The Union of Concerned Scientists have stated that "reactor owners ... have never been economically responsible for the full costs and risks of their operations. Instead, the public faces the prospect of severe losses in the event of any number of potential adverse scenarios, while private investors reap the rewards if nuclear plants are economically successful. For all practical purposes, nuclear power’s economic gains are privatized, while its risks are socialized".[37]

Any effort to construct a new nuclear facility around the world, whether an existing design or an experimental future design, must deal with NIMBY or NIABY objections. Because of the high profiles of the Three Mile Island accidentChernobyl disaster, relatively few municipalities welcome a new nuclear reactor, processing plant, transportation route, or nuclear burial ground within their borders, and some have issued local ordinances prohibiting the locating of such facilities there. and

-----------------------------

At the end of a nuclear plant's lifetime (estimated at between 40 and 60 years), the plant must be decommissioned. This entails either Dismantling, Safe Storage or Entombment. Operators are usually required to build up a fund to cover these costs while the plant is operating, to limit the financial risk from operator bankruptcy.

In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requires plants to finish the process within 60 years of closing. Since it may cost $300 million or more to shut down and decommission a plant, the NRC requires plant owners to set aside money when the plant is still operating to pay for the future shutdown costs.[38] In June 2009, the NRC published concerns that owners were not setting aside sufficient funds.[39]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants

From one of the master of spin: Andrew Bolt

IT'S not bad enough that thousands of people may be dead from Japan's earthquake and devastating tsunami. No, the media is instead obsessing over a nuclear reactor that has killed no one and probably never will.

This scaremongering over the crippled Fukushima nuclear complex is extraordinary.

Already anti-nuclear activists, rebadged as nuclear "experts", are out spreading terror.

There's Dr Tilman Ruff, actually a Nossal Institute infectious diseases expert and long-time anti-nukes activist, everywhere warning we might be "looking at a Chernobyl-type disaster or worse" and describing in lascivious detail the ways people could get sick from the fallout.

And what's a nuclear holocaust story without Helen Caldicott, actually a paediatrician and anti-nuke hysteric? So there she was, too, on 3AW, warning that if the reactor blew up, "hundreds of thousands of Japanese will be dying within two weeks of acute radiation illness", with countless more later suffering an "epidemic" of cancers.There's Dave Sweeney, actually a professional activist from the Australian Conservation Foundation with zero formal qualifications in nuclear science, warning the reactor was potentially like a kettle without water, and "sooner or later, it superheats and it blows".

But wait. Time to check the facts and get some perspective.

Let's start with Dr Ruff.

If the Fukushima reactor indeed becomes a "Chernobyl disaster", it will still be as nothing compared to the devastation the Japanese have already suffered.

Right now, rescue workers are combing through the ruins of the seaside cities swamped by the tsunami, looking for 10,000 missing people.

By contrast, Chernobyl, the world's worst nuclear power station disaster, is known to have killed no more than 65.

Yes, I know this doesn't fit with all the horror stories that activists and journalists spread about Chernobyl.

Yes, I know that even the Gillard Government's Education Minister, Peter Garrett, has warned that the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl's shambolic nuclear reactor "caused the deaths of more than 30,000 people".

I know that Mr Sweeney's ACF once published on its website a paper claiming the death toll was actually 250,000 people. And I heard Ms Caldicott on Wednesday trump them all by insisting "nearly a million" died.

But the most reliable assessment of the deaths in that iconic disaster comes instead from the Chernobyl Forum, which represents Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, as well as all relevant United Nations agencies, including the World Health Organisation and International Atomic Energy Agency.

After reviewing countless studies, the forum in 2005 concluded much of the reporting of the deaths was a beat-up.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion-old/time-to-stop/story-e6frfifx-1226022037307

-------------------------

Gus: the problem with radiation is that i's not a bullet nor a tsunami... People die of a horrible death should they be exposed to high doses. The lives of people exposed to medium to low radioactivity have a chance of being shortened in proportion to that of the amount of radiation. There are benefit with radiation below a certain amount, mostly for cancer patients but above this SMALL amount, the chances of dying early increase fast...

It's like asbestos: some people will get an awful disease and some won't. It may take up to 40 years to show up and death often happens within the first year of diagnosis. It's like mad cow disease: It may take up to 40 years before symptoms and a quick death... The radiation poisoning at low dosage is much harder to pinpoint... as people will react differently to exposure.

These are no illusions. Children are often the earliest victims (see Australian nuclear tests).

Just above the "safe" radiation level, about 5 per cent of a population is at risk and that percentage increases rapidly with exposure. One should remember the death of that spy in London from an isotope of polonium... The problem is that it's impossible to attribute some death to radiation while it would have been the origination from the onset.

If radiation was not such a problem, why are the Japanese engineers risking their lives — presently shortening their life-span by at least 10 years just to avoid a sunday radiation picnic? The answer is simple: a meldown would create a major radiation problem for Japan (see article above)...

The second biggest lung cancer killer is... Radon... It's a common gas found under old houses. It seeps from the ground and is a heavy radioactive gas. It's about 8 times heavier than "air", thus it lurks at the bottom below the floorboards...

Andrew Bold s a good spinner but a lousy analyst...

New Repairs Delay Work at Crippled Nuclear Plant

By KEN BELSON, HIROKO TABUCHI and NORIMITSI ONISHI

TOKYO — Efforts to stabilize the hobbled nuclear power plant in Fukushima hit a snag on Monday when engineers found that crucial machinery at one reactor requires repair, a process that will take two to three days, government officials said.

Another team of workers trying to repair a separate reactor were forced to evacuate in the afternoon after gray smoke was spotted escaping Reactor No. 3, according to the public broadcaster NHK. However, no explosion was heard and the smoke was starting to decrease, NHK said.

Hundreds of employees from Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the disabled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, worked through the weekend to connect a mile-long high-voltage transmission line to Reactor No. 2 in hopes to restarting a cooling system that would help bring down the temperature in the facility’s reactor and spent fuel pool.

After connecting the transmission line on Sunday, engineers found on Monday that they still did not have enough power to fully run the systems that control the temperature and pressure in the building that houses the reactor, officials from the nuclear safety agency said.

Engineers were also trying to repair the ventilation system in the control room that is used to monitor conditions in the No. 1 and No. 2 units. When that work is completed, possibly on Monday, it will allow the power company, also known as Tepco, to begin cleansing the air in the control room so that workers can eventually re-enter and begin using equipment inside to monitor conditions in the two reactor units.

Workers were also trying to connect a separate power cable to unit No. 4 by late afternoon in Japan on Monday.

The nuclear safety agency also said that some of the water used to douse the damaged reactors had reached the ocean nearby, and that officials were investigating radiation levels in the water.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/world/asia/22japan.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

Japan is continuing to deal with a nuclear emergency as fears of food contamination grow and high levels of radioactive substances are found in seawater near the crippled Fukushima plant.

The news comes amid another setback in efforts to cool the earthquake-crippled nuclear plant, with officials spotting grey smoke coming from the roof of the No. 3 reactor.

Some workers were temporarily evacuated from the nuclear plant, 250km north-east of Tokyo, but there are reports smoke can no longer be seen rising from that reactor.

The World Health Organisation says the detection of radiation in food is a more serious problem than first expected and food contamination is not a localised problem.

Four prefectures have been singled out, but it says there is no evidence of contaminated food from Fukushima reaching other countries.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/22/3170109.htm

Gus: after a snag on monday, no spinash on tuesday...

Sorry this is a sick joke... Why do people tell sick jokes?....

-------------------

I served for 19 years in the UK military. I completly understand the dynamics of sick humour as it predominates in the armed forces and is, in fact, intrisnic to it. Life is complex, short, unpredictable, and really, quite pointless in many ways. Who wouldn't want to laugh about it?

Garry Harriman, Labrador, Canada

A few weeks before the tsunami struck Fukushima's uranium reactors and shattered public faith in nuclear power, China revealed that it was launching a rival technology to build a safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper network of reactors based on thorium.

This passed unnoticed –except by a small of band of thorium enthusiasts – but it may mark the passage of strategic leadership in energy policy from an inert and status-quo West to a rising technological power willing to break the mould.

