Australia’s biggest emitter and coal generator says its customers are “strong green” — RenewEconomy
AGL’s next CEO says energy policy should be guided by customers – and says one-third of the coal generator’s customers are “strong green.” The post Australia’s biggest emitter and coal generator says its customers are “strong green” appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Australia’s biggest emitter and coal generator says its customers are “strong green” — RenewEconomy
From coal to inverters, AEMO’s engineering vision is ambitious and necessary — RenewEconomy
George Orwell wrote: “Our civilisation is founded on coal … The machines keep us alive and the machines that make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal”. From colonisation until recently, Australia too has been dependent on coal and gas and the large spinning turbines that turn these ancient, buried resources into electrons.…
From coal to inverters, AEMO’s engineering vision is ambitious and necessary — RenewEconomy
July 14 Energy News — geoharvey
Opinion: ¶ “New Republican-Only Conservative Climate Caucus Light On Science, Heavily Pro-Fossil Fuels” • A Conservative Climate Caucus has been formed with a roster of roughly 60 members. Their website is light on content, but it has enough to make a few early assessments. Their actions may pleasantly surprise me one day, but the start […]
July 14 Energy News — geoharvey
As the world starts to panic over climate change, nuclear evangelists offer spurious solutions.
I too wish that the things that the nuclear industry says about itself were true—I wish it was green and renewable. I wish that there weren’t multiple uranium mining sites around the world with thousands of tons of uranium tailings abandoned and open to the elements, continuing to harm the health of generations born long after mining ceased.
I wish that it didn’t take immense, carbon-intensive mining projects to extract uranium from the Earth, and then again to “deposit” the spent nuclear fuel from reactors back half a kilometer underground.
Nuclear Stockholm Syndrome, https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/07/09/nuclear-stockholm-syndrome/
BY ROBERT JACOBS 9 July 21, Bhaskar Sunkara’s recent opinion piece extoling the virtues of nuclear power and castigating its opponents as paranoid and ill-informed, is clearly motivated by his deep concerns over the dire impacts of global warming, which loom closer by the hour. Unfortunately, his arguments amount to little more than regurgitated industry talking points, in their traditional form of a Jeremiad.
First, Sunkara poses the decline of the nuclear industry in the West as an achievement of progressive political movements. Specifically, he cites the decline of nuclear power in Germany as attributable to a “Green party-spearheaded campaign.” This decline has been more reasonably ascribed to both market conditions and missteps by nuclear industry giants such as Westinghouse and AREVA. From its inception, nuclear power has been heavily dependent on government subsidies to appear economically viable (subsidies such as insurance and the disposal of waste largely configured as taxpayer burdens).
Rather than succumbing to its political opponents on the left, the industry has been sunk by its structural economic dysfunctions. In the US, this has sparked schemes to secure additional taxpayer subsidies in legislative fixes such as guaranteed returns for nuclear utilities, and outright bribery of legislators for taxpayer bailouts of failing companies.
The most simplistic recitation of nuclear industry talking points is when Sunkara dismisses concerns about nuclear waste, and extolls the mythic separation between “civilian” and “military” nuclear technologies. He asserts that most nuclear waste “can be recycled to generate more electricity,” an assertion that goes back more than half a century and has been ritualistically recited by an army of nuclear industry PR professionals before him…yet here we are 50 years later and very little spent nuclear fuel has actually been recycled. The most successful nuclear recycling nation is France which, nevertheless, is experiencing a “nuclear exit” and is unlikely to ever use this recycled fuel. AREVA, the French nuclear giant, has gone bankrupt. Reprocessing facilities like the Rokkasho plant here in Japan have never functioned properly, unless you consider their role enabling the stockpiling of plutonium by Japan to hedge against future weapon needs to be an elemental goal.
There is a difference between what can be done, and what actually happens. Rather than being recycled, hundreds of thousands of metric tons of spent nuclear fuel await “final disposal” in deep geological repositories. Some have been waiting for over 70 years. Just last week, a panel advising the EU on categorizing nuclear plant as “green” energy, and thus eligible to receive EU funding as a “sustainable investment,” concluded that the problems of nuclear waste preclude that designation.
