Campaign to scrap SA nuclear waste dump plans goes national
Campaign to scrap SA nuclear waste dump plans goes national Stephanie Corsetti reported this story on May 25, 2016 MP3 DOWNLOAD http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2016/s4468848.htm
The group of Adnyamathanha women are from the Flinders Ranges say it’ll be the first time they’ve made their case directly to the Minister, Josh Frydenberg.
As Stephanie Corsetti reports.
Traditional owner Vivianne McKenzie addressed a town hall meeting in the Melbourne suburb of Northcote last night.
VIVIANNE MCKENZIE: This is what you call the genocide once again of Aboriginal people.
On the land, we are only a minority group in this country. They tell us we’re only three per cent, but I’ll tell you what, by the time we finish this campaign to stop this waste dump, we’ll be at 300 per cent in this country.
(Sound of applause)
STEPHANIE CORSETTI: The Federal Government is looking for what it calls a “willing community” to host a national radioactive waste management facility.
Now the McKenzie’s have travelled across the border to Victoria to send their message to the Federal Government.
VIVIANNE MCKENZIE: This is mental and emotional abuse, on the minds of adults, on children, you see the generational abuse on Aboriginal people.
STEPHANIE CORSETTI: Vivianne’s sister is Regina McKenzie.
REGINA MCKENZIE: If we were to go to a Catholic church or the Vatican and ask them to move or say we want to move the Vatican five miles over and put a waste dump there, that’s the same thing.
It’s our belief system.
STEPHANIE CORSETTI: Last month, the Federal Government said it would accept new nominations for the nuclear waste site after narrowing down the list to the South Australian site near Yappala Station.
The Federal Resources Minister Josh Frydenberg has agreed to meet the McKenzies on Thursday in his Melbourne electorate of Kooyong.
Dr Jim Green from Friends of the Earth is calling for a national campaign against the nuclear plans.
JIM GREEN: There’s unanimous opposition from traditional owners, it’s an extraordinarily beautiful part of the iconic Flinders Ranges, and I really wonder why it was chosen in the first place. And I’m sure they were aware of the possibility that it’s not going to go ahead, and that’s why they’ve opened up nominations from other land holders from around Australia.
STEPHANIE CORSETTI: Dave Sweeney from the Australian Conservation Foundation agrees.
DAVE SWEENEY: It’s a test of our maturity to have a debate about a difficult policy issue, and it’s also a test of how we view and relate with the First Nations people of Australia.
STEPHANIE CORSETTI: The Federal Government says it hasn’t made a final decision and consultation with the Indigenous community is an integral part of the process.
Minister Frydenberg says a heritage assessment will be done with the traditional owners to ensure the area is protected.
ELEANOR HALL: Stephanie Corsetti reporting.
Business South Australia’s Nigel McBride touts nuclear waste importing plan
Homer Simpson and nuclear politics as France shows the way for SA, Fin Rev 23 May 16 by Simon Evans Nigel McBride, the chief executive of Business SA, the organisation that oversees the interests of more than 46,000 businesses in South Australia, has just returned from Finland and France, where he researched the nuclear waste industry.
He is convinced there would be no detrimental impact to the image of prime wine regions such as the Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale, Clare Valley and the Coonawarra from having an underground storage facility elsewhere in the state.
“We’re not going to have any overt signs anywhere,” Mr McBride told reporters in Adelaide on Monday………
Mitchell Taylor, the managing director of Taylors Wines, which has operations in the Clare Valley, Adelaide Hills, McLaren Vale and the Coonawarra, said the most sensible thing would be to locate any future nuclear waste storage facility in arid lands hundreds of kilometres away from agricultural land.
“You wouldn’t put it close to agricultural land,” he said…….
From an overseas marketing viewpoint, Mr Taylor said he didn’t think it would have any impact on the image of South Australian wines and premium food, provided the two were kept separate.
“You’ve got to get politics out of it,” he said.
Mr McBride said the regulatory model in Finland was a good benchmark, and there had been too much simplistic criticism of a nuclear industry based on what he termed “The Simpson’s model” taken from the popular cartoon series where a hapless Homer Simpson works at the Springfield nuclear power plant.
