Antinuclear

Willacy criticised Japan’s “nuclear village”, a club of politicians, scientists, journalists and business people who tightly control information about the atomic energy industry in Japan. Journalists and others who dare to disagree with the village-approved line risk being ostracised and ridiculed, Willacy wrote.

So I sought books by Japanese writers from outside “the village”, and found Fukushima Meltdown, by Takashi Hirose.

Even allowing for the possibility of a certain amount of overstatement – Hirose’s book is rather emotional behind its facts and figures – the descriptions of Japan’s 50-plus nuclear power plants make scary reading. Hirose itemises their locations relative to geological faults and volcanoes, their various levels of preparation for predictable disasters and their histories of accidents and problems.

In addition to the “normal” nuclear power plants (off-line since the Fukushima melt-downs), Japan also has a fast-breeder reactor with a terrible accident history, some reactors that use deadly plutonium as well as uranium for fuel and the Rokkasho Village nuclear fuel reprocessing facility. Continue reading →

Western Backtrack on Uranium Enrichment Killed Iran Deal    http://news.antiwar.com/2013/11/11/western-backtrack-on-uranium-enrichment-killed-iran-deal/ US, France Sought to Change Deal at Last Minute by Jason Ditz, November 11, 2013 More details continue to emerge on the disagreements that prevented an expected weekend pact between the P5+1 and Iran, with a last minute side conversation between Secretary of State John Kerry and his French counterpart Laurent Fabius apparently keeping it from continuing. Fabius demanded last second changes to the draft agreement, including removing a clause guaranteeing Iran’s right to civilian uranium enrichment. Kerry reportedly endorsed that demand.

Iran has, under its safeguards agreement, every right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes, and has insisted they are willing to limit that enrichment, but not abandon the right outright.

That already put the talks on shaky ground, and Fabius followed it up with a demand that Iran abandon the under construction Arak reactor, which runs on unenriched uranium. Between the two demands this amounted to a de facto demand to surrender their entire civilian nuclear program, but the US and France continued to insist on only minor sanction relief. At that point though, the deal was dead and everyone just decided to meet again later this month.

The delegates from Fiji and Samoa believe their nations do not get the support they need to conduct vital climate observations in the region.”In terms of climate change, up to 90 per cent of heat is absorbed by oceans, so understanding how the oceans behave is critical to understanding how the atmosphere will change,” says Neville Koop, a climatology advisor with the Samoan delegation.

Considering the huge marine areas that Pacific nations cover — Kiribati consists of 800 square kilometres of coral atolls spread over an area half the size of Europe — the poor observational capacity of island states creates a large gap in the global climate data set, he says.

Better oceanic and high altitude measurements, as well as more rudimentary metrics such as rainfall and atmospheric pressure are vital for producing more accurate climate models, Koop adds.

Furthermore, as the birthplace of the El Niño Southern Oscillation weather system that periodically warms the waters of the Pacific Ocean, this patch of ocean influences climates across Asia, Africa and the Americas, and so accurate observations are necessary to predict future changes, he says.

But with populations often in the tens of thousands, these states’ meteorological agencies can never hope to fulfill this vital task alone, Koop says. Some governments, such as the United Kingdom’s, are already working to increase the observational capacity in the Pacific, but a concerted international effort is needed to fully plug the data gaps, he says.