POWER POLITICS: West Virginia redefines dirty energy as “alternative”
POWER POLITICS: West Virginia redefines dirty energy as “alternative” FACING SOUTH 14 July 09 “………. In the recent legislative session, Gov. Joe Manchin (D) (in photo at right) championed and state lawmakers approved an energy portfolio standard bill requiring 25% of generation to come from “alternative and renewable” sources by 2025. But the new standard, which goes into effect this month, has defined “alternative” to include……………………… nuclear power, which releases radioactive pollution to the environment and also produces dangerous waste products.
The West Virginia Environmental Council head lobbyist Donald S. Garvin Jr. blasted the new standard in an op-ed:
No other state includes natural gas as a source of “alternative” energy. Nuclear energy is included by only a few, and they specify “advanced generation” nuclear facilities.
ISS – POWER POLITICS: West Virginia redefines dirty energy as “alternative”
A Look at Uranium Mining
A Look at Uranium Mining Texas Vox July 8, 2009 by Public Citizen Texas
“………………………There is one destructive aspect of nuclear power that public discourse tends to be especially silent on. Just as coal industry apologists brush over the enormous damage caused by coal mining, any discussion of nuclear is power is likely to be silent on the damage done by uranium mining.
The damage to human health associated with uranium mining is huge. Historically, uranium miners have had a significantly higher risks of developing small cell Carcinoma, which is a likely product of their exposure to Radon-222 — a cancer causing agent created by decaying uranium. The presence of Radon gas also makes uranium mines a very dangerous work environment.………………………..
Last year the French mining company Areva was nominated for a Public Eye Award (a recognition intended for companies who brought about the most social or ecological damage) by Pro Natura (Switzerland’s branch of Friends of The Earth), and the Berne Declaration development campaign. The nomination came from the company’s perceived failure to adequately disclose the risks associated with uranium mining to its workers in Niger, as well as neglecting to treat patients who are unable to pay at company hospitals. Workers also mentioned deaths caused by radioactive contamination of air and ground water.
Aside from the dangers of uranium exposure, mining projects also cause considerable damage to the local environments and to the health of people who live nearby.
A Look at Uranium Mining « TexasVox: The Voice of Public Citizen in Texas
Another Green World: Nuclear power? No point, says new report
Nuclear power? No point, says new report
Another Green World 12 july 09 In Nuclear Power? No Point! the Green Party’s spokesperson on trade and industry, Darren Johnson AM, reviews recent developments and argues that:a.. Nuclear power provides less than 4% of UK energy – which is far less than could be saved by energy-efficiency measures that would cut people’s fuel bills.b.. New nuclear stations will not help the fight against climate change because major CO2 reductions are needed in the next ten years. New nuclear power stations could not be built fast enough.c.. Massive investment in renewables could deliver the necessary short-term CO2 cuts – but “feeding cash to the nuclear delusion” could help starve the renewables industry of some of the investment and skilled personnel it needs to grow rapidly.d.. The nuclear industry’s current financial problems cast serious doubt on its ability to deliver new power stations anyway. Darren Johnson, who is currently chair of the London Assembly and Green Party candidate for Lewisham Deptford, said today:
“The industry that was going to produce electricity ‘too cheap to meter’ has landed us with massive costs for handling its dangerous waste. Now the nuclear industry can’t even give us a reliable quote for the cost of a power station. The current projects in Finland and France are experiencing safety concerns, long delays and big overspends.
“There’s no point expecting nuclear to solve the climate crisis, because new stations couldn’t be built fast enough to help achieve the big CO2 reductions we need to make in the next ten years – which mature renewables could deliver.
“There is no point even considering nuclear power, because demand-reduction measures could easily save far more power than nuclear could generate. And the latest studies argue convincingly that green energy sources with a European smart grid could provide all the power we need.”
Another Green World: Nuclear power? No point, says new report
Energy risk –
French power supply problems could hit UK COMMODITY RISK MANAGEMENT & TRADING Energy Risk News 10 July 2009 : London Unusually high temperatures last month put a third of France’s nuclear power stations out of action, forcing the country to import electricity from the UK. According to Chris Bowden, CEO of energy and carbon advisors Utilyx, the UK may face similar crises in years to come.Bowden says higher temperatures in summer periods can increase UK demand significantly because of increased use of air-conditioning. This, along with accidental and planned power plant outages, could “dramatically reduce” supply margin.”The UK must not become complacent and believe that France’s crisis call for electricity is limited to France alone,” says Bowden. “Nuclear power currently accounts for about a fifth of the UK’s total electricity generation so our own security of supply could also be at risk during hot weather.”