I would point out that even though plastics manufacturers assure us that most plastic can be recycled, we still seem to be living a world with ever increasing amounts of plastic waste. Their greenwashing has not eventuated in a world full of plastics made from recycled materials. The market reality is that it is cheaper to manufacture new plastic than it is to manufacture plastic from recycled materials. Similarly, it is cheaper to discard spent nuclear fuel than it is to reprocess it.
Sunkara dismisses the irrevocable link between military and civilian nuclear technologies as imaginary. First, let’s consider the present imbrication. A 2019 Atlantic Council study places the value of the US civilian nuclear complex to the US national security apparatus at $26 billion annually simply in terms of the human capital assets: “In terms of nuclear technology innovation, export capacity, and geopolitics, a vibrant civilian nuclear energy sector is a critically important national security asset.”
However, the civilian operation of nuclear power plants also places future generations at military risk. I have written that, historically, nuclear reactors were “born violent.” That is to say, they were invented by the Manhattan Project in the early 1940s to manufacture plutonium for use in nuclear weapons, and were instrumental in killing almost 100,000 people in 1945. The “first” American commercial atomic plant in Shippingport, PA that went critical in 1958, was actually the 14th industrial nuclear reactor built in the United States, the other 13 only manufactured plutonium, which by then formed the fissile cores of thousands of nuclear weapons.
In nuclear reactors used to make electricity, this plutonium is not separated out for use in weapons. However, all nuclear power plants remain plutonium production factories. The fact that most of those tons of plutonium remain in the spent fuel rods does not mean they will stay there forever. Thousands of years from now, some government or military may dig up the spent fuel in our deep geological repositories and separate that plutonium out to build nuclear weaponry. All it would take is the technology (technology we currently possess) and the will. We continue to manufacture that plutonium—perhaps for them to weaponize. Every nuclear power plant that operates adds to that inventory; more than 99% of existing plutonium was manufactured in nuclear reactors. In 1962, the US successfully detonated a nuclear weapon assembled with just such “reactor-grade” plutonium. Our generation’s use of nuclear power silently stockpiles fissile material that will remain militarily viable for millennia.
I too wish that the things that the nuclear industry says about itself were true—I wish it was green and renewable. I wish that there weren’t multiple uranium mining sites around the world with thousands of tons of uranium tailings abandoned and open to the elements, continuing to harm the health of generations born long after mining ceased. I wish that it didn’t take immense, carbon-intensive mining projects to extract uranium from the Earth, and then again to “deposit” the spent nuclear fuel from reactors back half a kilometer underground. Estimates before construction began at Onkalo spent fuel repository in Finland were that the site would entail a “half-billion-euro construction project will generate some 2,500 person years of employment,” and would take 100 years to complete. That is just to contain the spent fuel from five nuclear power plants. The United States, by contrast, has 94 commercial nuclear power plants. There is still no actual plan for the astonishingly large and carbon-intensive site it will take to bury the more than 140,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel, with some hope of containing it for thousands of generations of future human beings. This doesn’t include the thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel from the nuclear reactors operated by the US military to provide the fissile cores of more than 70,000 nuclear weapons during the Cold War.
The panic-inducing impacts of anthropic climate change spark a desperate need for immediate reassurance and calming: we want to fix it now. We long to turn some corner that will change the situation. It is unlikely that the same short-sighted military-industrial technophilia that brought us to this climate crisis will flip over and provide us the urgent path to its resolution. Technological evangelists have been auditioning for the part of Climate Change Savior to anyone who will listen. Some proffer a Reagan-era Star Wars pitch: they will fill the skies with material to block the enemy (in this case sunlight rather than Soviet ICBMs). These geoengineering quick-fix schemes are more likely to cause unplanned outcomes than to achieve their missions.
