A conversation with Dr. Gordon Edwards: contemporary issues in the Canadian nuclear industry, and a look back at the achievements of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (CCNR), http://www.ccnr.org/ Montreal, August 25, 2018, Nuclear waste management: an exercise in cynical thinking. DiaNuke.org, 24 Sept 2018. “…….. The elusive “willing host community”DR: I know too there have 
been a lot of targeted “willing host communities” that have rejected it. Do you think they’ll succeed in finding one?
GE: Here in Canada they have gone through this process of looking for a “willing host 
community,” which is kind of foolish because these communities are very small. For example, I just visited two of them within the last few weeks way up above Lake Superior. In the two communities that I visited, Hornepayne and Manitouwadge, I gave presentations. These communities have less than a thousand residents in each one of them and they get $300,000 a year as basically bribe money in order to keep them on the hook, to keep them interested in learning more. It’s called the “learn more” program, and as long as they’re “learning more,” they can get $300,000 a year. Well, they are both interested in getting the money, and consequently they’re still in the running, but do they really want to be a nuclear-waste community? If this is such a good deal for them, then why aren’t other communities bidding for this—larger communities? Of course, one of the points that comes to mind immediately is that if you had a city of a million people or so, then you’d have to shell out $300 million instead of $300,000 every year, so this idea of a “willing host community” exists only because of the bribes that are given by the industry in order to keep these communities supposedly interested in receiving the waste. And in some of them, of course, there are people who see dollar signs and who see an opportunity for them to make a lot of money. In a small community, a certain small number of people can make a lot of money by capitalizing on an opportunity like that without being concerned very much about the long-term wisdom of it.
DR: Yeah, and the seventh future generation doesn’t get a voice.
I did speak to two other communities a couple of years ago in that same general area north of Lake Superior. One of them was the town of Schreiber, and one of them was White River, and both of those communities are now off the list. They’re no longer candidates, so we now have only three communities up north of Lake Superior which are still actively pursuing this program of taking money and “learning more.” I have spoken now to two of them and I haven’t yet been invited to go to the third one.
10. The great unknowable: long term care for nuclear waste. Who pays? Who cares?When I go there I try and point out to them not only the fact that this whole exercise is questionable, but also the fact that once the nuclear waste is moved up to a small remote area like this, what guarantee is there that it’s really going to be looked after properly? Because these small communities do not have a powerful voice.
They don’t have economic clout, and so they can’t really control this. If a person like Donald Trump, for example in the United States, or Doug Ford in Ontario, who many people think is a kind of a mini Donald Trump, thinks, “Why are we going to spend money on that? Forget it we’re not going to spend money on that,” then it’s going to not be pursued as originally planned. And it could become just a surface parking lot for high-level nuclear waste. Who is going to guarantee that it is actually going to be carried out? Now the nuclear plants are in danger of closing down. We’re having fewer nuclear plants every year than we had the year before now in North America, and consequently there’s not the revenue generation that there used to be. The money that’s been set aside is nowhere near adequate to carry out the grandiose project they’re talking about, which here in Canada is estimated to cost at least twenty-two billion dollars. They have maybe five or six billion, but that’s not nearly enough.
So there’s also another problem lurking in the wings, and that is that if you do want to carry out this actual full-scale program of geological excavation with all the care that was originally planned, how do you generate revenue? What company is willing to spend twenty-two billion dollars on a project which generates absolutely no revenue?
There are only two ways you can generate revenue from that, and one way is to take waste of other countries and charge a fee for storing the waste. The other thing is to sell the plutonium. If you extract the plutonium, then you could have a marketable product, but both of these ideas are extremely far from what these communities are being told. In other words, the plan that’s being presented to them does not include either one of these possibilities, and it changes the game considerably. As we all know, getting the plutonium out of the spent fuel involves huge volumes of liquid radioactive waste. It involves very great emissions, atmospheric emissions, and liquid emissions. The most radioactively polluted sites on the face of the earth are the places where they’ve done extensive reprocessing, such as Hanford in Washington, Sellafield in northern England, La Hague in France, Mayak in Russia, and so on.
DR: And Rokkasho in Japan.
GE: That’s right, and so this is a completely different picture than what they’re being presented with. Now whether or not that would actually happen is anybody’s guess, but it’s written right in their documents that this is an option, and they’ve never excluded that option. They’ve always included the option. In fact, the first sentence of the environmental impact statement written by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited many years ago says that when we say high-level nuclear waste we mean either irradiated nuclear fuel or solidified post-reprocessing waste. They have always kept that door open for reprocessing.
