Bungled design blamed for cracks in the lining of ANSTO’s new nuclear waste plant
A bitter clash has erupted over who is to blame for cracks appearing in the lining of the “hot cells” of a brand new radioactive waste plant.
Linda Silmalis, Chief Reporter, May 12, 2024, The Sunday Telegraph https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/bungled-design-blamed-for-cracks-in-the-lining-of-anstos-new-nuclear-waste-plant/news-story/07b3fc1e633cd769bbecb9da90e4932a
The lining within the “hot cells” of the new radioactive waste treatment plant at Lucas Heights has literally been peeling off, with secret details about the defect in the ANSTO-designed facility unveiled during a legal dispute.
The construction of the $27 million plant has been at the centre of a protracted legal battle between ANSTO and the contractor, with each blaming the other for the bungle.
The plant – which will become operation in the late 2020s – has been built to treat waste from the production of a special radioisotope called Mo-99 to be used in medicine.
Contractors were invited in 2017 to build the plant with ANSTO and Icon SI (Aust) – comprising Cockram Construction – awarded a contract for $27 million for the construction of the building.
However, Icon SI has since taken ANSTO to court with the two parties in dispute over the works, including the withholding of payments and who is responsible for the so-called “epoxy defect”.
A technology and construction list statement filed in the NSW Supreme Court late last year by lawyers for Icon IS revealed how ANSTO had noted a “subsisting defect in the epoxy coating”.
However, Icon SI’s lawyers claimed it was ANSTO which had caused the problem – now rectified – as it was its design.
“The defendant’s design at the junctions of steel and concrete failed to take into account the different thermal expansion of the two materials,” the statement said.
“The different thermal expansion of the two materials causes the epoxy coating at the junctions to crack.”
An Icon spokeswoman said the choice of lining within the hot cells had been found to be inadequate, resulting in the delamination and “peeling”.
While ANSTO was trying to “blame the builder”, it had only engaged Cockram under a “construct-only” contract, she said. She also claimed Cockram had been engaged before ANSTO had completed the design, drawings and broader contract documentation for the project.
“ANSTO has consistently tried to blame what are in fact design defects on the builder,” she said.
“One such issue is the lining chosen inside of the hot cell, which contains the nuclear waste. This specification has been found to be inadequate, resulting in delamination/peeling. The design of the hot cell remains unsuitable for its intended purpose.”
The Sunday Telegraph has been told the epoxy coating was applied to the internal floors and walls in the facility, and to the front and back of the hot cells.
The hot cells have yet to receive nuclear waste – which occurs during the “hot commissioning” phase – with the defect detected as it was undergoing cold commissioning. The plant has now been returned to “fit out” stage with defect being rectified by ANSTO.
An ANSTO spokeswoman said it was inappropriate to comment on the matter given the ongoing legal proceedings.
NSW Supreme Court Justice Michael Ball last month sent the matter to arbitration.
Coalition MPs dismiss International Energy Agency advice to ditch nuclear plans
IEA chief urges Australia to prioritise ‘untapped potential in solar and wind’ as opposition pushes on with its nuclear policy
Guardian Sarah Basford Canales, Fri 10 May 2024
Coalition MPs have dismissed advice from the world’s international energy body urging Australia to ditch any nuclear plans in favour of the “untapped potential” of solar and wind power.
After the Albanese government’s announcement on Thursday that gas will remain key to the country’s energy and export sectors to “2050 and beyond”, the opposition has doubled down on its plans to unveil a nuclear energy policy before the next federal election.
While details of the plan, including the location of up to six possible sites for nuclear plants, have yet to be announced, the Nationals leader, David Littleproud, said the Coalition’s goal was to plan for a “gradual transition from coal to nuclear, gas and renewables built in the right place and in the right concentration”.
In an interview with the Australian Financial Review, the International Energy Agency (IEA) executive director, Dr Fatih Birol, said politicians in Australia should be prioritising the country’s renewable energy sources over investing in new nuclear projects…………..
Birol told Nine newspapers nuclear was not an avenue Australia should be looking at.
Birol said he hoped discussions around nuclear “can be made more factual, less emotional and political”, stressing Australia should prioritise the “untapped potential in solar and wind”…………………………………………………….
O’Brien’s Nationals colleague, Keith Pitt, similarly dismissed Birol’s advice as coming from a “Paris-based” commentator, saying the IEA has had “more positions on energy advice to Australia than the Kama Sutra”.
It is understood the Coalition will propose locating nuclear power plants on the site of retiring coal power plants, claiming the use of existing transmission infrastructure would bring down costs.
Figures released by the federal energy department last September revealed the plan could cost as much as $387bn. The analysis showed a minimum of 71 small modular reactors – providing 300MW each – would be needed if the policy were to fully replace the 21.3GW output of Australia’s retiring coal fleet.