At one time nuclear weapon producers imagined they too could geoengineer the planet to shape it to human desires. They tested the use of nuclear weapons to sculpt harbors into coastlines, and to release natural gas trapped in rock formations. These experiments led to some of the most significant radiological distributions and contaminated sites in the wide panoply of nuclear testing. Still, hyper-capitalist techno utopians like Elon Musk envision the key to human habitation on Mars is the detonation of a massive arsenals of thermonuclear weapons to shape it to our needs.
The nuclear industry will ignore its market dilemmas as long as taxpayers continue to backstop its investors. However, to believe that this massive, for-profit, military-based industry has concern for the welfare of the Earth and its inhabitants is akin to believing the plastic industry is actually beavering away to make the plastic waste disappear. Repackaging their talking points out of a genuine concern for living creatures is a resource they will continue to tap so long as it flows freely. Sunkara would do better to advocate for the mass social movements that have shifted giant industries towards social welfare in the past rather than preaching that the industries themselves are saviors. Time is obviously short, wrong turns are catastrophic.
Robert (Bo) Jacobs is a historian at the Hiroshima Peace Institute and Graduate School of Peace Studies at Hiroshima City University. He has written and edited multiple books and articles on nuclear history and culture including, The Dragon’s Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age, and Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future: Art and Popular Culture Respond to the Bomb. He is a founder and a principal researcher of the Global Hibakusha Project, studying radiation exposed communities around the world. His book, Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha, will be published by Yale University Press in 2022. His Global Hibakusha blog can be found here.
British court ruling heightens danger of Assange extradition to the US
British court ruling heightens danger of Assange extradition to the US, WSWS, Oscar Grenfell, 12 July 21, Last week’s ruling by the British High Court allowing prosecutors to appeal an earlier judgment blocking Julian Assange’s extradition, poses the very real danger that the WikiLeaks publisher will be dispatched to his American persecutors in the not-too-distant future.
The ruling is a microcosm of the Assange case as a whole. As they have for the past decade, the British courts have thrown aside the WikiLeaks founder’s legal and democratic rights. They have granted a US appeal that is both duplicitous and irregular under conditions in which the entire attempt by the American state to prosecute Assange has been exposed as an illegal frame-up.
The US appeal is a damning refutation of those, including among Assange’s own supporters, who have peddled dangerous illusions that the US administration of President Joe Biden may drop the prosecution if a sufficient number of moral pleas are addressed to the new occupant of the White House.
The appeal was first issued in the dying days of the Trump administration but it was continued, honed and argued for by Biden’s Justice Department. Assange remains in London’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison and faces the prospect of lifetime incarceration in the US because Biden is determined to press ahead with the prosecution of a journalist and publisher for exposing American war crimes, human rights violations and illegal spying operations.
That is because the Assange prosecution is viewed as a crucial precedent by the imperialist powers for the suppression of dissent and anti-war opposition amid a ratcheting up of the preparations for military conflict, including the Biden administration’s threats and provocations against China, and the first signs of a resurgence of working-class struggle.
The appeal also confirms the warnings made by the World Socialist Web Site about January’s British District Court decision that barred extradition.
Judge Vanessa Baraitser accepted all the substantive arguments of the US prosecutors, including their right to try a publisher under the Espionage Act. Her ruling, prohibiting extradition, was framed in the narrowest terms. Its purpose was to defuse a groundswell of opposition to the prospect of Assange’s extradition and to provide the US with ample scope for appeal.
Baraitser ruled that extradition would be “oppressive.” Assange’s compromised health and the conditions of his imprisonment in the US would likely result in his suicide.
The deliberate consequence of that judgment was that there was only a legal sliver between Assange and extradition.
The US has exploited this with its appeal claiming that the conditions of imprisonment would not be so oppressive. It has proposed worthless assurances that Assange would not be held under Special Administrative Measures (SAM), regulations that impose almost total isolation on a prisoner, and that he could serve out his sentence in Australia.
The extradition hearing had heard harrowing testimony about the dire psychological consequences of SAMs and conditions at the supermax ADX Florence prison where they are frequently imposed.
