Submission: Medical Association for the Prevention of War (MAPW) supports a new Intermediate Level Solid Waste Storage Facility at Lucas Heights
MAPW supports the construction of a new Intermediate Level Solid Waste Storage Facility at Lucas Heights.
MAPW strongly recommends:
• an open and independent review of nuclear waste production and disposal in Australia, and
• progressing a shift to cyclotron rather that reactor-based production of isotopes for nuclear medicine as rapidly as feasible.
Arguments that radioactive waste should all be at one site overlook the ongoing need for hospitals to store clinical waste. After nuclear medicine is used in a patient, the vast majority of the residual material and radioactively-contaminated equipment is stored on site while the radioactivity decays away. Within a few days, it has lost so much radioactivity that the material can go to a normal rubbish tip. There will always need to be multiple waste storage locations at sites which utilise radiopharmaceuticals.
Clean cyclotron production of Tc99m has recently been approved and is being implemented in
Canada. This should rapidly become the future of isotope production
Medical Association for the Prevention of War (MAPW) 30 July21, Submission to the Public Works Committee regarding Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation Intermediate Level Solid Waste Storage Facility Lucas Heights, NSW.
SUMMARY
MAPW supports the construction of a new Intermediate Level Solid Waste Storage Facility at Lucas Heights. As noted in the ANSTO submission, there will be minimal expected impact on the community and ANSTO has excellent existing security.
This contrasts with the massive distress and community division in regional and remote communities that has been created by a succession of nuclear waste storage proposals.
This facility will be useful over a much greater timeframe if ANSTO’s rapidly expanding production of isotopes for nuclear medicine is reined in. This very heavily subsided export business has only a small minority of the radiopharmaceuticals produced being utilised in the care of Australians. There is no evidence whatsoever of more than minimal cost recovery. The burgeoning amounts of ILW produced will be a liability for Australians or many generations.
More reliable, safer, cheaper and much cleaner cyclotron production of technetium99m (Tc99m) has been shown to work and is being implemented in Canada. Japan, the USA, the UK and several European countries are all looking to implement cyclotron.
The proposed new ILW facility provides an opportunity to identify and implement world’s best practice ILW disposal options and update and reset nuclear medicine production tocleaner, cheaper and more reliable methods.
MAPW strongly recommends:
• an open and independent review of nuclear waste production and disposal in
Australia, and
• progressing a shift to cyclotron rather that reactor-based production of isotopes for nuclear medicine as rapidly as feasible.
Individual criteria will now be addressed.
Continue readingA reminder to gullible followers of Angus Taylor – small nuclear reactors are just not economically viable.
Paul Richards 31 July, 21, SMR is no more than a conventional nuclear reactor, broken down, isolating, the reactor component.
Branding one component, small.’mass produced’ Small reactors destroys the economies of scale of conventional reactors, and they are no longer economically viable.
As every reactor ever built, needs, the other components to function.Same $US trillion-dollar infrastructure, mining, milling, yellowcake, fuel rod manufacture, transport, construction, production, output for the earth’s highest-priced electricity.
Anyone claiming unspent nuclear fuel can be run through twice is lying.The nuclear state has not been able to run unspent fuel through once more, in over 60 years, speaking to economic viably. Let alone the countless times it needs to transmute to make this claim real.
Something to think about is uranium. Uranium is at historic low prices, and running fuel through once more is not even viable.The price will rise, as the resource is limited, making it even far less viable economically.
Australian Labor Party does not trust Angus Taylor’s ”moronic” approach to energy and economics
“Nothing better demonstrates the Liberals’ deeply moronic approach to energy and economics,” Josh Wilson, federal MP for Fremantle, tweeted on Friday.
“Nuclear power is not only ferociously expensive, but also slow, inflexible and toxic to the environment and human health.”
Top union leader backs Angus Taylor’s nuclear deal with UK, Jacob Greber AFR, Senior correspondent 30 July 21 One of Australia’s leading union leaders has lent support to Energy Minister Angus Taylor’s decision to enable Australian scientists to work with the UK on next-generation nuclear power development even as two Labor MPs slammed the idea of such power plants as “deeply moronic” and “toxic” to the environment and human health.
Daniel Walton, head of the Australian Workers Union called for “open and pragmatic energy solutions” to reduce carbon footprints at reliable and affordable rates.
