South Australian Labor govt clings to its nuclear waste dream

Nuclear roadblock warning but door still open, says Tom Kenyon http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/nuclear-roadblock-warning-but-door-still-open-says-tom-kenyon/news-story/e19a89bfb94a87bbe14d2a18d082da0a Adam Langenberg, Political reporter, The Advertiser November 15, 2016 A SOUTH AUSTRALIAN high level nuclear facility looks further off into the distant future after one of its most strident backers outlined a series of roadblocks before a statewide referendum could be held.

Speaking after Premier Jay Weatherill said the path ahead was through a referendum that could not be held until there was bipartisan support, Labor MP Tom Kenyon acknowledged the difficult task ahead but said the door was “still open”.

Opposition Leader Steven Marshall announced he didn’t support a high level facility last Friday, a position unanimously endorsed by the Liberal party room yesterday.

“There is still an opportunity for a very competent venture but there’s no point having a discussion where we’re the only people talking to ourselves,” Mr Kenyon said.

“At the moment the door is open, we’re happy to continue with it should other people choose to be involved but it’s not moving forward at a million miles an hour.”

One of the first backers of a high level facility, Mr Kenyon told the Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle the plan was not dead, but said a referendum would be “quite a long time away” due to the bulk of information required.

“I think if you go to a population with a vague question, should we have a nuclear waste facility in SA, to be honest I think the result of that referendum would be not much better than what we saw from the Citizens Jury,” Mr Kenyon said.

“If it was ever going to happen firstly it would need bipartisan support to at least continue those investigations and continue discussions.

Then you would need to have quite a lot of information, and I would suspect you would need to know how much you were going to get paid and how much it was going to cost you to store and to know that you almost certainly need to know a site and you would need to have most likely an agreement of a community around a site.”

Asked if the Government could expect support of the Parliament to continue those discussions, Mr Kenyon responded “not at the moment”.

Liberal Treasury spokesman Rob Lucas, the first opposition MP to publicly air concerns about the proposal, told the conference the economic risks were “too great”.

He also criticised Mr Weatherill’s decision to ever put the proposal before a Citizens Jury.

“I always thought it was a naive and ill informed view that you would ever get majority support, whether it be from a Citizens Jury or any other process.

“Frankly if you were going to take on this particular challenge it was going to be an issue of leadership where ultimately the government of the day and the Parliament would have to say, we think it’s in the best interests of South Australia and even though there’s a majority view against it; we’re prepared to support it in terms of the public interest.” http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/nuclear-roadblock-warning-but-door-still-open-says-tom-kenyon/news-story/e19a89bfb94a87bbe14d2a18d082da0a

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Projects For Good’ – This Ingenious Website Makes it Easier to Change the World! https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/projects-for-good-makes-it-easier-to-change-the-world/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_medium=weekly_mailout&utm_source=29-03-2019

By Good News Network -Mar 26, 2019 Unlike Kickstarter which funds creative startups, or GoFundMe which addresses personal needs, Projects for Good was designed for people who want to support the greater good, not just with money, but with their talent and energy—and don’t know where to start.Patrick Furlotti is giving them that opportunity. Growing up in Santa Monica, California, Patrick learned at an early age that society could create a better world if people just worked together.

As a teen he volunteered with Heal the Bay, which was trying to clean up water pollution in 1980s Los Angeles. He folded, sealed, and mailed thousands of letters. The group scored a huge victory when a billion-dollar sewage treatment facility was erected right next to LAX airport.

I realized how valuable a campaign could be to the world, and that politicians weren’t all bad—they just didn’t know what to do. We provided momentum and direction.”

Beyond studying business at college, Furlotti began captaining ships for researchers who were studying human impact on coral and water quality around the Hawaiian islands.

At age 20, he was one of the youngest ever to captain a sailboat from California to Tahiti, gaining a deep respect for the natural forces that connect us to the planet. Now 37, he enjoys big wave surfing whenever he’s not launching or investing in social impact technology and environmental protection.

He also has attended many green tech conferences: “I saw all these people with great ideas—so many half-baked projects, but the world needs all these ideas.”

“I had seen firsthand how hard it is to get projects started, funded, and completed, and wanted to create a whole new model to help people with their ‘Projects for Good’.”

It took a year to design the web platform, and today they are adding new features all the time to make it “a complete project success ecosystem”.

‘Currently with Kickstarter and Gofundme, you can just give money. That’s cool, but what about if you’re really inspired and want to join the project? A lot of people don’t have any money, but they think, ‘I would really love to work for this cause.’”

“Our commitment is not to make money, but to build a community of like-minded individuals who are passionate about changing the world—not by featuring someone who is trying to build a robot that makes coffee and smoothies (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), but by focusing on projects that help the greater good,” Patrick told GNN.

“It’s about humans working together, and educating each other on what’s possible, that’s why I love partnering with Good News Network.”

PFG is trying to give project owners the tools they need—to make it cheaper to become a nonprofit, easier to find grants, and even make it free to crowdfund, so fees aren’t diverted from the money that is being donated. Patrick also believes there should be more transparency about where the money is going on these fundraising platforms.

The Community Center is where jobs can be posted, milestones recorded, and new members welcomed. These are some early success stories on the PFG platform:

Peter Gottesman is passionate about animal rights and has championed projects from saving cheetahs in Africa to rescuing bears in Laos through his non-profit Endangered Species Revenge. For him, Projects for Good offers exposure to caring people who want to support him. To date, he has raised over $6500 on PFG to help fund his animal causes.
Andrew Malais saw how badly Joshua Tree National Park needed a trash cleanup. He used PFG partially as a fundraising tool but mainly to list jobs and hire the perfect candidate or find volunteers. His project was a success, raising over 80% of its fundraising goal to purchase the supplies he needed and hire workers to cover the vast acreage.
Peter Fiekowsky raised money on Projects for Good to help develop patented technology that will capture excess CO2 in the atmosphere—and convert it into building materials. They are literally turning ‘air into concrete’. The founder of Foundation for Climate Restoration and partner in Blue Planet Ltd. praised Projects for Good for “helping the foundation raise the crucial seed funding needed to design our first Blue Planet prototype direct air capture machine.”

THE HUMAN EFFECTS OF THE NUCLEAR INDUSTRY – theme for June 2019.

Before we enter “a new nuclear age” – learn from the newly declassified Chernobyl health records April 7, 2019

Fortunately, Chernobyl health records are now available to the public. They show that people living in the radioactive traces fell ill from cancers, respiratory illness, anaemia, auto-immune disorders, birth defects, and fertility problems two to three times more frequently in the years after the accident than before. In a highly contaminated Belarusian town of Veprin, just six of 70 children in 1990 were characterised as “healthy”. The rest had one chronic disease or another. On average, the Veprin children had in their bodies 8,498 bq/kg of radioactive caesium (20 bq/kg is considered safe).

For decades, researchers have puzzled over strange clusters of thyroid cancer, leukaemia and birth defects among people living in Cumbria, which, like southern Belarus, is an overlooked hotspot of radioactivity from cold war decades of nuclear bomb production and nuclear power accidents.

Currently, policymakers are advocating a massive expansion of nuclear power as a way to combat climate change. Before we enter a new nuclear age, the declassified Chernobyl health records raise questions that have been left unanswered about the impact of chronic low doses of radioactivity on human health.

Chernobyl’s disastrous cover-up is a warning for the next nuclear age

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/04/chernobyl-nuclear-power-climate-change-health-radioactivity, Kate Brown , 5 Apr 19, Before expanding nuclear power to combat climate change, we need answers to the global health effects of radioactivity

https://www.3cr.org.au/radioactive

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