11. A disturbed “undisturbed” geological formation is no longer undisturbed But even under the best of circumstances we know that you can’t get waste into an undisturbed geological formation without disturbing it. As soon as you disturb it, it’s no longer the same ballgame. The other thing that people are unaware of, generally, is the nature of this waste. They really don’t realize that this waste is not inert material, that it’s active. It’s chemically active. It’s thermally active. It generates heat for fifty thousand years. They have a fifty thousand-year time period they call the thermal pulse, and the degree of radio-toxicity staggers the mind. Most people have no ability to wrap their mind around that. Take a simple example like Polonium 210 which was used to murder Alexander Litvinenko, and which will breed into the irradiated fuel as time goes on… According to the Los Alamos nuclear laboratories (it’s on their website), this material is 250 billion times more toxic than cyanide. That’s a staggering concept. In fact, nobody can wrap their mind around that, really. 250 billion times more toxic?! Theoretically that means that if you had a lethal dose of cyanide, and you had the same amount of Polonium 210, the cyanide could kill one person. The Polonium 210 could kill 250 billion persons. That’s amazing. How do you possibly wrap your mind around that?………https://www.dianuke.org/a-conversation-with-dr-gordon-edwards-contemporary-issues-in-the-canadian-nuclear-industry-and-a-look-b
Observer 23rd Sept 2018 , Warnings about the dangers of global warming are being watered down in the
final version of a key climate report for a major international meeting
next month, according to reviewers who have studied earlier versions of the
report and its summary.
They say scientists working on the final draft of
the summary are censoring their own warnings and “pulling their
punches” to make policy recommendations seem more palatable to countries
– such as the US, Saudi Arabia and Australia – that are reluctant to
cut fossil-fuel emissions, a key cause of global warming.
“Downplaying the worst impacts of climate change has led the scientific authors to omit
crucial information from the summary for policymakers,” said one
reviewer, Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on
Climate Change and the Environment.
The report – to be presented at a
meeting in Korea in early October – will make clear that allowing
temperatures to rise by 2C will have devastating consequences, including
rising sea levels, spreading deserts, loss of natural habitats and species,
dwindling ice-caps and increases in the number of devastating storms.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/23/scientists-changing-global-warming-report-please-polluters
Informal Labour, Local Citizens and the Tokyo Electric Fukushima 
Daiichi Nuclear Crisis: Responses to Neoliberal Disaster Management Adam Broinowski {extensive footnotes and references on original] September 2018, “……… (Official Medicine: The (Il)logic of Radiation Dosimetry On what basis have these policies on radiation from Fukushima Daiichi been made? Instead of containing contamination, the authorities have mounted a concerted campaign to convince the public that it is safe to live with radiation in areas that should be considered uninhabitable and unusable according to internationally accepted standards. To do so, they have concealed from public knowledge the material conditions of radiation contamination so as to facilitate the return of the evacuee population to ‘normalcy’, or life as it was before 3.11. This position has been further supported by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which stated annual doses of up to 20 mSv/y are safe for the total population including women and children.43 The World Health Organisation (WHO) and United Nations Scientific Commission on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) also asserted that there were no ‘immediate’ radiation related illnesses or deaths (genpatsu kanren shi 原発 関連死) and declared the major health impact to be psychological.
While the central and prefectural governments have repeatedly reassured the public since the beginning of the disaster that there is no immediate health risk, in May 2011 access to official statistics for cancer-related illnesses (including leukaemia) in Fukushima and southern Miyagi prefectures was shut down. On 6 December 2013, the Special Secrets Protection Law (Tokutei Himitsu Hogo Hō 特定秘密保護法) aimed at restricting government employees and experts from giving journalists access to information deemed sensitive to national security was passed (effective December 2014). Passed at the same time was the Cancer Registration Law (Gan Tōroku Hō 癌登録法), which made it illegal to share medical data or information on radiation-related issues including evaluation of medical data obtained through screenings, and denied public access to certain medical records, with violations punishable with a 2 million yen fine or 5–10 years’ imprisonment. In January 2014, the IAEA, UNSCEAR and Fukushima Prefecture and Fukushima Medical University (FMU) signed a confidentiality agreement to control medical data on radiation. All medical personnel (hospitals) must submit data (mortality, morbidity, general illnesses from radiation exposures) to a central repository run by the FMU and IAEA.44 It is likely this data has been collected in the large Fukushima Centre for Environmental Creation, which opened in Minami-Sōma in late 2015 to communicate ‘accurate information on radiation to the public and dispel anxiety’. This official position contrasts with the results of the first round of the Fukushima Health Management Survey (October 2011 – April 2015) of 370,000 young people (under 18 at the time of the disaster) in Fukushima prefecture since 3.11, as mandated in the Children and Disaster Victims Support Act (June 2012).45 The survey report admitted that paediatric thyroid cancers were ‘several tens of times larger’ (suitei sareru yūbyōsū ni kurabete sūjūbai no ōdā de ōi 推定される有病数に比べて数十倍の オーダーで多い) than the amount estimated.46 By 30 September 2015, as part of the second-round screening (April 2014–
