Just how strictly controlled the process is becomes obvious when it emerges that the task of those 50, during two weekend meetings in June and July, will be to produce ‘a short independent guide to help every South Australian understand the recommendations raised’ by the report.ABC news dubbed this whole process the Premier’s ‘public relations exercise’, and surely they’re not wrong. The Premier is urging all South Australians to remain ‘open’ about the proposal. But are they, including the Citizens’ Jury, allowed to be open to refusal?
Tag Archives: Nuclear Weapons/Energy
The ethics of burdening future South Australians with nuclear wastes?
These questions apply everywhere.
A high-level nuclear waste dump for SA What is our moral obligation?
Conservation Council of South Australia
The argument goes: surely SA has a moral obligation to import nuclear waste…
…because we mine uranium?
Uranium mining is only the first of many stages in the nuclear fuel chain. Mined uranium is converted, then enriched, then made into fuel and then used in nuclear power plants. All through this process, there are companies and other countries generating income and profits.
Why is it that companies are very happy to take the profits from their activities, but always try to push the costs (financial, environmental and social) back on to the public? For years, tobacco companies tried to dodge their disastrous impact on the health system until governments forced them to be held to account.
Surely the nuclear industry should be required to use some of its profits to invest in processing…
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Nuclear history – theme for January 2016
GR: People react slowly or not at all to the chronic action of toxic pollutants that escape our control or, more often, are simply cast away. It’s easy for the polluters to deny the danger. One day, there will be statistics to show how Earth’s plants and animals were harmed and what this did to their health and life span. Will people say, “Why didn’t someone do something?”
The start was America’s Manhattan project – developing the atomic bomb. Then came the horror of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then came – the shock and guilt, and the attempt to turn the nuclear project into something good – “atoms for peace’ “electricity too cheap to meter”.
Of course the costing for “cheap” nuclear energy did not include the health and environmental toll of uranium mining, which, as always, was to be paid by indigenous people. Costing also did not include the virtually eternal toll of the cleaup of radioactive trash. And of course, there would be no accidents, (no Chalk River, Rocky Flats, Windscale, Mayak, Lenin icebreaker, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Tomsk, Hanford, Fukushima Daiichi)
Meanwhile, the military-industrial complex continued its production of nuclear weapons. Other countries adopted the “peaceful nuke”, so that they could develop nuclear weapons. The nuclear arms race was underway.
FROM THE…
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A nuclear free Australia : White Australia must join Black Australia in fighting for this – theme for Dec 15
Insightful perspective and comments.
Nuclear power as panacea for climate change? Experts divided
“As delegates at a Paris summit haggle over how to curb global warming, the role of nuclear energy in limiting climate-changing emissions is the subject of fierce debate between champions and critics of atomic power.” phys.org
GR: Nuclear energy is not the answer. It’s support is merely an attempt by large investors to retain control over our energy sources.
Are mini-nuclear reactors the answer to the climate change crisis?
“Mini nuclear power plants could be trucked into a town near you to provide your hot water, or shipped to any country that wants to plug them into their electricity grid from the dock. That is the aim of those developing “small modular reactors” and, from the US to China to Poland, they want the UK to be at the centre of the nascent industry. The UK government says it is “fully enthused” about the technology.”
“With UN climate change summit in Paris imminent, the question of how to keep the lights on affordably, while cutting emissions, is pressing.” www.theguardian.com
GR: Nuclear energy is dangerous and it produces wastes that remain deadly for tens of thousands of years. This article is propaganda coming from investors interests who want to centralize energy production and keep distributed systems such as “rooftop solar” out of the hands of consumers. You can’t get wealthy with a resource that is free and unlimited.
Finland’s nuclear waste burial plan
As in all things we do, we humans have a very shortsighted view of the future. We have 5-year plans, we discuss what might happen by the end of the century, and all the while, we are destroying species and ecosystems that took thousands of years to develop. Nuclear wastes will be with us for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Don’t we expect to be around still? Do we expect that within a few hundred years we will have found the means to destroy our wastes? Scientists are warning that our civilization may not survive human-caused global warming and our planet-wide ecocide. Our descendants, living in collapsing buildings and searching the ruins for anything edible, do not need radiation sickness to contend with as well.
Finland’s Nuclear Waste Solution. IEEE Spectrum, By Sandra Upson 30 Nov 2009 Here on Olkiluoto Island, the forest is king. Elk and deer graze near sun-dappled rivers and shimmering streams, and humans search out blueberries and chanterelle mushrooms. Weathered red farmhouses sit along sleepy dirt roads in fields abutting the woods. Far beneath the vivid green forest, deep in the bedrock, workers are digging the labyrinthine passages and chambers that they hope to someday pack with all of Finland’s spent nuclear fuel.
Posiva, the Finnish company building an underground repository here, says it knows how to imprison nuclear waste for 100 000 years. These multimillennial thinkers are confident that copper canisters of Scandinavian design, tucked into that bedrock, will isolate the waste in an underground cavern impervious to whatever the future brings: sinking permafrost, rising water, earthquakes, copper-eating microbes, or oblivious land developers in the year 25 000. If the Finnish…
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Nature News Digests
President Obama failed his commitment to reducing nuclear weapons
The power to annihilate the planet grows more frightening as forests, fertile soil, fresh water, and clean air become scarce. As great nations weaken and face final dissolution, the risk of a doomsday act of desperation or vengeance will become a hovering dark shroud over the Earth.
Over the next 30 years, the bill could add up to $1 trillion. Instead of spending less on nukes, we’re spending more – and a new nuclear arsenal comes at the expense of more important national security programs.
Missing a nuclear opportunity http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/230565-missing-a-nuclear-opportunity 25 Jan 15 By Will Saetren In the State of the Union address, President Obama once again failed to rekindle his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. This is inexcusable. The Cold War ended nearly 25 years ago, but the threat of nuclear annihilation remains. Preventing nuclear disaster is possible, but it requires a serious commitment from all of us – the government, private sector, and regular citizens.
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GarryRogers Nature Conservation 