Antinuclear

Comment from USA on Australia’s election result

Gloria, 2o0 May 19, Not so much time left. If they start burying nuclear waste and parking Hi level wastein Australia, time to act. You have a very crooked government there. it would not surprise me if they push it through.

Trrump is doing it here. I hope people will act.

Jeffrey St. Clair, an old time antinuclear advocate, now says the nuclear issue is more serious, than the climate issue. It is in America for sure.

The northern midwest, has been flooding around several nuclear reactors in Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa where there are nuclear reactors. Many close calls this spring . The ground there is saturated with water.

The same for the south. Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee. 5 feet of water in Houston. Small towns wiped out, all the way to the STP reactor on the coast of Texas.

Hurricane season is starting . Many places with reactors have flooded with high and have high, geound saturation levels. Trump and Perry have gutted supervision, of reactors in the USA. A fukushima event or two here, will effect the whole world. It will effect australia too.

May 19, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | General News | Leave a comment

The world’s happiest people already have a Green New Deal, and they love it, by George Lakey — Rise Up Times

The Nordics [are] in the top tier of nations for equality because they adopted a radically different economic model…

via The world’s happiest people already have a Green New Deal, and they love it, by George Lakey — Rise Up Times

May 19, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Morrison’s reelection is a disaster for the future of the country — and the world

‘We have lost Australia for now,’ warns climate scientist in wake of election upset

The unexpected victory of conservatives in Australia’s election is bad news for the future of global climate action. https://thinkprogress.org/we-have-lost-australia-warns-climate-scientist-scott-morrison-upset-92008fabb597/?fbclid=IwAR2pfAFrP0d2JOTKR5QaIqt8cBVZGfTE_cwjY82DyE8603QnDRp_clnc-q

JOE ROMM, MAY 18, 2019,The unexpected victory of conservatives in Australia’s election Saturday is bad news for the future of global climate action, warn climate experts.

Polls had suggested that the Labor Party, which supports strong climate action, held a narrow lead in recent days. But in the end, Prime Minister Scott Morrison won re-election as his Liberal Party (which is actually conservative) swept to victory.

“Australians elected someone who once brought a lump of coal into Parliament urging us to dismiss the warnings from climate scientists, and to dig up more coal instead,” Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, an Australian cognitive scientist, told ThinkProgress in an email. “There is little doubt that his government will do precisely that.”

“We have lost Australia for now,” warned Penn State climatologist Michael Mann in an email. “A coalition of a small number of bad actors now threaten the survivability of our species,” he said.

These include “the fossil fueled Murdoch media empire, which saturated the country with dishonest right-wing campaign propaganda” working with a few “petrostates including Saudi Arabia, Russia, Trump’s America, and now Australia.”

Rupert Murdoch’s grip on the Australian media — and his support of climate disinformation around the world — led one Australian scientist to write in 2011, “The Murdoch media empire has cost humanity perhaps one or two decades of time in the battle against climate change.”

In re-electing Morrison, a long-time opponent of climate action, Murdoch and his allies have triumphed again.

In fact, Morrison first became prime minister back in 2015 following a party coup against then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who supported the climate action.

Turnbull’s efforts to cut carbon pollution and promote clean energy rankled right-wing members of his ruling Liberal Party, whose stances were closer to President Trump’s pro-coal (and anti-immigrant) policies.

Ironically, 2019 has already seen the hottest summer on record for Australia. The temperatures have been so brutal in South Australia, in fact, that heat-stressed bats are literally falling out of trees.

Australia is one of most vulnerable countries to climate change, since much of it is already very hot and dry — and so much of its population lives along the coast, which is threatened by rapidly rising sea levels.

Morrison’s reelection is thus a disaster for the future of the country — and the world, since avoiding catastrophic climate change requires a collective effort.

And so “we must redouble our efforts to make sure that the rest of the world works even harder to act on climate,” said Mann. “The stakes are too great to simply give up.”

May 19, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, election 2019 | Leave a comment

Australia stuck with pro-nuclear. climate sceptic, government – theme for May 19

The election result was not what was expected. Progressive Australians are still reeling from the shock – of another 3 years of a government whose loyalty is to the fossil fuel industry and to the nuclear lobby.

The Scott Morrison government has no plans, no idea at all, about how Australia might genuinely aim to meet its Paris climate change commitments.

It seems that most Australians were taken in by Scott Morrison’s simplistic message “I alone can manage the economy, cutting taxes (for the wealthy) is all that is needed” . The message of Labor and The Greens comprehensive policies did not come across.

A Trump -like victory, a Brexit like victory – grim years ahead for Australia.

The goal of a clean, positive programme for energy, climate, water, and the environment must not be abandoned. Progressive Australians, whether in Parliament, in the Senate, in the media, or in the environmental movement will not give up.

Reflecting on the catastrophic failure of the opinion n polls that consistently predicted a Labor win , I realised the deep division in Australia between the (mainly city-dwellers) and rural Queensland. We who see ourselves as “progressives” are in general,, followers of ABC and SBS, readers of The Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald, and our friends on social media. The ABCs “Vote Poll” reflects only opinions of ABC viewers, not Australians as a whole.

The unpalatable fact is that most Australians get their information from commercial TV and Murdoch media. Their realities are the struggle for jobs and just managing from day to day. They simply are not getting the facts.