March 2016) to be conducted once every two years until the age of 20 and once every five years after 20, there were 15 additional confirmed thyroid cancers coming to a total of 152 malignant or suspected paediatric thyroid cancer cases with 115 surgically confirmed and 37 awaiting surgical confirmation. Almost all have been papillary thyroid cancer with only three as poorly differentiated thyroid cancer (these are no less dangerous). By June 2016, this had increased to 173 confirmed (131) or suspected (42) paediatric thyroid cancer cases.47
The National Cancer Research Center also estimated an increase of childhood thyroid cancer by 61 times, from the 2010 national average of 1–3 per million to 1 in 3,000 children. Continue reading
According to records from the Malaysian Atomic Energy Licensing Board, there have been more than 16 cases involving the theft or loss of radioactive material since the 1990s, with the last incident reported in February 2017. Reports of the present incident in Malaysia indicate that the source “was being transported 30 miles from the town of Seremban to Shah Alam on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, the capital.” The missing device is an industrial radiography unit with an iridium 192 isotope used for non-destructive testing. Without knowing the specific activity (i.e., the concentration of radioactivity) of the isotope, one cannot be sure of its precise potential harm, but commonly, this type of device is considered to be, in plain language, very dangerous. ……..
The incident caused concerns at the highest levels of the government, and it was discussed in the National Security Council of Malaysia. Datuk Ayub Khan Mydin Pitchay, the Special Branch’s Counter-Terrorism Division assistant principal director, reported that after an investigation, the case was not linked to terrorism, and now is a criminal investigation. However, the possibility of malicious intent and insider threat cannot be ruled out, and the Malaysian government in late August set up a special force of the Atomic Energy Licensing Board and local police to continue investigating the incident.
Regional concerns in Southeast Asia. The missing radioactive device in Malaysia also raises concerns on the regional level, for a variety of reasons. First, Malaysia is in a strategic location for shipping routes as it shares a border with Singapore—one of the world’s busiest ports. With a high volume of cross-border transfer of goods into and out of Singapore, a perpetrator could smuggle a radioactive source to a country with porous borders. Fortunately, Singapore has a robust radiation portal monitor (RPM) infrastructure to prevent the smuggling of radioactive material. Complementing their RPMs, national authorities decided to ramp up security at their borders checkpoints as well. ……..
Global problem. One of the common motivations behind the theft of radiation sources is the hope of profits; missing or stolen radioactive sources can become a safety concern if they end up in scrap metal yards or are intentionally sold as scrap metal……… https://thebulletin.org/2018/09/radioactive-material-is-still-missing-in-malaysia-cause-for-concern/?utm_source=Bulletin%20Newsletter&utm_medium=iContact%20Email&utm_campaign=September21
Big research payments in radiation oncology are distributed only to a few, Radiology Business, September 19, 2018 | Subrata Thakar |New research in the Journal of the American College of Radiology suggests an association between disclosed payment from the healthcare industry and increased individual productivity metrics.
MEPs defy warnings from internet pioneers, civil liberties groups and commercial interests, Guardian, Rankinin Brussels, Wed 20 Jun 2018 A European parliament committee has voted for legislation that internet pioneers fear will turn the web into “a tool for surveillance and control”.
Guardian 17th Sept 2018 Britain’s energy regulator has been fighting to keep secret the claims of
two whistleblowers who independently raised concerns about potentially
serious irregularities in projects worth billions of pounds, the Guardian
can reveal. The two men say Ofgem threatened them with an obscure but
sweeping gagging clause that can lead to criminal prosecutions and possible
jail terms for those who defy it.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2018/sep/17/ofgem-made-my-life-hell-whistleblowers-say-they-were-threatened-by-regulator
The 73-year-old said he was held for 19 hours under the Explosives Act before being released with no further action………..
A cordon was set up around his home on Wednesday morning when the two officers complained of feeling unwell – which Dr Busby attributed to “psychological problems associated with their knowledge of the Skripal poisoning”.
The scientist said he was handcuffed and interviewed all night by police who suspected he was making a bomb, but the only substances found at his home were “innocuous chemicals for research into radiation”.
He returned home that night to find officers had searched his home laboratory and sealed off his home in Bridge Street.
