Nuke test survivors to take battle to UK

Nuke test survivors to take battle to UK Sydney Morning Herald ANDREA HAYWARD December 16, 2009 –

AAP

The fallout continues for Australian veterans exposed to British nuclear testing in the 1950s and ’60s, as they take their legal battle for compensation to London…………..17 atomic bombs were detonated at Maralinga in South Australia and the Monte Bello Islands, off WA’s Pilbara coast, between 1952 and 1958.

The British government paid STG20 million pounds ($A35.92 million) to Australia in 1993, but veterans have not received compensation for their exposure to the radioactive material.

About 8000 defence force personnel from the navy, army and airforce were exposed to the blasts, but fewer than 2000 are still alive.

They were ordered into radiation zones and told to clean planes and vehicles following the blasts.

The veterans were not entitled to veteran’s entitlements because they did not serve overseas.

Sydney law firm Stacks will represent the Australian Nuclear Veterans Association (ANVA) in London next year when the ex-servicemen join a class action of 1000 British ex-servicemen and widows who have won the right to take the UK Ministry of Defence to court for compensation……….”… we’re extremely worried about all those widows who have never had any compensation and plus we’ve got offspring that were born with genetic defects, and that’s going to go on for a long period of time we’re told.”

The men exposed to the blasts developed cancers at three times the rate of other men, ANVA claims……..The tests were conducted in secret, and the servicemen were told little of the potential risks to their health.

Nuke test survivors to take battle to UK

Uranium Sales | Exports To India On Cards

Uranium exports to India on cards The Age DANIEL FLITTON December 16, 2009 AUSTRALIA could drop its ban on uranium sales to India after an international expert panel called for a fresh approach to restricting the world’s nuclear arsenal…….

……But ”recognising the reality” that India, Pakistan and Israel are unwilling to sign up to existing safeguards, the report says ”equivalent disciplines” should be applied to help them meet disarmament obligations. These countries could then be given access to nuclear materials and technology for civilian purposes provided they show a strong commitment to disarmament and non-proliferation…………

”I think it’s pretty self-evident that the ban on supplying uranium to India is a lost cause,” commission co-chairman and former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans told The Age…………”nations would instead work through the difficult issues raised by the place of nuclear technology in the modern world.”

Uranium Sales | Exports To India On Cards

Nuclear Disarmament plan doesn’t go far enough

Anti-nuclear groups, however, are worried the report won’t go far enough in calling for the eradication of all nuclear weapons.David Noonan, the nuclear free campaigner for the Australian Conservation Foundation, told AAP the report would do nothing to lesson the pressure for nuclear proliferation.”Other countries will see that America and other states are retaining the military, political and strategic advantage that they see in nuclear weapons,” he said.”It will perhaps increase the pressure on countries to develop their own nuclear weapons programs.”Australian Greens nuclear spokesman Scott Ludlam urged the federal government to lead by example by seeking alliances with nuclear weapons-free states.”If we want the nuclear weapons states to put down nuclear weapons, we must also find the courage and the trust to put down the nuclear umbrella,” he said.”We can continue to have alliances but let those alliances be between equal sovereign states and let those alliances be nuclear weapons-free.”

Report seeks a cut in nuclear stockpile

Report seeks a cut in nuclear stockpile

Report seeks a cut in nuclear stockpileS Sydney Morning Herald ANDRA O’MALLEY December 15, 2009

Nuclear weapons states will be urged to adopt a “no first use” policy and slash the global arsenal of atomic weapons in a landmark report to be released on Tuesday.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will help launch the final report of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND) in Tokyo on Tuesday.

The report is set to call on nuclear weapons powers to reduce the worldwide stockpile to 2,000 – around 10 per cent of current levels – by 2025 at the latest.

It will also urge nations to adopt a “no first use” agreement within the same timeframe, meaning states would only use their weapons in the event of an attack by a foreign power.

As part of that strategy, the report will call for weapons to be taken off high-alert status, preventing them being deployed at short notice……………….

Anti-nuclear groups, however, are worried the report won’t go far enough in calling for the eradication of all nuclear weapons.

David Noonan, the nuclear free campaigner for the Australian Conservation Foundation, told AAP the report would do nothing to lesson the pressure for nuclear proliferation.