The challenge for progressive campaigns is to get across the message that renewable energy supplies jobs, while coal is being increasingly automated, as well as other messages on the vital importance of managing water supplies, and of saving our one great river system. Action on climate change is essential for quality of life in rural Australia – but this is a message that has not come through to people there.

May 19, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, election 2019 | 2 Comments

It’s time to kick this mob out, and end this climate crap — RenewEconomy

It’s time for Australia to seize the opportunities in climate action and renewable energy. It’s time to kick this mob out and end the climate crap. The post It’s time to kick this mob out, and end this climate crap appeared first on RenewEconomy.

via It’s time to kick this mob out, and end this climate crap — RenewEconomy

May 18, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

What is needed is a war on climate change: why are people not voting Green?

Climate crisis demands war footing, but we won’t even vote for the Greens, https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/federal-election-2019/climate-crisis-demands-war-footing-but-we-won-t-even-vote-for-the-greens-20190516-p51o38.html, By Elizabeth Farrelly
May 18, 2019 The world’s children are demanding that we forget the past and look to the future. Hope? “I don’t want your hope,” says Greta Thunberg, the deadpan Swedish teen who inspired the climate strikes. “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear.” We’re moved, watching this stuff, but are we listening? Will we act?

A recent poll puts climate change atop Australians’ list of perceived threats, with almost two-thirds of us believing it’s situation critical. This is scarcely a surprise, given the unignorable increase in intensity of heatwaves, cyclones, fire and drought, the unassailable axiom that all economies need ecology and the unwelcome news that atmospheric CO2 this week topped 415ppm for the first time in human history – not to mention the kids and their climate strikes. What is surprising is how few of us will vote accordingly.

The evidence is mounting – for climate change, but also for official acceptance of it by our hopelessly laggard institutions. In February, the NSW courts made history by rejecting the Rocky Hill coalmine (in part) for its climate impact. This is huge and will ripple far and wide through the system. Almost more astonishingly, even the NSW government – although still frantically building motorways and increasing coal exports – now thinks it might find room for a little climate change department within its voluminous but dowdy skirts.

So climate-consciousness is now commonsense. Yet still the party most devoted to it – the Greens – is generally seen as radical and nonsensical. Even those who vote Green do it, one suspects, more as heartfelt protest than from a genuine desire to see the Greens take government.

This anomaly derives both from public misperception of the party and from the party’s refusal of anything resembling discipline in its public persona.

Leaving parties aside, briefly, what if we did vote for climate? What if, today, a miracle occurred across Australia and we decided, en masse, neither to stuff our ballot-papers down the dunny of rusted-on tribal loyalties nor engage in our usual election scrabble for the goodies, but to vote instead for climate commonsense, for survival? How would that shape the policy agenda?

Chief Justice Brian Preston’s long and scholarly judgment on the Rocky Hill mine is instructive here, noting with refreshing candour that government is tasked to guard the public interest, that this is not served by climate destruction and that the precautionary principle is required by law to be applied to all State Significant Projects.

“The Rocky Hill Coal Project,” wrote Preston, “will yield public benefits, including economic benefits, but it will also have significant negative impacts, including visual, amenity, social and climate change impacts and impacts on the existing, approved and likely preferred uses of land in the vicinity … which are all costs of the project.”

This is important, setting as legal precedent the self-evident fact that climate destruction is a very real cost and yet another way in which the public is routinely required to foot the bill for private gain

Which is the only reason climate change has been allowed to rampage on. We talk much about costs of mitigation and – obvious riposte – the far greater cost of non-mitigation. But there’s a critical difference. Mitigation costs are payable immediately and by the rich, whereas the cost of failure is payable later, by the poor.

Or so the rich (people and countries) like to think. But unless they want, metaphorically speaking, to clean their own toilets they – and especially their kids and grandkids – are umbilically linked to the poor. On anything more than a five-minute time-frame it’s all interconnected. There is no Planet B.

So how would it look, this Green Centre policy platform?

Naturally there’d be a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, where our still-considerable smarts (despite what we’ve squandered during neoliberal decades) go to capture that vast natural resource, the sun. Every vehicle is electric, most freight is transported by solar train and every horizontal surface not devoted to growing food – be it desert, paddock, rooftop or road – is photovoltaic, generating energy for local use.

With mining thus reduced (and fracking banned), farmland is no longer under siege and the great river systems begin to recover. Petrochemical fertilisers and pesticides, being CO2-intensive, are also phasing out so industrial-scale farming – which kills more than it grows – is dwindling. Instead, regenerative agriculture reappears, building soil and re-planting trees in a way that both enhances water-retention and sequesters CO2.

Such agriculture, necessarily smaller in scale, requires more human input – in particular, intellectual. So country populations are again flourishing. To enhance walkability and urban vitality but also to reduce energy consumption, these towns, like the big cities, have set boundaries, further protecting precious foodlands from sprawl.

To achieve this, under scrutiny from a new federal Independent Commission Against Corruption, political donations have been banned and elections are publicly funded. This has lessened the skewing of politics towards large corporate interests leaving governments genuinely interested in what people think.

In places where people rejected tower-living, the need for medium density, and for people to like it (since now the developers are not running the show), has placed extra emphasis on both design and consultation.