If China's dash for thorium power succeeds, it will vastly alter the global energy landscape and may avert a calamitous conflict over resources as Asia's industrial revolutions clash head-on with the West's entrenched consumption.

China's Academy of Sciences said it had chosen a “thorium-based molten salt reactor system”.

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/energy-smart/the-reactor-that-saves-itself-safe-nuclear-does-exist-and--china-leads-the-way-with-thorium-20110323-1c6eb.html

-------------------------

 

What will it take for our world to recognise the dangers that nuclear scientists and even Albert Einstein were warning about at the "dawn" of the nuclear age?

Amy Goodman reminds us of the prophetic statement by Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett who tried to find words to describe the horror he was seeing in Hiroshima in 1945 after the bomb fell.

"It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as a warning to the world."

The world heard his warning, but seems to have ignored it. In fact, what followed has been decades of nuclear proliferation, the spread of nuclear power plants and the escalation of the arms race with new higher tech weaponry.

As Hiroshima becomes yesterday's distant memory and Fukishima the current threat, the full extent of the casualties and body count are not yet in, partly because the Japanese government and the power companies do not want to alarm the public.

Nuclear cover-up

Years earlier, a similar cover-up was in effect at Thee Mile Island complex in Pennsylvania where reports of the damage people suffered from a serious accident was minimised, never examined in depth by some of the very same media outlets who are today criticising Japan for a lack of transparency.

On April 6, 2009, the anniversary of the dropping of the first nuclear bomb, Alternet.org reported that the government and media were complicit in minimising public awareness of the extensive suffering that did take place:

"But the word never crossed the conceptual chasm between the 'mainstream' media and the 'alternative'. Despite a federal class action lawsuit filed by 2400 Pennsylvania families claiming damages from the accident, despite at least $15 million quietly paid to parents children with birth defects, despite three decades of official admissions that nobody knows how much radiation escaped from TMI, where it went or who it affected, not a mention of the fact that people might have been killed there made its way into a corporate report."

Was this just accidental or is there a deeper pattern of denial? The great expert on psycho history, Robert J. Lifton, wrote a book, Hiroshima In America, with journalist Greg Mitchell about the aftermath of Hiroshima in America exploring what they call '50 years of denial'.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/03/201132291551838399.html#

Nothing is deadly to those who do not die from whatever. Those who die from whatever become statistics.

Once again, as the western world seems to teeter on the edge of catastrophe, mankind begins fearfully to wonder, "What on earth is to be done?" Practically speaking, the disasters in Japan and the revolutions in the Middle East demand an answer to an urgent, even desperate, question. Global warming may be high on the international agenda, but global capitalism still takes nuclear power and fossil fuels for granted.

1. Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered
2. by E F Schumacher
3. 
4. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop  

One draft of an answer lies buried in the crumbling, saffron pages of the Observer's back numbers from the 1940s, 50s and 60s. As 2011 unfolds, their author, the economist EF Schumacher, looks set for rediscovery as a man with a plan whose hour has come. Here, for instance, is Schumacher on "the so-called peaceful use of atomic energy" – "There could be no clearer example of the prevailing dictatorship of economics… That nuclear fission represents an incredible, incomparable, and unique hazard for human life does not enter any calculation and is never mentioned."

To submit to the nuclear lobby, he continues, "is a transgression against life itself, a transgression infinitely more serious than any crime ever perpetrated by man. The idea that a civilisation could sustain itself on the basis of such a trangression is an ethical, spiritual, and metaphysical monstrosity." These brave, burning words could have been written last night. But who, exactly, was EF Schumacher?

To his family, he was "Pop". To friends he was "Fritz" and, occasionally, "James". To David Astor, editor of the Observer, he was "Professor". When he died in 1977, EF Schumacher was not only a secular guru to countless admirers, but also the author of Small Is Beautiful, a global bestseller subtitled "a study of economics as if people mattered".

Schumacher expressed the ideas of Small Is Beautiful in pithy soundbites: "Technology must be the servant of man, not its master"; "there is more to life than GDP"; "the world cannot rely on diminishing supplies of non-renewables"; and, most famous of all, his belief in "lots and lots of small autonomous units". For a moment, in the 1970s, these caught the wind of the zeitgeist.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/mar/27/schumacher-david-cameron-small-beautiful/print

--------------------

Gus: on this site we have mentioned "Small is Beautiful" by E F Schumacher, many times, as a reference point to do "human" things in harmony with the planet...

 

The Simpsons has been edited for TV in Europe to remove sensitive storylines involving a disaster at the Springfield nuclear plant in light of the current crisis in Japan.

Japanese officials have been struggling to contain radiation levels around a nuclear centre in Fukushima since the complex was damaged in the earthquake and tsunami which struck Japan earlier this month.

TV producers at Germany's Pro7 channel reacted to the disaster by checking through new episodes of The Simpsons and removing "unsuitable" segments featuring trouble at Mr Burns' plant.

The Hollywood Reporter says network executives in Austria and Switzerland have since taken Germany's lead and followed suit.

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/tv-bosses-pull-simpsons-episodes-20110328-1ccxn.html

 

SEVENTY-FIVE PROFESSORS from the world’s leading universities have signed a letter urging environmentalists to re-think their attitude to nuclear power as a way to save the planet from climate change and preserve its animals, plants and fish.

Ironically, it is two Australian academics who came up with the research. They come from a country whose government has reversed measures to cut climate change, is one of the world’s biggest coal exporters and has no nuclear power production. Australia has also just recorded the hottest spring since records began 100 years ago.

The two professors are Barry W. Brook, Chair of Environmental Sustainability at the University of Tasmania and Corey J.A. Bradshaw, Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change at the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute. Their backers include many leading experts on ecology, biodiversity, evolution and geography from the U.S., UK, China and India.

Read more: https://independentaustralia.net/environment/environment-display/professors-tell-greens-to-accept-nuclear-power,7227

-------------------------

One could be sucked in by the spiel...  Gus has to reiterate here that nuclear power is not cheap. Every single nuclear power station in the world does not make money unless subsidised by government. Gus will add here that unless weapon grade uranium and plutonium is sold to government, nuclear power stations would be further in the red. The decommissioning of nuclear power stations is often left to governments to clean up and pay enormous amounts of cash for the process. Nuclear power CENTRALISES power distribution while renewables allows decentralisation AND CHEAPER electricity from smaller units — limiting the amount of transport of "dangerous goods" such as coal dust and nuclear material — often driven during the night.

Getting rid of the WASTE from nuclear power is still an unsolved problem.

And please do not Bob Hawke and his mates turn Australia into a nuclear waste dump.

Renewables have a long way to go in exciting development, yet once online, they already prove reliable and cheaper than gas and coal. I would not be surprised if the dear professors are misled or at worse being coerced by the nuclear industry sweet-talking nonsense into their ears... 

The cost of electricity is only going up for various reasons — the carbon pricing and the cost of renewables being the least of the culprits. Despite the price of coal going in the dumps, electricity is still charged at the old price in order to keep the old coal fired stations going. 

Meanwhile the other LYING turds (especially Cormann) in the Abbott Regime decided that the emission reduction due to the CARBON PRICING during the Gillard years were not due to the CARBON PRICING but due to the economy tanking — which it was not. The economy was growing faster under the Gillard government than it has under the destructive incompetent idiotic Abbott — who has managed to create unemployment beyond the acceptable.

 

back in 1959 or so...

 

Russian authorities have confirmed reports of a spike in radioactivity in the air over the Ural Mountains.

Key points:

• Russia admits "extremely high contamination" of Ruthenium-106 around Ural Mountains
• Air samples near Mayak nuclear plant showed levels nearly 1,000 times higher than usual
• The state-controlled plant denies any nuclear accidents and claims there's no health risk

 

But the suspected source of the leak, a nuclear fuel processing plant, denied it was the source of contamination.

The Russian Meteorological Service said in a statement on Tuesday it recorded the release of ruthenium-106 in the southern Urals in late September and classified it as "extremely high contamination".

Russian authorities insisted, however, that the contamination posed no health risks.

