Investigative journalism lives! In this media climate of the 24 hr news cycle, and of journalists losing their jobs – it can still happen! This week:
McClatchy News Service’s Washington Bureau’s Rob Hotakainen, Lindsay Wise, Frank Matt and Samantha Ehlinger spent a year, over 100 interviews across USA, and analysing over 70 million records in a federal database obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. for this story: At least 33,480 American nuclear workers dead from radiation-caused illness
The Center For Public Integrity’s Adrian Levy documented the scandal of India’s nuclear industry , in India’s nuclear industry pours its wastes into a river of death and disease, and also India’s repression of activists who protest about its poor safety record.
AUSTRALIA
SOUTH AUSTRALIA NUCLEAR FUEL CHAIN ROYAL COMMISSION has gone very quiet, following its low key rural community propaganda meetings earlier this month. It’s getting ready to release findings in February. I note A couple of good Submissions. Aboriginal, environmental, public health groups produced a composite report on assessing the Commission:
The report raises serious concerns about the Royal Commission, from the unrepresentative and unbalanced composition of the Expert Advisory Committee, conflicts of interest, the Royal Commission’s unwillingness to correct factual errors, to a repeated pattern of pro-nuclear claims being uncritically accepted and promoted.
FEDERAL SEARCH FOR WASTE DUMP SITE for Lucas Heights’ returning nuclear wastes. Aboriginals near Alice Springs, and medical experts fight nuclear dump plan, but they’re up against complete stupidity! Even more stupid, the Shire of Leonora, Western Australia is enthusiastic for nuclear waste dump. Hill End community (NSW) not satisfied with MP John Cobb’s attitude to nuclear waste dump proposal. Lithgow, New South Wales, is very concerned about transport of radioactive trash.
WESTERN AUSTRALIA Yeelirrie uranium proposal poses genuine extinction threat.
QUEENSLAND Wangan and Jagalingou traditional owners continue to fight $16.5 billion Carmichael coal mine. Queensland Premier says “focused on solar and wind’ but also ‘committed to coal’
CLIMATE CHANGE. Prime Minister Turnbull returns from Paris Summit with the same old Abbott fossil-fuel pleasing policies, but with an unnerving jollity “great optimism and faith in humanity’s genius”.
RENEWABLE ENERGY new wind farms to go ahead as Turnbull removes barrier to Clean Energy investment. Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) funding new solar technology to reduce solar costs. In Australian Capital Territory panasonic home battery trial launched.
December 19, 2015
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
Christina reviews |
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Bill Fisher Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission – Submission – All Issues
Introduction I frequently make submissions to parliamentary enquiries on matters nuclear: most recently the Enquiry into Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament and the Enquiry into expansion of the Roxby mine. My submission is usually among the large majority (about 90%) opposed to uranium mining and export. The usual 90% majority is usually ignored! The 10% who are listened to are uranium industry representatives, governments and government departments, and a few scientists who are on the payroll of the uranium industry or the government. While this is a significant problem in the case of federal governments, it is far worse in South Australia, where the Roxby Downs Indenture Act is designed to override virtually all other legislation, and government departments which are supposed to monitor mining and export also act as promoters and protectors of the industry…..
(On nuclear wastes)
Fuel leasing Even BHP Billiton admits there is no commercial case for fuel leasing or front-end processing (submission to the Switkowski Review, 2006). Even the promoters and industry-boosters admit there is a risk of proliferation. Dangerous, unwanted – any belief in short-term financial gain is delusional……..
Radioactive Waste Spent nuclear fuel is massively more radioactive than mined uranium. It takes 200,000 years for that spent fuel to decay to the radioactivity of the original ore. Every year, power plants worldwide produce 12,000 tonnes of spent fuel. The mass and volume matter very little compared to its toxicity, longevity, heat-generation and plutonium content. For over 60 years the industry has been promising a method for safe disposal of this waste. It has always been ‘just around the corner’, ‘about to be developed’. Only some delusional governments have continued to believe these broken promises; like, apparently, the South Australian Government.
After 60 years of broken promises, there is not one repository anywhere in the world for the disposal of high-level waste. There is one deep underground repository for long-lived intermediate- level waste, in New Mexico, USA. In 2014, a heat-generating chemical reaction ruptured one storage barrel, the air filter system failed, 22 workers were exposed, the repository is shut for 4 years and will cost $500million to restore. Safety analysis predicted one radiation-release accident in 200,000 years; now it looks more like an (estimated) 13,000 such accidents in 200,000 years. And that has to be just a wild guess. How many barrels last 200,000 years? My guess is none at all. Hell, the average barrel doesn’t even last 200 years (as a handy benchmark, that is about how long white settlers/invaders have been destroying the environment which had been better managed by the indigenous people for thousands of years) – and the average barrel isn’t expected to contain material of this toxicity. How long can we expect governments to keep us and our environment safe from this extremely toxic stuff? Based on the experience at WIPP, New Mexico, USA, about 10 to 15 years. That is how long it took from the opening of the repository to the beginning of complacency and cost-cutting.
That would never happen here, of course(?) It has already. In the late 1990s, the Australian government ‘cleaned-up’ the Maralinga nuclear test site. The government called it ‘world’s best practice’. It breached Australian standards for the management of long-lived nuclear waste. The truth always seems so elusive when we look at the nuclear industry. In 2011 – yes, that is 10 to 15 years after the latest ‘promise’ – a survey found 19 of the 85 contaminated debris pits had suffered erosion or subsidence.
There are basically 2 ways radioactive waste could be ‘dumped’ in outback South Australia: in a deep underground repository or at or near the surface. Given the lazy thinking and eagerness for easy financial returns characteristic of current governments, digging a deep underground repository – with the expense that involves – is very unlikely. That at least should save our groundwater, already so massively threatened and abused by allowing the Roxby mine free access to trillions of gallons of fossil water. The mound springs I was able to drink from and swim in 20 years ago no longer exist. That’s the fault of the South Australian Government & its Indenture Act. That leaves a shallow or surface repository. Presumably, we and our environment will be ‘protected’ from this extremely toxic waste by some kind of substantial building. Last time I looked, the longest surviving man-made buildings were the pyramids in Egypt – about 3,000 years old. Most modern structures are not intended to last anywhere near that long – and they don’t!
The plight of hapless authorities trying to contain the radiation from Chernobyl and Fukushima should warn us not to trust any snake-oil salesman telling us this stuff which remains deadly for 200,000 years can be kept isolated from our environment for anything like that long. We live in an age our parents could hardly have imagined where governments routinely renege on firm commitments made by previous governments. An age where our environment and its protection is of such little account that landholders in the Murray-Darling river system who are upstream from poor South Australia are permitted to build dams big enough to retain more fresh water than the capacity of Sydney Harbour.
Has the South Australian Government even heard of the precautionary principle? Briefly, it says if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or the environment, unless there is scientific consensus that it is not harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action. ………….
http://nuclearrc.sa.gov.au/app/uploads/2015/11/Bill-Fisher-03-08-2015.pdf
December 19, 2015
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
Submissions to Royal Commission S.A. |
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Investigative journalism lives! In this media climate of the 24 hr news cycle, and of journalists losing their jobs – it can still happen! This week:
Bill Fisher Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission – Submission – All Issues
Antinuclear 