Submission for the public good: to Federal Nuclear Inquiry – Noel Wauchope
Recommendation. There is no need to change Australia’s laws prohibiting nuclear activities. They were devised to protect Australians from the health, and safety risks of nuclear facilities, – far-sighted in that they have saved Australia from the unnecessary expense of a now collapsing industry. Meanwhile Australia is very well placed to put energy and funds into truly modern developments, and could become a world leader in energy efficiency and renewable energy.
To start with, the title of this Inquiry , featuring the word “prerequisite” really makes clear the major issue.
What is the major prerequisite?
Obviously the one important prerequisite is to repeal Australia’s laws banning nuclear activities.
First the Federal Law would have to be repealed. (a1)
Then – State Laws – Victoria’s NUCLEAR ACTIVITIES (PROHIBITIONS) ACT (a2) -and South Australia’s Nuclear Waste Storage Facility (Prohibition) Act 2000 (a3)
(a1) https://www.environment.gov.au/epbc/what-is-protected/nuclear-actions
(a2) http://www8.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdb/au/legis/vic/consol_act/naa1983337/
Once these laws are repealed, then nuclear industry proponents will be free to spend much money on publicising the benefits of the industry. With helpful politicians and press, particularly from the predominant Murdoch media, this will give the industry huge boost. As Australia moves further into drought and water shortages, they will claim that nuclear power is essential to solve climate change. (Even if nuclear power could combat climate change, it would take decades to establish, and by then it would be too late.)
So – that is what the global nuclear industry needs, especially for South Australia, which has specific legislation against spending public money on promoting the nuclear industry .
While Australians have concerns about cost, safety, environment , health, wastes, Aboriginal rights, weapons proliferation etc, I am sure that the nuclear lobby will be able to overcome those hesitations, with an effective programme.
So, I have my doubts that the Terms of Reference matter all that much, but – here goes. I understand that the emphasis in this Inquiry is on Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMRs)
a . waste management, transport and storage. Continue reading
Scott Morrison and Donald Trump happily together against climate change action
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Scott Morrison’s decision to spurn the UN climate summit for a Trump rally speaks volumes, https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/2019/09/23/scott-morrison-donald-trump-climate/ Prime Minister Scott Morrison has enthusiastically shared the stage at a Trump rally in the US swing state of Ohio rather than attend the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York.The rally was organised around the opening of Australian cardboard box billionaire Anthony Pratt’s new recycling factory in the regional town of Wapakoneta.
Its timing is probably no coincidence either, as President Donald Trump, like the Prime Minister, was not invited to speak in New York and didn’t want to go anyway. The Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Rachel Kyte, said: “He (Mr Guterres) wanted people to come with plans, not speeches.” Those plans had to be about doing more to reduce emissions and combat climate change than had already been promised. Mr Guterres, backed by the latest scientific assessments, is concerned by the fact that what nations promised at the Paris Climate Summit four years ago will fall disastrously short of what is needed to avert a catastrophic rise in global temperatures by 2050. Simply put, if a nation had nothing new to say, it was not welcome to make it to the podium. Our Foreign Minister Marise Payne is reduced to bystander status. At the Ohio Rally, Trump told 1500 cheering supporters that Scott Morrison was supposed to lose the last election, but “he blew ’em away”. And added that the PM did that because “he believes the same things I believe”. Incredibly, given the fact that some 300,000 people rallied for climate change action around Australia – and millions more did the same around the world – climate change wasn’t mentioned during the leaders’ Oval Office love in. “No it didn’t come up” was Morrison’s terse reply to reporters. Even though since achieving the top job, Mr Morrison has said he believes the climate science and is “taking action”, that is not how he is perceived by the American media. CBS Radio commentator Michael Williams, in a live cross from Washington to The Sunday Project, said the two men get on because they both like “free trade and closed borders”. And more to the point, “both are big on climate scepticism”. Williams, like other foreign commentators, hasn’t caught up with the Prime Minister’s rhetorical pivot. Or maybe, like the UN Secretary-General, is judging him on his government’s weak commitments. Though Energy Minister Angus Taylor insists “we are taking strong action and we