If nuclear energy “ticks those three boxes, we should give it serious consideration,” Mr Walton told AFR Weekend. “If it doesn’t tick those boxes, we should move to the next solution.”
Mr Taylor signed a letter of intent this week with his British counterpart, Kwasi Kwarteng, for both countries to collaborate on low-emissions technology, including “advanced nuclear designs and enabling technologies”.
It is understood the co-operation will involve “leveraging” the expertise of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation in waste processing and advanced materials to help advance development of small modular reactors, which are about the size of a standard shipping container……….
Reports of the UK-Australia nuclear tie-up triggered an immediate backlash from two West Australian Labor MPs.
“Nothing better demonstrates the Liberals’ deeply moronic approach to energy and economics,” Josh Wilson, federal MP for Fremantle, tweeted on Friday. “Nuclear power is not only ferociously expensive, but also slow, inflexible and toxic to the environment and human health.”
………….Mr Taylor said many Australians, particularly younger Generation Y and X voters, are looking at nuclear plants as a way of getting reliable power.
“All of it comes down to the genuine economic argument. If it’s uncompetitive against existing fossil fuels, then it won’t stack up,” he said. “But we’ll never know that if we never explore nuclear development. https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/top-union-leader-backs-angus-taylor-s-nuclear-deal-with-uk-20210730-p58eiz
Tokyo’s Games Are Harming the Nuclear Weapons Ban
a two-week Olympic media blitz that normalizes nuclear disasters and shrugs at rising nuclear dangers, which illustrates why –
we need a new drive for mass nuclear literacy. With arms control in retreat, an informed citizenry could be our last, best line of defense.
Tokyo’s Games Are Harming the Nuclear Weapons Ban Movement https://www.thenation.com/article/society/tokyo-olympics-nuclear-weapons/
By paying lip service to the Fukushima disaster and the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, these games are downplaying the growing danger of nuclear catastrophe.
By Alyn Ware
The Olympics are supposed to be a tangible symbol of global cooperation and peaceful competition. But the games carry a lot of baggage—not only from the pandemic but also from the Fukushima disaster and Japan’s nuclear politics.
As Covid cases spread in the Olympic Village and in Tokyo, protesters continue to demand the Olympics be canceled, and they continue to be ignored. But the tone-deafness of these Olympics goes back further—to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. In 2019, then–Prime Minister Shinzo Abe dubbed the Tokyo Olympics the “Recovery Games,” meant “to showcase the affected regions of the tsunami” and the nuclear meltdown of 2011, which continues to pose threats today.
That’s why some Olympic events are being held in Fukushima’s Azuma Stadium, and why Olympic torch runners have been routed through Fukushima prefecture, hitting what the official Olympic website calls “places of interest” near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. It started at J-Village, a former logistics hub for crews working to remediate the stricken reactors, now a sports complex, where Greenpeace detected a radiation hot spot in late 2019. It passed through Ōkuma and Futaba, where the plant is located, and other nearby towns long abandoned after the disaster.
This is intended to project an image of recovery and normalcy to the world. But it’s government propaganda, deaf to citizens’ concerns, and blind to ongoing threats. Fukushima Daiichi continues to leak radioactivity. New radiation hot spots and other impacts are being discovered all the time.
This sort of Olympic spin tactic has been used before. In the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the government sought to portray Japan as a modern industrial nation with its own nuclear research program. Yoshinori Sakai, born in Hiroshima on the day the atomic bomb was dropped, lit the Olympic flame. A scant year and half after the Cuban missile crisis, this gesture soft-pedaled the dangers of nuclear technology, nuclear weapons, and the burgeoning arms race.
Today, the tone-deafness continues. This month, on the anniversary of the Trinity nuclear tests that enabled the atomic bombings of Japan, IOC President Thomas Bach went to Hiroshima to lay a wreath at a memorial, prompting an angry response. “President Bach using the image of ‘a peaceful world without nuclear weapons’ only to justify holding of the Olympics by force under the pandemic is a blasphemy to atomic bombing survivors,” a coalition of civic groups wrote. “An act like this does nothing but do harm to the global nuclear weapons ban movement.”
