Medium 22nd Aug 2018 , The dumping of radioactive mud would break the law because the project has
had no Environmental Impact Assessment carried out to ensure that the
radioactive mud has been properly assessed as to the risk to the
environment and people’s health!
Without such an assessment it would also
fall foul of Section 4 of the Environment Wales Act 2016 which requires
full consideration of all relevant evidence and gather evidence on
uncertainties, the Well-being of Future Generations Act 2015 which requires
public bodies in Wales to think about the long-term impact of their
decisions, to work better with people, communities and each other and the
Marine Works (Environmental Impact Assessment) (Amendment) Regulations
2017. https://medium.com/@tomstanger/hinkley-c-a-project-literally-stuck-in-the-mud-an-update-a7891d8803de
· COLUMBIA — Attorneys suing South Carolina Electric & Gas say the power company should have to refund everything it collected for its failed nuclear project over the past year — some $452 million in all.
· In a motion filed Wednesday, lawyers representing SCE&G ratepayers say the utility should have dropped its nuclear financing charges from electric rates as soon as it told construction workers at the V.C. Summer power plant to leave the site.
· They say state law only allows SCE&G to charge people for the nuclear project while it is under construction or if it’s fully built — something the company gave up after it abandoned the $9 billion investment on July 31, 2017.
· The nuclear project was dropped after nine years of work on the power plants. SCE&G’s customers paid more than $1.8 billion to finance the endeavor. The troubled utility company is now facing a wave of legal challenges due to the unfinished reactors —now considered the biggest economic failure in state history.
· The new motion threatens to pile another massive liability onto SCE&G’s books.
· State lawmakers already forced the power company earlier this month to temporarily slash its nuclear charges, a move that reduced its customers’ bills by 15 percent and will cost the company roughly $270 million by the end of this year.
· Those customers will also receive a rebate for the power they purchased between April and July.
Trib Live 9th Aug 2018 The volunteer efforts of a Hyde Park environmental activist and a retired
Washington Township engineer helped about 300 former nuclear workers in the
region collect $60 million from the federal government for cancers likely
caused by their jobs.
A federal entitlement program that was enacted in 2000, the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program pays$150,000 tax-free, plus medical benefits, to workers who became ill,
because of their work for the government or contractors for nuclear weapons
and Cold War-related work.
Julian Assange should ensure he’s granted immunity from prosecution before testifying to the Senate Intelligence Committee, former CIA officer John Kiriakou told RT, citing previous US attempts to charge those who did testify.
“If Assange is offered immunity by the committee, he then could not be charged with the crime because anything he said before the committee could not be used against him,” Kiriakou stressed, recalling how in 1987 former marine Oliver North was granted congressional immunity in exchange for his testimony on the Iran-Contra affair.
The Department of Justice then filed multiple felony charges against North, and he was arrested. But the Supreme Court later dismissed the charges, citing his immunity. Kiriakou believes the same measure can shield Assange, who has spent the last six years living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London fearing extradition to the US.
The WikiLeaks founder was earlier requested to give a closed interview to the staff of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee as part of the investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election – an accusation Moscow flatly denies.
In October, 2017, WikiLeaks published the cache of emails belonging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta, whose account the US Intelligence Community claims was hacked by ‘Russian operatives.’
Kiriakou reminded viewers that while many view Assange as a journalist and publisher, American lawmakers generally have a much more negative perception of the whistleblower. “On the Senate Intelligence Committee almost nobody believes that,” he said, explaining why the potential trip to the US can be risky for Assange.
Over the years, US politicians and intelligence officers have branded Assange a “traitor” and an “enemy of the state” for publishing classified materials on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as leaking US diplomatic cables. Last year, the then-head of the CIA Mike Pompeo, who now serves as the secretary of state, labeled WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service.”
The animosity harbored towards Assange suggests that the US Senate has “ulterior motives” for summoning him, human rights activist Peter Tatchell believes.
“I believe they want to snare him into somehow admitting or implying that he got information from Russian sources. That seems to be the focus of their attention,” the activist said, adding that the US authorities might use the interview to collect new evidence to prosecute Assange in the future.
Former MI5 officer Annie Machon, meanwhile, argues that it may be “difficult” for Assange to agree to a closed interview with US officials on such a sensitive subject. She believes he “always has got to be very careful about how they approach this, how it might be perceived, and what might be the outcome.” But crucially, the very nature of the hearing goes against the principles of WikiLeaks which Assange has staunchly defended.
“The whole ethos of WikiLeaks is to be open and transparent, and to bring the information out for the public’s good,” she said.
