Antinuclear

Campaign against transport of nuclear wastes to “temporary” sites

Activists rally against nuclear waste transport,  By JOSHUA SOLOMON
Staff Writer,Greenfield Recorder  September 21, 2018 GREENFIELD — In a lot of ways it was like a party, celebrating the accomplishments of the past few years: The closures of the Vermont and Rowe nuclear plants. ……..The theme of the night? The high-level nuclear power plant waste being stored in Rowe and Vernon, Vt., must go — but only once the right and final safe place for it is decided.

“I haven’t bothered you for three or four years at this point,” leader of CAN and Rowe resident Deb Katz said. “But we’ve come back to our community to say: We need to be involved again. And I wish it wasn’t so.”

Katz and CAN just begun a tour of New England, and after spending their first two nights in Vermont, they came to Greenfield Thursday. On Friday, they will take the tour to the Statehouse on Beacon Hill.

Currently, the anti-nuclear activists are rallying against a bill that could allow for the high-level nuclear waste in Rowe and Vernon, Vt., to be shipped in canisters across the country to Texas or New Mexico. It would place the waste in what CAN is calling “parking lots” that are seen as more temporary holdings than anything else, but could be pitched as helping tthe economy in these regions in the Southwest of the country.

“Why shouldn’t we just say ‘yes, wow. Thank you so much’? The trouble is this is a really bad idea,” Katz said. “We all want the waste off the site, but we want it done right. And we want it done once.” ………

At the moment there isn’t a distinct solution on where to move the high-level nuclear waste, but Katz and fellow lead organizer Chris Williams of Vermont advovated for more science to figure out the best solution to storing waste that remains toxic for thousands of years.

“It took a lot of hard science to create this mess,” Williams said. “To get rid of this stuff properly, we’re going to have to apply real science and not just political expediency.”

The goal is to look to scientists to find the place for “deep geological storage,” Williams said.

Preaching to find a better, scientific solution was organizer and activist Kerstin Rudek from the Peoples Initiative, based out of Germany, where her neighbors have faced similar issues.

“It’s an international thing,” Rudek said, pointing to the lack of answers of what to do with the nuclear waste and the need for answers. “It’s not just a local thing.”

The meeting, which Williams described as a “little more lively than your usual nuclear waste meeting,” also included the speaker Leona Morgan, from the Navajo Nation and an Albuquerque, N.M. resident.

“It’s great news when we hear a nuclear power plant has been shut down, but it makes me nervous because it makes the push for these false solutions even harder,” Morgan said.

She described the political climate in New Mexico as pitching to residents that moving the nuclear waste there would be good for their economy, creating jobs, but ignoring the will of the residents who might be affected by it most.

“I’m here tonight to tell you we don’t want it,” Morgan said. “We don’t want this waste.”………

You can reach Joshua Solomon at:  jsolomon@recorder.com  413-772-0261, ext. 264     https://www.recorder.com/Anti-nuclear-group-CAN-advocated-for-one-final-location-for-waste-at-tour-event-at-Hawks—Reed-20333471

September 21, 2018 Posted by Christina MacPherson | General News | Leave a comment

Busting nuclear propagandist Harry Degenaar’s ode to nuclear reprocessing

Paul Richards Nuclear Fuel Cycle Watch South Australia, 20 Sept 18,  Harry Degenaar wrote: ‘A topic well documented…[speaking to reprocessing nuclear unspent, spent, and weapons-grade plutonium]’

Yes, the documentation in sales brochures, selling a dead technology.

You will never find any independent energy auditing specialists servicing the corporate state or global governments, pushing the nuclear industries;

* well documented, topic.

What are the probabilities this will ever take a 180º turnaround?

If anyone was going to take a bet like that one, they would be wasting their time and money.

Something never considered when these nuclear fuel reprocessing concepts started, as this was purely an engineering process.

Nonetheless, ‘proof of concept’ is very much the domain of good engineering, and that must include economic viability.

The nuclear industry can’t run unspent fuel through any reactor twice, as uranium is getting cheaper and cheaper.

Worse than that, is the reality renewables drive energy costs of electricity down;

* nuclear reactor costs are going up, &
* renewables are going down.

