New South Wales South Coast to become a nuclear wasteland? That’s the plan of the National Party
Nationals to support nuclear power;
Far South Coast flagged as possible location https://www.begadistrictnews.com.au/story/6665667/nationals-to-support-nuclear-power-far-south-coast-flagged-as-possible-location/, Albert McKnight 6 Mar 20,
The Nationals will support a bill to allow nuclear power in NSW, while separately the Far South Coast has been flagged as a possible location for a nuclear power plant.
When speaking to Sky News earlier this week, Deputy Premier John Barilaro confirmed The Nationals would support a bill proposed by One Nation on the matter, and said the state would not achieve its 2050 net zero emissions target without nuclear energy.
Mr Barilaro has been vocal about the nuclear power issue for years, last year saying it was “guaranteed baseload energy with zero emissions, no fossil fuels and probably the cheapest cost to the average Australian household”.
In a study by Nuclear for Climate Australia published on its website, the area between Bermagui and Merimbula is among 18 proposed areas of interest in NSW for a nuclear power station.
Under its proposal it states the South Coast has potential if included with other power plants that could be built at East Gippsland, the Snowy Mountains or Jervis Bay.
While it states the coast has many sites with “good access to once-through sea water cooling” – running a large amount of water through a power plant’s condensers then discharging it into a waterway with only a small amount of evaporation – an extensive grid upgrade would be required for a 2.2GW plant.
Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy Adam Searle confirmed a McKay Labor Government would maintain a ban on uranium exploration, extraction and export.
“Nuclear is the most expensive form of power and its waste is a disaster for the environment,” he said.
“Regional and coastal communities now face the grim prospect of becoming a nuclear power plant wasteland, as a result of Mr Barilaro leading this government by the nose.”
Shadow Minister for the Illawarra and South Coast Ryan Park said coastal communities would never embrace nuclear energy.
“This has clearly divided the Liberal-National Government,” he said.
“[Member for South Coast] Shelley Hancock has already said she would not support nuclear plants on the South Coast.”
He said Member for Bega Andrew Constance should do the same. Mr Constance has been approached for comment.
One Nation’s Mark Latham introduced the bill to lift the ban on nuclear power and uranium mining in NSW, saying it would “create jobs, investment” and “undertake the long-term planning needed to keep the lights on”.
Does NSW need nuclear power? Write a letter to the editor
Nature Conservation Council says the Nationals’ support for nuclear power is a “dangerous and expensive distraction”
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Environment groups say nuclear push a “dangerous distraction” to clean energy debate, Macquarie Port News, 6 Mar 20, THE Nature Conservation Council says the Nationals’ support for nuclear power is a “dangerous and expensive distraction” from the coal to clean energy debate and is not the sustainable, long-term priority for the environment. Deputy premier John Barilaro has confirmed The Nationals will support a One Nation bill to allow nuclear power in NSW, reigniting debate on the controversial topic. NSW One Nation leader Mark Latham’s Uranium Mining And Nuclear Facilities (Prohibitions) Repeal Bill is currently before the upper house and, if successful, would see the 36-year prohibition on uranium mining and nuclear lifted.
NSW Labor hit back immediately confirming it would not introduce nuclear power in NSW, if elected. Port Macquarie, Kempsey, Grafton and Coffs Harbour have all been flagged as regions of
 interest for nuclear power plants.Other regions include the Upper Hunter (Singleton, Muswellbrook), Shoalhaven (Jervis Bay, Nowra), Central West (Lithgow), Snowy Mountains, and Albury/Wodonga. “Local MPs Leslie Williams and Stephen Bromhead need to tell us whether they support their leader’s plans to make it legal to build a nuclear power plant on the Mid-North Coast,” Nature Conservation Council chief executive Chris Gambian said. “Nuclear power is extremely dangerous and leaves a legacy of radiation pollution that lasts generations. “It is a dangerous and expensive distraction from urgent work we need to do to transition from coal to clean energy and storage. “People on the Mid-North Coast don’t want nuclear power and they don’t need it. “Clean energy is by far the cheapest, cleanest and most sustainable way to meet our energy needs and it offers regional areas a very bright future. “The transition from dirty coal and gas to clean solar, wind and storage will attract $25 billion of investment, result in the construction of about 2,500 wind turbines and installation of more 42 million solar panels across the state.”….. Newcastle MP Tim Crakanthorp slammed the Nationals’ move and condemned the Nationals’ “reckless support” for nuclear power in NSW at its 2019 conference. https://www.portnews.com.au/story/6665518/environment-groups-say-nuclear-push-a-dangerous-distraction/ |
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Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?
Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus? Owen Jones Guardian, 6 Mar 2020 No Cobra meetings, no sombre speeches from No 10, yet the consequences of runaway global heating are catastrophic, It is a global emergency that has already killed on a mass scale and threatens to send millions more to early graves. As its effects spread, it could destabilise entire economies and overwhelm poorer countries lacking resources and infrastructure. But this is the climate crisis, not the coronavirus. Governments are not assembling emergency national plans and you’re not getting push notifications transmitted to your phone breathlessly alerting you to dramatic twists and developments from South Korea to Italy.More than 3,000 people have succumbed to coronavirus yet, according to the World Health Organization, air pollution alone – just one aspect of our central planetary crisis – kills seven million people every year. There have been no Cobra meetings for the climate crisis, no sombre prime ministerial statements detailing the emergency action being taken to reassure the public. In time, we’ll overcome any coronavirus pandemic. With the climate crisis, we are already out of time, and are now left mitigating the inevitably disastrous consequences hurtling towards us. While coronavirus is understandably treated as an imminent danger, the climate crisis is still presented as an abstraction whose consequences are decades away. Unlike an illness, it is harder to visualise how climate breakdown will affect us each as individuals. Perhaps when unprecedented wildfires engulfed parts of the Arctic last summer there could have been an urgent conversation about how the climate crisis was fuelling extreme weather, yet there wasn’t. In 2018, more than 60 million people suffered the consequences of extreme weather and climate change, including more than 1,600 who perished in Europe, Japan and the US because of heatwaves and wildfires. Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe were devastated by cyclone Idai, while hurricanes Florence and Michael inflicted $24bn (£18.7bn) worth of damage on the US economy, according to the World Meteorological Organization.As the recent Yorkshire floods illustrate, extreme weather – with its terrible human and economic costs – is ever more a fact of British life. Antarctic ice is melting more than six times faster than it was four decades ago and Greenland’s ice sheet four times faster than previously thought. According to the UN, we have 10 years to prevent a 1.5C rise above pre-industrial temperature but, whatever happens, we will suffer.
Pandemics and the climate crisis may go hand in hand, too: research suggests that changing weather patterns may drive species to higher altitudes, potentially putting them in contact with diseases for which they have little immunity. “It’s strange when people see the climate crisis as being in the future, compared to coronavirus, which we’re facing now,” says Friends of the Earth’s co-executive director, Miriam Turner. “It might be something that feels far away when sitting in an office in central London, but the emergency footing of the climate crisis is being felt by hundreds of millions already.”
Imagine, then, that we felt the same sense of emergency about the climate crisis as we do about coronavirus. What action would we take? ….. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/05/governments-coronavirus-urgent-climate-crisis
The demonisation of Julian Assange: Former foreign minister Carr calls on the Australian govt to intervene
As anger mounts over Assange’s persecution, former foreign minister Carr calls for moral appeals to Australian government, WSWS, By Richard Phillips, 6 March 2020
Popular opposition to the ongoing imprisonment and state persecution of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange is increasing following last week’s extradition hearing in Britain. The four-day show trial, which blatantly violated Assange’s basic legal rights and subjected him to even more psychological torture, has deeply shocked many people and intensified the determination of those fighting for Assange’s release.
Addressing a public meeting last week in the New South Wales (NSW) parliament, Bob Carr, a former federal foreign minister and state Labor premier from 1995–2005, denounced the bogus espionage charges against Assange and warned that if extradited to the US, he would die.
Carr and other speakers, including Assange’s Australian lawyer Greg Barns and former SBS television journalist Mary Kostakidis, insisted, however, that those defending Assange should concentrate on lobbying state and federal MPs.
This orientation, they suggested, would pressure the Liberal-National Coalition government and Foreign Minister Marisa Payne to ask Washington to release the WikiLeaks publisher.
uCarr called for Payne to have a “friendly chat” with Mike Pompeo, the former CIA chief and current US Secretary of State, and offered some talking points…….
