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Thorium nuclear reactors – expensive, dangerous and leave dangerous radioactive isotopes with long half-lives

New nuclear power proposal needs public  debate   https://independentaustralia.net/environment/environment-display/new-nuclear-power-proposal-needs-public-discussion,13071   By Helen Caldicott | 4 September 2019  The prospect of thorium being introduced into Australia’s energy arrangements should be subjected to significant scrutiny, writes Helen Caldicott.

AS AUSTRALIA is grappling with the notion of introducing nuclear powerinto the country, it seems imperative the general public understand the intricacies of these technologies so they can make informed decisions. Thorium reactors are amongst those being suggested at this time.

The U.S. tried for 50 years to create thorium reactors, without success. Four commercial thorium reactors were constructed, all of which failed. And because of the complexity of problems listed below, thorium reactors are far more expensive than uranium fueled reactors.

The longstanding effort to produce these reactors cost the U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars, while billions more dollars are still required to dispose of the highly toxic waste emanating from these failed trials.

The truth is, thorium is not a naturally fissionable material. It is therefore necessary to mix thorium with either enriched uranium 235 (up to 20% enrichment) or with plutonium – both of which are innately fissionable – to get the process going.

While uranium enrichment is very expensive, the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel from uranium powered reactors is enormously expensive and very dangerous to the workers who are exposed to toxic radioactive isotopes during the process. Reprocessing spent fuel requires chopping up radioactive fuel rods by remote control, dissolving them in concentrated nitric acid from which plutonium is precipitated out by complex chemical means.

Vast quantities of highly acidic, highly radioactive liquid waste then remain to be disposed of. (Only is 6 kilograms of plutonium 239 can fuel a nuclear weapon, while each reactor makes 250 kilos of plutonium per year. One millionth of a gram of plutonium if inhaled is carcinogenic.)

So there is an extraordinarily complex, dangerous and expensive preliminary process to kick-start a fission process in a thorium reactor.

When non-fissionable thorium is mixed with either fissionable plutonium or uranium 235, it captures a neutron and converts to uranium 233, which itself is fissionable. Naturally it takes some time for enough uranium 233 to accumulate to make this particular fission process spontaneously ongoing.

Later, the radioactive fuel would be removed from the reactor and reprocessed to separate out the uranium 233 from the contaminating fission products, and the uranium 233 then will then be mixed with more thorium to be placed in another thorium reactor.

But uranium 233 is also very efficient fuel for nuclear weapons. It takes about the same amount of uranium 233 as plutonium 239 – six kilos – to fuel a nuclear weapon. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has already, to its disgrace, ‘lost track’ of 96 kilograms of uranium 233.

A total of two tons of uranium 233 were manufactured in the United States. This material naturally requires similar stringent security measures used for plutonium storage for obvious reasons. It is estimated that it will take over one million dollars per kilogram to dispose of the seriously deadly material.

An Energy Department safety investigation recently found a national repository for uranium 233 in a building constructed in 1943 at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

It was in poor condition. Investigators reported an environmental release from many of the 1,100 containers could

‘… be expected to occur within the next five years because some of the packages are approaching 30 years of age and have not been regularly inspected.’

The DOE determined that this building had:

Deteriorated beyond cost-effective repair and significant annual costs would be incurred to satisfy both current DOE storage standards, and to provide continued protection against potential nuclear criticality accidents or theft of the material.

The DOE Office of Environmental Management now considers the disposal of this uranium 233 to be ‘an unfunded mandate’.

Thorium reactors also produce uranium 232, which decays to an extremely potent high-energy gamma emitter that can penetrate through one metre of concrete, making the handling of this spent nuclear fuel extraordinarily dangerous.

Although thorium advocates say that thorium reactors produce little radioactive waste, they simply produce a different spectrum of waste to those from uranium-235. This still includes many dangerous alpha and beta emitters, and isotopes with extremely long half-lives, including iodine 129 (half-life of 15.7 million years).

No wonder the U.S. nuclear industry gave up on thorium reactors in the 1980s. It was an unmitigated disaster, as are many other nuclear enterprises undertaken by the nuclear priesthood and the U.S. government.

September 5, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA, Reference, thorium | 1 Comment

US experts propose having Artificial Intelligence control nuclear weapons 

History is replete with instances in which it seems, in retrospect, that nuclear war could have started were it not for some flesh-and-blood human refusing to begin Armageddon. Perhaps the most famous such hero was Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet lieutenant colonel, who was the officer on duty in charge of the Soviet Union’s missile-launch detection system when it registered five inbound missiles on Sept. 26, 1983. Petrov decided the signal was in error and reported it as a false alarm. It was. Whether an artificial intelligence would have reached the same decision is, at the least, uncertain. 

Strangelove redux: US experts propose having AI control nuclear weapons    https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/strangelove-redux-us-experts-propose-having-ai-control-nuclear-weapons/

By Matt Field, AA August 30 2019  Hypersonic missiles, stealthy cruise missiles, and weaponized artificial intelligence have so reduced the amount of time that decision makers in the United States would theoretically have to respond to a nuclear attack that, two military experts say, it’s time for a new US nuclear command, control, and communications system. Their solution? Give artificial intelligence control over the launch button.

In an article in War on the Rocks titled, ominously, “America Needs a ‘Dead Hand,’” US deterrence experts Adam Lowther and Curtis McGiffin propose a nuclear command, control, and communications setup with some eerie similarities to the Soviet system referenced in the title to their piece. The Dead Hand was a semiautomated system developed to launch the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal under certain conditions, including, particularly, the loss of national leaders who could do so on their own. Given the increasing time pressure Lowther and McGiffin say US nuclear decision makers are under, “[I]t may be necessary to develop a system based on artificial intelligence, with predetermined response decisions, that detects, decides, and directs strategic forces with such speed that the attack-time compression challenge does not place the United States in an impossible position.”

In case handing over the control of nuclear weapons to HAL 9000 sounds risky, the authors also put forward a few other solutions to the nuclear time-pressure problem: Bolster the United States’ ability to respond to a nuclear attack after the fact, that is, ensure a so-called second-strike capability; adopt a willingness to pre-emptively attack other countries based on warnings that they are preparing to attack the United States; or destabilize the country’s adversaries by fielding nukes near their borders, the idea here being that such a move would bring countries to the arms control negotiating table.

Still, the authors clearly appear to favor an artificial intelligence-based solution.

“Nuclear deterrence creates stability and depends on an adversary’s perception that it cannot destroy the United States with a surprise attack, prevent a guaranteed retaliatory strike, or prevent the United States from effectively commanding and controlling its nuclear forces,” they write. “That perception begins with an assured ability to detect, decide, and direct a second strike. In this area, the balance is shifting away from the United States.”

History is replete with instances in which it seems, in retrospect, that nuclear war could have started were it not for some flesh-and-blood human refusing to begin Armageddon. Perhaps the most famous such hero was Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet lieutenant colonel, who was the officer on duty in charge of the Soviet Union’s missile-launch detection system when it registered five inbound missiles on Sept. 26, 1983. Petrov decided the signal was in error and reported it as a false alarm. It was. Whether an artificial intelligence would have reached the same decision is, at the least, uncertain.

One of the risks of incorporating more artificial intelligence into the nuclear command, control, and communications system involves the phenomenon known as automation bias. Studies have shown that people will trust what an automated system is telling them. In one study, pilots who told researchers that they wouldn’t trust an automated system that reported an engine fire unless there was corroborating evidence nonetheless did just that in simulations. (Furthermore, they told experimenters that there had in fact been corroborating information, when there hadn’t.)

University of Pennsylvania political science professor and Bulletin columnist Michael Horowitz, who researches military innovation, counts automation bias as a strike against building an artificial intelligence-based nuclear command, control, and communications system. “A risk in a world of automation bias is that the Petrov of the future doesn’t use his judgment,” he says, “or that there is no Petrov.”

The algorithms that power artificial intelligence-systems are usually trained on huge datasets which simply don’t exist when it comes to nuclear weapons launches. “There have not been nuclear missile attacks, country against country. And so, training an algorithm for early warning means that you’re relying entirely on simulated data,” Horowitz says. “I would say, based on the state-of-the-art in the development of algorithms, that generates some risks.”……..