France's nuclear safety agency earlier this month said it recorded radioactivity in the area between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains from a suspected accident involving nuclear fuel or the production of radioactive material.

It said the release of the isotope posed no health or environmental risks to European countries.

Last month, when reports of a trace of ruthenium over Europe first appeared, Russia's state-controlled Rosatom corporation denied any leak.

Rosatom reaffirmed on Tuesday that the ruthenium emission registered by the state meteorological service had not come from any of its facilities.

The corporation said it was working closely with international organisations to identify the potential source of the emission.

The Russian meteorological office's report, however, noted high levels of radiation in residential areas near Rosatom's Mayak plant.

The Mayak plant reprocesses nuclear fuel and produces radioactive material for industrial and research purposes. It accounts for half of Russian exports of radioactive isotopes.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-22/russia-admits-ruthenium-106-spike-...

 

Meanwhile:

 

An analysis of xenon isotopes created four days after the Chernobyl explosion of 1986 in Kiev, Ukraine is challenging our understanding of what happened on that catastrophic day.

It’s long been accepted that the explosion, which killed 30 people, was a steam one—not nuclear. A group of scientists from the Swedish Defense Research Agency, Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, and Stockholm University says that an assessment of the isotopes shows that they’re the products of nuclear fission—meaning they could have originated from a nuclear explosion.

read more:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/tech/chernobyl-reactor-was-destroyed-b...

Note: the "pretty colours" of the image in this comment comes from Gus' old computer screen (I won't name the brand) but it's definitely not as good as the Philips...

 

 

IN SEPTEMBER THIS YEAR, National Geographic will launch the documentary series, Wild Edens. It's all about wilderness areas and is also a soft sell for the nuclear industry. And there's a proud Australian connection, with the Global Ecology Lab of Flinders University, South Australia. Their energy researcher, Ben Heard, was master of ceremonies at the premiere in Spain in April.

Gone are the days of "nuclear power too cheap to meter" and "Atoms for Peace”. These were the 20th Century catch calls to promote the nuclear industry to business and to the public. Even late in the 20th Century, when things had come a bit unstuck with Windscale, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents, the propaganda was still straightforward and often simplistic.

By 2018, things have changed. The argument that nuclear power is cheap has fallen apart. As for the "peaceful atom" and "no connection with nuclear weapons", that one has fallen through, too. Recent research in UK and the USA make it clear that nuclear energy and developing new reactors are necessary for the continued development of nuclear weapons.

Hans-Josef Fell, president of the global Energy Watch Group, states in the brief titled 'The disaster of the European nuclear industry':

‘The driving force behind the UK government's affinity to nuclear technology is the cross-subsidization of the military nuclear program.’

In the 20th Century, the industry was slow to come up with the new selling arguments — the need for boundless energy, nuclear being "clean", combating climate change, the need for nuclear for space travel. Another factor was the type of nuclear reactor being developed. By the turn of the century, the "conventional" large nuclear reactors were looking expensive to build, fraught with safety problems (and hence, strict regulations) and lumbered with issues of radioactive waste disposal.

 

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/national-geographic-joins-thenuclear-propagandists---the-australian-connection,11577

 

Read from top.

A shocking exposé from the most powerful insider in nuclear regulation about how the nuclear energy industry endangers our lives—and why Congress does nothing to stop it.

Greg Jaczko never planned things to turn out this way. A Birkenstocks-wearing physics PhD, he had never heard of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) when he came to Washington and—thanks to the determination of a powerful senator—found himself at the agency’s head. He felt like Dorothy invited behind the curtain at Oz.

The problem was that Jaczko wasn’t the kind of leader the NRC had seen before: he had no ties to the nuclear industry, few connections in Washington, and no agenda other than to ensure that nuclear technology was deployed safely. And so he witnessed what outsiders like him were never meant to see, including an agency overpowered by the industry it was meant to regulate and a political system determined to keep it that way. After the shocking nuclear disaster at Fukushima in Japan, and the American nuclear industry’s refusal to make the changes necessary to prevent a catastrophe like that from happening here, Jaczko started saying something aloud that no one else had dared: nuclear power has fatal flaws.

Written in a tone that’s equal parts self-deprecating, puzzled, and passionate, Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator tells the story of a man who got pushed from his high perch for fighting to keep Americans safe. Never before has the chairman of the world’s foremost nuclear regulatory agency challenged the nuclear industry to expose how these companies put us at risk. Because if we (and they) don’t act now, there will be another Fukushima. Only this time, it could happen here.

Read more:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Confessions-of-a-Rogue-Nuclear-Re...

 

 

Read from top.

An astonishing exposé of the aftermath of Chernobyl - and the plot to cover up the truth

The official death toll of the 1986 Chernobyl accident, 'the worst nuclear disaster in history', is only 54, and stories today commonly suggest that nature is thriving there. Yet award-winning historian Kate Brown uncovers a much more disturbing story, one in which radioactive isotopes caused hundreds of thousands of casualties, and the magnitude of this human and ecological catastrophe has been actively suppressed.

Based on a decade of archival and on-the-ground research, Manual for Survival is a gripping account of the consequences of nuclear radiation in the wake of Chernobyl - and the plot to cover it up. As Brown discovers, Soviet scientists, bureaucrats, and civilians documented staggering increases in cases of birth defects, child mortality, cancers and a multitude of life-altering diseases years after the disaster. Worried that this evidence would blow the lid on the effects of massive radiation release from weapons-testing during the Cold War, scientists and diplomats from international organizations, including the UN, tried to bury or discredit it. Yet Brown also encounters many everyday heroes, often women, who fought to bring attention to the ballooning health catastrophe, and adapt to life in a post-nuclear landscape, where dangerously radioactive radioactive berries, distorted trees and birth defects still persist today.

An astonishing historical detective story, Manual for Survival makes clear the irreversible impact of nuclear energy on every living thing, not just from Chernobyl, but from eight decades of radiaoactive fallout from weapons development.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/309/309235/manual-for-survival/9780241352069.html

 

Read from top.

The slow poison of "forgotten" radioactive waste contaminating French soils
In France, 200 million cubic meters of long-lived residues do not have a management system. Only 1.6 million cubic meters are supported by Andra.
In front of the municipal stadium of the small town of Gueugnon (Saône-et-Loire), a tarmac esplanade, completely empty, is surrounded by a metal fence two meters high. "No access", announces in red letters a sign. On this former wasteland, the town had planned to build parking for busy days. Because the Gueugnon Football Club had its hour of glory: champion of France of second division in 1979, winner of the cup of the League in 2000 against PSG.
There, under the bitumen, lie more than 20,000 tons of radioactive waste dumped by a former uranium ore processing plant, operated from 1955 to the early 1980s, by the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), then by Cogema, now Areva and today Orano.
"In some places, it spits! The radon fumes [a carcinogenic gas formed by the decay of uranium] are enormous, "says physicist Roland Desbordes, spokesman and former chairman of the Commission for Independent Research and Information on Radioactivity (Criirad), who led several measurement campaigns.
Closed to the public since 2009, the land has long been kept only by simple barriers. In October 2018 again, during a match, dozens of supporters entered it to park. It was not until early 2019 that a grid was laid and the site was integrated into a facility classified for the protection of the environment (ICPE), including an old sand pit where 220,000 tons of uranium sludge were transferred. , covered with a mound of earth. Without being disturbed at the time. To the point that had been arranged, all around, a running path, dismounted since.

"Truncated and tendentious information”
The case of Gueugnon is far from isolated. Between 1947 and 2001, nearly 250 uranium deposits were exploited in France, for the manufacture of nuclear weapons and fuel supply of nuclear reactors.
They left as legacy 51 million tons (about 40 million cubic meters) of residues stored in the mining enclaves, but also 170 million tons (more than 100 million cubic meters) of waste rock: rocks extracted to access the ore , which contain radioactive heavy metals. These wastes were piled up here and there in "verses", when they were not reused, without any other precaution, to backfill roads, develop sports fields or even serve as a base for houses.
https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2019/06/11/la-contamination-sans-...