With the loosening of the developer stranglehold, self-help and co-operative housing has also flourished. The resulting communities, prioritising street life and walkability, render people more engaged and also fitter. Epidemic obesity and diabetes have reduced, paving the way for changes to the health system that shift the emphasis from gargantuan, energy -guzzling, waste-spewing mega-hospitals to smaller local hospitals where sunlight and fresh air reduce energy and enhance healing.

It’s not a pipe dream. It’s not even radical. It simply acknowledges that grabbiness and tribal loyalties are irrelevant. Thunberg told the UN, “we had everything we could wish for and yet now we may have nothing.” Justice Preston puts it more drily. The costs of mining will “exceed the benefits”.

This is war. We’ve a common enemy, measurable in °C, and a common goal – survival. To win we must act with the focus, haste and unity of a war effort.

May 18, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, climate change - global warming, election 2019 | Leave a comment

Why is UK govt covering up the records on nuclear bomb tests in Australia in the 1950s?

Unusual secrecy around 1950s nuclear testing , The Saturday Paper, Martin McKenzie-Murray 18 May 19 Between 1952 and 1957, Britain tested 12 nuclear weapons in Australia – on the Montebello Islands off the Pilbara coast, and at Maralinga and Emu Fields in the South Australian outback. The tests were hurried, incautious and showed extraordinary disregard for Australian assistance and the local Indigenous people who had been forcibly but imperfectly evacuated from their land.

It was a clusterfuck,” says Elizabeth Tynan, an Australian historian, and the award-winning author of Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga Story. “The disregard was partly driven by the fact they were in a rush. They cut corners. They did it on the cheap – and it showed. They had very little regard for safety. Cavalier. They knew about the risks. There were international protocols. Many were disregarded. I met one man, he was a technician with the British effort in Australia, and he said of Indigenous Australians that they were ‘nothing to do with us – it was the Australian government’s responsibility’.”

For Susanne Roff growing up in Melbourne in the 1950s was uneventful. But later, living in Scotland with her husband, William Roff, an eminent historian, she developed a dogged, almost obsessive interest in this chapter of British history that remains cloaked in secrecy.

Once a month, Roff takes the train south from her home in a Scottish fishing village – to archives in London, Birmingham and Cambridge. She’s still looking for answers. “Why was the purportedly Australia-controlled Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee so ineffective?” she asks. “Why was the UK able to continue testing at Maralinga until barely six weeks before opening of the 1956 Olympics despite the known hazards to east coast populations? Why didn’t [Sir Mark] Oliphant ever speak out against the tests and contamination, including when he was governor of South Australia?”

Late last year, Roff had another question: Why, more than 60 years after the last nuclear test in Australia, had the British government suddenly vanished previously declassified documents about the tests from its national archives? Roff wasn’t alone in her surprise. The Campaign for Freedom of Information, a British not-for-profit organisation, described it as worrying.

All that was certain was that the files had been removed on the order of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.

“WE CAN BUT WONDER WHY THE WORLD’S THIRD ATOMIC AND THERMONUCLEAR POWER HAS SUDDENLY BECOME SO NERVOUS ABOUT EVENTS THAT HAPPENED DECADES AGO.”“The secrecy is arguably even worse today,” Tynan tells me. She is working on a second book about the British tests. “British service personnel have run into brick walls at every turn [in seeking compensation and acknowledgement]. One of the clues to the attitude of the British government is that it has not really ever properly acknowledged what they did. They were nuclear colonialists and they buggered up a part of our country. One former British personnel I met burst into tears when he thought about how Britain had never said sorry. The secrecy … seems incomprehensible. They continue to be secretive.”

But not all documents are closeted. Susanne Roff has some, which she shared with me – British intelligence files on Dr Eric Burhop, an Australian physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, which ran from 1939 to 1946. …….

Robert Menzies agreed to the testing immediately, without bothering to consult cabinet. For a time, only three people in the country knew of the agreement: the prime minister, treasurer and defence minister. He asked few questions of the British. “But it wasn’t pure patriotic sycophancy,” Tynan says of Menzies’ decision. “The pragmatic response was: vast reserves of uranium in Australia. It’s central to weaponry and power. It was completely valueless until the Manhattan Project. Then it became a valuable commodity. Australia had a lot of it. That was a very significant part of his reasoning. The other thing that would’ve informed Menzies’ thinking was that he was anxious to ensure Britain and America would protect Australia.”

They were also without the counsel of the Australians who had worked on the American tests – notably, Mark Oliphant and Eric Burhop. Both Susanne Roff and Elizabeth Tynan agree Oliphant would have been a strong head of the safety authority, which was otherwise feckless.

Both men were long suspected of being Communist spies, and may have been excluded to mollify US doubts about British security. The files on Burhop that I’ve seen are voluminous. The FBI, MI5 and ASIO all had records on him. In England and America, he was aggressively surveilled. His phone was tapped. Even Joseph Rotblat had his doubts about his former colleague. The British intelligence historian Andrew Brown has written: “Rotblat remained convinced that Burhop and other left-wing scientists … opposed the [proposed nuclear] moratorium not for their stated reasons but because it would perpetuate the USA’s monopoly and place the USSR at a dangerous disadvantage.”……

In 1984, Australia held a royal commission into the British tests. It found a litany of negligence and cover-ups. “Britain had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to it,” Elizabeth Tynan says. Today, their attitude is much the same. In 2015, Fiji – frustrated by Britain’s refusal to compensate its people who suffered radiation poisoning during the Pacific tests – declared it would compensate citizens itself. “We are bringing justice to a brave and proud group of Fijians to whom a great injustice was done,” Fiji’s prime minister said. “Fiji is not prepared to wait for Britain to do the right thing.”