A final report by royal commissioner Kevin Scarce in early May recommended the state set up a nuclear waste storage facility to generate $100 billion in profits over the project’s forecast 120-year life, with Mr Weatherill saying he would make a decision by the end of the year after an extensive community consultation process, on whether to proceed. http://www.afr.com/it-pro/homer-simpson-and-nuclear-politics-as-france-shows-the-way-for-sa-20160522-gp1851
Turnbull govt’s election gamble: ignoring climate change at their political peril?
have Hunt’s strategies worked on the Australian electorate? Not according to a recent ReachTEL poll of 2,400 respondents on May 9, which revealed that 56% believed the government needed to do more to tackle global warming.
64% said they would be more likely to vote for a party that has a plan to source 100% of Australia’s electricity from renewable sources like wind, solar and hydro in the next 20 years.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull seems to have switched off his personal barometer on climate as an issue that is too politically fraught.
The Greens, for their part, are making many more inroads into this election than the last. They certainly have thestrongest climate policy, with a renewable energy target of 90% by 2030. The ReachTEL poll referred to earlier shows the Greens have four times the primary vote than the National Party.
The Greens know that for under 30 voters they are already matching the primary vote of the major parties, and that a core platform of strong action against global warming is a big part of this support. Whether the major parties can ignore this support that springs from climate will be one of the biggest gambles of this election.
Why has climate change disappeared from the Australian election radar? http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2016/05/23/comment-why-has-climate-change-disappeared-australian-election-radar Two weeks into a protracted election campaign, it is looking ever-more likely that climate change is to be placed way down the order of business – at least for the major parties, writes David Holmes. Source: The Conversation 23 MAY 2016 DAVID HOLMES, MONASH UNIVERSITY
The contest over climate change that characterised the previous three elections seems to have disappeared off the political radar despite the issue being more urgent than ever. Since the Paris climate summit, global average temperatures continue to break month-on-month records.
Just a few weeks after the summit, the North Pole was briefly not even able to reach freezing point – in the middle of winter. And just this month, Cape Grim surpassed a 400 ppm baseline minimum.
Then there is the truly frightening climate spiral developed by Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading. It shows what an El Niño amplified global temperature has climbed to. The spiral assumes a tight-knit but ever-expanding ball until April 2015, when the spiral line starts to separate dramatically from the ball. This year it careers dangerously close to the 1.5℃ threshold.
The diminishing political and media spiral on climate
While global temperatures may be spiralling out of control, the opposite appears to be happening with the climate issue attention cycle in Australia. Continue reading
Australia should join growing global push for treaty banning nuclear weapons
ICAN 24 May 2016 This Friday, 27 May, US President Barack Obama will make an historic visit to Hiroshima, which was devastated by a US nuclear bomb in the final days of World War II. It will be the first time a sitting US president has visited the city.
The White House has made clear that he will not apologise for the attacks, but his visit will nevertheless be an important acknowledgement of the horror caused by nuclear weapons. Hiroshima survivor Junko Morimoto, who now lives in Sydney, said: “It is great that President Obama will visit Hiroshima to pay his respects to the victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All we ask for is an ongoing commitment to global nuclear disarmament.”
In recent years, the Australian Government has vocally opposed efforts by two-thirds of the world’s nations to negotiate a treaty banning nuclear weapons, claiming instead to rely on security provided by “extended nuclear deterrence”. In contrast, the Australian Labor Party last year declared support for a ban treaty in its revised national policy platform.
At a recent UN meeting in Geneva, 127 nations proposed the start of negotiations on a ban treaty. These nations believe that nuclear weapons are illegitimate and immoral given their devastating humanitarian impacts. Several nations have specifically proposed that negotiations on a ban treaty begin in 2017 and be concluded by 2018. This proposal will be voted on in the UN General Assembly in October this year.
“The Australian Government should take the opportunity of President Obama’s historic visit to move away from its cold-war era policies that undermine nuclear disarmament. It is more than seven decades since nuclear catastrophe was unleashed on Hiroshima. It is well beyond time to outlaw these ultimate weapons of mass destruction,” said Tim Wright, Asia Pacific Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).
“Australia has become increasingly isolated in our region as the only member of the South Pacific nuclear-free zone to insist that these horrendous weapons are necessary for its security. The government should look at what nuclear weapons do to people and the environment, and join the majority of nations in working to ban them.”
California’s nuclear waste problem
California looks to Texas to solve nuclear waste problem
Dallas company has filed to open nuclear waste dump in West Texas
Californians say proposal is chance to move spent fuel from Rancho Seco, San Onofre plants
Moving radioactive materials out of earthquake zones still won’t happen till 2021
BY MAGGIE YBARRA mybarra@mcclatchydc.com 9 May 16. WASHINGTON
California lawmakers are rallying around a plan to relocate radioactive waste from the state’s shuttered nuclear power plants to a storage site in West Texas after failing to secure enough political support to move that waste to a repository in Nevada.