Carr said nothing about Pompeo’s threatening denunciations of WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” his visit to Sydney last August when he demanded greater Australian involvement in Washington’s aggressive confrontations with Beijing and Iran, or his role as former CIA chief.
As for Payne, she rejected any defence of Assange, declaring in the Senate a day earlier that the WikiLeaks publisher would receive a fair trial and disparaging UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer’s reports on the decade-long persecution of Assange.
Carr’s opposition to the US-led vendetta against Assange, which he first voiced in May, appears to constitute a remarkable political turn around. Eight years ago, as foreign minister in the Labor government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard—from early 2012 to September 2013—Carr, like other federal Labor MPs and the party as a whole, was virulently hostile to Assange…….
The demonisation of Assange by Australia’s political establishment and the corporate media, which is part and parcel of its commitment to the US alliance, has not convinced tens of thousands of ordinary Australians. Important layers of workers, young people, students and middle-class people have taken up Assange’s defence as part of a growing international movement. …… https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/03/06/carr-m06.html
Keeping the global plastic calamity going – by Big Oil and Big Soda
“They really sold people on the idea that plastics can be recycled because there’s a fraction of them that are,”..“It’s fraudulent. When you drill down into plastics recycling, you realize it’s a myth.” …… “Recycling delays, rather than avoids, final disposal,” the Science authors write. And most plastics persist for centuries. …….
We are all guinea pigs in this experiment, as plastics accumulate in the food web, appearing in seafood, table salt, and ironically even in bottled water. Many plastics are mixed with a toxic brew of colorants, flame retardants, and plasticizers.
PLANET PLASTIC, How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret 
for decades, Rolling Stone, By TIM DICKINSON, MARCH 3, 2020
Every human on Earth is ingesting nearly 2,000 particles of plastic a week. These tiny pieces enter our unwitting bodies from tap water, food, and even the air, according to an alarming academic study sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, dosing us with five grams of plastics, many cut with chemicals linked to cancers, hormone disruption, and developmental delays. Since the paper’s publication last year, Sen. Tom Udall, a plain-spoken New Mexico Democrat with a fondness for white cowboy hats and turquoise bolo ties, has been trumpeting the risk: “We are consuming a credit card’s worth of plastic each week,” Udall says. At events with constituents, he will brandish a Visa from his wallet and declare, “You’re eating this, folks!”
With new legislation, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act of 2020, Udall is attempting to marshal Washington into a confrontation with the plastics industry, and to force companies that profit from plastics to take accountability for the waste they create. …….
The battle pits Udall and his allies in Congress against some of the most powerful corporate interests on the planet, including the oil majors and chemical giants that produce the building blocks for our modern plastic world — think Exxon, Dow, and Shell — and consumer giants like Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Unilever that package their products in the stuff. Big Plastic isn’t a single entity. It’s more like a corporate supergroup: Big Oil meets Big Soda — with a puff of Big Tobacco, responsible for trillions of plastic cigarette butts in the environment every year. And it combines the lobbying and public-relations might of all three………
Massive quantities of this forever material are spilling into the oceans — the equivalent of a dump-truck load every minute. Plastic is also fouling our mountains, our farmland, and spiraling into an unmitigatable environmental disaster. John Hocevar is a marine biologist who leads the Oceans Campaign for Greenpeace, and spearheaded the group’s response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf. Increasingly, his work has centered on plastics. “This is a much bigger problem than ‘just’ an ocean issue, or even a pollution issue,” he says. “We’ve found plastic everywhere we’ve ever looked. It’s in the Arctic and the Antarctic and in the middle of the Pacific. It’s in the Pyrenees and in the Rockies. It’s settling out of the air. It’s raining down on us.”
More than half the plastic now on Earth has been created since 2002, and plastic pollution is on pace to double by 2030. At its root, the global plastics crisis is a product of our addiction to fossil fuels. The private profit and public harm of the oil industry is well understood: Oil is refined and distributed to consumers, who benefit from gasoline’s short, useful lifespan in a combustion engine, leaving behind atmospheric pollution for generations. But this same pattern — and this same tragedy of the commons — is playing out with another gift of the oil-and-gas giants, whose drilling draws up the petroleum precursors for plastics. These are refined in industrial complexes and manufactured into bottles, bags, containers, textiles, and toys for consumers who benefit from their transient use — before throwing them away. Continue reading
Morrison to cancel Australia’s participation in the Energy Transition Hub
 Morrison government to stop funding international collaboration on shift to zero emissions. The five-year Australian-German initiative to transition to new energy and low emissions was due to end in 2022, Guardian , Adam Morton Environment editor @adamlmorton Fri 6 Mar 2020 The Morrison government has told researchers at two of Australia’s leading universities it will break a commitment to fund an international collaboration into what is required to shift to a zero emissions future.
