Australian government OK about dealing with corrupt firms – whether coal or nuclear
DCNS Opens New Australia-Based Office to Support Country’s Submarine Replacement Project http://blog.executivebiz.com/2016/12/dcns-opens-new-australia-based-office-to-support-countrys-submarine-replacement-project/on: December 22, 2016 France-based naval shipbuilder DCNS has established a new headquarters for its Australian subsidiary that will design the future submarine of Australia’s navy as part of an intergovernmental agreement between the two countries.
DCNS said Wednesday its Adelaide Future Submarine Facility is scheduled to begin operations in early 2017 and will support activities such as the transfer of technology from France to Australia, development of a supply chain and design of a shipyard in Adelaide.
“This facility, and our local Adelaide workforce starting with 50 people in 2017, marks the beginning of our relationship as part of the community,” said Herve Guillou, DCNS Group chairman and global CEO.
The Australian government selected DCNS in April to provide design services for the country’s estimated $38.7 billion SEA 1000 Future Submarine Program.
Marise Payne and Jean-Yves Le Drian, respective defense ministers of Australia and France have signed an agreement that establishes a framework for the two countries on the development of the Australian navy’s fleet of submarines.
France’s submarine sales firm DCNS is notorious for corruption
“DCNS’s operations face questions across almost the entire globe, including in Pakistan, Malaysia, India, Saudi Arabia and Chile, with bribes and kickbacks reportedly comprising 8 per cent to 12 per cent of DCNS’s entire budget.”
French subs builder’s record of corruption, The Saturday Paper, HAMISH MCDONALD, 30 Apr 16 “…….The Defence Department has been dazzled by promises from shipbuilder DCNS of ultra-quiet pulse-jet propulsion, a powerful sonar array from Thales, a comfortable space for the crew, and a very long range. Now all that has to be done is design the new boat, replacing the nuclear reactor in the Barracuda with diesels, batteries and fuel cells, and fitting in fuel tanks.
As the Hong Kong-based website Asia Sentinel has pointed out, “DCNS’s operations face questions across almost the entire globe, including in Pakistan, Malaysia, India, Saudi Arabia and Chile, with bribes and kickbacks reportedly comprising 8 per cent to 12 per cent of DCNS’s entire budget.”
No doubt our politicians and officials are aware of all this, and will be ready to account for any largesse. Perhaps they should automatically knock off 8 to 12 per cent of any price quoted by DCNS. https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/world/north-america/2016/04/30/french-subs-builders-record-corruption/14619384003178
FUKUSHIMA – THE NUCLEAR ACCIDENT THAT NEVER ENDS
December 22, 2016, by Radio Ecoshock Well I guess the triple-meltdown nuclear disaster at Fukushima is all over. It must be. We’re not hearing much about it, right? As we’re about to find out, the silence about the continuing horror in Japan is no accident.
Robert Hunziker has some news even hardened Fukushima-watchers missed. Robert’s the free-lance environmental journalist whose work is published all over the world. This latest article can be found in the online magazine Counterpunch on October 31st, under the title “Fukushima Cover Up”. Fukushima Cover Up
I’ve covered the triple-melt down at Fukushima from the very day it started. There were emergency podcasts, interviews with tons of experts, including from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Just Google “Radio Ecoshock and Fukushima” and stand back. But just because the story is over in the media, and the Japanese government would dearly love us all to forget about it – THIS ACCIDENT IS STILL HAPPENING.
The three reactor cores, including one laced with plutonium, are still lost somewhere under the ground in Fukushima, and still pumping out massive amounts of radioactivity. The Japanese utility TEPCO, which went bankrupt and was bailed out at huge cost by the people of Japan, continues to pump out very radioactive water, to be stored in an ever-increasing vast tank farm on the site. That may go on for another 40 years or so, except (a) the company is running out of places to build those tanks and (b) radioactive particles are flowing into the Pacific Ocean daily anyway.
The Government announced an “ice wall” to contain that radioactivity, but that didn’t work, despite the tens of billions of dollars spent. There is no solution to this problem.
Radioactivity is now acknowledged by American experts as having arrived in the currents to the West Coast of North America. Of course the Pacific fisheries has been irradiated. I would not eat fish caught there. The levels may be “low” but there is no safe level of radioactivity.
