Greenpeace: TEPCO assessment of Fukushima water dumping lacks analysis of impact on S. Korea — Fukushima 311 Watchdogs
The international environmental organization called TEPCO’s radiological impact assessment “highly selective” in its use of IAEA guidelines Contaminated water is currently being stored in roughly 1,000 tanks located at the Fukushima Daiichi site. Dec.18,2021 The international environmental group Greenpeace sent an opinion to the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) on Thursday stating that the company’s […]
Greenpeace: TEPCO assessment of Fukushima water dumping lacks analysis of impact on S. Korea — Fukushima 311 Watchdogs
NSW tightens rules on where wind and solar farms can be built — RenewEconomy
New guidelines designed to protect regional centres from “encroaching solar and wind development” to come into play in early 2022. The post NSW tightens rules on where wind and solar farms can be built appeared first on RenewEconomy.
NSW tightens rules on where wind and solar farms can be built — RenewEconomy
AEMC’s failure to act on solar, EVs and battery standards will cost consumers — RenewEconomy
Behind-the-meter resources like solar and battery storage must be optimised or consumers will pay more in the energy transition. The post AEMC’s failure to act on solar, EVs and battery standards will cost consumers appeared first on RenewEconomy.
AEMC’s failure to act on solar, EVs and battery standards will cost consumers — RenewEconomy
December 20 Energy News — geoharvey
Opinion: ¶ “The Arctic Should Never Feel Like The Mediterranean” • A warming Arctic should alarm all of us. The BBC has reported that it’s been seeing Mediterranean-like temperatures in the summer. The UN’s World Meteorological Organization recently verified the record that was set on June 20, 2020, in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk. [CleanTechnica] […]
December 20 Energy News — geoharvey
The week in nuclear news – Australia and more
Just when we thought it was safe to go out again, along comes the Omicron variant of Covid-19. It’s almost comic, watching our (Australian) politicians twisting themselves into knots telling us to go out and rejoice, while the medical experts are more quietly advising us to wear masks and steer clear of crowds.Meanwhile more populous countries struggle with the sheer numbers of infections, and the load on health services.
While the pandemic swamps the news – weather extremes keep happening.
On the nuclear scene, all seems quiet, BUT, there’s something of a crisis brewing in France, where climate effects and aging technology are causing problems in nuclear power supply, cracks both real and symbolic, are appearing as Macron gallantly pushes for a new ‘nuclear renaissance’.
COVID-19: What you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic on 20 December, Fauci warns Omicron COVID variant ‘raging through the world’ Top US infectious diseases expert warns hospitals in the country could face stresses in coming weeks as COVID-19 infections surge.
CLIMATE. 2021: when the link between the climate and biodiversity crises became clear.
AUSTRALIA.
- What’s next for Julian Assange? and for media freedom? Julian Assange trial is political hypocrisy. Julian Assange’s freedom must be an Australian election issue.
- Submarines. Australian taxpayers up for $170Billion, for American nuclear submarines. No problem? Australia has been warned, even from the militaristic Australian Strategic Policy Institute, on the problems and astronomic costs of the nuclear submarines. Protesters say no to AUKUS nuclear submarine deal. Defence scrambles to train nuclear scientists for ‘exciting roles’ on AUKUS programme.
- Proposed National Radioactive Waste Facility: Implications and Options for South Australia. Spent fuel rods – toxic? -not when we relabel them.
- Environmentalists and Traditional Owners very dissatisfied with Western Australia’s Environment Department ‘s ruling supporting uranium project. Traditional Owners and environment groups vow to fight Mulga Rock uranium decision.
- ‘Catastrophic’: Warning as Australia scorched Economic planners do not reckon with climate crisis bearing down on us
INTERNATIONAL
Chris Hedges on the Execution of Julian Assange. Classified Documents Invalidate United States‘ Appeal Against Assange — Richard Medhurst. The disgraceful case mounted against Assange by a corrupt U.S. Department of Justice and their hired guns in Britain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trzrUK_fmZI
Nuclear power’s economic failure – a ”renaissance in reverse”. Dr Jim Green dissects the hype surrounding Small ”Modular” Nuclear Reactors. Why Nuclear Power Is Bad for Your Wallet and the Climate.
Small nuclear reactors for military use would be too dangerous – excellent targets for the enemy.
15 minutes to save the world’: a terrifying Virtual Reality journey into the nuclear bunker.
Climate change has crashed Earth’s ”air – conditioners” – the North and South poles. Warmer winters are happening across the globe.Adapting to climate change will only get more expensive
Nuclear Energy Cannot Meaningfully Contribute to a Climate-Neutral Energy System . Energy economics – getting the fuel -oil and nuclear -for continued expansion of capitalism – is costing more all the time.