The US arguments, accepted as a legitimate basis of appeal by the British court, were demolished by Stella Moris, Assange’s partner and an international human rights lawyer.
In a statement issued on Friday, Moris wrote: “Reports about US undertakings are grossly misleading. On any given day 80,000 prisoners in US prisons are held in solitary confinement. Only a handful are in ADX/under special administrative measures. ADX is just one of dozens of self-described supermax prisons in the United States. The US government also says it may change its mind if the head of the CIA advises it to do so once Julian Assange is held in US custody.
“With regard to the supposed concession of allowing Julian to serve jail time in Australia, it was always his right to request a prisoner transfer to Australia to finish serving his sentence because he is an Australian. It is no concession at all. There are existing agreements between the US and Australian authorities. What is crucial to understand is that prisoner transfers are eligible only after all appeals have been exhausted. For the case to reach the US Supreme Court could easily take a decade, even two.
“What the US is proposing is a formula to keep Julian in prison effectively for the rest of his life. The only assurance that would be acceptable would be for the Biden Administration to drop this shameful case altogether, once and for all. He should not be in prison for a single day, not in the UK, not in the United States, not in Australia—because journalism is not a crime.”
As Moris noted, the US appeal itself reserved the “right” to impose SAMs once Assange is on US soil. Testimony at the extradition hearing, including from a former US prison warden, established that the imposition of SAMs is essentially extra-judicial, often being introduced at the say-so of the intelligence agencies, and with no genuine means of appeal.
“What the US is proposing is a formula to keep Julian in prison effectively for the rest of his life. The only assurance that would be acceptable would be for the Biden Administration to drop this shameful case altogether, once and for all. He should not be in prison for a single day, not in the UK, not in the United States, not in Australia—because journalism is not a crime.”
As Moris noted, the US appeal itself reserved the “right” to impose SAMs once Assange is on US soil. Testimony at the extradition hearing, including from a former US prison warden, established that the imposition of SAMs is essentially extra-judicial, often being introduced at the say-so of the intelligence agencies, and with no genuine means of appeal.
The hearings, moreover, heard evidence of a case in which similar assurances were immediately thrown out the door once extradition was secured……………
Thordarson has now admitted, however, that almost all his testimony consisted of lies proffered in exchange for immunity from US prosecution. The American government thus submitted a false indictment to the British courts……….https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/07/12/assa-j12.html?pk_campaign=assange-newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Adani says it wants kids to take climate action, while it grows fossil fuel empire — RenewEconomy
Adani says it wants kids to take personal responsibility for climate action, while new research shows the depth of its fossil fuel ambitions. The post Adani says it wants kids to take climate action, while it grows fossil fuel empire appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Adani says it wants kids to take climate action, while it grows fossil fuel empire — RenewEconomy
WA mulls three gigawatt-scale PV plants to export solar to Asia — RenewEconomy
Plans to build three gigawatt-scale solar farms in Western Australia’s Pilbara and Kimberley regions and sell their output to Indonesia via submarine cables, could soon be commercially viable.
WA mulls three gigawatt-scale PV plants to export solar to Asia — RenewEconomy
July 12 Energy News — geoharvey
Science and Technology: ¶ “Experts Are Close To Generating A New Form Of Renewable Energy From Water” • Splitting water molecules to make green hydrogen requires large amounts of energy. New research suggests, however, that instead of having to use large amounts of power, the same results can be achieved using more effective and energy-efficient […]
July 12 Energy News — geoharvey
The week in nuclear news
No – there’s not really much happening in the nuclear sphere. What is happening is the increasing pro nuke propaganda. It is so noticeable in my country, Australia. Not that it’s widespread (yet), but the pro-nuke spiel from the Murdochracy is so patently, silly, and ill-informed that it deserves mention for its absurdity. I hope to write more about this next time.
CLIMATE Serious as the pandemic is, – I’m thinking that in the total picture, it does not compare with the weather extremes, the suffering, the forced refugees, that the world faces from global heating.
