France to reduce its use of nuclear power as soon as possible, and discredit the myth of “cheap” nuclear energy
France to reduce share of nuclear in power mix ‘asap’: minister, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity/france-to-reduce-share-of-nuclear-in-power-mix-asap-minister-idUSKBN1DZ17YGeert De Clercq, PARIS (Reuters) – France will reduce the share of nuclear energy in its electricity mix “as soon as possible”, French junior environment minister Brune Poirson said on Tuesday, although she did not give a target date.
The PPE…will lay out how we increase the share of renewable energy in our electricity mix and little by little reduce the share of nuclear,” she said.
Matthieu Orphelin, a member of parliament for President Emmanuel Macron’s ruling LREM party and an energy specialist and former spokesman for environment minister Nicolas Hulot, said everybody knew the 2025 target was not achievable.
He added he expected the share of nuclear will be cut to 50 percent between 2025 and 2030.
“What counts is that we end our total dependence on nuclear as soon as possible after 2025. Whether that is 2027 or 2028 is not important,” he said at the UFE conference.
He said France must irreversibly get on a path to use energy more efficiently, to use more renewable energy and thus mechanically reduce its reliance on nuclear energy.
“We are finally dropping the myth that nuclear energy will forever be the cheapest energy in the world,” he said.
According to North korean Defectors, Radiation Is Leaking From Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site
North Korean Defectors Say Radiation Is Leaking From Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site, Gizmodo, Tom McKayNorth Korea’s infamous nuclear test site, a facility in Punggye-ri in Kilju County, has long been reported to maintain the standards one might expect for a pariah government low on everything but zeal and weaponry. Outsiders can only get a limited picture of the country, let alone the test site, thanks to its isolation from the rest of the world. But concerns have included tunnel collapses at the facility and the possibility Mount Mantap, where it is located, could implode under stress from repeated nuclear tests and release large amounts of radiation.
Former Defense Secretary William Perry Sounds the Alarm Over the Present Nuclear Danger
What will the consequences be if the bipartisan consensus on Russia continues to be almost completely untethered from reality?, The Nation, By James Carden, 30 Nov 17, “……Kerry observed that, while many in Congress and in the administration are agitating to implement ever-greater sanctions on Iran (in order, of course, to destroy the deal), few are aware that the we have fewer sanctions in place against North Korea, which has roughly 20 nuclear weapons, than we have in place against Iran, which has none.
And so: What to do with the world on the nuclear brink, with the very real potential for an outbreak of perhaps simultaneous crises between the United States, Russia, Iran and North Korea?
As Perry pointed out, climate change is another looming catastrophe, but it is one of which the public is, for the most part, aware. Perry argued that, as is the case with climate change, “we need a program of public education” regarding the growing nuclear danger.
And for his part, Perry pledged to dedicate the remainder of his public career to the task.
In his recent book, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink, Perry writes: “Our chief peril is that the poised nuclear doom, much of it hidden beneath the seas and in remote badlands, is too far out of the global public consciousness. Passivity shows broadly.”
Finding, he said, his motivation in a wish that his grandchildren not have to live with the ever-present specter of nuclear catastrophe hanging like a Sword of Damocles above their heads, Perry has proved to be anything but a passive player in this continuing, and very troubling, drama. https://www.thenation.com/article/former-defense-secretary-william-perry-sounds-the-alarm-over-the-present-nuclear-danger/
Workers report strange odors at Hanford nuclear reservation
http://komonews.com/news/local/workers-report-strange-odors-at-hanford-nuclear-reservation 30 Nov 17 HANFORD, Wash. (AP) – Employees at a Washington nuclear reservation reported smelling strange odors.
The Tri-City Herald reports eight workers reported the odors Tuesday at AW Tank Farms in Hanford, with three of the workers receiving medical evaluations before being cleared to return to work. The other five reported smelling odors but declined medical evaluations.
The workers were preparing an empty storage box to receive containerized tank waste samples when they reported smelling a glue-like odor.
Washington River Protection Solutions says the workers were told to leave the building. Access to the area was then restricted.
Technicians used instruments to examine the area, but did not detect anything above background levels.
The contractor says other air samples tested in a lab came back as “below action levels.” Access to the building was then restored.
Russia: a new nuclear accident on the anniversary of the secret Mayak accident 60 years ago?
Counterpunch 24th Nov 2017, Linda Pentz Gunter: September 29 marked the 60th anniversary of the
world’s third most deadly— and least known — nuclear accident. It
took place at the Mayak plutonium production facility, in a closed Soviet
city in the Urals. The huge explosion was kept secret for decades.
Itspread hot particles over an area of more than 20,000 square miles,
exposing a population of at least 270,000 and indefinitely contaminating
land and rivers. Entire villages had to be bulldozed. Residents there have
lived for decades with high rates of radiologically induced illnesses and
birth defects.
