Kazzi Jai No nuclear waste dump anywhere in South Australia , 31 Dec 2020,
As 2020 draws to an end, and we welcome 2021 it is important to reflect what a whirlwind year 2020 has been – and I’m not talking about COVID-19!
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We have had people claiming “thank goodness we are talking about WASTE and not POLLUTION” with regards to nuclear waste ….and to the dump itself being a “growing tech industry”!!!
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We have had “our greatest export, after wheat perhaps— or perhaps before wheat—is our children” – yes that quote is memorialized in hansard – ummmm….pretty sure that’s against the law by the way…..and we have had ….”we’re widely recognized as one of the most informed communities virtually throughout the country but also throughout the world” – ummmm….what about Hawker?…Pretty sure they had the SAME information thrust upon them – surely that makes them TOO “THE” MOST INFORMED!
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“Goodness gracious me”- “it’s just getting out of hand” – “I do get a bit sick and tired….” – particularly when they can’t even get the timeline right about how long Kimba has been “in the process”…..Hint – Kimba was taken COMPLETELY off the list in April 2016 and only through one (greedy) person’s perseverance – how much money are we getting for that “very low value farmland” again????….Kimba was back on the short list the following year 2017
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Might be the reason DIIS are hesitant to actually PUBLISH the recipients of the latest Community Benefits Program….because IF Kimba had been in the process of this dump for as long as Hawker this should be Kimba’s THIRD Bribe Money submission – not its SECOND!
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And WHY is there not a published list of recipients for this latest round? Surely DIIS and NRWMF would be CROWING about how FORTUNATE these towns are to have PARTICIPATED and gotten up to $2 million for their respective communities again. And it WAS communities we were talking about…NOT individuals getting an individual commercial advantage…..BECAUSE that’s right AGAINST the rules isn’t it?
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So where is Kimba’s list – since Flinders Ranges Council was happy to print theirs IN JUST A DAY OR TWO OF ANNOUNCEMENT…
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Was going to keep this short – although the figure 580 seems to come to mind for some reason….something about documents and accusations of alleged deliberate misleading of the Senate Inquiry…..
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These things calling on ACCOUNTABILIITY AND TRANSPARENCY just don’t seem to go away for some reason…….
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Anyway….all I wanted to say is that whatever 2021 brings we will be ready for it!
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Oh….and thank you to the person for the chuckle doing the rounds about a certain individual needing to be asked to use “plain english” so that her “vague comments” could be properly understood!… 10/10
My Six Mentors, “…….Helen Caldicott, MD, by Mary Olson, Gender and Radiation Impact Project, 1 January 20121
Helen Caldicott deserves a much greater place in our histories of the Cold War and ending the USA / USSR arms race than she generally gets. This is, perhaps, because she is powerful and a woman. A pediatrician, who in the 1970’s would not tolerate the radioactive fallout she and her patients were suffering from nuclear weapons tests in Australia, Helen and her family came to the USA. She and another physician named Ira Helfand revived what had been a local Boston organization of physicians and created a Nobel Prize winning organization called Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), which later participated in the creation of another Nobel Prize winning group, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). These two along with hundreds of other organizations committed to peace and nuclear disarmament formed the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) which has helped to create the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (see http://icanw.org/the-treaty ) and also won the Nobel Prize (2017).
Helen herself is a powerful communicator and will move audiences at a level that can change the course of someone’s life and work. She followed her own destiny to winning meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the Soviet Union, where she educated him about Nuclear Winter and the fact that nuclear is not a war that anyone can win. She also met with President Reagan in the era and diagnosing early-stage dementia… Her ability to bring the reality of the world to these men, and reality of these men to the world set her aside, in a class by herself—and was an enormous contribution to us all.
I first met Helen in the body of her Cold War block-buster book “Nuclear Madness.” I was in the midst of an existential crisis that could have become an even bigger health crisis. After college I needed a job (not yet a career) because I was broke, broken up from my first “true” love, and far from home. I got a job as a research assistant in a lab at a prestigious medical school; it was 1984.
Within 2 weeks, I was inadvertently contaminated with radioactivity (without my knowledge) by carelessness of a lab-mate. The radioactive material, Phosphorus-32 is used in research to trace biochemical activity in living organisms. This type of radioactivity is not deeply penetrating, so there was some reason not to panic, however the I was exposed continuously for over a week, and I also found radioactivity at home– my toothbrush was “hot”—so I had also had some level of internal exposure. I was terrified. The lab used concentrations of the tracer thousands of times higher than is typical.