The Texas site is owned by Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists, which submitted a nuclear waste storage proposal to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in April.
Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, who represents parts of Orange and San Diego counties, said the proposed Texas site is California’s next best hope for moving high-level radioactive waste from areas vulnerable to earthquakes and other natural disasters………
“Seems like we’re on track to make West Texas the nation’s default nuclear waste dump after the one in Nevada fell through,” said Andrew Wheat, the research director for Texans for Public Justice, an advocacy group that targets what it labels the corrupt influence of corporate money in politics.Even if legislators and government officials do decide to move forward with building a nuclear waste facility in West Texas, it would still be years before Californians would see a reduction in the size of the toxic inventory at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in San Diego County, which was decommissioned in 2013, and the Rancho Seco Nuclear Generating Station in Herald, which was mothballed in 2009.
Waste Control Specialists did not respond to questions about how long it would be before the company would be able to relocate nuclear waste from California to Texas, but The Texas Tribune has reported that waste relocation efforts would not begin until 2021………
Irradiated
The U.S. government has compensated over 52,000 nuclear workers illnesses related to radiation exposure, but the process is complicated. Deaths resulting from exposure while working at the plants and the compensation process for survivors begs the question http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/congress/article76532967.html
For iodine tablets to be effective against radiation, the timing must be just right
North Rhine-Westphalia prepares for Belgium nuclear accident with iodine tablets, DW, 2q4 May 16“…….In the case of a nuclear disaster, timing is paramount in the administration of iodine tablets. The medication works by supplying the thyroid gland with a concentrated amount of “healthy” iodine. In theory, this should prevent the gland from absorbing any radioactive iodine released into the air in a nuclear accident.
Taken too early, however, “healthy” iodine will already have been partially or even completely broken down. Taken too late, the radioactive iodine will have already been absorbed by the thyroid – potentially increasing the risk of thyroid cancer.
The only nuclear accident to date, which called for the use of iodine tablets was the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. In Poland, some 10.5 million children and 7 million adults were successfully administered the “healthy” iodine, with later examinations reaping only positive results. In Belarus, however, where no iodine tablets were administered, thyroid cancer in children – which is usually extremely rare – was reported 100 times higher than normal. http://www.dw.com/en/north-rhine-westphalia-prepares-for-belgium-nuclear-accident-with-iodine-tablets/a-19279950
600 tonnes of highly radioactive, melted uranium, missing at Fukushima nuclear station
Fukushima nuclear plant missing 600 tonnes of highly radioactive, melted uranium, http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2016/s4468286.htm ABC Radio, TONY EASTLEY: We all misplace things from time to time, but at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant, its managers have lost a staggering 600 tonnes of highly radioactive, melted uranium.
The man in charge of cleaning up the plant, Naohiro Masuda, admits the exact location of the melted fuel remains a mystery.
As well he’s told the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program that the plant operator, TEPCO, still hasn’t developed the technology to retrieve blobs of fuel from deep inside three reactors.
Correspondent Mark Willacy filed this report. It begins with him speaking through his mask and safety equipment as he enters the broken reactor building….. Continue reading
Neighbouring State anxious about safety of Belgian nuclear facility
North Rhine-Westphalia prepares for Belgium nuclear accident with iodine tablets, DW, 24 May 16 Amid growing safety concerns over Belgium’s aging nuclear reactors, Germany’s most populous state has purchased iodine tablets in case of a nuclear accident. Activists insist the best solution is to close the plants. With plans already in place to end its domestic use of nuclear power by 2022, Germany has taken a clear stance on its use of nuclear energy since the 2011 Fukushima disaster.
But while Berlin pushes forward with alternative renewable energy sources at home, across the border in Belgium, its efforts are overshadowed by two controversial nuclear power plants.
Tihange 2 and Doel 3 were both scheduled to be shut down in 2015. Under a deal to preserve jobs and invest in clean energy, however, Belgian officials decided to extend their operation until 2025.
Following reports that pressure vessels at both reactor sites have shown signs of metal fatigue, the two reactors have become a source of growing tension between Germany and Belgium in recent months. Just 60 kilometers (37 miles) away from Tihange, lies the German city of Aachen – home to some 240,000 people and best known as the residence of ninth century emperor, Charlemagne. Continue reading
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 