In a lawsuit filed today, Brett Wingo, a former Southern Company engineer, alleges he warned the company’s top executives that it would not be possible to meet key construction deadlines. Management responded by retaliating against him, the complaint asserts, and Southern continued to assure investors and the public that Kemper’s schedule and budget targets would be met, then blamed unpredictable factors like the weather when those goals were missed. Continue reading
The week that has been in climate and nuclear news
Things would appear to have calmed down in the North Korea nuclear situation, with some positive signs. Unfortunately the USA does not grasp China’s point of view.-In order to defy Trump, Kim Jong-un will probably target waters near Guam. -USA defence chiefs insist that a military action is an option. Most Americans are anxious about President Trump’s ability to handle the situation.
Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute argues that endless growth, not just climate change, is the world’s biggest problem, and that technology will not save us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALugeRQbXAM
AUSTRALIA
NUCLEAR. Stand Tall: No Dump Alliance urges South Australian leaders to halt federal nuclear waste dump plan.– The ABC swallows the nuclear lobby line on medicine – hook line and sinker. Two Kimba farmers happy at the prospect of stranded radioactive trash on their land.
CLIMATE Australia failing in migration and humanitarian help for Pacific Islanders in their drowning islands. Climate Denial in Australia and USA: the Differences.– Parliament passes Bill with amendment accusing government of failing to protect Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef. World first: shareholders sue Commonwealth Bank of Australia for misleading shareholders over climate risks.Adani coal project Auditor General to investigate Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility (NAIF) ?
RENEWABLE ENERGY South Australian Premier announces Solar thermal power plant for Port Augusta,– Port Augusta local community welcome greenlighting of solar thermal power plant. Even the right-wing Adelaide Advertiser (!) applauds decision.
Standards Australia to ban home energy storage batteries! -Loads more renewables news at http://reneweconomy.com.au/
The ABC swallows the nuclear lobby line on medicine – hook line and sinker
The post below this is an extract from the ABC article “Nuclear medicine production in Australia at risk if dump site can’t be found, industry head says”. I left out the bits where ANSTO officials orgasmically discussed how much Australia needs the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor for medical reasons.
Anyone would think that this humanitarian motive is the sole raison d’etre for this nuclear reactor. The ABC apparently buys that story.
BUT, Medical radioisotopes have been made without need of a nuclear reactor. They are made in a linear accelerator https://antinuclear.net/2016/12/23/usa-to-produce-medical-radioisotopes-by-using-particle-accelerator-not-a-nuclear-reactor/
or by a cyclotron https://antinuclear.net/2016/11/27/cyclotrons-for-medical-uses-a-better-option-than-lucas-heights-nuclear-reactor/
ANSTO at Lucas Heights I believe already has a cyclotron. . The Nuclear Fuel Chain Royal Commission recommended expanding a cyclotron industry in South Australia, to develop medical radioisotopes.
Reactor at Lucas Heights was initially intended as prelude to nuclear weapons production. The medical use was tacked on to make it look more respectable. It remains a fig leaf on the nuclear industry.
Two Kimba farmers happy at the prospect of stranded radioactive trash on their land
Nuclear medicine production in Australia at risk if dump site can’t be found, industry head says ABC, Landline By Marty McCarthy 19 Aug 17, Australia may have to stop producing nuclear medicine if it cannot find a central site to dump all of the radioactive rubbish made in the process in the next decade.
The Federal Government has been trying to find a site somewhere in Australia to dump nuclear waste for 30 years, including all the waste produced by the government-owned OPAL reactor at Lucas Heights.
There is about 4,250 square metres of radioactive waste in Australia — enough to fill two Olympic-sized swimming pools — and most of it is held at the Australian Nuclear Science Technology Organisation (ANSTO) at Lucas Heights…… the facility also stores a small amount of intermediate-level waste.
This waste comes from the spent fuel rods used in Australia’s first nuclear reactor, HIFAR, which operated for 50 years and was decommissioned in 2007.