The Fukushima nuclear accident also continues because the people irradiated by the accident (including a huge part of Japan, and including Tokyo) will pass down illness for an unknown number of generations. The largest number of people receiving medical treatment due to the Fukushima nuclear disaster were born AFTER the accident, Robert Hunziker tells us. The government and the nuclear industry have found multiple ways to hide this.
One of the largest was to pass fake “terrorism” legislation, where any journalist reporting on Fukushima impacts could be charged as a “terrorist”. Then some one leaned on the largest daily newspaper of Japan (7.5 million subscribers, about triple the New York Times) to dismantle their team of more than two dozen journalists covering Fukushima. After winning awards for their reporting and exposes, these journalists at Asahi Shimbum newspaper were either fired or moved to other departments. That’s another way to “solve” the crisis.
I won’t go into all the ways the doctors have been silenced, medical records faked, and “temporary” workers at the cleanup not counted. It’s horrifying – and it’s an example of why humans cannot be trusted with nuclear power.
Japan says they have “cleaned up” the Fukushima area, by scraping up dirt and storing it God-Knows-Where in giant bags which might circle the Earth if lined up together. I doubt it, and nobody can “clean up” all the forests which were laced with particles, right up to and including plutonium that last for over half a million years. The clean-up is a fairy tale.
Meanwhile, and this is too incredible, Japan has somehow captured the 2020 Olympics. Worse, they plan to force people evacuated from nearby Fukushima city back into hot zones (by cutting off their aid if they don’t). They, Japan has scheduled sports events at Fukushima – with local food brought in from the irradiated zone! It’s not bad enough our athletes had to deal with Zika virus and polluted water in the Brazil Olympics. No, they have to be publicity guinea pigs for the Japanese nuclear disaster.
By the way, during my many interviews and podcasts, often using reporting from Japanese TV during the incident, there is no doubt that Tokyo itself was blanketed by nuclear particles. More ran into the underground water supply from the nearby irradiated hills.
Earthquakes continue to rock the Fukushima area, like this one. Who knows what can happen, with those lost reactor cores. ra ra http://www.ecoshock.org/2016/12/greenland-melt-japanese-meltdown-conspiracy.html
Adani Corruption Probe: A Responsible Government Would Not Gamble A Billion Dollars
https://mysunshinecoast.com.au/news/news-display/adani-corruption-probe-a-responsible-government-would-not-gamble-a-billion-dollars,47272 22nd of December 2016:
“The Queensland Greens say it beggars belief that the Federal Coalition and Queensland Labor governments would gamble a billion dollars of taxpayer’s money on Adani, a multinational company
implicated in corruption, tax evasion and ripping off consumers.
Spokesperson and candidate for Mount Coot-tha, Michael Berkman, said:
“”A responsible government would not gamble a billion dollars of taxpayer money on a company
implicated in tax evasion, fraud, corruption and consumer rip-offs.
Adani wants to rip off Queenslanders too, threatening to destroy the Reef and the 70,000 jobs that depend on its health. … “
THE THREAT OF A CLIMATE DENIER COUP IN THE UNITED STATES
-Alex Smith, 22 Dec 16 The fossil fuel industry, and their paid climate deniers, have taken control of the government of the United States. Russia, another major world supplier of oil and gas, played it’s part, raiding the servers of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Candidate, and their campaign Chair.
As a result, scientists at the recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union are gathering to protect their data, and likely many of their jobs. Our first guest Joerg Schaefer came from his training in Germany and Switzerland for the brightest minds and best technology to analyze and predict climate change. Now all that is in doubt.
There are several movements in science to make copies of key climate databases and models, to get them out of the country before the climate killers take control.
But even this misses another threat. Climate science depends on long strings of dependable records. Weather comes and goes, but climate is understood decade by decade, through centuries, and even millions of years. The United States, through it’s network of satellites, ocean buoys, and research ships provides a great deal for scientists in many countries. If there is a break in those critical records, even for four years, or heaven forbid, eight – then we’ll know less, and be less prepared. Less prepared for the biggest shift in human affairs in the whole time we have been on this planet.
