New research into plutonium workers’ internal radiation exposure.
  Job-exposure matrix sheds light on plutonium workers’ radiation exposure https://physicsworld.com/a/job-exposure-matrix-sheds-light-on-plutonium-workers-radiation-exposure/
Internal exposure to plutonium, which decays via alpha particle emission, is a recognised health hazard. But with little specific information available, potential risks from plutonium exposure have largely been assessed through knowledge of radiation exposure risks in general, much of which comes from external exposure to photon radiation such as gamma and X-rays. However, due to its high linear energy transfer rate, alpha particle radiation exhibits significantly enhanced biological effects at the cellular level, creating a specific need to investigate the associated exposure risks. To obtain more direct estimates of potential internal exposure risks, epidemiological studies of plutonium workers need to be conducted,” explains lead author Tony Riddell, from Public Health England’s Centre for Radiation, Chemical and Environmental Hazards. “These studies require individual plutonium exposure estimates that are as accurate and unbiased as possible.” The Sellafield workforce includes one of the world’s largest cohorts of plutonium workers. Through the support of the workforce, this group has been comprehensively monitored for internal exposure to plutonium, primarily through inhalation. However, for 630 workers employed there at the start of plutonium operations, from 1952 to 1963, the historical urinalysis results available do not provide sufficiently accurate and unbiased exposure assessments. These results were based on a threshold level of urinary plutonium excretion, which was suitable for operational protection purposes at the time, but tended to overestimate exposure, leading to underestimation of any risks if used in epidemiological analyses. “This means these early workers are excluded from epidemiological studies of exposure risks, which significantly reduces the power of these studies,” says Riddell. “Early workers are important for assessing potential exposure risks because they usually received some of the highest plutonium exposures and, due to the passage of time, health outcomes for these workers will now be largely known.” To solve this problem, Riddell and colleagues employed an approach called a job-exposure matrix (JEM). The JEM approach uses exposure data from other sources to estimate the average exposure that a typical worker (in the same work group) would have received in a given period. Substituting the missing data with these JEM estimates allowed the researchers to build a more reliable picture of the early workers’ radiation exposure. “To overcome the problem of missing or deficient exposure data, we used more reliable data from other relevant workers (‘exposure analogues’) along with statistical, mathematical and empirical analyses to estimate the average exposures for a typical worker at Windscale/Sellafield for all combinations of specific occupation and year required to build the JEM,” explains principal investigator Frank De Vocht from the University of Bristol. The authors note that the exposure analogues approach developed in this study provides a generic methodological advance that is potentially transferable to other internally exposed workers, and which may permit other epidemiological cohorts to include significant groups of workers who otherwise might have been excluded due to the lack of reliable exposure information. “It’s likely that replacing the missing or unreliable exposure data with JEM-derived values in future epidemiological studies could have considerable impact on the risk estimates which can be produced,” adds De Vocht. |
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Sweden Requests Detention of Assange as WikiLeaks Accuses U.S. of Illegally Seizing His Property
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Sweden Requests Detention of Assange as WikiLeaks Accuses U.S. of Illegally Seizing His Property https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/20/headlines/sweden_requests_detention_of_assange_as_wikileaks_accuses_us_of_illegally_seizing_his_property MAY 20, 2019 Swedish authorities issued a request Monday for the detention in absentia of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is facing rape charges in Sweden and is currently serving jail time in Britain for skipping bail in 2012. Last week, Swedish prosecutors reopened a sexual assault investigation into Assange which was dropped in 2017 because they said the case could not proceed while Assange was holed up at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he lived for seven years before being forcefully removed by British police last month. Assange has denied the accusation, and his lawyer representing him in Sweden said he has not been able to get hold of his client to discuss the detention order. WikiLeaks’ Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson has previously said of Sweden’s case, “Since Julian Assange was arrested on 11 April 2019 there has been considerable political pressure on Sweden to reopen their investigation, but there has always been political pressure surrounding this case. Its reopening will give Julian a chance to clear his name. This case has been mishandled throughout.” Assange must reportedly serve 25 weeks of his British prison sentence before he can be released. Assange now faces possible extradition to both Sweden and the United States, where he is wanted for the publication of leaked documents by Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning which showed evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq. In related news, WikiLeaks is reporting that Ecuador will allow U.S. prosecutors to go through and take possession of Assange’s belongings left in their London embassy. Assange reportedly has two manuscripts at his former living quarters; his lawyers have called it an illegal seizure of property.
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Climate change action is a top priority for UK’s moderate Conservatives
Guardian 19th May 2019 , Moderate Conservatives including Nicky Morgan and Amber Rudd are urging contenders for their party’s leadership to put the battle against the climate emergency at the forefront of the contest.