Meanwhile, in Britain’s national archives, the nuclear files are still gone. “The UK government has always [downplayed] risks to the servicemen who took part in the tests, the Aboriginal community in the immediate vicinity of them, and the general population downwind … as well as possible genetic effects on subsequent generations,” Susanne Roff says. “We see similar responses in relation to Fukushima in Japan. All the operational and scientific documents relating to the Australian tests that have been on open access in the National Archives have suddenly gone walkabout. We can but wonder why the world’s third atomic and thermonuclear power has suddenly become so nervous about events that happened decades ago.” https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/law-crime/2019/05/18/unusual-secrecy-around-1950s-nuclear-testing/15581016008158

May 18, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, politics international, secrets and lies, wastes, weapons and war | 1 Comment

Mineral wealth, Clive Palmer, and the corruption of Australian politics

Mineral wealth, Clive Palmer, and the corruption of Australian politics https://theconversation.com/mineral-wealth-clive-palmer-and-the-corruption-of-australian-politics-117248 Warwick Smith, 17 May 19, Research economist, University of Melbourne

Clive Palmer is reportedly spending A$70 million of his own money on his party’s campaign.How is it possible for one individual to command so much wealth and where did it come from? The sad and strange reality is that Australian governments gave him most of it by letting him dig up and sell natural resources that, by rights, belong to us not him.

We’ve a history of handing vast wealth to resource and mining magnates and companies and then watching them use that wealth to undermine our democracy in order to continue to get access to that wealth. Palmer is small fry compared to Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest or the corporate power of BHP, Rio Tinto and others.

So, what do state and federal governments charge for our mineral wealth? You would hope that they use state-of-the-art methods to get the best possible prices. You’d be wrong, of course.

We barely charge for resources

The federal government relies primarily on company tax and then on extra tax from employment and consumer spending and other things that are boosted as an indirect result of mining.

But many of the big mining and resource companies use the holes in our tax system to avoid paying company tax. In addition, mining is being increasingly automated, with self-driving trucks and trains becoming the norm, and ever-larger machinery meaning that fewer workers are needed for each tonne extracted and refined. These days billions can be spent with relatively few jobs created.

State and territory governments collect royalties from land-based mining companies, which are charged per unit of product. It means that when the prices of our mineral resources go up during a commodity boom the royalties do not rise with them – the mining companies benefit, but not the people who own the resources.

How much we collect in taxes is just the beginning of the story.

We also spend vast amounts of taxpayer cash on building the infrastructure needed for resource extraction; things such as roads, railways and ports. We also often end up footing the bill to clean up after mines close and the big companies sell depleted mines and their clean-up obligations to shell companies that then file for bankruptcy.

We could (and should) seek more

We could fix the system to get a fairer price.

We already have a more effective tax system for offshore oil and gas. It is, in effect, what the Rudd government tried to do in 2010 when it proposed a mining super profits tax. Foolishly, the tax was announced more than a year before it was to come into effect, giving the mining interests plenty of time to campaign against it.

They spent more than A$22 million just on advertising. Rudd abandoned the original proposal and was removed from office.

The Gillard government consulted the miners and adopted a watered-down version – the Mineral Resource Rent Tax – that was so toothless it collected almost nothing. Even though it was worthless, the mining industry still saw it as enough of a threat to pressure Tony Abbott to kill it off when he took government, which he did with Clive Palmer’s vote in parliament.

But miners have muscle

A more radical idea would be to put out tenders for the extraction and refinement of natural resources and then have the government or an independent authority owned by the government allocate them. Such a “single desk” would have considerable market power – it could demand good payments.

The truth is that all of this has been public knowledge for a long time and the solutions are well known. The problem is politics, not knowledge. The mining industry is so powerful that our leaders rarely attempt to take it on.

Given that Palmer set the record for most absent politician in two out of the three years he was in the parliament last time, why is he so keen to go back? There’s no evidence that he’s a conviction politician, trying to make the country better based on some strongly held principles; quite the opposite given how regularly he has changed his positions.

Could it be that what he really wants is political power in order to defend and increase the extent to which him and his mates rake in the cash at our expense?

In 2016 the government used it’s position as a creditor to seek the appointment of a special liquidator to look at the collapse of Palmer’s Queensland Nickel company and the actions of Palmer’s actions personally. The government’s Michaelia Cash said at that time it would use every power as it’s disposal to hold company officers to account.

On Thursday at the National Press Club Prime Minister Scott Morrison was asked how he intended to manage the conflict between pursuing Palmer in the courts and courting his vote in the Senate.

He replied that he would be able to.

We will continue to pursue that measure through the courts with full vigor – we are very confident in our ability to pursue that as we absolutely should

It is obvious that we need political donation reform to keep the influence of money out of politics but we need to go one step further and reform how we, the Australian people, sell our mineral resource wealth so that we don’t create mining giants like Palmer in the first place. He is just the tip of the iceberg.