Now, evidence is emerging of a potentially new nuclear
accident and indications point once again to Mayak as one of the likely
culprits. Ironically, if there was indeed an accident there, it happened on
or around the precise anniversary of the 1957 disaster. The Research
Institute of Atomic Reactors in Dimitrovgrad in the region is another
possible suspect. https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/11/24/a-radioactive-plume-thats-clouded-in-secrecy/
Hypocritical promotion of nuclear waste dumping for Cumbria
Radiation Free Lakeland 19th Nov 2017, West Cumbria was ruled out as a site to bury nuclear waste 20 years ago because the geology was unsafe. The plan this time round is ten times as big and to include high level nuclear wastes, so not surprisingly Cumbria County Council said NO in January 2013.
However, in order to build new nuclear plants the industry and government need to be seen to have a
“final solution” to the problem, no matter if that “final solution” is dangerous to life in Cumbria and on planet earth. The ducks are being lined up.
To soften the public up in West Cumbria deep mining is once again being promoted as a “good thing” no matter that it is for coal, the mining expertise and infrastructure is being aggressively put into place
creating a “demand”. Companies like Eden Nuclear and Environment are sprouting up like toxic mushrooms and promoting their services: “Our team has undertaken work for a range of disposal facilities including the Geological Disposal Facility” (the one that is planned for Cumbria?)
https://mariannewildart.wordpress.com/2017/11/19/geological-dumping-of-nuclear-waste-where-why/
Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board warns about Hanford nuclear site
Nuclear safety board warns of trouble ahead at Hanford, but could lose role under Trump, Seattle Times Nuclear safety board report finds serious problems persist with a massive facility to help treat Hanford’s chemical and radioactive wastes. The report comes as the Trump administration considers a proposal to downsize or do away with the independent oversight board. By Hal Bernton An unfinished $16.8 billion complex to treat chemical and radioactive waste at the Hanford site in Central Washington continues to suffer design problems that risk explosions and radioactive releases from unintended nuclear reactions, according to a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board report.
Hanford board says billions more needed for nuke cleanup
, by Associated Press http://keprtv.com/news/local/hanford-board-says-billions-more-needed-for-nuke-cleanup 14 Nov 17RICHLAND, Wash. (AP) – The Hanford Advisory Board says more money is needed to clean up the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.
The board says Congress needs to give Hanford some $4 billion per year to reach cleanup deadlines.
The Tri-City Herald reports Hanford currently receives $2.2 billion to $2.5 billion per year.
The board is composed of people from the Tri-Cities and the Northwest who have an interest in cleaning up the site.
The board at a meeting last week said the current funding level is “dangerous and destructive.”
Hanford is located near the Tri-Cities and for decades made plutonium for nuclear weapons. The site is now engaged in cleaning up the resulting radioactive wastes.
Drop in EDF share price as Hinkley nuclear saga drags on
FT 13th Nov 2017, Shares in French energy company EDF dropped more than 10 per cent on Monday
after it cut its profit and cash flow targets because of falling demand and
delays in restarting some of its nuclear reactors. The state-backed company
said earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation for 2018
were now expected to be between €14.6bn and €15.3bn, compared with its
earlier assumption of at least €15.2bn. It also said it was less confident
about achieving positive cash flow, saying it will be “slightly
positive or close to balance”. It had previously said it would return to
positive cash flow, after dividend payments, in 2018.
EDF, which is in charge of the controversial new nuclear power development at Hinkley Point
in the UK, blamed lower electricity consumption in France, lower
availability of some of its nuclear reactors in France and the risk that it
might sell less energy in the UK and at a lower price. “Basically, this
is the market taking into account the series of bad news that has been
coming,” said one sector specialist.
“It’s Hinkley Point, it’s the
number of plants that have had to be stopped due to the regulator and
fundamentally a Nicolas Hulot climate that is not very positive.” Mr
Hulot is a climate campaigner and strident critic of nuclear power who is
now France’s energy minister. Morgan Stanley suggested that additional
risks included “possible delays in the delivery of nuclear plants”,
while Mr Jeffery said there is “a strong risk the issue caused by the
nuclear regulator’s ongoing investigation into EDF’s existing nuclear
plants could roll on beyond early 2018 as anticipated by EDF”.
Unwise to subsidise failing energy technologies, as wind ans solar now beat coal and nuclear
Don’t subsidize under-performing technologies http://www.news-leader.com/story/opinion/readers/2017/11/11/dont-subsidize-underperforming-technologies/853397001/
Leukaemia High Court Case Transcripts from 1992.
CORE 11th Nov 2017
Rick Perry’s strange point of view, North West Arkansas
Democrat Gazette, By GAIL COLLINS New York Times News Service, November 12, 2017 Oh, that Rick Perry.