“Other countries will see that America and other states are retaining the military, political and strategic advantage that they see in nuclear weapons,” he said.

“It will perhaps increase the pressure on countries to develop their own nuclear weapons programs.”

Australian Greens nuclear spokesman Scott Ludlam urged the federal government to lead by example by seeking alliances with nuclear weapons-free states.

“If we want the nuclear weapons states to put down nuclear weapons, we must also find the courage and the trust to put down the nuclear umbrella,” he said.

“We can continue to have alliances but let those alliances be between equal sovereign states and let those alliances be nuclear weapons-free.”

Report seeks a cut in nuclear stockpile

Low Emissions Distributed Energy Could Save Australia $130 Billion

Low Emissions Distributed Energy Could Save Australia $130 Billion Renewable Energy News, by Energy Matters 15 Dec 09  Broad adoption of clean distributed energy production technology including residential solar power systems could reduce the cost of Australia evolving into to a low-carbon country by as much as $130 billion by 2050, according to a new report released by CSIRO.

CSIRO’s research has also found that water used for electricity generation can be reduced by as much as 75 per cent through a combination of distributed energy technology and large-scale renewable energy such as solar farms.

Unlike CCS (Carbon Capture and Sequestration) technology that is still many years away from being commercially viable, CSIRO project leader Anthony Szatow points out that clean distributed energy technologies are available now and these options offer an immediate and cost effective response to climate change
 
The CSIRO Energy Transformed Flagship report outlines the potential contribution distributed energy can make to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Australia and how it can be achieved. The report is the result of the Flagship’s three year project focusing on smart grids and examined the social, technological, environmental and economic value of widespread distributed energy use in Australia.

Distributed systems have the advantage of creating power closer to where it is consumed, minimizing line loss and reducing the need for power line infrastructure associated with electricity generating plants. The further the distance from the point of generation to the point of consumption, the more electricity is lost; usually as heat. Transmission and distribution losses in the USA and UK are around 7%. Decentralised power generation also offers advantages in relation to national security.

Low Emissions Distributed Energy Could Save Australia $130 Billion : Renewable Energy News

Carbon capture scheme causing anxiety

Concerns about carbon capture ABC News Dec 9, 2009 The Conservation Council has expressed concerns about a proposal that would see millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide pumped underground in Western Australia’s South-West.

The Collie South West Hub would reduce carbon emissions from five of the region’s biggest industrial companies, Griffin Energy, BHP Worsley Alumina, Verve Energy, Wesfarmers Premier Coal and Perdaman Chemicals.

The project is one of four across Australia to receive Commonwealth funding to conduct a feasibility study.

The council’s Jessie Cochrane says the risks associated with carbon sequestration are unknown.

“We don’t know how it’s going to behave underneath the ground and how it may affect the environment,” she said.

“In Western Australia we’ve got amazing renewable energy resources through wind power, solar, geothermal energy and wind farms; we should be capitalising on this potential rather than a technology that’s not proven and may not even work.”

Concerns about carbon capture – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Refuting pro-nuclear lies

Get Ready For These Nuclear Fallacies  newmatilda.com Mark Diesendorf  8 Dec 09 “………………..Fallacy number 6: “We have solved the problem of managing high-level nuclear wastes for the long-term.”Refutation: Possibly in engineering theory, but not in practice. There is no long-term high-level nuclear waste dump operating in the world.
President Obama has terminated work on the Yucca Mountain dump in Nevada. Only Finland and Sweden are building underground dumps. No-one knows how to create social institutions to keep the waste safe for 100,000 years or more.

Fallacy number 7: “You must choose between coal or nuclear.”Refutation: No, the real choice is between dirty and dangerous technologies (coal and nuclear) on one hand and clean technologies (energy efficiency and renewable energy) on the other. It’s interesting that the biggest corporations pushing this fallacy — BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto — are mining both coal and uranium. With their false choice, they would win either way.

Fallacy number 8: “It’s impossible to use reactor-grade plutonium (extracted by reprocessing the spent fuel from a nuclear power station) to make nuclear weapons. Only weapons-grade plutonium (extracted from military plutonium production reactors) is suitable.”Refutation: Although nuclear weapons based on reactor-grade plutonium are less “efficient” and the amount of damage caused by them is less predictable, bombs can certainly be made (and indeed have been made) from reactor-grade plutonium. This has been confirmed by many experts, including leading US nuclear bomb designer Dr Theodore Taylor, Dr Victor Gilinsky from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the US Department of Energy.Number 8(a): A variant of the fallacy above runs: “Countries which have developed nuclear weapons have used military facilities, not civil.