May 17, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, election 2019 | Leave a comment

USA community resists federal govt’s plan for a radioactive waste dump

This Town Didn’t Want to Be a Radioactive Waste Dump. The Government Is Giving Them No Choice. Earther, Yessenia Funes , 17 May 19,PIKETON, OHIO—David and Pam Mills have grown tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and okra on their secluded Appalachian property for about 18 years now. This will be the first year the retired couple doesn’t. They just can’t trust their soil anymore. Not with what’s being built barely a five-minute walk away.
Past the shed and through the gray, bare trees that grow in the backyard, bulldozers and dump trucks are busy scooping tan-colored dirt atop an overlooking hill on a brisk January afternoon. They’re constructing a 100-acre landfill for radioactive waste. …..On a short metal fence marking where the Mills property ends, a sign reads, “U.S. PROPERTY, NO TRESPASSING,” in big, bold letters with red, white, and blue borders.

The Department of Energy (DOE) owns what sits on the other side: the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant. The DOE built the 1,200-acre facility, located just outside town of Piketon about an hour’s drive south of Columbus in southcentral Ohio, in 1954, as one of three plants it was using to enrich uranium and develop the country’s nuclear weapons arsenal. Now, the agency is trying to clean it up.

The landfill—or “on-site waste disposal cell,” as the department calls it—would extend about 60-feet down and house 2 million tons of low-level radioactive waste comprised of soil, asbestos, concrete, and debris. It’ll be outfitted with a clay liner, a plastic cover layer, and a treatment system for any water that leaches through it. When finished, it will be one of the largest nuclear waste dumps east of the Mississippi.

Waste could begin entering it as soon as this fall…….

“It’s gonna contaminate everything,” David says, after he shows me how close the landfill sits to his property. “It’s just a matter of time.”

The couple is far from alone in their fears. The 2,000-strong Village of Piketon passed a resolution in August 2017 opposing the landfill. So did the local school district and the Pike County General Health District, where Piketon resides. The rural, low income, and largely white county is home to more than 28,000 people across a number of small towns and cities, some of which have passed their own resolutions against this project. Driving through neighborhoods behind Piketon’s main highway, lawn signs covered in red stating “NO RADIOACTIVE WASTE DUMP in Pike County” can be seen everywhere……

The Zahn’s Corner Middle School, which sits barely a 10-minute drive away from the plant, closed on May 13 after university researchers detected enriched uranium inside the building, and traces of neptunium appeared in readings from an air quality monitor right outside the school. While the DOE believes everything’s fine, the Pike County General Health District has been calling for the department to halt work while it investigates the matter. Townspeople worry this contamination is a direct result of recent activity at the plant.

All of this highlights deep public distrust over the nuclear facility’s cleanup plan. And after reviewing thousands of pages of documents—including independent studies, the project’s record of decision, and the remedial investigation and feasibility studies that went into writing it—to understand the risks, it’s clear the public isn’t worried for nothing.

Here’s the thing: Nothing is technically illegal about the landfill. The DOE, though the polluter, is taking the lead on cleaning up the facility, and the Ohio EPA supports its plan. Whether their decision is morally right given local opposition is another matter. But this is what often happens when a corporation or governmental entity needs to dispose of toxic waste: It gets left in an overlooked town no one’s heard of……..

What they, and everyone really, didn’t understand at the outset of the Cold War was the lasting impacts uranium enrichment could have. Sure, scientists understood radioactive material could cause cancer, but they thought that it’d take a lot of radiation, explained Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist and acting director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Nuclear Safety Project. Now, we know any exposure poses a risk……

Now, the DOE is left with the task of cleaning up the more than 2 million tons of low-level radioactive waste and thousands more tons of hazardous waste the plant’s operations left behind. Completing the landfill is estimated to take another 10 to 12 years, with the entire clean-up projected to go on until 2035. ……

Money aside, shipping radioactive waste off-site has other benefits. Some 24 wetlands and 38 streams sit near the landfill. To bury the waste on-site, the DOE must waive a requirement that prevents it from constructing the landfill within 200 feet of these kinds of water bodies. The department can do so because even though it’s not technically a Superfund, it’s being regulated as one, a common practice for such DOE facilities. ……

the local hydrology is a key point of concern among community members. The region has a rainy climate, and it’s been seeing above-average levels of precipitation in recent years. More than anything, it’s the idea of rainfall causing the landfill’s contents to leak into the groundwater that makes people so nervous…….

Despite the fancy cut-outs put together by DOE contractor Fluor-BWXT, Chillicothe city council members passed a resolution that day against the waste cell. And it wouldn’t be the last: at least 11 counties, townships, city councils, and school boards in southcentral Ohio have come out against the project. Unfortunately, the plan was set by the time these resolutions passed.

Here’s the thing: Many residents didn’t even know about the landfill until after the DOE had already decided on it. The public had between November 2014 and March 2015 to comment on the project. The department published its record of decision in favor of the landfill on June 30, 2015. Then, the backlash hit……..

A lot of community members worry that the town will continue to be impoverished and devoid of business opportunities so long as it’s home to the landfill. Who’s going to want to invest in a place that’s a nuclear dumpsite?

And Piketon officials don’t trust the DOE at all. Neither does the plant’s former chief scientist, David Manuta, who worked there for nearly 11 years and has seen firsthand the operations that went on.

“DOE has a history in this community of not listening,” Manuta told Earther. “DOE is not a popular government agency in this community.”……

As the Ferguson Group points out in its analysis, fractures deeper than 20 feet exist throughout the entirety of where the landfill will be built, with some reaching as deep as 70 feet.

