Dr Edwin Lyman at Nuclear Royal Commission, speaks on waste transport problems.

Dr Lyman’s evidence can be pretty heavy going for the non technical reader. First, he explained safety problems in standards for transportation casks for land or sea shipment of spent fuel, high-level radioactive waste and specially with materials like plutonium or plutonium oxide. These standards have not been updated over many decades, and the USA Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has not yet carried out tests intended to address this problem.

If a transport package of radioactive material is lost in the ocean, it could lead to significant long term contamination, if the package is not retrieved.

With increased transport, and speed of transport, of radioactive wastes, the risk of such accidents is increased, and the NRC would have confidence in the current standard for transporting wastes.

Apart from accidents, the other big danger is terrorism.

SA NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE ROYAL COMMISSION DR EDWIN LYMAN, Union of Concerned Scientists TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS ADELAIDE 7.30 AM, TUESDAY, 17 NOVEMBER 2015 DAY 23

The Commission’s first witness today, Dr Edwin Lyman, is a senior scientist in the global security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists in the United States. His areas of interests include nuclear proliferation, terrorism and nuclear power safety and security, and he’s published articles in a number of 5 journals and magazines on these topics. Dr Lyman is a member of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management and has given evidence before the US Congress and Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the NRC, on multiple occasions. 10 Prior to joining the Union of Concerned Scientists, Dr Lyman was president of the Nuclear Control Institute, the CI, in Washington, an organisation concerned with nuclear proliferation. The Commission calls Dr Edwin Lyman……..

The transcript of Dr Lyman’s interview can be read at http://nuclearrc.sa.gov.au/app/uploads/mp/files/videos/files/151117-topic-14-day-1-transcript-full.v5.pdf

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