The Association 193 has told a news conference in Tahiti it has been encouraged by the response from the commission charged with assessing claims for poor health.
The Association’s Auguste Uebe-Carlson said six applications, however, have been rejected.
Father Uebe-Carlson is encouraging people to contact his association to lodge claims if they meet the criteria for compensation, such as location and type of illness.
According to the public broadcaster, since 1992 about 10,000 people have developed radiation-related conditions or illnesses which might be eligible for compensation.
Between 1966 and 1996, France carried out 193 nuclear weapons tests in the South Pacific.
A top SCANA accountant says the company’s most powerful executives pressured her to lie and she was given altered information to share with state regulators about how much it would cost to finish the utility’s faltering nuclear project, according to a transcript of her sworn testimony.
If the estimates were lower, that could have made the project appear healthier than it was. Leaders at SCANA, which owns South Carolina Electric & Gas, have been accused of painting a rosy picture to regulators, customers and investors about the health of the $9 billion project before it failed a year ago.
Carlette Walker, who managed the nuclear project’s finances, testified under oath that she left her $565,000-a-year job in 2016, “Because I wasn’t going to lie.”
“And who do you feel was pressuring you to lie?” an attorney representing SCE&G customers asked.
Walker answered with the names of the power company’s top officials: Kevin Marsh, its CEO throughout the nuclear project’s final years; Steve Byrne, who had been its operations chief; and Jimmy Addison, the finance chief who was her boss and is now SCANA’s chief executive.
SCANA and attorneys representing Addison, Byrne and Marsh did not respond to requests for comment Monday. Marsh and Byrne resigned from the company last year after the project went bust and state lawmakers called for them to step down.
Walker was in SCANA’s inner circle and was repeatedly called to testify about its budget to South Carolina’s utility regulators and her work won her raises year after year as one of the project’s leaders.
AN AUSTRIAN appeal against UK Government funding for Hinkley Point C has been dismissed after a sprawling investigation. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled the UK government’s contribution to the new nuclear power station did not constitute illegal ‘state aid’.
Green MEP for South West Dr Molly Scott-Cato said. “This decision is hugely regrettable. There can be no justification for EU subsidies to be thrown at nuclear. Hinkley C is a particular tragedy for the South West when we are blessed with exciting renewable energy alternatives. The region has huge potential for both onshore and offshore wind; for tidal and geothermal energy and is the region best suited in the whole of the UK to capture the power of the sun. Sadly, today’s ECJ ruling will only serve to reinforce the government’s ideological obsession with nuclear. The National Infrastructure Commission agrees that nuclear is not the way forward for the UK and that we should seize the golden opportunities that renewable energy technologies provide.” (1)
Austria objected on three grounds. First, that Britain was guaranteeing to buy energy from the plant for 35 years at £92.50 per megawatt hour, index-linked from 2012 – or twice today’s wholesale price. Second, the government has undertaken to compensate the developers “in the event of an early shutdown on political grounds”. Third, that the UK was happy to underwrite project debt, via credit guarantees on bond issues, up to a total £17 billion.
The Times said according to the ECJ none of that remotely counts as state aid. No, the EU’s general court has just slapped down Austria for bringing its complaint, arguing that “aid is necessary in order to attain, in good time, the objective of creating nuclear energy generating capacity” Yes, just don’t call it state aid. (2)
Rebecca Harms, spokeswoman for the Greens / EFA Group in the European Parliament says “The Euratom Treaty is a relic of the past and gives the high-risk nuclear technology with billiondollar subsidies an unfair competitive advantage. The Euratom Treaty does not match the European requirements for clean energy and fair competition. We must end the distortion of competition in the European energy market, reform the Euratom Treaty and rely on the energy transition.” A report “Pathways to a Euratom Reform ” by Dr. Dörte Fouquet on behalf of the Greens / EFA Group is available here: http://rebeccaharms.de/files/1/n/1nqn7097gnq8/attc_9ZoZQVsNer5ciwSC.pdf
As one of a few islanders in his company within the U.S. Army, Robert Celestial jumped at the chance to help with post-World War II cleanup in the Republic of the Marshall Islands in the late 1970s. He looked forward to six months of island living and was promised a monthly trip to Hawaii for some R&R.
Not long after, Celestial found himself draining water from a crater on Lojwa Island in the Enewetak Atoll, wearing shorts, boots and a dust mask. The crater was left over from a nuclear test explosion. While he knew they were dealing with nuclear waste during the deployment, he said he did not know that was what the crater was from.