need to”. Mr Taylor says Australia is overachieving in reaching the commitments we have made. Never mind that a special exemption was given to Australia at Kyoto to keep emitting on the promise to do better later. Our emissions, on the government’s own figures, are continuing to rise. Mr Taylor, like his Prime Minister, has no plans on how to achieve our net zero emissions target by 2050 other than yet-to-be invented technology. Fuel reserve failureIt’s becoming the MO of this government – as they say in police speak of the modus operandi or the usual way suspects commit their crimes – to claim success while failing to really deliver. Another worrying example is its failure to deliver its commitment to the international world-standard minimum of 90 days of fuel reserves. Now in its seventh year, the best the government has done is two to three weeks of fuel reserves. The attack last week on the Saudi oil refinery complex and the disruption this caused could be just a foretaste of the dangers ahead. Mr Taylor claims we are close to 90 days because he is including “stocks on water”. Not even his colleague, Resources Minister Matt Canavan, believes that. He told Sky TV on the weekend “we’ve got roughly on average about 40 days” of reserves. Nero famously fiddled while Rome burned. Pity he seems to be a role model for our leaders in Canberra. Paul Bongiorno AM is a veteran of the Canberra Press Gallery, with 40 years’ experience covering Australian politics |
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A warming world means an increased danger from nuclear wastes
Can Nuclear Power’s Deadly Waste Be Contained in a Warming World? PART OF THE SERIES Covering Climate Now, Truthout. Karen Charman 23 Sept 19, ‘…………Nuclear Energy Is Not “Clean”
Ever since the nuclear industry became a global pariah following Three Mile Island and the much more severe accident at Chernobyl in 1986, it has been desperately trying to make a comeback.
In the late 1980s, then-chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency Hans Blix began touting the idea that nuclear power should play a significant role in combating climate change because it does not release carbon while generating electricity, a position he continues to promote.
Several prominent advocates for addressing the climate crisis have taken up this call, some of the latest being Democratic presidential hopefuls Cory Booker and Andrew Yang.
……… Because of the huge volume of deadly poisons that the nuclear fission process creates, nuclear reactors need an uninterrupted electricity supply to run the cooling systems that keep the reactors from melting down, a requirement that may be increasingly difficult to guarantee in a world of climate-fueled megastorms and other disasters.
The ongoing accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan following the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 demonstrates the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to such disasters.
Nuclear boosters have been remarkably successful in ignoring and erasing the health effects of radiation exposure, enabling them to downplay the impacts of serious accidents. In truth, reactor meltdowns, depending on where they occur, can kill and injure enormous numbers of people and contaminate the air, water, land and food supply over thousands of miles with radiation. A 1982 study by the Sandia National Laboratory, one of the labs run by the U.S. Department of Energy, calculated deaths and injuries within a year of a core meltdown and subsequent cancer deaths at 76 different nuclear power plant sites, many of which were only proposed at that time. According to this study, the Salem nuclear plant outside Philadelphia could kill 100,000 people within a year, result in 40,000 subsequent cancer deaths and give another 70,000-75,000 people a range of radiation-related injuries. A 1997 report by Brookhaven National Laboratory on the potential consequences of a spent fuel accident also forecasted large numbers of fatalities.
Fission 101
The risks of radiation exposure are downplayed and easily dismissed as “irrational fear” because the physics and chemistry of the fission process and the radioactive elements it produces are complex and not understood by the general public and also because, except in cases of acute radiation poisoning, radiation is invisible.
Radioactive fission products are “variant forms of the ordinary chemicals which are the building blocks of all material and living things,” explains Dr. Rosalie Bertell in her book, No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth. The difference is that stable, non-radioactive atoms have an equal number of protons and electrons.
Nuclear fission creates an imbalance between protons and electrons, producing enormous quantities of hundreds of different radioactive elements — the high-level waste and activation products — all of which seek to return to a stable state. These unstable atoms become stable by knocking out the extra particles fission created, a process she says takes hundreds of thousands of years.