“They destroyed my experiment. It was most irritating,” he said.
Dr Busby said he felt he was being targeted because of his criticism of the government’s current assessment of radiation risks.
The force said the affected officers were unharmed and there was no risk to the wider public.https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-45516797
 |
ReplyForward
|
Edward Snowden surveillance powers ruled unlawful https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-45510662
WikiLeaks Whistleblower Awaits Fate, American Free Press , he fate of gutsy WikiLeaks founder and whistleblower Julian Assange rests in the hands of the government of Ecuador, first reported here in AFP’s Issue 33&34. Assange has lived at the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012 and will be instantly arrested by the UK if he leaves the building. Just-released news that his health is deteriorating rapidly makes even more urgent Ecuadorian action’s even more urgent.
By S.T. Patrick As the future of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange twists in the political winds, the United States, Great Britain, and Ecuador continue to negotiate over the life of the Australian computer programmer and hacker.
Assange has been housed at the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012. According to one of his lawyers, Assange’s health is suffering and, for the past four months, he has been held in a situation that can be more accurately described as “solitary confinement.” The end of WikiLeaks, as well as Assange’s own version of freedom, may soon be near.
Technically, Assange is not a prisoner of any government. That is the inevitability that he is trying to avoid. He may leave the embassy, but doing so would trigger the execution of an active warrant that still exists in the UK for jumping bail. If arrested, extradition to the United States seems likely.
Because there is a clause in the UK-Ecuadorian extradition treaty that bars one country turning citizens over to the other, Assange’s Ecuadorian citizenship may have to be rescinded for extradition to occur.
…..In April, Attorney General Jeff Sessions hinted to the media that he would consider bringing criminal charges against Assange.
“We are going to step up our efforts and already are stepping up our efforts on all leaks,” Sessions said. “We will seek to put some people in jail.”…….
Former U.S. litigator Glenn Greenwald, founder of “The Intercept” website, believes that extradition to the United States would not be as automatic as is being reported by many news outlets. He calls the British government “subservient” to the United States, yet he points out that the British judges lean more independent. He also points out that the specifics of the U.S.-UK treaty may not allow extradition.
“Political crimes, like publishing documents and engaging in journalism—that really isn’t what extradition is for,” Greenwald said. “And in fact . . . is excluded from most extradition treaties, including the one between the U.S. and the UK.”……
For Assange, his life is now in the balance, wavering like the First Amendment freedoms that Americans once thought were constitutionally guaranteed. http://americanfreepress.net/wikileaks-whistleblower-awaits-fate/
Big Brother is keeping ‘Five Eyes’ on you, Darius Shahtahmasebi is a New Zealand-based legal and political analyst, currently specialising in immigration, refugee and humanitarian law. Rt.com 7 Sep, 2018 Just last week, the world’s leading snooping powers quietly and without notice issued a disturbing warning to tech giants, telling them to surrender unprecedented backdoor access to their citizens’ data.
Not many people know this, but the United Kingdom has some of the most extreme spying powers in the developed world. At the end of 2016, passing what some people called the “Snooper’s Charter,” the UK put into law some of the most draconian anti-privacy laws that we have ever known, allowing its government to compel companies to break their own encryption.
The UK plays a pivotal part in the so-called Five Eyes alliance, which also includes the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Nobody knew it at the time, but the American military base which my family and I grew up next to has played a crucial role in delivering US drone strikes across the Middle East and beyond. America’s drone-strike regime, largely considered illegal for numerous reasons, is not something that countries should willingly participate in lightly and without public scrutiny.
Why am I mentioning this? Because it goes to the very heart of my point: the extent to which we know or do not know what our governments are doing behind closed doors is quite literally a matter of life and death.
Now, it has been revealed that the Five Eyes alliance, dedicated to a global “collect-it-all”surveillance task, has issued a memo calling on their governments to demand that tech companies build backdoor access for states to access users’ encrypted data or face measures that will force companies to comply.
The memo was released quietly with little media coverage last week by the Australian Department of Home Affairs, and essentially demanded that providers “create customized solutions, tailored to their individual system architectures that are capable of meeting lawful access requirements.” The memo was reportedly released after ministers for the intelligence agencies of the Five Eyes nations met on Australia’s Gold Coast last week……
Will those tech companies cave in to these government’s demands? You can bet your bottom dollar that eventually, yes, they very well might. ……
It is worth noting that there has been next to no criticism of these Five Eyes powers for delivering such a blatant attack on our right to privacy. Remember that, of course, Russian President Vladimir Putin is attempting to “wrest control of the internet,” as the Guardian wrote approximately three years ago. But these same Western media companies are awkwardly silent about what their own governments are proposing to do, something which other nations could only dream about achieving on such a global scale. …….https://www.rt.com/op-ed/437895-privacy-five-eyes-encryption/
The Fukushima Prefectural Government and the Reconstruction Agency are looking to take legal action over the video over concerns it will stoke “unreasonable” fears of radiation in the Fukushima Prefecture, the Japan Times reports.