There is some precedent for the system proposed by the War on the Rocksauthors, who have served in government or in the military in nuclear-weapons-related capacities. In the fictional world of Hollywood, that precedent was established in Stanley Kubrick’s nuclear satire Dr. Strangelove and called the “Doomsday Machine,” which author Eric Schlosser described this way for The New Yorker:

“The device would trigger itself, automatically, if the Soviet Union were attacked with nuclear weapons. It was meant to be the ultimate deterrent, a threat to destroy the world in order to prevent an American nuclear strike. But the failure of the Soviets to tell the United States about the contraption defeats its purpose and, at the end of the film, inadvertently causes a nuclear Armageddon. ‘The whole point of the Doomsday Machine is lost,’ Dr. Strangelove, the President’s science adviser, explains to the Soviet Ambassador, ‘if you keep it a secret!’”

About two decades later, satire became closer to reality with the advent of the Soviet Union’s semiautomated Dead Hand system, formally known as Perimeter. When that system perceived that the Soviet military hierarchy no longer existed and detected signs of a nuclear explosion, three officers deep in a bunker were to launch small command rockets that would fly across the country initiating the launch of all of the Soviet Union’s remaining missiles, in a sort of revenge-from-the-grave move. The system was intended to enhance deterrence. Some reports suggest it is still in place.

The possibility that taking humans out of the loop might lead to an accidental launch and unintended nuclear war is a main element in US Naval War College Prof. Tom Nichols’ harsh characterization of the Dead Hand system in a 2014 article in The National Interest: “Turns out the Soviet high command, in its pathetic and paranoid last years, was just that crazy.”

But Lowther and McGiffin say a hypothetical US system would be different than Dead Hand because “the system itself would determine the response based on its own assessment of the inbound threat.“ That is to say, the US system would be better, because it wouldn’t necessarily wait for a nuclear detonation to launch a US attack.

Still, the authors clearly appear to favor an artificial intelligence-based solution.

August 31, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Reference, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Climate change is destabilising the Earth’s marine environment

Oceans turning from friend to foe, warns landmark UN climate report, Phys Org, by Marlowe Hood, Patrick Galey  30 Aug 19, The same oceans that nourished human evolution are poised to unleash misery on a global scale unless the carbon pollution destabilising Earth’s marine environment is brought to heel, warns a draft UN report obtained by AFP.

Destructive changes already set in motion could see a steady decline in fish stocks, a hundred-fold or more increase in the damages caused by superstorms, and hundreds of millions of people displaced by rising seas, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “special report” on oceans and Earth’s frozen zones, known as the cryosphere.

As the 21st century unfolds, melting glaciers will first give too much and then too little to billions who depend on them for fresh water, it finds.

Without deep cuts to manmade emissions, at least 30 percent of the northern hemisphere’s surface permafrost could melt by century’s end, unleashing billions of tonnes of carbon and accelerating global warming even more.

The 900-page scientific assessment is the fourth such tome from the UN in less than a year, with others focused on a 1.5-Celsius (2.6-Farenheit) cap on global warming, the state of biodiversity, and how to manage forests and the global food system.

All four conclude that humanity must overhaul the way it produces and consumes almost everything to avoid the worst ravages of climate change and environmental degradation.

Governments meet in Monaco next month to vet the new report’s official summary. While the underlying science—drawn from thousands of peer-reviewed studies—cannot be modified, diplomats with scientists at their elbow will tussle over how to frame the findings, and what to leave in or out.

The final advice to policymakers will be released on September 25, too late to be considered by world leaders gathering two days earlier for a summit convened by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to extract stronger national commitments in confronting the climate crisis.

Guterres may be disappointed by what the world’s major greenhouse gas emitters put on the table, according to experts tracking climate politics in China, the United States, the European Union and India………..

1,000-fold flood damage increase

By 2050, many low-lying megacities and small island nations will experience “extreme sea level events” every year, even under the most optimistic emissions reduction scenarios, the report concludes.

By 2100, “annual flood damages are expected to increase by two to three orders of magnitude,” or 100 to 1,000 fold, the draft summary for policymakers says.

Even if the world manages to cap global warming at two degrees Celsius, the global ocean waterline will rise enough to displace more than a quarter of a billion people.  The report indicated this could happen as soon as 2100, though some experts think it is more likely to happen on a longer timescale………

Marine heatwaves

Oceans not only absorb a quarter of the CO2 we emit, they have also soaked up more than 90 percent of the additional heat generated by greenhouse gas emissions since 1970.

Without this marine sponge, in other words, global warming would already have made Earth’s surface intolerably hot for our species.

But these obliging gestures come at a cost: acidification is disrupting the ocean’s basic food chain, and marine heatwaves—which have become twice as frequent since the 1980s—are creating vast oxygen-depleted dead zones.

In the Tasman Sea, for example, a 2015-16 heatwave lasted for 251 days, causing disease outbreaks and a die-off of farmed shellfish.https://phys.org/news/2019-08-oceans-friend-foe-landmark-climate.html

August 31, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, climate change, oceans, Reference | Leave a comment

The village of Iitate – nuclear tragedy, and Fukushima’s black snow

Fukushima tragedy: The day of black snow  https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/23925/fukushima-tragedy-the-day-of-black-snow/ by Sean Lee 30 August 2019  Toru Anzai is a former resident of Iitate, a small village in Fukushima, Japan, and dearly missed the bamboo shoots that grew in his hometown. During autumn, the bamboo shoots would blanket the mountains that overlooked the residents’ homes in the village. The residents would climb the mountains, gather the plants, and prepare them for dinner. But ever since that tragic day, no one climbed the mountains, and the wild plants vanished from their dinner tables. For Anzai, the bamboo shoots became sad reminders of what used to be.  

Anzai remembers the day as the “black snow” day. He heard the explosions on 12 March, 2011. Black smoke rose from the Fukushima nuclear power plant, and the smell of burning iron pervaded the village. It started to rain. The rain turned into snow. The snow was black.

The black snow filled Anzai with an ominous dread, and soon, his fears became reality.

After the black snow shrouded the village, Anzai described in an interview how he started to feel throbbing pain on his skin. It was almost like being sunburned after sunbathing for too long. Both of his legs darkened then peeled in white patches. The only remedy to the peeling was applying medicinal ointment.

Soon after, his entire body began to suffer. The headaches came, followed by shoulder pains. Then the hair loss occurred. Three months after the disaster, he left behind his home and evacuated to survive. Unfortunately, the tragedy did not end there.

Three years later, Anzai started having strokes and heart attacks. A stent was placed in his blood vessel; the tube held open his narrowed blood vessel and kept the blood flowing to his heart. With treatment, his pain somewhat subsided, but whenever Anzai visited Iitate, the pain throughout his entire body relapsed. While these symptoms have not been conclusively connected to the radiation exposure, Anzai believed that they were the realities of the black snow day.

Anzai’s temporary housing was very narrow and consisted of a living room and a bedroom. He had moved into this subsidised housing complex eight years ago. He was one of the first of the 126 families. Often, evacuees gathered around the common area and shared fond memories of their hometowns with each other. Whatever solace could be found, the evacuees found it in each other.

Since allegedly completing the decontamination operation in Iitate, the Japanese government have been urging people to return to their village. In fact, Fukushima prefectural government had ended housing subsidies this past March, and by the end of the month, most people had left the complex. Only around ten families were still looking for a new place to live.

Absently gazing into the dark, clouded sky, Anzai spoke bitterly. “I was kicked out of my hometown for doing nothing wrong. It was heartbreaking. Now, Iitate is polluted, and some of my neighbours have died. When the government asked me to evacuate last minute, I left. Now, they want me to go back. Back to all of the radioactive contamination. I’m so angry, but I don’t know what to do. We have repeatedly petitioned the government, but they’re not willing to listen. Our government has abandoned us.”

Prior to the nuclear incident, there were about 6,300 residents in Iitate. Eight years later, only a little over 300 evacuees have returned at the government’s persistent urging. Most of the returning residents were elderly, aged 60 or older. Even counting the non-natives who had recently relocated to the village, the total figure hovered around only 900 residents.

Iitate’s old and new residents are exposed to radioactive substances on a daily basis. The Japanese government claimed to have completed the decontamination work, but a full decontamination is impossible due to the village’s terrain. More than 70% of Iitate is forest, and unlike in the farmlands, the removal of contaminants that have fallen among the mountainous forest is nearly impossible.

