Militarisation of Science and Nuclear Policy
Militarisation of Science and Nuclear Policy
Web Newswire April 1, 2009 <!–
–> Dhirendra Kumar – “………………………………..Pro-nuclear pundits have, however, claimed that the N-power programme is now a peaceful civil industrial activity, eco-friendly, and necessary for the country’s energy requirement for futuristic development. Also that the engineering of nuclear reactors had reached high levels of safety of “one in the millionth” chance of an accident or radiation leaks. If that were the case, our civic administration and population around nuclear establishments should be provided with possible risks warnings and as with normal industrial activities, the public should be provided with adequate Insurance coverage against radiation damage and injury. Radiation accidents should be covered in Insurance Policies. Presently all Insurance Policies carry a special “ exclusion” clause that the policy excludes any radiation damage to life and property…………………
……………..Science and Public Policy principles cannot and must not be ignored in formulating the nuclear power policy. Political expediency, and narrow chauvinistic aspiration to have the Bombs must not be the basis of Science policy……………..
…………….the fission process suffers from genuine technological infirmities resulting from radiation and there is no fail-safe reactor system to guarantee absolute safety for our oncoming generations. Notwithstanding the Right to Information Act, the Department of Atomic Energy is free from any public and parliamentary scrutiny…………
………………..There is no constitutional protection for a whistleblower or informer who dare to report any radiation leaks or nuclear accident.Concerned scientists’ opposition to nuclear power primarily centers on how and how soon N- technology can resolve problem of waste disposal. Sufficient scientific data exist to indicate potential biological hazards from actinides, including potential genetic effects of exposure and high probability of migration of radioactivity through the food chain……………
……………..Technical problems of de-commissioning of dead reactors and the long-term waste storage cannot be ignored. For, to keep the large amount of radioactive waste material would requ
Militarisation of Science and Nuclear Policy | webnewswire.com
NBRI’s radioactive waste being released in Gomti? –
NBRI’s radioactive waste being released in Gomti? THE TIMES OF INDIA 2 Apr 2009, 0215 hrs IST, Neha Shukla, TNN LUCKNOW: Could NBRI be dumping radioactive
waste in Gomti directly through its sewage system? Knowing that radioactive material can induce
cancer, birth defects and infertility in humans directly exposed to it, releasing it in Gomti is a huge big ecological disaster. A Bareilly-based NGO, Shree Mahalaxmi Aushadhiya Paudha Sanrakshan Vikas Samiti, has accused NBRI of polluting Gomti. It filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the high court claiming NBRI is illegally discharging radioactive elements in the river
NBRI’s radioactive waste being released in Gomti? – Lucknow – Cities – The Times of India
Pro nuclear push in US Senate
Help Stop Pro-Nuke Budget Amendments NOW!
March 31, 2009
They’re at it again! And we have to act again–now!
The U.S. Senate is currently debating President Obama’s FY 2010 budget on the Senate floor.
A small group of Senators, led by Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsay Graham (R-SC), is preparing to introduce a number of pro-nuclear amendments intended to support still more subsidies to the nuclear industry. Other Senators involved are Crapo, Brownback, Voinovich, and Vitter.
One amendment we’ve seen would allow money to be shifted around in the budget if the nuclear industry can get $50 billion in new loan guarantees later. Another would allow money to be shifted around if pro-nuclear boosters are successful in getting more R&D money for Generation IV reactors. Another would do the same if construction of a reprocessing facility were authorized. These amendments are intended to make it easier for nuclear backers to try again to boost nuclear spending once the budget bill is enacted.
Please call your Senators–NOW--and urge them to vote against any and all amendments to the budget bill that would pave the way for additional nuclear subsidies. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121.
And please send your Senators an e-mail on these amendments by clicking here.
And please help us pay for this ongoing campaign by making your donation here. Your contributions of any size are gratefully appreciated, and enable us to continue doing this work.
Spread the word–post this Alert everywhere!
Thanks for all you do,
Michael Mariotte
Nuclear Information and Resource Service
As CT Radiation Accumulates, Cancer Risk May Rise
As CT Radiation Accumulates, Cancer Risk May RiseThose who have the most scans over a lifetime face greatest risk, experts sayP osted March 31, 2009
By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay ReporterTUESDAY, March 31 (HealthDay News) — Cumulative exposure to radiation from CT scans can increase the risk for cancer by as much as 12 percent, Harvard University researchers report……………………………people who are having a lot of CTs need to think more carefully and talk with their doctor to determine whether additional scans add value to their care because the risks can add up over time, he said. “We found cancer risks up to 12 percent” higher for people who had 38 scans, he said.