The Australian-German Energy Transition Hub was announced in 2017 by then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and German chancellor Angela Merkel as a collaboration that would “help the technical, economic and social transition to new energy systems and a low emissions economy”. Based at the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University and three German institutions, it was to receive $4m over five years from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade as part of an eventual full cross-country funding of $20m. But in an email to staff on Friday afternoon, hub managers said the department had told them the government had decided it would “not follow through on its original commitment to fund the hub until 2022”. Government funding for the hub will end in June. Guardian Australia has been told there is $1.75m unpaid from the original agreement. Some researchers said the decision made little sense given the hub’s work included areas of government interest, particularly the development of a clean hydrogen industry. Other hub projects focus on energy storage, energy system modelling, plans for a just transition to clean energy and integrating solar energy into the grid……..https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/06/morrison-government-to-stop-funding-20m-international-collaboration-on-shift-to-zero-emissions |
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Cancer in US Navy Nuclear Powered Ships
They reported the results of their own epidemiology study which they carried out on the Ronald Reagan sailors. This compared the illness yield (including cancers) of the 4,843 RR sailors with a matched control group of 65,269 sailors on nuclear powered ships that were not anywhere near Fukushima. Cancer in US Navy Nuclear Powered Ships https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/06/cancer-in-us-navy-nuclear-powered-ships/ by CHRIS BUSBY Here is a good one. In 2011, the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan was about 100km off the coast of Japan at the time of the Tsunami and the subsequent Fukushima reactor explosions. It was directed by the US government to ride to the rescue in what was later called Operation Tomodachi (friendship)–to provide assistance to the victims of the floods. What no-one on board was told was that the reactors had exploded and a plume of highly radioactive material was blowing east from the site into the path of the vessel. Of course, when this arrived, all the radiation monitors on the boat started screaming, and the planes and helicopters that had flown the rescue sorties were contaminated.
In 2014, following all the publicity about the cancers, a number of US Senators and important people were asking pertinent questions—the Navy had to do something to answer the accusations that the Fukushima radiation was killing those who sailed on Operation Tomodachi. They panicked. A big report was prepared by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), entitled: Final Report to the Congressional Defense Committees in Response to the Joint Explanatory Statement Accompanying the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2014, page 90, “Radiation Exposure” [2]. Never use one word when ten will do Continue reading
The secret “dark money” that funds nuclear subsidies in USA
Dark money dominated Ohio’s nuclear subsidy saga ENERGY NEWS NETWORK, Kathiann M. Kowalski, March 5, 2020
FirstEnergy Solutions paid nearly $2 million to at least one group, but most other data remains hidden.
After-the-fact filings show that FirstEnergy’s generation subsidiary paid nearly $2 million to Generation Now, one of the special interest groups that orchestrated ads, political donations and other efforts behind Ohio’s nuclear and coal bailout.
But legal loopholes make it harder to find out the total spent and who else was behind xenophobic advertising, dueling voter petitions, alleged intimidation and other claims of foul play. And none of those actions fully disclosed who was behind them.
The scant public filings that are available show additional connections to FirstEnergy Solutions (now Energy Harbor), as well as the law firm of an outspoken legislator who has long fought the state’s clean energy standard, and others with high-level political influence.
House Bill 6 gutted Ohio’s renewable energy and energy efficiency standards while putting ratepayers on the hook for nearly $1 billion in subsidies for nuclear power plants, plus an additional amount for aging coal plants. Multiple groups spent heavily to promote HB 6 and prevent a referendum on the law following its passage.
In some cases, nonprofit and for-profit organizations funded each other or shared the same spokesperson. Groups active in the HB 6 campaign also had links to some of the same lobbyists and consultants who acted for companies that stood to benefit from HB 6, or unions with workers at their plants. But only limited amounts of funding could be traced.
ON ORIGINAL – INTRIGUING INTERACTIVE DIAGRAM HERE _ shows interrelationships of individuals and groups Continue reading
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 