Each year, Greenpeace Germany conducts extensive research on Fukushima villages including Iitate. The findings confirm that the radiation exposure in these villages exceeds the established international safety standards. Anzai believes that the Japanese government is behind the forced homecoming of the Iitate residents.

“The government hopes to publicise good news: the nuclear accident has been dealt with, and the residents have returned home. People who had no choice but to leave are now being pressured to return and put their lives on the line,” lamented Anzai.

The Japanese government hopes to release more than one million tonnes of highly radioactive water into the Fukushima coast. If the contaminated water becomes flushed into the ocean, the contamination will only add to the harm already inflicted by the Fukushima accident. Furthermore, the ocean currents will shift the radioactive materials through the surrounding waters including the Pacific Ocean.

The industrial pollution and toxins have already caused much distress to our oceans. Discharging the Fukushima’s radioactive water will only worsen the situation, and we cannot, and should never, let this happen.

August 31, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Fukushima continuing, PERSONAL STORIES, Reference | Leave a comment

’12 Years to Act on Climate Change’ – what does this really mean?

What Does ’12 Years to Act on Climate Change’ (Now 11 Years) Really Mean?   https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27082019/12-years-climate-change-explained-ipcc-science-solutionsIt doesn’t mean the world can wait until 2030 to cut greenhouse gas emissions, or that chaos will erupt in 2030. Here’s what the science shows., BY BOB BERWYN, INSIDE CLIMATE NEWS, AUG 27,2019We’ve been hearing variations of the phrase “the world only has 12 years to deal with climate change” a lot lately.Sen. Bernie Sanders put a version of it front and center of his presidential campaign last week, saying we now have “less than 11 years left to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and sustainable energy, if we are going to leave this planet healthy and habitable.”

But where does the idea of having 11 or 12 years come from, and what does it actually mean?

The number began drawing attention in 2018, when the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report describing what it would take to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal of the Paris climate agreement. The report explained that countries would have to cut their anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, such as from power plants and vehicles, to net zero by around 2050. To reach that goal, it said, CO2 emissions would have to start dropping “well before 2030” and be on a path to fall by about 45 percent by around 2030 (12 years away at that time).

Mid-century is actually the more significant target date in the report, but acting now is crucial to being able to meet that goal, said Duke University climate researcher Drew Shindell, a lead author on the mitigation chapter of the IPCC report.

We need to get the world on a path to net zero CO2 emissions by mid-century,” Shindell said. “That’s a huge transformation, so that if we don’t make a good start on it during the 2020s, we won’t be able to get there at a reasonable cost.”

How Do Scientists Know?

Basics physics and climate science allow scientists to calculate how much CO2 it takes to raise the global temperature—and how much CO2 can still be emitted before global warming exceeds 1.5°C (2.7°F) compared to pre-industrial times.

Scientists worked backward from that basic knowledge to come up with timelines for what would have to happen to stay under 1.5°C warming, said Scott Denning, who studies the warming atmosphere at Colorado State University.

“They figured out how much extra heat we can stand. They calculated how much CO2 would produce that much heat, then how much total fuel would produce that much CO2. Then they considered ‘glide paths’ for getting emissions to zero before we burn too much carbon to avoid catastrophe,” he said.

“All this work gets summarized as ‘in order to avoid really bad outcomes, we have to be on a realistic glide path toward a carbon-free global economy by 2030.’ And that gets translated to something like ’emissions have to fall by half in a decade,’ and that gets oversimplified to ’12 years left.’

“There’s certainly a grain of truth in the phrase, but it’s so oversimplified that it leads to comically bad misconceptions about how to get there, conjuring up ridiculous cartoon imagery suggesting we just go on with life normally for the next 11 years and then the world ends,” Denning said.

That’s not what the IPCC writers envisioned, he said.

The science on the 2030 date is clear, said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. The controversy stems from people mischaracterizing the carbon reduction timeline as a threshold for climate disaster. He noted that people promoting climate science denial and delay have also latched on to the phrase “to intentionally try to caricature the concern about climate change.”

What Would Success Look Like?

It would be helpful if people looked at the 2030 target in terms of what success looks like rather than what failure means, Denning said.

“Solving the problem by 2030, 2040 or 2050 requires a new global energy infrastructure, which is arguably easier and less expensive than past infrastructure shifts like indoor plumbing, rural electrification, the automobile and paved roads, telecommunications, computers, mobile phones or the internet.

“All of these past changes cost tens of trillions of dollars, adjusted for inflation. All of them were hugely disruptive. All of them took a decade or more, completely changed the industrial and economic and social landscape, and created bursts of growth and productivity and jobs. And arguably, all of them made life better for huge numbers of people.”

This time, the shift is from heavy reliance on carbon-emitting fossil fuels to carbon-free energy sources, like wind power. And even with a speedy energy transition, the IPCC says keeping temperatures from warming more than 1.5°C will also likely require removing CO2 from the atmosphere on a large scale.

Missing the target doesn’t imply the onset of cataclysmic climate change in 2030, Denning said.

“Things just keep getting worse and worse until we stop making them worse, and then they never get better,” he said. “But no matter what, the world has to move on from fossil fuels just as we moved on from tallow candles and outhouses and land lines.”

What Would Exceeding 1.5°C Warming Mean?

The IPCC report described how increasing greenhouse gas emissions will result in more dangerous and costly disruptions to global societies and ecosystems, including longer, hotter heat waves and more frequent crop-killing droughts.

Mountain glaciers will melt faster as the planet warms, creating new risks for settlements in the valleys below. The meltdown of polar ice sheets is also projected to accelerate, intensifying flooding and speeding up sea level rise to a rate that will be hard to adapt to. More Arctic permafrost will thaw, releasing more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Despite the rising risks, it’s important to understand that, “in the physical climate system, there are no scientists claiming that there is a magical threshold that we breach or don’t breach that determines whether we have a habitable climate system,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Center for Climate and Weather Extremes.

The 2030 target is useful because it shows how the “next decade is incredibly consequential for what we do.” Swain said. “But I think the emphasis that’s being placed on this specific 12-year window as a differentiator between existential crisis or not is problematic.

“First of all, it negates some of the risks that already exist and that will continue to build no matter what. And it also potentially suggests that anything short of complete victory in the next 12 years is pointless, which is exactly the opposite of the truth. At any point along the spectrum, more progress is always going to be better than less progress, less warming is always going to be better than more warming.”

Have We Passed Tipping Points Already?

In some ways, the “12 years” narrative may set up a deadline that’s too lenient, because some key part of the climate system may already be at or past tipping points, Swain said.


It creates the false illusion that there is some sort of guardrail moving forward, that if we just get in under the deadline we’ll be OK, he said. But “twelve years from now, it could be too late for some of these things, like the ice sheets.”

Research in the past few years reinforces the idea that some climate tipping points have already been breached. Studies show some parts of the Greenland Ice Sheet are unlikely to recover, and parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may also be at or very near a tipping point to rapid disintegration.

A study published in June suggested that the rate of permafrost thawing is progressing much faster than climate models projected. And scientists studying the link between global warming and European heat waves said those recent extremes are also outside the scope of what they expected at current levels of warming.

The world will still exist if we breach 1.5°C and 2°C, but “the climate impacts and risks will be higher and the temperature will be higher,” said Glen Peters, research director at the CICERO climate research center in Oslo. That all seems to be sinking in to public awareness, he said.

“But in terms of deadlines, we have already missed the deadline,” he said. “We should have started mitigating decades ago, then we would have the problem solved.”

August 29, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, climate change, Reference | Leave a comment

“Chernobyl on the Seine” – Marie curie’s radioactive legacy

France Is Still Cleaning Up Marie Curie’s Nuclear Waste, Her lab outside Paris, dubbed Chernobyl on the Seine, is still radioactive nearly a century after her death. Bloomberg Business Week , By Tara Patel,  28 Aug 19,

In 1933 nuclear physicist Marie Curie had outgrown her lab in the Latin Quarter in central Paris. To give her the space needed for the messy task of extracting radioactive elements such as radium from truckloads of ore, the University of Paris built a research center in Arcueil, a village south of the city. Today it’s grown into a crowded ­working-class suburb. And the dilapidated lab, set in an overgrown garden near a 17th century aqueduct, is sometimes called Chernobyl on the Seine.
 