The 60-strong One Nation group of senior Tories, created as a bulwark against what they perceive as their party’s lurch to the right, is calling for the environment to form a central part of the leadership debate. The heat is on over the climate crisis. Only radical measures will work.
Outages extended at EDF’s Hunterston nuclear plant
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EDF Energy extends outages at Hunterston nuclear plant https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/20/edf-energy-extends-outages-at-hunterston-nuclear-plant
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Advertising industry is urged to use its power for good
Extinction Rebellion urges ad industry to use its power for good, Guardian, Seth Jacobson, 19 May 2019 Letter to senior figures urges them to use their power to influence public opinion on climate change Environmental activists Extinction Rebellion have turned their fire on the advertising industry in a public letter, encouraging it to use its expertise in manipulating public opinion for good or risk mass public protests against it.
Speaking to the Guardian, one of the authors of the letter, which was written by Extinction Rebellion members with decades of experience of the advertising industry, said the group was not “singling out advertising, as we previously disrupted fashion week and are systematically challenging all industries who have the platform, influence and skills to tackle this epoch-defining crisis but are failing to do so in any meaningful way”.
“Though our letter is addressed to the boardroom, we ask everyone within the industry to ‘Tell the Truth’ about the climate and ecological emergency,” he continued. “This is the first of Extinction Rebellion’s demands, to business and governments; the vital step required to wake everyone up and drive action to deal with this crisis……. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/19/extinction-rebellion-urges-ad-industry-to-use-its-power-for-good
UK’s Committee on Climate Change makes an urgent call for action
Sussex Energy Group 17th May 2019 , Another climate report and another urgent call for action, along with a dizzying array of graphs and figures. The Committee on Climate Change (CCC), who advise the UK government on policies and planning for a low carbon economy, have produced their analysis and recommendations on how to stop UK’s contribution to global warming by 2050.
This follows the “Paris Agreement” signed in December 2015 where the UK, along with 196 other countries, agreed to reduce their nation’s greenhouse gas emissions in efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
The CCC’s excellent and thorough report makes for some tough reading; not for its 277 pages and plethora of statistics and figures, but for the scale of collective effort required. The benign-sounding estimate of costs – 1-2% of GDP – disguises the extent of system change and efforts required, not only of government and businesses, but households as well. http://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/sussexenergygroup/2019/05/17/net-zero/
UK Labour’s bold energy policy on nationalising the grid
Ecologist 16th May 2019 The national grid would be nationalised under a Labour government so that
£13 billion would no longer be paid to shareholders each year and more
investment would be targeted at decarbonisation, the Shadow Business
Secretary, Rebecca Long Bailey, announced today. Heat and electricity would
be made a “human right for all” under the radical new policy which has the
personal support of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour party leader. A Labour party
spokesperson said: “Privatisation of the UK’s energy grid is ripping off
customers. 25 percent of energy bills is paid out to network companies.
This is used to line the pockets of shareholders, with over £13 billion
paid out in dividends over the last five years.”
https://theecologist.org/2019/may/16/labours-green-industrial-revolution
Scotland increasing its commitment to act on Climate Emergency
Business Green 17th May 2019 Scotland stepped up its response to the ‘climate emergency’ earlier this
week as Glasgow and Edinburgh adopted zero-carbon targets in swift
succession and the Scottish Parliament provided further details on how it
plans to meet its new target of building a net zero emission economy by
2045.
ScottishPower pledged on Monday to help make Glasgow the first UK
city to reach net-zero carbon emissions, setting a target for meeting the
goal of 2045. In related news, SSE announced this week that the last of 84
offshore wind turbines was commissioned this week at Beatrice, Scotland’s
largest offshore wind farm. The company said the project – which is a joint venture development led by SSE Renewables, Copenhagen InfrastructurePartners and Red Rock Power Limited – has been completed on time and under
budget after three years of construction. The final 7MW Siemens Gamesa
turbine was installed in the Outer Moray Firth, around 13km off the coast
of Caithness, bringing the site’s total installed capacity to 588MW –
enough to provide clean, low carbon energy to over 450,000 homes.
UK covering up the records on nuclear bomb testing in Australia and the Pacific. Why?
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Unusual secrecy around 1950s nuclear testing , The Saturday Paper, Martin McKenzie-Murray 18 May 19 Between 1952 and 1957, Britain tested 12 nuclear weapons in Australia – on the Montebello Islands off the Pilbara coast, and at Maralinga and Emu Fields in the South Australian outback. The tests were hurried, incautious and showed extraordinary disregard for Australian assistance and the local Indigenous people who had been forcibly but imperfectly evacuated from their land. It was a clusterfuck,” says Elizabeth Tynan, an Australian historian, and the award-winning author of Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga Story. “The disregard was partly driven by the fact they were in a rush. They cut corners. They did it on the cheap – and it showed. They had very little regard for safety. Cavalier. They knew about the risks. There were international protocols. Many were disregarded. I met one man, he was a technician with the British effort in Australia, and he said of Indigenous Australians that they were ‘nothing to do with us – it was the Australian government’s responsibility’.”
