Hiroshima, Nagasaki week – nuclear, climate news
75 years on, the inhumanity, racism, and sheer immorality of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is becoming recognised. Was the bombing of Nagasaki necessary, or more likely, done as a statement of threat to Russia? A Hiroshima survivor explains why 75 years of radiation research is so important. On the Hiroshima anniversary, four States ratify the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, bringing the number up to 43 ratifications, near to the required 50, to make it law. This is a significant Treaty, making it clear that, like chemical and biological weapons, nuclear weapons are not respectable, not justifiable.
The coronavirus, and climate change have their worst effects on underprivileged people, and regions at war harder hit by climate change.
AUSTRALIA
Links between Trump administration, Falun Gong, and Australia’s government. Another Hiroshima is Coming…Unless We Stop It Now
NUCLEAR.
Australia’s ICAN and Conservation Council of Western Australia commemorate Hiroshima Day.
Australia’s nuclear lobby targets young people, using Facebook and Instagram.
Nuclear waste dump plan for Kimba, South Australia:
- Problematic selection of “community” in decision to site nuclear waste dump at Kimba. South Australia. Napandee nuclear waste dump – potential impact on the neighbouring Pinkawillinie Conservation Park and Gawler Ranges National Park.
- Call for public release of ANSTO Nuclear Waste Reports and ARPANSA’s Response. Vital questions for Senate Nuclear Waste Committee – on NOMINATIONS, EXPERT EVIDENCE, RADIONUCLIDES, RESET INITIATIVE. Senate committee to report by August 31 re Kimba Nuclear Waste Dump plan.
- David Noonan: a new Submission to Senate Environment Inquiry – on BHP Olympic Dam.
CLIMATE. Labor’s carbon price proves effective climate policy is possible, Julia Gillard says. CEFC backs ‘climate transition’ linked green bonds with $60m investment.
Why Kalgoorlie-Boulder wants a Malaysian rare earths plant and its radioactive waste.
RENEWABLE ENERGY– Rooftop solar’s stunning surge to new records, as Australia installs reach 2.5 million. ACT Labor promises zero interest loans for solar and batteries, as election looms. Hung out to dry: The dark side of big solar.
INTERNATIONAL
A doctor who is a hibakusha speaks out for the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Nuclear bomb devastation killed over 90% of the doctors and nurses in Hiroshima. Hiroshima survivor Koko Kondo met the man who dropped that atomic bomb. Untrue: claims that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War 2. The nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did NOT save lives and shorten World War 2. Racism in nuclear bomb testing, bombing of Japanese people, and nuclear waste dumping.
Arms control, the new arms race, and some reasons for optimism. The illusion that nuclear weapons are under control.
The longlasting impact of Fukushima nuclear disaster, and nuclear activities world-wide.
Nuclear waste – how to warn people for 10,000 years.
It’s not the energy salvation for the world – nuclear fusion.
Four more states ratify Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and Australians commemorate anniversary of atomic bombing
The Irish Foreign Minister, Simon Coveney, said: “I am proud that Ireland today ratifies the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons … It honours the memory of the victims of nuclear weapons and the key role played by survivors in providing living testimony and calling on us as successor generations to eliminate nuclear weapons.”
The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Saint Kitts and Nevis, Mark Brantley, said on Sunday “The bombing of Nagasaki was the apogee of human cruelty and inhumanity. As a small nation committed to global peace, Saint Kitts and Nevis can see no useful purpose for nuclear armaments in today’s world. May all nations work towards peace and mutual respect for all mankind.”
In Australia, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki anniversaries were honoured by activities and events on and off line, with the demand for Australia to join the nuclear weapon ban treaty loud, clear and persistent.
The Irish Foreign Minister, Simon Coveney, said: “I am proud that Ireland today ratifies the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons … It honours the memory of the victims of nuclear weapons and the key role played by survivors in providing living testimony and calling on us as successor generations to eliminate nuclear weapons.”
The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Saint Kitts and Nevis, Mark Brantley, said on Sunday “The bombing of Nagasaki was the apogee of human cruelty and inhumanity. As a small nation committed to global peace, Saint Kitts and Nevis can see no useful purpose for nuclear armaments in today’s world. May all nations work towards peace and mutual respect for all mankind.”
In Australia, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki anniversaries were honoured by activities and events on and off line, with the demand for Australia to join the nuclear weapon ban treaty loud, clear and persistent.
special webinar on Tuesday night titled “Remembering the Atomic Bombs: History, Memory and Politics in Australia, Japan and the Pacific” featuring one of our wonderful board members Dimity Hawkins. Click here for info and registration.