No major accidents occurred at the lab, which closed in 1978. But it’s brimming with radio­activity that will be a health threat for millennia, and France’s nuclear watchdog has barred access to anyone not wearing protective clothing. The lab is surrounded by a concrete wall topped by barbed wire and surveillance cameras. Monitors constantly assess radiation, and local officials regularly test the river. “We’re proof that France has a serious nuclear waste problem,” says Arcueil Mayor Christian Métairie. “Our situation raises questions about whether the country is really equipped to handle it……. (subscribers only)  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-28/france-is-still-cleaning-up-marie-curie-s-nuclear-waste

August 29, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | France, Reference, wastes | Leave a comment

Hiroshima Round Table’s urgent appeal to save nuclear agreements  

Urgent appeal to save nuclear agreements  https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2019/08/25/commentary/japan-commentary/urgent-appeal-save-nuclear-agreements/#.XWL9GugzbIU

BY RAMESH THAKUR  HIROSHIMA, 25 Aug !9 – The Hiroshima Round Table held its seventh annual meeting last Wednesday and Thursday. For the first time, in recognition of the uniquely dangerous international security environment since the dawn of the atomic age in this beautiful city, the Round Table issued an urgent appeal to maintain existing nuclear arms control, disarmament and nonproliferation pacts and to build on them in order to deepen strategic stability. Continue reading →

August 26, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, politics international, Reference, weapons and war | Leave a comment

International concern growing over Fukushima’s radioactive contamination of surface-level soil

The danger of sourcing food and material from the Fukushima region   Ground-level nuclear disasters leave much more radioactive fallout than Tokyo is willing to admit 　 Hankyoreh  By Seok Kwang-hoon, energy policy consultant of Green Korea   Aug.25,2019 International concerns are growing over the Japanese government’s plans to provide meals from the Fukushima area to squads participating in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The starting point for the Olympic torch relay, and even the baseball stadium, were placed near the site of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. It seems to be following the model of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, where Japan’s rise from the ashes of the atomic bombs was underscored by having a young man born the day of the Hiroshima bombing act serve as the relay’s last runner. Here we can see the Shinzo Abe administration’s fixation on staging a strained Olympic reenactment of the stirring Hiroshima comeback – only this time from Fukushima.

But in terms of radiation damages, there is a world of difference between Hiroshima and Fukushima. Beyond the initial mass casualties and the aftereffects suffered by the survivors, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima resulted in little additional radiation exposure. Nuclear technology being as crude as it was back then, only around one kilogram of the Hiroshima bomb’s 64kg of highly enriched uranium actually underwent any reaction, resulting in a relatively small generation of nuclear fission material.
Whereas ground-based nuclear testing results in large quantities of radioactive fallout through combining with surface-level soil, the Hiroshima bomb exploded at an altitude of 580m, and the superheated nuclear fission material rose up toward the stratosphere to spread out around the planet, so that the amount of fallout over Japan was minimal. Even there, most of the nuclides had a short half-life (the amount of time it takes for half the total atoms in radioactive material to decay); manganese-56, which has a half-life of three hours, was the main cause of the additional radiation damages, which were concentrated during the day or so just after the bomb was dropped. The experience of Nagasaki was similar. As a result, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were able to fully resume as functioning cities by the mid-1950s without additional decontamination efforts.
Ground-level nuclear disasters leave much more radioactive fallout than Tokyo is willing to admit
nternational concerns are growing over the Japanese government’s plans to provide meals from the Fukushima area to squads participating in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The starting point for the Olympic torch relay, and even the baseball stadium, were placed near the site of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. It seems to be following the model of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, where Japan’s rise from the ashes of the atomic bombs was underscored by having a young man born the day of the Hiroshima bombing act serve as the relay’s last runner. Here we can see the Shinzo Abe administration’s fixation on staging a strained Olympic reenactment of the stirring Hiroshima comeback – only this time from Fukushima.But in terms of radiation damages, there is a world of difference between Hiroshima and Fukushima.
Beyond the initial mass casualties and the aftereffects suffered by the survivors, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima resulted in little additional radiation exposure. Nuclear technology being as crude as it was back then, only around one kilogram of the Hiroshima bomb’s 64kg of highly enriched uranium actually underwent any reaction, resulting in a relatively small generation of nuclear fission material. Whereas ground-based nuclear testing results in large quantities of radioactive fallout through combining with surface-level soil, the Hiroshima bomb exploded at an altitude of 580m, and the superheated nuclear fission material rose up toward the stratosphere to spread out around the planet, so that the amount of fallout over Japan was minimal. Even there, most of the nuclides had a short half-life (the amount of time it takes for half the total atoms in radioactive material to decay); manganese-56, which has a half-life of three hours, was the main cause of the additional radiation damages, which were concentrated during the day or so just after the bomb was dropped. The experience of Nagasaki was similar. As a result, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were able to fully resume as functioning cities by the mid-1950s without additional decontamination efforts…… http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_editorial/907055.html

August 26, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | environment, Japan, Reference | Leave a comment

Fukushima’s radiation increases over time

The danger of sourcing food and material from the Fukushima region   Ground-level nuclear disasters leave much more radioactive fallout than Tokyo is willing to admit 　 Hankyoreh  By Seok Kwang-hoon, energy policy consultant of Green Korea   Aug.25,2019  “…………..Fukushima’s radiation increases over time.  The Fukushima disaster did not result in mass casualties, but the damages from radiation have only increased over time. The nuclear power plants experiencing core meltdowns had the equivalent of around 12 tons of highly enriched uranium in nuclear fuel – roughly 12,000 times more than the amount of uranium that underwent nuclear fission in the Hiroshima bomb. At one point, the Japanese government announced that Fukushima released 168 times more cesium than the Hiroshima bomb. But even that was merely a difference in emissions; there’s an immeasurable difference between the amount of fallout from Hiroshima, which was left over from a total spread out over the planet at a high altitude, and the amount from Fukushima, which was emitted at ground level.
Hiroshima also experienced little to no exposure to cesium-137 and strontium-90 – nuclides with half-lives of around 30 years that will continue to afflict Japan for decades to come. Due to accessibility issues, most of the forests that make up around 70% of Fukushima’s area have been left unaddressed. According to Japanese scholars, around 430 square kilometers of forest was contaminated with high concentrations of cesium-137. The danger of this forest cesium is that it will be carried toward residential or farm land by wind and rain, or that contaminated flora and fauna will be used in processing and distribution. Indeed, cedar wood from Fukushima remains in distribution in the region, and was even shipped off recently to serve as construction material for the Tokyo Olympics. Meanwhile, the incidence of thyroid cancer in children – a rare condition – has risen all the way from one to two cases before the incident to 217 in its wake. Yet the Abe administration has only impeded a study by physicians, using various government-controlled Fukushima-related investigation committees as vehicles for sophistry and controlling media reporting on the issue. http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_editorial/907055.html
Abe administration hoping to cut costs in nuclear waste disposal   The economic consequences have been astronomical as well. From an expert group’s analysis, the Japan Center for Economic Research estimated that the 14 million tons of radioactive waste from collecting Fukushima’s cesium-contaminated soil would result in a financial burden of 20 trillion yen (US$187.98 billion) based on the acceptance costs at the Rokkasho-mura radioactive waste disposal center. Contaminated water from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant – which already amounts to 1.2 million tons and is expected to increase to 2 million – was predicted to cost fully 51 trillion yen (US$479.35 billion) in tritium and strontium removal costs alone. Factor in the 10 trillion yen (around US$94 billion) in resident compensation, and the amount is close to the Japanese government’s total annual budget. Hoping to cut costs, the Abe administration announced plans to reuse soil waste in civil engineering, while the contaminated water is expected to be dumped into the Pacific after the formalities of a discussion. But few if any Japanese news outlets have been doing any investigative reporting on the issue.