Understanding cobalt’s human cost
PFAS ‘forever chemicals’ constantly cycle through ground, air and water, study finds
‘Anti-5G’ necklaces are radioactive and dangerous, Dutch nuclear experts say.
Some bits of good news – 10 inspiring environmental victories of 2021 Don’t Look Up: A movie about climate change that is actually good
ANTARCTICA. An Antarctic glacier the size of Britain could ”shatter like a car windscreen” in the next 5 to 10 years. Humanity should not test whether Antarctica’s ice will hold out.
ARCTIC. U.N. sounds alarm bells over highest Arctic temperature on record. Fukushima toxins in Arctic add to pressure on Japan.
A free press, a free Julian Assange – would be the best gift for the world
The reasons for the USA’s persecution of Julian Assange : Glenn Greenwald spells it out
“much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely — and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do.”
Julian Assange Loses Appeal: British High Court Accepts U.S. Request to Extradite Him for Trial
Press freedom groups have warned Assange’s prosecution is a grave threat. The Biden DOJ ignored them, and today won a major victory toward permanently silencing the pioneering transparency activist.
| Glenn Greenwald 11 December In a London courtroom on Friday morning, Julian Assange suffered a devastating blow to his quest for freedom. A two-judge appellate panel of the United Kingdom’s High Court ruled that the U.S.’s request to extradite Assange to the U.S. to stand trial on espionage charges is legally valid. |
As a result, that extradition request will now be sent to British Home Secretary Prita Patel, who technically must approve all extradition requests but, given the U.K. Government’s long-time subservience to the U.S. security state, is all but certain to rubber-stamp it. Assange’s representatives, including his fiancee Stella Morris, have vowed to appeal the ruling, but today’s victory for the U.S. means that Assange’s freedom, if it ever comes, is further away than ever: not months but years even under the best of circumstances…………
In response to that January victory for Assange, the Biden DOJ appealed the ruling and convinced Judge Baraitser to deny Assange bail and ordered him imprisoned pending appeal. The U.S. then offered multiple assurances that Assange would be treated “humanely” in U.S. prison once he was extradited and convicted. They guaranteed that he would not be held in the most repressive “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado — whose conditions are so repressive that it has been condemned and declared illegal by numerous human rights groups around the world — nor, vowed U.S. prosecutors, would he be subjected to the most extreme regimen of restrictions and isolation called Special Administrative Measures (“SAMs”) unless subsequent behavior by Assange justified it. American prosecutors also agreed that they would consent to any request from Assange that, once convicted, he could serve his prison term in his home country of Australia rather than the U.S. Those guarantees, ruled the High Court this morning, rendered the U.S. extradition request legal under British law.
What makes the High Court’s faith in these guarantees from the U.S. Government particularly striking is that it comes less than two months after Yahoo News reported that the CIA and other U.S. security state agencies hate Assange so much that they plotted to kidnap or even assassinate him during the time he had asylum protection from Ecuador. Despite all that, Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde announced today that “the court is satisfied that these assurances” will serve to protect Assange’s physical and mental health.
The effective detention by the U.S. and British governments of Assange is just months shy of a full decade. ……………………….. Assange has been imprisoned in the high-security Belmarsh prison, described in the BBC in 2004 as “Britain’s Guantanamo Bay.” He has thus spent close to seven years inside the embassy and two years and eight months inside Belmarsh: just five months shy of a decade with no freedom………..
………. In May 2019,the British government unveiled an 18-count felony indictment against him for espionage charges, based on the role he played in WikiLeaks’ 2010 publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs and diplomatic cables, which revealed multiple war crimes by the U.S. and U.K. as well as rampant corruption by numerous U.S. allies throughout the world. Even though major newspapers around the world published the same documents in partnership with WikiLeaks — including The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais and others — the DOJ claimed that Assange went further than those newspapers by encouraging WikiLeaks’ source, Chelsea Manning, to obtain more documents and by trying to help her evade detection: something all journalists have not only the right but the duty to their sources to do.
Because the acts of Assange that serve as the basis of the U.S. indictment are acts in which investigative journalists routinely engage with their sources, press freedom and civil liberties groups throughout the West vehemently condemned the Assange indictment as one of the gravest threats to press freedoms in years. In February, following Assange’s victory in court, “a coalition of civil liberties and human rights groups urged the Biden administration to drop efforts to extradite” Assange, as The New York Times put it.