Energy risk – – risk management, trading, finance, commodities in the global energy market
Nuclear critics suspect hidden agenda in Sask. medical isotope plan
Nuclear critics suspect hidden agenda in Sask. medical isotope plan , July 10, 2009 CBC News Critics of nuclear development in Saskatchewan say a plan by the provincial government to supply medical isotopes may lead to more substantial nuclear facilities…………………………….
Jim Penna, a retired philosophy professor and a member of the Coalition for a Clean Green Saskatchewan, said there are ways of producing isotopes for medical diagnostics that do not require the construction of a nuclear reactor.
Penna said people should be wary of the motives behind the premier’s proposal. Penna said a plan for a research reactor may be the thin edge of the wedge leading to further expansion of the nuclear industry.
“That’s how it’s argued you see,” Penna told CBC News on Thursday. “They do talk about a research reactor … as one of the elements of a nuclear program for Saskatchewan. So this is a way of bringing about their nuclear agenda by piggybacking on the medical isotope issue.”…………………………….
Sandra Morin, environment critic for the Saskatchewan NDP, said Thursday that an economic feasibility study should be prepared, to demonstrate the project’s financial viability.
“We need a much more careful examination of just how much money will be put up by the Saskatchewan taxpayer and whether this is truly a feasible option for our province,” Morin said. “By all accounts, an isotope reactor simply doesn’t make sense from an economic standpoint so I would question the rush for the province to get involved in one.”
Morin also raised questions about one of the people closely involved in Saskatchewan’s pitch to the federal government, Richard Florizone.
Florizone, the vice-president of finance and resources at the University of Saskatchewan, is helping to prepare Saskatchewan’s proposal.
Florizone also chaired the province’s Uranium Development Partnership, the group appointed to look for ways to develop the uranium industry. Their report recommended building a research reactor that could produce medical isotopes.
Morin called the overlap of roles troublesome.
Nuclear critics suspect hidden agenda in Sask. medical isotope plan
The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board ruled that the Green Party of Florida and two other environmental groups could challenge Progress Energy’s plan for two new nuclear reactors. | Ocala.com | Star-Banner | Ocala, FL
Legal challenge to nuclear plant advances Environmental groups opposing Progress’ proposed Levy reactors may argue issues in court, board rules. Ocala.com By Fred Hiers
Friday, July 10, 2009Progress Energy’s road to building its proposed nuclear power plant in Levy County northwest of Dunnellon is becoming anything but smooth.
On Wednesday, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board – an arm of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission – ruled that the Green Party of Florida and two other environmental groups could challenge the utility company’s plan for two new nuclear reactors and had successfully raised major concerns about the plant’s potential environmental impact.
That means Progress Energy will have to argue its case about those environmental issues during a legal hearing, including in oral arguments
The other two environmental organizations that petitioned to be part of future hearings and had objections were the Nuclear Information and Resource Service and the Ecology Party of Florida.
The environmental groups had 12 areas of concern. The licensing board dismissed nine. The remaining three had to do with radioactive waste, how construction would affect the aquifer in the area and the plant’s use and disposal of salt water…………………………
The environmental groups also said the proposed plant should make better plans as to what it would do with its spent radioactive waste and have long-term storage strategies. The utility should also better explain its safety and security procedures for the waste.
The licensing board also agreed with the environmental groups that the utility company should better address the environmental impact of building its plant on a flood plain and its effect on the aquifer and wetlands.
Don’t nuke the climate
International campaign “Don’t nuke the climate” : we need your support
Please answer before the 12th of July 2009.
Register your group
The first partners In December 2009, at the next UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, it will be the world leaders’ duty to aim for an ambitious agreement regarding greenhouse gas emissions cut targets. They should also agree on a relevant budget to finance climate change mitigation and adaptation.Nuclear power has been kept outside of climate change mitigation mechanisms like CDM (Clean Development Mechanism) and JI (Joint Implementation) so far. However, some evidence shows that the nuclear lobby could be preparing its comeback at the next COP to have this dirty energy labeled as clean or carbon-free and thus benefit from new subsidies. Will our leaders let themselves be talked into financing a dangerous, costly and irrelevant technology, which would divert urgently needed money from real solutions to climate change?
This is why we now propose you to support the international campaign “Don’t nuke the climate” which will be initiated by the Réseau “Sortir du nucléaire” (French Network for Nuclear Phase-out). A campaign document will be edited at a large scale (several hundreds of thousand copies) by September 2009. It will include petition postcards to be signed by citizens, which will be gathered and then presented in Copenhagen during a media-oriented action. Beside, we will ask citizens to send us pictures to make a huge mosaic showing the face(s) of world citizens’ refusal of nuke as a solution to global warming.