When Abe declared the situation “under control” during the Olympic bidding campaign in 2013, this truthfully amounted to a gag order on the press and civil society. Having the world’s sole experience of filing and winning a World Trade Organization (WTO) case on Fukushima seafood, South Korea may be in the best position to alert the world to the issue of radioactivity and the Tokyo Olympics. I look forward to seeing efforts from the administration.By Seok Kwang-hoon, energy policy consultant of Green Korea

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr] http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_editorial/907055.html

August 26, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | environment, Japan, Reference | Leave a comment

Chinese Academy of Sciences warns on the safety hazards of new nuclear

Assessing the possible safety issues in the second nuclear era, by Bob Yirka , Phys.org  25 Aug 19, A team of researchers with the Chinese Academy of Sciences has carried out an assessment of possible safety issues tied to the rise of the second nuclear era. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes the factors that led to the rise of a second nuclear era and possible safety concerns that need to be addressed……

 now, the researchers claim, a new nuclear era has begun—this time, driven by less-developed countries such as India and China, and to some degree, Russia. The researchers suggest this new, unexpected second nuclear era is fraught with great risk. They note that despite efforts by the parties involved in implementing nuclear power plants in the first era, major accidents occurred. They further note that recent history suggests that safely producing nuclear energy has still not been fully realized. In their paper, they outline some of the safety issues involved with the second nuclear era.

The researchers note that unlike most advanced countries, less-developed countries suffer from poor infrastructure and the means for safely maintaining a complex nuclear plant. They also note that the laws in some of the countries developing nuclear plants are less stringent, and that there is more corruption. They also note there is often less political stability. And there are differences in social values regarding risk and the need for safety practices. They also note that many such countries do not have well-established communications channels between those operating nuclear facilities and the public at large. The recent nuclear accident in Russia highlights why such communications are needed—to protect those in the path of radiation leaks.

More information: Yican Wu et al. Nuclear safety in the unexpected second nuclear era, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(2019). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1820007116–  https://phys.org/news/2019-08-safety-issues-nuclear-era.html  Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

August 26, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | China, Reference, safety | Leave a comment

“ZATO” Russia’s many closed cities, – some site of nuclear accidents

Russia’s closed cities hold the secrets to global nuclear disasters you’ve never heard of https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-24/russia-closed-cities-hold-secrets-to-global-nuclear-disasters/11437734

By Lauren Beldi   The lack of information from the Russian Government following the deadly explosion on August 8 has some questioning whether the situation might be worse than originally thought.

Key points:

  • There are at least 40 closed cities in Russia, officially known by the acronym ZATO
  • Some have also been home to some of the world’s worst nuclear incidents
  • President Vladimir Putin is trying to encourage more Russians to move to closed cities

But it makes sense why Russia might be vague on the detail.

Both the city near the accident site, Severodvinsk, and the one where the victims were buried, Sarov, are “closed cities” — highly controlled areas that house the country’s most important weapons sites.

The Government does not want outsiders knowing what goes on there, especially when accidents happen.

And when accidents do happen in closed cities, like a radioactive explosion or an outbreak of anthrax, Russia has a long history of covering them up.

Russia is far from the only country to have closed cities, but it does have a lot of them.

It’s thought there are about 40 closed cities in Russia, though it’s suspected there are others whose very existence is highly classified.

First established in the 1940s, closed cities — officially known by the acronym ZATO in Russian — are most often associated with either military installations or major research centres and are used to house employees and their families.

For example, Sarov, where the five scientists killed in the explosion were buried, is the site of a nuclear weapons design facility.

It’s been a closed city since 1946, when it was renamed Arzamas-16 and its location was removed from all unclassified maps.

The movement of people and information in and out of these cities is highly restricted, and residents are often not allowed to disclose where they live to outsiders.

“There’s levels of security inside levels of security, it’s like a series of concentric circles,” Kate Brown, MIT Professor of Science, Technology and Society, told the ABC.

“And when you have those it is easy to gloss over problems, perhaps cover up accidents, there’s not a lot of ways for information to get out.”

The nuclear disaster you probably haven’t heard of

While Chernobyl and Fukushima might be synonymous with nuclear disasters, that might not be the case for Kyshtym.

It was the third most-serious nuclear accident ever recorded, and it happened at the Mayak facility in the closed city of Ozyorsk, in Russia’s Ural Mountains, in 1957.

A cooling system in a radioactive waste tank broke down and the rise in temperature resulted in an explosion that released an estimated 20 million curies of radioactivity into the environment.

During the Chernobyl explosion, about 50–200 million curies of radioactivity was estimated to have been released.

The Kyshtym disaster contaminated an area up to 20,000 square kilometres, known as the East-Ural Radioactive Trace, and thousands of people near the plant were evacuated.

But the Soviet government didn’t publicly acknowledge the accident until 1989.

The incident was happening at the time of the Cold War so it was also an attempt by the Soviet authorities to prevent the news from reaching the outside world,” Alexey Muraviev, a specialist in Russian strategic and defence policy at Curtin University, told the ABC.

But the area had been contaminated even before the Kyshtym disaster, when high-level radioactive waste from the production of plutonium at Mayak had been intentionally dumped into the nearby Techa river.

“They put about 3.2 million curies into that small river, and the people who lived downstream drank from it, swam in it, ate from it, fished in it, watered their crops in it,” Professor Brown said.

Twenty-eight communities live down that river, several tens of thousands of people, and they didn’t tell anybody that they were putting high-level waste [in the river].”

Mayak now serves as a reprocessing plant for spent radioactive fuel.

In October 2017, a network of monitoring sites picked up a cloud of radioactive material, Ruthenium-106, above Europe.

In a report published just last month, a team of scientists say the most likely source was a fire or explosion at Mayak that occurred during the reprocessing of spent fuel to create enriched caesium for an Italian laboratory.

Russia’s nuclear energy agency continues to deny anything happened at Mayak in 2017, but at the time, the Russian Meteorological Service admitted there was “extremely high contamination” in the air around the Ural mountains.

And it’s not just nuclear accidents that happen at closed cities.

In 1979, spores of anthrax leaked from a biological weapons facility in the closed city of Sverdlovsk and killed at least 68 people, many of whom were civilians from a nearby ceramics plant.

The Soviet government blamed the deaths on the consumption of contaminated meat, and it was only in 1992 that then-president Boris Yeltsin publicly linked the anthrax outbreak with the military facility.

While some have a bad safety reputation, there’s a big reason why Russians might want to move to a closed city: they’ve historically gotten the best of everything.

As part of the privileges of working on important, secret and dangerous processes, residents are promised a higher standard of living and better resources.

During the Soviet era, those who lived in closed cities were spared the austerity of other parts of the country.

“So there were no problems with, for example, food supplies; people could buy anything they wanted,” Dr Muraviev said.

“They also provided better living conditions, so people who would work at closed cities would be guaranteed state funding accommodation and so on.”

The reputation of the living standards and privileges of those cities meant the jobs that would allow you to move to one were highly sought after.

“This is an important element, otherwise it sounds like [closed cities] are like a giant concentration camp,” Dr Muraviev said.

And according to Dr Muraviev, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been actively trying to restore the glamour of the country’s remaining closed cities.

“Back in the 1990s those privileges kind of really lapsed, so there were no incentives anymore, but now they’re sort of back on the agenda and the Government is really pumping funds into these cities,” he said.

“That’s part of [Mr Putin’s] strategy to rebuild Russia’s national security as well as rebuild Russia’s national defence capability.”

And as far as the risks go of moving to a secretive town next to a nuclear facility or a military installation?

Dr Muraviev said the people who chose to move to closed cities knew what came with the job.

“They understand risks associated with it and they’re not just doing it for money; they’re also doing it for the idea of making Russia safe,” he said.

August 24, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Reference, Russia, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

Climate change killing nuclear power? nuclear reactors can’t cope with water needs, as temperatures rise

Nuclear vs. Climate Change: Feeling the Heat, NRDC, August 12, 2019 Christina Chen 

Note: This is part one of a two-part blog series on the impacts of climate change on nuclear power plants. Part one covers the impacts of increasing ambient temperatures, while part two will cover the impacts of sea level rise.

This summer’s heatwaves did more than send Parisian swimming in the Trocadero fountains. Unable to cope with high water temperatures and low river flows, six European nuclear reactors were forced to curtail their electricity output and two went offline during a region-wide heatwave late this July. This is not the first (and won’t be the last) time nuclear plants face difficulties operating through extreme heat. In a deadly 2003 summer heat wave in Europe, 30 nuclear units were required to either shut down or reduce their power output.