Billions watching the games are imbibing the idea that, protests notwithstanding, Covid, Fukushima, the atomic bombings, and rising nuclear dangers today pose no impediment to normalcy. This should be countered with factual context and truth-telling.
Nuclear Games, a new documentary available online, attempts this by contrasting the Olympic ideals of peace and humanity with our history of nuclear violence and inhumanity (full disclosure: My organization Basel Peace Office is one of several NGOs helping with the project). It uses manga and interactive content to counter Olympic spin and teach mass audiences, including young people, Nuclear History 101: the Cuban missile crisis, Chernobyl, the victims of uranium mining and nuclear testing, the North Korean nuclear program.
We urgently need remedial education on nuclear issues. Most millennials believe nuclear war will occur within the next decade, yet they also rank nuclear weapons as the least important of 12 global issues. They’re both justifiably anxious and badly misinformed.
Achieving basic nuclear literacy is indispensable now. Nuclear dangers are more acute than in 1964, the risk of nuclear war is growing, and the arms control regime is failing. This year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock ahead to 100 seconds before midnight—closer to the zero hour than during the Cuban missile crisis.
Nuclear weapons states are turning away from arms control and embarking on a second Cold War–style arms race. As China builds missile silos and Russia builds new types of nuclear weapons, the United Kingdom and Pakistan are expanding their nuclear arsenals, the United States is spending billions to “modernize” its arsenal, and other nuclear powers are following suit.
To be sure, there is pushback. Some 1,200 policy-makers, celebrities, academics, and civil society leaders issued a joint letter to presidents Biden and Putin flagging growing nuclear dangers and urging them to adopt a no-first-use policy to defuse nuclear tensions and facilitate disarmament. US Senators Ed Markey and Jeff Merkley and their colleagues on the Nuclear Arms Control Working group recently called on Biden to guide the Nuclear Posture Review towards a pledge of no first use and the elimination of new types of nuclear weapons.
But such things can hardly compete with a two-week Olympic media blitz that normalizes nuclear disasters and shrugs at rising nuclear dangers, which illustrates why we need a new drive for mass nuclear literacy. With arms control in retreat, an informed citizenry could be our last, best line of defense.
Australia’s carbon emissions down 20% due to wide take-up of renewable energy
Telegraph UK, 29th July 2021, For Australia’s part, our experience with technology-orientated pathways
gives us confidence that with the right investments and partnerships, a prosperous net-zero world is well within our reach.
On the ground, our real-world rollout of renewables has made clear to Australian firms and families the immense benefits of investing in clean technology. Because of their embrace of our new energy future, Australia’s emissions are down over 20 per cent on 2005 levels and green technology continues to be taken
up at record levels right across our nation.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/29/technology-key-free-prosperous-net-zero-world/
Japanese civil society calling for the suspension of the Olympic Games — limitless life
\ Dear Friend, The daily covid-19 infections in Japan today surpassed 10 thousand for the first time. Tokyo recorded 3865,the largest number. The explosion of the Delta type of Corona-related infections is now a reality. Civil society has started pleading for the immediate suspension of the on-going Olympic Games. The responsible organizers, the Japanese Government, the […]
Japanese civil society calling for the suspension of the Olympic Games — limitless life
Taylor tries again to redirect renewables funds into hand picked technologies — RenewEconomy
Angus Taylor re-issues ARENA regulations in new attempt to open up the renewable energy agency to the government’s preferred technologies. The post Taylor tries again to redirect renewables funds into hand picked technologies appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Taylor tries again to redirect renewables funds into hand picked technologies — RenewEconomy
Australia’s market operator plans path to zero emissions grid by 2035 — RenewEconomy
AEMO presents five scenarios for the energy transition, but only one delivers on climate targets and requires zero emissions grid by 2035. The post Australia’s market operator plans path to zero emissions grid by 2035 appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Australia’s market operator plans path to zero emissions grid by 2035 — RenewEconomy
Rio Tinto powers ahead on solar farm to supply Pilbara iron ore mine — RenewEconomy
Rio Tinto awards contract to build the mining giant’s first fully-owned solar farm at the Gudai Darri mine in WA Pilbara region. The post Rio Tinto powers ahead on solar farm to supply Pilbara iron ore mine appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Rio Tinto powers ahead on solar farm to supply Pilbara iron ore mine — RenewEconomy
A-bomb survivor activist, 89, calls Japan’s failure to back nuclear ban ‘disgraceful’
A-bomb survivor activist, 89, calls Japan’s failure to back nuclear ban ‘disgraceful’ https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210729/p2a/00m/0na/034000c
July 30, 2021 (Mainichi Japan) TOKYO — The world took a major step toward a nuclear-free world when the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons completely banning the use and storage of atomic arms went into effect in January.