We would highly appreciate to see your logo on this document and on the dedicated website, our aim being to distribute this campaign as broadly as possible, not only in France, but also in Europe and maybe further. Our last campaign on this topic, in year 2008, has already gathered 27 partners at a national level. However, the issue is global and requires international committment. We know some of you are already active on the issue of nukes and global warming, and hope this campaign could contribute in joining our efforts to allow the antinuclear voice to be heard even stronger in Copenhagen.Like already many organizations, do not hesitate to register your NGO as a partner of the campaign “Don’t nuke the climate”The writing work is in progress and your remarks will be welcomed.
Nuke plant blames maintenance problems for leak
Nuke plant blames maintenance problems for leak philly.com Jul. 9, 2009 The Associated PressLACEY TOWNSHIP, N.J. – Officials at a New Jersey nuclear power plant say a maintenance problem is to blame for a tritium leak this year.The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission released a statement explaining what operators of Lacey Township’s Oyster Creek plant say went wrong.A 1991 report indicated two pipes had been recoated. But a new analysis finds they were not completely recoated and were prone to corrosion.
Nuke plant blames maintenance problems for leak | AP | 07/09/2009
Swedish nuclear watchdog puts plant on probation amid safety concerns |
Swedish nuclear watchdog puts plant on probation amid safety concerns
Detsche Welle 9 July 09 After a series of incidents that could endanger the security at a nuclear plant in Sweden, officials in the Scandinavian country have called for new security measures.
The Swedish Radiation Safety Authority (SSM) has placed the Ringhals nuclear plant, in the southwest of the country, under special supervision after a series of incidents.
“The agency has on several occasions pointed out deficiencies that have been followed by measures from Ringhals, but the problems still remain,” said Swedish Radiation Safety Authority official Leif Karlsson……………
……………Sweden at one time had as many as 12 nuclear reactors in operation, but decommissioned two reactors at the Barseback plant in southern Sweden in an effort to cut back on nuclear energy. The current center-right government has announced that the country will continue relying on nuclear plants, disregarding a 1980 referendum in which Sweden decided to gradually phase them out.
Overweight Get More Radiation and Doctors Admit Ignorance to Damage Caused
Overweight Get More Radiation and Doctors Admit Ignorance to Damage Caused
NaturalNews.com July 08, 2009 by: Jane Jones “………………….Recently, it was uncovered that obese patients are receiving up to 4000 percent more exposure to radiation with each X-ray – and in the ambitious medical world, the number of X-rays people receive is also increasing. The increase of radiation exposure appears to be done on the basis of logic: more radiation is needed to get an accurate exposure due to the excess fat getting in the way.
While more radiation might actually help get a usable x-ray, the question of what damage it’s causing the patient is one an MIT doctor admits hasn’t even been looked at. The question of it being an acceptable risk has also been neglected.
We know that radiation is dangerous. We know that radiation even from X-rays is dangerous…………
……………..Resources:
Obese Get Higher Doses of Radiation for X-Rays
http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/2009063…
Radiation Damage
http://www.umm.edu/altmed/articles/…
http://www.naturalnews.com/026570_doctors_overweight_X-rays.html
Vattenfall sacks head of defective nuclear plant
Vattenfall sacks head of defective nuclear plant
Deutsche Welle 08.07.2009
Four days after a technical failure shut down a nuclear power station in northern Germany, operator Vattenfall admitted to having made a mistake, while Social Democrats and Green are urging a boycott.
Vattenfall admitted that a mistake had been made at the Kruemmel nuclear power station and confirmed that it had fired the plant manager. The Swedish operators said the head of the reactor had broken an agreement with German authorities to install discharge detectors on a transformer.
It was a short-circuit on one of the transformers that caused the Kruemmel plant to shut down last weekend, thus restricting power supplies across much of the city of Hamburg.
Vattenfall has now said it will not repair the electrical transformers, responsible for the supply of power to on-site machinery, but will replace them entirely. As a result, the reactor will not resume operations for several months.
The latest incident at Kruemmel, just one of many problems that have dogged the plant over the past years, has sparked furious political debate over the security of nuclear fuel technology.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4464985,00.html
Tactical Nuclear Weapons, the Menace No One Is Talking About
Politics Daily David Wood 8 July 07 “…………………………Presidents Obama and Medvedev, who agreed on the outlines of the treaty at their Moscow summit, seem to have overlooked thousands of nasty nuclear weapons bristling right under their noses in Europe: Russian and American tactical nukes. About 4,500 of these war-fighting weapons, mostly bombs and short-range missile warheads, are stored in Europe and in western Russia. They are not a subject of the strategic nuclear arms talks announced in Moscow. In fact, they are not part of any arms control treaty or negotiation.
The security of the facilities where they are stored, including underground U.S. bunkers across Western Europe, has come under question. The Russians have at least eight times as many of these weapons as the United States has deployed in Europe, an imbalance that a panel of senior American experts recently called “stark and worrisome.”