When it happens in America, the media does sit up and take notice. It’s happening in California, with raging temperatures and raging wildfires. I know that this is terrible, and not funny, but still, I wonder if some climate change denialists might be having second thoughts , as they’re finding it hard to get oysters and other luxury shellfish – seeing that these coastal marine organisms are being cooked now, before they can be harvested.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTZD5K6JBGk
CORONAVIRUS. World Health Organisation sounds alarm as global deaths top 4 million, delta variant spreads to 100 countries.
AUSTRALIA.
South Australian law demands an Inquiry into the Federal government’s nuclear waste storage plan. Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation (BDAC) will take legal action against nuclear dump plan if Resources Minister Keith Pitt names Napandee as the site.
Australian Members of Parliament from right and left parties call on US President Biden to drop charges against Julian Assange,
INTERNATIONAL
Reaching net zero without nuclear. Nuclear Energy Will Not Be the Solution to Climate Change – not enough time, even if it were effective.
If They Chose, Biden and Putin Could Make the World Radically Safer, Nuclear arms control hasn’t worked. We need a new approach.
Key witness in Julian Assange case admits to lies in indictment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlLbAVSHeA8 U.S. government offers meaningless assurances on Julian Assange’s well-being, as it gets right to appeal on UK court ruling against his extradition. U.S. proposals about extradition of Julian Assange are designed to keep him in prison for life.
Rapid growth of global renewable energy: it’s the major energy source in Europe.
Mobile phones/cellphones – the health danger from electromagnetic radiation.
Reaching net zero without nuclear
Our latest Talking Points makes the case
Not only is it possible, it’s essential https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2021/07/11/reaching-net-zero-without-nuclear/
The fourth in our series of Talking Points draws on the new report by Jonathon Porritt, New Zero Without Nuclear: The Case Against Nuclear Power. Given the far-off illusory promise of new reactor designs; the enormous costs; the limited capacity for carbon reductions compared to renewables; the unsolved waste problem; and the inflexibility and outdatedness of the “always on” baseload model, nuclear power is in the way of — rather than a contributor to — climate mitigation. You can download the Net Zero Without Nuclear Talking Points here. This is the fourth in our series. You can find all four here.
By Jonathon Porritt 10 July 21
I first took an interest in Greenpeace back in 1973, before I joined Friends of the Earth, CND and the Green Party (then the Ecology Party) a year later. I’d followed the campaigns against the testing of nuclear weapons in Amchitka (one of the Aleutian islands in Alaska), and then in the French nuclear testing area of Moruroa in the Pacific. I was 23 at the time, with zero in-depth knowledge, but it just seemed wrong, on so many different fronts.
That early history of Greenpeace seems much less relevant now, given all its achievements over the last 50 years in so many other areas of critical environmental concern. But it still matters. Greenpeace has been an ‘anti-nuclear organisation’ through all that time, sometimes fiercely engaged in front-line battles, sometimes maintaining more of a watching brief, and nuclear power plays no part in Greenpeace’s modelling of a rapid transition to a Net Zero carbon world. It’s been very supportive of my new report, ‘Net Zero Without Nuclear’.
I wrote this report partly because the nuclear industry itself is in full-on propaganda mode, and partly because that small caucus of pro-nuclear greens (that’s existed for as long as I can remember) seems to be winning new supporters.
And I can see why. The Net Zero journey we’re now starting out on for real (at long last!) is by far the most daunting challenge that humankind has ever faced. Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books in June 2019, author and Army veteran Roy Scranton put it like this:
‘Climate change is bigger than the New Deal, bigger than the Marshall Plan, bigger than World War II, bigger than racism, sexism, inequality, slavery, the Holocaust, the end of nature, the Sixth Extinction, famine, war, and plague all put together, because the chaos it’s bringing is going to supercharge every other problem. Successfully meeting this crisis would require an abrupt, traumatic revolution in global human society; failing to meet it will be even worse.’
Not many people see it like that – as yet. But more and more will, as signals of that kind of chaos start to multiply. And we already know that the kind of radical decarbonisation on which our future depends is going to be incredibly hard. So why should we reject a potentially powerful contribution to that decarbonisation challenge?