Nuclear powers and countries like Japan which are under the U.S. nuclear umbrella have not signed the treaty, only going as far as joining the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), but the influence of the ban treaty on the NPT is enormous.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that top-level meetings concerning both treaties have not been held as planned, grinding international discussion of them to a halt. The pandemic has also thrown cold water on citizens’ anti-atomic weapons activism, forcing events to be minimized or canceled outright.
With the 76th anniversaries of America’s atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fast approaching, what do hibakusha — people exposed to the effects of the bomb — still alive today think of these dilemmas?
“This is the only country in the world to have been attacked with nuclear bombs in wartime, and yet it can’t ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. I think it’s so pitiful, so disgraceful,” said Terumi Tanaka, the 89-year-old co-chair of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations. Anger laced his calm tones, obvious even over the online video conference.
In response to the nuclear arms ban treaty going into effect, Tanaka began a petition drive to urge the Japanese government to join the treaty. But half a year has passed now with him unable to go out in the streets due to the pandemic………..
Countries with nuclear weapons won’t attend the conference of the signatories, and only countries without the arms will need to seek ways to ban them. “How do we get nuclear-armed countries involved? I think a time is coming where a great effort will have to be put in (to activism),” he said.
Getting nuclear powers and those under the nuclear umbrella like Japan to take part is no simple task. But while the coronavirus has prevented certain forms of activism, and spread with apparent ease across borders, Tanaka sees a silver lining in the situation, saying, “It’s presented the opportunity to realize that the conflicts countries have between each other are meaningless.”
With this year marking the 65th anniversary of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations’ founding, Tanaka had in mind that it would mark a sense of closure. Its general meeting is held every June, but due to the state of emergency declared in Tokyo, it has been turned into an on-paper event this year.
“It was very disappointing. We’d needed to do a full review of our activism so far,” Tanaka said regretfully. The average age of hibakusha now is over 83. The generation of people with clear, unshakeable memories of that time like Tanaka, who was 13 when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, are gradually but steadily leaving this world.
“We experienced that sound with our bodies. The people who will make up the core of the activism going forward were very young children when they were exposed to the bomb, so they have few memories of the time involving their five senses. But, they might at some point remember what was for them a strange experience. In that sense, those people can be said to have experienced it first hand, too,” he said.
In March, Tanaka ended the international campaign he has pursued for five years to see an earlier implementation of the ban treaty. At the end of May, he resigned as chair of the Saitama Prefecture hibakusha association. After days spent passionately involved in anti-nuclear activism, Tanaka is thinking of using the time he has now to write about the life he spent giving himself to his work.
“Nuclear weapons are so cruel it seems they don’t even qualify for the name ‘weapon’. This testimony must, even when all the hibakusha are gone, be passed down for as long as the human race exists,” Tanaka said.
(Japanese original by Kayo Mukuda, Tokyo City News Department)
Algeria: deep resentment of French colonialism and the effects of nuclear bombing -still very real today.
In Algeria, France’s 1960s nuclear tests still taint ties, https://www.france24.com/en/africa/20210729-in-algeria-france-s-1960s-nuclear-tests-still-taint-ties More than 60 years since France started its nuclear tests in Algeria, their legacy continues to poison relations between the North African nation and its former colonial ruler.The issue has come to the fore again after President Emmanuel Macron said in French Polynesia on Tuesday that Paris owed “a debt” to the South Pacific territory over atomic tests there between 1966 and 1996.
The damage the mega-blasts did to people and nature in the former colonies remains a source of deep resentment, seen as proof of discriminatory colonial attitudes and disregard for local lives.
Diseases related to radioactivity are passed on as an inheritance, generation after generation,” said Abderahmane Toumi, head of the Algerian victims’ support group El Gheith El Kadem.