The report is published in the April issue of Radiology.
As CT Radiation Accumulates, Cancer Risk May Rise – US News and World Report
NIGER: Desert residents pay high price for lucrative uranium mining | Economy Environment Health & Nutrition Conflict Water & Sanitation | Feature
NIGER: Desert residents pay high price for lucrative uranium mining IRIN 1 April 09 DAKAR, – After a visit in late March from French President Nicholas Sarkozy to Niger, residents in the uranium-exporting desert country continue questioning whether AREVA, a company primarily owned by the French government, will honour its promise to protect communities from mining hazards.
Studies and residents’ testimonies have pointed to health and environmental dangers from mining operations owned and operated by both AREVA’s subsidiaries and the Niger government…………………… The AREVA majority-owned mine called COMINAK (Mining Company of Akouta) commissioned an environmental study of its operations in Arlit in 2006, which reported that the number of deaths linked to respiratory infections was twice as high in the mining town (16 percent) as in the rest of the country.
Arlit’s population is 110,000.
“The wind carries dust contaminated with the long-lasting radium [time required for it to lose toxicity is more than 1,600 years] and lead…Samples taken from 5km within site…Sandstorms [and] atmospheric waste from mines could be aggravating factors for pulmonary [illnesses] in the region,” the researchers wrote in COMINAK’s environmental study. ………………. Radioactive waste – possibly used in road construction – may be responsible for the abnormally high levels of radiation, according to CRIIRAD. In 2007 CRIIRAD researchers wrote that radiation levels were up to 100 times above average in front of the AREVA-funded hospital near the COMINAK mine…………………… But environmental studies carried out by CRIIRAD and Sherpa in 2005 in mining communities showed water radiation levels up to 110 times higher than World Health Organization (WHO) safe drinking water standards in industrial areas
Europe Won’t Buy Into Nuclear Power Until Waste Problem Is Solved
Europe Won’t Buy Into Nuclear Power Until Waste Problem Is Solved THE BUSINESS INSIDER Jay Yarow|Mar. 31, 2009, The renaissance of the nuclear power industry appears to be in a holding pattern. The two big problems: Lack of funding for the expensive construction of the reactors, and public skepticism about nuclear waste.
EE News attended a two-day nuclear energy conference last week and reported that Ute Blohm-Hieber, head of nuclear energy and waste management at the European Commission, agreed that waste is the “Achilles’ heel of the nuclear industry.” What’s interesting is that the news org didn’t have any word from the conference of workable solutions to the problem.
Europe Won’t Buy Into Nuclear Power Until Waste Problem Is Solved
Nearly $2 billion for Hanford cleanup
Nearly $2 billion for Hanford cleanup seattlepi.com By SHANNON DININNYASSOCIATED PRESS WRITERRICHLAND, Wash. — The Department of Energy plans to spend about $2 billion in stimulus money to speed some of the cleanup at south-central Washington’s highly contaminated Hanford nuclear reservation………………..The extra $2 billion equals what the federal government typically spends cleaning up Hanford each year……………………53 million gallons of radioactive brew, were left behind in 177 underground tanks. Some of those tanks are known to have leaked into the aquifer, threatening the neighboring Columbia River, and 144 tanks remain to be emptied.
Anti-nuclear groups fear danger at new reactor
Anti-nuclear groups fear danger at new reactor Mar 28 2009 by Darren Devine, Western Mail ANTI-NUCLEAR campaigners have warned a type of uranium that is up to 15% more radioactive and has to be stored on site for 100 years will be used, should a new Welsh plant get the go-ahead.The warning came as the Government’s deadline for nominations for sites to house a new generation of nuclear plants passes on Tuesday.The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which owns Wales’ only nuclear power station at Wylfa, on Anglesey, has already indicated it intends to nominate the site as suitable for a new facility.But the Wales Anti-Nuclear Alliance and Anglesey group Pawb warned that the only two firms left in the bidding process to build and run the new plants intend to use so-called “high burn-up uranium”.The two firms hoping to build the new nuclear sites are US company Westinghouse Electric and Areva of France.
WalesOnline – News – Wales News – Anti-nuclear groups fear danger at new reactor
A little insight into uranium
A little insight into uranium – Marketplace 27 march 09 – Interview with Tom Zoellner,”………………………….the Atomic Energy Commission gave these fantastic bonuses for prospectors and minors to go out into the American southwest and dig up as much of it as they could. This amounted to the last, kind of, gold rush in American history. And on the other side of the planet the Soviets were up to the same thing…………………………This is a really fascinating market, and talk about volatility. We’ve seen the price go up to 135 bucks a pound. It’s tied to perceptions of supply and demand. It’s tied to, most importantly, the prognosis for worldwide enthusiasm for nuclear power. And now with the president giving a signal that the United States is not going to rely on nuclear power as a short-term energy solution, this price is most likely going to drop further……………………………..what do you suppose the future of the uranium market is, at least in the short term? Zoellner: Dismal. Wall Street has consistently refused to finance the construction of new nuclear power and this has been the reality since the early ’80s.