Our secretary of energy was in South Africa recently for Africa Oil Week. Whenever the word “oil” is mentioned, Perry responds like a dog on the scent of a hamburger. So no surprise there. We wouldn’t even have noticed he was gone, except for the part where he suggested that fossil fuels would protect women from sexual assault………
Rick Perry is an absolutely terrible secretary of energy. We all remember that he took the job without realizing that his central responsibility would be overseeing the safe handling of nuclear materials, a topic he knew nothing whatsoever about. Interested bystanders recalled sadly that Barack Obama’s first secretary was a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and the second a nuclear physicist.
On the other hand, Rick Perry once shot a coyote while jogging.
He claims.
Anyhow, Perry and Donald Trump are of one mind about the Department of Energy’s new mission, which is making our nation “energy dominant.” Once it was all about energy independence, and that’s going pretty well, thanks to solar and wind power and natural gas. Now, the administration’s obsession is to find new ways to market our fossil fuels, including an increasingly large amount of excess oil……….
…….a little village girl could put a solar cell on the roof and power a battery for her reading light. And no pollution. That’s exactly the kind of thinking that drives Perry nuts. So there he was in Cape Town, spreading the faith and urging his audience to break the “culture of shame” around oil and coal.
Africa was actually the worst place possible for a U.S. official to be waving the fossil fuel flag. Climate scientists expect it to be particularly hard hit by global warming, with expanding droughts on one hand and flooding on the other……….http://www.nwaonline.com/news/2017/nov/12/rick-perry-s-strange-point-of-view-2017/?opinion
11 November – film examining nuclear industry – “Power Struggle”
Nuclear Power Documentary Film and Panel Discussion Coming to Chatham https://www.capecod.com/newscenter/documentary-film-and-panel-discussion-coming-to-chatham/ November 3, 2017 CHATHAM –The documentary “Power Struggle” will be screened at the Chatham Orpheum Theater on Saturday November 11th,followed by a panel discussion.
The film chronicles the heated political battle to close the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant.
It shows how a nuclear engineer turned whistle blower, a 93-year-old grandmother, and a scrappy new governor, join forces with a wide array of activists to score a major environmental victory by shutting down the aging atomic plant.
The film’s Director will be part of the post film discussion. The documentary, which is at times humorous and frightening, captures the views of people on both sides of the issue.
Producers said one fact in the film that can’t be ignored is that high-level radioactive waste will remain at every nuclear power plant around the world indefinitely.
The film’s world premiere was at The Provincetown International Film Festival. Tickets for this special premier are just $12.
British navy has to take parts from some vessels to maintain others, especially submarines
Scotsman 1st Nov 2017, The Royal Navy is increasingly forced to strip parts from its vessels in
order to maintain other ships and submarines in the fleet, an investigation
has found. Equipment “cannibalisation” increased 49% from 2012 to 2017
and spending watchdog the National Audit Office (NAO) said budget cuts in
the last two years could have increased the need to move parts between
vessels and naval helicopters.
Nuclear-powered Astute-class hunter-killer
submarines, some of the most modern and advanced vessels in the Royal Navy,
experienced the highest level of cannibalisation in the fleet with 59
instances per boat on average.
http://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/britain-s-nuclear-submarines-reliant-on-spare-parts-1-4601926
North Korea: How to start a nuclear war without even trying
Interpreter, https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/north-korea-how-start-nuclear-war-without-even-trying Van Jackson, 1 Nov 17, If effective strategy requires realistic aims, then America is in trouble. US officials have shown themselves to be pathologically overconfident in their ability to achieve political outcomes with military signals, and the outcome they’re trying to achieve is utterly unrealistic.
Imagine if the US flew what North Korea thought were nuclear-capable bombers up near its border, sporadically at first, then once per month. Then twice per month. In parallel, the US starts sending nuclear-capable submarines to port in South Korea. Then it issues warning orders to US Navy surface ships armed with Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles (the kind used against Syria in April) to program North Korean targets while patrolling in waters off North Korea’s eastern coast. Then it deploys fifth-generation stealth fighters to Japan in conjunction with the arrival of three aircraft carriers to the Pacific.
What do these military preparations look like?
Now imagine that the political rhetoric coinciding with all these military moves aims for nothing short of convincing a nuclear North Korea to unilaterally disarm itself. Imagine President Trump says Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is ‘wasting his time’ with diplomacy. Then the National Security Adviser says the US cannot ‘accept and deter’ a nuclear North Korea because North Korea is ‘undeterrable’. President Trump, he says, will not accept North Korea having the capability to threaten the US with nuclear weapons. Consequently, he claims the US is ‘in a race to resolve this short of military action.’