Hiroshima survivor explains why 75 years of radiation research is so important
Watch: Hiroshima survivor explains why 75 years of radiation research is so important https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUz6mAkaMLs https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/watch-hiroshima-survivor-explains-why-75-years-radiation-research-so-important, By Joel GoldbergAug. 3, 2020 ,
Seventy-five years ago on 6 August, the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Up to 120,000 people died in the bombing and its aftermath. Some of the survivors, known as hibakusha, would eventually enroll in the Radiation Effects Research Foundation’s Life Span Study, which continues to examine the effects of atomic radiation on the human body. The study’s findings have been the basis for radiation safety standards around the world, ranging from power plants to hospitals. Decades of archival footage and images, survivor drawings, and the testimony of research participant Kunihiko Iida convey the kind of misery that results from an atomic bombing—as well as the message of peace and humanity that can result from scientific research.
Nagasaki urges world ban on nuclear weapons 75 years after US atomic bomb blast
Nagasaki urges world ban on nuclear weapons 75 years after US atomic bomb blast https://www.sbs.com.au/news/nagasaki-urges-world-ban-on-nuclear-weapons-75-years-after-us-atomic-bomb-blast 9 Aug 20, Survivors of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki have urged world leaders to do more for a nuclear weapons ban on the 75th anniversary of the US attack.
The Japanese city of Nagasaki has marked its 75th anniversary of the US atomic bombing, with the mayor and dwindling survivors urging world leaders including their own to do more for a nuclear weapons ban.
At 11.02am, the moment the B-29 bomber Bockscar dropped a 4.5-ton plutonium bomb dubbed “Fat Man”, Nagasaki survivors and other participants stood in a minute of silence to honour more than 70,000 dead.
The 9 August 1945 bombing came three days after the United States dropped its first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the world’s first ever nuclear attack that killed 140,000.
Problematic selection of “community” in decision to site nuclear waste dump at Kimba. South Australia
Kazzi Jai Fight To Stop A Nuclear Waste Dump In South Australia 9 Aug 20
There’s something that has been bothering me for some time…..This is a copy of a table from page 9 of the Phase 1 Document released in April 2016 by the Minister at that time Josh Frydenberg. Even with the “service towns” included for some of them – and of those, some of them DEFINITELY OUTSIDE the so called 50 km radius of the sites….doesn’t it seem interesting that the LEAST POPULATED SITES remained those IN SOUTH AUSTRALIA!
It was ULTIMATELY decided by Matt Canavan, as Minister, that Kimba would only have its Council boundary as the community ballot area, and not have the 50km radius involved at all!
And remember during all of this that the South Australian Royal Commission into the Nuclear Fuel Cycle was running AT THE SAME TIME – March 2015 to May 2016!
No wonder people thought that the nuclear dumps were one in the same! And they had thought it had ALL been dealt with when the Citizen’s Jury came back with an over two-thirds majority (70%) saying NO MEANS NO!https://www.facebook.com/groups/941313402573199/
No. The U.S. did not need to drop a second nuclear bomb on Japan
 Did the U.S. Need to Drop a Second Atomic Bomb on Japan? NEWSWEEK, BY DAVID BRENNAN ON 8/9/20 “……… The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki together killed somewhere between 129,000 and 226,000 people, the vast majority of them civilians. Then, it was argued that the bombs were the only way to defeat the forces of Imperial Japan, which were fighting tooth and nail for every inch of Japanese territory against the Allies………This has remained the dominant view through most of the post-war era, even with the shifting debate on whether the bombings constituted war crimes. …….
But not everyone agrees that the bombs were necessary. Miyako Taguchi is the daughter of two atomic bomb survivors—known as hibakusha—who lived in Nagasaki at the end of the war. Now living in New York, she told Newsweek that she grew up some 30 minutes walk from ground zero.