Bill Would Stop Uranium Mining Near Grand Canyon National Park
Bill Would Stop Uranium Mining Near Grand Canyon National Park
FLAGSTAFF, Arizona, January 26, 2009 (ENS) – Congressman Raul Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat, has reintroduced legislation prohibiting new uranium claims, exploration, and mining across one million acres of public lands watersheds surrounding Grand Canyon National Park.The lands covered by the bill are the last remaining public lands not protected from new uranium development around the park, which extends for 277 miles along the Colorado River in Arizona and receives some five million visitors a year.
The bill protects the Tusayan Ranger District of the Kaibab National Forest south of the canyon, the Kanab Creek watershed north of the park, and House Rock Valley, between Grand Canyon National Park and Vermilion Cliffs National Monument.
………………….”Uranium mining poses one of the greatest risks to Grand Canyon National Park in decades,” said Roger Clark of the Grand Canyon Trust. “It threatens to contaminate park waters with radioactive waste, poses public-health problems for local residents and downstream communities dependent upon the Colorado River, and endangers the park’s unique ecosystems.”
Bill Would Stop Uranium Mining Near Grand Canyon National Park
Cleanup agencies looking for more money as Hanford work continues
Cleanup agencies looking for more money as Hanford work continues Jan 26, 2009
Komo News By SHANNON DININNY, Associated Press
RICHLAND, Wash. (AP) – Each year, the federal government spends roughly $2 billion to rid the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site of toxic and radioactive waste………………………..The federal government created Hanford in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. Today, it is the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site, with cleanup costs expected to top $50 billion…………………Even more challenging in recent months: finding the money to complete the work and meet legal deadlines for cleanup.The Energy Department has said it will miss 23 deadlines this year because there is insufficient money in the 2009 budget. Now, some U.S. senators are pushing the Obama administration to spend stimulus money to clean up not just Hanford, but all Cold War-era sites……………….In 1989, the state and federal government signed the Tri-Party Agreement to establish legal deadlines for completing all phases of the cleanup. Twenty years later, the two sides are embroiled in a lawsuit over missed deadlines and inadequate funding.
Nuclear plant foes shift from environmentalists to consumer groups
Nuclear plant foes shift from environmentalists to consumer groups
By DON NORFLEET The Fulton Sun Jan 26, 2009 Other than balancing the state’s budget during a recession, AmerenUE’s plan to build a second reactor at the Callaway Nuclear Plant is considered by many as the biggest issue facing the current session of the Missouri General Assembly.The plant expansion, estimated to cost from $6 to $9 billion, would be the single most expensive construction project in Missouri’s history.
Unlike the first nuclear reactor to be constructed in Missouri, opposition to the second nuclear reactor at the Callaway Nuclear Plant has come more from consumer groups than anti-nuclear activists and environmentalists.
Worker guilty in bid to sell France nuke secrets | U.S. | Reuters
Worker guilty in bid to sell France nuke secrets
WASHINGTON (Reuters) 26 Jan 09 – A nuclear industry worker who tried to sell uranium enrichment technology to NATO ally France pleaded guilty on Monday to illegally disclosing restricted information, the Justice Department said.
Roy Lynn Oakley, who worked at a facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee that had formerly been used to produce highly enriched uranium, sought to sell equipment and information for $200,000 to representatives of the French government in 2006, according to his plea agreement with federal prosecutors………………….had been told in a security briefing he was given by his employer Bechtel Jacobs that “a number of nations including France” would be interested in buying parts and information stored at the complex.
The pieces of equipment he tried to sell were related to an advanced “gaseous diffusion” process for enriching uranium. Highly-enriched uranium is a fuel used in nuclear weapons.
The Oak Ridge facility was previously operated by the U.S. Department of Energy and is now run by environmental cleanup contractor Bechtel Jacobs.