“This is the craziness of it all. They go out there and investigate this what we call ‘ideal site,’ right?” Karl Kalbacher, the Ferguson Group consultant Piketon hired for this analysis, told me. “There’s groundwater just oozing out of the ground, which tells you there’s a very shallow water table. They document that there are streams that are flowing through the proposed site area.”……..

To opponents of the landfill, all these fractures and discrepancies raise concerns about the DOE’s commitment to keeping the region contaminant-free. So does the recent independent analysis from Northern Arizona University that prompted the closure of Piketon’s Zahn’s Corner Middle School this week. That analysis found that the Scioto River and village creeks, as well as dust and soils from the school and private homes, are currently contaminated with enriched uranium, neptunium, and plutonium—all radioactive carcinogens. While the analysis did not measure concentrations, it found that much of this contamination could, indeed, be traced back to the plant……..

Regardless of whether the DOE is concerned, the evidence suggests demolition of the plant and construction of the landfill may already be spreading some contaminants via the air. Add in the threat of the landfill impacting groundwater, and opponents see several additional health risks in a regional already overburdened by cancer.

Pike County’s cancer rate of 487.9 per 100,000 incidences is higher than the state average of 459.8 per 100,000 incidences. In fact, all the counties surrounding Portsmouth—Vinton, Ross, Highland, Adams, Scioto—have some of the highest rates in the state.

Jeanie Williams, a 63-year-old who’s lived in a spacious trailer home since 1972 right alongside the plant—not far from where the Mills live—knows that statistic all too personally. Cancer took Williams’ brother in 1999. Her dad worked at the plant and died of lung disease about 10 years ago. Her stepfather worked there and died last year from cancer. Her daughter is battling colon cancer. https://earther.gizmodo.com/this-town-didnt-want-to-be-a-radioactive-waste-dump-th-1834789264?IR=T

May 17, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | General News | Leave a comment

Lessons from a solar school campaigner: Why your climate vote counts — RenewEconomy

Last year, I organised, lobbied and arranged funds for a 100kW solar array for my school in Sydney’s south. This year, I will let my vote do the talking. The post Lessons from a solar school campaigner: Why your climate vote counts appeared first on RenewEconomy.

via Lessons from a solar school campaigner: Why your climate vote counts — RenewEconomy

May 17, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

May 17 Energy News — geoharvey

Opinion: ¶ “Five Reason’s Why HB 6, Ohio’s Nuclear Plant Subsidy Proposal, Should Be Rejected” • By giving a blatant handout to the nuclear and fossil fuel industries at the expense of renewable energy and energy efficiency, the latest proposal for a “Clean Air Program” in Ohio is bad for consumers, the economy, and the […]

via May 17 Energy News — geoharvey

May 17, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Beware Bill Shorten’s quietly pro nuclear attitude

Yes, Shorten is better than Liberal’s aggressive pawn of big industry , Scott Morrison. And, more importantly, yes, the Labor Party’s policies are much, much better -on climate change, renewable energy, along with so many other areas. Indeed, Liberals barely have any policies, other than kow-towing to their corporate donors, and to their far right Abbott-led faction.

Labor has a clear anti nuclear policy, and backs the Federal law prohibiting the building of nuclear reactors, or of any stage of the nuclear fuel cycle, except for uranium mining. Building of a nuclear waste dump is prohibited, as is the importation of nuclearwaste. However, it does permit the building of a dump for waste produced in Australia.

Bill Shorten has been equivocal about nuclear issues. I suspect that he would go with whatever policy helped him to pursue his own career.

Both Liberal and Labor have maintained complete silence about the proposed Kimba/Hawker nuclear waste dump. It’s almost as if the dump idea is just a little plaything of ANSTO’s nuclear archbishop Dr Adi Paterson, nothing to do with the nation.

May 16, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Christina reviews | Leave a comment

NSW State Labor parliamentarians Walt Secord and Janelle Saffin fight One Nation’s push for nuclear power

Secord and Saffin fight One Nation over nuclear power https://www.echo.net.au/2019/05/secord-saffin-fight-one-nation-nuclear-power/?fbclid=IwAR1kVyvdy4J_DhZi_kbM5DAQQ5OI8rujTpkNoHgutlrmwyFndVbiF1w1b9g–16 May 19, NSW State Labor parliamentarians Walt Secord and Janelle Saffin have vowed to work together to fight One Nation senator Mark Latham’s legislation to set up a nuclear power industry in NSW.

The Uranium Mining and Nuclear Facilities (Prohibitions) Repeal Bill 2019 was the first bill introduced by Mark Latham into the new State Parliament on May 7.

It reads: ‘a bill for an Act to repeal the Uranium Mining and Nuclear Facilities (Prohibitions) Act 1986 and make consequential amendments to other legislation’.

In 2012, the then-O’Farrell government (Liberal/National) passed the Mining Legislation Amendment (Uranium Exploration Bill) 2012 to allow exploration for uranium in NSW. At the time, the Liberal-Nationals claimed that it would only allow exploration and not the creation of an industry.

Secord and Saffin say that Mark Latham’s bill follows a push last year by Nationals leader and Deputy Premier John Barilaro, to establish a nuclear power industry in NSW.

They also say that Mr Barilaro also completed a taxpayer-funded visit to the United States where he was drumming up interest in US investors to build nuclear reactors in NSW. At the time, 18 sites were identified as possible sites for nuclear power plants in NSW– including a 250km stretch of coast from Port Macquarie to north of Grafton.