I became Director of Friends of the Earth in 1984. The same year that my first book, ‘Seeing Green’, was published. Looking back on what I said then, I was indeed fiercely critical of nuclear power, but have to admit that my advocacy of renewables (as the principal alternative) was somewhat muted. Apart from a few visionaries in the early 1980s (including Friends of the Earth’s Amory Lovins and Walt Patterson), no-one really thought that renewables would be capable of substituting for the use of all fossil fuels and all nuclear at any point in the near future. And anyone expressing such a view in official circles was rapidly put back in their box.
Given the scale of the challenge we face, we need to have very strong grounds for keeping nuclear out of today’s low/zero-carbon portfolio. Not least as nuclear power, historically, has already made a huge contribution to low-carbon generation. Since the early 1960s, nuclear power has provided the equivalent of 18,000 reactor years of electricity generation. We’d be in a much worse place today if all that electricity had been generated from burning coal or gas.
Happily, there is no longer any doubt about the viability of that alternative. In 2020, Stanford University issued a collection of 56 peer-reviewed journal articles, from 18 independent research groups, supporting the idea that all the energy required for electricity, transport, heating and cooling, and all industrial purposes, can be supplied reliably with 100% (or near 100%) renewable energy. The solutions involve transitioning ASAP to 100% renewable wind – water – solar (WWS), efficiency and storage.
The transition is already happening. To date, 11 countries have reached or exceeded 100% renewable electricity. And a further 12 countries are intent on reaching that threshold by 2030. In the UK, the Association for Renewable Energy and Clean Technology says we can reach 100% renewable electricity by 2032. Last year, we crossed the 40% threshold.
There is of course a world of difference between electricity and total energy consumption. But at the end of April, Carbon Tracker brought out its latest analysis of the potential for renewables, convincingly explaining why solar and wind alone could meet total world energy demand 100 times over by 2050, and that fears about the huge amount of land this would require are unfounded. The land required for solar panels to provide all global energy would be 450,000 km2, just 0.3% of global land area – significantly less than the current land footprint of fossil fuel infrastructures. As the Report says:
The technical and economic barriers have been crossed and the only impediment to change is political. Sector by sector and country by country the fossil fuel incumbency is being swamped by the rapidly rising tide of new energy technologies. Even countries where the technical potential is below 10 times energy demand. . . have devised innovative approaches to energy generation.
The fossil fuel industry cannot compete with the technology learning curves of renewables, so demand will inevitably fall as wind and solar continue to grow. At the current 15-20% growth rates of solar and wind, fossil fuels will be pushed out of the electricity sector by the mid-2030s and out of total energy supply by 2050.‘
The unlocking of energy reserves 100 times our current demand creates new possibilities for cheaper energy and more local jobs in a more equitable world with far less environmental stress.‘
Poor countries are the greatest beneficiaries. They have the largest ratio of solar and wind potential to energy demand and stand to unlock huge domestic benefits.’
Nuclear plays no part in any of these projections, whether we’re talking big reactors or small reactors, fission or fusion. The simple truth is this: we should see nuclear as another 20th century technology, with an ever-diminishing role through into the 21st century, incapable of overcoming its inherent problems of cost, construction delay, nuclear waste, decommissioning, security (both physical and cyber), let alone the small but still highly material risk of catastrophic accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima. My ‘Net Zero Without Nuclear’ report goes into all these inherent problems in some detail.
So why are the UK’s politicians (in all three major parties) still in thrall to this superannuated technology? It’s here we have to go back to Amchitka! Some environmentalists may still be taken aback to discover that the Government’s principal case for nuclear power in the UK today is driven by the need to maintain the UK’s nuclear weapons capability – to ensure a ‘talent pool’ of nuclear engineers and to support a supply chain of engineering companies capable of providing component parts for the nuclear industry, both civilian and military. The indefatigable work of Andy Stirling and Phil Johnston at Sussex University’s Science Policy Research Unit has established the depth and intensity of these interdependencies, demonstrating how the UK’s military industrial base would become unaffordable in the absence of a nuclear energy programme.