The TN81 cask is a 120-tonne rubbish bin that currently contains more than half of the waste from 2,000 spent fuel rods used in HIFAR over its half-a-century-lifespan.
“This does actually represent one of the more radioactive things in Australia,” said James Hardiman, waste operations manager at ANSTO…..
‘It’s for Kimbra we are doing this’
The rural town of Kimba, on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, could be the eventual home of all of Australia’s nuclear waste. Two farmers in the region have put forward their properties, along with a third at Barndioota in the Flinders Rangers, for the Federal Government to build its facility on.
The site would be a permanent dump for all of the low-level waste, which would be buried in cement chambers and left for 300 years, and a temporary storage site for the more dangerous, intermediate-level waste…..To guarantee your town’s future for the next 300 years is pretty good reason for me, because they are talking 100 years of storing the waste and 300 years of monitoring,” Jeff Baldock said.
Bob Maitland, who owns farmland next to Mr Baldock’s property, said he had a moral obligation to support his neighbour’s nuclear dump plan. “It’s for Kimba we are doing this, not for ourselves.” http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-19/nuclear-medicine-production-in-australia-at-risk:-industry-head/8815902
Linear accelerators a safer way than nuclear reactors, to produce medical radioisotopes
How Better Cancer Treatment Can Also Mean Better
Nuclear Security http://www.nonproliferation.org/how-better-cancer-treatment-can-also-mean-better-nuclear-security/August 14, 2017 C. Norman Coleman, Silvia Formenti, Miles A. Pomper A recent report in The Washington Post that the self-proclaimed Islamic State almost stumbled upon radioactive material in Mosul—in the form of cobalt-60, a substance used in radiation therapy—raises a profound dilemma about cancer treatment in developing countries and the risk of terrorists obtaining a key ingredient for making “dirty bombs.”
Cobalt-60 radiation machines are one of the many tools doctors have used in the treatment of cancer for the past 50 years. In North America, nearly all of these units have been replaced with more advanced technology called linear accelerators, which do not contain radioactive material and provide medically superior treatment. In developing countries, the cobalt-60 radiation machines remain prevalent. They are cost-effective and appealing in states with limited or intermittent electricity supplies and other physical infrastructure as well as a shortage of medical and technical expertise.
Australia failing in migration and humanitarian help for Pacific Islanders in their drowning islands
Pacific Islanders forced to leave, The Saturday 
Paper, Chris Woods 18 Aug 17, “Last month,” Ursula Rakova says, “when I returned home just to visit family and talk to the islanders about the situation, it was really, really hard to see a lot of the land being lost to the sea.”
Rakova is from the Carteret Islands, commonly known as Tulun, the horseshoe-shaped scattering of low-lying coral atolls 86 kilometres north-east of Bougainville. “More and more, palm trees are falling, the scarcity of food is becoming a real issue, and the schools close, and close for long periods,” she says.
With an indigenous population of 2700 on seven small islands with a maximum elevation of just 1.5 metres above sea level, there are few other places on Earth where the injustice of global warming is more apparent than on the Carteret Islands.
The Carterets have been on the front line of climate change for decades: one of the islands, Huene, was cut in half by shoreline erosion about 1984. While seawalls and mangroves had been holding the ocean back until this period, further seawater inundation and storm surges over the past few decades had salinated crops and water supplies, intermittently shut down the island’s five schools due to childhood malnutrition, and destroyed homes.
Part of the reason the area is so vulnerable is that, while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reported a global sea level rise of about three millimetres per year from 1993 to 2012, the fact that water expands exponentially as heat is applied means that bodies of water that are already hot rise more swiftly. For the western Pacific Ocean, this has meant an increase of about eight to 10 millimetres a year.
“The western Pacific is a lot hotter than the water is in the eastern Pacific – hotter by about five or six degrees – and where the islands are is amongst the hottest ocean water in the world,” says Ian Simmonds, professor of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne. “Hence a warming of one degree there gives you just so much more of a sea level rise.”
Simmonds notes that the same is true for the severity of storms in the region: a warmer planet means more moisture, and, therefore, stronger and more frequent storms.