“We were never told the extent of the 66 nuclear detonations,” he said. “The only thing that was serious was the Air Force was in charge of the Geiger counters … if you see an Air Force guy running, then you better run.”
Like any good soldier, he followed orders and didn’t ask questions. When a magazine came to report on the cleanup, some soldiers donned a full-body protective suit. Celestial said it was the only time he saw the suit used.
Celestial said he and fellow soldiers often caught fish, lobster and octopus to eat. They were not told that the seafood could be contaminated until months after arriving.
More than 70 years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Celestial’s past willingness to be exposed to that level of nuclear radiation is unthinkable.
But that was decades ago, at the dawn of the nuclear age. Few could be expected to predict the ramifications of their six-month cleanup tour.
An undetectable enemy
“We were all young. … We got to the Marshall Islands and it was beautiful,” he said. “You can’t see the danger, you can’t smell it, taste it. … We just did what they told us.”
Today, Celestial, who serves as president of the Guam-based Pacific Association for Radiation Survivors, says he is blessed: He hasn’t been diagnosed with cancer, unlike many of his fellow veterans, and was discharged from the Army with full disability.
Celestial said he deals with rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis. In fact, he said, almost all atomic veterans suffer from brittle bones. Two decades ago, while living in San Diego, California, Celestial was told he had the liver of a 90-year-old and was given four years to live, but he ultimately recovered.
Others have not been as fortunate. One Enewetak veteran, who lives in Maine, has been diagnosed with six distinct cancers, Celestial said. Because he was diagnosed after his separation from the military, he does not receive any compensation for medical costs.
Without any major medical issues, some wonder why Celestial has spent the better part of the past two decades fighting for Guam and veterans who participated in the Enewetak Atoll cleanup to receive federal reimbursement for illnesses linked to radiation exposure.
Proposed amendment
Legislation has been introduced that would expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. The current law has distributed more than $2 billion to residents within Nevada, Utah and Arizona who suffer from radiation-related illnesses, but will end payments by 2022. The last year for people to apply for coverage is 2020.
The proposed amendment would extend RECA by 19 years and offer up to $150,000 in medical coverage to residents of Guam, Idaho, New Mexico and the Navajo Nation.
In late June, Celestial gave testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Toward the end of the hearing, he was asked if he had cancer.
“I told them no,” Celestial said with a laugh. “It made other people realize … what the hell is he doing it for? I’m not doing it for myself. I’m doing it for other people. I’m fighting for the people of Guam and the other states, and I’m also fighting for the Enewetak veterans who haven’t been rightly identified.”
He said his Senate testimony – given alongside downwinder allies from Idaho, New Mexico and Navajo Nation – was a new high in his decades-long fight.
But he refuses to make any promises about the future.
“What we’ve done in the Senate is the closest we’ve come,” he said. “Now we have to go to the House.”
……… Years ago, Celestial’s fight was bolstered by a report from the Board on Radiation Effects Research, which determined that Guam “did receive measurable fallout.”
Without this proof, Celestial said, he would not have continued his work on RECA.
‘Very, very wrong’
Lt. Charles Bert Schreiber, a chemical, biological and radiological officer with the U.S. Navy who served on Guam in 1952, gave testimony to the BRER, saying that just two days after a nuclear explosion in the Marshall Islands, radiation level readings were off the charts on Guam.
According to Schreiber’s testimony in 2001, he went straight to the admiral’s top aide to see what needed to be done. Minutes later, he was told to leave.
“I then knew something was very, very wrong,” Schreiber said in his testimony.
After giving this testimony, containing information that Celestial said was previously classified above the top-secret level, Schreiber revealed to Celestial that a burden had been lifted from him, as he was finally able to share what happened.
“The Guamanians, for the large part, had only rainwater for drinking … and they were drinking highly contaminated radioactive water and I could not tell them to stop. The Navy … did not provide any information to the military personnel, civilians or the natives about how to protect themselves.”
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Jul 28, 2018 In the 12 muddled months since the abandonment of two South Carolina nuclear reactors that never produced a watt of power, only one thing seems certain: it will take a lot of litigation to untangle the mess.
Courtrooms are where much of the saga some call South Carolina’s nuclear boondoggle will unfold.
South Carolina Electric & Gas Co. and state-owned utility Santee Cooper spent more than $9 billion before abandoning construction on the reactors at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station near Columbia last year. State and federal authorities are probing the failure, and irate customers and shareholders have filed lawsuits.