Hinkley Point nuclear power station, Britain’s biggest construction project since the second world war, is grappling with a mental illness crisis, with several attempted suicides since work began in 2016, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

More than 4,000 workers are on site delivering the vast decade-long building project, a central plank in Britain’s future energy strategy.

But according to union officials, there has been a surge in suicide attempts this year, a rise in the number of people off sick with stress, anxiety and depression, and an increase in workers suffering from mental distress.

Officials from the Unite union say they have been told of 10 suicide attempts in the first four months of 2019. The Guardian understands at least two workers connected to the project have taken their lives since construction started in earnest in 2016.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/aug/13/revealed-suicide-alarm-h...

 

 

Read from top.

 

Russia’s first floating nuclear power plant has set sail from the Arctic port of Murmansk to provide power to one of the country’s most remote regions, sparking environmental concerns.

Developed by the Russian state nuclear company Rosatom, the plant, known as Akademik Lomonosov, set off on Friday on a 5000km journey through Arctic waters to reach the Chukotka region, which lies across the Bering Strait from Alaska.

The plant, loaded with nuclear fuel, will replace a coal-fired power plant and an ageing nuclear power plant supplying more than 50,000 people with electricity in the town of Pevek.

Rosatom says the plant is safe and can serve as a new power source for the planet’s most isolated communities, but environmentalists have voiced concerns over the risk of nuclear accidents.

Greenpeace has called it the “nuclear Titanic”.

“We think that a floating nuclear power plant is an excessively risky and costly way of obtaining energy,” Rashid Alimov of Greenpeace Russia told Reuters.

He added the unit had not been built with the purpose of fulfilling the energy needs of Chukotka, but rather to serve as a model for potential foreign buyers.

Rosatom did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The plant’s voyage comes at a time of heightened concern over nuclear energy, following a deadly blast this month in northern Russia during a weapons system test that caused a spike in radiation levels in a nearby city.

 

 

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/2019/08/23/russia-floating-nuclear...

 

 

Read from top.

There are more than 140 nuclear subs in operation and a few of them have already bitten the dust...

Nine nuclear submarines have sunk, either by accident or scuttling. The Soviet Navy has lost five (one of which sank twice), the Russian Navy two, and the United States Navy (USN) two.

 

ASTRID (Advanced Sodium Technological Reactor for Industrial Demonstration) was a proposal for a 600 MW sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor (Generation IV), proposed by the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique (CEA). It was to be built on the Marcoule Nuclear Site in France. It was the successor of the three French fast reactors Rapsodie, Phénix and Superphénix.

The main goals of ASTRID were the multi-recycling of plutonium, aiming at preserving natural uranium resources, minor actinidetransmutation, aiming at reducing nuclear waste, and an enhanced safety comparable to Generation III reactors, such as the EPR. It was envisaged as a 600 MW industrial prototype connected to the grid. A commercial series of 1500 MW SFR reactors was planned to be deployed around 2050.[1]

As of 2012, the project involved 500 people, with almost half among industrial partners. Those included Électricité de France, Areva, Alstom Power Systems, Comex Nucléaire, Jacobs France, Toshibaand Bouygues Construction.[2]

In 2014 Japan agreed to cooperate in developing the emergency reactor cooling system, and in a few other areas.[3][4] As of 2016, France was seeking the full involvement of Japan in ASTRID development.[4][5] In November 2018 France informed Japan it will halt joint development.[6][7]

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASTRID_(reactor)

 

 

ASTRID has been terminated.

 

 

Read from top.

The Syrian Job: Uncovering the Oil Industry's Radioactive Secret

Read time: 27 mins

By Justin Nobel • Wednesday, April 29, 2020 - 02:38 

Cancerous lesions have developed across Keith MacDonald’s body and his son is dead from leukemia. His life has disintegrated, and in his eyes fault lies with the third richest company on earth. It is headquartered in the Netherlands, incorporated in the United Kingdom, and is an entity (thanks to the Parliamentary Pension Fund) that every single British MP has a stake in — Royal Dutch Shell.

The story of how MacDonald got here is a tale of adventure and tragedy fit for a Hollywood thriller, only it is real. Even with many unknowns, MacDonald’s case unearths a shocking part of the world’s most powerful industry that somehow has remained hidden for generations.

MacDonald was born on a military base in Scotland in 1951. When he was three years-old, his older brother was killed in a tragic cliff accident—the boy chased a stray football over the edge and fell 100-feet to his death. “My mother couldn’t deal with the stress and became obsessed with my wellbeing,” says MacDonald. “Safety, safety, safety, all of my life. It was almost claustrophobic. I became the family rebel and left home.”

His oilfield story begins in the early 1970s. MacDonald was a rock and roll roadie, setting up equipment for Santana, Elton John, and Rod Stewart — “I was making good money, having a ball.” One autumn day in 1975, he hitched a ride to Birmingham with a friend who had an interview for a job inspecting oil and gas pipelines. The recruitment manager for British Industrial X-Ray wore a shirt and tie, looked MacDonald over and with a string of words that would change the course of his life, offered him a job.

Into the action

This began a tour of work in some of the world’s most lucrative and remote oil and gas fields, the type of adventurous life that many British men who got into the business in that era can relate to.

“It all happened so quick I couldn’t believe my luck,” says MacDonald. “I was going from peanuts a day to £50 a day, and eventually £5,000 a month.”

MacDonald started on a pipeline in Wales and by 1977 had a job inspecting pipelines as an industrial radiographer in the Libyan oilfields, surrounded by bleached Saharan sands and the hottest temperatures on the planet. A stint in Saudi Arabia followed, then a two-year job in the United Arab Emirates building gas plants where MacDonald was assistant quality assurance superintendent. He spent much of the 1990s in Nigeria, working for Chevron as a senior company representative on a barge that fabricated and upgraded oil rigs. By the late 1990s he was in Oman.

MacDonald is “completely reliable,” one Omani supervisor wrote on a reference form, and has “wide and valuable experience of the inspection and maintenance of oilfield equipment.”

On 13 March 2000, MacDonald celebrated his 49th birthday. Around the same time, he landed in Damascus, Syria, to take a job arranged by the UK oilfield service company, Gray Mackenzie. He would be working for the Al Furat Petroleum Company (AFPC) in the rich Omar oilfield of eastern Syria. It was to be an exciting job, and his first time in the vibrant heart of the Middle East’s oil and gas country, working under one of the world’s storied big majors, Shell.

His penny-pinching days as a roadie were long gone. The constraints of his concerned mother and the cloud of his brother’s accidental death seemed long gone, too.

MacDonald loved his work, and there was an overwhelming sense that he had made it. “You come across people who get up in the morning and are like, ‘Ugh, I got to go to work,’” says MacDonald. “That wasn’t me. I enjoyed every minute of it.”

Shell, according to the Wall Street Journal, helped build the Middle East into “a petroleum powerhouse”. AFPC was founded in 1985, a joint venture between the state-owned General Petroleum Corporation, a subsidiary of Shell called Syria Shell Petroleum Development, and other groups. Shell gave the Syrians technology, experts, and technical expertise, according to an AFPC website. A map shows Shell’s various interests in Syria, including the Omar oilfield, not far from the Iraqi border.

In 2001, the closest year to MacDonald’s time of work for which Shell’s annual reports are readily available, the company produced 48,000 barrels of oil a day in Syria – at the time just over two percent of their global output. Although Shell left Syria in 2011, as civil war broke out and the European Union imposed sanctions, there is still a record of how the company co-sponsored a festival for “Arab Environment Day,” supported a forum on women leaders, raised money for the blind, and worked with the Ministry of Education to develop lectures for school children about traffic accidents and environmental safety. “We invested more than $8 billion in Syria,” Shell's general manager for the country, Graham Henley, is quoted as saying. 

By the time MacDonald got to Syria, he had worked in oil and gas fields on three continents, but he immediately noticed there was something different about the Omar field. “Wellheads were blocked off with barbed wire fence that prevented anyone from getting close,” recalls MacDonald. “There was yellow caution tape on each side of the fence, and large signs with writing in English that read: ‘Radiation – Do Not Enter.’”