CSIRO’s GenCost report showed that once up and running, a theoretical small modular reactor built in 2030 – which is unlikely to exist – is estimated to cost $382 to $636 per MWh while solar and wind would cost between $91 and $130 per MWh once integration costs are included.
Outside the Coalition, political support for a domestic nuclear power industry is limited.
The climate change minister, Chris Bowen, has previously accused advocates for an Australian nuclear industry as “peddling hot air”, saying Labor’s plan backs the IEA chief’s comments.
The Fremantle MP, Josh Wilson, a loud nuclear critic within Labor, questioned the Coalition’s “obsession” with the “most expensive and slowest form” of energy generation.
The independent ACT senator David Pocock, a vocal advocate for renewable energy, said nuclear power “makes no sense in this country”.
The senator’s lower house independent colleagues Monique Ryan and Kate Chaney agreed but added that Labor’s future gas strategy was also the wrong path forward.
Chaney said it was a “no-brainer” that IEA would steer Australia towards its obvious solar and wind advantages, noting it was “driven by data rather than politics”.
Ryan said Australia was once again being seen as a pariah internationally on climate policy.
The Greens leader, Adam Bandt, said the federal government should deliver “massive investment” in public solar and wind, instead of opening up more gas mines. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/10/coalition-mps-dismiss-international-energy-agency-advice-to-ditch-nuclear-plans
Fixation on UK nuclear power may not help to solve climate crisis
Waste and cost among drawbacks, as researchers say renewables could power UK entirely
Paul Brown 10 May 24, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/10/fixation-on-nuclear-power-in-uk-may-not-help-to-solve-climate-crisis
In the battle to prevent the climate overheating, wind and solar are making impressive inroads into the once dominant market share of coal. Even investors in gas plants are increasingly seen as taking a gamble.
With researchers at Oxford and elsewhere agreeing that the UK could easily become entirely powered by wind and solar – with no fossil fuels required – it seems an anomaly that nuclear power is still getting the lion’s share of taxpayer subsidies to keep the ailing industry alive.
Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are backing as yet unproven small modular reactors (SMRs) as an indispensable part of the answer to the climate crisis and are running competitions to get this industry started. These reactors, from tiny ones of the type that power nuclear submarines, to scaled-up versions that can, in theory, be factory produced and built in relays to provide steady power, are all still in the design stage.
As the Union of Concerned Scientists in the United States points out, whichever model is chosen they have all the drawbacks of existing nuclear power stations; expensive, even without cost overruns, and the still unsolved waste problem. The biggest disadvantage, the group says, is that even if the technology worked it would be too little, too late, to keep the climate safe.
Biden’s war on Gaza is now a war on truth and the right to protest
media has carefully refocused attention, dealing exclusively with the nature of the protests – and a supposed threat they pose to “order” – not addressing what the protests are actually about.
As ever, establishment journalists have been essential to distracting from these horrendous realities.
The student protest movement has been remarkably peaceful
The media’s role is to draw attention away from what the students are protesting – complicity in genocide – and engineer a moral panic to leave the genocide undisturbed
JONATHAN COOK, MAY 10, 2024, First published by Middle East Eye
As mass student protests quickly spread to campuses across the United States last week, and others took hold in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, the western media gave centre stage to one man to arbitrate on whether the demonstrations should be allowed to continue: US President Joe Biden.
The establishment media reverentially relayed the president’s message that the protests were violent and dangerous, treating his assessment as if it had been handed down on a tablet of stone.
Biden declared the protesters had no “right to cause chaos”, giving the green light for police to go in with even greater force to clear the encampments.
This week, Biden raised the stakes further by suggesting the protests were evidence of a “ferocious surge” of antisemitism in the US.
According to reports, more than 2,000 protesters have been arrested after some university administrators – under growing pressure from the White House and their own wealthy donors – called in local police.
In approving the crushing of dissent, Biden contradicted himself: “We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent. But order must prevail.”
One small problem went unmentioned: Biden was not a disinterested party. In fact, his conflict of interest was so gigantic it could, like the damage to Gaza, be seen from outer space.
The students were calling on their universities to pull all investments from companies that are assisting Israel in carrying out what the World Court has called a “plausible” genocide in Gaza. Those weapons are being supplied in huge quantities largely thanks to the decisions of one man.
Yes, Joe Biden.
Law-breaking Biden
The “order” the US president wants to prevail is one in which his decisions to block any ceasefire and arm the slaughter, maiming and orphaning of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children go unchallenged.
