Barb Walker Fight To Stop Nuclear Waste Dump In Flinders Ranges SA, 19 June 18
I’ve just listened to another snow job on ABC 891 and then repeated on ABC 639. Senator Canavan is not telling the truth. He also contradicted statements he made in ‘The Australian’ newspaper this week.
Mr Canavan, your nuclear waste dump does NOT have 65% community support. He has used a figure from a dodgy phone poll that was conducted well over 2 years ago in the Flinders Ranges. Incidentally, that poll only consulted a small percentage of people on fixed phone lines – asking if they would like more information about the process of hosting a nuclear waste facility and so on. Hardly grounds to spruik 65% support, Mr Canavan!
This has been a flawed process every step of the way.
Senator Rex Patrick states, and rightly so;
“RADIOACTIVE WASTE SITE SELECTION = A SHAM”
Here in the Flinders, we have been fighting this proposed dump for over 2 years. Stress levels are through the roof for a lot of people within our communities. People are getting sick, and some are just sick and tired of hearing about it and many wanting the dump to just, go away!
The Australian Radiation Protection And Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA), has stated they will not give a licence to build a nuclear waste facility where there is no community support. Why then are the facts being twisted to suit Mr Canavan? He is still spruiking “hospital waste”. Does he think he is talking to fools? Our communities have done extensive research and we are well informed. Perhaps we know more than he does?
Doesn’t he realise the implications of the ILW sitting in the Flinders for hundreds of years with no forward plans of future repacking and deep underground disposal. Lay your plans on the table, Senator Canavan. Let’s hear it.
If we were to hide valuable information by twisting the truth to suit an outcome that will effect communities for hundreds, if not thousands, of years we would all lose our jobs and probably finish up in jail.
Senator Canavan, if the August vote swings to a ‘NO’ vote will that be seen by you as just, “community sentiment” or does NO actually mean NO ? https://www.facebook.com/groups/344452605899556/
Just thinking, the proposed nuclear rubbish dump been forced upon us and the rest of the Adnyamathanha people is like imperialism. It is an economic, political dominance over us.
We as traditional owners have not heard of or seen any report of the so called cultural heritage assessment that was done upon our traditional lands, so I believe and see that as tokenism, because the wider community of Adnyamathanha people weren’t involved or weren’t consulted in a proper manner and it looks like we will never get to see the cultural heritage report.
So why is there so much secrecy on the cultural heritage report because at the end of the day, we are the Adnyamathanha people and its our traditional land and cultural heritage, our overall a big part of our cultural stytem our Muda that will be destroyed.
It will be total cultural genocide, so please dont destroy our culture our Muda by ripping out the pages of our story lines just for a nuclear waste repository. Listen to the first sovereign people, the Adnyamathanha of the Flinders Ranges, because we know the end of the story and the consequences that the Muda will bring, please respect it as we dont want mankind to suffer today, tomorrow and in the years to come.
Leave the poison nuclear waste at Lucas Heights or wherever it is around the world today, we dont want it on and in our yarta its muntha, no good! Hopefully oned ay, but at the moment it is only a big dream, our knowlege of our yarta and of the Dreaming, our people will be accepted, respected and embraced by all non Aboriginal Australians as true history and sovereign people of the northern Flinders Ranges and surrounding areas so please dont put a nuclear waste dump on our yarta.
painting done by Regina McKenzie 6 yrs ago about Yurlus Dreaming tracks and where he went. This one depicts the a part of the tracks area where Yurlu went, but unfortunately now this area destined for a nuclear waste repository which will destroy the story and Dreaming tracks storyline and songs.
I want to stress, that I dont hate anyone regardless of race creed or colour all I want is for us as all Adnyamathanha people a tribal nation to be listened to by DIIS so that they dont destroy our cultural beliefs, our heritage our stories of creation of this land and where it goes. https://www.facebook.com/groups/344452605899556/
Australian mining companies have a poor track record operating in Africa. Australian uranium company Paladin Energy has now put two of its mines into ‘care-and-maintenance’ and bankruptcy looms. But who cleans up the company’s mess in Namibia and Malawi, asks JIM GREEN
Many Australian mining projects in Africa are outposts of good governance – this is what Julie Bishop, the country’s Foreign Minister, told the Africa Down Under mining conference in Western Australia in September 2017. The Australian government “encourages the people of Africa to see us as an open-cut mine for lessons-learned, for skills, for innovation and, I would like to think, inspiration,” the minister said.