“Every such release of energy is an explosion on the microscopic level,” Bertell says. Radiation exposure is particularly damaging to the structure of cells, which is why it is necessary to keep these radioactive elements, known as radionuclides or radioisotopes, out of the bodies of humans, other living beings and the environment.
As climate models have long predicted, our warming world is now experiencing much larger and stronger storms with significantly more rainfall in the Earth’s wetter areas and more sustained and severe drought and wildfires in the drier regions. In 2019, the hottest June on record triggered an unprecedented fire season in the Arctic, with over 100 intense fires. The summer of 2019 also saw 55 billion tons of water melt off Greenland’s ice sheet in just five days, a rate scientists hadn’t expected for 50 years.
A month before the massive ice loss in Greenland, scientists predicted sea levels could rise 6.5 feet by the end of the century, submerging nearly 700,000 square miles of land.
Most nuclear power plants are located beside rivers, lakes, dams or oceans because they need a continuous source of water to cool the reactors. In August 2018, Ensia reported that at least 100 nuclear power plants built a few meters above sea level in the U.S., Europe and Asia would likely experience flooding due to sea level rise and storm surges.
Though nuclear reactors vary in generating capacity, 1,000 megawatts is common. A reactor of that size contains 100 metric tons of enriched uranium fuel, roughly a third of which needs to be replaced with fresh fuel each year. According to radioactive waste expert Dr. Marvin Resnikoff, the spent fuel, also known as high-level waste, becomes 2.5 million times more radioactive after undergoing nuclear fission in the reactor core.
In a May 2011 report, Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) senior scholar Robert Alvarez, a top official at the U.S. Department of Energy from 1993 to 1999, described the danger of high-level waste this way: “Spent fuel rods give off about 1 million rems (10,000 sieverts) of radiation per hour at a distance of one foot — enough radiation to kill people in a matter of seconds.”
The intense radioactivity the fission process creates is why reactor cores are surrounded by five-feet thick reinforced concrete containment structures and spent fuel must be shielded by at least 20 feet of water in pools for several years after it leaves the reactor.
As of September 2019, 444 nuclear reactors are operating in the world, with 54 under construction, 111 planned and 330 more proposed.https://truthout.org/articles/can-nuclear-powers-deadly-waste-be-contained-in-a-warming-world/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=a5fbaf3b-857d-46f7-9571-6774775ad709
Australian schoolgirl attends United Nations Youth Climate Summit.
Australian climate striker Harriet O’Shea Carre takes fight to New York https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-23/australian-climate-striker-15-takes-fight-to-new-york/11539354, By Kirsten Robb 23 Sept 19, Every Friday night, 15-year-old Harriet O’Shea Carre can be found hanging upside down from an aerial hoop in an old train shed in Castlemaine, Victoria.
She is one of the founding members of the School Strike For Climate (SS4C) movement in Australia. Ms O’Shea Carre has just taken her fight all the way to New York City, where she was invited to attend Saturday’s United Nations Youth Climate Summit.
Around the world on Friday, millions of students — including Ms O’Shea Carre — and their supporters skipped school and work to attend what was touted as the biggest climate protest in world history.
Organisers estimated around 4 million people in more than 163 countries turned out, including an estimated 300,000 Australians.
It was in October last year that the “Castlemaine Three” — Ms O’Shea Carre and her friends Milou Albrecht and Callum Neilson-Bridgefoot — started the Australian SS4C movement in the town of Castlemaine, 120 kilometres north-west of Melbourne.
The teens stumbled across an article about Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who has been credited with beginning the global student climate movement.
“Milou read an article about Greta Thunberg when she was pretty much solo striking,” Ms O’Shea Carre said.
“She was really excited about it and she came to me on the school bus and was like, ‘Harriet, there’s this awesome article I read about this girl who’s doing this school strike.'”