“As long as the region is polluted, the danger will persist,” he said, citing severe health impacts from birth defects and cancers to miscarriages and sterility.
France carried out its first successful atomic bomb test deep in the Algerian Sahara in 1960, making it the world’s fourth nuclear power after the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain.
Today, as Algeria and France struggle to deal with their painful shared history, the identification and decontamination of radioactive sites remains one of the main disputes.
In his landmark report on French colonial rule and the 1954-62 Algerian War, historian Benjamin Stora recommended continued joint work that looks into “the locations of nuclear tests in Algeria and their consequences”.
France in the 1960s had a policy of burying all radioactive waste from the Algerian bomb tests in the desert sands, and for decades declined to reveal their locations.
‘Radioactive fallout’
Algeria’s former veterans affairs minister Tayeb Zitouni recently accused France of refusing to release topographical maps that would identify “burial sites of polluting, radioactive or chemical waste not discovered to date”.”The French side has not technically conducted any initiative to clean up the sites, and France has not undertaken any humanitarian act to compensate the victims,” said Zitouni. According to the Ministry of the Armed Forces in Paris, Algeria and France now “deal with the whole subject at the highest level of state”.
“France has provided the Algerian authorities with the maps it has,” said the ministry.
Between 1960 and 1966, France conducted 17 atmospheric or underground nuclear tests near the town of Reggane, 1,200 kilometres (750 miles) from the capital Algiers, and in mountain tunnels at a site then called In Ekker.
Eleven of them were conducted after the 1962 Evian Accords, which granted Algeria independence but included an article allowing France to use the sites until 1967.
A radioactive cloud from a 1962 test sickened at least 30,000 Algerians, the country’s official APS news agency estimated in 2012.
French documents declassified in 2013 revealed significant radioactive fallout from West Africa to southern Europe. Algeria last month set up a national agency for the rehabilitation of former French nuclear test sites.
In April, Algeria’s army chief of staff, General Said Chengriha, asked his then French counterpart, General Francois Lecointre, for his support, including access to all the maps.
We respect our dead’Receiving the maps is “a right that the Algerian state strongly demands, without forgetting the question of compensation for the Algerian victims of the tests,” stressed a senior army officer, General Bouzid Boufrioua, writing in the defence ministry magazine El Djeich.”France must assume its historical responsibilities,” he argued.President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, however, ruled out any demands for compensation, telling Le Point weekly that “we respect our dead so much that financial compensation would be a belittlement. We are not a begging people.”France passed a law in 2010 which provided for a compensation procedure for “people suffering from illnesses resulting from exposure to radiation from nuclear tests carried out in the Algerian Sahara and in Polynesia between 1960 and 1998”.
But out of 50 Algerians who have since launched claims, only one, a soldier from Algiers who was stationed at one of the sites, “has been able to obtain compensation”, says the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).
No resident of the remote desert region has been compensated, it said.
In a study released a year ago, “Radioactivity Under the Sand”, ICAN France urged Paris to hand Algeria a complete list of the burial sites and to facilitate their clean-up.
The 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons obliges states to provide adequate assistance to individuals affected by the use or testing of nuclear weapons.
It was signed by 122 UN member states, but by none of the nuclear powers. France argued the treaty was”incompatible with a realistic and progressive approach to nuclear disarmament”.
ICAN France in its study argued that “people have been waiting for more than 50 years. There is a need to go faster.
“We are still facing an important health and environmental problem that must be addressed as soon as possible.”
Japanese civil society calling for the suspension of the Olympic Games — limitless life
\ Dear Friend, The daily covid-19 infections in Japan today surpassed 10 thousand for the first time. Tokyo recorded 3865,the largest number. The explosion of the Delta type of Corona-related infections is now a reality. Civil society has started pleading for the immediate suspension of the on-going Olympic Games. The responsible organizers, the Japanese Government, the […]
Japanese civil society calling for the suspension of the Olympic Games — limitless life
July 30 Energy News — geoharvey
Opinion: ¶ “Tesla’s Superior Engineering Cuts Costs, Giving Company New Option To Stoke Demand” • Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call confirms it is on track to continue to expand production like never seen before in the automotive market. Tesla will need to reduce pricing and pull other levers to sell the massive volume of cars it […]
July 30 Energy News — geoharvey
Antinuclear 