Nuclear power in Australia not realistic for at least a decade, Ziggy Switkowski says
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Nuclear power in Australia not realistic for at least a decade, Ziggy Switkowski says
Expert who led 2006 review says ban on nuclear should be lifted, but much more overseas evidence is needed on small modular reactors, Guardian, Adam Morton Environment editor@adamlmorton, 29 Aug 2019 It will be about a decade before it is clear whether small nuclear reactors are suitable for Australia and would take about 15 years to bring a plant online if a decision was made to build one, one of the country’s leading experts has said. |
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Risk of ‘catastrophic failure’ if Australia adopts nuclear energy: Switkowski
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Risk of ‘catastrophic failure’ if Australia adopts nuclear energy: Switkowski, The Age, By Rebecca Gredley August 29, 2019, There is a risk of “catastrophic failure” if Australia adopts nuclear energy, a federal parliamentary inquiry has heard.Ziggy Switkowski, who led a Howard government review into the power source, drew attention to the nuclear disasters of Chernobyl in Ukraine, Fukushima in Japan and Three Mile Island in the US.
After those events, the possibility of catastrophic failure within the nuclear system is non-negligible“, he told the committee in Sydney on Thursday. Issues also arose around managing nuclear waste and the cost burden on future generations, Dr Switkowski said……. The committee heard from several government agencies on Thursday, including the Australian Energy Market Operator and the Australian Energy Regulator. It will consider waste management, health and safety, environmental impacts, affordability and reliability, economic feasibility and workforce capability. https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/risk-of-catastrophic-failure-if-australia-adopts-nuclear-energy-20190829-p52m2h.html |
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Australia’s nuclear research reactor was always intended as the first step towards the nuclear bomb
The push for an Aussie bomb It took former PM John Gorton almost three decades to finally come clean on his ambitions for Australia to have a nuclear bomb. THE AUSTRALIAN, By TOM GILLING 30 Aug 19,
In December 9, 1966, the Australian Government signed a public agreement with the US to build what both countries described as a “Joint Defence Space Research Facility” at Pine Gap, just outside Alice Springs. The carefully misleading agreement expressed the two countries’ mutual desire “to co-operate further in effective defence and for the preservation of peace and security”.
Officially, Pine Gap was a collaboration between the Australian Department of Defence and the Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, but the latter was a red herring meant to conceal the real power at Pine Gap: the Central Intelligence Agency….the truth was that the Joint Defence Space Research Facility was joint in name only and its purpose was not (and never would be) “research”. It was a spy station designed to collect signals from US surveillance satellites in geosynchronous orbit over the equator. ……
The building of an experimental reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney’s south was supposed to be the first step in a nuclear program that within a decade would see the development of full-scale nuclear power reactors. ……
During the 1950s Australian defence chiefs lobbied vigorously for an Australian bomb. When it became clear that the prime minister, Robert Menzies, had reservations, they went behind his back. Menzies did agree, however, to let Britain test its nuclear weapons in Australia — a decision, according to historian Jacques Hymans, taken “almost single-handedly… without consulting his Cabinet and without requesting any quid pro quo, not even access to technical data necessary for the Australian government to assess the effects of the tests on humans and the environment”……….
Gorton’s political reservations about the non-proliferation treaty masked a deeper fear: that signing the treaty might cause Australia’s nascent atomic energy industry to be “frozen in a primitive state”. Gorton and the head of Australia’s Atomic Energy Commission, Philip Baxter, were both committed to pursuing the development of an Australian bomb. Scientists at the AEC worked with government officials to draw up cost and time estimates for atomic and hydrogen bomb programs. According to the historian Hymans, they outlined two possible programs: a power reactor program capable of producing enough weapons- grade plutonium for 30 fission weapons (A-bombs) per year; and a uranium enrichment program capable of producing enough uranium-235 for at least 10 thermonuclear weapons (H-bombs) per year. The A-bomb plan was costed at what was considered to be an “affordable” $144 million and was thought to be feasible in no more than seven to 10 years. The H-bomb plan was costed at $184 million over a similar period.
Aware of opposition to any talk of an “Aussie bomb”, Gorton carefully played down the military aspect and argued instead for the economic benefits of a nuclear power program. ………
a US mission did visit Canberra at the end of April 1968. Officials from the AEC had impressed the US visitors with “the confidence of their ability to manufacture a nuclear weapon and desire to be in a position to do so on very short notice”.