“We’re just at the end of the beginning,” said Lynn Teague, vice president of the League of Women Voters in South Carolina who has made protecting ratepayers her goal since noticing things weren’t going right for the projects three years ago.
Customers of SCE&G, a SCANA subsidiary, got a temporary 15 percent rate cut. But even the rate cut isn’t on bills yet. Four months of cuts are supposed to show up in August. SCE&G is asking a federal court to stop it, but a judge hasn’t taken up the request.
There is also a likely showdown ahead between Gov. Henry McMaster and the state Senate about whether the governor’s pick to run the board of state-owned Santee Cooper can start immediately without Senate approval. And there are ongoing criminal investigations of potential wrongdoing.
The complexity in unraveling the mess is in part because the two different utilities involved. SCE&G is privately owned with shareholders able to shoulder the loss . Dominion Energy in Virginia appears to be working toward a merger with SCE&G that is awaiting approval.
Santee Cooper is owned by the state and its holdings include land and lakes as well as the power grid. The utility the chief provider for power for the tinier co-ops that serve some of the most remote areas of South Carolina. The utility’s debt — which includes more than just the billions poured into the failed nuclear reactors — is around $8 billion or roughly equal to the annual state budget.
“We got out the paddles and kept the patient from dying. We did CPR,” Climer said of the past year in the Legislature. “Now we need to nurse him back to health.”
But experts predict whether Santee Cooper is sold or not, rates are going up for its customers. The average Santee Cooper customer pays $130 a month, while SCE&G customers pay some of the highest rates in the nation at $163 a month, based on power usage statstics.
“They had three to four billion of state assets and they go up there and they put money in the hole and now, of course, they’re not going to go under because they have a captive audience,” Condon told lawmakers considering his appointment in April. “But is that fair to all concerned? I think not.”
Liberation 17th July 2018, Flamanville: NGOs lodge a complaint against EDF for “breaches” of security.
Sortir du nucléaire and Greenpeaceare to take legal action this Wednesday morning in the case of defective welds detected on the pipes of the future EPR reactor. The soap opera of the shipyard of the EPR reactor, built by EDF on the Flamanville power station (Manche), takes a legal turn.
Nucnet 12th July 2018, Europe’s second highest court has rejected Austrian objections to the
planned Hinkley Point C nuclear station in southwest England, saying
British government aid offered to the project did not violate EU rules.
The European Commission approved the project in October 2014, saying it did not
see any competition issues, but a previous Austrian government took issue
with the decision and filed a case with the General Court in 2015, arguing
that it contradicted EU policy of supporting renewable energy.
Luxembourg has also challenged the approval, backed by a group of more than 20
academics, politicians and renewable energy officials who say it distorts
competition and flouts rules on government subsidies. But the court noted
in its decision today that the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Poland,
Romania, Slovakia and the UK intervened in support of the EC.
The General Court dismissed Austria’s arguments against the project. The court said:
“The General Court confirms the decision by which the Commission approved
the aid provided by the UK in favour of the Hinkley Point C nuclear power
station,” judges said. The judges said Britain has the right to choose
between the different energy sources. https://www.nucnet.org/all-the-news/2018/07/12/european-court-dismisses-austria-s-objections-to-hinkley-point-c
J Truman’s earliest memory is of sitting as a child on his father’s knee in Enterprise, Utah, transfixed by a show in the sky from nuclear-bomb testing in nearby Nevada, including watching pink-gray fallout clouds pass overhead.
“My parents died from cancer,” he says, blaming those radioactive clouds. So Truman, director of Downwinders, Inc., has fought since the 1970s for compensation for victims. A bill by Sen. Orrin Hatch and the late Rep, Wayne Owens in 1990, and expanded in 2000, gave money to victims in 10 southern Utah counties.
Now Truman hails new legislation that proposes finally offering payments to victims in all of Utah — and neighboring states. And payments under the plan would grow from $50,000 for downwind cancer victims to the same $150,000 paid to Nevada Test Site workers. People who received the lower payment could apply to get the additional $100,000.
“Salt Lake County was hit just as hard by fallout” from some nuclear tests as areas in southern Utah that have long qualified for compensation, Truman says. “So was the Uinta Basin,” according to federal fallout studies ordered by the earlier bills.
“We need justice. Not ‘just us.’ There must be equal justice for all exposed and sickened,” Truman says. He adds that the $50,000 offered to some through earlier bills “doesn’t even cover the first round of chemo.”
Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and Rep. Ben Lujan, D-N.M., are sponsoring the new legislation — mostly to help victims in their states that had been excluded. No Utah members of Congress have signed on as co-sponsors so far.