There was something else different about work in the Syrian oil fields. MacDonald had to take a 40-hour course on what’s referred to in the industry as Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials, or NORM. The topic had come up in other oilfields but this was the first time he had been forced to formally learn anything, although it wasn’t much of an education. “The exam we took at the end had all the right answers already crossed in,” says MacDonald.

Regardless, radioactivity was hardly on his mind in Syria. He stayed in a well-run workcamp that served a British breakfast and spent free time listening to rock music and drinking beers on the banks of the Euphrates River in the city of Deir Ez-Zor, part of a culturally-rich region that has been inhabited by humans for 11,000 years, and in more recent times was a brutal ISIS stronghold and flashpoint in the Syrian war.

The fateful day

On 1 August 2000, MacDonald was called out to check the Thayyem-107 well. It would be a fateful job.

A driver took him in a company SUV and he arrived at the well in the late morning, with temperatures boiling and the weather dry. A piece of piping connected to the wellhead called an expansion loop was corroded and had to be replaced. As MacDonald recalls it, his boss, a Shell official named Brian Welch, told him, “We need to replace this piping fast because this well is a big producer—go out there and make sure it’s done.”

To inspect the pipe, MacDonald had to put his hands inside the valve and run his fingers around the seal to feel for corrosion. He wore standard work boots and coveralls, but no gloves or respirator. Despite radioactivity being a known danger in Syria, he says he had never been informed by Shell before taking the job that the task involved contamination risks. And nobody mentioned anything about radioactive elements, which can hitch onto dust and blow about freely in the wind.

It’s an incredibly dangerous exposure pathway, because tiny dust particles can contaminate virtually everything they touch, such as a worker’s boots and clothes. They can also easily, and unknowingly, be breathed into the body or ingested when someone licks their dust-coated lips. That day at Thayyem-107 “was so damn hot and dry,” remembers MacDonald. “The valve was caked in dust, and I had my bare hands in the dust. Dust was in the air, and dust got all over my body.”

The valve was indeed corroded and would have to be replaced, but there wasn’t a replacement onsite. MacDonald ordered a safety test that would check the pipe’s strength, then walked off to smoke a cigarette. He had been at the wellhead for 45 minutes. It was now near noon and blazing hot. He stepped inside a little cabin that served as an office to make a cup of coffee and wait for the safety test. A paper on the desk caught his eye: “Al Furat Petroleum Company Radiological Survey and NORM Precaution Report.”

It revealed that at 8:09 that morning a radioactivity inspection had been conducted at the Thayyem-107 well and the numbers were off the charts. In fact, the report stated that in order to do work on the site, rubber gloves, rubber boots, goggles, an impervious coverall and air supplied respiratory equipment were all needed. Plus, the area was to be protected by warning signs and workers were, “to be checked for contamination before leaving [the] radiological area.” None of these protocols had been followed.

One way to measure the amount of radioactivity being given by a surface or object is with a scientific unit called Counts Per Second, or CPS. According to the report MacDonald found, the background level of radioactivity at the site was four CPS. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission says an area is considered a “hot zone” at five CPS. Yet, the report MacDonald had found indicated readings at the wellhead for beta particles, a type of radioactivity that can pass through skin and cause genetic mutations and cellular damage that leads to cancer, of 6,336 CPS, an astonishing 1,584 times background levels.

“It’s a pretty darn big exposure,” says Dr. Marco Kaltofen, a US nuclear forensics scientist at Worcester Polytechnic Institute with two decades of experience examining radioactivity around the world. (Kaltofen has testified as an expert witness on radioactivity in numerous legal cases and before the US Environmental Protection Agency; DeSmog passed him the report MacDonald had found).

“This worker certainly has a potentially large internal exposure from ingestion or inhalation or both,” Kaltofen added, “under normal circumstances this type of exposure should have generated a nasal swab and urine or fecal test of the worker.” MacDonald received no such thing.

He dashed back into the heat, horrified over the harm he had so quickly and silently bestowed upon his body, furious that he was not informed by his seemingly trustworthy superiors, and completely unaware of the depths of the rabbit hole he had just stumbled down.

“I asked the Syrian workers if they knew there was radiation there and they looked at me like I had just landed from Mars,” says MacDonald. He had the impression that “it was obvious they were being kept in the dark.”

MacDonald and the Syrian workers at the site were not the only ones. To this day, much of the world remains in the dark on the topic of oil and gas radioactivity, and nowhere is the lack of knowledge so stark as with the industry’s own workers, who are regularly lulled into a false sense of security.

Regulatory agencies, weakened in countries like the UK and US by defunding and deregulatory efforts, are unable to ensure safety standards are effectively met. A lack of attention from the media and medical community mean stories go untold. And oil and gas operators generally fail to fully inform their workers of the risks, despite knowing they exist. That combination of factors means MacDonald’s story is just the tip of the iceberg.

The industry has known

Nearly everyone on earth uses oil and gas products. But most people are completely unaware that oil and gas production brings large amounts of radioactivity to the surface.

The first scientific record comes from a 1904 paper by a University of Toronto researcher who examined crude oil from a well in a farmer’s field in southern Ontario. He discovered a radioactive gas we now know to be radon, which is currently pegged by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States. Radon is just one of many radioactive elements oil and gas brings to the surface. “The presence of these naturally occurring radionuclides in petroleum reservoirs,” states a 1991 EPA report, has actually been used, “as one of the methods for finding hydrocarbons.” 

Much of the radioactivity brought to the surface in oil and gas production is part of a salty toxic stream of liquid the industry calls brine or produced water. Most oil wells produce far more brine than oil, and some wells can produce 10 times as much. Geologists have long known that the radioactive element radium, peppered throughout earth’s layers and moderately soluble, flows with brine to the surface. “We have created a transit system for taking radioactivity from underground,” says Kaltofen, the US nuclear forensic scientist, “bringing it up to the biosphere where it can interact with people and the environment.”

Because radium accumulates in oilfield piping — part of a difficult to remove deposit called “scale” — and sludge at the bottom of tanks, certain workers can become coated in radium-laden waste. The radioactive element can also easily be made airborne with dust, and accidentally ingested or inhaled. The US EPA has reported that each oil well generates approximately 100 tons of scale annually, and that conventional oil production alone produces 230,000 metric tons of radioactive sludge a year.

In the United States, because of exemptions written in 1980 by a pair of Democratic Congressmen, this hazardous waste, which according to the US EPA contains not just potentially concerning levels of radioactivity but also potentially concerning levels of carcinogens like benzene and toxic heavy metals like lead and arsenic, has been deemed “non-hazardous.” This means it can be disposed of in landfills intended to hold household garbage. There is little easily accessible information available on just where the rest of the world’s massive amounts of radioactive oil and gas waste ends up.

A 2005 report of the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority reveals it has been standard practice in the North Sea oilfields to dump toxic radium-laden brine into the ocean. While the report indicates that in most areas background levels of radium would not change, “in limited areas in the northern North Sea, a doubling of the activity concentration … could be encountered.”

Much of this radioactivity is transported towards the Norwegian coast, the report notes. “To place this into context,” states a 2016 report of the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (IOGP), co-authored by retired Shell radiation expert Gert Jonkers, the North Sea oil industry’s emissions, by one measure of radioactivity, “are forty times those reported by the nuclear energy sector.”

While today the oil and gas industry does not talk openly about the risks radioactivity poses to their workers, they once did. “The presence of natural radioactivity in oil and gas fields has been recognised worldwide,” states a 1987 document from the UK Offshore Operators Association, a leading trade association for the UK’s oil and gas industry.

Shell is aware of the issue too. The company’s own documents reveal that the oil and gas giant has known for 70 years that various exposures from oil and gas work, including exposure to radioactive materials, can lead to cancer.

“Human contacts with soot, carbon black, pitch, asphalt, crude petroleum, shale oil, paraffin oil, lubricating and fuel oil, anthracene oil and other distillations and fractionation products of coal and petroleum apparently cause the majority of environmental cancers in man,” states a 1950 report produced by a toxicologist working at Emeryville Research Center, a bygone Shell lab in California. Substances like “arsenic” and “radio-active elements” are unique, the report notes, as they have “established carcinogenic qualities” for which the “origin of environmental cancer” can actually “be traced”.