Nuclear power has been heralded to have the power to “save the world” from the catastrophic impacts of a rapidly changing climate. The problem is, with increasing temperatures already posing threats to many nuclear plants around the world, we are faced with a sobering picture of nuclear energy’s vulnerability to climate change impacts.

What’s the Risk?

Increasing temperatures can result in reduced nuclear reactor efficiency by directly impacting nuclear equipment or warming the plant’s source of cooling water. There is no linear air-water temperature trend given the variability of environmental factors (oxygen content, water levels, industrial activity), nonetheless most rivers in the U.S. show a 0.6-0.8°C increase in water temperature for every 1°C increase in air temperature. This poses a risk for all thermal power plants, not just nuclear units. But, nuclear power is uniquely vulnerable to increasing temperatures because of its reliance on cooling water to ensure operational safety within the core and spent fuel storage.

As the most water-intensive energy generation technology, nuclear reactors are located near a river or the ocean to accommodate hefty water usage, which averages between 1,101 gallons per megawatt of electricity produced to 44,350 gal/MWhdepending on the cooling technology. Just as weather varies with location, the degree to which nuclear plants will experience ambient temperature increases will vary. Thus, inland reactors that use rivers as a source for cooling water are the most at risk during heat waves, which according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are “very likely” to occur more often and last longer in the coming decades.

Where Are the At-risk Nuclear Plants?

Using climate projection models aggregated from the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) and the Power Reactor Information System (PRIS) global nuclear power reactor database from the International Atomic Energy Association, we mapped projected temperature increases at each existing and planned nuclear site for several climate change scenarios. Of all four representative concentration pathway (RCPs) scenarios, only RCP2.6 is likely to meet the 2 degrees Celsius goals set by the Paris Climate Agreement……..

Under an RCP 4.5 scenario, 26 percent of nuclear power plants worldwide will experience ambient temperature increases of more than 2°C as early as 2040 compared to a 2005 baseline. That’s 131 reactors. Under the same scenario, that number will increase to a whopping 73 percent by 2060.

The nuclear plants that will see the fastest increase in ambient temperature are inland power plants in the U.S. Northeast and Central and Eastern Europe. Under a RCP4.5 scenario, 46 of the 98 operational nuclear reactors in the U.S. (47 percent) will experience ambient temperature increases of more than 2°C by 2040.  Under a RCP8.5 business-as-usual scenario, 91 percent of nuclear reactors will have to adapt to mean annual temperature increases of more than 2°C by 2040.  …..

Within the last decade, multiple nuclear plants across the US have already scaled back generation due to warmer waters brought by heatwaves. Several have requested and obtained permits to increase their maximum temperature limit for their cooling water. This includes Connecticut’s low-lying Millstone plant, which in 2012 was the first nuclear plant to shut down because of rising water temperatures. Unable to prevent a temporary shut-down when its cooling water exceeded 75°F (23.8°C), the Millstone plant requested to increase the minimum temperature to 80°F (26.7°C). Studies have concluded that repeated thermal discharge from nuclear power plants can threaten marine life and the coastal environment. But, while Long Island’s Suffolk County in 2015 voted to commission an independent study on the impact of Millstone’s thermal plume on the aquatic environment in the Long Island Sound, no study has since emerged……..

This February, the IRSN, a French nuclear safety authority, instructed Electricite de France (EDF), which owns three quarters of nuclear plants in France, to consider hotter and longer heat waves when approving lifetime extensions of reactors.

As nuclear reactors reach the end of their license or if new reactors are sited, it is imperative that climate change projections are not only carefully considered but also accounted for—particularly in the extension of U.S. nuclear plant licenses from 60 to 80 years, a regulatory process called “subsequent relicensing” by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. NRDC is currently litigating the adequacy of the environmental analysis of the subsequent license renewal and extension for the Turkey Point Generating Station, a two-unit nuclear plant at the southern tip of Florida, primarily for failure to consider impacts of climate change, specifically the impact of sea-level rise.

While reduced thermal efficiency and electricity output (which raises its own energy security concerns that should not be downplayed) are pressing concerns during scorching heatwaves, rising sea levels coupled with storm surge and increasingly severe weather events can pose even more serious health and safety risks to nuclear plants around the world. If we seek to take advantage of nuclear power’s low carbon attributes, we must carefully assess all risks, including the very crisis that nuclear power aims to help solve—climate change.

For more information about NRDC’s recommendations on Nuclear Energy, see our blog series on our 2017 Pathways Report.   https://www.nrdc.org/experts/christina-chen/nuclear-vs-climate-change-feeling-heat-0

August 19, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, climate change, Reference | Leave a comment

USA lost unexploded nuclear bomb in Japanese waters

World War 3: Unexploded US nuclear weapon hiding beneath Japanese waters ‘covered up’  https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1166479/world-war-3-nuclear-bomb-japan-philippine-sea-us-soviet-union-cold-war-sptWORLD WAR 3 could have erupted after the United States Navy accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb in Japanese waters – and it is still there today. by CALLUM HOARE, Aug 18, 2019. On December 5, 1965, just three years after the Cuban Missile Crisis pushed Cold War tensions to the limits, the US made a monumental mistake during a training exercise. A United States Navy Douglas A-4E Skyhawk attack aircraft fell off the side of aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga while sailing through the Philippine Sea. The pilot, Lieutenant Douglas M Webster, the plane, and the B43 nuclear bomb on board all fell into the water, 68 miles from the coast of Kikai Island, Japan.

However, it was not until 1989 that the Pentagon admitted the loss of a one-megaton hydrogen bomb.

The revelation inspired a diplomatic inquiry from Japan, however, neither the weapon, or the pilot, was ever recovered.The incident, the most serious involving nuclear weapons in the Navy’s history, showed that US warships carried atomic weapons into Japanese ports in violation of policy, according to researchers.

Japanese law banned ships carrying nuclear weapons from sailing in its territorial waters or calling on its ports following the terrible Hiroshima and Nagasaki incidents.

However, the US warship routinely docked in Japan.

William M. Arkin of the liberal Institute for Policy Studies claimed in 1989: “For 24 years, the US Navy has covered up the most politically sensitive accident that has ever taken place.

“The Navy kept the true details of this accident a secret not only because it demonstrates their disregard for the treaty stipulations of foreign governments but because of the questions it raises about nuclear weapons aboard ships in Vietnam.”

The event was highly sensitive, with Japan being the only country to ever be attacked with nuclear weapons at the end of World War 2.

On September 8, 1951, 49 nations drew a line under the devastating event and signed the Treaty of San Francisco – also known as the Treaty of Peace with Japan.

The document officially ended US-led occupation of Japan and marked the start of re-establishing relations with the allied powers.

Meanwhile, In 1965, the US was arguably at the height of tensions with the Soviet Union.

Not only did the accident threaten to spoil already tenuous relations with Japan, but it would have also have given the USSR an excuse to start a nuclear war.

Despite the worrying claims, the US Navy confirmed inn 1989 that the waters were too deep for the weapon to pose a threat.

Worryingly though, it would not be the last of the nuclear gaffes for America. On January 17, 1966, a B-52G USAF bomber collided with a KC-135 tanker during a refuelling mission at 31,000 feet over the Mediterranean Sea.

During the crash, three MK28-type hydrogen bombs headed for land in the small fishing village of Palomares in Almeria, Spain.

Worse still, the explosives in two of the weapons detonated on impact, contaminating the surrounding area of almost one square mile with plutonium.

The fourth sunk off the coast of Spain and was recovered three months later.

August 19, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | general, history, incidents, Reference, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Australian investigative journalist Mark Davis explodes the myths around Julian Assange

CN LIVE! Mark Davis Wikileaks Revelations

While the Internet was meant to democratise the transmission of information we see a few giant technology companies, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, have near total control of what is seen and shared.

The situation is even worse in Australia with two or three media companies and the same technology giants having control. And the Government of Australia has granted them ever wider market access to extend their monopolies.

Slowly, instance by instance, the malicious and deceitful smears of Julian Assange’s character have been exposed for what they are; an effort to destroy trust in a system of anonymous leaking that will educate everyone.

WikiLeaks’ threat to the powerful was recognised and every effort was, and is, being made to criminalise anonymous leaking, which would be akin to criminalising Gutenberg’s printing press, but there is not much chance this criminalisation will succeed.