But such claims sit uneasily with the highly critical findings arising from a detailed investigation by the International Consortium of Independent Journalists (ICIJ). The ICIJ noted in a 2015 report that since 2004, more than 380 people have died in mining accidents or in off-site skirmishes connected to Australian mining companies in Africa.
The ICIJ report further stated: “Multiple Australian mining companies are accused of negligence, unfair dismissal, violence and environmental law-breaking across Africa, according to legal filings and community petitions gathered from South Africa, Botswana, Tanzania, Zambia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal and Ghana.”
Paladin Energy’s Kayelekera uranium mine in Malawi provides a case study of the problems with Australian mining companies in Africa. Western Australia-based Paladin exploited Malawi’s poverty to secure numerous reductions and exemptions from payments normally required by foreign investors.
United Nations’ Special Rapporteur Olivier De Schutter noted in a 2013 report that “revenue losses from special incentives given to Australian mining company Paladin Energy, which manages the Kayelekera uranium mine, are estimated to amount to at least US$205 million (MWK 67 billion) and could be up to US$281 million (MWK 92 billion) over the 13-year lifespan of the mine.”
York would look like This Is What a Nuclear Bomb Looks Like (picture of a somewhat rusting ordinary van) Ny Mag. 12 June 18
If America is attacked, the strike probably won’t come from North Korea. And it will be even scarier than we imagine. …….
There are currently at least 2,000 tons of weapons-grade nuclear material stored in some 40 countries — enough to make more than 40,000 bombs approximately the size of the one that devastated Hiroshima. Stealing the material would be challenging but far from impossible. Russia stockpiles numerous bombs built before the use of electronic locks that disable the weapons in the event of tampering. Universities that handle uranium often have lax security. And insiders at military compounds sometimes steal radioactive material and sell it on the black market. Since 1993, there have been 762 known instances in which radioactive materials were lost or stolen, and more than 2,000 cases of trafficking and other criminal activities.
‘Our kids need proper water’: Families plead for action over uranium in drinking water, ABC, 7.30 by Indigenous affairs reporters Isabella Higgins, Bridget Brennan and Emily Napangarti Butcher, 19 June 18,
Key points:
At least three communities in central Australia have levels of uranium in drinking water that exceed health guidelines
Dozens of other communities not meeting aesthetic guidelines, which ensure taste, feel and smell are up to standard
Residents fear water could be harming them and say governments have failed to act
Aboriginal community of Laramba, north of Alice Springs, drinking water contains more than double the recommended levels of uranium, and it’s been like that for a decade.
Billy Briscoe, a long-term resident, is deeply concerned about the impact that water is having on his family.
“The really important thing is about kids. Our kids need proper water, not with uranium. They need quality, really good water,” he said.
“We all drink the bore water … if there’s no water, how can you survive?
Official data obtained by the ABC’s 7.30 program shows Laramba’s water supply contains uranium at higher than 0.04 milligrams per litre (mg/L).
Australia’s drinking-water guidelines outline it should not exceed 0.017mg/L.
“The main toxic effect of short-term exposure to high concentrations of uranium is inflammation of the kidney,” according to the National Health and Medical Research Council.
“Little is known about the long-term exposure to low concentrations.”
Most communities in the Northern Territory rely on bore water, pumped up from an aquifer deep underground, which often contains high concentrations of naturally occurring minerals and contaminants — like uranium.
….. 7.30 can reveal that, in total, seven communities in the NT have exceeded health guidelines in the last financial year due to elevated levels of contaminants including uranium, barium, antimony, chromium and fluoride……A report from the West Australian auditor-general released in 2015 said three remote communities had exceeded the safe limit of uranium about half the time. ……
Arrernte elder Bob Liddle took this fight to the Federal Government after what he saw as inaction from the Territory Government.
The Federal Government said the provision of clean, safe, drinking water was not a federal responsibility.
“It is a responsibility of state, territory and local governments,” a spokeswoman for the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet said……
Mr Liddle said his biggest frustration was that he believed no level of government was taking carriage of fixing the water in his home communities.
“It’s an international scandal that this is allowed to happen in a country like Australia — a rich country like Australia,” he said.
“If that was happening in Victoria, you’d have a hell of a row. There would be politicians on the guillotine.
ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie has hit back against critics with a Deloitte Access Economics assessment that the public broadcaster contributed more than A$1 billion to the Australian economy in the last financial year.