What that means is that today’s pro-nuclear greens are throwing in their lot not just with a bottomless pit of hype and fantasy, but with a world still dangerously at risk from that continuing dependence on nuclear weapons. That’s a weird place to be, 50 years on from the emergence of Greenpeace as a force for good in that world.
Fukushima’s ”nuclear recovery Olympics” has gone even more wrong, as spectators banned.
Fukushima to ban Olympic spectators as Covid cases rise,
U-turn deals blow to Japan’s hopes of using Games to showcase recovery from 2011 tsunami, Guardian, 10 Jul 21,
, The Fukushima prefecture of Japan will bar spectators from the Olympic events it hosts this summer owing to rising Covid-19 infections, its governor said on Saturday, reversing a position announced two days earlier by organisers.
The decision deals another blow to Japan’s hopes of using the Olympics to showcase its recovery from a devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit the northern coast in 2011, destroying a nuclear power station in Fukushima in the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.
Organisers had said on Thursday there would be no spectators in the host city, Tokyo, as a resurgent coronavirus forced the prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, to declare a state of emergency in the capital that will run throughout the Games, which were already postponed by a year due to the pandemic……..
Fukushima’s move comes a day after the Australian Olympic Committee president, John Coates, expressed optimism about audiences in Fukushima. Japan take on Australia in a softball game that will be the first competition of the Olympics on 21 July, two days before the opening ceremony.
………. Organisers said there was no change to plans for limited crowds in Miyagi, Shizuoka and Ibaraki prefectures. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/jul/10/fukushima-to-ban-olympic-spectators-as-covid-cases-rise
Mobile phones/cellphones – the health danger from electromagnetic radiation
Ed. note. We know that ionising radiation from nuclear activities causes cancer and other health ill-effects. But we should also be aware of non-ionising radiation,and its effects on health – electromagnetic radiation as emitted by mobile pnones.
Since then, he said, research has shown significant adverse biologic and health effects — including brain cancer — associated with the use of cellphones and other wireless devices. And now, he said, with the fifth generation of cellular technology, known as 5G, there is an even bigger reason for concern.
Moskowitz: Cellphone radiation is harmful, but few want to believe it. Berkely News, Anne Brice, Berkeley News| JULY 1, 2021 For more than a decade, Joel Moskowitz, a researcher in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley and director of Berkeley’s Center for Family and Community Health, has been on a quest to prove that radiation from cellphones is unsafe. But, he said, most people don’t want to hear it.
“People are addicted to their smartphones,” said Moskowitz. “We use them for everything now, and, in many ways, we need them to function in our daily lives. I think the idea that they’re potentially harming our health is too much for some people.”
Since cellphones first came onto the market in 1983, they have gone from clunky devices with bad reception to today’s sleek, multifunction smartphones. And although cellphones are now used by nearly all American adults, considerable research suggests that long-term use poses health risks from the radiation they emit, said Moskowitz.
“Cellphones, cell towers and other wireless devices are regulated by most governments,” said Moskowitz. “Our government, however, stopped funding research on the health effects of radiofrequency radiation in the 1990s.”
Since then, he said, research has shown significant adverse biologic and health effects — including brain cancer — associated with the use of cellphones and other wireless devices. And now, he said, with the fifth generation of cellular technology, known as 5G, there is an even bigger reason for concern.
Berkeley News spoke with Moskowitz about the health risks of cellphone radiation, why the topic is so controversial and what we can expect with the rollout of 5G.
Berkeley News: I think we should address upfront is how controversial this research is. Some scientists have said that these findings are without basis and that there isn’t enough evidence that cellphone radiation is harmful to our health. How do you respond to that?
Joel Moskowitz: Well, first of all, few scientists in this country can speak knowledgeably about the health effects of wireless technology. So, I’m not surprised that people are skeptical, but that doesn’t mean the findings aren’t valid.