It’s time to bring Julian Assange home. Torturing and punishing him has never been legitimate and serves absolutely no purpose.

Media dead silent as Wikileaks insider explodes the myths around Julian Assange, Michael West, by Greg Bean — 16 August 2019 – It is the journalists from The Guardian and New York Times who should be in jail, not Julian Assange, said Mark Davis last week. The veteran Australian investigative journalist, who has been intimately involved in the Wikileaks drama, has turned the Assange narrative on its head. The smears are falling away. The mainstream media, which has so ruthlessly made Julian Assange a scapegoat, is silent in response.

Greg Bean likens the revolutionary work of Julian Assange to that of Johannes Gutenberg who invented the printing press. Government reaction, 580 years later, is similarly savage.

Five hundred and eighty years ago, Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press to the world. That single act created a free press which gave birth to the concept of freedom of speech. The two are inextricably linked; printing is a form of speech.

Gutenberg’s invention started the Printing Revolution, a milestone of the 2ndmillennium that initiated the modern period of human history including the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution, and began the knowledge-based economy that spread learning to the masses.

Such mass communication permanently altered the structure of society. Removing control of information from the hands of the powerful and delivering it into the hands of the disempowered…….

From paper revolution to digital revolution

Today in 2019, 580 years since Gutenberg unleashed his printing press, the powerful are still trying to put the free press and freedom of speech genie back in the bottle.

Their present strategy is to make their knowledge, the element that is the key to retaining authority, as it was in Gutenberg’s day, secret, even Top Secret, and criminalising any action that reveals these secrets to anyone outside their circle of authority.

One of the ways this has been achieved is by enlisting the very core of what should be the free press, granting them almost monopoly rights to information dissemination and transmission and in exchange attaining for themselves the guarantee that their secrets will not be revealed.

Media concentration and control

In the US today, it is estimated that five dominant media organisations have almost total control of information transmission to the entire 325 million Americans. While the Internet was meant to democratise the transmission of information we see a few giant technology companies, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, have near total control of what is seen and shared.

The situation is even worse in Australia with two or three media companies and the same technology giants having control. And the Government of Australia has granted them ever wider market access to extend their monopolies. As an aside, it’s both funny and ironic that the Turnbull Government last increased the capacity for Australian media to further consolidate and then Malcolm Turnbull was deposed by that same media for being insufficiently sycophantic to their wishes.

But in 2006, something akin to the arrival of Gutenberg’s press appeared that would threaten the tightly held master’s control as surely as Gutenberg’s press threatened autocratic control in 1439.

That something was a technology suite, from WikiLeaks, that protected the anonymity of individuals who leaked the secrets of corruption that powerful governments preferred to keep hidden.

The strategy was quite elegant in its simplicity. WikiLeaks recognised that organisations and governments can only succeed if they can communicate their instructions to the operational workforce. If the instructions are legal and legitimate, this can be done publicly and with no need to hide any of these instructions.

What have they got to hide?

If however, the instructions entail illegal or illegitimate actions, then the only way these can be communicated to the entire workforce is as secrets. And to ensure they remain secret the organisation or government must impose a penalty on anyone who breaks that secrecy and divulges the information to person not authorised to see it.

The very act of defining something as secret and restricting its dissemination is a clear indicator that the actions or events are very likely illegal or illegitimate. Imposing penalties on those who disseminate these secrets outside authorised channels is another indicator of illegal or illegitimate actions or events.

Authoritarian regimes, murderous military organisations, human rights breaching spy agencies, polluting or corrupt organisation, mind control religious cults, and many more examples are available where their ability to continue with the illegal or illegitimate actions or to hide past events all must utilise secrecy and impose punishment on leakers to ensure that secrecy.

WikiLeaks destroyed that ability. Anonymous leaking of illegal or illegitimate actions or events destroys the ability of corrupt organisations to continue being corrupt.

That undermines their authority and control. And that’s what WikiLeaks introduced to the world — a mechanism and technology that was as pivotal to educating, enlightening, and promoting corrective action as was previously achieved by the creation of Gutenberg’s printing press.

WikiLeaks destroyed the masters in virtually every realm by providing the means to expose knowledge worldwide. The genie was out of the bottle.

Imagine the master’s anger.

A drastic response

WikiLeaks’ threat to the powerful was recognised and every effort was, and is, being made to criminalise anonymous leaking, which would be akin to criminalising Gutenberg’s printing press, but there is not much chance this criminalisation will succeed.

Their strategy however, as exposed in a document leaked by WikiLeaks, outlined how WikiLeaks uses trust by protecting the anonymity and identity of leakers and concluded that damaging or destroying this trust would deter leaking; defame Assange and WikiLeaks to kill the threat posed by anonymous leaking.

For 12 years, since 2008, that is exactly what powerful organisations, powerful media and government, powerful military and corrupt corporations have been doing. They are trying to destroy the public’s trust in Julian Assange and, by so doing, destroying the trust in WikiLeaks and ensuring this mechanism of educating the world fails.

Slowly, instance by instance, the malicious and deceitful smears of Julian Assange’s character have been exposed for what they are; an effort to destroy trust in a system of anonymous leaking that will educate everyone. As an example, on Thursday, August 8, 2019, at an event in a pub in Sydney, Mark Davis, a multi-Walkley award winning video journalist destroyed the smear that Assange was cavalier; cavalier that is about the risk of death of informants whose names appeared in documents in one of the sets of releases.

Davis said that, not only was Assange quite worried about the risk, but that The Guardian and New York Times journalists showed little if any worry. The video is here. It is quite remarkable.

As well as these smears, numerous torturous actions were visited on Assange, aimed at achieving not just his discrediting but also to break him mentally and physically.

Assault on human dignity

The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, recently wrote a damning articlepublished on the United Nations Human Rights website describing the situation in detail and comments, “In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law,” Melzer said. “The collective persecution of Julian Assange must end here and now!”.

Sydney based Clinical Psychologist Lissa Johnson has also written about the treatment of Julian Assange ( link ) and the complicit actions of many who turn a blind eye.

“At this democratic crossroads, although establishment media have signalled their reluctance to support Espionage Act charges, in the knowledge they could be next, many nevertheless appear willing to act as instigators of torture, inciting publics to morally disengage, so that states can continue persecuting Julian Assange,” wrote Johnson. “Every act of ‘journalism’ that buries crucial information, and every utterance that vilifies or dehumanises Julian Assange, or sanitises his abuse, is complicit.. “.

Bring Julian Assange home

It’s time to bring Julian Assange home. Torturing and punishing him has never been legitimate and serves absolutely no purpose.

It’s time to recognise that anonymous leaking is here to stay and promote the world changing benefits that this system of mass education will deliver.

How can I be sure anonymous leaking is here to stay? Like Gutenberg’s printing press, WikiLeaks is not a one-off unit, it is a model for how to approach and overcome an issue. Many printing presses were built after Gutenberg revealed the concept and they were soon powered, automated and churning out printed material in huge volumes.

The same has happened with Julian Assange’s concept of a mechanism and technologies that can support anonymous leaking. A group called The Freedom of The Press Foundation, founded among others by Daniel Ellsberg, the man famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers that exposed the lies about the War in Vietnam, created a freely available WikiLeaks-like system called SecureDrop that is now in use by many news organisations.

And a number of these SecureDrop implementations are multi-national and so shield the recipient from AFP-style raids as they exist out there … somewhere … out of AFP and Australian authority reach … out of the reach of any other nation attempting to clamp down on anonymous leaking.

The WikiLeaks style anonymous leaking genie is out of the bottle and is not going back in.

Vive la revolution!  https://www.michaelwest.com.au/media-dead-silent-as-wikileaks-insider-explodes-the-myths-around-julian-assange/

 

August 17, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | civil liberties, investigative journalism, Reference | Leave a comment

Church Rock America’s Forgotten Nuclear Sacrifice Zone

Church Rock, America’s Forgotten Nuclear Disaster, Is Still Poisoning Navajo Lands 40 Years Later. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne8w4x/church-rock-americas-forgotten-nuclear-disaster-is-still-poisoning-navajo-lands-40-years-later      Residents say they’ve been ignored even as they struggle with contaminated water and worry about having children.  By Samuel Gilbert; photos by Ramsay de Give, Aug 12 2019, 
Early in the summer of 1979, Larry King, an underground surveyor at the United Nuclear Corporation’s Church Rock Uranium mine in New Mexico, began noticing something unusual when looking at the south side of the tailings dam. That massive earthen wall was responsible for holding back thousands of tons of toxic water and waste produced by the mine and the nearby mill that extracted uranium from raw ore. And as King saw, there were “fist-sized cracks” developing in that wall. He measured them, reported them to his supervisors, and didn’t think anything more of it.