In response to increasingly severe events, Carteret elders initiated a voluntary relocation program in 2006, named Tulele Peisa, or “Sailing the Waves on Our Own” – outwardly a response to failed talks with neighbouring governments dating back to 2001. The group contacted Ursula Rakova, a Huene expatriate who had gone on to direct a Bougainville-based non-government organisation, to lead the initiative. After unsuccessfully applying for land through official channels, she was given four different locations by the Catholic Church in 2007, and relocation to the first of the abandoned plantation sites started that year.
Now, after more than a decade of leading the first recorded example of forced displacement due to global warming, Rakova has almost completed housing for the first group of 10 families. She has successfully established food gardens and a mini food forest, rehabilitated plantations and begun selling crops of cocoa. New education and management facilities have been set up, and both funding and food relief arranged to be sent back to the Carterets.
But the plight of the Carterets is not unique. Three other atolls within the Bougainville area are facing similar challenges with rising sea levels, and extreme weather events have caused internal displacement everywhere from Bangladesh to Syria to Australia.
The Australian government does not, broadly speaking, have the greatest track record on the issue. Not only did then prime minister Tony Abbott refuse to meet a call from Pacific Island leaders in 2015 to reduce emissions – indirectly resulting in Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s infamous “water lapping at their doors” quip – but the current budget offers the lowest foreign aid in eight years, at $3.82 billion over 2016-17.
Yet Australia has offered a range of targeted, if less publicised, initiatives in the region, largely funnelled through the Autonomous Bougainville Government, in consultation with Papua New Guinea……..
Australia was also a member of the Nansen Initiative, a program launched in 2012 by Switzerland and Norway intended to strengthen the protection of people displaced across borders by disasters and the effects of climate change. Along with 108 other countries, Australia endorsed its Protection Agenda in 2015, leading to a range of partnerships between policymakers, practitioners and researchers as part of the follow-up Platform on Disaster Displacement.
The director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, Jane McAdam, has worked with Nansen and similar initiatives for more than a decade, and advocates Nansen’s “toolbox approach”. Solutions range from better supporting disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation, to developing humanitarian visas in the immediate aftermath of disasters and offering new migration opportunities such as “labour visas, educational visas, bilateral free movements agreements”.
While forced climate migrants are often incorrectly referred to as “climate refugees” – a term that would require persecution – the issues are distinct in a legal sense. The first person to seek asylum on the grounds of climate change, Ioane Teitiota, of Kiribati, lost his New Zealand application in 2015.
McAdam says there is no political appetite to change the United Nations’ refugee convention definition. While there is scope to expand the definition of refoulement, governments are better suited to developing new migration opportunities.
“It’s interesting that both the Lowy Institute and the Menzies Research Centre – two think tanks, one more conservative, the other less conservative – along with the World Bank, all in the last six months or so, have each recommended that Australia enhance migration opportunities from the Pacific,” she says.
“They say this would really make a huge difference to development and assistance generally, livelihoods generally, than would humanitarian assistance – it would cost us a lot less, and it would yield a lot more.”
While Labor offered more overt leadership on the issue while in opposition in 2006, specifically in terms of training islanders for skilled migration programs, neither Coalition nor Labor governments have since restructured our migration system to the extent McAdam recommends……..
Despite Rakova’s work, which led to a Pride of PNG award in 2008, the Carteret group is struggling to fund homes for the final two families, who are sharing houses, let alone start resettling the remaining 1700 volunteers meant to migrate over the next five years. She says the delay, exacerbated by intercultural challenges and the emotional toll of abandoning ancestral homes, is causing anxiety……..https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/immigration/2017/08/19/pacific-islanders-forced-leave/15030648005088
Australia’s clean energy wave now an $11b tsunami
AGL Energy wind farm helps turn clean energy wave into tsunami, http://www.afr.com/news/agl-energy-wind-farm-helps-turn-clean-energy-wave-into-tsunami-20170818-gxzbmm The wave of wind, solar and battery energy investments across Australia is becoming a tsunami, with $11 billion of projects under way or set to begin construction this calendar year.