This was on a par with the public funding of the organisation, she told the Melbourne Press Club, in an address coming days after the Liberal Federal Council urged the ABC be privatised – a call rejected by the government.
Far from being a drain on the public purse, the audience, community and economic value stemming from ABC activity is a real and tangible benefit,“ she said. The Deloitte study was commissioned by the ABC; Guthrie said its report was still being compiled and would be released next month.
Of the $1 billion, “more than a third is economic support for the broader media ecosystem. Far from being Ultimo-centric, the ABC is boosting activity across the country,” she said, giving as examples the filming of Mystery Road in the Kimberley and the production of Rosehaven outside Hobart.
Deloitte calculated the ABC was helping sustain more than 6000 full-time equivalent jobs across the economy. “It means that for every three full-time equivalent jobs created by the ABC, there are another two supported in our supply chain – local artists, writers, technicians, transport workers and many more.
“In hard figures, the research shows that the ABC helps to sustain 2500 full-time equivalent jobs in addition to the 4000 women and men who are directly employed by the public broadcaster.
“When broken down this equates to more than 500 additional jobs in production companies, over 400 jobs elsewhere in the broadcast sector, and close to 300 full-time equivalent jobs in the professional services.
“Amidst the debate over the ABC’s purpose and its funding we should all remember that there are 2500 jobs outside public broadcasting at risk in any move to curtail our remit and activities”.
Addressing the critics’ argument that the ABC’s about $1 billion funding wasn’t well spent, Guthrie pointed out that the broadcaster’s per capita funding had halved in real terms in three decades while the demands on it had increased, and that this financial year 92% of its budget would be spent on making content, supporting content makers and distribution.
“Thirty years ago, the ABC had five platforms and 6000 people working around the country. Today, Your ABC has two-thirds the number of people operating six times the number of platforms and services with half the real per capita funding”.
Guthrie argued that the claim that the latest 1% efficiency dividend could easily be accommodated ignored the accumulation of efficiency takes over the past four years, and the fact these efficiencies robbed the organisation of its ability to finance new content and innovation.
She rejected what she described as two other “fallacies” – that the ABC should be stripped back to servicing gaps in the market, becoming a “media failure operator”, and that the ABC served only sectional interests.
Referring to the ABC charter, she said that “as the independent national public broadcaster, our purpose is to provide a balance between broadcasting programs of wide appeal as well as specialised interest”.
Public broadcasting was “about providing the distinctive programs that Australians young and old, left and right, rich and poor, in Bourke and in Brisbane, both want and need”.
She attacked those commentators and politicians who liked “to pigeonhole our audience as being of a particular political bent or social strata.
“In the two years since I’ve been in this role, I have been constantly reminded how wrong that is”, she said, citing the 12 million Australians who would watch ABC TV this week, the nearly five million who’d listen to ABC radio, and the 13 million ABC podcast downloads that occurred every month.
“If all those listeners and viewers were on the one side of politics, there wouldn’t be much politicking left to do.
“I note also the findings of the recent Reuters Digital News Report. Australia may have an increasingly polarised media sector, but ABC television attracts viewers from across the political spectrum for its news coverage”.
Guthrie said that Australians regarded the ABC “as one of the great national institutions” and “deeply resent it being used as a punching bag by narrow political, commercial or ideological interests”.
June 19 marks six years since the founder of WikiLeaks entered the building of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He hasn’t stepped foot outside it since.
Julian Assange has been residing at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012, where he sought refuge while facing sexual assault allegations in Sweden.
981 days have passed since the Metropolitan police removed dedicated 24/7 guards from outside the Ecuadorian Embassy on October 12, 2015.
“Like all public services, MPS resources are finite. With so many different criminal, and other, threats to the city it protects, the current deployment of officers is no longer believed proportionate,” a statement by the Met police said.
865 days since the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) ruled in a majority decision that Assange was being detained inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London arbitrarily and was allowed to leave.
396 days since the allegations were dropped by Swedish prosecutors, but the Wikileaks founder would still get arrested if he left the embassy’s premises — by the UK police — for failing to surrender to the court in 2012.
158 days since Assange was granted Ecuadorian citizenship and subsequently the UK was asked to recognize the whistleblower as a diplomatic agent. Had the British agreed — it would have given Assange immunity to finally leave the embassy.
83 days since the whistleblower’s access to the Internet was cut off “in order to prevent any potential harm.”