The Australian officials, they said, had “studied the draft NPT [non-proliferation treaty] most thoroughly… the political rationalisation of these officials was that Australia needed to be in a position to manufacture nuclear weapons rapidly if India and Japan were to go nuclear… the Australian officials indicated they could not even contemplate signing the NPT if it were not for an interpretation which would enable the deployment of nuclear weapons belonging to an ally on Australian soil.”
Eighteen months after Rusk’s fractious visit to Canberra, Gorton called a general election. He declared his commitment to a nuclear-powered (if not a nuclear-armed) Australia, announcing that “the time for this nation to enter the atomic age has now arrived” and laying out his scheme for a 500-megawatt nuclear power plant to be built at Jervis Bay, on NSW’s south coast. While the defence benefits of such a reactor were unspoken, there was no mistaking the military potential of the plutonium it would be producing.
The Jervis Bay reactor never got off the drawing board, although planning reached an advanced stage. Detailed specifications were put out to tender and there was broad agreement over a British bid to build a heavy-water reactor. A Cabinet submission was in the pipeline when Gorton lost the confidence of the party room and was replaced by William McMahon, a nuclear sceptic who moved quickly to defer the project.
It would be another 28 years before Gorton finally came clean on the link between the reactor and his ambition for Australia to have nuclear weapons. . In 1999 he told a Sydney newspaper that “we were interested in this thing because it could provide electricity to everybody and… if you decided later on, it could make an atomic bomb”. Gorton did not identify who he meant by “we” (although Philip Baxter was almost certainly among them) but Gorton and those who shared his nuclear ambitions were unable to win over the doubters in his own government.
Australia signed the non-proliferation treaty in 1970 but even as it did so it was clear that Gorton had no intention of ratifying the treaty. Australia would not ratify it until 1973, and then only after McMahon’s Coalition government had lost power to Gough Whitlam’s Labor Party. As well as ratifying the treaty, the Whitlam government cancelled the Jervis Bay project that had been in limbo since McMahon became prime minister. And with that, Whitlam effectively ended Australia’s quixotic bid to become a nuclear power.
Australia never got its own bomb, although as late as 1984 the foreign minister, Bill Hayden, could still speak about Australian nuclear research providing the country with the potential for nuclear weapons. The Morrison Government is unlikely to let the nuclear genie out of the bottle, with a spokesperson from the Department of Defence telling The Weekend Australian Magazine that “Australia stands by its Non-Proliferation Treaty pledge, as a non-nuclear weapon state, not to acquire or develop nuclear weapons”. ….. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/weekend-australian-magazine/gorton-and-the-bomb-australias-nuclear-ambitions/news-story/00787e322a41d2ff37a146c86a739f02
France shuts down sodium-cooled fast Nuclear reactor project
News1 29th Aug 2019 The Astrid Fast Reactor Project is shut down by the Atomic EnergyCommission. A blow to the future of the sector. This was to be the nextstep in the development of the French nuclear industry, one that wouldallow it to project into the future, but which is likely never to see the
light of day. According to our information, the Astrid Fast Neutron Reactor
(RNR) project is being abandoned by the Atomic Energy and Alternative
Energies Commission (CEA), which is nevertheless at the origin.
https://www.news1.news/2019/08/france-abandons-the-fourth-generation-of-reactors.html
Le Monde 29th Aug 2019 Astrid, the acronym for Advanced Sodium Technological Reactor for Industrial Demonstration, is a sodium-cooled fast reactor prototype project to be built at the Marcoule nuclear site in the Gard.
The objective of this new generation is to use depleted uranium and plutonium as fuel, in other words to reuse the radioactive materials from the electricity generation of the current nuclear fleet and largely stored at the La Hague site. (Channel), operated by Orano (formerly Areva).
US experts propose having Artificial Intelligence control nuclear weapons
Strangelove redux: US experts propose having AI control nuclear weapons https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/strangelove-redux-us-experts-propose-having-ai-control-nuclear-weapons/
By Matt Field, AA August 30 2019 Hypersonic missiles, stealthy cruise missiles, and weaponized artificial intelligence have so reduced the amount of time that decision makers in the United States would theoretically have to respond to a nuclear attack that, two military experts say, it’s time for a new US nuclear command, control, and communications system. Their solution? Give artificial intelligence control over the launch button.