Even as a child she felt nervous about the incident and recalled how big a role it played in Nagasaki’s culture and story. Taguchi even remembers how the city’s hot, humid summer days would make her think of the unimaginable heat of an atomic blast and how it must have felt for those caught in it. As she got older, Taguchi said she better understood what happened to her family’s home town and the horrors that befell them—horrors that her family members were reluctant to recall. As the anniversary approaches each year, she said these feelings resurface. Taguchi told Newsweek that the bombing was “inhuman,” regardless of arguments about the lives that the attacks hypothetically saved elsewhere. When hearing people advocate for the bombs, Taguchi said she struggles to control her temper. ……. by explaining her family’s experience Taguchi said she hopes she can make some people reconsider their assumption that the attack was necessary. “It’s very difficult to change other people’s minds,” she said, especially when they know little about what really happened on that fateful day….. the Soviet Union declared war on Japan at midnight on August 8, 1945—hours before Nagasaki was destroyed. More than the atomic bombs, the Soviet entry into the war against Japan was the final nail in Tokyo’s coffin, according to Tsuyoshi Hasegawa—a Japanese-American historian who is an expert in Soviet Russian and Japanese history. Hasegawa noted that Japanese leaders were seeking Soviet mediation for talks with the U.S. during the closing stages of the war, even after the first atomic bomb killed tens of thousands of people in Hiroshima. “The Hiroshima bomb did not change Japanese policy to seek mediation,” Hasegawa told Newsweek. “So in that sense that was not the decisive factor… I would say that the Soviets entering the war was a more decisive factor.” “The Soviet Union was the last hope for the Japanese government to terminate the war,” he added. “That hope was totally dashed.” Had the Soviets not entered the war, “I think the Japanese government would have continued to seek mediation from Moscow.” Emperor Hirohito took the “sacred decision” to surrender early in the morning of August 10, military and political leaders having met throughout August 9 following the Soviet entry into the war. The emperor informed citizens of the surrender on August 15. Hasegawa said that the Nagasaki bomb did not dominate the emperor’s decision, as the full extent of the damage and casualties were not known until August 10. The Nagasaki explosion was contained in the Urakami Valley, protecting the parts of the city spread across the nearby hills including the city’s civil defence headquarters which sent out the first reports of the explosion. “The extent of the damage of Nagasaki was not properly reported to Tokyo throughout August 9,” Hasegawa said. Another theory for both atomic bombs is that while they were not necessarily needed to defeat Japan, U.S. leaders wanted to show the Soviet Union what their weapons of mass destruction could do……… Hasegawa said the accepted history of the atomic bombs in the U.S.—and much of the Western world—argues that both bombs were necessary to bring Japan to its knees. It gained popularity and acceptance, he believes, for psychological reasons. “The use of atomic bombs really, really bothered the conscience of Americans—it’s a psychological factor,” he said. “They really wanted to believe that what we did, the terrible thing that we did was necessary.” Hasegawa also said that the prevailing history of the war has been too U.S.-centric, allowing American explanations to take root with little challenge. Many American scholars treat the Soviet Union factor as a sort of “side show,” he said, and write the history of the atomic bombs with little attention given to the Japanese decision making process. https://www.newsweek.com/second-atomic-bomb-hiroshima-1523608 |
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A doctor and hibakusha speaks out for the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
Dr. Masao Tomonaga Surviving the nuclear bomb at Nagasaki 75 years ago showed me nuclear weapons shouldn’t exist https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/surviving-nuclear-bomb-nagasaki-75-years-ago-showed-me-nuclear-ncna1236148
People like me learned firsthand the results of using nuclear weapons. A full-scale nuclear war would destroy both the world and humanity as we know it. Aug. 9, 2020, By Dr. Masao Tomonaga, vice president, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War
It has been 75 years since August 9, 1945, when the atomic bombing of Nagasaki opened the nuclear weapon age. I was 2 years old, and only 1 1/2 miles from ground zero of the nuclear explosion in there; I was, fortunately, unhurt by the blast itself. I was rescued by my mother from a half-destroyed wooden house just before it burned down.
I am one of a dwindling number of hibakusha — atomic bomb survivors; we are now, on average, 83 years old. Many of us still die of radiation-induced cancers and leukemia from the bombs dropped on our cities in 1945 because that exposure to radiation — when most of us were just 10 years old or younger — led to gene abnormalities in many organs that are still causing malignant diseases today.
That means, legally and morally, the human toll of the bombings is still unfolding and the total number of casualties cannot yet be calculated.
Only two atomic bombs of what we would, today, consider a rather small size were used by the United States in Japan: They were 20 kilotons (Nagasaki) and 15 kilotons (Hiroshima), whereas the common size today is a few hundred kilotons. Still, one 15- and one 20-kiloton bomb were enough to devastate two medium-sized Japanese cities and kill 200,000 or more people, either instantaneously or within five months due to acute radiation injuries and skin burns.
Almost the same numbers of hibakusha survived the immediate aftermath, only to go on living with the fear of both contracting radiation-related disorders and passing malignant genetic diseases onto their children.
We hibakusha learned firsthand the horrible human consequences of using nuclear weapons and thus have long feared that a full-scale nuclear war would destroy both the world and humanity as we know it. This made us determined to fight for nuclear abolition — for the sake of the rest of humanity.
Many hibakusha came together years ago, drawing emotional energy from one another, to begin a campaign against nuclear weapons and move humanity forward by spreading our testimonies worldwide and warning of the global danger of human extinction.
In our first success, we hibakusha witnessed the passage of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970 by the United Nations, which gave us hope for a nuclear weapon-free world.