For Susanne Roff growing up in Melbourne in the 1950s was uneventful. But later, living in Scotland with her husband, William Roff, an eminent historian, she developed a dogged, almost obsessive interest in this chapter of British history that remains cloaked in secrecy.
Once a month, Roff takes the train south from her home in a Scottish fishing village – to archives in London, Birmingham and Cambridge. She’s still looking for answers. “Why was the purportedly Australia-controlled Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee so ineffective?” she asks. “Why was the UK able to continue testing at Maralinga until barely six weeks before opening of the 1956 Olympics despite the known hazards to east coast populations? Why didn’t [Sir Mark] Oliphant ever speak out against the tests and contamination, including when he was governor of South Australia?” Late last year, Roff had another question: Why, more than 60 years after the last nuclear test in Australia, had the British government suddenly vanished previously declassified documents about the tests from its national archives? Roff wasn’t alone in her surprise. The Campaign for Freedom of Information, a British not-for-profit organisation, described it as worrying. All that was certain was that the files had been removed on the order of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. “WE CAN BUT WONDER WHY THE WORLD’S THIRD ATOMIC AND THERMONUCLEAR POWER HAS SUDDENLY BECOME SO NERVOUS ABOUT EVENTS THAT HAPPENED DECADES AGO.”“The secrecy is arguably even worse today,” Tynan tells me. She is working on a second book about the British tests. “British service personnel have run into brick walls at every turn [in seeking compensation and acknowledgement]. One of the clues to the attitude of the British government is that it has not really ever properly acknowledged what they did. They were nuclear colonialists and they buggered up a part of our country. One former British personnel I met burst into tears when he thought about how Britain had never said sorry. The secrecy … seems incomprehensible. They continue to be secretive.” But not all documents are closeted. Susanne Roff has some, which she shared with me – British intelligence files on Dr Eric Burhop, an Australian physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, which ran from 1939 to 1946. ……. Robert Menzies agreed to the testing immediately, without bothering to consult cabinet. For a time, only three people in the country knew of the agreement: the prime minister, treasurer and defence minister. He asked few questions of the British. “But it wasn’t pure patriotic sycophancy,” Tynan says of Menzies’ decision. “The pragmatic response was: vast reserves of uranium in Australia. It’s central to weaponry and power. It was completely valueless until the Manhattan Project. Then it became a valuable commodity. Australia had a lot of it. That was a very significant part of his reasoning. The other thing that would’ve informed Menzies’ thinking was that he was anxious to ensure Britain and America would protect Australia.” They were also without the counsel of the Australians who had worked on the American tests – notably, Mark Oliphant and Eric Burhop. Both Susanne Roff and Elizabeth Tynan agree Oliphant would have been a strong head of the safety authority, which was otherwise feckless. Both men were long suspected of being Communist spies, and may have been excluded to mollify US doubts about British security. The files on Burhop that I’ve seen are voluminous. The FBI, MI5 and ASIO all had records on him. In England and America, he was aggressively surveilled. His phone was tapped. Even Joseph Rotblat had his doubts about his former colleague. The British intelligence historian Andrew Brown has written: “Rotblat remained convinced that Burhop and other left-wing scientists … opposed the [proposed nuclear] moratorium not for their stated reasons but because it would perpetuate the USA’s monopoly and place the USSR at a dangerous disadvantage.”…… In 1984, Australia held a royal commission into the British tests. It found a litany of negligence and cover-ups. “Britain had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to it,” Elizabeth Tynan says. Today, their attitude is much the same. In 2015, Fiji – frustrated by Britain’s refusal to compensate its people who suffered radiation poisoning during the Pacific tests – declared it would compensate citizens itself. “We are bringing justice to a brave and proud group of Fijians to whom a great injustice was done,” Fiji’s prime minister said. “Fiji is not prepared to wait for Britain to do the right thing.” Meanwhile, in Britain’s national archives, the nuclear files are still gone. “The UK government has always [downplayed] risks to the servicemen who took part in the tests, the Aboriginal community in the immediate vicinity of them, and the general population downwind … as well as possible genetic effects on subsequent generations,” Susanne Roff says. “We see similar responses in relation to Fukushima in Japan. All the operational and scientific documents relating to the Australian tests that have been on open access in the National Archives have suddenly gone walkabout. We can but wonder why the world’s third atomic and thermonuclear power has suddenly become so nervous about events that happened decades ago.” https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/law-crime/2019/05/18/unusual-secrecy-around-1950s-nuclear-testing/15581016008158 |
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UK Labour Party’s plan for a Green Industrial Revolution
Solar Power Portal 16th May 2019 The Labour Party has announced plans to install solar one 1.75 million homes as part of a huge energy sector shake-up. The plans would see solar
installed on 1 million social homes in a bid to tackle fuel poverty, while
a series of interest free loans, grants and regulatory changes will help
enable an additional 750,000 domestic installs. Full details of the plans
are to be announced by Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn later today. The
party said the policies stood to create nearly 17,000 jobs, while raising
as much as £66 million for local authorities through the export of surplus
generation. Corbyn said that the party’s self-styled Green Industrial
Revolution would benefit homeowners and revive parts of the country through
the creation of new industries.