The Flamanville EPR nuclear reactor, a nightmare site forFrance.
Le Monde 30th Aug 2019 The Flamanville EPR, a nightmare site for EDF.
The third-generation Normanreactor, scheduled to be launched in 2012, will not start until the end of 2022 due to faulty welds on the site. Launched in 2007, the third generation EPR reactor was initially to be connected to the electricity grid in 2012, and cost around 3.5 billion euros. In practice, it will not
start before the end of 2022, at the earliest, and the bill will rise to
more than 11 billion euros. An amount likely to be further revised upwards
depending on the work that remains to be done.
Even a very small nuclear research reactor itself becomes a costly radioactive waste problem
Environmental groups concerned about demolition plan for Saskatoon’s SLOWPOKE-2 nuclear reactor, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/saskatoon-nuclear-reactor-demolition-concerns-1.5264231
Groups worried about transportation of nuclear waste, pouring treated water into sewer,
· CBC News ·Aug 30, 2019 Environmental groups from across the country are expressing concerns about the decommissioning of a small nuclear reactor near the University of Saskatchewan campus.
The Saskatchewan Research Council is applying to dismantle its SLOWPOKE-2 reactor. The demolition would likely happen next year, but before that happens the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) will hold a hearing in Ottawa next month to look at approving the plan.
Environmental groups’ concerns about the plan include the intentions to release treated water from the reactor pool into the City of Saskatoon’s sewer system and to send the non-radioactive building materials to a private landfill.
“We don’t know what the cumulative effect or the additive effect of the radioactive burden is going to be of either of those practices,” said Brennain Lloyd, project manager of Northwatch, an environmental group in northern Ontario.
Other concerns include the fate of the reactor pool itself. The proposed plan includes filling the empty pool with concrete, rather than removing the contaminated site completely, as long as the site meets radioactivity guidelines.
Michael Poellet of Saskatchewan’s Inter-Church Uranium Committee Educational Co-operative (ICUCEC) questioned leaving the pool site in the ground.
“The issue there is that the cement in the pool has absorbed radioactivity,” said Poellet. “It’s not assured that the cement will be able to keep that radioactivity within that cement.”
Northwatch, along with the ICUCEC and Nuclear Waste Watch, have all applied to provide comment at the hearing.
The groups said they have important questions, including concerns about eight cubic meters of nuclear waste being transported hundreds of kilometres to a holding facility in South Carolina and parts of the reactor being sent to long-term storage in Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario.
“It’s a big deal project,” said Lloyd. “It seems to have been flying under the radar but it needs to come out out front.” Continue reading
NATO kow-towing to Trump in ignoring Russian nuclear explosion
Russia’s nuclear weapons tests were linked to a radioactive explosion. Trump’s friendliness with Putin makes it hard for NATO to do anything about it. Business Insider, MITCH PROTHERO, AUG 29, 2019
Julian Assange: the latest blackout by Mnar Muhawesh and Robert Sheer on effects on journalism — Rise Up Times — nuclear-news
If you are waiting for corporate media pundits to defend freedom of the press, you’re going to be disappointed. via Julian Assange: the latest blackout by Mnar Muhawesh and Robert Sheer on effects on journalism — Rise Up Times
August 30 Energy News — geoharvey
Science and Technology: ¶ “Shrimp, Fish, And Solar: A Recipe For Success” • Fraunhofer ISE is leading experiments that combine solar power with aquaculture along the Mekong River in Vietnam. Many shrimp and fish farms use greenhouse-like structures to keep the water free of contaminants, and Fraunhofer is using the structures for solar power. [CleanTechnica] […]
NSW coal city, Newcastle, sets sights on 100 per cent renewables — RenewEconomy
NSW city best known for its busy coal port wants to take council operations 100% renewable by 2020, with a combination of installed solar and a renewable off-take deal. The post NSW coal city, Newcastle, sets sights on 100 per cent renewables appeared first on RenewEconomy.
via NSW coal city, Newcastle, sets sights on 100 per cent renewables — RenewEconomy
Taylor gaslights as Australia hits seven year high on emissions — RenewEconomy
Australia’s emissions rise again to a seven year high, but minister for emissions reductions Angus Taylor says that is a really good thing, because of gas. The post Taylor gaslights as Australia hits seven year high on emissions appeared first on RenewEconomy.
via Taylor gaslights as Australia hits seven year high on emissions — RenewEconomy
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 