More recent documents from Shell indicate that through the fracking boom of the 2000s, knowledge of the risks of radioactivity has not been lost. In fact, Gert Jonkers, the retired Shell radiation expert, has authored or co-authored half a dozen papers on the topic.

“The encounter of Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material (NORM) is of increasing concern for the oil and gas industry, not only because of radiological safety aspects, but also from an environmental point of view,” states one 1997 article, published with the American Petroleum Institute. Another paper discusses how NORM “is often encountered during gas and oil production” and “gives rise to increased health hazards to personnel.”

The 2016 report on radioactivity that Jonkers co-authored for the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers serves as an informative field guide to these hazards. “There are two ways in which personnel can be exposed to radiation,” the report states, “irradiation from external sources and contamination from inhaled and ingested sources.”

An accompanying diagram features an oil and gas worker standing above an open pipe spewing radioactivity, a hauntingly similar version of the situation MacDonald found himself in at Thayyem-107. While radioactivity can damage the skin, breathing or ingesting dust allows the hitchhiker radioactive elements, or radionuclides, to enter our bodies, where they may lodge in the lung or gut and continue their radioactive decay, leading to the “irradiation of tissues and organs.”

But while Shell scientists may be schooled on the matter, workers like MacDonald, labouring in the company’s gritty and far-flung oil and gas fields, appear to be left to fend for themselves. And the company does not seem willing to fill in the blanks.

“While the risk of exposure to radioactive elements in some phases of our operations is low,” Shell spokesperson Curtis Smith replied to me in early January, “Shell has strict, well-developed safety procedures in place to monitor for radioactivity as well as a comprehensive list of safety protocols should radioactivity be detected.”

When pressed in March on the details of these safety procedures, and the commonness of a case like MacDonald’s, Smith replied, “unfortunately, all of our resources are dedicated to current/fluid events related to the COVID-19 outbreak. As a result, I won’t have the time to revisit this topic with you.” When pressed again in April regarding the specifics of MacDonald’s case, including a copy of the Thayyem-107 radiological report, Smith replied with the following statement:

“Safety is a top priority in all our operations and we take seriously any allegations that our operating companies might have a negative impact on employees, contractors or local communities. However, since Shell is not the operator in Syria but a minority shareholder in Al Furat Petroleum Company (AFPC), we do not hold nor have access to any operational level data owned by AFPC which can substantiate these claims.”

Andrew Gross, a US-based Radiation Control Consultant who for years ran a business cleaning up the oil and gas industry’s radioactive waste, and now works as an independent consultant, has little doubt where the buck stops.

“These companies will pretend they are ignorant but you got to remember these are corporations, and Shell or whoever it is has one purpose in life, to maximize profits,” says Gross. “If you are a worker, that is something important to understand,” he adds. “These guys need to know that they have to take care of themselves.”

Regulatory failures

MacDonald has been trying to get someone to take his story seriously for 20 years.

One of many legal firms he contacted was Thompsons Solicitors, headquartered in London. A June 2018 letter from attorney Stephen Ireland conveys an acknowledgment of the situation MacDonald encountered at Thayyem-107. “You believe that as a consequence of this exposure, you have developed a psychiatric/psychological disorder and skin lesions” the letter stated. But Ireland’s letter also noted that MacDonald’s legal claim was far from certain.

In fact, according to Dr Andrew Watterson, an occupational and environmental health researcher at the University of Stirling in Scotland, it is exceptionally difficult to get compensation. “The government’s workplace compensation scheme is an unholy mess,” he states in a 2015 article he co-wrote for Hazards Magazine. For workers to receive compensation they must usually show their illness is twice as likely to occur in their profession as compared to the general population. This is an “all-or-usually-nothing conservative epidemiology,” writes Watterson, “designed to give as many victims as possible a big fat zero.”

Watterson said he was not aware of a single worker case on oilfield radioactivity being brought before courts in the UK. There is a “lack of awareness” on the issue, he says, which means there are no detailed scientific studies and no case law to build from. But the primary problem in his opinion lies with “toothless” health and safety regulators. “In the UK, we have a vicious circle on occupational cancers,” says Watterson. “Don’t look, don’t find, no problem.”

When DeSmog asked the Health and Safety Executive, the UK agency responsible for regulation and enforcement of workplace health and safety, if it had ever assessed oil and gas worker cancers to determine whether or not a link could be drawn to occupational radioactivity exposures, an HSE spokesperson told DeSmog: “There have been numerous epidemiological studies into radiation exposure within the UK over the last 70 years but as far as I am aware there is nothing at present within the UK oil and gas [industry].”

Other aspects of HSE’s radioactivity policy convey that for the oil and gas industry, regulations largely rely not on government regulators, but self-enforcement. In the agency’s 176-page Approved Code of Practice and Guidance for Work With Ionising Radiation, there is just one fleeting reference to the oil and gas industry. An HSE document entitled Offshore Radiation Essentials states to the industry: “Following the guidance is not compulsory and you are free to take other action.” HSE told DeSmog, “the protection of workers is the responsibility of the companies.”

Part of the problem is a trend in countries such as the US and UK toward deregulation, and the weakening of environmental laws and the regulatory agencies that enforce them. In recent decades, the the Conservative-led governments have cut funding for the Health and Safety Executive, and the previous Labour government neglected its funding. “There is an ideological commitment to cutting red tape, then there is the practical act of cutting staff and regulators,” explains Watterson. “It goes back to [Conservative Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher, she wanted to see softer regulation in the UK, and that was picked up by [Labour Prime Ministers] Blair and Brown.”

There is a sign of hope for workers like MacDonald. A court case settled in 2016 in the state of Louisiana, in the heart of America’s conventional oil and gas patch, reveals that dozens of workers working a variety of common industry jobs such as roughneck, roustabout, pipe cleaner and truck driver developed cancer.

A report written by radiation experts uses an analysis program created by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to link these worker’s cancers to radioactivity exposures received on the job. Cancers the workers developed include non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, various leukemias, colon cancer and liver cancer, among others.

“These men are guinea pigs,” says Stuart Smith, the New Orleans-based attorney who tried the cases, and was the first attorney to try oil-field radiation cases. “I have litigated several cases that showed that oilfield waste caused cancer,” he says. “All the big majors have known about this for many decades. The regulators are obviously aware of it too, it’s just that they don’t have the political cojones to do anything about it.”

Personal tragedy

MacDonald was furious with his superiors at Shell who had failed to inform him of the radioactivity risks at Theyyem-107. He had also been seeded with a horrible dread – that the high dose of radiation he received had forever mutated his body.

On the afternoon of 1 August 2000, he filed a report detailing his visit to Thayyem-107. “Specific methods for protection of personnel and the environment…were not applied,” it stated. He tried to get colleagues to listen to concerns but says he was treated like an outcast. A 7 November 2000 letter from Al Furat Petroleum Company to Gray Mackenzie, the UK-based oil service company that initially hired MacDonald for the Syria job, described him as a “disruptive influence.” The letter continued, “I would therefore advise you … to terminate this individual immediately.”

But AFPC’s own investigation appeared to vindicate MacDonald. The underlying cause of the incident, their report stated, included the failure to follow working rules regarding NORM, a failure of communication, poor supervision, and a perceived pressure to finish the job in a hasty manner and ignore safety rules. On a scale of one to five, where one was slight injury and five was death, the report labeled the incident a three — “Major Injury”. Exposure, on a scale of A to E, was D — “High”. The report was signed by Robin Gardiner, an AFPC maintenance chief, and Brian Welch, a top Shell inspector.

Even this admission of error did not translate to compensation MacDonald thought he deserved. Lawyers and the judicial system had failed him. He grew despondent, and had trouble sleeping. In nightmares, cancer blossomed across his body. In 2005, while working in Kula Lumpur, Malaysia, MacDonald collapsed on the side of a busy city street. At a hospital he was fitted with a pacemaker. “There was nothing wrong physically,” he says – just crushing stress.

Then there was a high point. MacDonald had met his first wife, Sara, while working in the Philippines and together they set up home in the UK and had a son, Alastair. But the marriage ended in the 1990s, largely because of his work’s constant travel, says MacDonald. He wondered if he would ever have a stable family life.

