#NuclearCommissionSAust plans for radioactive trash dumping on Aboriginal land: a confusing issue

SA Royal Commission: Nuke waste dump on Aboriginal land? Really?, Independent Australia Noel Wauchope 23 October 2015 THIS IS clearly a terribly important question that needs discussion. When and if theNuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission (RC) ultimately results in establishing a nuclear waste import business in South Australia, it is a certain bet that it will be on Aboriginal land.

There are relatively few published submissions from Aboriginal people and organisations. However, these cannot be easily lumped into pro or anti nuclear boxes. There are some passionately anti nuclear ones. There are no passionately pro nuclear ones, but there’s more than a hint of support in the two submissions that take an apparently neutral stance. The RC has allowed Aboriginal people to choose whether or not their submissions are published.

There might be several unpublished submissions from Aboriginal people and/or organisations. What would the writers stand to lose if these were published?

A pro nuclear submission might evoke condemnation from environmentalists and other Aboriginal groups. This fact is recognised in the submission by Maralinga Tjarutja and Yalata Community Incorporated: …..

Of the six Aboriginal organisations that sent published submissions, only two take a neutral stance that could be interpreted as (vaguely) pro nuclear. These are Maralinga Tjarutja and Yalata Community Incorporated and the Alinytjara Wilurara Natural Resources Management Board……All the same, their [Maralinga] submission is by no means a ringing endorsement of the plans to expand the nuclear industry in South Australia. ….

Even within their [Alinytjara] determinedly neutral stance, their submission clearly criticises the RC:….

The remaining four submissions from Aboriginal people and/or organisations are clearly anti nuclear……….

Even though the Royal Commission has made efforts to communicate with Aboriginal people, the vast majority of those who would be affected by a nuclear waste dump are not well informed and not involved in the decision-making. It remains a confusing issue for the Australian community at large, but even more so, for the Aboriginal people of South Australia. https://independentaustralia.net/environment/environment-display/sa-royal-commission-nuke-waste-dump-on-aboriginal-land-really-,8294

1.This month

For international news go to https://nuclear-news.net/

Climate change – the global emergency – theme for August 2017

The Uninhabitable Earth, Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think. By David Wallace-Wells

To read an annotated version of this article, complete with interviews with scientists and links to further reading, click here.

I. ‘Doomsday’ Peering beyond scientific reticence.

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.

The Doomsday vault is fine, for now:……..

In between scientific reticence and science fiction is science itself. This article is the result of dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields and reflects hundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate change. What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they are our schedule……..http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html?utm_campaign=nym&utm_medium=s1&utm_source=fb

EVENTS

more info at Action Australia

Sign the Petition – No Dump!

8,9 & 10 September 2017 – Melbourne – Conference: War, Peace & Independence: Keep Australia out of US Wars

Antinuclear

Australian news, and some related international items