In the shifting geopolitics of post-Cold War Europe, tactical nuclear weapons play an increasingly important role in Russian military doctrine, a brute reminder of Russian power against the growing influence of the West along its borders. For instance, the Russians are working to fit tactical nuclear warheads onto submarine-launched cruise missiles, a weapon that “will play a key role” in Russian strategy, according to Vice Adm. Oleg Bursev of the Russian General Staff. “Their range and precision are gradually increasing,” he said this spring.
………………………….. These are bombs carried on ordinary jets, like F-16s, and mounted on short-range ballistic missiles. This class of weapons might still include the nuclear land mines and nuclear artillery shells that were deployed by the tens of thousands in Europe during the Cold War. The United States and Russia both say they’ve gotten rid of these weapons, but intelligence services on each side harbor doubts.
The U.S. tactical weapons, mostly B-61 thermonuclear bombs, are stored in underground vaults in Belgium, Holland, Germany, Italy, and Turkey, where they are under the control of U.S. Air Force munitions support squadrons.
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/07/08/tactical-nuclear-weapons-the-menace-no-one-is-talking-about/
Can Nuclear Power Take The Heat?
Can Nuclear Power Take The Heat? The New Republic -Bradford Plumer 7 July 09 Via Climate Progress, the London Times reports that France’s nuclear fleet is once again running into water and heat trouble during the summer……………………….These summer shutdowns are becoming more and more common, and don’t bode well for the future, given that temperatures in Europe have been creeping up faster than the global average, according to a recent European Environmental Agency report, and will almost certainly keep climbing as the world warms. Some countries, like France, Germany, and Spain, have responded to this problem in the past by overriding their own environmental laws and allowing plants to dump hotter water into the rivers—the downside is that this can cause considerable damage to river life.
Nor is this just Europe’s problem: In 2006, Exelon had to cut the power at a nuclear plant in Illinois when the Mississippi River got too warm to be used as cooling water. According to the recent NOAA synthesis report on climate-change impacts in the United States, one of the things we can expect to see across the country in the coming decades is a much greater frequency of hotter-than-90°F (32°C) days—precisely the point at which France’s plants keep running into trouble. Meanwhile, as the AP reported last year, if droughts become more frequent, that could mean additional trouble for nearly one-quarter of the nation’s nuclear plants.
Reprocessing is no solution
Reprocessing is no solution
Rutland Herald July 7, 2009 “………………The Bush administration began the new push for a Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. In 1979 a United States naval nuclear engineer and president, Jimmy Carter, ended this dangerous program.Reprocessing spent nuclear fuel was supposed to be one alternative to lots and lots of mining forever and forever. The biggest experiment in reprocessing was at Sellafield in Britain. In 2005, after decades of contamination and leaks and general spewing of horrible matter into the ocean, air, and land around the reprocessing plant, Sellafield was shut down because a bigger-than-usual leak of fuel dissolved in nitric acid —some tens of thousands of gallons — was discovered. It contained enough plutonium to make about 20 nuclear bombs.A nuclear dump site just six miles from the famous Champagne vineyards in France is leaking radioactive waste into the groundwater. According to the French nuclear safety authority, the “wall of a storage cell fissured” while concrete was being added to a recent layer of nuclear waste.It showed levels of radioactivity leaking from another dump site run by the same company in Normandy — at up to 90 times above European safety limits.That waste has seeped into underground water used by farmers, with contamination spreading into the countryside and threatening dairy production. The Champagne site will receive a total of 4,000 terabequerels of tritium — more than three times the amount of tritiumwaste as the dump site in Normandy.
Reprocessing is not a new idea. In fact, more than $40 billion has been spent globally on reprocessing technologies that have never become commercially successful. A 1996 report by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the costs of reprocessing and transmutation of irradiated fuel from waste produced by existing U.S. reactors alone easily could be more than $100 billion, in the addition to the cost of a geologic repository.
A new face of nuclear medicine
A new face of nuclear medicine Heart Institute makes own medical isotopes By Tom Spears, The Ottawa Citizen J uly 7, 2009 “…………………In the institute’s basement, there’s a machine with a name like a carnival ride — the cyclotron — that produces medical isotopes (radioactive atoms) without a nuclear reactor.
To anyone who has toured a nuclear reactor building, the contrast is startling. Reactors are huge machines in earthquake-proof buildings running 24 hours a day, surrounded by layer upon layer of security and shutdown systems, and with radioactive waste that will last for millennia.
They cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build (even the smallest ones), and the last pair built in Canada flunked their safety tests last year and therefore have never operated.
The cyclotron at the Heart Institute is a big metal box in a room that measures about eight by 10 metres. You can walk right up to it safely while it’s running.
At night, the staff just turn it off and go home.
This is a new face of nuclear medicine, making medical isotopes that will make pictures of the heart, brain, bones and so on.
De Kemp continues his explanation of the glowing blobs on a compu
1 This Month
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
of the week–London Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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