Fight against nuclear power

Mr Secord, who is Shadow Minister for the North Coast and Upper House deputy Opposition leader and Ms Saffin, who is the Country Labor MP for Lismore said they would fight the bill.

‘This is the next step in the development of a nuclear power industry in NSW,’ said Mr Secord said. ‘It is no coincidence that the first piece of legislation to come from the new parliamentarians was a bill to set up a nuclear power industry.

‘The Berejiklian Government has always supported a nuclear power industry.’

Ms Saffin said that the North Coast community is clear and has spoken. ‘They do not want to see nuclear reactors in NSW. We fought them on CSG and unconventional gas and we will fight them on nuclear power.

‘North Coast primary producers pride themselves on the quality of their goods and their clean and green reputation,’ she said. ‘The National Party Leader’s obsession with building nuclear reactors would jeopardise this hard fought for advantage for local producers on the North Coast.’

Saffin says nuclear reactors would tarnish NSW’s clean and green image, and threaten the reputation and emerging markets of many north coast primary industries.

‘Nuclear power is a distraction from real long term energy solutions that provide the cheapest and most sustainable forms of electricity for the community and business – which is renewable energy,’ she said.

‘The NSW Coalition Government has always harboured dreams of nuclear power plants in NSW, having first proposed a site for Jervis Bay on the South Coast in the 1960s’.

May 16, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | New South Wales, politics | Leave a comment

Resources Minister Matt Canavan has failed to comply with an order to process information about the nuclear waste dump plan

Susan Craig

Nuclear Fuel Cycle Watch South Australia https://www.facebook.com/groups/344452605899556/

THE CANBERRA TIMES MAY 16 2019 Resources Minister could avoid FOI request come Saturday’s election.

• Sally Whyte Federal Politics

Resources Minister Matt Canavan has failed to comply with an order to process a freedom of information request by the Information Commissioner, with concerns the chance for scrutiny will be lost after Saturday’s election.

Centre Alliance Senator Rex Patrick first requested access to parts of the minister’s diary at the end of 2017, seeking information about who the minister met with regarding the National Radioactive Waste Management Facility at Kimba and Hawker in South Australia.

Resources Minister Matt Canavan may avoid scrutiny if he loses his job on Saturday. The two towns are proposed locations for a nuclear waste storage site, and Senator Patrick said he wanted to know who was being consulted over the plans.

The request has been bogged down in bureaucracy for 18 months, culminating in an order on March 25 by Information Commissioner Angelene Falk to process the request within 30 days.

Senator Patrick has heard nothing from the minister’s office, despite repeated attempts by the Information Commission to contact the office. He is concerned the minister could dodge scrutiny if the Coalition loses the election and Senator Canavan is no longer minister.

Under a precedent set by the former information commissioner in 2013, if documents are requested from one minister, and then the minister changes, the documents are considered no longer subject to Freedom of Information laws because they are not held by a current minister.

“If Minister Canavan holds out until Saturday and the current polling correct, it is likely that he will have successfully avoided

disclosure, but in a manner contrary to law and in contravention of the Prime Minister’s Statement of Ministerial Standards,” Senator Patrick said.

Senator Patrick also believes the failure to obey the information commissioner’s order shows disregard for the law.

“The minister disobeying the lawful direction of the Information Commissioner shows a complete lack of respect for the Information Commissioner and my constituents,” Senator Patrick said.

“This sort of conduct shows the Coalition’s complete disregard for openness and transparency and to the FOI regime.”

A spokesman for the minister said Minister Canavan’s office received a large volume of requests under the FOI scheme.

“All applications are processed with adherence to the law, and

mindful of the other workload that must also be completed at the same time as processing FOI requests,” he said.

“This FOI request is being completed and all transparency

requirements will be met.”

Gaining access to ministerial diaries has been a fraught legal frontier for transparency advocates, with former attorney general George Brandis fighting a three-year legal battle to keep his diaries under wraps. The 34 pages of printouts from his Outlook calendar were released after he was threatened with contempt of court proceedings

May 16, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, Federal nuclear waste dump, secrets and lies | Leave a comment

Labor clearly better than Liberals on climate change and renewables, BUT not that much better

Stark climate policies on offer at this election but will voters bite? SMH, By Peter Hannam, May 15, 2019 If our

politicians are supposed to be driven by polls and focus groups, why is it that climate change isn’t a policy that attracts bipartisan or even tripartisan support?As we learnt again last week from the respected Lowy Institute, the threat of a warming world is of growing concern for Australians and now tops even terrorism or North Korean nukes.

While the full findings won’t be out until next month, support for renewable energy is likely to remain high, too. Last year, backing was 84 per cent – numbers “that we don’t really see on other issues”, Lowy’s poll chief Natasha Kassam told the Herald.

Britain, of course, offers good and bad models when it comes to governance of late, but the Conservative government under Theresa May cheered the fact that the country had gone a week without burning coal for electricity for the first time since those dark satanic mills started spinning……

With the Morrison government dropping the NEG, it is not clear what the Coalition is offering voters on the energy front.

Yes, investors have earmarked about $25 billion for wind and solar projects over the past three years of the Renewable Energy Target, and that is no small change.

However, there is little indication what will follow after 2020 if the Morrison government is returned, and the industry is fearful they are facing a cliff…..