Similar bills have been introduced for the past eight years with no action, but Crapo managed finally to win a hearing last monthin the Senate Judiciary Committee. “This hearing has been a long time in coming,” Crapo said there.
The senator complains that 20 of the 25 U.S. counties hardest hit by radioactive Iodine-131 were in Idaho and Montana, where residents received no compensation.
His bill would now cover victims of cancers tied to radiation in all of Utah, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and Guam (because of Pacific ocean nuclear tests).
Crapo said he’s talked to many Idaho farmers who awoke after a 1952 nuclear test to “find their pastures and orchards covered with a fine white dust. It seemingly appeared out of nowhere. It looked like frost. But it was not cold to touch.” It was fallout, and he said no one warned farmers about its dangers.
Crapo complained that the government has long known, because of studies in Utah, about unexplained clusters of cancer downwind of nuclear tests. “That was 40 years ago. However, there are still a number of those affected who are still waiting for the government to do the right thing and make them eligible for compensation.”
Eltona Henderson, with Idaho Downwinders, testified that her native rural Gem County, Idaho, has been devastated by cancer that she blames on the nuclear tests — and has collected the names of 1,060 cancer victims from there. “Some entire families have been wiped out by cancer, where there was no cancer before the 1950s.”
She added, “It seems that because of the nuclear testing, our ‘Valley of Plenty’ is now ’The Valley of Death…. I have 38 people in my family that have had cancer, 14 have died from the disease,“ adding most did not have lifestyles that otherwise would have increased their likelihood for cancer.
Earlier bills also never compensated victims downwind of the nation’s first Trinity atomic bomb test in New Mexico, which developed the bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War
II. Tina Cordova of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders protested that omission at the hearing.
“The radioactive fallout settled on everything. On the soil, in the water, in the air, on the plants, and on the skin of every living thing,” she said. “The New Mexico Downwinders are the collateral damage that resulted from the development and testing of the first atomic bomb.”
Hatch and Owens in earlier decades said a major problem of passing compensation bills was their cost, and Truman said it is also an ongoing problem with new legislation.
Justice Department data show that more than $1 billion has been paid to 21,649 downwiders through the years, “and that’s just covering some rural counties. If bigger urban areas were added, that number could really take off,” Truman said.
When compensation is added in that was paid to workers at the Nevada Test Site and at uranium mines and mills, the U.S. government has paid $2.26 billion in radiation compensation.
Studies have said radiation from nuclear tests hit virtually every county in the nation to some extent.
Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., whose father, former Interior Secretary Stuart Udall, started early lawsuits seeking downwinder compensation in Utah, said paying some but not other victims is a grave injustice. “We must do everything we can now to make sure the many unwilling Cold War victims and their families are compensated.”
Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said the new legislation “is about confronting the dark corners of our country and working to bring on the light,” and is about “making sure we do right by people who were wronged when our nation was building up and testing its nuclear arsenal.”
Greenpeace France 28th June 2018 The verdict of the trial of Privas, where Greenpeace France, one of his employees and 22 activists were judged on May 17 following an intrusion into the Cruas-Meysse nuclear power plant, fell. Despite EDF’s will to attack our activists, none of them have been sentenced to imprisonment.
Yannick Rousselet, a nuclear campaigner prosecuted for complicity, was released. EDF’s strategy to demand heavier prison sentences and colossal damages to Greenpeace to dissuade us from denouncing nuclear risk has failed.
The lawsuit against Greenpeace France, his campaign campaigner, Yannick Rousselet, and 22 activists of the organization was held May 17 at the tribunal de grande instance Privas in Ardeche. The verdict was made public six weeks later. https://www.greenpeace.fr/proces-nucleaire-privas-verdict/
https://apnews.com/dc5e3c60042741c696dd062462a03cca– 28 June 18, ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Advocates for New Mexicans who many believe were sickened by U.S. uranium mining and nuclear weapons testing have urged Congress to acknowledge their sacrifice and authorize compensation for them.
Navajo Nation Vice President Jonathan Nez and the co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium testified during a hearing Wednesday in Washington on a compensation measure.
Sponsored by U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, it proposes expanding eligibility for payouts under the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act of 1990, which currently covers claims from areas in Nevada, Arizona and Utah that are downwind from a different test site.
Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa consortium, said many who lived in the area weren’t told about the dangers of the Trinity Test on generations of residents.
They could benefit from the proposal, along with post-1971 uranium mine workers in Northwestern New Mexico.
nuclear-news 