How might you characterise this US policy? If effective strategy requires realistic aims, then America is in trouble. US officials have shown themselves to be pathologically overconfident in their ability to achieve political outcomes with military signals, and the outcome they’re trying to achieve is utterly unrealistic.
Imagine if the US flew what North Korea thought were nuclear-capable bombers up near its border, sporadically at first, then once per month. Then twice per month. In parallel, the US starts sending nuclear-capable submarines to port in South Korea. Then it issues warning orders to US Navy surface ships armed with Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles (the kind used against Syria in April) to program North Korean targets while patrolling in waters off North Korea’s eastern coast. Then it deploys fifth-generation stealth fighters to Japan in conjunction with the arrival of three aircraft carriers to the Pacific.
How might you characterise this US policy?
Then imagine that Trump takes occasion to not only threaten North Korea, but to insult Kim Jong Un. Oh yes, and that South Korea leaks that it is preparing for ‘decapitation’ operations to eliminate Kim Jong Un. To top it all off, North Korea obtains US plans for fighting a war with the North, making it fully aware of how the US might preposition and deploy various forces in the region prior to conflict.
Taken together, how might all this appear to Kim Jong Un and his regime?
I’ve just described a situation of immense pressure and narrow (if any) maneuverability if either side misperceives the actions or statements of the other. What worries me, and most experts watching the situation, is that every single word and deed described above is real.
After a North Korea policy review earlier this year, the Trump Administration settled on an approach of ‘maximum pressure’ in pursuit of North Korean denuclearisation. Notwithstanding occasional mixed messaging, what I have just described above is what maximum pressure looks like. As it turns out, it’s basically the Obama Administration’s quixotic North Korea policy with an overlay of escalating threat-making.
That’s a problem. By 2016, virtually nobody in the community of experts thought North Korean denuclearisation was possible short of regime change in the North. The Trump Administration has loudly declared it won’t accept a nuclear North Korea, but has been quiet on how it plans to convince North Korea to give up a nuclear arsenal it has suffered decades of sanctions and pressure to obtain. And in recent remarks at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies Summit, HR McMaster made clear that US policy still holds to the maximalist goal of North Korean unilateral disarmament, and nothing less.
The risks in this approach are apparent even to its advocates. But what of the benefits? What is the Trump Administration’s theory of the case here? There isn’t one, at least not one with merit. It doesn’t matter whether one bases policy on insights from coercion theory or Korean history; there’s no reason to believe that going on the offensive with North Korea will lead to any favorable outcomes for the US.
One of the most common lessons from studies of Cold War competition is that coercion is difficult, and nuclear coercion even more so. As Robert Jervis, a godfather of security studies, observedlong ago, military signals are likely to be dismissed as cheap talk if there isn’t something that imbues them with credibility. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Twitter can signal hostility, but not resolve. In general, the idea that military signals will convince a nuclear state to disarm — or even show up at the negotiating table to disarm — commits the grievous sin of assuming you can buy deterrence on the cheap.
But even if the Trump Administration ignores theory to justify its pressure campaign in terms of Korea’s historical circumstances, there’s a major problem: the most relevant insight from Korean history is that North Korea already fears the US. Fear is why it went to such great lengths to get nuclear weapons in the first place. The Trump Administration doesn’t need to do anything out of the ordinary to make Kim Jong Un believe the US is willing to wage a war. This is a context in which US military signaling is like pouring extra water on a wet sponge; the threat environment is already so saturated that no good can come of more gratuitous US threats, even if the threats were in service of an achievable goal (and denuclearisation is not that).
Some of my colleagues close to the Administration have told me that escalating military pressure is really aimed at getting China to do more, rather than North Korea. But to what end? This is no more thoughtful than applying pressure directly on North Korea. Even if China becomes convinced that the US could attack North Korea and cause a regional catastrophe, it is irrational to expect that China would induce the catastrophe itself by bringing overwhelming pressure to bear on North Korea. And even if China did decide to coerce North Korea into denuclearisation, there’s no reason to believe it would be successful; except for one notable instance in the 1970s, North Korea’s entire history has been one of responding to pressure with pressure. So again, the Administration and its surrogates in the think-tank world have a broken theory of coercion.
It’s true that the likelihood of war is relatively low because, well, war is inherently far less common than non-war. As quantitative political scientists are fond of saying, ‘war is in the error term’. But taking solace in statistics misses the point.
War has antecedent conditions, and its indicators are alight in Korea. The Trump Administration’s maximum-pressure policy generates risks of miscalculation and an obvious impression that the US is positioning itself for war without any prospect of upside for the effort. Flirting with the possibility of inadvertent war needs to have payoffs for the nation. We should all be concerned about the lack of a positive rationale supporting America’s risk-taking approach to a quixotic goal.
1 This Month
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