AGL Energy and QIC’s blockbuster 453-megawatt Cooper’s Gap wind farm in north Queensland won financial close on Thursday, pushing the combined power of projects in the pipeline to 5661 MW, the Clean Energy Council says.
That’s close to the 5900MW that Bloomberg New Energy Finance says is needed to meet the federal Renewable Energy Target of about 23 per cent of total generation by 2020.
“There’s no question that 2017 has been a game-changing year for the industry, with record investments being made in renewable energy projects across the country,” said Clean Energy Council chief executive Kane Thornton.
Cooper’s Gap will cost the $2-3 billion Powering Australian Renewables Fund (PARF) – backed by AGL, QIC and the Future Fund – $850 million, and deliver electricity and renewable energy credits to AGL for below $60/MWh.
Low-cost energy
It’s the latest in a series of big wind and solar projects to promise energy at lower prices than a new high-tech coal-fired power station of the kind promoted by former Prime Minister Tony Abbottcould manage commercially.
On Monday US company Solar Reserve said it would build a 150MW solar thermal power plant near Port Augusta, South Australia, for $650 million, and sell the power to the SA government for $78/MWh or less.
Earlier this year Origin Energy sold its 530MW Stockyard Hill wind farm in Victoria to China’s Goldwind with a deal to buy the power and renewable energy credits for about $52/MWh, and AGL sold its Silverton wind farm in NSW to PARF with a power and credits purchase deal at $65 /MWh.
According to figures compiled by the Clean Energy Council and AFR Weekend, 2600MW of wind and solar projects are under construction or have already been commissioned in 2017 at a cost of $4.6 billion. Another 3190MW of projects worth $$6.35 billion are committed or expected to begin construction this year or in January.
More conservatively, Bloomberg New Energy Finance counts about $3.7 billion of renewable energy investment commitments for the first half of the year, and $1.1 billion for the September quarter to date – or nearly $5 billion.
Post-2020 challenge
Smaller-scale solar rooftop installations are not included in these figures and are also running at record levels for the first half of the year, with more businesses installing panels as the price drops. But the boom in large-scale renewables may not continue after 2020 if the Finkel energy review’s proposal to extend the Renewable Energy Target into a Clean Energy Target is not adopted.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s Kobad Bhavnagri said that from 2020 to 2025 not much new capacity will be needed, because rooftop solar installations by households and businesses will continue to grow and “crowd out the need for large scale” wind and solar.
He expects the installed base of rooftop solar to jump from 6400MW by end of this year to 16,100MW by end 2025.
“Without further policy we think there’ll be a large-scale downturn from 202 to 2025,” Mr Bhavnagri said.
For the second time, an unexploded WW2 bomb found near to Hinkley nuclear power project
Second World War bomb found off coast of Hinkley Point http://www.somersetlive.co.uk/news/somerset-news/second-world-war-bomb-found-335854 Watchet Coastguard shared a notice on their Twitter account telling people to stay clear of the cordon, RUTH OVENS, 16 AUG 2017,
A 250 pound bomb has been found off the coast of Hinkley Point.
Mariners are being advised to avoid the area of the bomb which is thought to date back to the Second World War.
Watchet Coastguard shared a notice on their Twitter account telling people to stay clear of the cordon.
Hinkley Point C Harbour Authority have shared the following notice:
“Mariners are advised that a 250 pound bomb thought to date from Second World War has been discovered in position Latitude 51’13.43’ North, Longitude 003’09.22 West. This position is approximately six cables south-east from Gore Bouy. “Vessels within this area are requested to proceed with caution, maintain minimum safe distance of 500 metres and keep continued watch on VHF channel 16.”
Earlier this month, the Explosives Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team destroyed a piece of ordnance that was found in the sea off the West Somerset coastline. A 1km exclusion zone was put in place after the large piece of ordnance was found 2.5nm off Lilstock Range in the Bristol Channel on August 8.