Repeating, this 1970s “Blue Sky Mining” ideal is pointless, despite the partial truth, its a con.

The part that makes it impossible, is economics, the con is believing global markets aren’t judging uranium harshly.

The reality is, it costs far more to run the unspent fuel through once let alone twice, three, four or five times claimed!

I can give a century of ore metrics, but it seems pointless.

What are the probabilities these ore prices dropping will reverse?

Sure there will be blips like we had with iron ore, but those are very tempory factors, short-lived, the trend down is unstoppable, as innovation efficiencies increase in mining. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1021186047913052/

September 21, 2018 Posted by Christina MacPherson | General News | Leave a comment

North Korea would dismantle nuclear complex, provided that USA takes corresponding action on the peninsula

North Korea Agrees to Permanently Dismantle Nuclear Complex If U.S. Takes Corresponding Steps, TIME,  ERIC TALMADGE AND KIM TONG-HYUNG / AP , September 19, 2018   (PYONGYANG, North Korea) — South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un announced a sweeping set of agreements after their second day of talks in Pyongyang on Wednesday that included a promise by Kim to permanently dismantle the North’s main nuclear complex if the United States takes corresponding measures, the acceptance of international inspectors to monitor the closing of a key missile test site and launch pad and a vow to work together to host the Summer Olympics in 2032.

September 21, 2018 Posted by Christina MacPherson | General News | Leave a comment

Antarctic melting could raise sea levels by up to 30 feet

At this rate, Earth risks sea level rise of 20 to 30 feet, historical analysis shows  New research finds that a vast area of Antarctica retreated when Earth’s temperatures weren’t much warmer than they are now, WP  Chris Mooney, September 20  2018

Temperatures not much warmer than the planet is experiencing now were sufficient to melt a major part of the East Antarctic ice sheet in Earth’s past, scientists reported Wednesday, including during one era about 125,000 years ago when sea levels were as much as 20 to 30 feet higher than they are now.

“It doesn’t need to be a very big warming, as long as it stays 2 degrees warmer for a sufficient time, this is the end game,” said David Wilson, a geologist at Imperial College London and one of the authors of the new research, which was published in Nature. Scientists at institutions in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Spain also contributed to the work.

The research concerns a little-studied region called the Wilkes Subglacial Basin, which is roughly the size of California and Texas combined and contains more than 10 feet of potential sea-level rise. Fronted by three enormous glaciers named Cook, Mertz and Ninnis, the Wilkes is known to be vulnerable to fast retreat because the ice here is not standing on land and instead is rising up from a deep depression in the ocean floor.

Moreover, that depression grows deeper as you move from the current icy coastline of the Wilkes farther inland toward the South Pole, a downhill slope that could facilitate rapid ice loss.

What the new science adds is that during past warm periods in Earth’s history, some or all of the ice in the Wilkes Subglacial Basin seems to have gone away. That’s an inference researchers made by studying the record of sediments in the seafloor just off the coast of the current ice front……..

Humans have caused about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming above the preindustrial planetary temperatures experienced before the year 1880 or so. The world has pledged to avoid a warming above 2 degrees Celsius, and even hopes to hold the warming to 1.5 degrees, but current promises made by countries are not nearly enough to prevent these outcomes.

n other words, we are already on a course that could heat the planet enough to melt some or all of the Wilkes Basin.

“We say 2 degrees beyond preindustrial, and we’re already beyond preindustrial,” Wilson said. “So this is potentially the kinds of temperatures we could see this century.”

The study cannot reveal, however, just how quickly ice emptied out of the Wilkes Basin. The past warm periods in question are thought to have been driven by slight variations in Earth’s orbit as it rotates around the sun, leading to stronger summer heat. That warmth was maintained for thousands of years.

…….. The new research “contributes to the mounting pile of evidence that East Antarctica is not as stable as we thought,” Isabella Velicogna, a glaciologist at the University of California at Irvine, said by email. Velicogna was not directly involved in the paper…….https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/09/20/antarctica-warming-could-fuel-disastrous-sea-level-rise-study-finds/?utm_term=.7c426ea2a985

September 21, 2018 Posted by Christina MacPherson | General News | Leave a comment