The institution told me there was no danger, but because I was upset, they helped me transfer to a different job. No accident report was filed, and in the midst of transition, my radiation detection badge was never processed. It is not possible to know the dimensions of my exposure—I began having symptoms that were not normal for me. Many people, including some family members told me I was imagining things. No one in my circle understood how terrified I was.
I was fortunate that Helen had already written “Nuclear Madness”—the first edition came out in 1978, just before the March 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in Harrisburg PA—an event that propelled the book into multiple printings including a Bantam Paperback edition that I found. It turned out that 7 years later I helped Helen to revise and update the same text for the 1994 WW Norton edition. It was Helen’s deep commitment to truth, to speaking and writing that truth, to empowering people to take action for good. Helen’s words accurately described radiation and its potential for harm, and in my panic about the unknown, this calmed me.
Every other authority I had encountered was trying to tell me there was no problem—when I knew they had no right to dismiss what had happened to me. I am quite certain that had I remained alone with my fear, despair, and confusion my panic would have resulted in behaviors that would have compounded any harm bodily from that radioactive contamination. Reading Helen’s work let me know there was at least one woman walking the Earth who did know what I was going through… it made it possible for me to choose recovery and walk away from a legal battle that would have forced me to maintain, hold and prove a myself a victim. Instead, following in Helen’s wake, I chose Peaceful Warrior. Thank you Helen! : ……….. https://www.genderandradiation.org/blog/2020/12/31/my-six-mentors
Letter to the editor, Jan 01, 2021 To Mayor Brian Bigger and city council:
The United Nations has passed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and it will become international law on Jan. 22, 2021. Some 86 countries have signed this agreement. Unfortunately, Canada is not one of them.
As it is cities that will be targeted by nuclear weapons, Sudbury, a producer of nickel, would likely be a target. The International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons (ICANw) is asking cities to support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons by passing the following motion (many Canadian cities have already passed this motion including Toronto, Halifax, Vancouver and Victoria):
“Our city of Sudbury, Ont., is deeply concerned about the grave threat that nuclear weapons pose to communities throughout the world. We firmly believe that our residents have a right to live in a world free from this threat. Any use of nuclear weapons, whether deliberate or accidental, would have catastrophic, far-reaching and long-lasting consequences for people and the environment. Therefore, we support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and call on our governments to sign and ratify it.”
The world has about 14,000 nuclear weapons with about 1,500 on hair-trigger alert. The firing of these weapons could happen by accident, miscalculation, terrorism or an unstable government. The catastrophe would be immediate.
I would urge Sudbury city council to pass the motion and support the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
In what Japanese regulators on Wednesday called an “extremely serious” development, leth
al levels of radiation have been recorded inside the damaged reactor building at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, threatening the shutdown and decommissioning of the site of the second-worst peacetime nuclear disaster in history.
“This will have a huge impact on the whole process of decommissioning work.”
—Toyoshi Fuketa,
Nuclear Regulation Authority
According to The Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) reported that massive amounts of radioactive materials have been found around shield plugs of the containment vessels in the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors.
NRA officials estimated radiation levels at 10 sieverts per hour—enough to kill a worker who spends just one hour there.
Decommission of the reactor requires workers to remove the shield plugs, which block radiation from the reactor core during normal plant operation. This discovery has forced officials to reconsider their shutdown plans.
NRA chair Toyoshi Fuketa said that removing the highly irradiated shield plugs made safe retrieval of nuclear fuel debris—an already dangerously daunting task—all the more difficult..
“It appears that nuclear debris lies at an elevated place,” Fuketa said at a news conference earlier this month. “This will have a huge impact on the whole process of decommissioning work.”
The latest alarming find is the result of an investigation that resumed in September after a five-year pause in which the NRA took new measurements of radiation levels around the shield plugs at the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors.
Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the plant, announced December 24 that nuclear fuel debris removal would be postponed until 2022 or later due to the coronavirus pandemic.
As Common Dreamsreported in October, Greenpeace and other environmental and anti-nuclear advocates expressed shock and outrage after the Japanese government announced a plan to release stored water from the ill-fated plant into the Pacific Ocean. Greenpeace subsequently released a report claiming that radioactive carbon-14 released into the ocean “has the potential to damage human DNA.”
The Fukushima Daiichi disaster—the result of a 2011 earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 15,000 people in northeastern Japan—was the worst nuclear incident since the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown in the former Soviet Union, and the worst in Japan since the United States waged a nuclear war against the country in 1945 that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Opinion: ¶ “If We Want Hydrogen To Live Up To Its Promise, Let’s Get It Right From The Start” • There is broad consensus that “green” hydrogen will be needed to avoid even more dangerous climate change, and it can help us achieve a net-zero emissions global economy by midcentury. But hydrogen has its limits. […]