem…….
n a statement on Thursday, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility Pacific Director Jeff Ruch also criticized the proposal.
“NRC’s action could transform most municipal dumps into radioactive repositories, with essentially no safeguards for workers, nearby residents, or adjoining water tables,” he said. https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/490988-advocates-raise-questions-about-proposal-to-allow-some-nuclear
Our war against the environment is bringing pandemics upon us
Coronavirus is a wake-up call: our war with the environment is leading to pandemics, The Conversation, Fiona Armstrong Executive Director, Climate and Health Alliance, Occasional Lecturer, School of Public Health and Human Biosciences, La Trobe University, Anthony Capon, Director, Monash Sustainable Development Institute, Monash University, Ro McFarlane, Assistant Professor in Ecological Public Health, University of Canberra, March 31, 202 The COVID-19 pandemic sweeping across the world is a crisis of our own making.
That’s the message from infectious disease and environmental health experts, and from those in planetary health – an emerging field connecting human health, civilisation and the natural systems on which they depend.
They might sound unrelated, but the COVID-19 crisis and the climate and biodiversity crises are deeply connected.
Each arises from our seeming unwillingness to respect the interdependence between ourselves, other animal species and the natural world more generally.
To put this into perspective, the vast majority (three out of every four) of new infectious diseases in people come from animals – from wildlife and from the livestock we keep in ever-larger numbers.
To understand and effectively respond to COVID-19, and other novel infectious diseases we’ll likely encounter in the future, policymakers need to acknowledge and respond with “planetary consciousness”. This means taking a holistic view of public health that includes the health of the natural environment.
Risking animal-borne diseases
Biodiversity (all biological diversity from genes, to species, to ecosystems) is declining faster than at any time in human history.
We clear forests and remove habitat, bringing wild animals closer to human settlements. And we hunt and sell wildlife, often endangered, increasing the risk of disease transmission from animals to humans.
The list of diseases that have jumped from animals to humans (“zoonotic diseases”) includes HIV, Ebola, Zika, Hendra, SARS, MERS and bird flu.
Like its precursor SARS, COVID-19 is thought to have originated in bats and subsequently transmitted to humans via another animal host, possibly at a wet market trading live animals.
Ebola virus emerged in central Africa when land use changes and altered climatic conditions forced bats and chimpanzees together around concentrated areas of food resources. And Hendra virus is associated with urbanisation of fruit bats following habitat loss. Such changes are occurring worldwide.
What’s more, human-caused climate change is making this worse. Along with habitat loss, shifting climate zones are causing wildlife to migrate to new places, where they interact with other species they haven’t previously encountered. This increases the risk of new diseases emerging.
COVID-19 is just the latest new infectious disease arising from our collision with nature……. https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-is-a-wake-up-call-our-war-with-the-environment-is-leading-to-pandemics-135023
12 Fukushima decontamination locations likely to leak radiation, in heavy rain
The ministry checked all the sites where the waste is kept after 91 bags were swept into rivers in Fukushima and Tochigi prefectures last year due to downpours caused by Typhoon Hagibis.
Of the 322 locations that are near rivers or in flood-prone areas, 12 sites in Fukushima Prefecture were found to be at risk of having bags of waste swept away or ruptured by mud flows.
The ministry plans to set up fences or move the waste to intermediate storage facilities to reduce the risk by the end of May this year.
Environment Minister Shinjiro Koizumi told reporters on Tuesday his ministry hopes to do the work as soon as possible because of the growing risk of sudden downpours in recent years.
LANL Plans to Release Twice the Amount of Tritium Allowed
 LANL Plans to Release Twice the Amount of Tritium Allowed http://nuclearactive.org/ March 26th, 2020 The Department of Energy (DOE) and its contractor at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) plan to vent radioactive tritium into the air in an amount twice the federal standard of 10 millirems a year. LANL estimates a possible offsite dose to the public of 20.2 he Department of Energy (DOE) and its contractor at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) plan to vent radioactive tritium into the air in an amount twice the federal standard of 10 millirems a year. LANL estimates a possible offsite dose to the public of 20.2
In 2019, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved a 2018 LANL plan under the Clean Air Act. This month, the New Mexico Environment Department approved the plan under the state’s Hazardous Waste Act because there are lead tools present in the containers. But there are inconsistencies between the two plans.
For instance, the earlier Clean Air Act plan proposed using “getters” to capture a portion of the vented tritium before it is released through an open door in the prefabricated shed. The later plan deleted the use of a “getter bed” and replaced it with an unnamed air emissions control system. Nevertheless, the Hazardous Waste Act plan states the gases will pass through a molecular sieve bed and through a metering value before release. https://permalink.lanl.gov/object/tr?what=info:lanl-repo/eprr/ESHID-603412 New Mexicans are concerned about the proposed venting. Tritium is radioactive hydrogen and is highly mobile moving from air to water and back. It can cross the placenta and affect a developing fetus. The 10 millirem standard is based on a 154-pound, five feet 6 inch, Anglo “reference man,” between the ages of 20 to 30, who consumes a European diet. Beata Tsosie, a Community Doula and Gardener, from Santa Clara Pueblo, said, “As a Pueblo woman living downwind and downstream from Los Alamos nuclear weapons production, I am very concerned about the lab’s intentions to go forward with releasing radioactive tritium vapor into our air, land, waters, and ecosystems. During mid April is when our land-based community is outdoors for longer periods of time preparing their fields and gardens for planting. What will it mean to also have cumulative exposure when we consume these crops? There are also increased exposures due to active foraging of wild plants, gathering of clays, fishing, hunting, and ceremony. “Our children are also outdoors for longer periods of time due to the school shutdown for COVID-19, which is scheduled to go on indefinitely. I watch my son playing in his backyard, making his own gardens, running, getting out of breath and breathing deeply the air that I need to know is safe for him to be exposed to. We live 20 minutes away from these planned releases, and now in addition to an already stressful self-quarantine I need to worry about my family being outside enjoying their birthright. “It is my understanding that in the documents submitted to the EPA and NMED in 2018, there is no inclusion of alternatives to these releases. There should not be a rush to put our communities in harms way when all solutions have not even been discussed. I know that the federal standards for tritium exposure are not protective of land-based people of color, or pregnant families and infants who are more vulnerable to radioactive toxicity. Tritium can cross placental boundaries. These standards of exposure are still based on an obsolete model of an adult, white male of European descent and custom. There must be an informed public process that prioritizes protecting those most vulnerable. I do not consent to these toxic releases in my ancestral homelands; it is the continuation of nuclear colonialism and violence on Indigenous lands and bodies and a sorrowful history of environmental racism in our sacred Jemez Plateau. I call on all of our Congressional delegation, EPA and NMED directors to put an immediate halt and suspension to these planned tritium releases and increase in LANL production. Our communities deserve reprieve, health, calm, and wellness in these challenging times.” Given the cumulative health consequences from the proposed venting, organizations and individuals are requesting the Environment Department hold a public comment period and a public hearing. |
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1 This Month
petition to oppose the rapid increase of space-military industry threatening Jeju Island and the region.
[Petition by April 19th (KST)] Stop the joint military-Hanwha Systems-Jeju Provincial Government Sea Launch!
World Nuclear Power. Reactors 1951-2026, 75 Years of Nuclear Power.
Interactive Map– https://dv.worldnuclearreport.org/
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
of the week–London Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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