That coalition — which includes the ACLU, Amnesty International, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Committee to Protect Journalists — warned that the Biden DOJ’s ongoing attempt to extradite and prosecute Assange is “a grave threat to press freedom,” adding that “much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely — and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do.” Kenneth Roth, Director of Human Rights Watch, told The New York Times that “most of the charges against Assange concern activities that are no different from those used by investigative journalists around the world every day.” ………………
But the Biden administration — led by officials who, during the Trump years, flamboyantly trumpeted the vital importance of press freedoms — ignored those pleas from this coalition of groups and instead aggressively pressed ahead with the prosecution of Assange. The Obama DOJ had spent years trying to concoct charges against Assange using a Grand Jury investigation, but ultimately concluded back in 2013 that prosecuting him would pose too great a threat to press freedom. But the Biden administration appears to have no such qualms, and The New York Times made clear exactly why they are so eager to see Assange in prison:
Democrats like the new Biden team are no fan of Mr. Assange, whose publication in 2016 of Democratic emails stolen by Russia aided Donald J. Trump’s narrow victory over Hillary Clinton.
In other words, the Biden administration is eager to see Assange punished and silenced for life not out of any national security concerns but instead due to a thirst for vengeance over the role he played in publishing documents during the 2016 election that reflected poorly on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. Those documents published by WikiLeaks revealed widespread corruption at the DNC, specifically revealing how they cheated in order to help Clinton stave off a surprisingly robust primary challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). WikiLeaks’ reporting led to the resignation of the top five DNC officials, including its then-Chair, Rep. Debbie Wassserman Schultz (D-FL). Democratic luminaries such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Al Gore’s 2000 campaign chair Donna Brazile both said, in the wake of WikiLeak’s reporting, that the DNC cheated to help Clinton……………………………
It is difficult at this point to avoid the conclusion that Julian Assange is not only imprisoned for the crime of journalism which exposed serious crimes and lies by the west’s most powerful security state agencies, but he is also a classic political prisoner. When the Obama DOJ was first pursuing the possibility of prosecution, media outlets and liberal advocacy groups were vocal in their opposition. One thing and only one thing has changed since then: in the interim, Assange published documents that were incriminating of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, and Democrats, as part of their long list of villains who they blamed for Clinton’s defeat (essentially everyone in the world except Clinton and the Democratic Party itself), viewed WikiLeaks’ reporting as a major factor in Trump’s victory.
That is why they and their liberal allies in corporate media harbor so much bloodlust to see Assange imprisoned. Julian Assange is a pioneer of modern journalism, a visionary who was the first to see that a major vulnerability of corrupt power centers in the digital age was mass data leaks that could expose their misconduct. Based on that prescient recognition, he created a technological and journalistic system to enable noble sources to safely blow the whistle on corrupt institutions by protecting their anonymity: a system now copied and implemented by major news organizations around the world.
Assange, over the last fifteen years, has broken more major stories and done more consequential journalism than all the corporate journalists who hate him combined. He is not being imprisoned despite his pioneering journalism and dissent from the hegemony of the U.S. security state. He is imprisoned precisely because of that. The accumulated hostility toward Assange from employees of media corporations who hate him due to professional jealousy and the belief that he undermined the Democratic Party, and from the U.S. security state apparatus which hates him for exposing its crimes and refusing to bow to its dictates, has created a climate where the Biden administration and their British servants feel perfectly comfortable imprisoning arguably the most consequential journalist of his generation even as they continue to lecture the rest of the world about the importance of press freedoms and democratic values.
No matter the outcome of further proceedings in this case, today’s ruling means that the U.S. has succeeded in ensuring that Assange remains imprisoned, hidden and silenced into the foreseeable future. If they have not yet permanently broken him, they are undoubtedly close to doing so. His own physicians and family members have warned of this repeatedly. Citizens of the U.S. and subjects of the British Crown are inculcated from birth to believe that we are blessed to live under a benevolent and freedom-protecting government, and that tyranny only resides in enemy states. Today’s judicial approval by the U.K. High Court of the U.S.’s attack on core press freedom demonstrates yet again the fundamental lie at the heart of this mythology. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/julian-assange-loses-appeal-british
Proposed National Radioactive Waste Facility: Implications and Options for South Australia
Proposed National Radioactive Waste Facility: Implications and Options for SA, https://www.conservationsa.org.au/kimba_report, After a controversial process that has torn apart the previously close-knit Kimba community, Federal Resources Minister Keith Pitt (Liberal National Party – Qld) has formally declared the Napandee area near Kimba in the Eyre Peninsula grain belt as the proposed site for Australia’s first dedicated national radioactive waste facility – the National Radioactive Waste Management Facility (NRWMF).
The planned facility is not consistent with international best practice, and waste will be placed in temporary storage without a plan for what happens next.
The government says this will take decades while the federal nuclear regulator says it could take a century. Yet, there is a safer and cheaper alternative: keep the waste where most is currently stored at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation’s (ANSTO) Lucas Heights facility south of Sydney, and only move it once a long-term site to house Australia’s long-lived intermediate-level waste is identified.
It simply does not make sense for the waste to be sent on a temporary basis to SA. Especially as it is fiercely opposed by the Aboriginal Traditional Owners – the Barngarla people and many regional grain producers. Further, the federal plan is illegal under SA law.