Labor’s promise of securing 50 per cent of electricity from renewables by 2030 is a key arrow in its policy quiver. Even though it looks like a long shot – roughly doubling where we are now in the eastern states that make up the National Electricity Market – in fact it’s probably not much more than business-as-usual. ……

The likelihood is the surge in clean energy alternatives to coal and gas in power generation will continue, meaning there’s a reasonable chance that 50-50 target will be exceeded and then some by 2030.

The Greens say 100 per cent renewables should be the goal by then, and that a bonanza of new jobs – in the order of 180,000 – will offer employment opportunities to aid the transition for the Hunter and Latrobe valleys that will fare worst from the demise of coal-fired plants.

They also advocate a policy whose name the two main parties dare not utter – a carbon price. That’s despite seasoned commentators such as Tony Wood from the Grattan Institute supporting a market solution.

“The major parties seem to prefer an unproductive debate on cost [of taking climate action], while the Greens have arguably the best core policy – an economy-wide carbon price,” Mr Wood told readers of our sister paper The Australian Financial Review last week.

Labor’s climate policy will indeed generate a carbon price as companies face a “cap” on carbon pollution, with those able to reduce emissions more quickly able to trade their surplus achievements with laggards.

The problem is that Labor’s goal of cutting emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 compared with 2005 levels will be complicated by adjustments for all the sectors or enterprises that will be partly or fully exempt. These include the agriculture sector and trade-exposed firms such as aluminium smelters – which is a key reason that Labor can’t come up with a pat answer to the question of what its climate plan will cost.

But Labor is at least taking a stab. It has a declared net-zero emissions target for 2050 and, although Australia arguably signed up for a similar goal when it agreed to the Paris climate goals, the Coalition appears not to have a policy to get there.

The Morrison government says its rebadged direct action plan – now called the Climate Solutions Fund – will earmark $2 billion over a decade to pay polluters to cut emissions to farmers – and other sectors – to sequester emissions such as boosting the carbon content of soils or restraining land-clearing.

The Coalition’s headline goal of cutting 2005-level carbon emissions by 26 per cent masks a couple of backtracks. Australia’s official Paris goal is 26-28 per cent, but the upper end of the range has quietly been dropped.

More contentious, though, is the Coalition’s plan to use expected carry-over credits from the current climate policy to which Australia has signed up, the Kyoto Protocol, as the Herald and The Age first reported last December.

Most nations with such credits, including Germany, Britain, New Zealand and Sweden, have voluntarily decided to extinguish any such “surplus” generated by exceeding goals up to 2020 when the Paris accord kicks in.

The consequence is that Australia’s abatement effort of 695 million tonnes of carbon dioxide shrinks to about 325 million tonnes at the stroke of a pen – assuming global negotiators don’t blow the whistle on this plan……..

Australia’s emissions are unhelpfully rising, reaching their highest quarterly rate in the year to September 2018 for seven years. The arc, therefore, is not yet bending down, and the longer they continue to rise, the harder for any future government to get emissions down to where they need to be.

The Greens, though, also highlight what they see as a sleeper issue masked by the Adani coal mine kerfuffle.

Labor plans to inject $1.5 billion into developing the gasfields of the Northern Territory and Queensland’s Bowen and, yes, Gallilee basins – site of that particular coal mine proposal and eight others.

The Greens point out that, even assuming a conservative leakage rate, the greenhouse gas emissions of the new gasfields will dwarf those of Adani’s Carmichael mine.

They predict trouble ahead for Labor if the Greens hold sway in the Senate, not least because soaring domestic emissions will make it harder for Australia to stem the rise of national carbon pollution, let alone hit targets such as net zero by mid-century. https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/stark-climate-policies-on-offer-at-this-election-but-will-voters-bite-20190509-p51lh7.html

May 16, 2019 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries Next Entries »

Antinuclear

Australian news, and some related international items

Comment from USA on Australia’s election result

The world’s happiest people already have a Green New Deal, and they love it, by George Lakey — Rise Up Times

Morrison’s reelection is a disaster for the future of the country — and the world

Australia stuck with pro-nuclear. climate sceptic, government – theme for May 19

It’s time to kick this mob out, and end this climate crap — RenewEconomy

What is needed is a war on climate change: why are people not voting Green?

Why is UK govt covering up the records on nuclear bomb tests in Australia in the 1950s?

Mineral wealth, Clive Palmer, and the corruption of Australian politics

We barely charge for resources

We could (and should) seek more

But miners have muscle

USA community resists federal govt’s plan for a radioactive waste dump

Lessons from a solar school campaigner: Why your climate vote counts — RenewEconomy

May 17 Energy News — geoharvey

Beware Bill Shorten’s quietly pro nuclear attitude

NSW State Labor parliamentarians Walt Secord and Janelle Saffin fight One Nation’s push for nuclear power

Fight against nuclear power

Resources Minister Matt Canavan has failed to comply with an order to process information about the nuclear waste dump plan

Susan Craig

Labor clearly better than Liberals on climate change and renewables, BUT not that much better

1 This month.

Australians deserve the truth
about AUKUS

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Australian news, and some related international items

We barely charge for resources

We could (and should) seek more

But miners have muscle

Fight against nuclear power

1 This month.

Australians deserve the truthabout AUKUS

Pages

Blogroll

Categories

Site info

Australians deserve the truth
about AUKUS