“Refutation: Actually, India, Pakistan, North Korea and (soon) Iran have used the civil nuclear fuel cycle and/or research reactors to develop their nuclear bombs. There is also evidence that the UK and France used nuclear power generation to add to their stocks of plutonium. In addition, Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, Libya, South Africa and Taiwan used nuclear power and/or research reactors to go part of the way to nuclear weapons (South Africa tested a bomb), but fortunately dismantled their facilities subsequently.

Fallacy number 9: “If Australia had nuclear power, we would be responsible and would never develop nuclear weapons.”Refutation: Actually a previous Australian government commenced building a nuclear power station at Jervis Bay, NSW, with the joint purposes of generating electricity and producing plutonium for nuclear weapons. Fortunately, a change of prime minister resulted in the project being cancelled after the foundations had been dug. The sad truth is that no government can be trusted to resist the temptation to enhance its political and military power on the global scene by using nuclear power to become nuclear weapons ready.

Get Ready For These Nuclear Fallacies | newmatilda.com

Largets solar plant for Australia?

Overcoming Apathy in Australia – Project Omelas  by Unenergy on   12/04/2009 -  WorleyParsons, Australia’s biggest engineering company, is studying the construction of the world’s biggest project producing power from the sun’s heat, tapping incentives for renewable energy generation.An initial 250-megawatt unit may start up in 2011 at a cost of about $1 billion, Peter Meurs, managing director of WorleyParsons’ EcoNomics unit, said today in Sydney. Some $34 billion of projects may be built by 2020, by companies including BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, he said.

Overcoming Apathy in Australia – Project Omelas | ePluribus Media

Australian uranium industry hyping up claims about Climate Change

Australia Nuclear Option Asia Calling  04 December 2009  Erica Vowles Climate change might be bad news on many fronts, but in Australia it has revived the flagging fortunes of one former outsider of the energy sector ‑ nuclear.

The uranium industry and its supporters are marketing nuclear energy as the only way to tackle climate change and preserve the economy.

As Erica Vowles reports, concern over how to reduce Australia’s high rate of CO2 emissions have revived an idea that many thought was dead and buried…………Steve Campbell at Greenpeace says ” The costs to build new nuclear power reactors are huge and the timelines are very bad and it takes decades to get approvals and to get them built and so on when we need to be acting much faster than that. And we need to be investing far more in energy efficiency and renewable energy.”

Surveys show the Australian public is broadly against nuclear power plants.

Safety concerns mean no one wants a nuclear power plant in their back-yard.

And then there is the unsolved waste question.

“The nuclear industry still hasn’t discovered, or decided or figured out what to do with waste and so that’s a huge issue.”…………“The biggest problem now is that really, we have about 10 years to react, globally to the problem of global warming. We need to start to bring down our emissions very very rapidly. It this country, we are never going to get a nuclear reactor built for 15 – 20 years. And we need to start taking the actions we can take now in order to bring our emissions and that means efficiency and renewable energy. Our studies show that in Australia we could get 20 percent reductions in emissions just by implementing stringent efficiency standards.”

Australia Nuclear Option

Australia should act now on climate change

Hot air over Australia  Business Spectator Grant Anderson 26 Nov 09 “……….the notion of a ’silver bullet’ approach to climate change is also a myth.Every country has different causes of their emissions and therefore their approach to dealing with them is likely to be unique.

What might be good for Australia is not necessarily going to work anywhere else.This takes us to the final myth on climate change policy: that we need to wait for the Copenhagen conference next month to see what the rest of the world will do.Apart from the fact that the conference is likely to yield little in the way of tangible commitments (which might only come after a further six to 18 months of negotiation), countries in the Asia Pacific are already taking unilateral measures to constrain their emissions growth, save energy, plant forests and position themselves to prosper in a green global economy.

This does not mean that more cannot be done (indeed it is imperative that more is done), but it is at least a start.Australia is contributing to the climate change task (as it should), but we are far from being out on our own.

Hot air over Australia – Grant Anderson – News – Business Spectator