Defence scrambles to train nuclear scientists for ‘exciting roles’ on AUKUS programme.
Defence scrambles to train nuclear scientists for ‘exciting roles’ on AUKUS program
ABC, by defence correspondent Andrew Greene 19 Dec 21, Students and public servants are being enticed with generous scholarships to study nuclear science and engineering so they can begin “exciting roles” on the massive AUKUS submarine program.
Key points:
- Defence expects to offer more than 300 scholarships
- The program will train graduates to work in the nuclear-powered submarine program
- The scholarships are worth approximately $20,000 per student yearly
Defence is scrambling to find hundreds of properly qualified staff for the mammoth task of acquiring a nuclear-powered submarine fleet with the help of the UK and US.
| The ABC can reveal Defence is establishing a nuclear scholarship program from next year, offering scholarships worth approximately $20,000 per student per year. Over the next five years Defence expects to offer over 300 scholarships and has launched a separate initiative to sponsor existing staff to undertake nuclear-related Masters courses. ………………….An existing Defence STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) Cadetship Program is also being expanded to target nuclear-related studies, with cadets entering trainee positions in the department…………….. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-19/defence-staff-studying-nuclear-science-aukus-program/100710264 |
Economic planners do not reckon with climate crisis bearing down on us
David Shearman
Economic planners do not reckon with climate crisis bearing down on us, David Shearman
The current population of 25 million may be Australia’s limit, unless we are prepared to reduce our lifestyle footprint.
All signs point to a quick transition to renewables. But can we connect them? — RenewEconomy
Connection problems have hampered wind, solar and battery projects for the last three years. Now something is being done about it. The post All signs point to a quick transition to renewables. But can we connect them? appeared first on RenewEconomy.
All signs point to a quick transition to renewables. But can we connect them? — RenewEconomy
Farmers shouldn’t have to compete with solar companies for land — RenewEconomy
We must ensure Australia’s clean energy transition sees solar development occur with co-benefits for local communities, and protects productive agricultural land. The post Farmers shouldn’t have to compete with solar companies for land appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Farmers shouldn’t have to compete with solar companies for land — RenewEconomy
Australia’s de facto carbon price surges to $47, on way to $60 — RenewEconomy
New report shows Australian carbon market experienced a major bull run in 2021, driven by voluntary corporate demand – and with no signs of slowing down. The post Australia’s de facto carbon price surges to $47, on way to $60 appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Australia’s de facto carbon price surges to $47, on way to $60 — RenewEconomy
Kean keeps energy portfolio in Perrottet reshuffle, new face for trasport — RenewEconomy
Matt Kean remains the NSW energy minister after a pre-Christmas reshuffle, but his predecessor will exit state politics altogether. The post Kean keeps energy portfolio in Perrottet reshuffle, new face for trasport appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Kean keeps energy portfolio in Perrottet reshuffle, new face for trasport — RenewEconomy
How to keep US-China rivalry from starting a nuclear arms race
The US needs to understand the Chinese government’s deeply anxious view of its own nuclear and wider geostrategic vulnerability.
China’s strategic culture is deeply realist. Moral appeals to China about doing the right thing will not get American negotiators anywhere, but cold, pragmatic arguments can.
The deepening US-China rivalry might itself create an incentive for Beijing to come to the table. That is provided the US can convince China it would be less vulnerable with an arms-control agreement than without one.
How to keep US-China rivalry from starting a nuclear arms race, https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3159963/how-keep-us-china-rivalry-starting-nuclear-arms-race
With tensions threatening to undermine strategic nuclear stability, talks are urgently needed to prevent the situation from spinning out of controlEven if the relationship is destined to be marked by mutual suspicion, establishing strategic transparency is still possible Kevin Rudd
19 Dec, 2021 China’s recently reported tests of a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in July and August, though officially denied, are threatening to undermine strategic nuclear stability. They have already added to escalating tensions between the United States and China.
Throughout the summer, satellite images revealed that China was in the process of building as many as 300 new missile silos in its northern deserts. Some of these silos are likely to be used merely as empty decoys. But, if even half of them become sites for nuclear-armed missiles, it would represent a near-tripling of China’s nuclear arsenal.
China’s recently reported tests of a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in July and August, though officially denied, are threatening to undermine strategic nuclear stability. They have already added to escalating tensions between the United States and China.
Following these revelations, the US State Department warned that, “This build-up is concerning. It raises questions about the PRC’s intent … We encourage Beijing to engage with us on practical measures to reduce the risks of destabilising arms races and conflict.”
China’s ambassador for disarmament affairs, Li Song, responded the same day. He described the new Aukus pact between Australia, Britain and the US to help Australia acquire nuclear submarines as a “textbook case” of nuclear proliferation spurring a regional arms race.
Continue reading
Antinuclear 