“The government of Ecuador has suspended the systems that allows Julian Assange to communicate with the world outside of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London… The measure was adopted due to Assange not complying with a written promise which he made with the government in late 2017, whereby he was obliged not to send messages which entailed interference in relation to other states,” the government of Ecuador said in a statement.
Julian Assange fears extradition to the United States to be prosecuted for espionage after his website leaked classified US data.
They advise people to contact the New Zealand Office of Radiation Safety or their doctor if they think they may have been exposed to radiation from the reactor used to power McMurdo Station, Antarctica, from 1962 to 1979.
The U.S. Department of Defense has assessed the risk of radiation exposure for those who worked near the power plant as low.
However, the Department of Veterans Affairs ruled in November that retired Navy veteran James Landy’s “esophageal, stomach, liver, and brain and spine cancers, [were] incurred in active duty service.”
Landy worked at McMurdo as a C-130 flight engineer from 1970 to 1974 and from 1977 to 1981 before dying at age 63 in 2012, said his widow, Pam Landy.
“He had pain in his kidneys and went to the doctor and they sent him to an oncologist who said he had cancer from radiation exposure,” she said in a phone interview Monday from her home in Pensacola, Fla.
Veterans who served in Antarctica should have been warned about the radiation risk, Pam Landy said.
“The government knew that thing was there. If they had given people a heads up he could have been diagnosed early and might have a shot at being alive,” she said. “I got a payout from the VA, but it’s a pittance compared to a life.”
The McMurdo reactor had many malfunctions, but personnel might also have been exposed during its decommissioning when soil and rock from the site was trucked through the base to be shipped off the continent, she said.
Peter Breen, 64, was a New Zealand Army mechanic about 2 miles from McMurdo at Scott Base from 1981 to 1982. Rock and soil from the reactor site was taken to a wharf in open trucks, and Breen fears he could have been exposed to contaminated dust blown by the wind or on ice harvested from nearby cliffs.
He’s campaigning for New Zealand Antarctic veterans to be recognized with a medal and offered health checks.
“It is not compensation that guys are after,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Tauranga, New Zealand. “They want a health-check program.”
According to reports from NASA GISS, May of 2018 was the 4th hottest in the 138 year global temperature record. This new warmth came as the Equatorial Pacific began to retreat from a cooling La Nina state — which, all things being equal, would have resulted in somewhat cooler than average global temperatures. (Analysis of […]
Opinion: ¶ “US Offshore Wind Upends Plans For Saving Coal & Nuclear Power Plants” • If the latest news out of the US DOE is any indication, the Trump Administration’s newest stratagem for keeping old coal and nuclear power plants in operation – make the taxpayers pay extra to keep uneconomical power plants running – is […]
Australia’s coal-fired generation capacity could be little more than a twinkle in Tony Abbott’s eye by as early as 2050, when renewables are forecast to provide 92 per cent of the country’s electricity.
UNSW academics compare campaign against wind and solar and high renewable energy scenarios led by pro-nuclear lobbyists to efforts by the tobacco industry to sow fear and uncertainty and delay action.
The NEG does nothing. It won’t lower prices, it won’t reduce the large gentailer influence, it won’t bring about new investment. In short, it’s fraud as far as policy goes.
¶ “Global warming cooks up ‘a different world’ over 3 decades” • We were warned. On June 23, 1988, a sultry day in Washington, Dr James Hansen told Congress that global warming was not approaching – it had already arrived. Thirty years later, it’s clear that Hansen and other doomsayers were right. And the change has been sweeping. [The Denver Post]
James Hansen (Marshall Ritzel, The Associated Press)
Science and Technology:
¶ In a world first, Siemens is opening a £1.5-million pilot project in Oxfordshire employing ammonia as a form of energy storage. The proof-of-concept facility will turn electricity, water, and air into ammonia without releasing carbon emissions. The ammonia can be stored and burned for electricity, sold as a fuel, or used for industrial purposes. [businessgreen.com]
¶ Tesla’s cobalt usage will soon be a thing of the past if Elon Musk has his way. And…
Strong earthquake shakes Osaka All but 1 or 2 of these are supposedly shut down since 3-11. Just before 8 am local time a magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck northern Osaka. It’s categorized as a six-minus on a scale of zero to seven on Japan’s seismic intensity scale. No tsunami warning has been issued. Hyogo, Kyoto, […]
Antinuclear 