“Clean coal” under scrutiny for fraud
Environmentalists have long objected to calling a coal-fired carbon capture and sequestration project “clean coal,” arguing that the label is misleading because it focuses on carbon dioxide pollution while ignoring other problems like acid rain and airborne contaminants. And carbon capture projects rely on continuing fossil fuel production, because the CO2 that’s captured is sold to oil companies who pump it into aging wells to coax more oil from the ground.
Politicians nevertheless continue to use the term. “My administration is putting an end to the war on coal,” President Donald Trump said this spring. “We’re going to have clean coal, really clean coal.”
New Fraud Allegations Emerge at Troubled ‘Clean Coal’ Project As Southern Co. Records Multi-Billion Loss, Desmog By Sharon Kelly • Tuesday, August 8, 2017 Southern Co. is accused of fraudulently misrepresenting the prospects for its troubled “clean coal” project in Kemper County, Mississippi in several legal filings this summer.
Southern announced in late July that it was shuttering the troubled “clean coal” part of Kemper after construction ran years behind schedule and the company spent $7.5 billion on the 582 megawatt power plant — over $5 billion more than it first projected.
The U.S. Navy – very aware, and active, in responding to climate change
How the U.S. Navy is Responding to Climate Change, Harvard Business Review AUGUST 18, 2017 FOREST REINHARDT AND MICHAEL TOFFEL, Harvard Business School professors, talk about how a giant, global enterprise that operates and owns assets at sea level is fighting climate change—and adapting to it. They discuss what the private sector can learn from the U.S. Navy’s scientific and sober view of the world. Reinhardt and Toffel are the authors of “MANAGING CLIMATE CHANGE: LESSONS FROM THE U.S. NAVY” in the July–August 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review. “……The U.S. Navy is raising its bases, using early storm warning systems, and increasingly powering its missions with the sun, instead of fossil fuels……
FOREST REINHARDT: ………. the Navy is our primary waterborne military force. And as the planet warms, the amount of water is going to increase. That is, the area near the poles, which until quite recently has been closed to marine traffic for much if not all of the year, is going to be increasingly open as the ice melts. You think the last time the Western world really encountered a new ocean was in the early part of the 1500s, and the same kinds of opportunities and conflicts are going to exist in the Arctic.
A second reason is that climate change is potentially destabilizing to societies, especially societies which are not particularly rich and not particularly well governed. And as those societies become increasingly stressed by things like drought and storm severity, the kinds of behaviors that call the military into action are going to become more frequent, whether those are wars or internal conflicts or just need for humanitarian assistance.
MICHAEL TOFFEL: And this is why the military refers to climate change as a threat multiplier. Many have made the connection between the breakdown of societies in the Middle East, in particular in Syria, for example, to be attributed to changing rainwater and other precipitation patterns. So you see these problems right now behind the growth of ISIS. You see these problems also with the migration into Europe and Europe’s struggle with what to do with these migrants. These are examples of issues that climate scientists suggest are only going to get worse in the coming decades..…..
….The Navy also is investing in massive amounts of solar to power their bases. But it’s not motivated so much by those effects that I just mentioned the private sector is trying to claim. It’s really about, in their case, about mission readiness and the resilience of their bases. They want to be sure that as climate change occurs with more intensive storms that that’s not going to knock out the power grids that supply their bases. So they’re investing in some of these power sources because of their distributed nature—the fact that they can produce power on site and not have to rely on long distance generating lines. ……. https://hbr.org/ideacast/2017/08/how-the-u-s-navy-is-responding-to-climate-change
USA town headed for submerging by rising sea levels, but they still deny climate change
Climate change will likely wreck their livelihoods – but they still don’t buy the science
The small Louisiana town of Cameron could be the first in the US to be fully submerged by rising sea levels – and yet locals, 90% of whom voted for Trump, still aren’t convinced about climate change, Guardian, Shannon Sims in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, 18 Aug 17, In 50 years, the region near where I grew up, Cameron Parish in south-west Louisiana, will likely be no more. Or rather, it will exist, but it may be underwater, according to the newly published calculations of the Louisiana government. Coastal land loss is on the upswing, and with each hurricane that sweeps over the region, the timeline is picking up speed.