Biden has been so indulgent of Israel’s destruction of Gaza that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government crossed the president’s supposed “red line” this week. Israel launched the initial stages of its long-threatened final assault on Rafah in southern Gaza. Some 1.3 million Palestinians have been huddling in makeshift tents there.
Biden could easily have forced Israel to change course at any point over the past seven months, but chose not to, even as he feigned concern about the ever-rising death toll among Palestinian civilians. Only under growing popular pressure, fuelled by the protests, has he finally appeared to pause arms shipments as the attack on Rafah intensifies.
The White House has authorised vast shipments of arms to Israel, including 2,000lb bombs that have levelled whole neighbourhoods, killing men, women and children outright or leaving them trapped under rubble to slowly suffocate or starve to death.
Late last month Biden signed a further $26bn of US taxpayers’ money to Israel, the majority military aid – just as mass graves of Palestinians killed by Israel were coming to light. He has been able to do so only by flagrantly ignoring the requirement in US law that any weapons supplied not be used in ways likely to constitute war crimes.
Human rights groups have warned his administration repeatedly that Israel is routinely breaking international law.
At least 20 of Biden administration’s own lawyers are reported to have signed off on a letter that Israel’s actions violate a host of US statutes, including the Arms Export Control Act and Leahy Laws, as well as the Geneva Conventions.
Meanwhile, the State Department’s investigations show that, even before Israel’s destruction of Gaza began seven months ago, five Israeli military units were committing gross violations of the human rights of Palestinians in the separate enclave of the Occupied West Bank.
There, Israel doesn’t even have the one-size-fits-all excuse that the abuse and killing of Palestinian civilians are unfortunate “collateral damage” in an operation to “eradicate Hamas”. The West Bank is under the control of the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, not Hamas.
Nonetheless, no action has been taken to stop the arms transfers. US laws, it seems, don’t apply to the Biden administration, any more than international law does to Israel.
Protest quicksand
In denying students the right to protest at the US arming of Israel’s plausible genocide, Biden is also denying them the right to protest the most consequential policy of his four-year term – and of at least the last two decades of US foreign policy, since the US invasion of Iraq.
And it is all happening in a presidential election year.
The students’ immediate aim is to stop their universities’ complicity in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. But there are two obvious wider goals.
The first is to bring attention back to the endless suffering of Palestinians in the tiny, besieged enclave. Until this week’s attack on Rafah, the plight of Gaza had increasingly dropped off front pages, even as Israeli-induced famine and disease tightened their grip over the past month.
When Gaza has made the news, it is invariably through a lens unrelated to the slaughter and starvation. It is details of the interminable negotiations, or political tensions over Israel’s Rafah “invasion”, or plans for the “day after” in Gaza, or the plight of the Israeli hostages, or their families’ agonies, or where to draw the line on free speech in criticising Israel.
The students’ second goal is to make it politically uncomfortable for Biden to continue providing the weapons and diplomatic cover that have permitted Israel’s actions – from slaughter to starvation, and now the imminent destruction of Rafah.
The students have been trying to change the national conversation in ways that will pressure Biden to stop his all-too-visible law-breaking.
But they have run up against the usual problem: the national conversation is largely dictated by the political and media class in their own interests. And they are all for the genocide continuing, it seems, whatever the law says.
Which means the media has carefully refocused attention, dealing exclusively with the nature of the protests – and a supposed threat they pose to “order” – not addressing what the protests are actually about.
Last Sunday, the head of the UN Food Aid Programme, Cindy McCain, warned that northern Gaza was in the grip of “full-blown famine” and that the south was not far behind. Dozens of children were reported to have died of dehydration and malnutrition. “It’s horror,” she said.
The head of Unicef pointed out last week, a few days before Israel ordered the evacuation of eastern Rafah: “Nearly all of the some 600,000 children now crammed into Rafah are either injured, sick, malnourished, traumatized, or living with disabilities.”
A separate UN report recently revealed it will take 80 years to rebuild Gaza, based on the historic levels of materials allowed in by Israel. On a highly unlikey, best-case scenario, it will take 16 years.
As ever, establishment journalists have been essential to distracting from these horrendous realities.
The students are caught in a protest equivalent of quicksand: the more they struggle to draw attention to the Gaza genocide, the more the Gaza genocide sinks from view. The media have seized on their struggle as a pretext to ignore Gaza and turn the spotlight on to their protests instead.
Feeling ‘unsafe’
The student protest movement has been remarkably peaceful – a fact that is all the more obvious when compared to the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the US in 2020, with Biden’s approval.
Four years ago there were many episodes of property damage, but that has been all but unheard of in the student protests, which are mostly confined to encampments on university campus lawns………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… more https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/bidens-war-on-gaza-is-now-a-war-on?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=476450&post_id=144499809&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
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