After penning an impassioned letter to the editor of a Melbourne newspaper, the three teenagers and about two dozen classmates took the train from Castlemaine to Bendigo to protest outside the offices of their federal members of parliament, MP Lisa Chesters and Senator Bridget McKenzie.
The Castlemaine strikers then decided to hold a global SS4C on November 30. When their rally went viral, Prime Minister Scott Morrison famously called for “more learning in schools and less activism in schools”.
David Carre, Ms O’Shea Carre’s father, says the Prime Minister could not have helped more to galvanise the youth.
“It was probably the best thing he could have said in terms of mobilising these young people.
“To be so dismissive of them, and to suggest that they’re trying to get away with wagging school, that is just quite offensive.”
More than 10,000 went on strike on November 30. Another was held in March 2019, with 1.5 million striking around the world.
“We’re at a point in time where it’s an emergency, and we’re not seeing any action from our leaders,” Ms O’Shea Carre said.
“And if the people who are leading us aren’t doing any leadership, then I will.”
Ms O’Shea Carre was invited to attend the first United Nations Youth Climate Summit in New York City alongside Ms Thunberg.
While her parents and friends marched from Castlemaine to Melbourne, Ms O’Shea Carre joined the rally through the streets of Manhattan.
“It’s so inspiring to be here,” she told 7.30 from New York.
“There are so many people, I’m really excited to be involved in it.”
Ms O’Shea Carre says the group will keep striking until they get action.
“We’re not going to stop because there’s no point in having an education on a dead planet, and at this stage, that’s what we’re headed for.
“We’re going to keep going and keep fighting because we’re not going to let our future go away.”
1.This month
For international nuclear news go to https://nuclear-news.net
of the week
Nuclear power cannot solve the climate crisis
PETITION https://www.alp.org.au/petitions/australians-dont-want-nuclear-power/
26 Feb – 24 April The Image is not Nothing (Concrete Archives) is a group exhibition that explores the ways in which acts of nuclear trauma, Indigenous genocide and cultural erasure have been memorialised by artists and others. It comes as the result of research by curators Lisa Radford and Yhonnie Scarce whose fieldwork has encompassed sites of significance including Auschwitz, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Hiroshima, Maralinga, New York, Wounded Knee and former Yugoslavia.
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Submissions to the Senate Committee Inquiry into National Radioactive Management Amendment Bill. 2020. Go to our summaries of significant submissions, conveniently listed in alphabetical order at Kimba waste dump submissions or see all submissions listed at Read the Submissions
Bill Gates, while motivated to help fight climate change, has also long been trying to make a success of his nuclear technology company Terra Power. The climate emergency presents him with the perfect opportunity to promote this, and especially, to get tax–payer funding to do it, as he suggests in his new book.
Elon Musk and Bill Gates: beware of gurus toting solutions to climate change
Elon Musk has grand plans to save the world. Bill Gates has just published his book ”How To Avoid a Climate Disaster”. They both envisage tax-payer funding for their solutions. But beware of gurus toting the solution to the planet’s crisis.
If you don’t think that our home planet is in an ecocidal crisis, then you’ve been blissfully unaware of global heating, over-population, biodiversity loss, waste crises, plastic pollution, overconsumption of energy , water shortages, deforestation, nuclear danger, space junk danger, perpetual nuclear war risk…….
Visionaries like Bill Gates and Elon Musk have brought extraordinary, and beneficial advances to our human society. On the way, they have become billionaires. And good luck to them. But their wealth and fame has made them all too ready to be seen as world leaders, and to see themselves as having the solutions to world problems. This can be problematic, as in effect, some of their solutions exacerbate the problems.
The future envisioned by both Bill Gates and Elon Musk has one huge blind spot. They both foresee ever-expanding energy use, and they plan for that – problems can be fixed with technology.