As a result, Cameron, the principal town in this 6,800-person parish (as counties are called in Louisiana), could be the first town in the US to be fully submerged by rising sea levels and flooding. So it’s here one would expect to feel the greatest sense of alarm over climate change and its consequences.
Instead, Cameron has earned a different kind of fame: it’s the county that, percentage-wise, voted more in favor of Trump than any other county in the US in last year’s election. Nearly 90% of the population did.
Why would some of the people most vulnerable to climate change vote for a politician skeptical of climate change’s existence? Why would people in Cameron Parish support policies that could ruin them?…….. Continue reading
USA’s New climate change report likely to be ignored to death
Editorial: New climate change report likely to be ignored to death http://www.stltoday.com/opinion/editorial/editorial-new-climate-change-report-likely-to-be-ignored-to/article_80383a19-d671-5703-b909-f928f594e75b.html, Aug 17, 2017
Nobbling the charities
Mike Seccombe, 19 Aug 17
The government is waging a multifaceted campaign to reduce the influence of charities, requiring disclosure of how donations are spent, seeking to ban electoral campaigning if overseas funds are received, and choosing not to renew the tenure of the respected head of the sector’s regulatory body…. (subscribers only)
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2017/08/19/nobbling-the-charities/15030648005086
Twiggy stands up against mining — wait, what!?
Guy Rundle
Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest has successfully fought off a mining lease from a rival miner on his land. However, in doing so he may have set a precedent that can work against him…. (subscribers only)
https://www.crikey.com.au/2017/08/18/rundle-twiggy-defends-property-against-mining-lease/
19 August REneweconomy News
Redflow chooses Thailand for battery factory
Australian battery company Redflow Limited has today announced it has established a company in Thailand to manage production of its zinc-bromine flow batteries in South East Asia.
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Researchers one step closer to efficient, colorful solar panelsResearchers at Netherlands’ AMOLF Institute develop method to make solar panels green. Next stop, red and blue – and maybe even white.
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Higher wind output in SA correlates with lower wholesale priceUnlike yesterday’s chart on gas, today’s graph shows wind has the opposite effect – more output takes power prices lower.
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Pic of the Day: Old meets new at solar-powered antique shopWe love this winter-time image of the solar powered Smythesdale Antique shop – and the message that it sends.
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Windlab’s 1200MW Kennedy Energy Park set for construction, after IPO windfallCSIRO spin-off raises $50m in IPO, taking its world-leading wind, solar, storage project in Queensland closer to financial close.
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Australian wind delivers more record low prices, as private sector piles inAGL Energy secures PPA of below $60/MWh for 453MW Coopers Gap Wind Farm, to be built in Queensland by 2019 after reaching financial close Thursday. AGL chief says deal signals private sector’s readiness to invest in Australian renewables – but warns policy certainty still vital.
1.This month.
The Road to War brings a sharp focus to why it is not in Australia’s best interest to be dragged into a war with China which will almost inevitably go nuclear very quickly. The filmmaker has interviewed some of Australia’s senior foreign policy analysts who have vast experience behind them in analysing what really is going on here as the United States rattles its sabres with China. And sets us up to be its proxy, like the poor Ukranians have been fed into the Meatgrinder. So America can remain the Top Dog. The Road to War reveals how the United States through its spy base at Pine Gap and by stationing six nuclear capable B52 bombers in the Top End (without permission from the traditional owners) is making Australia a prime nuclear target if the current war of words suddenly melts down into full scale war.
The Road to War shows the implicit connection between Carbon emissions (the US military uses a whopping 70% of America’s annual petroleum to move its armies and vast War Machine around the globe to its 800+ military bases..but under a loophole wangled at Kyoto, the US military does not have to report its C02 annual emissions). The Road to War starts screening at selected cities and regional centres in March. See the trailer end for details.
Antinuclear 