The false hope of “Small Modular Nuclear Reactors” being pushed in Wales
of Everlasting Nuclear Destruction. It is also the Welsh word for fox.
talked about as a possible location for a new, small modular reactor (SMR).
Trawsfynydd reactors are decommissioning now, but very slowly. On
Wikipedia, the page proclaims that the decommissioning is expected to take
“almost 100 years.”
beyond Trawsfynydd. Being described as “small” and “modular” tends
to mask the reality that it is expensive, of little use for climate change,
and likely still far in the future.
false hope, of course, because the likelihood of SMRs coming to fruition is
slim and would provide only a handful of jobs.
https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2019/05/12/the-fox-we-need-to-guard-this-henhouse/
Majority of UK voters want to slash greenhouse gases to nearly zero by 2050
Independent 12th May 2019 A majority of voters would support radical action to slash greenhouse gases
to nearly zero by 2050 at a cost of tens of billions of pounds, a new poll
has found. The public has thrown its weight overwhelmingly behind calls by
the government’s independent climate change advisers to make a legally
binding commitment to achieving net zero carbon emissions by the middle of
the century. The exclusive survey by BMG Research found 59 per cent of
voters would support such action, with only 8 per cent opposing it and 34
per cent who had no view.
UK’s Committee on Climate Change urged to consider a carbon tax
FT 13th May 2019 Nick Butler: There is a very simple measure the UK’s Committee on Climate
Change could have flagged. We need a carbon tax to change consumer
behaviour. Introduced at a level designed to alter behaviour (perhaps £50
a tonne), a carbon tax would encourage consumers of all kinds – from
manufacturers to domestic customers – to switch to lower-carbon energy
supplies and encourage the development of technology to make that possible.
Charged at this level a tax would be far more effective than the current
EU-based measures and would allow energy users to identify low-cost
alternatives, or where necessary develop them. In the process, it would
demonstrate whether the most expensive options, such as carbon capture and
the reconstruction of the way we heat buildings, are really necessary.
https://www.ft.com/content/2c5f19d6-7245-11e9-bf5c-6eeb837566c5
UK to become the first major economy to embrace a legally-binding net zero emissions goal
Business Green 10th May 2019 The UK government is preparing to announce that it will broadly embrace therecommendations of the Committee on Climate Change and introduce a new target to cut emissions to net zero by 2050, according to reports from news agency Bloomberg. Citing officials familiar with the plan, the agency
reported the new target is likely to be announced within two months. Such a fast tracked timetable could potentially allow for amendments to theClimate Change Act to be passed before Parliament’s summer recess,
especially given the limited nature of the government’s legislative agenda in the wake of the delay to Brexit.
Since the CCC’s wide-ranging report was released last week, leading Ministers have repeatedly hinted they want to
see the government adopt the target as quickly as possible and ensure the UK becomes the first major economy to embrace a legally-binding net zero emissions goal.
https://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/3075426/reports-uk-prepares-to-fast-track-new-net-zero-target
UK’s Conservative govt increases tax on domestic solar, despite its goal to fight climate change
The UK can’t fight the climate emergency when the Tories are entirely opposed torenewables like solar. The party’s decision to increase tax on domestic
solar power shows that its head is still firmly in the sand.
power? The real reason for this tax hike is that domestic solar has proved
too popular. The cost of solar panels have plummeted and people
increasingly see them as desirable improvements to their homes.
largely centralised energy grid. It also butts up against seemingly
ideological opposition to renewable energy in the current Conservative
Party. The decision to increase tax on domestic solar power needs to be
considered alongside its support of fracking for gas, billions of pounds of
subsidies to continue to pump fossil fuels out of the North Sea, and
resistance to onshore wind turbines.
1.This Month
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Hibakusha Appeal to End Nukes Now!
Decommissioning: A New Era for Nuclear Power; a Need for Congressional Oversight
Tom Lehrer – We Will All Go Together When We Go
Tom Lehrer – So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III) – with intro – widescreen
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