On a finite planet, endless energy use just cannot work. But the concept of enough is just not in their plans. If the human species does not take up the concept of enough, we could just become an extinct species. Technology could be used to reduce energy use, but that idea fades away as Gates, Musk, and other technocratic leaders see progress as being to have ever more exciting and energy-guzzling gimmicks and activities.The digital revolution. It should be a benefit, enhancing our lives, and in many ways, it IS. But an energy price is paid in our unbridled use of digital technology. Every email, emoji, Facebook post, tweet, blogpost, Youtube, uses electricity. It’s not as if these actions just disappear ”into the cloud”. What a dishonest term that is! There is no such cloud. What there actually IS – is a host of vast areas of dirty great data” farms”. There’s another dishonest term. They’re not farms. They are soulless collections of great metal servers, using ever growing amounts of electricity, and of water, to keep them cool.
Then there’s the price at the end. It’s very hard to find out the details and the extent of toxic materials from digital technology, that are dumped in poor countries.
And, to be fair, companies like Apple, have made some efforts to reduce their ewaste. https://www.ewaste-expo.com/is-apple-delivering-on-its-environmental-claims/
However, planned obsolescence is rampant in the high tech world, resulting in the utter tragedy of ewaste pollution, – from discarded smartphones, laptops, computers, printers, TVs, fidbits, smart fridges, robots etc, the tragedy of the thousands of children working as waste-pickers in India and Africa, in slum conditions. E-waste includes many toxic materials such as lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury, that release dioxins. . ”With no health or environmental protections in the slum, the toxins contaminate the air, water, and the food consumed in the slum…….. The area is constantly covered in thick, toxic smoke from the burning of electrical cables that goes on all day and night,” – High-tech hell: new documentary brings Africa’s e-waste slum to life https://news.mongabay.com/2012/04/high-tech-hell-new-documentary-brings-africas-e-waste-slum-to-life/
Both Gates and Musk are enthusiasts for renewable energy, and in the climate crisis, they are to be applauded for their work in this direction. Yet, as with all kinds of digital technology, renewables should not be unlimited, and do have their downsides, both in the production (pollution from rare earths mining/processing), and in the final disposal, with toxic wastes, and components that are difficult to recycle. . The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimates that solar panels produced 250,000 metric tonnes of waste in 2018 alone.
Bill Gates and Elon Musk do show their awareness of the planet’s grave environmental problems, but we don’t hear from them about energy conservation, or about moving away from the consumer society. Both talk quite enthusiastically about the great increase in energy use that we can expect. They complacently predict endless energy use, just as the nuclear lobby did in its glossy advertising film ”Pandora’s Promise”
Elon Musk now plans to put 24,000 satellites into space, and is well known for his dream of colonising Mars, and This idea has, of course, been taken up by many others, and there’s a sort of general public delight in space travel and interstellar rocketry. People seem oblivious to the fact that this will require huge amounts of energy, and that the space scientists already are turning away from clean solar power, to the far more dangerous source of nuclear fission. They’re also oblivious of the state of affairs in near space, where the trillions of bits of space debris pose dangers, floating about just like the plastic pollution in the oceans. Meanwhile the military planners in USA, Russia, China are already planning for nuclear weapons and war in space.
No surprise then that Elon Musk sees nuclear power as necessary – not just for his predicted need for much more electricity on Earth, but for this obsession with satellites and rockets.
Less well understood than his push for electric cars and Tesla technologies, is Elon Musk’s investment in the cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. Running Bitcoin demands enormous amounts of electricity, as Timothy Rooks explained recently https://www.dw.com/en/why-does-bitcoin-need-more-energy-than-whole-countries/a-56573390
Bill Gates, while motivated to help fight climate change, has also long been trying to make a success of his nuclear technology company Terra Power. The climate emergency presents him with the perfect opportunity to promote this, and especially, to get tax–payer funding to do it, as he suggests in his new book.
Wake up people! These two gurus have done some good stuff. But don’t let them manipulate us into dangerous territory – with nuclear technology, so connected with weaponry, and with its dangers, and the unsolved problem of radioactive trash. Sure, technology has got to be part of solving the planet’s crises. But we need much more imaginative leadership to steer our species away from infinite consumption and infinite energy use.