Worker guilty in bid to sell France nuke secrets | U.S. | Reuters
Foreign Policy In Focus | Anti-nuclear Nuclearism
Anti-nuclear Nuclearism
Foreign Policy in Focus Darwin BondGraham and Will Parrish | January 12, 2009
“……………………As a policy, anti-nuclear nuclearism is designed to ensure U.S. nuclear and military dominance by rhetorically calling for what has long been derided as a naïve ideal: global nuclear disarmament. Unlike past forms of nuclearism, it de-emphasizes the offensive nature of the U.S. arsenal. Instead of promoting the U.S. stockpile as a strategic deterrence or umbrella for U.S. and allied forces, it prioritizes an aggressive diplomatic and military campaign of nonproliferation. Nonproliferation efforts are aimed entirely at other states, especially non-nuclear nations with suspected weapons programs, or states that can be coerced and attacked under the pretense that they possess nuclear weapons or a development program (e.g. Iraq in 2003).
Effectively pursuing this kind of belligerent nonproliferation regime requires half-steps toward cutting the U.S. arsenal further, and at least rhetorically recommitting the United States to international treaties such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It requires a fig leaf that the United States isn’t developing new nuclear weapons, and that it is slowly disarming and de-emphasizing its nuclear arsenal. By these means the United States has tried to avoid the charge of hypocrisy, even though it has designed and built newly modified weapons with qualitatively new capacities over the last decade and a half. Meanwhile, U.S. leaders have allowed for and even promoted a mass proliferation of nuclear energy and material, albeit under the firm control of the nuclear weapons states, with the United States at the top of this pile.
Many disarmament proponents were elated last year when four extremely prominent cold warriors — George P. Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn — announced in a series of op-eds their commitment to “a world free of nuclear weapons.” Strange bedfellows indeed for the cause. Yet the fine print of their plan, published by the Hoover Institute and others since then, represents the anti-nuclear nuclearist platform to a tee. It’s a conspicuous yet merely rhetorical commitment to a world without nuclear weapons. These four elder statesmen have said what many U.S. elites have rarely uttered: that abolition is both possible and desirable. However, the anti-nuclear posture in their policy proposal comes to bear only on preventing non-nuclear states from going nuclear, or else preventing international criminal conspiracies from proliferating weapons technologies and nuclear materials for use as instruments of non-state terror. In other words, it’s about other people’s nuclear weapons, not the 99% of materials and arms possessed by the United States and other established nuclear powers…………………….Unfortunately the Obama administration is likely to pursue this Orwellian policy of anti-nuclear nuclearism rather than taking a new, saner direction.
Nuclear-related programs cost US 52 bln dollars in 2008: report
Nuclear-related programs cost US 52 bln dollars in 2008: report 13 Jan 09 WASHINGTON (AFP) — The United States spent at least 52 billion dollars on nuclear-related programs last year, most of it to maintain and refurbish its arsenal of nuclear weapons, a report said Monday.The report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said the estimate was pieced together from publicly available documents because the government does not track overall spending on nuclear-related programs.
“Total appropriations for nuclear weapons and weapons-related programs in fiscal year 2008 were at least 52.4 billion dollars, according to the best available data,” the report said.It said the Defense Department’s costs of deploying and maintaining nuclear weapons was a partial estimate, and therefore may be too low.Even so, the report said, it was far larger than most officials would acknowledge.”About 55.5 percent (29.1 billion dollars) of all nuclear expenses go toward upgrading, operating, and sustaining the US nuclear arsenal,” the report said.”These costs will increase significantly if the DOE’s (Department of Energy’s) proposals to rebuild the nuclear weapons production complex and resume the production of nuclear weapons are approved and funded,” it said…….………..”sends a message to the rest of the world that the United States considers preserving and enhancing its nuclear options more important than preventing nuclear proliferation.”
AFP: Nuclear-related programs cost US 52 bln dollars in 2008: report
1 This Month
26 April – Chernobyl: Inside the Meltdown airs on National Geographic on Sunday 26th April from 4pm
29 April – Nuclear Expert Webinar #1 – Radiation Impacts on Families with Mary Olson and Cindy Folkers
- 12:15 PM MT – 1:45 PM MT
- Location: Virtual – REGISTER TODAY
4 May -West Suburban Peace Coalition to discuss Iran war at May Educational Forum
Monday, May 4, 7:00 – 8:00 PM Central Standard Time
Title: : How Trump’s Narrative Tries to Shape the Reality of the War on Iran.
Contact Walt Zlotow, zlotow@hotmail.com 630 442 3045 for further information
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
Pine Ridge Uranium is the real threat, not Tehran- Tell Burgum: Stop the Extraction.
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
-
Archives
- April 2026 (346)
- March 2026 (251)
- February 2026 (268)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
- November 2025 (359)
- October 2025 (376)
- September 2025 (257)
- August 2025 (319)
- July 2025 (230)
- June 2025 (348)
- May 2025 (261)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
nuclear-news 