Sadly, as we approached the 50th anniversary of the passage of the NPT, the push for nuclear disarmament had almost stopped, and it seemed like the race for nuclear weapons might begin anew. The U.S., for instance, in August 2019 abandoned the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (signed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1987), the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (signed by U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in 2010) is set to expire next year, and other countries are building new, smaller nuclear weapons.
To push back against this new nuclear arms race, we hibakusha collaborated with the non-nuclear weapon states and many nongovernmental organizations such as ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, to establish a Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. We finally succeeded in July 2017, and since then, the TPNW has been signed and ratified by 43 countries — close to the 50 needed for it to become official under international law.
However, we are facing a serious opposition to the TPNW by the nuclear states, all of whom refuse to sign and ratify the treaty. There is a continuing belief in the nuclear weapon states and the allied countries under their “nuclear umbrella” — including many NATO states, Japan, Australia and Canada — that nuclear weapons are still necessary to keep peace.
Here in Japan, we hibakusha shed tears when our government declared at the United Nations Assembly in 2017 that it would not sign or ratify the TPNW, despite Japan being the only nation to experience nuclear attacks and know in the greatest detail the human consequences and social destruction of the weapons. The nuclear umbrella offered under the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty for the past 60 years has bound Japan tightly to U.S. political and military leaders, who oppose the treaty.
Why Kalgoorlie-Boulder wants a Malaysian rare earths plant and its radioactive waste
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Why Kalgoorlie-Boulder wants a Malaysian rare earths plant and its radioactive waste https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-10/lynas-building-rare-earth-processing-plant-kalgoorlie/12354150?fbclid=IwAR1P8stcOV05Un8BjuU2zv2fp1W1u3qnVaIvgwZSxJY3MkiIKg2eEfa_0G8
As the saying goes, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” — so why is a city in outback Western Australia embracing plans for a multi-million-dollar processing plant that Malaysia wants banned? Key points:
Lynas Corporation produces rare earth minerals, which are essential for technological devices such as smartphones, wind turbines and defence weapons systems. The company mines rare earths at Mount Weld in WA’s northern Goldfields and ships them to Malaysia for processing. The cracking and leaching part of the process creates low-level radioactive waste, a subject of controversy and protests in the Asian nation. In February, the Malaysian Government renewed Lynas’s operating licence with some key conditions, including that it must build a cracking and leaching plant elsewhere by mid-2023. Lynas would then be banned from importing materials containing naturally occurring radioactive material; the company still plans to use Malaysia for later stages of its processing. Race is on to build Kalgoorlie plantWhen the City of Kalgoorlie-Boulder heard Lynas was looking for a new site, it pursued the company and convinced it to move to the region. City chief executive John Walker said the plant would be a “game changer” for Kalgoorlie and help diversify the local economy, which was reliant on gold mining. Lynas has committed to using a residential workforce instead of fly-in fly-out workers, creating about 500 jobs in the construction phase and about 100 permanent roles.
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Nuclear Lobby getting into U.S. government via a new Nuclear Front Group – “The Good Energy Collective”
US / New Policy Group Calls For Nuclear-Specific Staff In White House https://www.nucnet.org/news/new-policy-group-calls-for-nuclear-specific-staff-in-white-house-8-4-2020, By David Dalton, 6 August 2020
The nuclear industry should create new business and finance models for new nuclear technologies and ensure a “robust commercialisation pathway” to bring advanced reactor designs to market.
“Nuclear energy will be needed to reach ambitious climate goals, but we must first reconstruct the technology for a new era complete with modern, socially-grounded approaches,” the Good Energy Collective said.
“Smart policies and better nuclear governance can help quickly shift the sector to a new, more sustainable pathway. Better governance will require a step-change by the administration, congress, and the nuclear industry.”
Nuclear power goes South in South Carolina — Beyond Nuclear International
New nuclear project built on cheating and lies
Nuclear power goes South in South Carolina — Beyond Nuclear International
Nuclear blackmail in Illinois — Beyond Nuclear International
Ratepayers robbed of renewables as well as cash
Nuclear blackmail in Illinois — Beyond Nuclear International
August 9 Energy News — geoharvey
Opinion: ¶ “Drawdown Review 2020: How To Address Global Warming In A Responsible Manner” • Three years later publishing Drawdown, Project Drawdown published Drawdown Review, which suggests humanity can manage the climate crisis effectively using only the tools available today. Of course, that assumes we start acting like responsible adults. [CleanTechnica] Science and Technology: ¶ […]
August 9 Energy News — geoharvey
August 8 Energy News — geoharvey
Opinion: ¶ “Five Lessons From The Pandemic To Tackle The Climate Crisis” • In the wars against coronavirus and the climate crisis, we have met the enemy and the enemy is us. Such is the sentiment of virologists and climatologists alike as they point out how much the pandemic can teach us about the fight […]
August 8 Energy News — geoharvey
Antinuclear 