Then, in 2006, while working for Chevron in Thailand, MacDonald met Kay. They married and moved to land owned by her parents in the countryside north of Bangkok. With his oilfield money, MacDonald built a veritable mansion: a five-bedroom house for his wife and her extended family.

“We had 40 acres of land and grew rice and corn, and we had chickens and pigs,” says MacDonald. A son, Calum, was born in 2007. In 2009, Scott was born. “I was in heaven,” says MacDonald. But just as swiftly as he had built a new world for himself, it crumbled.

In December 2010, Scott became sick. The diagnosis was Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia. For three years he was in and out of Bangkok General Hospital receiving treatments. MacDonald had a good job in Indonesia, working as construction superintendent for Saudi Aramco on a large project in the Straits of Malacca. He was making $24,000 a month and virtually all of it went to hospital bills. “I spent my life savings on medical treatment for Scott,” he says. 

A photo from October 2013 shows father and son seated together in Pattay, a resort city on the Gulf of Thailand. MacDonald has a bandage on his right arm from an operation he had just received for a subdermal tumor. Scott is in a gray T-shirt, leaning on his father’s shoulder and smiling. He appears to be missing a tooth. They are both bald.

“That was the last time I saw Scott alive,” says MacDonald. He had just been released and doctors said there was a 94 percent chance he would survive. But Scott relapsed, and on 29 November 2013 he died, at the age of four and a half. “That knocked the guts out of me,” says MacDonald.

Then his own health took a turn. More cancerous skin lesions appeared and he returned to the UK for treatment. While physicians tended to blame his skin cancers on the sun, MacDonald remained convinced it was from his radioactivity exposure at Thayyem-107. “Whilst ultraviolet light remains probably the biggest factor in developing skin cancers,” wrote Sharon Blackford, a UK dermatologist who assessed his case in 2018, “the BETA particle exposure certainly could be contributory.”

But by that point MacDonald had fallen down an even more shocking rabbit-hole of research. He had discovered childhood leukemia shared a potential link with a father receiving a high dose of radiation.

A famous study published in 1990 in BMJ — formerly the British Medical Journal — examined a childhood leukemia cluster in northwest England near Sellafield, a sprawling nuclear power facility. Many suspected links were examined, such as consumption of local fish and shellfish, nearness of homes to the facility, and whether or not mothers had been exposed to various viruses during pregnancy or received pre-natal abdominal x-rays. The link of statistical significance, researchers found, lay in the occupation of the sick children’s fathers, many of whom worked at the nuclear facility and had received elevated radioactivity exposures in the months leading up to their wives’ conception. “This result,” the authors concluded, “suggests an effect of ionising radiation on fathers that may be leukaemogenic in their offspring.”

The paper remains controversial. But when DeSmog put the question of whether MacDonald’s exposure in Syria could have led to his wife, eight and a half years later, giving birth to a son who would die from leukemia, Marco Kaltofen, the US nuclear forensics expert, said the question “was not crazy.” While a mutated sperm would not live long, says Kaltofen, in MacDonald’s case, radioactive elements accidentally ingested and inhaled would still be inside of him, blasting off harmful radiation. In fact, radium-226, the primary isotope of concern on pipes such as the one MacDonald examined has a half-life of 1,600 years.

Still, to firmly link Scott’s death to MacDonald’s cancer, a person with a combined expertise that includes a medical physician degree and a PhD in toxicology would have to examine the case, says Kaltofen. Unfortunately, they are few and far between. An even greater impediment to the truth might be a longstanding bias among this rarefied group of experts. “There is a real resistance in the health physics community to teratogenic radiation effects, meaning that exposure to an individual can effect the next generation,” says Kaltofen.”

Shell, however, is aware of the linkage. “Exposure to ionizing radiation, even at low doses, can cause damage to the nuclear (genetic) material in cells that can result in the development of radiation induced cancer many years later (somatic effects), heritable disease in future generations and some developmental effects under certain conditions,” states the 2016 International Association of Oil & Gas Producers paper on oilfield radioactivity, co-authored by retired Shell radiation expert Gert Jonkers.

More cases?

MacDonald remains convinced the negligent exposure he received while working for Shell in the oilfields of Syria led to the death of his son from leukemia and his own skin cancers, whatever the courts and toxicologist say. What worries him most is that he is not alone; that he is member of a vast hidden army of oil and gas workers who have been contaminated in oilfields the world over. And many of them may have received high exposures regularly, and over a much longer timespan.

Frances Leader, a Corfe Mullen resident who lost her husband Tony, a former North Sea oilman, to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2013 remains convinced radioactivity exposure during his time on rigs in the 1970s and early 1980s was the cause. The contamination, she believes, came from the drilling fluids and produced water that spilled all over men like Tony every time pipping was pulled up on deck. Additional exposure, she suspects, came from sludge in tanks located in the base of the rig that she says Tony regularly had to clean. “They wore no breathing apparatus, no protection, no dosimeter, and there was never ever any mention of radioactivity—none,” says Leader.

How many UK oil and gas workers share a similar fate is unknown, because no one has ever tried to search for and tally the cases. How many workers around the world have been harmed by radioactivity is an even greater mystery.

“The Syrians were basically deemed disposable,” concludes MacDonald, recalling his time with Shell in the Middle East. “They were green as grass and hadn’t been told anything. Guys were allowed to go into contaminated areas without any monitoring, and operators took no precautions.”

MacDonald realises that not everyone has the documents and evidence that he has been able to obtain over the years. And not everyone feels confronting one of the most powerful industries on earth is their only remaining option. “The industry is terrified to expose any of this knowledge because there are too many people with billions and billions of dollars invested,” he says. “At the end of the day I want to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is not an isolated incident, and there are other people being exposed.”

“No one give’s a shit, but I give a shit,” he adds. “This is all preventable, and if my coming out can save one life, then it was all worth it.”

Read more:
https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/04/29/syrian-job-oil-industry-radioactiv...

Read from top.

 

The former Trump administration national security advisor made the bombshell claim in his controversial new book, ‘The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir’.

The ‘nuclear material’ that Mossad agents allegedly discovered during their 2018 raid on a Tehran warehouse said to contain thousands of documents on Iran’s nuclear program was probably yellowcake, a partially refined form of uranium which can be turned into nuclear fuel when further processed, John Bolton has said.

Recalling a August 2018 visit to Israel, three months after the US withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, Bolton wrote that the nuclear archives from the Turquzabad site supposedly “revealed human-processed uranium”.

“It was not enriched uranium, but perhaps yellowcake (uranium oxide in solid form) and certainly evidence contradicting Tehran’s repeated assertions it had never had a nuclear weapons programme,” Bolton claimed. “Iran had tried to sanitise Turquzabad, as it had tried to sanitise Lavizan in 2004 and the explosive test chambers at Parchin between 2012 and 2015, but it had failed again. This could well be evidence that Iran kept alive its ‘Amad plan’ for nuclear weapons after it was supposedly ended in 2004, and would definitely put Tehran on the defensive internationally,” he added.

According to Bolton, “Israel knows for certain what form the uranium is in since it has stolen documents, as does the [International Atomic Energy Agency], which has collected samples.”

Mossad used the documents supposedly obtained during the Turquzabad raid to lobby the Trump administration to pull out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, otherwise known as the Iran nuclear deal. In late April 2018, less than a week before the US scrapped the agreement, Netanyahu held a press conference in which he accused Iran of “lying” about the extent of its nuclear activities. A year later, Israeli media reported that Israeli intelligence had carefully crafted the presentation right down to the smallest detail for maximum effect on President Trump.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/world/202006221079688124-in-repeat-of-bush-era-c...

 

Hello Yello?...

 

Australia produces and exports more yellowcake than cookies and bicycles! 