A big reason there isn’t more research about the health risks of radiofrequency radiation exposure is because the U.S. government stopped funding this research in the 1990s, with the exception of a $30 million rodent study published in 2018 by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences’ National Toxicology Program, which found “clear evidence” of carcinogenicity from cellphone radiation.
In 1996, the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, adopted exposure guidelines that limited the intensity of exposure to radiofrequency radiation. These guidelines were designed to prevent significant heating of tissue from short-term exposure to radiofrequency radiation, not to protect us from the effects of long-term exposure to low levels of modulated, or pulsed, radiofrequency radiation, which is produced by cellphones, cordless phones and other wireless devices, including Wi-Fi. Yet, the preponderance of research published since 1990 finds adverse biologic and health effects from long-term exposure to radiofrequency radiation, including DNA damage.
More than 250 scientists, who have published over 2,000 papers and letters in professional journals on the biologic and health effects of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields produced by wireless devices, including cellphones, have signed the International EMF Scientist Appeal, which calls for health warnings and stronger exposure limits. So, there are many scientists who agree that this radiation is harmful to our health.
Our 2009 review, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, found that heavy cellphone use was associated with increased brain cancer incidence, especially in studies that used higher quality methods and studies that had no telecommunications industry funding.
Last year, we updated our review, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, based on a meta-analysis of 46 case-control studies — twice as many studies as we used for our 2009 review — and obtained similar findings Our main takeaway from the current review is that approximately 1,000 hours of lifetime cellphone use, or about 17 minutes per day over a 10-year period, is associated with a statistically significant 60% increase in brain cancer.
Why did the government stop funding this kind of research?
The telecommunications industry has almost complete control of the FCC, according to Captured Agency, a monograph written by journalist Norm Alster during his 2014-15 fellowship at Harvard University’s Center for Ethics. There’s a revolving door between the membership of the FCC and high-level people within the telecom industry that’s been going on for a couple of decades now.
The industry spends about $100 million a year lobbying Congress. The CTIA, which is the major telecom lobbying group, spends $12.5 million per year on 70 lobbyists. According to one of their spokespersons, lobbyists meet roughly 500 times a year with the FCC to lobby on various issues. The industry as a whole spends $132 million a year on lobbying and provides $18 million in political contributions to members of Congress and others at the federal level.
……… there are strong parallels between what the telecom industry has done and what the tobacco industry has done, in terms of marketing and controlling messaging to the public. ……… For safety tips on how to reduce exposure to wireless radiation from the California Department of Public Health and other organizations, Moskowitz recommends readers visit his website, saferemr.com, Physicians for Safe Technology and the Environmental Health Trust. https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/07/01/health-risks-of-cell-phone-radiation/#:~:text=Moskowitz%3A%20Cellphone%20radiation%20is%20harmful%2C%20but%20few%20want%20to%20believe%20it,-By%20Anne%20Brice&text=For%20more%20than%20a%20decade,radiation%20from%20cellphones%20is%20unsafe.
“Embarrassing:” Ley to appeal court ruling she has duty of care to young people on emissions — RenewEconomy
Federal environment minister flags appeal of Federal Court order that she has a duty of care to protect young people from the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions. The post “Embarrassing:” Ley to appeal court ruling she has duty of care to young people on emissions appeared first on RenewEconomy.
“Embarrassing:” Ley to appeal court ruling she has duty of care to young people on emissions — RenewEconomy
Energy Insiders Podcast: Batteries accelerating shift to renewables — RenewEconomy
Alinta’s Gary Bryant on how battery storage is accelerating the shift to renewables. The post Energy Insiders Podcast: Batteries accelerating shift to renewables appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Energy Insiders Podcast: Batteries accelerating shift to renewables — RenewEconomy
First big battery on WA’s main grid gains development approval — RenewEconomy
Synergy says its 100MW/200MWh big battery has been given the green light for development at a decommissioned fossil fuel power station. The post First big battery on WA’s main grid gains development approval appeared first on RenewEconomy.
First big battery on WA’s main grid gains development approval — RenewEconomy
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