A few weeks later, at 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1979, the dam failed, releasing 1,100 tons of uranium waste and 94 million gallons of radioactive water into the Rio Puerco and through Navajo lands, a toxic flood that had devastating consequences on the surrounding area.

“The water, filled with acids from the milling process, twisted a metal culvert in the Puerco,” according to Judy Pasternak’s book Yellow Dirt: A Poisoned Land and the Betrayal of the Navajos. “Sheep keeled over and died, and crops curdled along the banks. The surge of radiation was detected as far away as Sanders, Arizona, fifty miles downstream.” According to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission report,  radioactivity levels in the Puerco near the breached dam were 7,000 times that of what is allowed in drinking water.

The heavily contaminated water flowed over the river banks, creating radioactive pools. “There were children up and down the river playing in those stagnant pools, and they were deadly poisonous,” Jorge Winterer, a doctor with Indian Health Service in Gallup, New Mexico, said after the spill.

Earlier this year, standing in his yard next to an old Chevy, King pointed in the direction of the now dry Rio Puerco. “It came right through there,” said King. The unleashed river of waste had flowed through his family’s land just a half-mile from his house. “I remember the terrible odor and the yellowish color of the water.” He recalls seeing an elderly woman who had burned her feet crossing the Puerco while watering her sheep that day.

King still lives on the family land, two miles downstream of the rebuilt dam in the Church Rock chapter of the Navajo Nation. His home is surrounded by a beautiful, unforgiving landscape of red rock cliffs, a scattering of Navajo residences and, if you look closely, fencelines with KEEP OUT signs marking the numerous abandoned uranium sites.

Forty years later, the Church Rock spill remains the largest single largest accidental release of radioactivity in U.S. history, worse in terms of total radiation than that of the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island and second in world history only to the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, both of which have loomed much larger in the cultural imagination. The effects of the spill have lingered for an entire generation: In 2007, the Church Rock Uranium Mining Project found widespread contamination of drinking water sources in the Church Rock area.

Navajo residents say they have not been given the attention given to other victims of nuclear accidents, even as they remain under the catastrophe’s long shadow, dealing with poisoned livestock and ongoing health problems amid other aftereffects. “We have never been a priority,” said King. “Forty years after the spill and nothing has been done.”

“Our generation is afraid of having children,” said Faith Baldwin, who grew up on the Navajo nation surrounded by abandoned uranium mines. “Cancer runs in our family but it shouldn’t. Cancer, diabetes were nonexistent in Navajo rez.”

During the Cold War, Navajo lands provided much of the raw material for the burgeoning nuclear industry. From 1944 to 1986 some 30 million tons of uranium ore were extracted from mines, but as demand for uranium decreased the mines closed, leaving over a thousand contaminated sites, few of which have been cleaned up.

The Church Rock Chapter has some 20 such contaminated uranium sites, including the mine where King worked. Navajo workers at these places were often poorly paid, underprotected, and uninformed about the danger of radiation exposure. And even before the spill, King said, UNC would routinely pump uranium-contaminated water from the mine into the Puerco, turning the seasonal wash into a toxic “man-made stream.” According to a 1994 report by the U.S. Geological Survey on levels of radioactive elements in the Rio Puerco and Little Colorado River basins, “at least 300 times more uranium and 6 times more total gross alpha activity were released by day-to-day pumping from the underground mines than was released by the spill.”

As a child King remembers playing in the dry Puerco wash, its banks often coated with a “yellowish slime.” And ranchers used the Puerco to water their livestock.

Residents couldn’t have known that the Church Rock dam was at risk of rupturing, but there’s evidence that the United Nuclear Corporation did. King wasn’t the first to notice cracks in the dam: An Army Corps of Engineers report would later find that UNC was aware of the cracks as early as 1977, two years before the breach. That report concluded that UNC failed to properly reinforce the tailings dam, ignored advice from its own engineering consultant that might have prevented the coming disaster, and did not report the cracks to regulators.

“The company was remiss in not heading the problem off,” said Chris Shuey, director of the Uranium Impact Assessment Program at the Southwest Research and Information Center, an organization providing information to the public about the impacts of energy development and resource extraction. Shuey said that UNC failed to repair cracks in the dam while simultaneously overfilling the uranium mill’s toxic tailing ponds that were being held back by that cracking wall.

The cleanup process after the spill was also lacking. Only 1 percent of solid radioactive waste was removed, according to Paul Robinson, the research director at the Southwest Research and Information Center, and no compensation for the nearby residents was provided. In contrast, those affected by the Three Mile Island disaster were paid thanks to the company that operated that plant and its insurers.

“Governments took meaningful measures to deal with the Three Mile Island accident,” said Eric Jantz, a lawyer from the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, “while neither the federal nor New Mexico governments have taken any steps to remediate the Church Rock spill even after 40 years.”

As time went on, the impacts of uranium exposure became more evident to residents. King watched as his former mine coworkers died early deaths. Community members complained of health problems that prior to the entrance of the uranium industry were foreign: kidney disease, bone cancer, and lung cancer afflicting non-smokers.

According to King, the only warnings about radioactivity were a few signs telling residents not to water their livestock in the wash. UNC’s cleanup efforts consisted of hiring some temporary workers to shovel waste from the wash into five-gallon buckets and haul it away, according to Colleen Keane, who made a documentary about the aftermath of the spill called The River That Harms.

In the early 90s, King joined the Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining (ENDAUM), a grassroots organization fighting against new uranium projects and trying to mitigate the negative impacts of mining operations. Through that work, King began hearing troubling stories from nearby Red Water Pond Road, a small community sandwiched between three uranium sites where residents “unwittingly used water from contaminated wells to drink, bathe, and hydrate their livestock,” according to a 2017 Reveal article.

“Their sheep were born hairless… like baby rats,” said King. There were also the stories of butchered animals whose insides had turned a sickly yellow. A few years back, one of King’s neighbors killed a sheep. Instead of white, the stomach fat was yellow, “more yellow than those happy faces,” said King, pointing to a stuffed smiley face pinned above his couch. “They got concerned and decided to butcher another one. Pretty soon there was a pile of carcasses, all the same… They burned the whole thing.”

he health impacts of the spill on residents remain poorly understood, with only a few authoritative heath studies having been conducted.

One of the few government studies that came out after the spill did limited testing on both residents (six in total) and livestock. The resulting 1983 report from the New Mexico government, based on Centers for Disease Control (CDC) tests, concluded that Rio Puerco water “may be hazardous if used over several years as the primary source of drinking water, livestock water or irrigation water.” The report goes on to state that “the severity of these hazards is not well known at the time.”

But since then, it’s become more obvious that the spill has had long-lasting and serious effects. In 2015, Tommy Rock, a doctoral student of earth science, uncovered uranium contamination in Rio Puerco water in Sanders, a town in eastern Arizona, by looking at tests stretching back to 2003. “The Church rock spill was the single most likely cause,” he said. “For decades people were unknowingly drinking poisoned tap water.” The water company did not report the contamination to residents, and after Rock’s findings a new company took over operations and is drawing on a different well.

For many residents, the spill has come to embody the broader toxic legacy of the uranium industry on the indigenous lands of the West. According to the EPA, there are over 500 abandoned uranium mines, mill sites, and waste piles on Navajo Nation land that continue to contaminate water, soil, livestock and housing.

“The Church Rock spill symbolizes the governmental and societal indifference to the impacts of uranium development on Indigenous lands,” said Jantz. “The Church Rock spill is the third largest nuclear accident after Fukushima and Chernobyl, and the largest in the US in terms of radiation released, but nobody knows about it.”

“Three Mile Island had more coverage and people were compensated right away,” said King. “I always say we don’t get the same attention because we live in impoverished native community… We live in a sacrifice zone.”

August 13, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | health, incidents, indigenous issues, Reference, USA | 2 Comments

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