 

See:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/13988

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/3374

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/1726

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/6856

 

etc...

https://www.foe.org.au/australian-yellowcake-fuels-ukrainian-fires

 

https://www.foe.org.au/news

Yellowcake isn't nuclear weapon... It's expensive mud... Iran is allowed to produce yellowcake and enrirch to a about a 5 per cent nuclear fuel for Nuclear power stations... It also get nuclear fuel from Russia... and France... So? To take it to the next level of nuclear weapon is the problem and Iran said NUKES were immoral. Iran won't produce Nuclear Weapons unlike Israel, the US, the UK, France, SA, India, Pakistan, China, NK, possibly Brazil, and oher countries that have been doing it quietly. 

 

Bolton is full of shit.

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Ah... and I forgot this one:

 

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/9473 (picture by Gus)...

The Windscale fire of 10 October 1957 was the worst nuclear accident in Great Britain's history, and one of the worst in the world, ranked in severity at level 5 out of a possible 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale.[4] The fire took place in Unit 1 of the two-pile Windscale facility on the northwest coast of England in Cumberland (now Sellafield, Cumbria). The two graphite-moderated reactors, referred to at the time as "piles", had been built as part of the British post-war atomic bomb project. Windscale Pile No. 1 was operational in October 1950 followed by Pile No. 2 in June 1951.[5]

The fire burned for three days and released radioactive fallout which spread across the UK and the rest of Europe.[6] The radioactive isotope iodine-131, which may lead to cancer of the thyroid, was particularly concerning at the time. It has since come to light that small but significant amounts of the highly dangerous radioactive isotope polonium-210 were also released.[7][6] It is estimated that the radiation leak may have caused 240 additional cancer cases, with 100 to 240 of these being fatal.[1][2][3] At the time of the incident no one was evacuated from the surrounding area, but milk from about 500 square kilometres (190 sq mi) of nearby countryside was diluted and destroyed for about a month due to concerns about its exposure to radiation. The UK government played down the events at the time and reports on the fire were subject to heavy censorship, as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan feared the incident would harm British-American nuclear relations.[3]

The event was not an isolated incident; there had been a series of radioactive discharges from the piles in the years leading up to the accident.[8] In the Spring of 1957, only months before the fire, there was a leak of radioactive material in which dangerous strontium-90 isotopes were released into the environment.[9][10] Like the later fire, this incident was also covered up by the British government.[9] Later studies on the release of radioactive material as a result of the Windscale fire revealed that much of the contamination had resulted from such radiation leaks before the fire.[8]

 

 

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

 

 

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The renaissance of nuclear energy is a myth

 

 

By CLAUDIA KEMFERT | On 22 October 2020

Dr Claudia Kemfert is an economist at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), the head of Energy, Transportation and Environment; and Professor of Energy Economics and Sustainability at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.

Nuclear energy is often abused to secure power political and geopolitical strength. Renewable energy, on the other hand, strengthens democracy, participation and prosperity.

Twenty years ago, Germany decided to phase out nuclear energy. This was preceded by decades of heated discussions, ongoing civil protests and large-scale social conflicts. Since the 1970s,  Germany has had a pronounced anti-nuclear power movement that included broad sections of society. After the nuclear power plant accident in Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986, this movement reached its peak. Twelve years later in 1998, the Federal Government pushed through the nuclear phase-out, which stipulated that all nuclear power plants would be shut within a fixed period of about two decades.

At the same time, the government promoted renewable energy, which today accounts for more than 40 per cent of electricity production. The last nuclear power plants will be decommissioned in the coming years. This means that renewable energies have already not only replaced the former share of nuclear energy, but have even overtaken it. Nuclear energy has been completely replaced by renewable energy.

With the need to transition rapidly to net zero emissions, the nuclear industry and mining groups have been busy in recent years promoting their so called ‘silver bullet’, hedged on unproven and incredibly expensive technology. But Australia has the opportunity to leapfrog Germany’s nuclear experience and move straight from polluting fossil fuels to 100 per cent renewable energy. Australia must not be tricked into going down the expensive nuclear road.

Nuclear power plants cause enormous costs; they only survive with considerable government subsidies. The construction of new nuclear power plants is at least twice as expensive as that for renewable energies. If the costs of the final storage of nuclear waste and the dismantling of nuclear power plants are added, the cost balance in favour of renewable energies improves significantly, even if all system costs of grid adjustments, and energy and load management including storage are added. Recent studies show that the energy system costs of a full supply of renewable energies are significantly lower than those of conventional energies such as coal and nuclear power.

Nuclear power plants are a high-risk technology, with potential risks of environmental and health damage. In contrast, renewable energies are environmentally and climate-friendly. The so-called renaissance of nuclear energy is a myth. Only a few countries worldwide are building nuclear power plants – all in countries that offer state subsidies to make the construction possible.

In addition, there is often little democratic participation. Nuclear energy is often abused to secure power political and geopolitical strength. Renewable energy, on the other hand, strengthens democracy, participation and prosperity. Nuclear energy creates the opposite. The energy transition, on the other hand, is a peace project.

What the current corona crisis makes evident once again is that in times of crisis, systemic relevance and resilience are very important. Energy system transformation is the solution to both challenges: a successful energy system transformation that guarantees a full supply of domestic renewable energies is systemically relevant and creates enormous economic resilience; it makes us independent of external negative shocks. What’s more, it strengthens regional value creation, promotes innovation and enhances the competitiveness of the entire economy. A full supply of renewable energies is technically feasible and economically profitable.

The next steps of the German energy transition will ensure that the share of renewable energies will continue to grow steadily, thus also replacing coal-fired power plants. In addition, everything will have to be done to save energy and to consistently implement “efficiency first”. This means buildings will have to be renovated.

In the transport sector, greater emphasis must be placed on traffic avoidance, modal shift and optimisation. “Renewable First” is just as important. Green electricity must be used as a priority for mobility on rail and road and in the heating sector. Only for those transport sectors where direct electrification is not possible does it make sense to use fuels derived from green electricity such as hydrogen.

The switch to a full supply of renewable energies is not only technically feasible, but  economically profitable. The political will is the key. Germany is showing that it can happen.

 

Read more:

https://johnmenadue.com/the-renaissance-of-nuclear-energy-is-a-myth/

 

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How Fukushima triggered Germany's nuclear phaseout

The Fukushima nuclear disaster shook the belief in safe nuclear power to its core. For Germany, it marked a historic turning point for environmentalism.

On March 11, 2011, one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded triggered a tsunami off Japan's Pacific coast. The gigantic waves rolled over the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, knocking out the cooling system and causing a meltdown in three of its six reactors. It was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

But the important difference between the two disasters is Japan's reputation as a high-tech country with high security standards. That difference is one that has made even avid supporters of nuclear energy second-guess themselves.

They included Angela Merkel, a trained physicist who believed in the peaceful use of nuclear energy. She had even attacked the center-left coalition government of her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, for deciding to phase out atomic power.

"I will always consider it absurd to shut down technologically safe nuclear power plants that don't emit CO2," she said in 2006.

But Fukushima changed her mind: Three days after the disaster, a subdued Merkel announced that Germany would be suspending its recently approved extension of the operating lives of nuclear power plants following the "unimaginable catastrophe" in Japan.

The political fallout in Germany

In only a matter of weeks, the political momentum unleashed by Fukushima became palpable. Merkel's close ally and a big supporter of atomic energy, Stefan Mappus, lost as the incumbent state premier in Baden-Württemberg to Winfried Kretschmann of the Green party. It was a political first for the anti-nuclear party, and in a conservative state, no less.

Three months later, the German parliament voted to phase out atomic energy by the end of 2022. But energy companies sued the government for damages. It took nearly 10 more years for both sides to agree to damages worth €2.4 billion ($2.86 billion,) with taxpayers footing the bill for Merkel's phaseout detour.

Climate-friendly nuclear power?

A number of governments, such as those of France, the UK, and the United States, consider nuclear energy, with its low CO2 emissions, as a tool in slowing climate change. And the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agrees.

But the idea that nuclear energy can help the climate is an "illusion," according to Jochen Flasbarth, deputy minister of Germany's Environment Ministry. For one, nuclear only makes up roughly 5% of the world's energy supply.

"In truth, it's not an energy supply that can be sustained in the future. These countries are faced with losing a connection to a truly sustainable renewable energy sector," he said.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/how-fukushima-triggered-germanys-nuclear-phaseout/a-56829217

 

 

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