The great but slow movement to get off fossil fuels will continue. Citizens will continue to install solar panels, the price will continue to drop. While Donald Trump may subsidize the coal industry, and get a mine or two going, nobody wants to go back to coal. It cost more than renewable energy, or gas, even without a price on carbon. America might as well go back to making horse carriages, or the original Apple computers. Trying to rebuild a coal industry is just going to waste money and time.
We don’t have that time. Each and every scientist you’ve heard on Radio Ecoshock this fall has brought out another feed-back, a greater climate sensitivity, more reasons why we have to cut carbon emission drastically, ideally starting 20 years ago. As our guest Kevin Anderson from the Tyndall Center told us, the next four years are critical.
Can we stop Greenland from reverting to the bare rock it knows best? Can we save the remaining Arctic sea ice, to stabilize the weather further south, where most of you live? Can we prevent methane geysers from the sea floor? Can we slow deglaciation in Antarctica until we find a way to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere?
All this may be up to the rest of the world, while America enters bizarro world, the place where foxes guard the hen-house. Or the responsibility may go back where it really belongs: into our own homes, lives and lifestyles. If we can’t count on the big father of national governments, the future returns to us. Prepare to organize. Prepare to act, to save ourselves and Nature…… http://www.ecoshock.org/2016/12/greenland-melt-japanese-meltdown-conspiracy.html
Since before 1880, scientists have been warning about fossil fuels’ effect on climate
A 1912 news article ominously forecasted the catastrophic effects of fossil fuels on climate change http://qz.com/817354/scientists-have-been-forecasting-that-burning-fossil-fuels-will-cause-climate-change-as-early-as-1882/ Akshat Rathi 24 Oct 16, A short news clip from a New Zealand paper published in 1912 has gone viral as an example of an early news story to make the connection between burning fossil fuels and climate change.
The French physicist Joseph Fourier had made the observation in 1824 that the composition of the atmosphere is likely to affect the climate. But Svante Arrhenius’s 1896 study titled, “On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature on the ground” was the first to quantify how carbon dioxide (or anhydrous carbonic acid, by another name) affects global temperature. Though the study does not explicitly say that the burning of fossil fuels would cause global warming, there were scientists before him who had made such a forecast.
The earliest such mention that Quartz could find was in the journal Nature in December of 1882. The author HA Phillips writes:
According to Prof Tyndall’s research, hydrogen, marsh gas, and ethylene have the property to a very high degree of absorbing and radiating heat, and so much that a very small proportion, of say one thousandth part, had very great effect. From this we may conclude that the increasing pollution of the atmosphere will have a marked influence on the climate of the world.
Phillips was relying on the work of John Tyndall, who in the 1860s had shown how various gases in the atmosphere absorb heat from the sun in the form of infrared radiation. Now we know that Phillips was wrong about a few scientific details: He ignored carbon dioxide from burning coal and focused more on the by-products of mining. Still, he was drawing the right conclusion about what our demand for fossil fuels might do to the climate.
Newspapers around the world took those words published in a prestigious scientific journal quite seriously. ……..
Nichols found many examples between 1883 and 1912, where newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, Kansas City Star, and York Daily, wrote articles about what rising carbon dioxide levels would do the climate.
All through the 19th century, the increasing use of coal was hard to miss. Towns and cities across the world were becoming noticeably polluted because of factories, and later steam trains. In this light, it’s not surprising that a tiny New Zealand newspaper carried an article in 1912 about how the ever-increasing use of fossil fuels might change Earth’s climate. http://qz.com/817354/scientists-have-been-forecasting-that-burning-fossil-fuels-will-cause-climate-change-as-early-as-1882/
Donald Trump’s tweet on nuclear expansion is most frightening news
Donald Trump’s nuclear expansion tweet ‘one of the most frightening things’, says Noam ChomskyThe US and Russia already own more than 93 per cent of nuclear warheads in the world, The Independent, Rachael Revesz @RachaelRevesz Friday 23 December 2016 One of the world’s most famous scholars said he was “frightened” by Donald Trump’s tweet on “strengthening and expanding” nuclear capabilities in the US.
Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Mr Trump’s tweet was “one of the most frightening things I’ve seen recently”. “Putin’s is bad enough,” Mr Chomsky told the Huffington Post, “but at least it has a defensive cast. It’s about Russia’s borders, not Mexico’s.”……..
Mr Trump’s tweet, limited to 140 characters, did not give national security experts and advisers much reassurance for anything other than his preference for heated rhetoric…….
John Noonan, a Republican national security expert who advised presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, wrote on twitter: “But imagine having to turn launch keys not knowing if we were under attack or it if was b/c foreign leaders said a mean thing on twitter.”Mr Trump has done little to assure his critics that he has the presence of mind and the steadiness to make a quick decision regarding an imminent nuclear threat……..http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-nuclear-expansion-tweet-noam-chomsky-weapons-arsenal-twitter-a7491921.html
Wind and Solar Are Cheaper (Without Subsidies) Than Dirty Energy
Low Costs of Solar Power & Wind Power Crush Coal, Crush Nuclear, & Beat Natural Gas [this article on original is full of excellent charts and maps], Clean Technica, December 25th, 2016 by Zachary Shahan “……..
Wind & Solar Are Cheaper (Without Subsidies) Than Dirty Energy
The first point is the very basic fact that new wind power and/or solar power plants are typically cheaper than new coal, natural gas, or nuclear power plants — even without any governmental support for solar or wind.
Not only are they typically cheaper — they’re much cheaper in many cases. [good charts on original]
……..A study led by the former head of the Harvard Medical School found that coal cost the US $500 billion per year in extra health and environmental costs — approximately 9¢/kWh ($90/MWh) to 27¢/kWh ($270/MWh) more than the price we pay directly. To fool yourself into thinking these are not real costs is to assume that cancer, heart disease, asthma, and early death are not real.
The air, water, and climate effects of natural gas are not pretty either. On the nuclear front, the decommissioning and insurance costs of nuclear power — unaccounted for above — would also put nuclear off the chart.
On the renewable front, costs to overcome intermittency of renewable energy sources (basically, presuming a very high penetration of renewables on the grid) are also not included. Once that is a significant issue (at which point solar and wind will be even cheaper), low-cost demand response solutions, greater grid integration, and storage will be key solutions to integrating these lower-cost renewable sources to a high degree.
Back to Lazard’s assumptions, note that the IGCC and coal cost estimates do not include the costs of transportation and storage.
Given these assumptions unrealistically favoring fossil fuels and nuclear energy, including subsidies for solar and wind is actually an even better way to look at costs of these electricity options. However, if you included historical subsidies as well — coal, natural gas, and nuclear have received a ton (well, many, many tons of subsidies) — dirty energy options would again look worse. In any case, here’s Lazard’s cost comparisons with current subsidies: [chart on original]………
People Can Get Lower Prices But More Jobs With Solar & Wind
Whether American, British, Canadian, Australian, Indian, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, or [fill in the blank], solar and wind power don’t just mean lower prices — they also typically mean more jobs. Much of the price of dirty energy power plants is in the fossil fuel — the physical resource. When we buy that fuel, much of the money goes to the billionaires and multimillionaires who “own” the fuel — the coal mines and the natural gas wells.
Sunshine and wind, of course, are free, but distributed solar and wind power plants have to get built and installed — those are things humans do. When we pay for solar and wind power plants, we pay for human labor, and often help create or support local jobs.
We don’t actually have to choose between low prices or jobs or protecting our air, water, and climate — we get all of those things with renewable energy options like solar and wind energy…….https://cleantechnica.com/2016/12/25/cost-of-solar-power-vs-cost-of-wind-power-coal-nuclear-natural-gas/
Bernie Sanders speaks out, urging Congress to stop Donald Trump launching nuclear arms race
Bernie Sanders urges Congress to stop Donald Trump launching nuclear arms race Democrat speaks out after President-elect appears to reverse decade’s-old policy of disarmament, The Independent, Charlotte England @charlottengland 24 December 2016 Bernie Sanders has urged Congress to stop Donald Trump launching a Cold War-style nuclear arms race.
“It’s a miracle a nuclear weapon hasn’t been used in war since 1945,” the Vermont Senator said in a post on Twitter. “Congress can’t allow the Tweeter in Chief to start a nuclear arms race.”
Antinuclear 