A senior official from the prefecture said they were “examining the video content”.
In the episode, Farrier is filmed taking a tour of areas affected by the 2011 meltdown of a nuclear plant in Fukushima where he suspects a meal served from a restaurant in Namie, a town in Fukushima Prefecture, has been contaminated by radiation.
It also shows the journalist enter a no-go zone around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant without permission from authorities, reporting from an abandoned game arcade, and tourists on a bus becoming distressed over rising radiation levels without information about the vehicle’s location.
The show has the journalist travel to different locations around the world associated with grim historical events, including the footsteps of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in Milwaukee, and voodoo rituals in Benin, West Africa.
Senator requests documents on Michael Cohen’s ‘pay to play’ work for nuclear developer
Pay no attention to that radiological disaster behind the curtains https://globalhibakusha.com/page-2/?permalink=hiding-fukushima-behind-the-curtains-in-official-japan by Bo,
The government of Japan is clearly intending that the 2020 Olympics will function as a public relations win in which the image of Japan, and especially of Northern Japan and Fukushima are cleansed of images of radiological contamination. Even as the Fukushima Daiichi site itself, and the traces where the plumes of its explosions deposited fallout throughout the area remain un-remediated, the public perceptions will be remediated. This is typical of the behavior of governments in the developed world that suffer radiological disasters. The disasters themselves are so difficult to clean up, and take decades to even begin the clean up, that money is allocated for extensive public relations efforts. These become tasks that CAN be completed and CAN be considered successful. They function both to advance the public image agenda of the governments, and also deliver a sense of agency when the overall tone of nuclear disaster remediation is one of lacking effective agency.
Towards that end, the Japanese government is planning to integrate Fukushima sites and perceptions into the upcoming Olympics media fest. The journey of the Olympic torch through every prefecture of Japan will begin in Fukushima, a symbolic rebirth intended to facilitate the repopulating of the local communities that were evacuated, many of which have had few returnees since the government has declared them “safe” and cut public funds to those forcibly evacuated.
The government is also planning to hold multiple Olympic events in Fukushima prefecture including baseball and softball events. “Tokyo 2020 is a showcase for the recovery and reconstruction of Japan from the disaster of March 2011, so in many ways we would like to give encouragement to the people, especially in the affected area,”said Tokyo 2020 president Yoshiro Mori last March.
This active rebranding of Fukushima as safe involves removing physical reminders of ongoing risk. The central government has recently announced that it will be removing 80% of public radiation monitors from the region. An argument can be made that the presence of these monitors is theatrical in that they only measure external gamma radiation levels, which are not the primary risk to residents (this comes from internalizing radioactive particles that blanketed the region in the fallout of the plumes of the explosions of March 2011), and that positioning these gamma detectors in midair produces low readings since the particles are primarily on the ground. However, they are a tangible, embodied reminder that risk remains.
While there is a clearly an active campaign to rehabilitate the image of the region leading up to the 2020 Olympics, an effort that will no doubt intensify as the event draws near, there is also pushback and resistance in the local and national communities. A recent sculpture unveiled at the JR train station in prefectural capital Fukushima City (about 80km from the Daiichi nuclear site) has been stirring up controversy. A Guardian article explained:
“The statue, by Kenji Yanobe, depicts a child dressed in a yellow Hazmat-style suit, with a helmet in one hand and an artistic 
representation of the sun in the other.
Yanobe said his Sun Child, which was installed by the municipal government after appearing at art exhibitions in Japan and overseas, was intended to express his desire for a nuclear-free world.
The artist said he did not mean to give the impression that local children needed to protect themselves from radiation more than seven years after the Fukushima Daiichi plant became the scene of the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
He pointed out that the child was not wearing the helmet and that a monitor on its chest showed radiation levels at ‘000’.”
While some, including the mayor of Fukushima City, have praised the statue for emphasizing a hopeful future for local children, others have criticized the statue for suggesting that there is any danger to local children.
Regardless of how one interprets the sculpture, it does confront people with the fact that things are far from normal in the region. This, in spite of the central government’s strong efforts to implore people not to pay any attention to what is happening behind the curtains it has been raising.
The Nuclear Resister, August 13, 2018 UPDATE: August 17 – the jailed activist was released from custody today.
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
nuclear-news 